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Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 61 – Things in the Forest
🕑 Added 2024-08-09 06:56:49 +0000 UTCThe next few hours were an exercise in frustration for Terry. While his intentions had been good, his skills at forest craft were somewhat subpar. He’d spent enough time in that forest while fleeing the church that he’d started to get a sense of what to watch out for, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing as being even an adequate tracker. He found plenty of tracks of various things, but he didn’t know what they were when he saw then. He felt like he was in a mystery show, except he was the derpy sidekick, not the master detective. He was basically just walking through the woods and metaphorically pointing at things while saying, Look, a clue! He was not, however, left with a warm and fuzzy feeling about the security of his home. There were a lot of signs that monsters lived in this forest, and that they routinely came close enough to be a threat.
“Are you going to chime in about anything we’ve seen?” said Terry, even though he was directing that question at other-Terry.
Oh, now you want my opinion about things.
“Weren’t you crying like a little kid with a skinned knee about me not asking for you input on things like… I don’t know. Less than six hours ago?”
Other-Terry didn’t seem to have an immediate response to that. Ha! Take that, you dickish substitute for an inner monologue. It felt like he so rarely got the upper hand in these exchanges that Terry couldn’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment. That was immediately undercut when other-Terry chimed in.
I heard that, you know.
Terry hadn’t known that all of his thoughts were readily available to other-Terry, but he couldn’t pretend some great surprise at learning that particular fact. He saw two main paths forward from that moment. In the first version of the events, he could backpedal and try to play nice. That’s certainly what the remnants of programmer Terry wanted to do with all of his social incompetence and anxiety. However, looking back on all the times he’d done something like that in past, he wanted to cringe a little. It was so disingenuous on the part of exactly everyone involved. He clearly hadn’t meant it when he backtracked. He could also see that there had been a bit of maliciousness on the part of the people who let him do it. They had liked watching him be uncomfortable. Maybe that wasn’t true in every case, but it had true often enough for him to recognize it in hindsight. He just didn’t know what to do with it at the moment.
In the second version of events, he could just own that shit like an adult. He might still feel uncomfortable, but at least it would be honest. The choice looked easy when he considered things from that perspective.
“I said what I said,” offered Terry in response. “You are a dickish substitute for an inner monologue. Especially when you’re still not being helpful.”
There was another drawn out moment of mental silence. You’re not supposed to just say things like that, said other-Terry. Even if they are true.
“I’m pretty sure that you’ll live,” muttered Terry.
He was staring down at a print that actually looked familiar to him. It looked like a dog’s paw print, assuming that dogs grew to be the size of horses. He thought he might be mentally exaggerating the size of the animal in question but he wasn’t sure it was a gross exaggeration. The paw print was huge. It had to be at least two or three times the size of any paw print he’d ever stumbled across in his old world. If he’d seen a paw print that big when he’d still been living in that world, he’d have either panicked or assumed someone was playing a bizarre prank on him. Now, he didn’t panic or assume it was a prank. He shared this world with creatures the size of Drumstick and the foliasaur, after all. Huge monsters weren’t a new thing anymore. Familiarity didn’t necessarily make them less dangerous, but his failure to panic about them would go a long way toward ensuring he survived an encounter with one.
He briefly entertained the question of whether or not huge monsters were a derivation of the everything’s bigger in Texas trope but swiftly dismissed the idea. Terrifyingly large monsters were a trope that existed wholly independent of that trope in the cultivation books he’d read. He was also fairly certain that while he might encounter it, the trope probably wasn’t directed at him personally. It seemed like those kinds of threats existed in this world long before he came along. That freed him of any lingering sense of responsibility he might have felt. Even if it seemed like his new world was occasionally importing tropes to make his life difficult, the blame for that one was one someone else’s head.
I guess I can’t complain that you’ve started to grow a spine, observed other-Terry. Very well. If you want some helpful advice, I’d suggest that you stop the pack of dire wolves that’s been tracking you from killing you.
“Dire wolves?” asked Terry.
He recalled that dire wolves were a larger species of wolves that used to live on his world. They’d gone exist because of… Terry racked his brain. Why did those damn things go extinct? It wasn’t the meteor. That killed the dinosaurs. Was it climate change? He gave up on trying to beat the information from his memory. It was entirely possible that he’d never known why they died out. If the internet had been good at something, it was providing snippets of information with zero context. Besides, he had a terrible feeling that other-Terry had undersold the threat. Big wolves would have been terrifying to old him, but he doubted they could do much more than annoy him in his current form. That had to mean that these dire wolves were something much, much worse than what he was imagining. Even worse, he hadn’t sensed anything, and he’d thought that was something he was getting better at.
