He’d been using terrain drops or some weird angles to gain speed for the last ten minutes, jumping off ledges and small cliffs where Featherfall Reflex softened each landing.

At fifty-five minutes he lost them again or Eren thought he did.

He found a sheltered overhang between two boulders and collapsed against the rock. His legs were cramping and his vision had a slight blur around the edges from low blood sugar. He pressed his face against the cool stone and closed his eyes.

Thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds and then I have to start running again. Damn it!!

He counted to twenty before his Primal Senses picked them up. Not sound this time but smell. The musky rock-dust scent of northern gorilla carried on a wind shift from the south.

They were still coming. Maybe two hundred meters. They hadn’t lost him at all. They’d just gone quiet.

They went quiet on purpose. They can stealth when they want to. That first time I thought I lost them, they were tracking me silently. They let me stop so they could close the gap.

He was running again and his legs were screaming but the realization was worse than the pain. These weren’t just strong. These were smart in a way that went beyond animal cunning.

Something he’d been trying not to think about crystallized as he ran. The thing that scared him about these gorillas wasn’t their size or their strength. He’d seen bigger threats. The turtles with their blood and water control were probably more dangerous. The colorful bird could’ve killed him at any point in four weeks.

But those creatures didn’t scare him the way these two did and he finally understood why. Two things.

The intelligence in the big one’s eyes. Clear, focused, calculating. Even the wyverns he’d seen didn’t have that quality. The wyverns were powerful and dangerous but they had animal eyes. These gorillas had people eyes inside gorilla skulls and that was the most unsettling thing he’d encountered in a month of living in a monster forest.

And the second thing. His Observe skill couldn’t read them. Not "too high" like the bird. Not "exceeds threshold" like the turtles. Just nothing, a blank wall. Every other creature he’d failed to read had at least given him something, a warning message, a feeling of overwhelming power, a sense of "you’re too weak for this." The gorillas gave him zero. Like they were actively blocking the skill.

His new cat instincts had been feeding him threat assessments all day. Every creature he passed got a gut-level danger rating from his Primal Senses. But the gorillas were blank spots in his awareness, two patches of nothing surrounded by data and that void was what was making his animal brain panic.

I can’t read them. Not their level, not their threat rating, not their intent. My skills say they don’t exist and my instincts say they’re the most dangerous things I’ve seen since the bird. And those two signals are contradicting each other and my brain doesn’t like it.

[Congratulations! Your skill Kinetic Flux Runner (Uncommon) levelled up] -Level 4 > Level 5

[Congratulations! Your skill Primal Senses (Uncommon) levelled up] -Level 5 > Level 6

At the one-hour mark he ran past a cave entrance guarded by something that stopped his brain mid-thought.

Three heads on one body. Dog-shaped but the size of a small van. Every inch of its skin was on fire, not burning but made of fire, like someone had sculpted a three-headed hound out of living flame and given it teeth. The heat coming off it was strong enough that Eren felt it on his skin from thirty meters away.

It was sitting in front of a cave mouth that glowed deep red from somewhere far inside. The glow pulsed slowly like a heartbeat and his Primal Senses lit up with a danger warning so intense it made his teeth hurt.

He changed direction instantly.

Not today. But I’m remembering that cave. Something in there is alive and glowing and guarded by a three-headed fire dog and I want to know what it is. Just not right now. Not covered in goblin sht and running on empty.*

A few minutes later he saw the other thing.

It moved through the trees about sixty meters to his east and his first thought was "centaur" because it had four legs and a quadruped body. But where a centaur would have a human torso and head there was nothing human at all. The upper body was a shapeless mass of dark tissue that elongated and retracted like a slug stretching toward food.

Its "head" was a bulge of grey-brown slime that extended outward on a neck of stretching flesh and when it found a fat glowing rabbit in the undergrowth the head wrapped around the creature and absorbed it whole. He could see blood flowing through the transparent parts of its body, the rabbit’s blood mixing with its own in visible channels under the skin.

His Observe tried to read it and gave him the same "too high, beyond threshold" feeling he’d gotten from the turtles and the bird.

Apex tier. A thing with a centaur’s body and an abomination’s head, eating magical rabbits by absorbing them alive. Same level as the colorful bird or close to it. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

But the gorillas behind him, the ones his Observe couldn’t read at all, weren’t at that level. He was almost certain of it now after more than an hour of being chased. The gorillas were strong, maybe Level 40 to 50 if he had to guess but they weren’t apex creatures. What made them terrifying wasn’t raw power but the combination of intelligence and concealment that no other creature he’d met had shown.

