Name: Calark

Description: Stop moving, hold your breath, and pray. You have finally reached a beast you shouldn’t even think of fighting. It’s the size of a jaguar but has a speed that will strain your current Moxle Dilation just to follow and will gore you in one second and break your bones like they were icicles. Your only saving grace is that its senses have degraded with this environment. If you must feel in control, summon Nymbral. But for the love of god, don’t charge a shot unless you want to broadcast your location to it.

P.S. This is clearly a third-evolution beast. So be careful.

—---

I froze and placed a panicked Kline on my shoulder, grateful that he understood the danger. The calark kept walking but was seemingly unaware of us as I slowly pulled Nymbral from my chest.

My heart pounded like a kick drum—my mind buzzed. I took shallow breaths, hearing the snorting and splashing and sloshing in the bog, praying it wouldn’t see us.

It pushed through the water, getting closer to us. It stopped and snorted, shaking its fur. Then it looked around and released a terrifying mating call.

My heart froze as it looked at us head-on—and I thought that moment would never end. But then it suddenly turned, and I breathed deeply.

That… I thought, was scary…

Kline jumped off my shoulder, landing on a dry patch with an eerie silence, trying to encourage me to continue. I nodded, but my body wouldn’t respond. My legs had turned to water, and my mind had shut down. For the first time, Lithco told me that I was defenseless.

He told me how dangerous other things were—but he didn’t tell me to sit back and pray.

I clenched my fists, feeling tense until Kline pawed my leg.

I looked down.

Kline nodded.

I swallowed hard. You just gotta getta plant… I reminded myself. That’s all you gotta do. I walked on.

Twenty agonizing minutes followed. All the moss and trees and water were purple, making everything I looked at and touched look like it was highlighted poison. That was my superpower and it was useless as I waded through the moss and filth and slime of the bog, passing rotting logs and rocks that were bleached so white they looked like quartz. The environment blended, and soon, I had to remind myself what I was doing.

I was looking for zorathorn, a bramble that looked like a yellow spring with thorns, wrapped together like a staircase somewhere in the bog. I should’ve popped against the purple, white, and gray backdrop, but there was a problem—it was extremely poisonous. So it would highlight neon purple—like everything else.

I reviewed it in my guide.

—---

Name: Zorathorn

Description: This beaut is the key to pushing elixirs through your muscles. If that didn’t trigger hundreds of danger signals in your brain, you should try caring about your survival more. If it did, it shouldn’t surprise you that this plant injects poison throughout your muscles, causing them to rapidly rot from necrosis. Cut it with care.

—---

I read it and carried on.

Soon, I started to feel weak. Using a domain above water was incomparably easier than doing it under, but I had only practiced five hours before. Now, I was approaching ten, and my concentration was fading. I didn’t know how long it would last.

Kline suddenly let out a piercing howl.

I froze and looked around but saw no one. Then I went to step forward but stopped and looked around. There, blending in with the neon purple algae and moss and trees, was a neon purple bramble with thorns in the form of a spring—a foot away from my bare feet.

One sting would cause my legs to rot and die.

I wiped my face, trying not to lose my cool, feeling my heart trying to break out of my chest.

You’re alive… I thought. You’re alive, and you just need to clip it and get the fuck out.

I steeled myself and pulled out a preservation container and my knife, and set to work.

2.

“Get the fuck out of there!” Elana screamed at the screen. Kline had alerted the calark, and it was investigating. The moment it found her, it could charge and move a hundred meters in a second.

Yet Mira was fully concentrated on clipping the zorathorn, using a mixture of telekinesis and mana sharpening to capture all of the goods.

Elana turned to Kline and felt a pang of pain. He was stressed beyond words, and he wanted to scream, but startling her could make her stab herself with a barb—and then she’d lose her arm. She had Diktyo River water and it would delay the poison, but it was a third evolution plant—it wouldn’t cure it.

Now, Kline was in a position where alerting Mira could kill her and leaving her alone would get her killed.

