Overpowered Farmer

The Alaskan winter was brutally cold, for no good reason.

Jack Hudson knelt in the snow, wrapped in a sheepskin that had frozen stiff, slowly scraping open a hole in the ground with his bare hands.

His fingers had gone almost completely numb. He stopped, shoved his hands under his armpits for a few seconds, then kept digging.

The hole got deeper.

Then he caught the smell — rabbit.

Over the past two weeks, he'd caught seven or eight of them. He'd cleaned out nearly every rabbit burrow in the area.

A second later, his fingertips touched something soft.

He held his breath, plunged his hand in, and grabbed a fat rabbit that was kicking like crazy.

He yanked it out and quickly pinched its neck with his other hand, twisting hard. The rabbit went still.

Jack crouched in the snow, breathing hard for a long moment.

He pulled out his folding knife and started skinning the rabbit right there in the snow.

The blade wasn't sharp, but he was fast.

He grabbed a handful of clean snow and scrubbed the rabbit meat with it, washing away the blood.

Then he tied the meat with a cord and hung it from his belt.

Three months ago, Jack had been a partner at a law firm in New York.

Then one bad call cost him his license. His partners pushed him out. The bank took his house. His car went to pay off debts. His credit cards were maxed out. Debt collectors called from morning to night, and he couldn't even bring himself to turn his phone on.

With nowhere left to turn, Jack saw an ad for a show called Alone Against the Wild.

The rules were simple: ten contestants dropped into the Alaskan wilderness, each given six pieces of survival gear and a live-streaming device, broadcasting around the clock. Viewers could watch them, but the contestants couldn't see any comments or hear anything from the outside world. Last one standing took home five hundred thousand dollars.

Five hundred grand. Enough to clear all his debts, with a little left over.

He signed up, got picked, and was dropped by helicopter into this endless white wasteland.

Jack carried the rabbit fur back to his shelter.

The shelter was built from pine branches and a waterproof tarp — small, just barely big enough to lie down in. At around five degrees Fahrenheit, it was more of a mental comfort than actual protection from the cold.

He hammered a wooden stake into the corner wall and hung the rabbit skin up to dry naturally.

A few other hides he'd saved were hanging there too, layered together, doing just enough to block the wind.

Jack quickly cut the rabbit into chunks and held them over the fire.

It was a small fire, burning the dry branches he'd been collecting over the past few days — the kind of fuel he had to ration carefully for warmth at night.

The meat sizzled over the flames, fat dripping, and the smell hit him before his stomach did. It growled several times.

He tore off a piece of the leg, blowing on it because it was scorching hot, and took a bite.

The meat was dry. No seasoning, just the raw, smoky taste of an open fire. But he thought it was the best thing he'd ever eaten.

Not because it was good. But because it was proof that he was staying alive on his own terms.

What Jack didn't know was that his livestream was blowing up.

"This guy's got crazy luck. Another rabbit?"

"I've been watching for twelve days. He finds food every single day. Everyone else is basically starving."

"Luck is still a skill, okay?"

"Yeah right. How long can luck last? He's running out."

The stream had climbed to over twenty thousand viewers — the most of any contestant currently broadcasting.

But Jack couldn't see any of that. To him, there was only the quiet, endless snowfield, and one long, lonely night after another.

The sun was going down.

Jack wrapped the leftover rabbit meat in the waterproof tarp and tucked it into the far corner of the shelter.

He added a few more sticks to the fire, rolled out his sleeping bag, and climbed in.

The sleeping bag was thin — standard issue from the show — nowhere near enough for this kind of cold. But he'd collected enough hides over the past few days to pad underneath him and layer on top. It was barely enough to get by.

The fire burned on, pushing out waves of warmth.

His eyelids started getting heavy.

He'd worn himself out completely. Jack rolled over to face the shelter wall, pulled the hide up over his head, and closed his eyes.

His breathing evened out within minutes.

He was asleep.

Back in the livestream, viewers were still talking about Jack.

The camera was pointed at the shelter entrance. Firelight flickered across the screen.

Viewers could see Jack curled up in his sleeping bag, just a shape under the hides. They could see the pine branches outside shaking in the wind. They could see the dark snowfield beyond, and a gray line where the sky met the horizon.

Everything looked quiet.

Then someone noticed something.

"Wait — what's that on the right?"

"Holy crap, are those eyes?"

"WOLVES. THERE ARE WOLVES."

