The Mandrill town was as impressive as ever. Three dozen buildings were clustered together in the space between the old growth trees. About two thirds of them were homes, while the others represented various other facilities, including workshops and storehouses.

I didn’t have the luxury of excess time and security to look around, but a lot could be inferred about the Mandrills from their set up, even as I hurried by.

The only materials the Mandrills seemed to use in construction was mud and wood, but despite the simple components, they were handled with unexpected mastery. Thick layers of sun-baked mud was used to construct deep and secure foundations for sturdy wooden houses. The digging of those foundations was no small task here in the old growth forest, where the tree roots ran deep and were hard as stone so close to the surface.

And despite the settlement being built on the forest floor, very few buildings leaned on the trunks of those trees for support.

In fact, it was only one.

The town’s central building.

It was constructed entirely of mud, reaching over fifty feet up the trunk of a tree. The appearance of it was somewhere between a hive and a castle, looking for all the world like a mason bee’s answer to the Taj Mahal.

I’d never been inside, so I couldn’t guess its purpose. But it was a dangerous-looking structure nonetheless, bristling with tunnels and passages that warned what a maze it would be to navigate for a stranger.

The only thing I knew for certain was that it was where the Alpha spent most of his time.

Of course, as soon as I set eyes on it, my Hide In Plain Sight buff fell off.

My Detection skill was going crazy, notifying me of almost two dozen Mandrills within the hundred feet or so that it covered, and that meant that suddenly becoming plainly visible was terrifying.

But nothing was so terrifying as looking up at the mud hive-castle.

The alpha was standing there on one of the balconies on the ominous structure. He was easy to recognize by his size alone. Pushing seven feet tall, and built like a pro wrestler, the alpha was downright terrifying. Even at this distance, over a hundred and fifty yards away, his brightly colored nose and nasal ridges popped out of the natural brown surroundings. Around his shoulders was what the blue-dyed scarf that I believed served as the mark of his station as the dominant male of this pack.

And his beady little eyes were locked onto me.

His detection radius had to be insane if he saw me from here. Not that my Stealth skill was very high, but it was usually adequate at this range.

As he threw his head back and shrieked to raise the alarm about my presence, it was absolutely impossible for me to stop him.

Not that I wanted to.

The guards being called into the town to deal with me was the whole point of my mission here.

I wanted the alarm raised.

What I didn’t expect was the subsequent hooting and gesturing. Mandrill language consisted of hoots, grunts, and growls that to the human ear were basically interchangeable, and then a large amount of actual meaning was conveyed with body language.

I didn’t understand any of it.

Mandrills responded to humans almost universally with hostility and violence. There wasn’t exactly an app for learning this stuff. I was forced to learn from context.

In response to the alpha’s call, mandrills emerged from their homes, while others who were on guard duty rushed to respond to the racket. When others saw me, they started to echo the shrieking alarm the alpha had raised, but there was a number that instead rushed off to the south. For a moment, I feared that they had intuited that my appearance meant that one of their farms was about to get raided, but they were going the wrong direction. My friends were approaching from the northwest, which is why I’d circled around to appear here, on the east side of their town.

Knowing their town layout from previous raids, the south was where they kept their livestock, but the task of stealing an aurochs was far beyond our capacity. There was simply no way for us to quickly transport one that wouldn’t leave a huge trail back to our camp.

They also hadn’t previously responded to my appearance with increased security to the south. The Mandrill guards were usually happy to chase me around for fifteen minutes before running me off.

I filed that information away for later. Perhaps there was something afoot.

Obviously I couldn’t make any kind of investigation now. The Mandrill guards who had responded to me instead of running to the south were trying to encircle me so that they could cut off my inevitable escape. I wasn’t going to have the chance to share this information with my friends if I didn’t live through to the end of the day.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Axes out, I charged. The guards closing in around me were women—as they were Mandrills in town who were neither juveniles or the alpha—and the one rushing the fastest to cut off the direction I’d come from was the largest of them. My friends had taken to calling her the queen, but I didn’t think Mandrill society worked like that. Unlike the others—and like the alpha—she wore adornment in addition to her loincloth. A necklace of enormous fangs dangled from her neck, clicking and clacking as she moved. Her fur was thinned from all the battle scars on her hide, and in several places, she’d woven bits of red cloth into the fur near the scars, making them look like fresh bleeding wounds at a moment’s glance.

To me, she seemed like much more of a guard captain than a queen. Because of her rapid response to my appearance as a threat, I’d tangled with her plenty of times. Her frustration with my escapes was half the reason why I was so successful in these endeavors.

If she responded rationally, then as soon as she saw me she’d be looking to find what my friends were doing. What could one man do loose in the town? Instead, I’d enraged her so much that my capture—or death—had become her all-consuming objective.

At my approach she bared her teeth at me. I knew enough of the Mandrills to know that it wasn’t a pleasant gesture in their nonverbal language. Despite that knowledge, I grinned right back at her. As long as her hatred was only for me, I was still useful as a distraction.

