It had been 6 days ever since I had been thrown into the hell hole that is Earth almost 250 million years ago, or to be precise, just a million years away from the largest mass extinction to ever be recorded, or that was what I thought anyway.
I was never the best of students and when it came to trying to remember things like these, I usually failed to recall them. For all I knew, the P-T mass extinction was the most catastrophic one, killing 75% of all terrestrial animals as well as 82% of all marine ones.
Yet, the things I've seen in the last few days alone had indicated to me that many of the "fun facts" that I knew of before simply did not matter anymore, as now there were creatures that simply defied all logic.
Speaking of defying logic, right now I was standing before the very thing that did so.
It was something that sent shivers down my spine. One could even say that it was my human instinct to be terrified at that very moment, or at least creeped out.
The thing that stood in front of me looked human, dressed as a human, and even stood up-right and bipedal, walking around as if it was a human.
It did not have long ears like those things that invaded Earth. I believe the mangas, games, and comic books called them Elves?
No, it looked nothing like them.
The Elves that I saw back then had crystalline white skin that shone with the radiance of a thousand suns. It was as if they amplified that light that hit them as well as giving themselves a halo of divinity and purity, something incomplete in contrast to the massacres they committed right before my death.
However, unlike the elves, the thing in front of me looks exactly like a human. An average, female human barely 5ft 4 chest long black hair, dark brown eyes, and an average outfit one wouldn't glance at twice.
I read somewhere before that it was a human's instinct to be creeped out by things that looked human, but were not quite human enough? If that makes any sense?
I was not quite sure what was wrong with her, maybe it was her skin, he normal teeth, her normal smile, and he naturally long and straight hair without a sign of being disheveled.
Oh, wait... I found it... She looked too normal...
Too calm. She is in the middle of what most people would deem an apocalypse after all.
Too normal. Everything she did was incredibly average.
Yet at the same time, there seemed to be nothing wrong with her.
For a few seconds, after I had looked at her in the dark forest, peering at me behind a tree in the middle of the night, I had thought I was hallucinating.
What kind of creature just looks at you from behind a tree with the most innocent smile? A smile that would have caused animals to submit to her, like a flytrap mixed in camouflage.
I had mistaken her eyes for being normal dark brown eyes that I simply couldn't differentiate from black in the dark forest, but I was wrong.
Her eyes were pitch black and hallow. It was an abyss one would grow more insane after looking at for too long.
So you might be asking, "How did you get yourself in this situation, Ezra?"
To answer that question, how about we have a pop quiz question.
What do you get when you add depression, sadness, realization, self-awareness, grief, and pain to an armless depressed, desperate person fighting for their life every day for a reason they themself could not understand?
Well, usually, the answer would be alcohol and a lot of it. Maybe even drugs, who knows. I've never really done any of those but at this point, I wouldn't have minded an overdose while I still could, since, of course, I was simply too much of a coward to die normally.
So of course, since none of those things existed yet to my knowledge, I went with the second-best thing.
I went on with my day as if there was nothing wrong.
Not a better way to fix yourself other than repressing all your emotions, am I right, or am I right?
What is the point of being sad if I could just force myself to smile?
And so I did so.
Getting up and wiping my tear-filled face, I threw on a wry smile, one that looked oblivious to everything that was happening.
Any other human would have realized that the smile never really reached my eyes, but I pushed on making sure that my smile looked normal, not that anyone around would have seen it anyway.
'Smile' I told myself as I skinned the corpse of the animal I had slain.
'Smile' I told myself as I created a fire, something my father had taught me in the countless camping trips we had gone on, despite the wood and flammable materials around me not being as big or as damp as I was used it.
'Smile' I told myself as I roasted the wolf's parts, like the arms and legs while keeping things such as the stomach, liver, and several other organs to eat later, or at least before they rot.
I went on with my day, choosing the end my pressure on the red monkeys or at least put it on hold until some time when I actually feel like becoming a skinless, organless, muscle-less corpse.
I quickly returned to my cave, not caring much about my surroundings as I simply moved too fast and with too much agility to look right or left, since there was always a tree blocking my sight.
Eventually, by following the tracks me and the monkeys left behind, mainly the monkeys though, I finally found my cave, entering it and making more food for myself as I had just run for almost 3 hours straight on the way back.
For the rest of the day, I created a few more weapons for myself, mainly using stones and wood to create stone tools wherever I saw suitable.
An example would be when I had found a sharp and wide rock that would have done amazing as an ax, and so I used it but putting the rock through the top of it and being able to wield it around and attacking things with enough power and momentum that it would pierce their skin, no matter how durable they were, or at least if they were more durable than a sharp rock.
For the rest of the night, I either looked at the stars, the stars which shone brightly in the night sky and illuminated the land below with their radiance, alongside the planets which I for some reason could see almost clearly now.
Looking at the sky like this had only made me think back to what the elf man had said, and when thinking about it, I could not help but as the question that would have been on the mind of anyone.
'Was he right?'
If I were to look at it from his perspective, humans were just an infestation that managed to repopulate the Earth with intelligent life, yet at the same time due to this, they had made it so the Earth had become polluted, while the beauty of nature was destroyed alongside animals who were enslaved to populate and give us food.
We destroyed habitats like it was nothing, while somehow at the same time causing small extinctions of thousands of animals all around the world, those we know of and those we have no idea exist.
letting out another sigh, I quickly willed for my status screen to open, and before me lay my stats telling me everything about my strengths and weaknesses.
[Stats-
HP: 12
Strength: 12
Agility: 12
Intelligence: 12
Vitality: 12
Mana: 0
Defence: 0 ]
'I'm still extremely weak so adding a few points to strength won't change anything... However, I am very good at evading, and even though this might not help in the long run, I know that the best thing for me to do right now is to strengthen my strengths and hope I survive.'
"Put two points into agility," I said aloud.
[+2 Agility]
Other than looking at the stars which were no longer shrouded by the pollution of the greenhouse gasses we produced without care, I went to sleep in the cave which seemed to be some kind of safe zone in which no creature would enter.
The next day, I went through the same routine, this time however I tried to sharpen my ax but failed a few times, cracking it half on others, and eventually barely succeeding just for it to shatter after the first use.
When I had finally gotten how to do it, I had created my first properly usable stone tool capable of both cutting down trees and killing creatures I could not kill with my bare fists.
Anyway, after looking at the stars, mesmerized by their radiant light as well as the moon's beautiful lunar light, I fell into another deep slumber, waking up on the 6th day of my adventure with a newfound vigor to explore the forest, something I would deeply regret afterward.
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