In a numerical world where Stats were what mattered, I was currently high on life: no more low HP, no more low SP, no more potential bone and paw pad damage. I wasn’t even hungry! Surely all my physiological problems had been solved!

Yes and no. My wounds were gone, but I was still suffering from something no known Stat could cure: mental fatigue. The kind that makes you tired or just worn-out.

But whatever! I’d played through the pain many times before! Now I was feeling young and reckless and pumped, and I stepped into the woods of Reed’s Mountain’s foot with confidence anyway.

I did my thinking as I walked. I did my strategizing as I crouched in tall grass and shrubs, wary of the clearings.

Was I really about to outsmart a wolf tonight?

That starving creature was getting closer. I could tell: my ears swiveled toward every howl, marking the distance, the direction. I could hear them. They couldn’t hear me.

This was the rough sketch of my plan:

Keep hugging the foot of the mountain. Get to know the lay of the land as well as I could.

Look for nice strategic setpieces—like cliffs, caves, or even particularly dry trees, the ones that a fiery wolf would love to burn.

Linger.

But the mountain would be crawling with foes, plural. I was still sweating over how tense my first encounter with an owl was sure to be.

Shortly after I stepped clear away from the overhang, making my way sideways along Reed’s Mountain, I nearly made a wrong move. I came this close to stepping on a choice foe: a snake!

The thin, speckled tail slithered across my path. I whipped my head to watch them duck into a hole.

Hm… After the initial primal fear, I reminded myself that I was at Level 6 now. I was drowning in power…relatively. Admittedly, it would’ve been a huge relief to have some way of knowing what Level other animals were.

I walked on. The idea of winding around in a spiral was tempting, but between Mapmaking, Reed, and a night-long hunt, I could only chase one goal at a time. Besides, I could always explore this territory more broadly later.

About an hour in, my ears spiked. I heard new shrieks and clatter from the lower hills. And then rustles. Faint, but coming my way.

So I settled on a place to call my hunting ground—a ring about a hundred meters around. Kinda big. Assuming I’d have enough time before the wolf closed in, I planned to tighten my scope like a lasso, deciding which parts of the combat playplace would give me the best advantage in a battle. The long, thin birches and the high boughs of the magnolias in this area, along with the lumpy rock ground, were really grabbing my attention.

Too bad the wildlife was complicating things. Strange Vencian insects, not sounding like cicadas and not like crickets either, chirped from underneath brush. I walked past a particularly noisy cluster. Then I backtracked. Nope, not going to let this mystery slide, especially if I had to fight alongside it.

I hovered beside the chirping bush and asked myself, did I feel cocky?

The answer was, only slightly. I would strike, but not without making sure that I could hop completely out of the way.

My claws cut through the night. I swatted with the full ten, slashing between leaves.

Something crunched. Had I massacred them?

A swarm of brown bodies exploded free, and I yowled and fell on my back. Hard carapaces and chittering wings flashed past me—and when they hit me, they glowed. Twenty bright-pink cuts must’ve razored across me in the span of seconds.

HP 66% (83/125)

Stronger than I’d assumed…

And stronger than any insects I’d met in my life. Ever.

By the time I’d whirled myself onto my feet, that swarm of brown insects had gone up through the pines and disappeared. Jerks.

Not only that, but the chirping insects I’d been hearing all around me rose en masse and followed, in a swarm like a whirring cloud, right behind.

I couldn’t see any of them—none were nearby—but I heard them and I felt them breaking holes in the earth, and I saw the swishing of the trees. Of the trees, not just their branches. The sound of so many animals moving at once, on such a vast communal instinct, was terrifying.

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With numbers like that, they could have…devoured me.

But they didn’t, and I was safe.

Note to self: avoid the insects I would call the chirps. Unless maybe I found a single chirp. Then I could probably take it.

***

As it turned out, seventy-five percent of my plan fell through!

But the rest held. I had, indeed, tightened my lasso, and this grove on the mountainside had plenty of burnable trees, in positions I had vaguely memorized. I’d spotted fallen logs and burrows, all empty at a glance and a sniff.

I was prepared for a wolf to come pacing or stalking—not whipping through.

Great paws stamped across the undergrowth. And I fled. Then, huddled inside of a hollow log filled with years’ worth of dead leaves and moist muck, I hoped all that litter could hide my scent.

Through termite-bitten holes in the side of the log, and then through the obligatory dark leaves of a summer night grove, I struggled, again, to see my enemy.

It was a moonless midnight. A lone firefly glimmered, then bobbed away. The wolf was now…nowhere in sight. They were about three meters away, but invisible, elsewhere. I could sense them prowling. Not just the sound of their paws in the grass, but also, though dimly, the weight of them. Can humans feel that? When someone else walks in the room you’re standing in, can you feel their shoes through the wood?

