3 Beast

As the coyote attempted to attack my neck, I quickly raised my left arm in the way of its bite. My right hand held tightly onto my makeshift cane.

I let out a scream as the fucker bit into my arm and I started trying to get it off of me. After a few seconds of wrestling against its bite, the coyote decided to get let go and re approach to bite my neck this time.

My left arm dropped down to my side, I couldn't keep it up any longer due to the bite. The coyote circled around me once and eventually decided to attempt to attack me once more. At this time, I thought of a plan, it would be a risk and I would only have one chance. However, between risking it all and accepting death. I only had one real option to choose.

I took a deep breath through my dry cracked lips and finally made my mind up, I would live, and the coyote would die. This would be the only result.

The coyote jumped at me again, following a similar path of aiming straight for my throat yet again. Exactly as I had predicted, the dumb fucker didn't have enough critical thinking to realize that I would predict this move.

I waited for a fraction of a second and then raised my makeshift cane from the ground with my right hand. I braced my legs and put the end of the stick against my abdomen so that if my grip failed me then I would still be able to do some damage to the mongrel.

I knew that nothing I could do would pierce the beast's hide, but I also knew that I didn't need to pierce the hide. The beast was giving me easy access to tender flesh that could be stabbed with the stick in my hand. The momentum from the jump that the beast made would cause the beast's own death.

I felt the stick make contact with the beast's throat and leaned forward to drive the stick into its organs. What I didn't account for was the immense force coming from the impact with the beast. Despite bracing myself, I got knocked to the ground from the hit.

The coyote did not solely have its teeth to attack with, it also had paws full of claws. On the ground with a coyote clawing at me was not how I wished for this to go down.

However, I knew I could still win, after all my gambit was not for nothing. I had a stick ready to pierce the bastard's heart already in its body. I rolled on the ground and got on top of the beast in one smooth motion, and quickly stuck the stick deeper into its body. It squirmed for a few moments, continuing to claw at me and draw more of my blood.

But even a beast with the power of mana flowing through its veins wasn't able to survive a wound to vital organs for too long. Its relentless squirming caused the stick to worsen the beast's internal injuries until it finally succumbed to its injuries.

I felt a rush of adrenaline pump through my body from the thrill of surviving against all odds and stood up, or at least tried to as I immediately fell into a tree, barely holding my body up whilst using the tree as a support.

"Ugh"

I had no idea how I would get out of this forest. I was bleeding from the cuts all around my body, and felt the tiny amount of strength I had slowly seeping out of my body. I couldn't feel my left arm and my vision was slightly blurry.

I let out a sigh and bit the bullet by starting to walk. I grabbed my walking cane from the corpse of the coyote and draped the coyote across the back of my neck. I would rather die than leave behind this bastard after all I had done to kill it.

I began walking with a hobble, somehow even slower than the snail's pace that I had walked through the forest at originally. I picked up my left foot, moved it forward, stepped, took a break, picked up my right foot, moved it forward, stepped and took a break. The weight of the coyote corpse pressed on my back as though I was carrying the world itself.

I continued this monotonous cycle until the sun had set, and from then I walked for perhaps an hour more. It felt like a year had passed when I finally arrived back at the entrance to the city. I hobbled into the city, found a dark corner of the city and prepared to sleep.

I had no idea if I would wake up the next morning, perhaps I would bleed out but I had no energy to seek help. Especially help that I was almost certain would not come.

In my previous life I came from a rather privileged family, my dad was an engineer and my mom worked in real estate. My dad was the type of man to plan for the worst, if he had the money for it, he would have certainly built a doomsday bunker. That led him to enlist me in a few first aid courses, just in case.

With a silent thanks to my dad, I began using the cloth from my pants to dress the wound on my arm. The other cuts had already stopped bleeding but this one was bleeding like a leaky faucet despite the time that had passed. I used a wod of the fabric as a dressing for the wound and a strip of it as a bandage to apply pressure.

I hung up the coyote by its legs with another strip of fabric, hoping that the cuts I had already done with the stick would help bleed the beast and preserve it.

As soon as my eyelids shut, in the darkness of the first night I would spend in this new world. I drifted into a deep sleep.