Elana felt like screaming. She wished she wouldn’t have told Mira to go out. She wasn’t ready. Not yet.

It was just hard for Elana to conceptualize how ready Mira was because all her past pupils were demigods or higher. By that point, people had survived for centuries and became extremely competent—apex mages in the wild. If they were in Mira’s shoes, they would have identified a higher level ten miles out and avoided it. By contrast, Mira didn’t even know how to utilize magic that children used. She kept forgetting that because of how competent Mira had shown herself to be. But it was true, and Elana was learning the consequences of her overestimation head-on. She would have to fix that.

Suddenly, the calark saw Mira as she finished sealing her preservation chamber.

Run…

The beast sniffed the air, taking a step forward.

Run.

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Mira abruptly turned to Kline, who was crying out to her silently. Then her arms prickled with gooseflesh as she threw the container in her bag like an idiot.

Run!

The calark charged. It made it a hundred meters in a second and prepared to close the other hundred in another.

Kline wouldn’t let it. He pounced through a portal the second it moved and came out of a portal half way. His ethereal body, small as it was, smashed into the calark’s side in mid-air. It didn’t do much to change the beast’s trajectory, but it was enough to make it miss Mira by one foot.

It slid and hit a tree, making it explode in a rain of shrapnel as Mira ran. She mostly avoided it but got smashed with thin limbs that would kill a mortal.

Elana’s heart stopped—

—but Mira got up and started running.

She was sturdier after constantly eating soul meat—and she ran faster.

Suddenly, the calark turned to her and prepared to charge. Kline warped above it, sending Phantom Claws on its spine. It couldn’t break its skin, but a direct attack rang its core, making it hesitate and turn to Kline.

Or what it thought was Kline. Kline had activated active camouflage, and what the calark was seeing was an illusionary double. The real Kline was behind it.

Mira didn’t know that. She turned just in time to watch Kline’s clone get gored—and then screamed.

3.

I had barely activated Moxle Dilation when the beast gored Kline. It happened so fast, and I saw Kline disappear as if he wasn’t there—

—and lost my fucking mind.

I screamed, unconcerned about victory—only blood. So I activated Moxle Dilation and cranked it to the max, utilizing the nightly training and gains from mental shielding practice to slow the world to a crawl.

The rustling leaves nearly stopped, and the shadows on the ground stilled.

Sound disappeared.

Despite that, the calark moved so fast it almost moved like a dog. I wasn’t sure if I could hit it with Nymbral, even with things moving so slow—

—so I decided to make it impossible to miss!

I pulled the bow from my chest and started activating it. My world darkened, and while the calark jumped forward, it shielded its eyes when the entire forest flashed white. I watched it from a darkened perception, like a person wearing welding goggles—and watched as my arrow became the size of a trash can. It was one arrow—but it was huge. I put everything—everything—into the shot and released it full blast.

The water from the bog turned to steam as it ripped across the ground, and the silica in the dirt turned to molten glass. The calark dodged—but not completely. The blast clipped its leg and sent it flying fifty meters away.

I silently released a battle cry—but it didn’t make me feel better. It wasn’t enough. So I lifted the bow again—but my mana channels and core were too weak. Both screamed out in pain, and Moxle Dilation broke, bombarding me with five seconds of intense perception.

I activated mental shielding and quickly recovered—but not before collapsing.

I expected to hit the dirt but found myself suspended in midair.

When my vision returned, I saw Kline below me, hovering off the ground. I realized, surprisingly quickly, that I was lying on his ghost body, the one he used to drag around meat. It was a cloud of raw mana.

I wanted to comment—but the calark roared, and everything changed.

My body snapped onto Kline’s like a magnet, and he burst ahead at lightning speed, jumping through a portal. I felt vertigo when the large tree I was next to was suddenly gone, replaced with a small thicket. Then the environment disappeared again, and Kline was bounding onto a boulder. He jumped off, but before he hit the ground, he melted right through it, coming out of a portal ten feet above the ground.

