This morning Eren decided to push deeper into the forest instead of sticking his head into the usual safe spots near his home-tree.

He’d been thinking about this for weeks but without the skill synergies he had now it would’ve been suicide.

Some creatures out here looked like abominations stitched together by a drunk scientist and even yesterday he wouldn’t have been fast enough to escape if one of them noticed him. The gap between "I can survive this" and "I will definitely die" was measured in fractions of a second in this forest.

That gap was the whole reason he tried or didn’t try things..

[Congratulations! Mana-Infused Stabbing (Uncommon) levelled up] -Level 1 > Level 2

The system’s voice had started sounding more robotic lately but in the early days it was weirdly feminine and soft which even made him call it "System Lady".

Eren could still hear echoes of that old voice sometimes but it wasn’t like before. Maybe his brain was finally breaking down. Twenty-four days of talking to nobody but birds and occasionally screaming at leopards would do that.

He looked at the thing he’d just stabbed with his thick sharpened branch.

It was a biological creature that technically had arms and legs but they were short and stubby like a child’s, attached to a body made of barks and tree roots but bled red from his stabs.

This thing, whatever it is called, wasn’t like Ents. The cool kind of tree creatures from fantasy movies.

These things looked like a lab experiment gone wrong and the pained internal sounds they made without having mouths made his skin crawl. The creature was horrifying with everything it had.

He’d never seen these disgusting things near this area. They usually stayed on the east side of the big lake. Finding them on this side and this far west was a first.

"Damn it!"

The real residents of the cave he was approaching heard the commotion and came out. A deep bear roar shook the ground and two massive bears emerged from the cave’s mouth. More started appearing from the surrounding brush, waking from their daytime naps.

His plan to raid the small fruit tree that the bears fed on daily was stopped before even it started.

He was running at full speed before the bears even locked onto him. He knew how these ones moved because he’d run into them several times before.

The bears in this forest weren’t all the same. Different families lived in different caves and had different magical abilities. The ones he’d just pissed off were the most docile ones with no special powers.

Eren actually felt bad for them. He’d once watched a massive fire-breathing bear walk into their cave and take several females before leaving. Even as a monster bear you weren’t safe from the law of the jungle.

But none of that matters right now. What’s next?

He noticed the tip of his stabbing branch had been eaten away by something acidic from the tree-creature’s blood. He sighed and tossed it aside.

"Great. They have toxic bark skin and acid blood too. I’m losing the ability to be surprised by anything."

Eren had started talking to himself constantly these days. He was aware of it but couldn’t stop. Loneliness was doing things to his head that no amount of stat points could fix.

A few minutes later he entered the territory where a creature he’d been tracking for days roamed.

It was something that looked like a beaver crossed with an anteater and it fed exclusively on giant underground ant colonies. This thing had a long trunk-like mouth that could create wind vacuums and miniature tornados to suck ants out of the ground by the thousands. But its body was big as a small elephant.

What a fuced up world I am living right now..*

The creature itself wasn’t what he wanted. What he pursued was what it left behind after its massacre of ants in the area.

A week ago he’d stumbled onto the aftermath of a massive ant colony war triggered by one of these anteater-things destroying a major nest. The moment it left the destroyed ant area, neighboring ant colonies had sent raiding parties to steal the remaining eggs, food stores and whatever magical objects the destroyed colony had been hoarding for who knows how long.

He wanted to intercept one of those raids. Sprint in during the chaos, grab whatever looked valuable and get out before anyone noticed.

Same plan as the bears. Let’s hope this one actually works.

He circled the territory from several hundred meters away to avoid disturbing anything. An hour of careful tracking later he found signs of the anteater’s recent activity.

[Congratulations! Your skill Tracking (Basic) levelled up] -Level 8 > Level 9 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

He didn’t know how many times this skill had saved his life. But until now he’d only used it to figure out what was trying to kill him or where he’d step on something that would swallow him whole.

That second specific example almost happened two days ago. He’d been drinking from the lake feeling confident and stepped on what he thought was mud. It was a crocodile monster which was the exact same color as the ground and it nearly took his leg off.

Never get cocky. The forest punishes cockiness with death.

The tracking level-up confirmed his read. The anteater had been here recently and was heading away from the area. He found a good tree, one of the tall ones with fire birds in the outer branches and climbed as high as he could go.

Some of the birds gave him annoyed looks but none attacked. One bird in particular caught his attention though. It was sitting on a branch very close to the main trunk, barely two meters from his own height on the tree. Bigger than the others with feathers that shifted between deep blue and electric green and orange depending on the angle. It looked at him with an expression that felt way too intelligent for a bird.

You’re different from the others aren’t you?

The bird turned its head away like it didn’t care he existed.

He settled in and waited. Half an hour should do it. If the pattern from last week held the raiding ants would show up once the anteater was far enough away.

He let his mind wander. Started thinking about home. His mother’s kitchen. The sound of the gas stove clicking three times before the flame caught. His father reading the newspaper in the living room with the TV on but not watching it because he’d been doing that since before Eren was born...

