He ran...

Like there was no tomorrow which was kind of true in his opinion.

"FUCK OFF..!"

Kinetic Flux Runner pushed his legs to a speed he’d never hit before and his bare feet slammed into the forest floor so fast the impacts blurred into one continuous noise against the dirt. This wasn’t jogging or pacing himself or being smart about his stamina. This was running like something behind him wanted to kill him because something behind him wanted to kill him.

Two heavy bodies crashed through the underbrush. One had dropped from the tree. The other one had been climbing the trunk when Eren launched himself north. Both of them were heading the same direction he was and both were faster than anything that size should’ve been able to move through dense forest.

He turned his head for half a second while running and almost wished he hadn’t.

The bigger one was closer than he expected. At least three and a half meters of grey muscle moving through the trees like a boulder that had learned to run.

It ripped a sapling out of the ground mid-stride just to clear its path. Its face was a gorilla’s face but it had intelligence in its eyes that Eren hadn’t seen in any creature in this forest except maybe the colorful bird. Not cunning or animal sharpness but actual thinking.

His old boss at the electronics store had that same look when she was about to fire someone, cold and clear and already knowing how this was going to end.

The smaller one was behind it and to the left. Still three meters tall but leaner, faster, with narrower shoulders and a smoother gait. It ran differently from the big one, more fluid and less like a demolition machine. Maybe the female, Eren thought, because in most primate species the females were smaller and quicker and this one moved like something built for chasing rather than smashing.

Great. A mated pair. I’m being hunted by gorilla husband and wife.

He turned his head forward and ran harder.

[Congratulations! Your skill Kinetic Flux Runner (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 2 > Level 3

The speed bump was small but instant. His stride lengthened by maybe two centimeters and his feet found the ground a fraction of a second faster. The gap between him and the gorillas was growing but they showed zero signs of tiring.

The first fifteen minutes were pure survival and zero thinking.

He ran through clearings where fist-sized bone beetles crawled in the thousands, the same eyeless armored things he’d killed with his bare hands on day one to activate his system. No eyes, no ears, thick calcium shells and larvae so small you could breathe them in by accident.

Every predator clan in this forest had figured out that farming those beetles was easier than hunting real prey. You didn’t need to chase something that couldn’t see you coming and bred by the thousand every few weeks.

Eren had less meat on him than a handful of those beetles. Chasing him through a forest at full speed made no biological sense when easy food was literally everywhere.

So why me? I bullied some fire gorillas this morning but these two are northern rock gorillas. Different clan, different territory, different everything. They shouldn’t care about their cousins getting tapped on the head by some scrawny half-elf.

He didn’t have an answer and the gorillas weren’t slowing down to give him one.

"I DIDN’T EVEN DO ANYTHING TO YOU FUC*ERS!!!!"

He didn’t know why they were so abanant about killing him specifically.

At the twenty-minute mark the trees started getting taller and the temperature dropped. The undergrowth shifted from bushy ferns to darker plants with leaves the size of dinner plates and the forest smelled different, less warm fruit-rot and more wet stone and cold moss.

A creature the size of a small horse burst out of the brush ten meters ahead. Six legs, plated scales along its back, a flat head with no visible eyes and a mouth that opened sideways instead of up and down. It hissed at him and sprayed something wet that hit his left arm.

His skin tingled where the liquid landed but his Poison Resistance absorbed it before it could do more than itch. He was past the thing and gone before it finished hissing.

Six legs and a sideways mouth. A month ago I would’ve screamed. Now I’m annoyed it got spit on my arm while I’m running for my life.

That was a thing he’d started noticing about himself in the last few days. New creatures didn’t scare him the way they used to. The first week in this forest every shadow had been a potential death sentence. Now his brain automatically sorted new things into categories: "can it catch me," "can it hurt me," "is it worth eating." Everything else was just scenery.

He wasn’t sure if that was the cat evolution changing how he processed fear or just a month of near-death experiences making him numb to surprises. Either way the six-legged acid lizard barely registered as a threat.

[Congratulations! Your skill Primal Senses (Uncommon) levelled up] 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

-Level 4 > Level 5

His senses sharpened mid-stride and the gorillas behind him went from blurry pressure signatures to detailed profiles. The big one breathed slower and heavier. The female’s footsteps had a slight irregularity like she was favoring one leg or just built with a different stride pattern.

At thirty minutes he thought he lost them.

His Tracking skill stopped picking up their footsteps and his Primal Senses couldn’t find their scent in the wind. He ran for another two minutes to be safe and then slowed to a jog and then stopped next to a narrow stream that cut through the rocks.

He dropped to his knees and drank. The water was cold and clean and his body absorbed it like a sponge. His hands were shaking from the run and his lungs were burning but the water helped. He drank until his stomach sloshed and then he sat on a rock and tried to figure out which direction he’d been running.

Northwest. Definitely northwest and uphill because the terrain was rockier and colder than anything in the southern forest. He was maybe ten or twelve kilometers from his tree already. Maybe more.

His stomach growled and the sound reminded him that he’d eaten exactly one bite of snake meat in the last several hours and his metabolism was burning through his reserves at triple speed.

I need to find something to eat. Anything. Even those disgusting grubs would-

His Primal Senses went insane. The gorillas were back. Close. Maybe a hundred and fifty meters south and closing fast.

How? I couldn’t hear them or smell them for the last four minutes. Did they go silent? Can gorillas track without making noise when they want to?

He was running again before the question finished forming.

[Congratulations! Your skill Kinetic Flux Runner (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 3 > Level 4

By forty-five minutes the terrain had changed enough that it felt like a different forest. A pack of creatures that looked like wolves with six eyes arranged in a circle around their skulls watched him sprint past without moving. One of them yawned and Eren was jealous of that fuc*ker..

Something massive flew overhead and blocked the sun for almost two full seconds. He looked up and saw a wyvern. Dark scales instead of feathers, maybe fifteen meters of wingspan and a jaw that could fit him inside it twice.

Then a rhinoceros flew past it.

Not jumped or glided but actually flew. A full-sized rhino with no visible wings soaring through the air about forty meters up chasing a fat bird. Its body was surrounded by a faint shimmer like heat haze and it moved through the sky like gravity was optional.

That thing has to weigh at least a ton. On Earth you’d need wings the size of a football field or a jet engine to get that in the air. Here it just goes up. Maybe at really high mana levels weight stops being a problem? If mana itself can replace lift then the rules aren’t just different here, they’re completely rewritten.

He filed that thought away and kept running. But even mid-sprint he noticed something about himself that would’ve seemed insane a month ago. He was analyzing a flying rhino’s mana physics while being chased by two gorillas through an alien forest.

His brain had split into two tracks without him telling it to, one track focused on survival and running and the other track cataloging everything he saw like a naturalist on a field trip from hell.

That had to be the Intelligence stat. Thirty-five points of it working in the background, sorting and filing observations that his old Earth brain would’ve missed completely.

[Congratulations! Your skill Featherfall Reflex (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 1 > Level 2