He peered around at the trees surrounding him. He didn’t see anything out there, but he supposed that these dire wolves wouldn’t be very good hunters if they went around getting seen all the time. He also didn’t want to go home now that they were on his trail. That would just put the others in danger they probably couldn’t handle. Even so, his information deficit was weighing on him. He didn’t know what these things were, or what they could do, or even which direction they would come from. That was assuming they didn’t come at him from every direction. Other-Terry had said it was a pack.
“I don’t suppose you want to weigh in with some more information about what I’m facing here, do you?”
Some lessons you have to learn for yourself, said other-Terry.
“Are you saying that because it’s true or because you want to be a dick to me for calling you out?”
Other-Terry didn’t say anything, which was an answer in itself as far as regular-Terry was concerns.
“You just want to be a dick to me. Remember that when I don’t talk to you about anything for the next six months.”
Terry felt other-Terry forming a response, but he never learned what it was going to be. Massive black forms that were, in fact, the size of goddamn horses seemed to appear out of nowhere. The damn things were intimidating as hell. They didn’t have eyes, as such. They had eye sockets that were filled with something that Terry’s mind jumped to calling primordial flame. They all had their teeth bared, and the teeth he saw looked like polished glass. When they snarled, it tugged at fears that dwelled deep, deep inside of Terry’s soul. It felt like an imprint from the days when his ancestors hid in caves and feared the cold and dark of the night. If he hadn’t come so close to death so recently, it might have had more of an effect on him. As it was, he felt a shudder pass over him.
These things are dangerous, thought Terry, and there’s so many of them. When other-Terry had said pack, regular-Terry had imagined eight or ten. There were dozens of the things around him. No wonder the adventurers who had tried to investigate hadn’t come back. Terry only had a general sense of where he stood in the hierarchy of power in Chinese Period Drama Hell, but he did know he was fairly well into the upper half of that hierarchy. He was in no way sure he could survive this. A rank three or rank four would be brought down in no time. There was a temptation to run, but he suspected that wouldn’t do him much good. These awful things could probably run for days without stopping.
That only left fighting, and this wouldn’t be like the fight with the foliasaur. He’d been wavering at the time. No, he’d practically begging for death back then. That had just been a knee-jerk desire to return to the familiar. He might hate this stupid world, but he didn’t hate himself nearly enough to want to actually die. He could live here. Maybe it wasn’t the life he had tried to make for himself but that life hadn’t exactly been great. He’d been scared of people, which meant he’d been perpetually lonely. His career had been one bad day away from imploding around him. That was particularly bad because coding had been one of the only things that hadn’t filled him with anxiety. The truth was that he’d more of a ghost than a person in that old life.
This new life of his was a chance to remake himself. Well, no, that implied a lot more agency that he’d been employing. This new life had forced enough change on him that he finally had the agency to remake himself. Some of that change had been shitty as hell to live through, but he had also gotten a lot of unearned power out of the deal. More than enough power to build a better life. He just had to decide to do it. Terry drew his jian and threw a thought at other-Terry. You better pull your goddamn weight in this fight. I’m not dying out here because you don’t feel like sharing. There was a silence in his head that had a profundity to it that he couldn’t rightly explain. Then, other-Terry spoke in a tone that regular-Terry could only describe as relieved.
Finally.
Comments
Angela Roberts
I agree, finally Terry's reached least partial acceptance of his new inner life. Can't wait to see what happens now.
Newbie_101
My theory is that other Terry has been put in this position as a punishment from his previous life. I suspect he is meant to learn from this and is not allowed to simply "let Terry die". Cultivators usually impose their will on the world, so Terry's behavior must seem indecisive and inconsistent.
Seriously
"You know, you and me, we're more ghosts than people" -Arthur Morgan
Marian Ch
Given how Terry himself constantly acts and the fact his other self is based on him, it's not exactly a surprise. Both of them act like obstinate mules, neither willing to give up an inch and rather 'stand up for themselves' (read be a stubborn, rude jackass). Must be quite annoying to watch someone ignore anything you have to say and just treat everything as if it's a made up hell. Now, with this dire wolf encounter maybe we get to see this two facets finally make some peace and grow together. Maybe even become a singular person.
BelligerentGnu
It's entirely possible I'm missing something, but other-Terry's antagonism feels a little arbitrary. Not hugely so, just somewhat disproportionate. Could just be we haven't seen much of him yet. On the other hand, Terry finally deciding to embrace his inner xianxia is a very welcome development.
