Frostbound

I woke up so early in the morning to start my training for the day that it felt like I just fell asleep and only got an hour of rest. It was so early that the birds had just begun their birdcalls and the sun was barely in the air. If my phone still worked it would show it being near the ass crack of dawn.

No one else in the camp was up yet and the lack of sound was disturbing. I was never the first one up so there was usually the sound of conversations or the clinking of pots and pans for cooking and it was odd to view the camp like this. It put the camp in a new light, the only time it was this quiet was late at night when it was dark outside.

Getting up so early in the morning was hard. Getting up so early in the morning without coffee was harder. I made a promise to myself that if this training went well and if I ended up raking in the points, I would splurge and buy some.

There was no better motivator for me right now than coffee and the impending doom that my family faced. So without further delay, I grabbed my gear and readied myself to venture into the forest to start my preparations.

After gearing up inside my tent and making sure that I had everything that I would need, I began to make my way out of camp toward the forest. Before I could make it a few steps toward the new gates, I saw Austin exiting his tent with all of his gear equipped and looking like he was ready to face down a monster.

We both spotted each other at the same time and when we did, both of us froze. Neither of us expected that anyone else would be up this early and it showed when we both just froze like deer in headlights.

After staring at each other for a moment I pointed at the gate to convey we should talk over there to not wake anyone else up from the noise. Austin nodded and both of us made our way over there, as soon as we were out of earshot I whisper yelled at him.

"What are you doing up? And why are you fully geared?" Yes, I was being a hypocrite asking what he was doing up when I was also up, but I didn't care about that right now.

"What am I doing up? Did you think that you were the only one to realize we needed to do more in order to survive? I'm up to go hunting same as you I'm guessing." He said.

Well, I didn't have a response to that. We both had the same idea and both woke up early to do it. I couldn't much blame him for realizing the same thing that I had and two is always better than one.

"Well, two is better than one, right? Did you want to go together or was there something specific that you wanted to do alone?" I asked, quickly glossing over the accusatory tone I had previously.

"If it's the two of us we should be safer, so let's go together. Did you have a plan to go about this?" Austin said.