Dante sprinted through the forest for the second day in a row, his new tail flapping behind him as he made sure to stay hidden under the leafy canopies. He felt a little stronger than usual today. His every footstep was followed by a resounding thump, and his breathing was steady despite the hours of exertion. There was also a natural steadiness to his movements, balancing him out in a way that made him feel unshakable.

But his improved condition did not grant him an undying body that could keep going for eternity. His flesh was still battered from yesterday’s events, and after running for almost the entire day, he was more exhausted than he thought possible. His legs felt like stone, his throat was raw, and his stamina was bottoming out.

A screech echoed off the closest mountains.

It was getting closer. Hunting him. Tracking him down since it first spotted the smoke from his campfire. That had been a mistake, but hindsight always made things clearer than his eyes could ever be. At least his inexperience didn’t end up killing him… yet.

Dante had wasted too much time trying to hide. He attempted to cover his tracks, camouflage himself with mud and leaves, and even mask his scent from the super predator by washing his body in a lake. Feeling the three slashes on his back, the tatters of his shirt sticking to the bloody wounds, he could safely guess that none of them worked.

Another screech came from behind, but this time it was no mere echo.

The light of the sun was dipping beneath the mountains now, leaving only a scant few rays of sunlight to illuminate his path ahead. He had been searching for hours now without a single clue, and the time limit was soon approaching its end. Once the sun disappeared, he would have to survive an onslaught of hawks for over twelve hours before the sun rose again.

Where he would have to continue his search.

Dante slowed down as he reached the edge of the forest. There were barren mountains in front of him, but no crystal could be found. They were always in the middle of the valley, lodged into the lowest point of the earth. And since there were mountains in every direction, that usually meant the middle of the valley was the lowest point.

Usually.

He had searched the entire forest and somehow didn’t come across it, but as he stood there, biting his lip in contemplation, Dante blinked and found himself ten metres off the ground. There had been no noise. He closed his eyes, felt his head jerk back as something pulled him forward, and opened them to find himself off the ground.

Looking up, Dante froze as he saw the feathered chestnut brown belly of a hawk the size of a car. He felt his stomach sink as it climbed into the sky, and Dante thrashed against the claws wrapped around his upper arms. Nothing happened. Its grip was like solid metal around the soft flesh of his arm, engulfing them like how an immovable machine swallowed the limb of a third world factory worker.

Realising he had no hope of escape, Dante took hold of his soul force and began to gather it for a massive-. The hawk arched its head down and locked eyes with him. As Dante stared back, he realised that the hawk had noticed his energy moving. It looked at him with curiosity and the supreme arrogance of a predator, waiting to see what someone so weak would do, if he could do anything at all.

Dante froze again as indecision swallowed his mind. If he continued to prepare his soul force, the hawk might just rip both of his arms off. But if he didn’t, the beast would eventually grow tired and drop him so that it could land. Even if the odds were slim, he could use that chance to escape when it was weary.

Dante stopped moving his soul force in a gesture of defeat, but the hawk only tilted its head the other way as it rose into the clouds. Then his tail slapped it across the face, and he got his wish, but not in the way he hoped. As Dante fell from hundreds of metres above the tallest mountain he could see, he vaguely recalled a documentary about eagles pulling goats off mountain tops and letting them fall to their deaths.

As the air whistled in his ears, Dante began to furiously move his soul force. He hadn’t used it since the incident with the egg, but now that he did, he almost couldn’t believe that he was using the same energy. Soul force streamed out of him as an iridescent cloud, weighing down his mind as a headache blossomed behind his eyes. Around half of the power faded into the atmosphere, but he took control of the rainbow-tinted cloud before the rest of it disappeared.

Biting his lip, Dante ignored his splitting headache and began to compress the cloud. It took seconds for the technique to snap into place, and as it did, he realised that it was an arm-thick haze covering his body rather than the previous cloud he barely managed to put together.

Almost as a recognition of his success, he received a notification.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill Levitation Lvl 1.

Several more dings echoed inside his head, but Dante ignored them for now. The ground was rapidly approaching, and he saw an unusual gleam near the middle of the forest. There was no time for indecision, so he gritted his teeth and guided his descent so that he was above the sparkling object.