My eyes, ears, and whiskers stayed alert, but the rest of me stayed utterly still. I couldn’t let the wolf know where I was.

Though I had a hunch they already did.

On the flipside, maybe their Wisdom Stat was lacking. Maybe their attention had wandered to some easier prey…or tastier. Maybe they were—afraid of cats?

A branch snapped. I tensed. It was followed by a cavalcade that sounded like, and might well have been, an entire tree’s worth.

I heard snarling and raving. Somewhere outside of my log, the wolf was running enraged circles like an insecure king of the wilderness. I would’ve thanked the goddess of luck and mercy for this distraction…if not for the fact that the wolf had torn right through my log.

Now I was staring straight into the night, my roof and windows torn from their foundations.

Leap away! I cried out to myself—but fear of the flash and noise it might cause stopped me—

Aw, it didn’t matter anyway. The wolf had stopped in their tracks not a meter behind me. And when I looked over my shoulder, I knew just who they were glaring at.

The thin wolf licked their chops.

Okay, now Leap away.

I Leapt, satisfied that stealth did not currently matter. But just before I did so, I hopped back—so that the kickoff would sail into the wolf’s lower jaw. Fortunately, this hurt enough to make the wolf whine. Unfortunately, it made my Leaping angle very awkward, so instead of jumping, I really skidded along the leaf litter. Ow!

HP 62% (78/125) SP 82% (82/100)

The moment I shot away, making a third of the distance I’d intended, the wolf was on my tail, running without stealth, without grace, just crashing through the forest. Quickly I recovered from my fall, went into a run, went hurtling downslope. Meaning that I was taking the opposite lesson from my running with rabbits and the berserk wolf behind me had the horrific momentum of a movie-ruins-style boulder. In seconds they would catch up.

I knew the only way to escape this wolf was to outwit them, recover the scraps of plans I’d made, but—but it’s so hard with a fear-plagued mind. How could I stand to do that when the world was racing by? When stopping for an instant would lose what little advantage I had?

Somehow I did it. I changed course, jumping and latching onto a flimsy tree.

The wolf did too. Not with their whole body, but with front paws that stretched above and around me.

The entire birch leaned with the weight. A bird’s nest collapsed and rained down past the wolf’s head while they barked as fiercely as any guard dog.

Injecting myself with false confidence, I leapfrogged my way to another birch, one just as flimsy. Now a more coherent plan was popping into place. I knew where a fat, sturdy, time-weathered magnolia was. If the wolf chased me there and I figured out how to enrage them enough to unleash a burning Skill…and then found a way to get them to blunder into their own flames… Yes. It had potential.

Until the wolf came soaring at me with a Leap.

I was…unaware that other animals had that.

In a mortifying instant, the jaws closed around me—the latest birch was falling below me—I was caged by a body at least twice my weight, with incalculable power.

There was no longer any time to think, only time to panic. So I did that.

Nor was there any time to act, only time to flip a switch in myself.

Suddenly this was do or die. Any indecision, any time spent not doing what I most feared, and my life would be over.

I activated Morph, and I became a nekomata.

A flash, then a flood of magical steam.

When it cleared, it left a bizarre scene. On one side was me, the cat-woman with clawed hands and feet still nailing me to the collapsed birch tree. On the other was the wolf, who would have been crushing my throat if the pain of my suddenly expanding inside-throat-size hadn’t wrenched their jaws wide enough to make a loud crack.

For a second, the wolf remained standing with their front paws on top of me. It dawned on me that I was now bigger than the wolf—and looking ludicrous on the tree, with my hands and feet all clustered right next to each other.

I still wasn’t completely sure why animals didn’t attack me in this form. It could’ve been a fear of humans, their firearms or their magic. It could’ve been simply the fear of an apex predator. Or maybe it wasn’t humans, but nekomata. Maybe they found something…uncanny about me being almost human.

The wolf was, apparently, no different from the rest. They backed off. Thumping onto all fours on the earth again, they looked up into my new face with a low growl.

Wait, that last part didn’t sound right.

Sadly, I knew what this growl meant. It was the wolf getting cautious without giving up. It meant the wolf was feeling truly brave, or insane. It meant I wasn’t free yet.

Quickly I checked my Stats. They only confirmed that my vitals didn’t change when I transformed…except for my SP, whittling away.

Then I rose from the tree with all the bluster I could manage, rearing up with teeth and fingernail-claws bared.

I lashed out with Swipe, but the wolf responded with a blade of fire.