I woke up hard.

  This was not a surprise. I was beginning to think I would wake up hard every morning for the rest of my life, which given the ring's general philosophy about downtime was probably accurate. The rocky outcropping was still dark, the forest outside doing its early morning sounds, something calling in a low tone from somewhere distant.

  I y there for about four seconds before I stopped pretending I was going to go back to sleep.

  I knew what the ring wanted. I knew what I wanted. The question of whether those were the same thing or whether the ring had simply colonized my wanting was one I'd examined for about thirty seconds back on day one and filed away unopened since. Either way the answer was the same and the answer was currently pressing against my goblin leather pants with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

  I untied the front cing and let my dick out into the cool morning air.

  I'd gotten good at this. That was the thing I noticed while I worked Morning Dew up and down the club's narrow end, coating it thoroughly, the luminescent slick catching what little light made it into the outcropping. Three days ago I'd have described myself as a guy who had never really done much of anything. A friend and I had fooled around some in junior year — just blowjobs, nothing more, the kind of thing that happened once in a bedroom and didn't get discussed afterward and didn't need to be. I'd imagined someday going further. Railing some guy or getting railed. The usual spectrum of things a nineteen year old thinks about at two in the morning when he's got his hand on his dick and nobody's watching.

  I had not imagined doing it to myself.

  I worked my elbows over my knees and folded myself in half the way years of cross country stretching had made possible, the cool stone at my back, and my cock rose up to meet my lips without much effort at all. I wrapped my mouth around the wide fred head and tasted Morning Dew immediately, warm and faintly sweet and alive with that systemic kick, and felt the healing warmth spread through me as I held myself there.

  At the same time I pressed the narrow end of the club against my asshole and worked it in with the patience of someone who had been doing this long enough to know exactly what his ass needed. The entry was smooth now, easier every morning, my body knowing what was coming and opening up for it without the resistance of the first few times. I pushed until I found what I was looking for — that specific deep pressure against my prostate that made my dick jump in my own mouth and Morning Dew surge against my tongue — and settled there and worked it slowly.

  The ring wanted to take everything as usual. I let it absorb most of the charge, the gauge climbing steadily, but I held back what I wanted to hold back the way I'd learned — focused intention overriding the ring's default setting. I built toward it slowly, club working steadily in my ass, my mouth full of my own wide fred tip, Morning Dew running constantly against my tongue, my dick leaking like crazy every time the club hit my prostate just right.

  When I finally let myself go I willed the ring to release it.

  My mouth filled with my own cum.

  Warm and salt-thick, coating my throat as I swallowed, the taste of myself mixed with the faint sweetness of Morning Dew, and the ring pulsed with what I was choosing to interpret as grudging acceptance. The systemic healing hit immediately, deeper than Morning Dew alone, the full combination working through me in a long warm wave that reached every part of me and left me feeling like a live wire wrapped in warm water.

  I straightened up slowly, spine popping in two pces, and ran my tongue up my own softening dick collecting the Morning Dew that had run down during the proceedings. I swallowed it and felt the st yer of warmth settle through me.

  I looked at the two craters in the tree across from my outcropping.

  What have I become, I thought, with genuine philosophical inquiry rather than any particur distress. I was pretty sure I was addicted to my own dick. The evidence supported this conclusion comprehensively. The ring had taken a nineteen year old who'd had exactly one sexual experience worth mentioning — some blowjobs with a friend who we'd both agreed not to discuss — and in three days had produced someone who woke up and immediately folded himself in half with a goblin club and his own cock in his mouth and considered this a completely reasonable morning routine.

  I cleaned the club, retied my pants, and stood up.

  A man can't live off his own cum, I thought.

  The probably was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Morning Dew addressed hunger in a functional sense but I needed actual food, actual calories, something that came from outside my own body, and I needed to find which direction civilization was before my situation became critical.

  I picked up the club and walked into the morning.

  I'd been walking two or three hours when it found me.

  I heard it before I saw it — a low sound in the undergrowth, heavier and more deliberate than anything I'd encountered yet, not bothering to hide because it was something that had never needed to hide. I had maybe two seconds of warning before it cleared the trees and unched itself at my throat.

