Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game
Chapter 229: Ch227. Survivalism

Chapter 229: Ch227. Survivalism

The days blurred. Not because time passed easily, but because it passed relentlessly.

With no sun to track across the sky and no System messages to mark the end of combat or quests completed, the rhythm of their lives became simple.

Forage, build, hunt, survive.

They marked time in firewood piles and the slow smoking of meat. In the dull ache of bruises that faded, and in Dee’s quiet growth. Its limbs lengthened, its eyes gained new shades of awareness, and its body became slowly, but steadily, thicker and stronger. It started mimicking their movements more often, tilting its head like Miles, twitching when Sarissa winced. Learning.

Each morning began with gathering roots, berries, and anything edible that didn’t fight back. Afternoons were for reinforcing the lean-to or sharpening the stones they used as tools. Night was the worst.

Every shadow held the weight of a threat.

Every breeze might carry the sound of something hunting.

The first week came and went like a stone sinking beneath still water.

By the sixth day, Sarissa’s first makeshift spear had splintered on impact with a panther-limbed bird-thing that bled smoke and didn’t stay dead the first time they killed it.

On the seventh, Miles managed to rig a stone-headed club using melted resin scraped from bark that burned the skin if left too long.

They got smarter, faster.

Not stronger, though. Not yet.

On what might’ve been the tenth day, the forest changed.

It wasn’t immediate. No sound of thunder or crack of split trees. But the air, always strange, turned heavy. The silence no longer came in between sounds, but settled on top of them, pressing.

The animals grew scarce. Miles noticed first, standing in a berry grove with Dee curled around his neck like a scarf, its tail flicking nervously.

"No birds. No rustling..." he muttered.

Sarissa knelt beside a patch of moss, inspecting torn tracks left by something large.

"Something passed through here."

They stood still, every sense alert, and Dee hissed low.

Miles turned slowly. The trees ahead seemed thicker than before, leaning, almost hunched. In their gnarled shadows, something moved. Slowly, hidden.

Watching.

"We’re being hunted." Sarissa’s voice came low.

They didn’t run. Running without knowing where it was could be suicide.

Instead, they backed away, step by step. Sarissa kept her makeshift spear raised, Miles unwrapped his club from the sling across his back.

They didn’t speak again until they reached their camp, breath shallow, eyes wide.

"Do you think it followed us?" Sarissa asked.

"No." Miles set down the rucksack of scavenged roots. "Doesn’t seem to be that kind of predator."

"Then what kind is it?"

He didn’t answer.

***

That night, they didn’t sleep.

They took turns on watch, but neither truly rested.

Dee curled inside the small lean-to they’d constructed over the past week. It was barely more than a bent tree and some reinforced bark, but it offered a sense of control.

Shelter, even illusionary, gave the mind something to hold onto.

When it came, though, it made no sound at all.

Miles caught the first glimpse near the middle of the night. A ripple of movement behind the trees, just outside the firelight.

"Movement," he hissed through gritted teeth. He leaned forward in a defensive stance, club in hand.

Sarissa was already awake, moving beside him, silent.

Then, the smell came. Like copper and rot, like something that had lived too long in between.

Like whatever that was wrong with the world had been made flesh.

Dee let out a warning chirp and scrambled toward them. Then, something stepped into view.

It had no shape at first. Just a mass of limbs that bent the wrong way, covered in coarse hair and bark-like plates. A dozen eyes blinked across a face that was too flat, and behind it, long antlers split into so many tines they resembled veins more than bone.

Its breath steamed despite the warmth of the forest.

For a moment, neither moved. Then, Sarissa hurled her spear.

It struck true, but bounced right upon impact.

The creature turned toward her with unsettling slowness, as if insulted. But Miles didn’t wait, charging and screaming, his club raised.

It met him in a blur of motion. One claw, twisted like the limb of a dead elk, swiped, and he barely dodged. The force still knocked him sideways, tumbling into the dirt.

Sarissa ran past him, jabbing with a second, shorter stake, trying to distract it.

It didn’t roar. It didn’t even seem angry.

It simply kept moving.

They circled the firelight, dodging, weaving, never getting close enough to do real damage. Miles landed a glancing blow once, his club striking the creature’s leg. But it didn’t react.

It moved like water in a container just slightly too small, forced to shift, tilt, compress itself. Never hesitating.

Minutes stretched, bleeding into one another. Circles of pain and exertion.

At some point, Sarissa got clipped, a shallow gouge running along her thigh.

She limped, and Miles covered her with wild, sweeping blows, buying some space. He shouted, not to intimidate it, but to keep himself sane.

And it finally pulled back.

A wash of green light filtered through the canopy, faint and unreal, and the creature paused, tilting its head. As if listening to something they couldn’t hear.

And without a sound... it turned.

Vanished into the dark, gone.

They stood there in the silence that followed, too exhausted to speak. Dee crept out from beneath a pile of woven moss and climbed into Miles’ lap.

He sat, breathing hard, one hand instinctively curling around Dee’s warm body.

Sarissa collapsed beside him, her eyes wide, not from fear — but from the sheer weight of survival. Her hands trembled as she pulled her leg up to inspect the bleeding.

"We didn’t win..." she whispered.

"No." He nodded, swallowing hard. "But we lived longer than it wanted to wait."

"That’s it, then. That’s the rhythm now." She closed her eyes.

Miles looked toward the trees, where the shadows pressed just a little too deep.

"No." He said softly. "It might be learning, but so are we."