I made my way deeper into the jungle, utilising [Mapping] to ensure my direction was approximately correct. I knew roughly how far into the jungle the tower had been, and I could make a reasonable guess of the direction, but it was nothing more than that—a guess. The chance I'd actually strike the tower seemed minuscule. Climbing a tree wouldn't help: even if I made it to the top and avoided a fortress eagle picking me off, the tower was cloaked by illusion. Maybe my first stage [Mana Mastery] would penetrate it, but I rated the chances of that as being pretty remote.

  The chances of a maxed out [Mana Mastery] being sufficient were slightly higher, but at five skill points each, I couldn't even afford to raise it a single stage.

  What should I spend my skill points on, then? Raising [Wind Scythe] was tempting, since now that I'd left the outer perimeter of the jungle, the volume of [Lightning Strike] made it too dangerous to use.

  Conversely, if I found myself staring into the maw of a braccus tyrant again, an advanced [Lightning Strike] may be my only chance, however loud, so maybe I should advance that?

  Or I could advance [Mapping] and [Adept Foraging], in the hopes of getting a cool skill evolution from them.

  Evolving [Heal] was also pretty high on my list, since its B-rank form would be able to regenerate damage that the C-rank spell simply couldn't. And then there was [Dagger Grandmastery], which would provide a more generic boost to my combat potential. Or, to come full circle, so would [Mana Mastery], since it would make my spells faster to cast, and both [Wind Scythe] and [Lightning Strike] were a touch slower than their lower ranked counterparts.

  Heck, there was a small part of me that was tempted to dump all the points into [Cooking], so I could at least enjoy a good meal in what could quite easily turn out to be the final hours of my life.

  Thankfully, not everything in the jungle could pierce [Expert Stealth] as easily as the acid crawlers. In this case, I could smell a faint sweetness on the air, which suggested a groping pulsator was nearby. The things took too long to kill for their experience value, not to mention that my previous strategy for dealing with them had involved using lightning to stop their tentacles multiplying, so I ignored it.

  It was a pity [Solivagant] hadn't evolved [Expert Stealth], but I couldn't have everything. Or perhaps I could... Would it be considered a lone-explorer survival Skill? Maybe it would merge into the others once I'd upped [Mapping] and [Adept Foraging].

  Of course, if I was honest with myself, letting myself get bogged down in the thoughts of Skills, and how to best spend skill points was nothing more than deflection. A way of avoiding thinking about the dragon in the room: what had happened the previous night. That path contained nothing but terror and existential dread, neither of which would be helpful in navigating the jungle.

  Although it was true that we'd talked, and neither of us had murdered the other. Yes, I rather suspected that we couldn't, but that wasn't the point. There had been a brief moment when all that anger and superiority had given way to something I rather suspected was grief. Had, in the distant past, someone seized past-me's family in an attempt to control him? Perhaps there was an opening there.

  Another glimmer of hope was how little he'd done. Spending my stat points would have taken only a few seconds of effort, while the ease with which the raptor pack had been dispatched suggested a few minutes at most. There were no signs he'd engaged in protracted torture, nor, as far as I could tell, had he wandered elsewhere. If he had, he certainly hadn't earned experience or killed anything while there—my experience gains were exactly consistent with the number of raptor corpses. Either he'd only been conscious for a matter of minutes, or else he'd spent hours just standing around idly. I'd only slept for my normal amount of time, too, as best as I could estimate from the sunlight, and my 'normal' had dropped to only five hours even before [Hardy II], so obviously he hadn't been 'awake' for my usual waking hours. If he could only act for minutes at a time, he didn't really have the leeway to keep me prisoner.

  ... For now. There was every possibility things would get worse, and there presumably was some reason he'd boosted my Memory. And I couldn't even guess how the void world worked.

  Oh well. If he did take over for the full duration whenever I fell unconscious, at least I wouldn't need to worry about monsters eating me in my sleep. I still wasn't sure how the warding stone worked, and I strongly suspected the answer was simply 'because the System says so'. That the same blind aggression that drove monsters to attack humans could be simply reversed, should a System effect decree it.

  As I tried to bury the existential horror beneath endless speculation on Skill builds and System internals, I continued to sneak deeper into the jungle.

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  Despite how things had seemed at the border, where every tree had been full of acid crawlers, the interior of the jungle wasn't as densely populated. I'd made it this far without a single encounter, and with only occasional experience dripping in from [Expert Stealth]. That was fine, but it was very unlikely I could avoid encounters forever, and unless I got the drop on something and ended it with a single stab, an encounter would create noise. Noise would draw in monsters. Encounters risked going bad very quickly. In a way, having got this far without a fight made me more nervous instead of less.

