Ten pairs of red eyes and two gorillas behind him and zero mana and a body running on fumes.

Eren stood in the wyvern feeding hall with dried blood under his bare feet and goblin filth crusted across every inch of his skin and thought about his options.

There weren’t many as the wyverns were watching him the way his old cat used to watch a moth that flew into their living room, with lazy amusement and absolute confidence that this situation had only one possible ending.

He hated that feeling.

Not the fear-no this wasn’t a fear.

For fear, he did gotten used to over the last month. Getting chased by all kinds of things taught him well.

What he hated was the dismissal and mockery. The casual certainty in those red eyes that he didn’t matter. That he was entertainment at best and a snack at worst.

His old boss used to look at him the same way. His ex-girlfriend’s father had that same expression every time Eren walked into the room.

Not anymore.

Something shifted in his mind that had nothing to do with his cat evolution or his skills or his stats. It was older than that and more human. A decision that had been building since the first day he woke up in this forest covered in dirt and bleeding from thorns and scared of everything.

Survival didn’t matter anymore. Neither did a way home. Those were the goals of a lesser man.

He would climb. He would reach a peak so high that no being, in this world or the next would ever dare look down on him again.

He was done being small.

Eren Teya. You’re going to remember that name whether you want to or not.

Just after he felt a permanent change in his soul, the damn gorillas entered the cavern.

They came through a larger tunnel on the right side, the male first with his scarred grey shoulders filling the passage and the female right behind him. Both of them were looking at Eren and not at the ten wyverns surrounding them. Their eyes were burning with the same focused intelligent hatred they’d been carrying for hours and the wyverns barely registered as obstacles.

Eren watched them in something that felt like slow motion. His Predatory Reflex was feeding him details at 2.3x normal speed and his Primal Senses at Level 9 were painting the entire cavern in overlapping layers of data so dense it was almost too much to process.

The male gorilla screamed.

Not a roar or a war cry but an actual scream of rage directed at Eren specifically. The sound bounced off the stone walls and every wyvern in the cavern lifted its head.

"What the fu*k did I do to you?!"

Eren yelled it out loud because he was tired of asking the question in his head. His voice echoed through the feeding hall and the wyverns shifted their attention from him to the gorillas for the first time since he’d entered.

That was his window.

He didn’t run away from the gorillas. He ran toward them.

His legs pushed off the bone-covered floor and his body launched forward with every remaining point of Strength he had. The gorillas were maybe fifteen meters away and both of them leaned forward to intercept him. The male swung one massive arm in a sweeping strike that would’ve taken Eren’s head off at the neck. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Eren hit the ground a meter before the arm reached him and bounced.

It wasn’t a roll or a dive or anything he’d ever practiced. His body compressed against the floor and then exploded upward like something with no weight and too much force, a movement that felt less like jumping and more like the ground had rejected him. He sailed over both gorillas with about half a meter of clearance and the female’s grab missed his ankle by the width of a finger.

He landed behind them and kept running toward the tunnel they’d entered from.

Behind him the wyverns attacked.

The sound was like nothing he’d ever heard. Not the sharp crack of fireball birds or the whooshing hiss of fire snakes. This was a deep wet roar followed by a wall of heat and light that turned the dark cavern into a furnace. Eren’s Primal Senses registered at least five or six separate fire attacks launching simultaneously and the temperature at his back jumped so fast his skin prickled through his Physical Durability.

He didn’t look back until he was in the tunnel.

When he did the feeding hall was a wall of dark red and orange fire and the gorillas were somewhere inside it. He could hear the male screaming but the sound was different now. Not rage but something worse.

The fire wasn’t normal fire. The wyvern attacks had a color to them that was wrong, darker than flame should be with edges that seemed to eat light instead of producing it. Whatever magical element powered wyvern breath it wasn’t the same basic fire that the forest creatures used.

Eren ran but the relief he expected to feel never came.

One minute into his escape through the tunnels his Primal Senses stopped picking up the gorillas behind him and the constant pressure that had been sitting on his shoulders for hours just disappeared. The tunnels were quiet except for his own breathing and the distant settling sounds of stone and air deep inside the mountain.

