He ran the ugliest forty meters of his life.

Stumbling and half-blind and trailing smoke from his own body and leaking blood from four different wounds. A fire arrow passed over his right shoulder and another one hit the ground next to his foot and the centaurs were behind him yelling in their grinding rock language.

Some new wounds stack up and all his body was covered in burn marks and some damaged parts. They weren’t in the same injury level of his left arm but still increased his mind f*cking pain.

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

-Level 7 > Level 8

His body was producing so much pain that the system couldn’t keep up with the adaptation speed and each level-up took a tiny edge off the agony which meant the difference between collapsing and reaching the water.

He hald jumped and half arrowed his body to the lake at full speed and the cold shocked every burn on his body at once and for about half a second the pain got so much worse that he thought he was dying right there.

Then the fire on his skin went out and the water closed over his head and the burns went from active destruction to the deep sick ache of already-damaged tissue floating in cold liquid.

Pain didn’t decrease even a bit!

He surfaced gasping with just one eye working. The other was swollen shut and the lid felt wrong, melted maybe or just so damaged that the muscles couldn’t open it. His chest and stomach were a landscape of blistered and blackened skin that he could see through the dark water when he looked down. His left arm hung in the water like something that belonged to a different body.

My arm is f*cked..

Something inside my shoulder is broken or burned through or both. My face.. I can feel my face is wrong. The skin on my eyelid is.. don’t think about that. My chest looks like.. like someone..

He stopped looking at his chest.

Can I still.. is everything still..

He checked. The area between his legs was burned but he could feel sensation there which meant the nerves were still working even if the skin wasn’t. Whether everything still functioned after this was a question for another time. A time when he wasn’t floating in a lake bleeding from six different wounds with one working eye.

If they took that from me. If those disgusting horse-dog-faced monsters burned my.. if I can’t ever have kids because of these shits... I swear to god I will find every member of their race and cut their penises..! All of it in front of all their female members are watching it..!

I will extinct you!

[Congratulations! Your skill Enhanced Healing (Basic) levelled up]

-Level 6 > Level 7

This skill leveled up like 4 times in the last seven days, but here and now, it was racing like a nascar driver. It was already close to evolution which Eren was desperately need it in this state.

[Congratulations! Your skill Poison Resistance levelled up]

-Level 5 > Level 6

His healing skill had gone up which meant his body was actively repairing something even now. And the poison level-up meant the jaguar’s anticoagulant venom from last week was still in his blood and never fully neutralized and now with every old wound ripped open again it was preventing his blood from clotting just like the first time but maybe new skill levels would do something.

He needed some hope and help from anything. Even if it was a mechanic system and it’s skills.

The pain was still enormous but his Pain Resistance at Level 8 was doing something to it. Not reducing it exactly but organizing it into channels his brain could process without shutting down.

And inside those channels of clarity, between the pulses of agony from his chest and his arm and his face or even his burned penis...a different feeling was growing.

Nothing clean like a newfound courage or determination.

Rage..!

I’m going to find a way to get stronger than every single one of those centaurs and when I do I’m going to walk into their territory in broad daylight. And I’m going to take every male in that clan and I’m going to drag them into the middle of their precious fruit grove where their females can see everything.

Maybe I could start with the alpha, huh.

I’ll rip his fire-making hands off first so he knows what it feels like to lose the thing he’s most proud of. Then I’ll work my way down. One by one. And when I’m done with the males..

He was swimming toward the far shore one-armed and every stroke sent fire through the burns on his chest but his brain was somewhere else entirely.

..when I’m done with the males I’ll go to the goblin settlement near the northern swamp. Those goblins hate everything bigger than them and they’d love a gift of a hundred female centaurs with no males left to protect them. And I’ll tell the goblins "these are yours now, do whatever you want" and the centaurs will understand exactly what happens when you try to kill me in this forest!

Every one of their males will be killed after a short torture, and all of their females will be rap*d and killed by the disgusting goblins!

He knew the thoughts were insane.

Eren knew this wasn’t how a normal person’s brain worked. Something in the jaguar poison or the burns or the combination of thirty-seven days of survival stress and a cat evolution that was slowly rewiring his emotional responses had turned his fear and pain into something darker and more creative than he’d ever been capable of on Earth.

Or maybe I skip the centaurs entirely and go straight to the rainbow bird. That thing gave me a dead cat once and didn’t look like hating me.

If I go to its tree and show it what the centaurs did, show it my burns and my arm and what’s left of my face.. that bird is smart enough to understand revenge. It controls this entire section of forest. One decision from that bird and the centaurs don’t have a home anymore. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Or maybe I do both. Get the bird to weaken them and then I come in after and handle the rest personally. A coalition. Me and the apex bird and maybe those red ants that throw boulders at wolves. An alliance of everything the centaurs have ever pissed off. Which in this forest is probably a long list.

Even if all of it fails and no one helps me, I will still find a way to torture them.

I SWEAR!

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

-Level 8 > Level 9

The level-up hit him mid swim and suddenly the burns on his chest went from screaming to a loud persistent ache and his brain got back about thirty percent of its usual Eren style thinking level.

And it was enough to notice that the far shore was only about twenty meters away now and the centaurs had stopped at the water’s edge behind him. His right arm was probably the most useful and helpful in his body in the whole escape operation. It was the only thing that kept him now drowned and pushed him forward.

