Chapter 3: No Tutorial
The first thing Mataon learned about another world was that moss tasted terrible. It was cold, and bitter, and somehow already inside his mouth.
He coughed, rolled onto his back, and immediately regretted it. Every muscle in his body complained at once. His ribs hurt. His throat felt scraped raw. The back of his skull pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
Above him, branches spread across a sky the colour of pale glass. They did not belong to any trees he knew.
Some were thick enough to hold up houses, their bark dark silver and split by thin green lines that glowed under the surface. Leaves as wide as shields overlapped high above.
Something small moved between them. It had too many wings. Mataon closed his eyes again.
"Right," he muttered.
"Still dead."
A warm male voice answered from nowhere.
"You are taking it remarkably well."
Mataon opened his eyes. The forest remained. A female voice came next, quieter and far less amused.
"He is lying in wet vegetation and speaking to himself. I would delay the compliment."
He pushed himself onto his elbows.
"Zahr?"
A pause.
"Part of him," the male voice said.
"Almina?"
"Part of her," the female voice replied.
That was not comforting.
He sat up and checked himself. The formal jacket he had been expected to keep buttoned under several hundred lights was torn at one shoulder, his right cuff was gone, and soot stained the shirt.
The clothes should have burned. So should he.
He pressed a hand to his chest. No wound. No broken ribs. No collapsed lung. The pain was real, but it belonged to a body that had been thrown against the ground, not one crushed inside a steel vault.
A translucent line appeared in front of him.
Mataon jerked back and nearly planted his palm in a patch of violet mushrooms. The letters followed his gaze. He read the name printed there twice. It still felt borrowed.
"Where exactly am I?"
More text appeared. Then the world exploded inside his head.
Maps flashed behind his eyes. Oceans larger than continents. Cities carved under glaciers. Forests swallowing abandoned kingdoms. Three different measurements for planetary curvature and a deeply unhelpful explanation of folded divine space.
He grabbed his forehead.
"Stop."
The information vanished. He sat very still until the nausea passed. Zahr laughed. Almina did not.
"The archive answered the question you asked," she said.
"I asked where I was."
"You asked exactly," Zahr replied.
"And it tried to explain the entire planet. Technically impressive."
"Useless."
"Also true."
He had known professors like that. People who considered an answer complete once it had become too complicated to challenge. He tried again, smaller.
"What is the name of this forest? How far is the nearest settlement?"
"It means," Almina said, "that the world has continued existing without updating a convenient map for you."
"Good. The sarcasm survived the transfer."
"That was Zahr."
"I am proud of her," Zahr said.
Then something roared far beyond the trees. The sound rolled through the ground beneath him. Leaves shook. A flock of narrow-bodied creatures burst from the canopy and vanished eastward.
His smile disappeared. He stood. His legs trembled, but they held.
The clearing was roughly circular, maybe forty meters across. Thick roots divided the moss into uneven ridges. Blue flowers grew between them, transparent petals holding beads of water.
No road. No path. No helpful wooden sign informing him that civilization waited three kilometers east. Zahr had built a world with gods, System windows, and ranked monsters. But not tutorials.
He checked his pockets. Nothing. No phone. No wallet. No pen. Not even the small printed card with his speaking schedule.
He had his belt, his shoes, his clothes, and half a tie still hanging beneath his collar. He pulled the tie free.
"First priority," he said.
"Water."
He crouched by the nearest blue flower. The petals were shaped like shallow cups, each holding perhaps a spoonful of clear liquid. He was thirsty enough to make poor decisions, but not yet thirsty enough to enjoy them.
"How do I use Druid Extraction?"
The answer did not come as text. He felt it.
Something unfolded behind his sternum, broad and strangely patient. The forest stopped being one solid mass and became layers. Water in leaves. Fibres in bark. Resin inside wood. He could not see them. He knew where they were.
He focused on the water held inside six nearby flowers. A thin blue line appeared, and the droplets lifted, gathering above his hand into a trembling sphere.
He stared at it. The sphere promptly collapsed. Water splashed across his fingers, his trousers, his shoes.
Zahr made a sound suspiciously close to a cough covering laughter. Mataon licked water from the side of his hand.
"Not one word."
"I said nothing."
"You were thinking loudly."
By the fourth attempt his headache had returned. Eight points of mana for less than two liters. Useful, but not free. Good. Anything without limits was simply a disaster waiting for confidence.
His next problem was shelter. After that, food. Then direction, information, and a way to avoid becoming lunch for whatever had roared.
He found a young tree fallen beneath one of the massive roots and used All-Knowing Worlds for the instructions to make a basic spear. The instructions were perfect. His hands were not.
Twenty minutes later he had torn the skin across two fingers and produced a sharpened stake that looked less like a weapon than like evidence of frustration. He bound a wedge of hard stone to the shaft with strips of his tie and set it with resin.
The result was ugly. It was also sharp.
"Behold," he said.
"The first instrument of my future civilization."
"It has a point," Zahr said solemnly.
"A disputed point."
He shook it. The head wobbled. Zahr was right. A sound came from the bushes. Mataon turned, spear up.
