Heyo, Kousuke here. Today I’m going to be playing day two of Survival in Another World.
If only this were a game! But no, this was still my actual life! I was reminded of all of the people who used speech synthesizer apps to play the main characters of games where they had been thrown into horrible situations and then forced to find means of survival.
I would be a bit kinder to everyone if I got to go home to my world. Maybe dial back the impulse to laugh at other people’s misfortune so much.
Anyway, it was morning. I was incredibly thirsty. Water was clearly my first priority. A forest needed a steady and abundant water source. The question was, where could I find it?
Hmm. I can’t come up with any good ideas. The only thing I can do is wander around and hope I find some. I have everything I need in my inventory, so I don’t need to stick to the border between the wasteland and the forest now. I’ll spend the day exploring the forest for water and things that look edible.
“Time to register these shortcuts.” I assigned numbers to the items in my inventory so that I could take an item out at a moment’s notice. Just by thinking it, I could switch between holding the spear, axe, knife, and bow in an instant. “It’s like a magic trick.”
Then it suddenly hit me. If I could double jump regardless of what I was doing, then maybe I could do something similar with my weapons and tools.
After some trial and error, I discovered that by imagining left-clicking the mouse, I could do a basic action with a weapon—or rather, I could do an ideal action with it. It felt really weird surrendering direct control of my body, but now I could use the spear and the bow. Using the bow actually displayed the sight for the bow in my vision. Now even an amateur like me could shoot like a marksman!
By combining my own actions with a command input, I could even fire one arrow after another at the speed of light! Although the second shot would inevitably be a vastly inferior one. In other words, I would have to train if I wanted to get better at it. I’d have to really work hard to make that happen. Ha ha ha.
But then…
“Crap. Oh, crap. There’s somethin’ over there.”
I was glad to have found a source of water, but there was something dangerous-looking there already: a lizard. Wait, was it a lizard? Maybe it was a wolf? But maybe it was more like a lizard? At any rate, it was equally scaly and furry and as big as a large dog, and sure as hell didn’t look herbivorous. I was glad for the small mercy that first contact hadn’t been with anything in the vein of a certain monster-hunting game’s earth-shakingly huge walking death machines.
Maybe this was its territory or something because it was snoozing away in a sunny spot. Would it be possible for me to sneak over and fill my canteen? But if it stirred and gobbled me up, that’d be game over for yours truly. At the very least, I was sure I’d be seriously injured, contract some infectious disease, and die sweaty, delusional, and soiling myself.
Time to retreat. If I wanted to challenge it, I’d need to set traps or something to even stand a chance. I calmly imagined the C key and entered stealth mode. Then I imagined the S key and smoothly started moving backward. Heh heh heh. This way, I wouldn’t make some careless mistake like stepping on a twig and making a big ruck—
*Rustle rustle rustle!*
Because I wasn’t watching where I was going, I wound up plunging into a bush. I quietly looked toward the lizard-wolf. Please! Don’t notice me! I beg you!
Our eyes met. Unfortunately, we didn’t fall in love. Which meant…
“GISHAAAAAAAA!”
“I suspected as much!”
It tried as hard as it could to intimidate me.
Oh yeah? You wanna try? Come at me, bro! I leveled the tip of my stone spear at it. If this was inevitable, then I would’ve been better off getting a blow in while it was asleep! Damn it all!
The lizard-wolf didn’t suddenly lunge at me; it held back, cautiously measuring the distance between us. I didn’t know what its movement capabilities were, but in this kind of case, victory went to the one who made the first move.
“Take that!”
Kousuke threw the stone spear! The lizard-wolf nimbly dodged it!
“SHAAAAAAA!”
“Oh yeaaaaaah?!”
The lizard-wolf used body slam! Kousuke took out a stone spear and immediately struck it! The lizard-wolf took damage, but Kousuke was knocked back! Ugh, this isn’t the time to be pretending I’m reading game text!
“Ahhhhhhh! Huuuuuh?!” I panicked. The stone spear I used to counter its attack broke, but I was lucky enough to stick it into its mouth, so now the lizard-wolf was on its side on the ground flailing.
Stone axe in hand, I ran over to the writhing creature and swung down with all my might. And continued hacking at it. The next thing I knew, the blade of the axe was gone and I was whacking at the lizard-wolf’s messed-up head with the handle.
“Urgh?! Blaaaaaaargh!” It was so grotesque that I puked. I was but a commoner who had only ever killed bugs. The only time I had ever touched something dead was when my mom died. I couldn’t really handle watching slasher films either. Even fairly corny, low-grade gore in games had left me queasy in the past.
“Phew. Hah…” The only thing that came out was bile, but I felt a bit better after. I had to contend with reality.
First things first: I need to deal with the carcass. Can I put it in my inventory? As I thought that, I realized I could access the carcass of the lizard-wolf. I gave it a try and opened its inventory.
“Nice, I don’t have to carve it. This is a godly feature.”
Its carcass contained a reasonable amount of raw meat, bones, fangs, tendons, and pelts. I moved all of these into my inventory, and then the lizard-wolf disappeared; all that remained was a puddle of blood.
This was incredible, although the blood was a bit of a nuisance. It was quite possible that it might draw other dangerous creatures.
So, in my crafting menu, I spent some time mass-crafting wooden canteens, filling them up with water from the spring, and then putting them into my inventory. Each canteen could hold approximately a liter of water, so I filled fifty of them.
That should be enough water to last me for now. Now I need to find a safe place to make a fire and make this water drinkable.
I was thirsty, but I wasn’t about to start chugging canteens. Who knew what kind of germs, poisons, or parasites were lurking within? If I got diarrhea here in the wilderness, then I was obviously going to wind up dying of dehydration. That’s not even touching on the question of what horrible business might be native to this world, ready to do me in with illnesses never before conceived by a human mind.
I checked to make sure I wasn’t injured and left the spring after thoroughly washing the blood out of my clothes. Along the way, I picked up more stones and wood. I remade my lost stone spear and stone axe while looking for a place to rest, like I did yesterday. I found a tree and clearing in a spot that seemed a good enough distance away and started a fire. Using the fire starter kit was faster and took much less effort than the bow drill had.
“Water, water…” From the fire’s crafting screen, I picked drinking water and cooked meat and started crafting. It only took about ten seconds to craft the first item, but those ten seconds felt like forever.
Then I took the crafted “Drinking Water” out from the completed column, took off the cap, and gulped it down. It tasted good. It felt like the water was spreading to every part of my dehydrated body.
“Ahhh, water is so good.”
I took a breath and then checked out what I had in my hand. It’s water. Yup, water. Water inside of a water bottle. The wooden canteen disappeared and turned into a water bottle? Well, whatever. Or maybe this isn’t something I should just brush off? I mean, this water bottle is 1.5 liters. I actually made more water.
Isn’t a net gain good, though? Well, uh, best not to think about the details. It’s probably something like whatever was in the impure water changed into pure water and increased the volume by half. Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Best not to dwell on what might have actually been in the water for that theory to work.
I looked closely at the meat in my inventory to find it was labeled as “Raw Meat (Lizaf).” So I guessed that lizard-wolf was called a lizaf. The fact that it had a name must have meant that creatures existed to give it a name, right? I couldn’t be the only person in this world.
I had my next goal: find wherever these people lived. I felt a little wary; I had no idea what kind of language barrier I’d have to deal with, let alone what kind of reception I could expect. It’d suck if they caught me and made me their slave, but that’d be better than them catching sight of me and clamoring, “Food! Eat!”