She held a long sword in her hairy hands. To a human, it would have been a two-handed blade, but the oversized and muscular build of the Mandrill let her swing it at me one-handed, with her other hand reaching to predict my dodge.

Even as I charged for her, she was trying to give me the option of letting her grapple me, or else get cleaved in twain by her blade.

Neither option appealed to me.

Throwing myself into a dive sent me rolling under her, between the wide stance of her legs. I felt a huge hand claw at my leg, tugging at my leather leggings, but the gear was too tight for her to grab. I was behind her in a flash, scrambling to my feet.

Either she’d botched the Athletics skill check to stop me, or she’d simply been unprepared to attempt it. Either way, I was past her, and outside of the ring of guards that were trying to trap me. Now that I was behind her, I smashed both of my hand axes into her flank and then turned that impact into momentum, pushing off of her with the weapons to break into a full sprint.

As I bolted away, another Mandrill guard dove at me with her bare hands, reaching to grab me in a big bear hug in a desperate attempt to stop me from getting loose. But her haste made her forget that I was dangerous in my own right. I faked left and then darted to the right, lashing out with my axes. Without a weapon or shield, and armored only in her natural hide, I left a pair of shallow slashes across the inside of her forearm. My attack sent her howling as she recoiled, letting me bolt past her and to the north, away from the crowd of guards.

The next Mandrill to lunge at me almost caught a pair of axes to the face as they seemed to appear out of nowhere with teeth bared, but I managed to stop myself. He’d appeared out of nowhere because he was barely five feet tall. A child. Someone’s son, just old enough for delusions of heroism but too young to be a proper fighter. Instead of killing him, I jumped up, planting my foot on his face instead of my weapons. With my momentum, it would disabuse him of the notion of giving chase while not being immediately fatal.

Weird violent primate-person or not, he was still just a kid.

I wasn’t a monster.

The Mandrill kid hit the ground, clutching his nose as I sprinted away. I thought maybe the injured juvenile might slow down pursuit. But I could already hear the click-clacking of the queen’s necklace jangling around her neck as she ran. She was right on my heels, even though that meant she’d had to step over a bleeding child.

There was a whooshing sound, and I knew that my Dodge skill had been tested from the way the wind of her swinging blade hit me. My hit points were intact, though.

I couldn’t let her take a second swing at me like that. As confident as I was in my ability to endure the queen’s damage for a couple of hits, I knew that letting her have her way with my hit point bar was a short trip to the long sleep.

With some pep in my step, I juked left again, and then actually ran left, knowing that she would respond to the obvious fake by trying to pounce on where she thought I would be.

True to expectation, her blade slammed into the side of the building to my right as I ran left around the other side of it. The trees and buildings were widely-spaced enough that I couldn’t break line of sight—not that it would matter with the alpha up on the hive-castle, still hooting and shrieking directions—but it was just enough of a lead that I could start creating a real problem. There were still guard patrols emerging from the forest in response to the alarm, and the longer I could keep them here, the more food my friends could pilfer.

With the little time I’d bought, I rushed towards the nearest spot where a building and a tree were close together. Kicking off of the ground, an Acrobatics skill check let me bounce between the tree and the building’s wall to get onto the roof. There were shrieks of alarm from inside the building, and I stoked that fear by hammering the back of my hand axes on the flat wooden roof as I ran down the length of the L-shaped building, heading for the corner.

There was a rattle of the queen’s fang necklace as her hand snaked up at my ankles from the side of the building, but too slow. I scrambled left and then ran to the corner, leaping across to the next nearest building.

It was a tremendous jump, over twenty feet, but one of the benefits of the System was that even after only six months of survival training, my strength and speed were comparable to Olympic athletes, even without the feats enabled by my Acrobatics and Athletics skills.

I touched down on the far roof with all my momentum intact. The queen was well behind me now, and as soon as I hopped off the corner of the roof of this building, she was going to have to run all the way around to catch up. I could be at the edge of the forest by then. Though now that the Alpha had stopped hooting directions, perhaps I could linger a little longer to buy a little more time. The other guards were still shrieking the alarm, trying to coordinate, but without him and his bird’s-eye view I could—

Wait.

When had the alpha stopped?

I stopped dead as an enormous shape clambered up onto the roof ahead of me. The queen’s click-clacking necklace was rattling behind me, and the howls of alarm from the guards were coming from every direction. I had to keep moving. But I was paralyzed with mingled fear and surprise.

The alpha stood up on the roof before me.

He didn’t bare his teeth.

He didn’t shriek.

He made no facial expression or noise at all.

He just started stalking towards me, his heavy footsteps thumping the roof.

Unarmed, but with his massive hands slowly curling into fists one finger at a time.

I couldn’t stop myself. The words went from my brain to my mouth in an instant without going through all of the necessary checks. I just blurted it out. Despite my hesitance, I had to agree with myself. There was no better assessment for the idea of being sandwiched between the imposing alpha and the enraged queen.

“Ah, shit.”