They were waiting for him.

Eren realized it about three seconds too late when the path he’d been walking every single day for the last week, the one cleared of brush from his own footsteps between his tree and the lake, erupted with fire from both sides at once.

"Oh you’ve got to be kidding me.."

Not even one centaur but at least six of them positioned behind trees and rockswith their fire spears already formed and aimed at the strip of dirt where he always walked.

They tracked my scent. Maybe my blood from the jaguar wounds or the trail I leave walking this same path every day.

Hells!

They even scouted the terrain and figured out the exact path I use to set up this shit show..

The first volley was spears and he dodged three of them by throwing himself sideways so hard the two jaguar gashes on his left thigh ripped at the edges where the pink scar tissue from a week of healing was the thinnest.

His Evade skill and Predatory Reflex fired together and the world slowed enough for him to see the trajectories but his damaged body could only avoid so many at once. He batted the fourth one away with the thick stick he’d been carrying and the impact sent a shower of sparks across his bare chest.

Then the second volley came and it wasn’t just the spear shaped fire skills anymore!

Two of the centaurs on his left made a motion with their hands like they were gripping something invisible and Eren’s cat senses screamed at him before he even saw what they were making.

Lines of compressed fire materialized between their fists and extended outward into long curving whips that cracked through the air toward his midsection with a sound like wet cloth being torn apart.

At the same time, bunch of other fire arrows came from behind at angles his Predatory Reflex could see but his wounded leg couldn’t dodge in time. And one of the bigger centaurs sent a spinning disc of flame at his head height that hummed like a circular saw cutting through the space where his skull had been a quarter-second ago.

He ducked the disc and jumped the whips and one of the arrows went past his ear close enough to singe the hair on the side of his head.

F*ck!

This isn’t a chase for them, more probably an execution.

"I stole two fruits you psychopaths!!" he yelled while running through a gap between two centaurs that was closing fast.

The gap closed slowly in his fast thinking eyes.

A fire spear materialized right in front of him and he had to change direction mid-sprint to avoid impaling himself on it.

His Kinetic Flux Runner handled the turn at a speed that should’ve been impossible for something with two wounded legs and still weak body but he was desperate and his stats and skills were pushing their limits, which he was very thankful already..

But now, the forest was full of centaurs and every direction he turned there were more heat signatures appearing on his Apex Predator Awareness.

An arrow caught the stick he was holding in his hand like a weapon at it’s base. Fİre skill blew half of it apart.

He threw the remaining piece at the nearest centaur’s face and turned toward the only open corridor in the ambush ring, a narrow gap between two thick oak trees that the centaurs were too wide to fit through.

He made it through the gap and sprinted for about thirty meters before three more centaurs stepped out of the tree line ahead of him. They’d anticipated his escape route too!

How..?

Eren’s Predatory Reflex was giving him openings or some ideas about his escape ways. Tiny windows where a centaur turned too slowly or left its flank exposed for a fraction of a second.

He tried to exploit one of them, pivoting hard to his right and swinging a new but random stick he plucked from a tree just a few seconds ago. It was half of the size of his usual preference but still used it at the nearest centaur’s unprotected side with every point of Strength he had. The centaur shifted its weight at the exact moment Eren committed to the swing and the stick passed through empty air where its ribs had been a quarter-second ago.

He tried again two strides later when a younger centaur stumbled on a root. Eren lunged with his Mana-Infused Stabbing activating on instinct and drove the glowing stick tip toward its neck from a much closer distance with the shortness of the weapon choice.

The centaur’s head moved sideways at the last possible instant like something had whispered in its ear which direction the attack was coming from.

How? How are they doing that? I’m faster than these little ones and I can see their openings and my reaction time is 2.5 times human and they’re still dodging everything I throw at them like they know where I’ll aim before I do.

And then he understood because the answer was hanging from the trees in their territory in clusters of rainbow-colored fruit.

It was their absurd Luck stat.

They eat those fruits every day.

Hundreds of them maybe thousands over their lifetimes. Their Luck isn’t 91 like mine from eating two fruits. It’s probably in the thousands.

Luck doesn’t just mean good things happen to you. It means bad things don’t most of the time if you have a probable outcome from a situation.

Eren was just guessing in the first seconds of the idea but his every attack failed and every thing he threw at them missed by a centimeter because the universe itself was nudging his supposedly perfect auto homing skill!

He couldn’t fight things that were mathematically lucky enough to dodge attacks they shouldn’t be able to see coming.

All he had was running.

"You eat those fruits every day don’t you.." he whispered while sprinting. "That’s why nothing touches you. That’s why you’re all so fu*king confident.."

His new cat side was proud and pissed of these enemies and Eren couldn’t accept this type of bullying.

Then a sudden fire arrow hit his left arm!

