Acceptance [II]

A cold breeze blew across the small forest.

Lucian shivered lightly, the unexpected movement causing him to jerk upward. His eyes shot open, and he scrutinized the clearing.

"Three dead rats..." Lucian muttered. "That actually happened."

There didn't seem to be any other disturbances in his immediate vicinity, but he was reluctant to relax his guard.

"These damn words!" Lucian grimaced as the familiar blood-red words continued to block his vision.

He focused on the prompts instead of the scenery behind, "Wait..."

The five prompts had changed.

[Wave 1: Success]

[Mission Complete: Grading Complete]

[Reward Selection Prepared]

[Menu Unlocked]

[11:18:27:59]

Lucian's eyes opened wide, and he leaped to his feet.

"I've been asleep for two days?!" He cried.

It was a miracle something hadn't climbed out of the darkness and killed him!

He looked around the clearing and found yet another oddity... He was standing!

Lucian's body wasn't sore at all. In fact, he felt like he had back when he played ball in college! It had been years since he'd felt so light.

He patted his body up and down, finding that all the more minor scrapes and cuts were gone entirely.

His abdomen and shin were still a bit tender, but the bruises were almost completely gone. Damage like that should have stayed for at least a week!

Though turning his neck that far was awkward, he did his best to examine his shoulder. Large scabs filled the openings that the rat's teeth had torn into his skin.

"You little shit," Lucian spat at the beast's corpse. He kicked it in the head for good measure before turning back to his wounds.

'Nothing's festering...' He thought. 'It looks like I got off lucky.'

He shivered and looked to the sky. Though it should have been early afternoon by his calculations, the forest was dim, and the wind was nippy.

"Rain?" Lucian muttered.

That wasn't good. He needed a shelter or some sort of cover.

He turned to the corpses of the rats, a disgusting thought creeping into his mind. Seeing no other choice, he got to work.

What he was doing would scarcely count as cover, but he could at least have some protection from this wind until the storm passed.

Lucian snatched up the nearest rat by its feet and instantly regretted the decision. In his haste to beat the rain, he forgot something important...

The carcass had been sitting for almost two days in the warm, muggy climate, which caused it to bloat. As soon as Lucian lifted it, the waste from its stomach was excreted.

Surprised, Lucian dropped the body, and the excrement splattered outward, splashing onto his legs and feet. The stench that it brought was excruciating, though not as putrid as the black gunk that he'd tossed up a few days prior.

Lucian staggered backward, doing his best to escape the stench.

"Fuck!"

He grabbed a handful of the recently fallen leaves and wiped off the sludge as best he could. The process made him retch, and if there were anything in his stomach, he would have lost it instantly.

Once he'd done the best he could to clean off the creature's shit, he turned to look at the corpse.

"Even giving me problems after you died, huh?" Lucian grumbled.

He didn't have a quick solution for this particular problem.

Though he'd regularly camped without the use of modern tools as a hobby, there wasn't much to make use of in this small entrapment.

Begrudgingly, he decided he would just have to deal with it and trudged over to grab the creature again. This time, he pulled it by its front paws, allowing the waste to leak from the back.

He repeated the process for the other two corpses, dragging them as far as he could from the pools of excrement that they left behind.

Once he'd pulled them a sufficient distance, Lucian collected as many of the largest branches as he could find.

As he did so, it started sprinkling. He'd amassed around fifty of the limbs. It was enough to get by.

Lucian carefully leaned the branches up against the broad side of one of the trees, stabbing the bottom ends into the ground.

He tilted the tops together, creating a teepee-like structure.

Still, the rain and the wind could easily cut into the half-baked shelter.

"At least these rats will have some use," Lucian muttered. The damned things had almost killed him!

He felt that he deserved some compensation.

Lucian rolled the first rat against the bottom of the shelter. The second, he pushed up on top of the first, and the third followed suit.

It wasn't much, but he could at least hunker down behind it while the corpses blocked the chilling wind and rain.

"Just in time."

The wind started to pick up, and the rain was pouring heavily on the tree canopy above. Lucian crawled into the small shelter and lay his back against the tree's trunk.

His head was pushed against the makeshift wall, but it was good enough to last the storm.

"Home sweet home..." Lucian almost choked on his own words as visions of his family once again flashed in his mind. Minus the rats, this little fort would have been something he and his son built in the woods.

He shook his head vigorously, "I can't get too caught up in my misery. I need to figure out what's going on and survive if I even want to think about seeing them again!"

With nothing else to do, his eyes fell on the floating words once again. At this point, he'd given up on finding a projector.

He was hunkered under a tiny shelter, and the words still hadn't dulled.

"How did I do it the first time?" Lucian asked himself.

He focused on the timer, willing it to go away. As the thought crossed his mind, the timer shrunk into the corner of his vision.

Lucian willed for it to expand, and immediately, it returned to the stack of prompts once again.

"Neat!"

He willed the clock back to the corner and looked at the other prompts.

"Now, on to business."