The first thing I felt when I woke up wasn't the cold. It was my stomach, gnawing at itself as if there were a living beast trapped inside me. Hunger had descended like a thick, grey fog, clouding my mind. When I tried to move from my trench beneath the leaves, my world spun. My hands were shaking, and my knees refused to hold my weight. My body had spent its last scrap of energy just trying to repair the gash in my side.
I sat up slowly and licked my cracked lips. I had to do something. Either nature would swallow me whole, or I would tear a piece out of it.
Staggering, I made my way toward a nearby creek bed. I needed water, but more than that, I needed a weapon. With bare hands, I was nothing but bait in this forest. I remembered an old trick my father used to tell—how hunters in the wild would make do when they had nothing. A hard stone with a sharp edge...
I knelt by the water. My fingers searched the ice-cold stream for a suitable piece of flint. Finally, I found a blackish rock, large enough to fit my palm. I picked up another heavy stone and began to strike it.
Crack.
The first strike just turned the stone to dust. On the second try, I sliced my finger. My own blood leaked onto the black stone, and I ground my teeth. Hours felt like they were passing. Beads of sweat stung my eyes, and my cut fingertips throbbed with every movement. Finally, I managed to flake off a piece that sat comfortably in my palm on one side, while the other was thin enough to slice skin.
It wasn't an axe. It barely counted as a knife. But it was my first victory.
I tried to cut a pine branch with it. It didn't snap in one blow like it does in the storybooks. Every time the stone bit into the wood, my wrist ached. I struggled for minutes, my breath ragged, my palms blistering. When I finally snapped a small branch off, I wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. I felt it in my marrow—nature gave nothing for free. It demanded blood and sweat for every inch of wood.
That was when I saw the Green Slime. It was hovering over a cluster of black, poisonous-looking mold on a tree root. It was devouring the dark filth—something that would have rotted a human's stomach instantly—with strange greed.
I watched. As the slime absorbed the black rot, its clear emerald hue slowly turned into a murky brown, a dirty yellow. Its color didn't change with its "mood"; it changed based on what it consumed. It was a filter. A tiny scavenger cleaning the world's poison within its own body.
"So, that's how you live," I whispered. If it could eat that, perhaps the sap inside these roots could keep me alive too. I took a gamble; I scraped a piece of the root the slime had "cleaned" and put it in my mouth. It tasted foul, like rotten earth, but that searing void in my stomach finally began to dull.
As the sun began to set, I gathered what I could to return to my shelter. But suddenly, the damp cold of the forest was replaced by a strange heat. The very texture of the air changed.
My eyes caught a flash of crimson through the brush.
I froze. This was a Red Slime, much larger, denser, and more vibrant than my Green one. It glided a few inches off the ground, as if floating over invisible embers.
The Red Slime paused the moment it noticed me. It was clearly wary of humans; it shivered and recoiled, but before fleeing, it made a sudden, aggressive lunge toward my Green Slime. There was a dull thud. As the Green Slime shrank back in fear, the Red one vanished into the thicket.
I looked at the ground. The dry leaves where the Red Slime had passed were scorched, turned black by the heat it radiated. This was a predator. Aggressive, hot, and territorial.
I looked at my makeshift stone knife, then at the scorched leaves. My Green Slime huddled next to me, its color faded and dull from the filth it had eaten.
In this forest, it wasn't just the King's soldiers I had to worry about. These "pests" had their own secret wars, their own hierarchies. And I stood in the middle of it all, defenseless, with nothing but a piece of stone in my hand.