Seconds later, he burned through most of Levitation’s energy to slow his fall, but he still crashed through the trees, snapping branches with his passing. Dante groaned as he slammed into the ground, silently pleased that he was smart enough to make it look like he was falling until the last possible second.

But despite the time he had made for himself, Dante pushed off the grassy earth before he was ready, stumbling over towards the hole in the ground. Peeking inside, he immediately spotted a small river flowing through the earth, disappearing as it moved into a tunnel.

Some kind of aquifer?

Ignoring it, Dante spotted the crystal he had been looking for. It was a metre tall pillar that poked straight up, and was close to a gleaming silver colour. Laying his hand on it, Dante fed it his soul force until a ripple appeared in the air. Before he was done, however, the hawk almost ripped a tree out of the ground as it landed behind him, furious that he hadn’t died.

It screeched at him and spread its wings, but as it pounced on him, the ripple tore a hole in space, and Dante stepped through it.

***

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After stepping through the portal, Dante continued his search in earnest. Every valley between the mountains had a portal crystal, and they were all linked to some kind of network. With a little bit of energy, he could connect to all of the crystals within a small area, teleporting to a valley a few mountains over in an instant.

If it wasn’t for the mountain range’s unique network, he would have definitely died by now. The hawks were much faster than him on flat ground and numbered in the thousands if his guess was correct, and that wasn’t even mentioning their advantage while he was climbing over a literal mountain.

But as Laurelai had said, the tutorial always left a way out. First it was the hole in the cavern wall, which she had literally dragged him through by breaking the rules of the tutorial. Then it was the ritual suppressing the egg followed by the crystal network that could help him end the first phase of the tutorial. They had all saved his life in some way, even if it wasn’t very conspicuous.

On the third day, Dante was far enough away now that he only heard a screech every few hours. He had teleported over five times a day at minimum, sleeping in bushes to make sure that he wouldn’t get found before. Now, he felt comfortable to slow down a bit and take advantage of this time to recover before the next phase of the tutorial.

Finding a cave to rest in for the night, Dante laid down in a dry area near the back wall before calling out to Laurelai. A moment later, she appeared from thin air in a burst of silver light. She had been resting in a kind of carrier space associated with the tutorial, which was sort of like a restricted area in a hotel. It provided food, water, toilets, a resting place, and many other things for the tutorial guides that couldn’t be taken out, sadly.

Once Laurelai was out, she crashed to the ground rather than landed, shocking Dante as she laid down across from him. There were deep bags under her eyes, her healthy caramel skin had turned a ghostly white, and her shoulders were hunched over along with her back. She was the complete opposite of the glowing fairy he originally met, and it was all his fault.

“How long has it been?” Laurelai said, her voice hoarse. “It feels like I just fell asleep.”

Dante sighed, his expression sinking. “It’s been five days.”

“Five days…” Laurelai stared into space, losing focus as her eyes began to droop.

Dante bit his lip. If he had been a little bit stronger, she wouldn’t have had to make such a sacrifice for someone she barely knew. She refused to say what the cost was, but he could tell it was steeper than he could imagine.

And all she wanted was a favour.

There was no iron-clad oath to bind his soul or written contract he was forced to sign. She put her faith in him doing the right thing, and that killed him a little bit inside.

Laurelai wasn’t a righteous saint, nor was she a selfish cur. She was a regular person who just wanted a good life for herself. There was no reason for her to save his life – a person who she’d met less than two weeks ago – and yet she trusted him enough to sacrifice more than he ever could for another person.

“How’s the egg?” She finally said, regaining focus. “Has anything changed with the ritual?”

Dante closed his eyes and focussed on his heart, but instead of visualising the clump of blood essence in his chest, a new location appeared in his mind. It was a small space hidden just below his heart, and floating in the middle of the endless stretch of darkness was the egg.

Instead of the void he saw before, Dante was able to look directly upon the egg. It was covered in the same scales as his tail, but there were three blood coloured rings carved into the shell that weren’t there before. At least it looked like a solid line, but according to Laurelai it was actually a condensed version of the ritual.

Neither of them had any idea how thousands of inscriptions could be shrunk down and carved onto the shell of the egg, yet it was there all the same.

