I Eat Monster and Gain Powers

Chapter 2: Arts and Crafts at the End of the World

Eto stood at the riverbank for another minute, staring downstream with the expression of a man who had just realized that wanting things to happen and making things happen were two entirely separate activities that required different amounts of effort.

He was going to need a cup.

This thought arrived not dramatically but with the quiet insistence of practical reality. He had water. He had a river. He had two hands and a mouth and no vessel connecting one to the other beyond the temporary architecture of cupped palms, which lost about forty percent of their contents before they reached his face. This was inefficient. He was going to need to drink a lot of water over the coming days and he could not spend all of them crouched at the riverbank like a deer.

He looked at the forest floor and then up at the trees.

Some of the leaves here were absurd. Not regular leaves, not the modest, appropriately sized leaves of a world that understood proportion. These were the kind of leaves that belonged in a children’s book about a giant’s garden, broad and waxy, some of them wider across than his shoulders. They grew in clusters at certain low-hanging branches and along the undergrowth near the water, catching what light came through the canopy and doing very little else with it.

He pulled one free and held it in both hands.

It was thick and slightly stiff at the edges, the central vein running down its length like a spine. He folded it experimentally. It held the shape. He folded it again at the sides, pinching the corners, working it the way he had once watched someone fold a piece of paper into a boat during a particularly long meeting he had not wanted to be in.

The leaf resisted in some places and cooperated in others. He spent several minutes folding, unfolding, refolding, muttering instructions to himself that he was mostly inventing as he went. The final result was a rough cone shape, wide at the top and pointed at the bottom, which was immediately a problem because a pointed bottom means nothing to set it down on without it tipping over.

He looked at the vine growing along a nearby root. Long, thin, flexible. He pulled a length of it free, wrapped it around the lower portion of the leaf cone, and tied it off in a knot that he was relatively confident about. Then he collected a second large leaf, formed a flat base from it folded several times over, and bound the cone to the base with more vine.

The result was not beautiful. It looked like something a child had made under time pressure as part of a school project they had forgotten about until the morning it was due. But when he held it under the river and lifted it, it held water. It leaked at two points along the seams where the vine wasn’t tight enough, losing perhaps a quarter of the volume in the first thirty seconds, but it held enough.

He made a second one because one felt irresponsible.

The second was marginally better than the first because he had now done it once and knew where the problems were. He got the vine tighter at the base, doubled the leaf layer at the sides, and ended up with something that lost perhaps fifteen percent of its contents over thirty seconds instead of twenty-five. He set both on the flat rock outside the cave entrance with a satisfaction that was entirely disproportionate to the achievement and entirely deserved given the circumstances.

He went back into the forest.

The weapons question had been forming since he woke up and he had been not thinking about it the way you don’t think about a sound in the walls at night, aware of it but not ready to engage with it directly. He was in a forest. He did not know what lived in this forest. The cave was shelter but shelter with no ability to defend it was just a place to die in slightly more slowly. He needed something sharp and something with reach and he needed them before dark, which based on the current light was not as far away as he would prefer.

He needed a good stone first.

He walked the riverbank because rivers are honest about stone. They carry it from wherever it originates, knock the soft parts off against each other over years and centuries, and deposit what remains in convenient piles along their edges. He walked slowly and looked at the ground with the focus of a man who had just discovered that geology mattered.

Most of the stones were round and smooth and useless for his purposes. He needed something with an edge, something that had broken recently enough that the fracture surface was still sharp. He found it after about ten minutes of walking, a dark grey stone the size of his palm that had split cleanly along one edge into a surface that caught the light.

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He picked it up and drew it carefully across the back of his forearm.

It left a thin red line that stung precisely the amount he had hoped it would. Sharp enough.

He found a second one shortly after, smaller, narrower, the kind of shape that fit naturally between the fingers. He carried both back toward the cave.