They’re not the strongest things in this forest. But they’re the smartest things that have ever tried to kill me.

..

At seventy-five minutes the first goblin camp appeared. All males, every one of them. He ran through it without slowing and the goblins scattered. The gorillas hit the camp thirty seconds later and the goblins scattered worse.

The second camp came at eighty minutes. Bigger, dirtier, a creek running through it brown with filth.

His plan was terrible and he hated it.

He jumped into the creek and grabbed handfuls of the dark mud from the banks, the mud that was more goblin waste than dirt and smeared it across his chest and his arms and his legs and his face and his hair.

His new cat instincts screamed at him to stop with a physical violence that made his hands shake. Every nerve in his body was telling him "DIRTY WRONG STOP" kind of primal and new signals.. and his chest locked up with a panicky tightness that felt like suffocating to Eren.

He overrode it and grabbed more filth.

I hate this. My entire body hates this. Every cell in my skin is trying to crawl off me right now. But if those things are tracking my scent then this is the only way.

He climbed out and ran north.

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

-Level 5 > Level 6

And one more skill level up came after this..!

[Congratulations! Your skill Absolute Equilibrium (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 1 > Level 2

The stink on his body was destroying his enhanced nose from the inside. He could identify at least fifteen different organic compounds in the smell and he hated that his cat brain was cataloging each one.

He passed a massive shape on a rock shelf, something with a crocodile’s skin and tusks curling from a jaw that could bite through a car door. An Ogre. It opened one eye, smelled him and closed it again. Even an Ogre thought he was too disgusting to bother with.

He passed a Rock Troll sitting on a boulder the size of a house. Eight or nine meters tall with skin made of actual cracked stone plates. It watched the gorillas run past without moving.

On a cliff edge he saw something with two heads on one body that made him stumble. Four meters tall, grey-brown skin, arms past its knees and two heads sitting side by side looking in different directions.

That’s an Ettin. I only know what that is because of the two heads. I read about them in a fantasy RPG sourcebook when I was sixteen and thought two heads on one body was the dumbest monster design ever. There it is though. Real and ugly.

..

At ninety minutes his body started shutting down.

Not dramatically. His legs just got heavier and his stride shorter and his brain fuzzy around the edges. The burn in his muscles went from painful to numb which was worse because numb meant his body had given up complaining and accepted the situation.

He found a tiny stream and dropped into it. The water was ice cold and he drank until his stomach hurt. The goblin filth on his skin didn’t wash off. He scrubbed at his arms with wet sand and it barely made a difference. The stink was in his pores now and his cat brain was generating a constant low-level anxiety that sat in his chest like a hot stone.

Being dirty after evolving from cat DNA might actually be the worst thing that’s happened to me in this forest. Worse than the purple berry vomiting. Worse than getting chased. My brain literally cannot relax while I smell like this.

His Tracking skill could barely pick up the gorillas now. The signal was faint and intermittent. Either the filth was working and they were having trouble following his scent or they’d fallen behind because even mountain gorillas couldn’t sprint for ninety straight minutes.

He wanted to believe it was over but he’d thought that twice already and both times they’d come back.

He stood up and looked north. The terrain was almost entirely rocky, sparse twisted trees growing sideways out of cliff faces. The wind was cold and carried the smell of something reptilian from higher up. His Primal Senses painted several large heat signatures in the rocks above him, flying things roosting on ledges and cliff faces.

Wyverns everywhere, lots of them.

He needed a plan because he had maybe three or four minutes of running left before his body quit entirely. His Invisibility skill gave him five seconds of total concealment. If he could lead the gorillas into a wyvern’s territory, go invisible at the right moment and let the wyvern deal with the intruders while he slipped away...

He spotted the cave from about three hundred meters up the slope. A dark opening in the cliff face surrounded by scratch marks and old bones. Big enough for something massive to enter.

He started climbing toward it and his Primal Senses painted one large heat signature inside.

Then painted another and another and another.

Not one wyvern. Multiple wyverns packed together with wings folded and heads tucked.

Wyverns aren’t solitary? Every fantasy book, every game, every movie says wyverns are territorial loners. Apparently nobody told these ones.

He kept moving toward the cave because there was nothing else left. Behind him his Tracking skill picked up the gorillas again, cresting the ridge maybe four hundred meters back. Still coming and still relentless.

Ahead of him a cave full of sleeping wyverns.

He had maybe three more minutes of energy left in this pace of running..

Five seconds of Invisibility skill which he wasn’t even sure if it would work on these high danger level creatures..

Two pissed and unreadible danger level gorillas behind him.

And an unknown number of wyverns ahead.

This has to work.