I love you my right arm..

The important part he noticed after the pain resistance leveled up was centaurs weren’t following him in which was the main point of his survival.

Whatever lived in this lake was enough to make fire-armed centaurs think twice about entering and that should’ve made Eren feel better but his Apex Predator Awareness was picking up something very large in the deep water about fifty meters to his right and he was trying very hard not to think about that.

He remembered Day 11. Standing on the shore of this same lake watching a creature the size of a small bus with a crocodile’s body and jaws wider than he was tall lunge out of the water and swallow three wolves in a single bite. The wolves had been drinking. They hadn’t seen it coming. Nobody ever saw it coming because the thing lived in the deep and only moved when blood hit the water.

Blood.

He was trailing blood from six open wounds into a lake that contained something that ate wolves whole.

Swim faster. Swim faster Eren. FASTER!!!

Less than ten meters to shore. His one good arm was burning from the effort and his legs were kicking weakly below the surface and the large heat signature to his right had changed direction.

I’m so close. I can see the mud on the bottom, the reeds.

The bird’s territory is thirty minutes northeast from the shore. I just need to get out of this water and run.

I’ve survived gorillas and wyverns and a jaguar and a hundred centaurs throwing fire at me for the last twenty minutes, damn it! I’m not dying in a stupid lake.

I’m going to get out and I’m going to heal and I’m going to come back stronger and There is so much more in this magica-

Something moved in the water below him.

His Apex Predator Awareness warned him at the same moment his Predatory Reflex told his body to move but there was nowhere to go or anything he could do. He was floating in open water with one arm and his body was so damaged that the reflex signal reached his muscles and his muscles just couldn’t answer.

It came from underneath as a fast dark thing. Creature was so large that his enhanced senses couldn’t map its full size before it reached him.

No..

A mouth opened in the water below his feet that was wider than his entire body and lined with rows of teeth and it closed around him from the waist down with a pressure that compressed his organs and snapped his spine and ended every signal his brain was receiving from his lower body in about a quarter of a second.

He didn’t scream. There wasn’t enough of him left connected to his lungs for screaming.

The last thing his working eye saw was the surface of the lake getting further away as the creature pulled the rest of his upper body under the lake waters.

This was a magical forest with endless possibilities and even if he was alone, Eren was almost having fun..

The afternoon sunlight was breaking into golden beams through the dark water above him and the beams were getting thinner and dimmer and his Predatory Reflex was still active so it showed him the light fading in slow motion at 2.5 times normal perception speed which meant the last three seconds of his life lasted about seven and a half seconds inside his head.

Seven and a half seconds was a long time when you knew it was all you had left.

He thought about his mother’s kitchen in the lower floor and his father’s back garden. The yellow tiles above the stairs that his mother been meaning to replace for more than he can remember.

The way she hummed Turkish pop songs while cooking and got the lyrics wrong every single time and got angry when anyone corrected her.

He thought about his father sleeping in the armchair with the newspaper on his chest and the now dead cat that was with his dad for more than twenty years..Portakal would only curl up on his dad’s lap and the TV playing a football match.

Eren thought about Rosa burning things while cooking and swearing in half Italian words her mother used in her childhood too much. And the engagement ring that he wanted to buy but didn’t even have enough money for it.

The fights they’d had was mostly awful but Rosa was a gentle soul. So she would find a way to trick him into smiling and that fighting days would turn into the best make-up sex nights of his life.

He thought about the two vines he’d planted at the base of his magical home-tree and whether they would ever grew.

He didn’t get to make the perfect choices in his life, But he almost had this fu*king forest.

He was so close to greatness for once in his life.

Damn close.

I miss mom.

The lights went out and Clone-Eren died.

..

The centaurs watched the surface of the lake go still.

The blood that had been spreading through the water near the center was already dissolving and within a few minutes there would be no trace that anything had happened there at all. The alpha grunted something to the nearest group and they turned their backs to the lake and started walking home.

On the shore the fire birds stopped screaming.

Fifty of them sat in the low branches near the water in complete silence with their heads tilted and their dark eyes fixed on the spot where the blood was fading.

The silence spread outward through the area as bird after bird picked up the signal and passed it along.

Within two minutes every bird in a three-kilometer radius knew that the only human who lived in the big tree was dead.

A few kilometers east of the lake, the rainbow-colored bird was in its usual spot near the top of a medium-sized oak. It tilted its head toward the lake and looked in that direction for a short time. It was probably longer than it had ever looked at anything that wasn’t prey or a threat. Then it turned away and settled back into its branch and the forest went quiet again.

Large numbers of creatures more powerful, talented or special than Eren had lives and died every day. Something ends and something else fills the space.

But for thirty-seven days the space had been filled by a twenty-five-year-old man from Earth who talked to birds that couldn’t answer him and planted vines he’d never see grow and made plans for a future he’d never reach.

He woke up every morning to the worst alarm clock in any universe and said good morning to a turtle that didn’t care and stole fruit from creatures that could kill him but most of them didn’t see the appeal and actually let him go most of the time..

He never found out why he was there. Never learned that he was a copy of someone else.

Like the system wrote somewhere, Clone always believed that he was the Eren.