  Wolf was the closest word I had for it. Wolf the way this forest was forest — recognizable in the basic shape but wrong in the specifics. Bigger than any wolf I'd ever seen a picture of, shoulders at my hip height, and its teeth were enormous in a way that suggested this world's evolutionary process had taken that particur design decision extremely seriously. It came through the air at my neck with the total commitment of something that had never missed a lunge in its life.

  I was already moving.

  My body moved before my brain caught up, a sidestep that took me clear of its trajectory by a margin I felt rather than calcuted, the wolf's teeth snapping through empty air where my throat had been. I got three quick steps of distance and put a tree between us and the wolf nded, skidded, and turned to face me with those enormous teeth and the focused expression of something that was not done.

  The ring was sitting at high charge from the morning's activities. Enhanced Physique running hot, that steady warmth of speed and strength avaible and waiting. I had my goblin club. I had no other weapons. The wolf was rger than me by a margin that made Dick Sp a logistically complicated proposition.

  I looked at the wolf.

  The wolf looked at me.

  I ripped my pants open.

  No time for ceremony. I grabbed my dick and stroked twice and the ring did the rest, bringing me up fast and hard, twelve inches of horse cock pointing at a rge predator at eight in the morning, and I had a brief clear thought of this is my life now before I focused on what I was doing.

  I built charge fast, the pressure accumuting behind the ring's absorption threshold, that concentrated heat building at the tip of my dick, and I aimed at the wolf's chest and let it go.

  The Cum Shot left me with that pressurized concentrated force I'd discovered yesterday and hit the wolf square in the chest before it had finished its second step toward me. The impact drove it backwards off its feet, a wet cracking thud, and I felt the recoil through my hips from the discharge.

  The wolf went down hard.

  A short sharp yelp and then silence. It hit the ground and stayed there, the impact site glowing faintly luminescent, a thick wet mark spreading through its grey fur. The morning air immediately and comprehensively announced the nature of what had just happened.

  The forest smelled aggressively like cum. Immediately and thoroughly and in every direction.

  I stood with my pants open and my dick slowly softening and looked at the wolf lying completely still in the dirt.

  Then the screen appeared.

  ? LEVEL UP

  Congratutions — Level 3 Reached +3 points applied to ALL stats

  STAT PREVIOUS NEW STR 10 13 END 10 13 AGI 10 13 INT 10 13 WIS 10 13 CHA 10 13

  RESOURCE PREVIOUS NEW HP 100/100 168/168 SP 100/100 168/168

  I stared at it.

  Level three. I'd apparently blown through level two without noticing, which said something about the wolf being worth significant experience or the previous days of systematic self-experimentation having been quietly accumuting toward a threshold I hadn't known existed. Three stat points in every single stat simultaneously. All of them. That seemed broken. That seemed like the kind of thing a game designer would look at and fg as a serious bance problem.

  I was not compining.

  My HP had jumped to 168. I could feel the difference the way I could always feel the ring's charge — not intellectually, just physically, a sense of more capacity, more structural integrity, the baseline of my body having stepped up a level in a way that was immediately apparent and difficult to articute.

  I closed the screen.

  I sat down in the dirt because my legs had made a uniteral decision that they were done holding me up, the combat adrenaline finishing its job and evacuating. My pants were open. My balls were resting in the dirt. My dick was slowly softening from its combat deployment, twitching its way down toward the ground with the unhurried dignity of something that had discharged its professional responsibilities and was clocking out.

  I looked at the wolf.

  I looked at my dick.

  I looked at the wolf again, lying still and thoroughly coated in glowing cum, in a forest that smelled like a very specific kind of catastrophe.

  "Level three," I said out loud, to nobody, to the forest, to whatever system had decided that shooting a giant wolf in the chest with a concentrated bst of cum qualified as sufficient grounds for a significant level jump.

  The forest offered no counterargument.

  I sat in the dirt for another minute, balls in the soil, morning air full of the aggressive evidence of my combat technique, and then I stood up, tied my pants back together, and picked up my club.

  I really needed to find something to eat that wasn't my own cum.

  Probably.