I almost became sick—but didn’t get a chance.

Despite jumping through portals and the calark caught up to us. I turned and saw it running on a bloodied leg, bounding between trees, keeping pace as we weaved through tree and brush and fern at a hundred miles an hour.

Suddenly, it turned and shot at us—but Kline was a bit faster. He activated Pounce, and we warped forward, barely missing it. Then we jumped through a portal and flew out a thousand feet away.

I couldn’t breathe and wanted to be sick, and that broke my domain. The first breath I took made my lungs burn, and my eyes turned itchy, like I was cutting onions from hell. My skin felt like it was bubbling.

I tried to create a new domain—but the domain just captured the environment.

It was now a race against time before I died.

Kline noticed and picked up the pace, warping into the calark’s shadow over and over and over until he did something strange. I couldn’t see it well because my eyes were shutting, but I would’ve sworn that Kline multiplied into three, and all three warped into other locations.

I wasn’t sure—but the beast looked at us one last time before rushing after one, disappearing into the bog.

I tried to think about it, but my mind was clouded with pain and delirium. I blacked out.

I came to with water trickling into my lips. It was Diktyo River water, and my face flushed with vitality, my eyes lost their itchiness, and my body fueled. I gasped and looked up and saw Kline above me.

The smart little warrior bit my water bladder’s straw again from my backpack, sucking in water and then bringing it to me like he was giving me CPR.

“You… drink it…” I said hoarsely, trying to push myself up. I couldn’t.

Kline thought about it and drank it. Then he brought the straw over to me. I took it and drank.

Only the skin on my arms had healed did I realize that half the sensations on my body were flying bugs that were swarming me like mosquitos. I slapped them and screamed and got up, activating a skin barrier. It didn’t help the ones on my skin, so I created a domain around me and removed the oxygen. They quickly panicked and flew off, leaving me alone.

I stood there, fully fine, looking at my limbs, searching for the beast—and finding none.

We’re alive… I looked at Kline and found him standing there with blubbery eyes that betrayed his prideful chest. “Oh, come here…”

I reached out my arms, and Kline jumped into them, curling up on me.

I’m not sure how we did it—but we won. We actually won.

That was what was surreal. We didn’t survive.

We won.

A third evolution beast challenged us to a race, and what happened? I crippled its leg, and Kline outran it. We outran it, and then Kline beguiled the asshole, taking us to a safe location.

We won! I grabbed Kline like Simba and lifted him to the world in triumph, and he yowled and wiggled until I dropped him. But he didn’t chastise me further. We won, and he knew it.

It wasn’t luck anymore. We were getting stronger—and it felt damn good.

4.

Elana pulled out a jar of the poison that Kori had brought over that night. Much as she loathed it, she wanted to escape for a bit. So she drank.

I’m going to load that girl up with so many elixirs… she thought.

Maybe it was because she was tired of being treated like a god and appreciated Mira’s recalcitrance, or simply because she found an interesting and lucrative reason to care about life again—or perhaps it was that she genuinely felt some connection—but Elana cared about Mira now. She actually cared.

The frozen ambivalence that all gods eventually built up after millennia of bloodshed and death and trauma was finally thawing, if only a little, and she didn’t shy away from it.

Elana wouldn’t forget why she was there. Ultimately, she was there for business, and she would push forward with that, making sure that she got her end of the bargain. That was her first priority. Still—that didn’t mean that she couldn’t care for her pupil, too—and she wouldn’t listen if it were against the rules.

So Elana drank and waited and canceled all her business meetings on the day Mira made it back to the alchemy station. Mira naturally set up a meeting the next day—and she canceled all her meetings then, too. People complained and called her unprofessional and demanded her attention—but she didn’t care. The moment the meeting time struck, Elana established a ninth-tier ward around herself and connected to the Guide, transporting her consciousness right into the forest.

Elana had a pupil to make stronger—and everything else could wait.