Alwyn got down on his stomach and started crawling towards the nearest plank. He lifted it up and found nothing under it. But the plank itself was also an object of his interest, being mostly undamaged, so he placed it in an open space and immediately headed back into the mess.
On the second try, he found a small bag of lizard feed. Although it was not something he could eat, it would definitely turn out useful for other tasks.
He repeated the procedure for twenty minutes, but found nothing salvageable every single time, except for plenty of wooden panels and some dry tattered rags.
He was starting to lose hope.
That work was taxing on both mind and body. He was quickly becoming exhausted, and by crawling in the rubble he was scratching up his arms badly.
The twenty-third attempt, however, was the fortuitous one.
When the sun touched the mountain's peak and the already dark sky gradually began to dim, Alwyn was suddenly distracted by a faint glimmer, and caught sight of a shovel hidden under a pile of smashed boxes.
'Why am I so lucky today?'
Thought in a sarcastic tone.
With renewed strength, he immediately started digging in that chaos, ignoring the splinters that pierced his hands.
"As if!"
Lucky was a big word.
Close to the metal extremity, the wooden shaft was split in half.
A shovel was extremely useful in that environment, so he wondered why the Reapers left it there.
Was it so that all the evidence of the crime would be dispersed more easily by the wind, or was there another reason?
If he survived the night, he would give it a deep thought. But what was important right now was that the tool, as it currently was, was completely useless. So he grabbed what little remained of the shaft and repeatedly swung the thing down, hitting the rock-hard ground, until the blade eventually popped off.
He picked the item up and went in search of an undamaged replacement for the shaft. He already knew where.
He needed to search for the axles of the carriage, hidden under big piles of rubble.
It took him great effort to lift up the voluminous piled-up planks, and after another twenty minute long quest, he finally succeeded in his goal.
'Yes!'
He could repair the shovel and finally start digging the shelter.
His joy however was short-lived, because the wind started picking up.
A shiver ran down his spine.
It had happened sooner than expected, but after all, the weather was unpredictable.
Only one of his three goals had been fulfilled, that of finding materials. Two if the still to be assembled shovel counted as a weapon.
But with no food, water, dry and heavy clothing, and a proper way to defend himself, his days were numbered.
And now, barely half of the sun could still be seen, looming over the Greyshard Range. Shadows had already begun to cover the plain, quickly devouring everything in their path.
He urgently needed to work on the shelter, giving up on searching for other supplies, so he preventively secured under some heavy debris what he had already looted.
It was not much, but he had to be grateful, as it could have been far worse.
Wooden boards, dry rags and the lizard feed.
There was only one small problem…
His legs had not finished healing yet, and they had a long way to go before being even remotely functional. Half the shin was still missing.
He didn't know when or why, but the regeneration had apparently slowed down significantly, messing up his plans.
'...Fuck.'
He had to reconsider all his strategies. If his legs completely stopped regenerating, he was as good as dead.
At that moment, he wondered why the regeneration started in the first place. Lynn was not a Reaper, let alone he knew magic. Strangely enough, magic was not even a thing in that fantasy world, the only things that came close were ancient relics. But those objects were in the Church's hands, and he obviously was not a member.
'Wait, don't tell me-'
If it was not the work of men, then it was that of gods. Here, only two such entities existed, or at least were known by mere mortals. Death and Life. It could have been the work of the latter, but she had never interacted with humans before.
Why would she save Alwyn? He was not even supposed to be in that world. It didn't make sense, it had to be someone else's doing, and there were not many other options.
'...Time.'
The guy could reverse the course of time, meaning he could potentially make a wound disappear. If that was true, it meant that the three bastards were currently watching him from somewhere, laughing their asses off.
Other trials would soon appear before him, and he was not prepared to face them… yet.
'There's so much to do…'
Alwyn took the axle and chipped one end with the metallic head of the shovel, reducing its circumference enough for it to fit on it. Then he positioned the head on that end and pressed them together with the little strength he had left, which was far from sufficient, but it at least stabilized the blade where it needed to be.
He then leaned on the axle, vertical to the ground, using all of his weight to force it to slide through the head's socket.
After a short series of profanities, it was finally done. The tool could now be considered sturdy enough to dig a bit.
Without resting for a second, Alwyn got to work. He took some cloth, not the dry one which he will need later, and wrapped it around the stumps, that now reached halfway up his shin, so that he could stand up on them without excessively dirtying the wound.
'Ohhh it hurts... It fucking hurts!'
The stumps started bleeding profusely, the pain felt excruciating, but he acted as if it didn't affect him in the slightest and began to dig, covered by the wreckage. He had reverted to his old self, the emotionless machine who always attained the impossible, even when his body was covered in deep gushing wounds.
Such was his determination to not bend down to the Gods.
With every scoop, he only removed a handful of dirt, but that did not discourage him from relentlessly repeating the taxing task. Even when a sudden gust of wind made him lose balance and fall to the ground, he kept getting up to resume the digging. To an outside eye he might have looked like a corpse digging his own grave.
Or better, a Revenant.
While repeating the same movements over and over, as if in a trance, he lost track of time, and before he knew it he had already been swallowed by the cold darkness.
He could hardly see anymore, but at least he had finished the first task. His lungs were burning, he was struggling to breathe.
A two and a half meters long wall lay before him, as high as the hips. Right at its feet, a ditch that could fit three human bodies had been clumsily dug.
But the aesthetic was not important to Alwyn, so he immediately got to the second task, that was isolating the interior.
He removed the heavy debris that he had previously placed on his supplies, and took the planks three at a time, placing them on each side of the rectangular trench. While doing so, a couple flew off in the distance, but luckily his far-sightedness had paid off, as he had prepared more than he needed.
At last, he covered the surfaces with the dry rags and got into the shelter together with the shovel and the lizard feed, placing another three panels on top of him. As the trench was quite deep and thanks to the wall of dirt, the chances that they could fly away were very slim, but they still rattled incessantly.
Only then did Alwyn take a sigh of relief.
He was hungry and thirsty, lightheaded, as he had lost lots of blood, freezing, still wearing the blood-soaked clothes, exhausted from all the hours of straight hard labor, and in pain for the open wounds, which had deeply deteriorated, but he still couldn't get a content smile off his face.
"I… I did it…"
His weak voice could barely be heard.
He only had one thing left to do: to not die in his sleep. But he fortunately had no control over that, and so, he immediately fell into a deep slumber, lulled by the howls of the wind.
'If I have to die, so be it.'