Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 17 – Acclimation (Patreon)

The next few days followed a similar pattern. Things attacked Terry. He killed them with some gentle and not-so-gentle prodding from other-Terry and the other-knowledge. The chicken-lizard stalked him like a crazy ex-girlfriend. He’d eventually locate a water source to wash the blood off. Then, he’d find somewhere to camp to try to sleep off the horror of, well, pretty much everything about his current situation if he was being honest with himself. He routinely dreamed of doing mundane things in his old world. Going to the post office. Shopping at the grocery store. Checking his email. Fuck, he thought after that dream. If I ever do manage to get back, there’s no way I’ll ever clear the backlog in my inbox. Despite minor concerns about overflowing inboxes, he was always so happy during those dreams. That simply magnified the crushing disappointment of waking up and still being stuck in Chinese Period Drama Hell.

He’d given serious consideration to just letting one of the damn monsters in this forest kill him, even if he had figured out that it wouldn’t be quick. He was more durable than a human being had any right to be. One particularly awful thing that other-Terry called a demon-weasel had tried to bite his arm off. It had only succeeded in opening some nasty cuts in his skin. Cuts that had healed with a truly disheartening swiftness. That meant that if something was going to do him in, it would either need to be really strong, or he would need to exhibit some forbearance. Still, if he was patient about it and not too afraid of several minutes of excruciating suffering, one of them could probably do the job for him. Unfortunately, other-Terry was not even a little bit on board with that plan. Any time regular-Terry even started to hold back in a fight, other-Terry started screaming at him. It was so eerie having his own voice shouting at him with words he hadn’t thought that regular-Terry found himself just going along to make the creepiness stop.

Part of him also recognized that all of this was desensitizing him to killing. While being splattered and sometimes coated with blood was almost enough to make him want to puke that first day, by day four it was just one more nuisance. As much as Terry thought he should be freaking out about it, he just couldn’t work up an emotional overreaction to something that happened ten times a day. The forest was so full of vicious, evil abominations that there was no escaping it. I guess it’s true what they say, thought Terry. You really can adapt to anything if you have to. Not that his survival had come without some costs. The only sword he had left was the one he’d gotten from that conniving Adventurer’s Guild woman. The ones he’d gotten off the bandits had broken, even with the energy that emanated from his stomach doing something that reinforced them. On three separate occasions, he’d been forced to pin beasts to the ground with the sword and then beat them to death with his free hand when they’d proven too resilient.

The constant fighting was a depressingly familiar element of pretty much every adventure manga, anime, LitRPG, and cultivation story he’d ever come across. He just knew that he was leveling up in some fashion. While that would normally thrill a hero in the story, it just made Terry feel like a failure. He’d run south because he wanted to avoid scenarios exactly like this one. But the stupid evil church got in the way, like it always did, and now he was getting stronger. Which can only mean there’s some truly terrible thing living in this endless forest that I will be entirely unable to avoid no matter how hard I try, griped Terry. He looked back at the chicken-lizard which was following along behind him like a puppy. At least, it would be if puppies were twelve feet tall and carried half-eaten monsters in their beaks. He squinted at the monster. Did that damn thing get bigger? He didn’t have anything like a tape measure, so he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. Nonetheless, it did seem to be looming from a greater height. Probably from eating all those monsters it didn’t help me kill. Why couldn’t I get a helpful stalker animal? Maybe something that could fly or teleport me around. No sirree Bob, that would be too goddamn useful for Chinese Period Drama Hell.

As the day dragged on, Terry got more and more nervous. The persistent attacks he’d been fending off for days went into an abrupt decline. While he was no expert on woodcraft or hunting, his pattern recognition abilities functioned just fine. And the pattern had been broken. He’d only had to kill one thing all afternoon. He ought to be splattered with gore by this part of the day. That meant that they had entered into the territory of something that scared all of the other terrible denizens of this arboreal wing of Hades. The problem, as Terry saw it, was that he had no way of knowing how best to avoid the problem. If he backtracked, he could theoretically stick to the outskirts of the territory by keeping track of how often something tried to kill him. Except, that was no guarantee that the whatever-it-was wouldn’t come looking for him there. Beyond that, the thing’s territory might be fifty square miles.

Moving forward was just as uncertain. He might bypass the creature through sheer happenstance or he might walk right up to it. He thought about using the chicken-lizard as a kind of canary in the coal mine, but he rejected that idea pretty fast. It was still following him, but it was constantly hunched over with its head whipping back and forth. It might give him a second or two of warning if something got really close, but that was about the best he could hope from the big, dumb tag-along. He found himself frozen in indecision for a few second that slowly stretched out into a few minutes. Bad choices ahead and bad choices behind. Inspiration struck. Terry poked the other-knowledge and mentally asked, do you know what’s waiting for me up there?

While the other-knowledge had been downright chatty in its nonverbal way for several days, it suddenly clammed up. He poked it a few more times, but got nothing from it. He could practically sense other-Terry in there, watching him, waiting to see what regular-Terry would do. Forward or back? Terry had the very bad feeling that no choice he made would let him avoid the violence he intuitively knew was coming. At the same time, he didn’t have the sense that some huge, malevolent beast was watching him. His sixth sense for danger had gotten much, much sharper after being attacked so many times, but he didn’t entirely trust it. Not feeling the danger didn’t mean there wasn’t any danger. In fact, the absence of that sensation of being about to die alarmed him more and more. What if the big bad in the forest could hide itself somehow. He didn’t know what method it would use, but it just stood to reason that it would be able to keep him from sensing it. Why? Because that was the best way to ensure that he had to fight with the damnable thing, and this new world he was living in clearly hated him personally.

The longer he stood there, the more certain he became that anything he did next would trigger some calamity. Even something as innocuous as reaching for a water skin was going to set off the boss fight. He stood there, motionless, for another thirty seconds before the futility of that finally struck him. He was going to move eventually. If for no other reasons than he’d fall asleep on his feet if he stood there long enough. Resigning himself to the inevitable, he turned to glare at the chicken-lizard.

“When it happens, you could at least do me the courtesy of helping.”

Right on cue, something started crashing toward him from a disturbing short distance away. He turned to look, blinked, and then sighed.

“Is that a dinosaur made out of plants?” he asked into the air.