Ethan burst out of the treeline, every crackle of leaves spiking his nerves. The jungle was thicker than he anticipated - vines drooped like ropes and enormous roots jutted out of the ground, forcing him to pick his footing carefully.
Somewhere to his left, movement.
He froze.
At first, it looked like a wild boar. Then it turned its head, and his stomach twisted. The tusks arched up into sickles, each one longer than his forearm, and a bumpy row of bone-like spikes ran down its back. Its eyes, sharp amber, locked onto him.
"....Okay," he muttered, slowly backing away. "That's not an Earth animal."
The boar snorted, pawed at the ground, and charged.
Ethan spun and ran. Branches slapped his face and roots pinned his shoe, but he didn't care. Behind him, the heavy thud of hooves and rusty snaps of foliage approached fast.
Then another sound joined the chaos — a high, guttural screech. From above, a blur of color dropped into his path. At first, he thought it was a monkey. Then he saw the claws.
It was lean and long-limbed, its fur a mottled mix of blue and black. A long tail coiled like a whip, and its teeth were sharper than any primate he'd seen in a zoo. It shrieked and leapt at him.
Ethan ducked under its swing, stumbling sideways into the undergrowth. The boar slammed into the creature with a sickening crunch, sending both rolling through the foliage in a flurry of screeches and roars.
He didn't wait to see who won. He ran until the sounds faded behind him, lungs burning, legs aching, until he stumbled into a patch of sunlight at the edge of the jungle.
While the beach felt safer, he could visualise the creatures and not a deserted island in the way he had expected — what he discovered was a site of distorted nature where every animal was made to kill you.
For hours he was pacing the beach and struggling to bring his breathing under control, and at some point it got easier and something else took over.
Hunger.
His stomach turned over and over telling him that he had not eaten since... well, long before a truck had hit him.
He turned back toward the trees along the beach, but now with care. He did not have any desire to encounter another one of the jungle's citizens. He kept at the edge where the trees met the sand, looking for anything edible on the ground when...
It did not take long for him to spy them - round orange fruit scattered beneath a tall, leafless tree. Above him, a troop of monkeys were chirping as they rapidly plucked the same fruit and shoved it into their mouths.
Ethan crouched down to pick one up. The skin was tough, but when he dug his fingernail into it, the flesh inside smelled faintly sweet.
"If it's good enough for them…" he murmured, peeling it clumsily. The taste was somewhere between mango and citrus, tangy but refreshing.
He ate three more before the monkeys started throwing unripe ones at his head, screeching in protest.
-----
That night, he slept on the beach, back against a fallen log, the gauntlet's cold weight pressing against his side. The stars above were brighter than he'd ever seen, unbroken by city lights. For the first time, he realized just how far from home he truly was.
Days melted into each other.
Ethan's world had shrunk to the expanse of beach he claimed as his own and the shallow edge of the jungle where he foraged. Each morning, he woke to the sound of hard waves smashing on the shore, scanned for any new debris that washed ashore, then returned to his usual fruit trees.
The gauntlet had become part of that morning routine. At first he tried not to look at it, still queasy about how it felt glued to his arm. But with nothing else to do, he started to experiment with the gauntlet. He flexed his fingers, tapped the plates, hammered the metal against rocks. There was still a slight hum with various intensities, though it didn't stop there. Every time he tightened his fist the hum went wild, as if it were reacting to him.
Once, he pressed on of the empty sockets. Nothing happened -- but for the briefest of moments, the air around my hand felt... different. Warmer. The feeling faded before he could figure out why.
He certainly did not dare venture any deeper into the island after that first encounter. The long roars and distant howls of the beasts in the dense interior were enough of a warning.
Instead, he found a small stream about a ten-minute walk from the beach. The water was cool and clear, gurgling over smooth stones. It tasted clean, and he told himself that if the water was going to kill him, he's probably going to know by now.
Now, the fruit. This was mostly taken from the ground near his "monkey trees," but sometimes he would find other varieties, some too bitter to eat, and others that would leave him doubled over in abdominal cramps for hours. He learned early on that what the monkeys ate was worth eating.
The nights were the hardest. The jungle never went silent, there was always something moving, rustling or calling in the dark. Once, he woke up to the sound of something massive walking along the tree line. He stayed frozen until it moved on.
As the week came to a close, the island began to develop its own rhythm. The tide still came in higher during the late afternoon, the monkeys still came down to forage in the mornings, and he still had to avoid any newly created shade on the beach, because around noon there was a lot sun beating down.
No matter how long he was on the island, the gauntlet had still not stopped feeling like a question he did not know to ask.
Some nights, he would end up awake staring at it in the moonlight. Why me? Why here? And what exactly was this thing supposed to do?
He did not have answers yet. But he also unconsciously knew that the answers were out there, somewhere past the trees, past the monsters, past the hold of this new strange world.
For now, it was just about survival.
In fact, survival, meant figuring out how to make sure tomorrow looked, as much as possible, like today.