That creature was enormous.

A centaur but not the graceful horse-bodied ones from the mythology books he’d half-read in high school. This thing had the lower body of something between a horse and a massive dog with thick legs built for power rather than speed and an upper body that looked vaguely like an oversized kobold with long arms and a flat face full of teeth. It was holding another fire spear that was materializing in its right hand, condensing out of the air like someone was building a weapon out of pure heat.

Its eyes were intelligent and very angry. Behind it Eren could see more of them, at least a dozen centaur shapes moving through the trees further back and this one was clearly the alpha because it was the biggest and it was the one standing between Eren and the fruit trees.

The branch in his left hand. He’d snapped it off the tree when his Awareness had screamed and he was still holding it with three plum-sized rainbow fruits attached. His right hand was gripping it so hard his hand was almost purple from stress of not harming the thing.

So I accidentally stole fruit from a centaur clan. Great, wonderful. Because the gorilla thing went so well last time..

The alpha threw its second spear and Eren’s new Evade skill fired simultaneously with his Predatory Reflex and forced him to sprint with a cat like move!

He climbed onto a giant rock and performed a backflip of the kind only seen in fantasy action movies, performed by the most acrobatic superheroes. Because all his skills and cat instincts told him another fiery spear was right behind him, and the moment he sensed more spears coming from the sides, his only escape route wasn’t left, right, or down, but upwards!

Even with his new level advancements, it was the strongest and highest jump in this magical forest, and he performed it as a backflip. At that moment, Eren’s body, filled with fear and adrenaline, felt as comfortable as a fish in water while still in the air, and he felt time slow down.

One of his skills had already begun to work!

His body read the trajectory and threw itself upward and backward so the burning spear passed through the space his chest had occupied a quarter-second ago. At the peak of his jump about 11 meters off the ground his Invisibility activated and his body vanished.

Twelve seconds. Maybe thirteen with his current mana.

The centaur’s eyes swept the area where Eren had disappeared and he could tell it knew about invisibility skills because it didn’t look confused. It just started scanning with its head tilted at the angle that meant it was listening and smelling rather than looking.

Eren didn’t go down. His left hand caught a vine hanging from the canopy above him and his Extreme Climbing skill engaged on contact. Suddenly "up" became "forward" and the vine wasn’t something he was hanging from but something he was running along. He swung his body sideways and launched himself toward a branch on the next tree over and his feet caught the bark and pushed off at an angle that would’ve been impossible for anything without multi-directional climbing ability.

Another fire spear punched through the air where gravity should have pulled him. The centaur had aimed at the ground beneath his last known position but Eren was fifteen meters up and moving laterally through the canopy with the branch and its precious fruit clutched in his right hand.

His Invisibility ran out and his body flickered back into visibility just as he leaped from one tree to the next. The centaur roared something in a language that sounded like rocks being ground together and the herd behind it started moving.

But Eren was already gone.

He moved through the canopy in a way that would’ve been impossible a week ago. His Extreme Climbing turned every surface into a runway regardless of angle. His Featherfall Reflex absorbed the impact of drops and jumps. His Kinetic Flux Runner managed his speed through branches and gaps with the precision of a machine calibrated for forest navigation.

At one point he launched himself off a high branch and sailed almost ten meters through open air before catching a vine on the opposite side. His chest was full of something between excitement and absolute calm and the combination felt like flying. Midair with nothing under his feet and the forest canopy stretching out in every direction he felt more alive than he had since the first day he’d woken up in this world.

[Congratulations! Your skill Extreme Climbing (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 1 > Level 2

He landed on a thick branch and kept running. Three trees later another notification appeared while he was sliding sideways along a trunk like a gecko crossing a wall.

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

-Level 5 > Level 6

The centaur’s roaring was fading behind him. He’d covered maybe four hundred meters through the canopy in under a minute and the herd wasn’t built for aerial pursuit. They were ground creatures with fire magic and numbers and territorial aggression but they couldn’t follow something that treated the forest canopy like a highway.

He dropped to the forest floor about a kilometer from the centaur territory and jogged the rest of the way home with his heart pounding and his hands shaking from adrenaline. He was grinning so hard his face hurt.

That was insane. I dodged two fire spears from an alpha centaur, went invisible, swung through trees like a monkey crossed with a spider and outran a whole herd through the canopy. And I did it while holding a tree branch in one hand without dropping a single fruit.