At the very edge of the firelight, two pairs of green eyes floated in the darkness, completely still, fixed on the shelter.

Nobody had seen them arrive. They were silent, like they'd grown straight up out of the snow.

"Jack! Jack, wake up!"

"He's facing the wall. He can't see them."

"That fire won't last much longer. When it dies, the wolves will go for him."

"He might actually die tonight."

"Where's the crew? Someone's going to get killed out there!"

"They don't care. He signed a liability waiver."

The comments were flying. Thousands of viewers were glued to the screen, hearts pounding.

But Jack couldn't see any of it. He was sleeping deeply, breathing steady, hadn't even shifted position.

Then the two wolves stepped out of the dark.

They weren't huge, but they were lean — ribs showing faintly in the firelight.

Mid-winter was exactly when wolves got desperate. No food meant they'd go after anything, and Jack's shelter smelled like fresh meat.

They moved together, bodies low, paws pressing into the snow without a sound.

The viewers stopped breathing.

For a moment, it felt like the wolves weren't watching Jack — they were watching them.

The comments went quiet for a second, then exploded again:

"Wake up! Come on, get up!"

"I can't look."

"If they both rush at once he won't even have time to react."

"He's done."

And then, in the middle of what everyone had already written off as the end —

Jack moved.

He shot straight up.

No grogginess, no looking around in confusion. He didn't even turn his head. It was like he already knew exactly where the wolves were standing.

He reached into the fire, pulled out a branch that was burning bright, stood up, and walked a full circle around the shelter with the burning end pointed outward.

One branch. Two. Three. He pulled out almost every thick piece of wood he had stored.

In less than a minute, he'd planted a ring of torches all the way around the camp.

The firelight merged into a solid circle and pushed the wolves back several steps.

They stopped just outside the light, the flames reflected in their eyes, a low growl building in their throats. They didn't run.

Jack didn't shout. He didn't charge at them with his axe.

He sat back down by the fire, draped the old sheepskin over his shoulders, laid the axe across his knees, and looked straight at those two pairs of green eyes.

One man. Two wolves. A wall of fire between them.

The comments lost it.

"When did he wake up?"

"He's so calm. How is he that calm?"

"He didn't even look back — how did he know where they were?"

"You still think that's luck?"

"I'm speechless. Does this guy have a sixth sense or something?"

"No wonder he's lasted this long."

"But the wolves still haven't left. What does he do now?"

Jack sat in front of the fire while the northern wind drove snow and ice particles into his face.

The firelight lit up his expression — or the lack of one. His eyes were half-closed, like he was zoning out.

But his hand never left the axe. His thumb moved slowly back and forth along the handle.

Nobody watching knew that Jack's survival had nothing to do with luck.

On his very first day, after the helicopter dropped him into this snowfield, a dangerous drop in body temperature had triggered something in him — an ability he hadn't had before.

His mind could spread outward like a wave, covering everything within a one-mile radius.

Within that range, he could sense every living thing and every useful resource, automatically ranked by how valuable they were to him.

Like having a massive radar scanner running inside his head.

Where to find dry firewood. Where there was water. Where the rabbit burrows were. Where edible berries might be hiding. It was all mapped out clearly in his mind.

That was how he'd made it through the past month.

As for the two wolves — Jack had known about them the whole time.

From the moment he was walking back with the rabbit, two red dots had been tracking him in his mind.

He'd played it cool, returned to camp, eaten, and pretended to sleep. He'd been waiting for exactly this moment.

He glanced at the ring of torches. They'd hold for a while.

But sunrise was still hours away.

Jack fed another stick to the fire, pulled the stiff sheepskin tighter over his shoulder, and kept his eyes on those two green lights in the dark.

He didn't move. The wolves didn't move.

They crouched outside the firelight like stone statues, eyes never blinking, watching him without pause.

Jack knew what wolves were like. Patient. Methodical. They'd look for any crack in your defense.

The moment you relaxed, they'd clear the fire in one leap and go straight for your throat.

A few more comments drifted across the screen.

"This scene is genuinely terrifying."

"Man versus wolf. Whoever moves first loses."

"I came for a survival show, not a western standoff."

"Come on Jack. You can make it."

"He's going to be fine. This guy is different."

The night dragged on. Deep in the Alaskan wilderness, the temperature had dropped as low as it would go.

Even next to the fire, Jack could feel the cold pulling heat out of his body.

He licked his cracked lips and breathed into his palms.

And that was when the wolves began to move.