Forcing his way into the space the egg created in his chest, Dante felt his stomach sink as he watched it. An endless stream of his energy poured into the space, twining themselves together as they were sucked into the egg’s shell. There were his three energies, but his blood, along with a few drops of green light, were also streaming into the egg.

Laurelai called it ‘life essence’, the substance that his body was literally using to keep itself alive. People were born with a set amount, and as they lived their lives, the drops would slowly disappear until none remained. Once a person’s life essence ran out, they would die of old age.

And the egg was eating his.

“It’s the same as before. Still slowly devouring my insides,” Dante sighed.

He could accept the egg consuming his blood essence and astral energy. The consumption would tire his body out, but it was an acceptable loss since he couldn’t use them anyway. As for his soul force, he was more than pleased for it to take some of his endless supply. Just the act of drawing his soul force into itself suppressed the chaos in his mind, pulling down on it all at once.

In fact, that was a significant benefit for him. Pliable soul force made his practice sessions infinitely easier, but the two things that he couldn’t abide by were the egg-eating his blood and his lifespan. Using the guidance of Laurelai, he calculated that the thing was sucking a week of his life away every twenty-four hours.

One month now cost him a freaking year of his life.

“Any new changes to your body?”

Dante shook his head. The most significant change occurred when the egg initially fused with his body, if it could even be called a fusion. The thing was a parasite living inside a magical space inside him, using him like an egg from the alien franchise would. At least there were no face-huggers involved this time, even if he did have to go through quite a bit of suffering anyway.

“How are you feeling otherwise? Is the tail coming under your control at all?”

Dante shook his head again. “It’s like it has a mind of its own. I tell it to go up, and it goes down. I tell it to go left, and it goes right. I tell it to stop moving, and...”

His tail smashed into the ground behind him, making a small crater the size of his thigh. As it rose into the air, leaving only shattered stones and a layer of dust on its scales, the tail wiped itself on his pants, almost like it was upset that something had the gall to tarnish it.

Dante glanced over as it playfully curled around his leg. It was longer than a metre and was tapered at the end, looking like the tail of a lizard. Dull black scales were covering it, but when the light of the sun collided with his tail, they lit up into a pure gold colour. It was almost like they were made of luminous gold or liquid droplets of sunlight, but even that didn’t do it justice.

“Definitely not there for show,” Laurelai said, her eyes wide. “So it’s being controlled by the egg, maybe?”

“Not consciously, I don’t think. It feels more instinctual, like how a turtle hatchling would crawl to the ocean seconds after being born. As for how I feel? Amazing. It’s like I’ve been sick my whole life and only just recovered.”

Dante looked into the space within his chest again, watching as his energy fed the egg. They entered as different coloured threads, all converging around the bottom of the egg before disappearing into individual scales. And as the threads entered the bottom of the egg, the ring around the top of its shell would occasionally light up, squeezing out a drop of green light against the egg's will. But instead of it melting his flesh like before, it would diffuse into his body, strengthening it a small amount.

Laurelai nodded, looking contemplative. “You need to keep the egg under a tight leash. The ritual is suppressing it, but it’s only keeping the egg from becoming stronger than you. If you don’t resist its hunger at all times, it will take ten years off your life in minutes.”

“Is there any way I can get rid of the thing? Like a potion for magic parasites?”

“This is an opportunity you can’t miss out on. I don’t know what the system intends for you to do, but I have a guess.”

“You do? What’s actually going on, then?”

“Well, since you have immense soul force but aren’t the most skilled at using it, the best alternative is to do something that requires little control but a lot of energy. And what else could be better than beast taming?”

“All you need to do is connect your mind to the beast’s and form a bond, and then all you have to do is give basic commands once you hatch and raise it. The stronger the beast, the more soul force you need to placate it. And if you want to teach it how to fight by your side, all you would need to do is train it like you would any animal. It’s perfect for you, and the system knows it.”

Dante felt his heart thumping in his chest. He had just been trying to survive until now, but Laurelai’s sacrifice was a wake-up call. He had a unique opportunity as a peak-grade talent, and he was squandering it by skulking around and hiding when he should be becoming stronger.

He had to do better, and this was his opportunity.