It wasn’t until he slowed to a walk near his tree that he realized something about the escape. Every skill he’d used during the centaur chase had worked together without him consciously activating any of them. Evade and Predatory Reflex fired at the same time. Extreme Climbing and Absolute Equilibrium coordinated during the vine swings. Featherfall and Kinetic Flux Runner managed every drop and acceleration. Invisibility bought the window and his tracking and awareness skills had been mapping escape routes in the background the entire time.

None of that was planned. My body just did it. Every skill talked to every other skill and they figured out the solution faster than I could think. That’s what integration feels like.

His tree appeared through the canopy and he slowed to a walk. The vine he’d planted yesterday was still clinging to the trunk and showed no signs of dying. He walked to the opposite side of the tree and dug a small hole with his stick and planted the centaur fruit branch in the soil and watered it from one of his stone cups.

Two of the rainbow fruits were still attached to the branch. He pulled them off carefully and carried them up to his sleeping platform. Both were about the size of plums with that shifting red-rainbow surface that caught the afternoon light.

The birds on the outer branches made noises he’d never heard from them before. Not their usual screeching or clicking but a series of rapid high-pitched calls that sounded almost excited. Or alarmed. Fifty of them were looking at the fruit in his hands with an intensity that went beyond their normal observation.

Whatever these are the birds know what they are and they’re losing their minds about it. Which means I definitely need to eat them right now before something else shows up and tries to take them.

He bit into the first one. The flesh was soft and seedless with a center that was almost liquid. The taste was incredible, sweet and complex with layers of flavor that he couldn’t identify but that made his tongue feel warm in a way that was more magical than physical. His whole mouth tingled for about five seconds after swallowing.

Nothing happened. He waited a full minute while his Apex Predator Awareness scanned his own body for changes. No system notification, no stat increase, no new skill. Just a really good piece of fruit.

Huh. Okay. Maybe they’re not magical. Maybe they’re just really good fruit and the centaurs guard them because they taste amazing and-

He ate the second one and for about ten seconds nothing happened again.

Just as he was about to lay to the branch to sleep a bit, things changed.

His body started trembling!

Not shaking from cold or fear but vibrating from the inside out. Every muscle fiber in his body began twitching simultaneously and underneath the physical trembling something deeper was moving.

Something in the core of his being, in whatever the system considered his fundamental identity, was shifting and rearranging. It felt like his soul was being tuned to a different frequency and the process was so alien and so far beyond anything physical that his brain couldn’t classify it as either pain or pleasure. It was just change happening at a level he didn’t have words for.

It lasted about sixty seconds. When it stopped Eren was lying flat on his back on the platform with his fingers gripping the bark and his breath coming in short gasps. No pain though. Whatever had happened hadn’t hurt.

A blue screen appeared.

[Congratulations! Luck: 41 > 91]

Eren stared at the notification for about five seconds. Then he sat up so fast he almost fell off the branch.

Plus fifty? FIFTY Luck?? From one fruit??

Fu*k me..!

His Luck stat had gone from 41 to 91 in a single bite. The same magnitude of boost he’d gotten from the ghost-deer fruit that had pushed his Perception from 34 to 84. Except this was Luck which was the most mysterious stat in the system because he had no idea what it actually did besides making a number go up.

But the number had gone up by fifty. And there were more of those fruits. Dozens of them on those trees in centaur territory. Maybe hundreds on the trees he hadn’t reached because the alpha had started throwing fire spears at him before he could explore further.

"So basically a simple math problem.." he muttered to himself while staring west in the direction of the centaur territory. "There’s a forest full of centaurs guarding trees that grow Luck-boosting fruit and each fruit gives plus fifty and there are probably thousands of those fruits on hundreds of trees. That’s millions of stat points just growing on branches waiting to be picked."

The math was probably wrong because the second fruit might not give plus fifty again. Stat-boosting consumables usually had diminishing returns or a cap. But even if each fruit only worked once the fact that this kind of resource existed and was being guarded by creatures that threw fire spears meant that the fruit was valuable enough to fight over.

He turned his head west toward the centaur territory. The territory he’d just barely escaped from with his life and two stolen fruits. The territory with an alpha that could materialize fire weapons from thin air and a herd of at least a hundred members.

I am so back bit*hes!!

Eren started laughing like a maniac with the possibilities of those fruits.