Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game

The days blurred. Not because time passed easily, but because it passed relentlessly.

With no sun to track across the sky and no System messages to mark the end of combat or quests completed, the rhythm of their lives became simple.

Forage, build, hunt, survive.

They marked time in firewood piles and the slow smoking of meat. In the dull ache of bruises that faded, and in Dee’s quiet growth. Its limbs lengthened, its eyes gained new shades of awareness, and its body became slowly, but steadily, thicker and stronger. It started mimicking their movements more often, tilting its head like Miles, twitching when Sarissa winced. Learning.

Each morning began with gathering roots, berries, and anything edible that didn’t fight back. Afternoons were for reinforcing the lean-to or sharpening the stones they used as tools. Night was the worst.

Every shadow held the weight of a threat.

Every breeze might carry the sound of something hunting.

The first week came and went like a stone sinking beneath still water.

By the sixth day, Sarissa’s first makeshift spear had splintered on impact with a panther-limbed bird-thing that bled smoke and didn’t stay dead the first time they killed it.

On the seventh, Miles managed to rig a stone-headed club using melted resin scraped from bark that burned the skin if left too long.

They got smarter, faster.