With only five days left on the clock, Nick was ready to begin his final preparations.

The tutorial would soon enter its third and presumably final phase. A forty-eight-hour period where he expected to face his toughest challenge yet, although the precise nature of this trial had yet to be revealed. Beyond gathering as many resources as possible, including any final loot boxes that he could get his hands on, Nick had two main objectives that he needed to accomplish before time ran out.

First, he needed to scout the highlands and try to scale the mountain in the middle. He was certain that exploring the region would uncover clues that were vital to his survival. Given how dangerous the isle had been up to this point, it would be reckless, bordering on suicidal, to enter the tutorial’s climax while flying blind.

It also ran counter to his nature. Nick’s approach wasn’t nearly as effective unless he was able to craft viable plans and contingencies ahead of time. He had to know what the System was going to throw at him before he was forced to face it head-on.

His second goal was to deal with the lurk once and for all. To kill the apex predator, or at least injure the beast, and reduce the constant threat it posed. But despite wracking his brain for over a week, he had been unable to concoct any method that could slay the massive mountain of muscle and ill will.

However, he had eventually come up with a way that might be able to wound the lurk if he was lucky. The problem was that enacting that plan would be almost as dangerous as facing the lurk head-on, and Nick judged his odds of success as falling somewhere between poor and none.

Until he came up with a better option, he decided to focus on his first goal for now. Unfortunately, the lurk’s presence was a major obstacle to completing his scouting mission as well. He was now certain that the lurk’s den was located somewhere in the northern highlands, if not on the mountain itself. This deduction was based on the trail signs he had observed, as well as the game-like logic of the island’s layout.

The Searing Isle had been divided into distinct biomes, with the danger and rewards scaling up as Nick moved closer to the center of the island. The weakest of the beasts, the lemurs, komos, and swordclaws, had been placed on the outer ring of the isle, where the pristine white sand beach had stood before the waters rose to devour it. The forest was the next layer in, and it was home to uniformly stronger predators. Namely, the creeper-mushroom symbiotes, the bonecruncher pack, and the spider colony. Not to mention whatever manner of beasts lived within the northern swamp.

Following this pattern, it was safe to assume that the strongest creatures on the island would claim the center, although Nick was uncertain if the highlands and the mountain constituted one large region or two medium ones. This was an important distinction. If they were separate zones, there might be unknown beasts stronger than the bonecruncher pack left to contend with. Perhaps even a species capable of going toe-to-toe against the lurk. Yet another reason why surveying the region was vital to his survival.

To explore the foothills surrounding the mountain, he needed to enter the highlands while the lurk was out hunting. To get the timing right, he needed to be able to predict the lurk’s movements. Given the beast’s incredibly sharp senses, Nick couldn’t survey the region while the lurk was home without alerting the deadly beast to his intrusion. If it caught wind of his presence within its territory, he strongly suspected that the terrifying predator would go out of its way to end his life.

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In short, the moment Nick left the forest, he would be gambling with his life. To maximize his chances of success, he needed to be able to model the beast's behavior and anticipate how it would react across a range of scenarios. Compared to the rest of his dilemma, this was an easier problem to solve, and he had devoted considerable effort to it. He had begun building a profile of his nemesis early on, after the lurk had nearly caught him just before the searstorm forced him into the dungeon.

Nick had been observing the lurk’s tracks, droppings, and kill signs for weeks. He had compiled his observations onto a plank that he recovered from the shipwreck, mapping out the island in charcoal and noting the location and time of each sighting. Over the last week, he had supplemented and analyzed these observances to come up with a working theory of the lurk’s behavior, which had not been possible until his proficiency in reading its tracks reached a critical threshold.

Armed with the results of his strategic analysis, Nick was now certain that the lurk was diurnal, active during the day and asleep at night. He had never found fresh trail signs anywhere near the southern half of the island until noon at the earliest. The time it took for the beast to walk from its lair in the north to the furthest reaches of the island. This timing also provided Nick with a rough estimate of how fast the lurk moved while traveling.

Of greater importance, he had deduced that the lurk had a method to its hunting. It was similar enough to his foraging strategy that he had eventually recognized the pattern at play. In short, the lurk had a basic rotation to where it hunted. A five-day cycle that took it to five distinct locations on the island.

Although Nick had learned that the beast sometimes skipped a day, which he believed occurred after days when the lurk’s hunt had been particularly successful and it was able to bring back enough carcasses to consume at its leisure. The intermittent staggering to the cycle made it harder for other creatures to recognize the logic to its movements, but he had finally cracked the code.

Judging by the handful of sightings he had made early on, the lurk had used a more complex rotation before the outer rim of the island sank. In a sense, Nick was lucky that the surface area of the isle had been curtailed. He would not have been able to collect sufficient information if the beast was free to roam across a wider area.

But since the second phase had begun, the lurk simply worked its way clockwise around the isle. It hunted swordclaws and komos most of the time, but also targeted the lemur tribe when its rotation brought the beast around to the southern forest. He was lucky it knew that the crunchers were out of the picture, as the lurk no longer hunted within the valley that was home to his cave.

It wasn’t until the end of his week of training that Nick had collected enough evidence to complete his working model of the lurk’s behavior. At least to the extent that he was able to predict roughly when and where it would strike next. All that was left was to test the theory by matching his predictions up against reality, and he would be ready to risk exploring the highlands while the lurk was away.

To confirm his hypothesis, he was presently hiding in the branches of a tree on the komos’ side of the forest, which offered a clear view of the surrounding terrain. After sizing up every komo in sight, he had passed the time by engaging in the purely visual version of his shadow boxing, as well as watching scores of the vicious lizards hunt wild game within the clearing below.

Nick had chosen a tall tree that was downwind of the glade, positioned so he could peer into the space where the second-largest pride of komos resided, rivaled only by the group led by the hulking lizard that he had dubbed Komo Alpha.

As he had learned firsthand that the lizards were relatively dumb and remarkably easy to ambush, he figured that the lurk would strike where the sentries were lax and the meat was plentiful—although he had no idea when the show would start, beyond “sometime after noon.” In addition to confirming its hunting rotation, the time of the attack would reveal vital information as well, letting him deduce how long it took the lurk to walk from its lair over to Nick’s side of the island.

It was the last piece of the puzzle he needed to place before he was ready to test his luck exploring the highlands.