The silence in the ruin was disrupted only by the heavy breathing of a young man and the sound of vines moving slowly across a hard surface. Lukas was sitting with his back resting against the wall—or rather, against a part of the wall with no moss. His shirt was torn, and his injuries were bandaged by those shredded pieces. The worst was behind him. He treated himself as much as he could and found that he wasn't in mortal danger, although he was still seriously injured. He watched as the vines of the vile red moss slowly crawled over the body of the dead amalgamation.
After the fight ended, he was so tired he immediately fell to the ground, almost giving out. It was only when he saw the moss slowly but surely moving that he got up. His first thought was food. He picked up his umbrella and managed to slice a few big chunks of meat off the dead monster's body before the red moss got too close. He then studied the creature for a bit. Now that he wasn't in mortal danger, he noticed how the proportions and the biology of this thing didn't make any sense. New genes are introduced by mutations; those are random, but the ones that end up being selected have some survival advantage. At least, that was how it functioned on good old Earth.
What kind of advantage could one possibly have by having human teeth on his tail? He could imagine sharp spikes—using a tail as a flail would surely prove useful in battle, and as he remembered, there was such a dinosaur. But having human teeth couldn't be useful in any way. His hypothesis seemed to fit, as the amalgamation never used its tail in the fight. It also looked as if the additional two legs, situated between the two pairs that wolves normally have, were a burden for the monster rather than an advantage. Multiple times, the wolf lookalike had almost stumbled.
The changes to the body of this creature simply didn't make logical sense. Lukas might have concluded it was the result of long exposure to heavy radiation. Just yesterday, he was a naturalist, and just yesterday, he truly would have come to that conclusion. But everything he had lived through since the moment he woke up shook this core principle of his worldview. He now considered magic to be a possible cause—maybe some corruption from a forgotten deity.
And then there was his umbrella. How in the world could it cut something? It was blunt. It was also much more durable than it should have been. Back then, Lukas had dented the wood simply by tapping it against the floor as he walked, and now it had withstood every slash and attack this amalgamation threw at him. The coat also seemed strangely durable. Not only did the wolf not rip it when trying to shake it off, but Lukas had performed several experiments over the last twenty minutes. He tried to slash the coat with his umbrella; the same umbrella that had passed through the skull of the monster wolf with only a little struggle now failed to tear the fabric. It was because of the conclusion of those experiments that Lukas now had the coat draped around his shoulders.
He also couldn't fail to notice that the... something... that transported him to wherever he was also transported these two things. If Lukas had to make a list or ranking of things he owned based on how much he liked them, both would be in the top two places. Maybe it was a coincidence, but this looked too much like a pattern.
He figured that day and night didn't exist here. After all, those things needed a sun and a spherical planet. A sun clearly didn't exist here, and since that was the case, he wasn't really sure this place was located on a sphere at all. Yes, gravity worked here, and that usually precluded being on a sphere, but when evolution was so horribly wrong here, he suddenly wouldn't bet on gravity working exactly as he knew it.
"Well, I am lucky to breathe here; that absolutely wasn't a certainty."
He debated if he should make a fire, then realized he didn't have any way to do so. He decided to eat the meat raw and drink some blood from it to try to substitute for water, though he suddenly wasn't sure if blood could truly replace water. But what other option was left?
With the (almost) indestructible coat laid over the vines—and with most of them busy trying to... eat the thing?... well, focused on the wolf monster—it was now possible for him to get to the roof. It was still very hard. It would have been hard normally, but in his injured state, it was a painstaking journey. However, the journey was somehow worth it. He was now on the roof, looking out into the distance.
It seemed that he had found himself in a large town, or rather, the ruin of one. The destruction was immense, but he could see that the ruins looked like late medieval structures. He saw something he recognized as a church. There wasn't a cross on it, or he simply didn't see one; he didn't expect this to be the church of mutated wolf Jesus. He also saw something that was unmistakably a royal palace. There were ruins of towers and walls around the city, but they were destroyed. It seemed as though whatever destroyed the city had come from the outside—probably the same monsters he had encountered. Reality became... fuzzy outside of the city. It was almost as if this were some kind of pocket dimension and it simply ended there. He also saw a tree on the other side across from the temple—a terribly huge, dark tree. Lukas didn't have a good estimate, but it was surely at least three hundred meters in height.
When he finally crawled back in, he was tired beyond reason. He had played with the idea of staying on the roof, but the thought of some flying amalgamation just picking him up made him come back down. He lay down, covered by his coat, and his eyes started to close.
"I hope I wake up in my cozy, warm bed and forget about this stupid dream."