A creature stepped into the clearing. Six narrow legs, a body like a small deer, moss growing along its spine, two thin antlers holding tiny blue flowers. Its black eyes studied him, decided he was either dangerous or embarrassing, and it lowered its head to graze.
The word monster felt inaccurate. It was strange. Magical. Possibly able to knock him flat. But it was not evil.
Then every bird in the clearing went silent. The grazer froze. Its head snapped up. The flowers on its antlers folded shut.
Mataon heard movement to his left. Heavy. Fast. The grazer ran. Something burst from the undergrowth after it.
The animal looked like a wild boar stretched over the frame of a large hunting cat. Black thorns jutted from its shoulders and spine. Its lower jaw split at the center, showing two inward-curving rows of teeth.
The grazer escaped between two roots. The creature stopped. Its head turned. Toward Mataon. Its yellow eyes found the blood on his fingers.
"Advice?" he asked.
"You are carrying a spear with poor durability," Almina said.
"I noticed."
"The creature accelerates quickly over short distances."
Zahr spoke more softly than before.
"Do not mistake information for experience."
The creature charged.
Mataon jumped behind the nearest root. It crossed the distance faster than his body expected and struck the bark, throwing splinters through the air. He stumbled, drove the spear down, and the stone tip scraped uselessly across the thorns on its back.
"Helpful!"
The jaw snapped where his knee had been. He scrambled backward, lost one shoe in the moss, and ran.
There was no dignity in it. He vaulted one root, slipped on the next, caught himself on both hands, and heard the thing crashing behind him.
The forest opened into a narrow slope. Ahead, two giant roots made a raised arch over a shallow ravine. Too small for the creature. Possibly too small for him too.
He shoved the spear into Astronomic Space, dropped onto his stomach and crawled under the roots. Thorns raked his back. The creature hit the opening a heartbeat later, jaw snapping inches from his shoe. He kicked on instinct; it bit the sole and tore the shoe clean off his foot.
He crawled harder. The thing could not fit its shoulders through the gap. It clawed at the earth, snarling, filling the narrow space with hot breath and the smell of wet iron.
Mataon reached the far side, rolled down the slope, and stopped against a tree trunk. For several seconds, neither of them moved. Then the creature began chewing his shoe.
"You know," Zahr said, "I once watched a king lose a war over a shoe."
"Please stop helping."
Mataon took a stone from storage and threw it deep into the western brush. The creature’s ears moved. He threw another. Then a third, farther off. It abandoned the shoe and charged toward the sound.
He stayed still until he could no longer hear it. Then he looked down. Torn trousers. Blood on both palms. One sock soaked through. A jacket hanging open where the buttons had been ripped away.
He had survived his first real monster. By crawling through mud and sacrificing imported footwear. Very heroic.
"Is there a healing skill?"
"Yes," Almina said.
"Do I have it?"
"No."
"Excellent."
He cleaned his hands with stored water and wrapped the deeper cut in cloth torn from the inside of his jacket.
The forest stayed quiet for another minute. Then something made a sound above him. Not a growl. Not quite a bark. Mataon looked up.
A small animal stood on a thick root, two meters away. At first glance, it looked like a husky someone had assembled using the instructions for a cat.
Compact, muscular, canine, covered in grey and black and white fur. Its tail curled thickly over its back. Its face was rounder than a dog’s, with folded ears and wide cheeks. One eye was blue. The other was golden.
It looked from Mataon to his missing shoe. Then back to Mataon. It made a short series of sounds.
"Rrrh. Mraow. Hff."
Mataon stared.
"I am sorry. I do not speak whatever that is."
The golden eye narrowed. The creature climbed down, walked past him, and sniffed the bloodied bandage. Mataon held out his uninjured hand. The animal slapped it away with one paw. Not scratched. Slapped.
"You are friendly."
It made another sound. This one was definitely insulting.
It walked toward a gap between the trees, stopped, and looked back over its shoulder. Mataon did not move. So it returned, took the torn edge of his trousers in its teeth, and pulled.
"You want me to follow you?"
It released him and exhaled loudly through its nose. He picked up the crooked spear. The creature looked at it, then at him, with what appeared to be genuine disappointment.
"Everyone is a critic."
It led him downhill by a narrow route hidden beneath hanging ferns. Twice it stopped him before he stepped on brightly coloured insects. Once it growled at a patch of harmless-looking white flowers until he walked around them.
After ten minutes they reached a hollow under the roots of a fallen giant. Dry inside, a stream close enough to hear, the entrance narrow enough to defend and high enough to sit up in.
Someone — or something — had already lined one side with dry grass.
Mataon looked at the animal that had led a bleeding stranger to the one safe place in a killing forest, and asked it the first entirely honest question he’d asked since he died.
"Why are you helping me?"
The creature settled onto the dry grass, tucked its curled tail over its paws, and regarded him with one blue eye and one golden one, as if it had been waiting a very long time for someone to finally ask.
It did not answer. But it did not leave, either.
And in a world with no tutorial, no map, and no shoes, Mataon Gaael decided that a companion who stayed was worth more than any answer he could have been given.