"..."

Not the forearm where the three jaguar claw scars ran from elbow to wrist but higher up near the shoulder where the flesh was thicker and the bones were closer to the surface.

The same left side that had already been shredded by the jaguar a week ago and had barely finished closing. The arrow didn’t bounce off. It went in through skin and deep into the muscle and then deeper still until Eren felt the heat of it reach something hard inside his arm.

It was probably his bones and the pain was so sudden and so wrong that his entire left side seized up.

Pain almost faltered his steps and already took most of his speed which Eren was so proud to begin with.

He was running with one functional arm and both legs getting worse with every step and the centaurs were closing from three directions.

Run. Run run run don’t think about the arm don’t think about how it feels inside your shoulder just run you piece of shit!

I WILL RUN AND SURVIVE!

He ran like his inner self commanded.

His Invisibility activated and bought him thirteen seconds of confusion while the centaurs lost visual contact. He used the time to change direction completely, heading north toward the lake instead of south toward his tree because south was where they expected him to go and north was where the water could extinguish their fire weapons.

At least that was the logical idea he had..

But like they already knew what he was going to do, every direction he tried to run had more of them. His Apex Predator Awareness was counting at least twelve new heat signatures in a loose ring around his position and each one was focusing his paths to burn him into oblivion.

He used his skills in combinations he’d never practiced.

Evade into Extreme Climbing into a tree with Invisibility from a high branch, Featherfall drop behind a centaur’s position and sprint through the gap before they turned around.

His body was performing feats that would’ve been impossible a month ago and none of it was enough because there were too many of them and they were too smart and his left arm was hanging at his side like a piece of dead meat.

But Eren still had some inner belief of his chances of escape. He knew they weren’t a fu*king dragon or something similar.

I can do this..!

The fireball hit him in the chest from the front..

He saw it coming in a slowed time and heard some level up voice for the skill- his Predatory Reflex showed him exactly what it was and exactly when the damn giant fireball would arrive. Hells- even his usually retarted brain calculated three different dodge angles in the time it took the fireball to cross the last five meters.

But sadly his legs were done of his abuse. The two jaguar gashes on his thigh had torn open completely and were bleeding through the scar tissue. The three claw scars on his left forearm were weeping red from the strain of running. His left shoulder was pumping blood down his side from the arrow that was still lodged somewhere inside the joint. His body saw the dodge angles and couldn’t reach any of them.

The fireball wasn’t like the spears or the arrows. It was bigger and brighter and it came from an alpha size Centaur.

Eren recognized the heat signature a quarter-second before impact and then the world turned white and orange and every nerve on the front of his body activated at once.

The explosion threw him backward about four meters and he landed on his back in the dirt and the fire spread across his chest and stomach and face and lower body with a heat that went past maximum pain his brain could bear!

It wasn’t just the burning or the explosion that hurt him, there was something more. A feeling of losing his sense of perfection as a body and like he lost something.

Like the cells on the surface of his skin were being told to stop existing and they were obeying the fire spell’s command.

He screamed like a lion! 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Not a word or a curse word but a sound that came from somewhere in his chest that had nothing to do with language. It was the sound a giant forest cat would make which Eren never heard of before. But somehow his evolved body had the urge to do it and the insane and sad scream kept going and going and it was coming from his own throat and he couldn’t make it stop..

Few seconds later with an insane dodge of a new fire skills aimed at his body, he still moved but didn’t know how he was doing that.

But he saw the lake finally.

Eren could see it through his left eye which was the only one that seemed to be working at normal capacity. Lake was maybe forty meters away and the water looked dark and weird but he wasn’t sure if it was the damaged eye was the issue or the lake. Probably the former one.

This lake was the only thing in the world that could stop what was happening to the front of his body. The whole pain and burned front parts of his body and probably lost the ability to reproduce with the pain was also in the middle of his legs too.

He didn’t know how how he moved.

Maybe I got a flying skill or an invisible flying unicorn with insanely big cock is carrying me...

His thinking and inner thoughts were in chaos. The only logical thing he could focus was the lake but it was too hard.

His legs shouldn’t have been able to hold his weight with the thigh wound reopened and his left arm was completely useless and the skin on his chest and stomach was doing things that skin shouldn’t do. But something between his Predatory Reflex and his cat instincts and whatever was left of the stubborn Turkish-Greek part of him that refused to die in this forest. Eren kept moving forward while still evading some fire skills.

The skill, no all the skills he got in this magical bullshit forest were levelling up in insane speeds.

[Congratulations! Your skill Pain Resistance (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 6 > Level 7

The lake. Get to the lake. Nothing else matters right now, not the arm and not the burns and not the fact that you can barely see or your lost co*k or test*cles.

Just go to that f*cking water!