But instead of relaxing his body stayed coiled tight and his senses kept scanning. He slowed to a walk and then to a careful creep, checking every shadow and side passage.

They let me stop twice before and both times they came back. I’m not falling for that again.

He moved backward through the tunnel system, retracing his path using the directional sense that Primal Senses had been building all day. After about two minutes he stopped because he could feel them. Both of them. Faint heat signatures in the wider tunnel about thirty meters ahead, not moving or stalking but just lying there.

He approached with his back pressed against the wall and every skill he had running at maximum. The darkness was total but his cat-adapted eyes resolved the shapes in the passage well before he reached them.

They were in a narrow section where the tunnel pinched between two rock formations. Too narrow for either of them to fit through which was why they’d stopped here. The male was lying on his side with one arm stretched forward and the other pressed against the female’s back. The female was curled against his chest with her face turned toward the direction Eren was coming from.

The wyvern fire had done something terrible to them. Their stone-grey skin was blackened and cracked in patches and entire sections of muscle had been burned away on the male’s left side. The female’s back was worse, raw and exposed where the fire had eaten through the outer layers of whatever made their skin so tough. Smoke was still rising from both of them in thin wisps.

They were alive. Their eyes were open and the male’s chest was moving with shallow irregular breaths. But neither of them could stand.

The female saw Eren first. Even with half her body burned and her muscles destroyed she bared her teeth at him and the hatred in her eyes was exactly the same as it had been when she was healthy and chasing him through the forest.

Eren looked at her, then at the male, then back at her.

His Observe skill activated and for the first time in hours it gave him something.

[Observe: Target Identified: Northern Rock Gorilla (Alpha) - Level 50]

-Status: Critical - Multiple organ failure in progress

-Species Note: Last surviving pair of the Subspecies of Northern Rock Gorilla in the Dark Forest

[Observe: Target Identified: Northern Rock Gorilla (Female) - Level 43]

-Status: Critical - Severe thermal damage to spine and internal organs

-Species Note: Bonded mate of Alpha. Last surviving pair of the Northern Rock Gorilla Clan

Eren still didn’t have a strong opinion about what this creatures was about. Or if he did something to them at all but that didn’t matter anymore.

[Congratulations! Your skill Observe (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 3 > Level 4

Last surviving pair huh..

Eren read those words and felt something complicated move through his chest.

These two had chased him for hours across an entire forest and up a mountain and into a nest full of wyverns. They’d thrown rocks at his head and tried to crush him between them and refused to stop even when every logical survival instinct should’ve told them to quit.

And they were the last two of their kind.

He didn’t know why they hated him. The system didn’t tell him that. Maybe another human had killed their clan. Maybe his scent carried something that triggered a species-level grudge. Maybe it was something he’d never understand because the system’s Observe skill at Level 4 couldn’t read motivations, only facts.

He picked up a large rock from the tunnel floor and felt its weight in his hand.

He’d promised himself he would kill them and he meant it. Leaving them alive meant they might heal with a miracle but unlikely. And they would come after him again if they survived even this. He couldn’t afford to be hunted in his sleep. But he also made a quieter promise underneath that one, the kind you make to yourself when you do something necessary and ugly.

He’d find out why.

Someday when he was stronger and had better skills and could read more from the system than names and numbers he’d find out what happened to the Northern Ridge Clan and why their last two members had spent their final hours trying to kill a stranger who’d never touched their territory.

It took him four minutes to kill them both.

When it was done he was covered in thick red blood from his hands to his elbows and his stomach was convulsing. He turned away from the bodies and vomited everything his body had left to give which wasn’t much. A thin stream of bile and water and the last traces of whatever he’d eaten so many hours ago that his stomach acid had already dissolved them.

The system notifications came while he was on his hands and knees.

[You gained 100% energy of Northern Rock Gorilla (Female) - Level 43]

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 26]

-All stats increased by 1

-You gained 1 Stat Point to distribute