The stick took longer to find than the stone, which was annoying in a forest that was substantially made of sticks. He needed something straight and that requirement alone eliminated about ninety percent of candidates. Trees grow toward light and light in a dense forest comes from unpredictable directions so the branches curved and angled and forked in ways that were structurally interesting but practically useless. He walked until he found a fallen branch that was straight enough along one section, roughly his own height in length, and solid enough that it didn’t flex when he put weight on it.

He broke it to length against a rock, which took four attempts and one moment of genuine frustration, then stripped the smaller branches off it by running his hands firmly down its length. The result was rough but recognizable as a shaft.

He seated the large stone against the top end of the shaft, flat side against the wood, sharp edge outward. He held it in place with one hand and wrapped vine around both with the other, working down from the tip and back up again, crossing the vine in patterns that increased the contact surface and tightened everything together. He tied it off and held the finished spear out in front of him at arm’s length.

It did not look like a weapon from a film. It looked like a stick with a rock tied to it, which was exactly what it was. But when he drove the tip into the soft earth near the riverbank it went in and held, and when he pulled it out the tip was intact. The binding held. The stone didn’t rotate or slip.

Functional. That was the word.

He spent a shorter amount of time on the dagger because the principles were the same and he had already made all the mistakes once. The smaller stone fit naturally against a short length of branch, maybe thirty centimetres long, and he wrapped it more tightly than the spear because a grip weapon needed to not shift in the hand under pressure. He tested it by pressing the edge against a root and drawing it across. It bit into the wood cleanly.

He set both down next to the leaf cups on the flat rock and looked at his inventory.

Two cups. One spear. One dagger. A tracksuit that was going to become a problem in about four days. A cave. A nearby river. Zero supernatural abilities, zero system support, zero indication that the universe had any specific plans for him.

He was hungry.

He had been hungry since waking up and had been successfully ignoring it through the distraction of having other problems but the other problems were temporarily resolved and his body had taken this opportunity to reintroduce the subject firmly. He needed food and he needed to be careful about it, because eating the wrong thing in an unfamiliar forest was the kind of mistake that solved all your other problems permanently.

He took the dagger and went foraging.

The rule he remembered, from some distant source he couldn’t attribute, was to watch for things that looked like food he already recognized, things growing in ways that suggested they were meant to be eaten, and to avoid anything with a white or yellow berry, a strong chemical smell, or sap that was milky or brightly coloured. He remembered this with the confidence of someone who had read it once and never verified it, which was the only kind of confidence available to him currently.

He found berries first. Small and dark red, growing in clusters on a low shrub near a patch of light where a tree had fallen and opened the canopy. They looked familiar in the general category of berry without matching anything specific he could name. He picked one and pressed it between his fingers. The juice was dark red, not white, not yellow. He smelled it. Sweet, slightly tart, nothing alarming. He touched it to the tip of his tongue and waited.

No immediate burning. No numbness. Nothing that seemed like a warning.

He ate one and waited several minutes before eating more. Then he ate a small handful and moved on, not because he was full but because concentrating a risk in one source seemed unwise.

The fruit was harder to categorize. He found it growing from a vine, a rough-skinned thing about the size of a large plum, greenish yellow on the outside. He cut it open with the dagger and examined the inside. It had flesh and seeds and smelled like fruit, generically, the way something smells when it belongs in the category of edible things. The taste was odd, tropical in a way he couldn’t place, with an aftertaste that lingered longer than expected and wasn’t entirely pleasant but wasn’t alarming either.

He ate two of them slowly and stopped there.

He also found something that resembled a root vegetable growing near the river, a pale thing that came out of the mud when he dug around it with the dagger, and which he did not eat because it smelled wrong in a way he could not specify more precisely than that. He left it where it was.

He brought the berries and the remaining fruit back to the cave.

The light in the forest was shifting now, the grey deepening, the shafts between the canopy going amber at their edges. He sat at the entrance of the cave on the flat rock and ate slowly, watching the trees, listening to the forest change its sounds as whatever lived in it began its evening routines.

He was not full. He was less hungry, which was different. He was also not dead, which felt like a minimum standard he should try to maintain.

He picked up the spear and set it across his knees.

Somewhere in the forest something called out, once, and then was quiet.