Then the world below him exploded.

..

It started with fire.

A column of orange flame erupted from a hole in the ground about sixty meters south. Then another one from the west. A jet of pressurized water shot sideways from a dirt mound and collided with the fire mid-air and the collision created a cloud of steam that covered an area the size of a football field in seconds.

What the...

Eren gripped his branch and leaned forward.

Ants poured out of the ground. Not the tiny black ones that stole his food. These were a meter tall with armored shells that reflected light like polished stone. They came from at least four different holes and each group was a different color. Black ones from the north. Dark red ones from the east. Brown ones with green stripes from two holes in the south. And a fourth group from the west that were pure white and almost see-through.

Hundreds of them. Maybe more than a thousand across the clearing.

The black ones hit the red ones first. Pure physical combat and absolutely brutal. Mandibles the size of Eren’s forearm crunching through armor plates, legs getting ripped off, bodies stacking up within seconds. They fought with zero hesitation and zero fear. When one died the one behind it climbed over the corpse and kept going.

They fight like machines. No retreat. No pause. Just forward.

The brown-green ones from the south fought completely differently. The green-striped ones stopped behind the front line and their bodies started glowing. A second later the ground underneath a cluster of black ants turned into wet mud and they sank to their waists. The regular brown ones charged into the stuck enemies while they couldn’t move with mandibles swinging.

That’s a support class. They have a support class. Ants have a fuking support class.*

The white translucent ones from the west didn’t fight at all. They formed a wall around one of the destroyed nest entrances and started pulling things out. Eggs, chunks of something that glowed faintly blue, small round objects that Eren’s Collector skill was screaming at him about from sixty meters away even though he couldn’t tell what they were from this distance.

Those white ones are the thieves. Same plan I had. They’re not here to fight, they’re here to loot while everyone else kills each other.

Smart bugs.

Then things got worse. Or better depending on how you felt about watching monsters die.

A shadow crossed over the clearing and something heavy landed in the middle of the ant war hard enough to crack the ground in a three-meter circle. It was a beetle the size of a small car with a horn on its head that crackled with blue electricity. It swept the horn sideways and a wave of electrical discharge jumped through twenty ants at once. They seized up and dropped twitching.

From the treeline on the east side three spiders the size of wolves came out and started shooting webs at everything in range. The silk glowed faint purple and anything it touched just stopped moving. Paralytic webbing. The spiders weren’t picking sides either. They wrapped up fresh corpses and dragged them back into the trees. They’d come for the free food and nothing else.

A pack of something ugly sprinted out of the underbrush from the south. About forty of them. They looked like hairless cats with their muscle tissue exposed, crackling with thin arcs of electricity between their legs as they ran. They slammed into the brown ant formation from behind and tore through a dozen in seconds, biting down and discharging electricity directly into the ants’ bodies.

Those ugly things are the electric cats that have been stalking near my territory for weeks. So THIS is what they can do when they’re actually trying...

He’d spotted them from a distance before. Hairless and disgusting, each one about a meter and a half to two meters long. They looked like someone had skinned a panther and forgot to finish the job. But their speed was terrifying and now he understood why even the regular leopards gave them space.

Something massive crashed through the canopy on the north side. A centipede the length of a bus dropped from the trees and landed directly on a cluster of the white looter ants. Its body segments glowed red hot and everywhere it touched the soil turned black and started smoking. The white ants broke formation and scattered but the centipede was faster than it had any right to be at that size. It caught six of them before they got clear, crushing them under its burning body.

The centipede uses heat. The beetle uses lightning. The spiders use paralysis. The cats use electrical bites. The green ants use earth magic. Does everything in this forest have magic?

From the sky three creatures that looked like birds with bat wings dove into the clearing and started snatching ants off the ground one at a time, carrying them fifty meters straight up and dropping them. The ants that fell outside the mudded zone hit hard ground and basically exploded on impact.

Then the really crazy things showed up.

A swarm of glowing bugs no bigger than Eren’s thumb came down on the battlefield in a cloud of thousands. They didn’t fight anything. They just ate. Every corpse they landed on started dissolving. The swarm stripped a dead giant beetle down to empty shell in under thirty seconds and moved to the next body like a cleaning crew on a schedule.

Cleanup crew. They wait for everyone else to do the killing and eat everything before anyone can collect their kills.

A serpent with two heads squeezed out of a hole and both mouths started spitting green liquid that sizzled and smoked on contact. The ants it hit stumbled as their armor started bubbling and peeling away from the acid.

The ground rumbled and a whole section of the clearing caved in, exposing a tunnel system underneath. Dozens of pale eyeless worms writhed in the sudden sunlight. Every single ant colony in the clearing stopped fighting each other and turned on the worms at the same time. For about fifteen seconds a thousand ants attacked the same enemy together like they’d signed a ceasefire on the spot. The worms were shredded. Then the ants went right back to killing each other like nothing happened.

They just had a temporary truce. In the middle of a war. These ants are smarter than half the people I used to work with.