  At least the sparse undergrowth made traversal easy. If the space beneath the trees had been full of brambles, and I'd needed to cut my way forward, [Expert Stealth] would have been no help.

  And then, as if to penalise me for that small sliver of optimism, [Sixth Sense] fired. I barely had the time to twitch before a sudden thud sounded from my back. I barely felt a thing, but I knew an impact when I heard it. I spun around, and sure enough, there was a monster hiding among the leaves of a tree behind me. It was well camouflaged, green feathers blending in perfectly with the leaves, but the strange effect [Mana Mastery] had on my eyesight made such camouflage redundant. The earthy brown-green-yellow of the leaves was completely different from the red-purple of the monster.

  [Expert Stealth] belatedly broke. The way I only knew when it failed when I knew that it failed was rather annoying. Given that it awarded me experience even when I hadn't spotted whatever I'd hidden from, why couldn't it let me know when something spotted me even if I hadn't spotted them?

  I hurriedly brought to mind the monsters in this jungle with green feathers as I charged a [Wind Scythe], but much to my surprise, the monster didn't press its attack but hopped higher into the tree, vanishing completely behind the dense foliage, forcing me to cancel the spell.

  There were a few avian monsters in the jungle. The fortress eagles were the top of the food chain, undisputed rulers of the local skies, but they didn't have the air completely to themselves, and they were too big to land in a tree. Not unless they wanted to snap it. This was something else.

  ... Something that had struck me in the back from a distance, and then hidden itself. Monsters didn't run. They fought to the death. Either it was intelligent enough to plot, or else it hadn't 'run'. This jungle didn't contain intelligent birds, so it was the second option.

  A feathered hornet, then. Not a real bird, but since when did monsters respect biology? A feathered insect was hardly any worse than walking trees. In any case, that confirmed that it hadn't run away; it was waiting. Their stingers could be fired from a distance and were filled with a venom that induced paralysis, so it was simply getting out of harm's way until I fell over and it could eat me in safety.

  I hurriedly reached for my back, keeping a careful watch on the canopy as I gingerly felt around for any unwanted additions. Sure enough, there was a thin spine stuck into my armour. Thankfully, pulling it out revealed a lack of blood. Despite my light armour, it hadn't penetrated my skin. That was fortunate. I had a substantial pile of antivenoms stashed away—cheaper than healing potions, thank goodness—but I'd rather not need them.

  It seemed [Sixth Sense] had proven its worth already. Despite the monster catching me completely by surprise, my twitch had been enough to ensure the spine had struck an overlapping section of armour, where it was twice as thick as other places.

  Alas, surviving the first attack didn't help me decide what to do next. If I turned around and walked away, it would just attack again. I could probably lose it if I ran away at full speed, but I risked running into something nastier. Launching spells into the tree without being able to see it would just waste Mana. If I climbed the tree to find it, it could simply move to another. If I dumped my skill points into [Wind Scythe] it might be sufficient to fell the tree, but that would make a lot of unwanted noise, and probably wouldn't achieve anything; again, it could just fly elsewhere.

  Hmm...

  I fell over.

  It was a gamble, but I wasn't dealing with something as cunning as a braccus raptor here. I wasn't even dealing with a goblin. It was waiting for the paralysis to kick in, so if I pretended that it had, the thing should come in close.

  Sure enough, a few seconds after hitting the dirt, the thing reappeared above me. A few more seconds of watching, during which I did my best to remain still, and it dropped out of the tree.

  It was a wacky thing. The feathers only covered its thorax, but its wings were thin enough to be transparent, and its legs thin enough to not be obvious. A fragile little thing, if you could get one of the buggers out into the open.

  I had. The foolish monster swooped in to land right next to me, and the moment it was committed, I smoothly drew a dagger and swiped at it before it could react.

  Yellow liquid splashed from the wound, the top half of the monster folding backward like a hinge. I hadn't quite managed a complete bisection, but it had been close, and the effect was rather humorous. Not that I hung around to enjoy the skit; I leapt back to my feet and resumed my trek through the forest, wanting to leave the area before anything else showed up. The altercation had been quiet, but had still resulted in spilt blood.

  Was blood the right word for the yellow stuff?

  Whatever it was, I'd be willing to bet there were monsters around that could smell it, and I'd rather not be standing right next to it when they turned up to investigate.

  Alas, despite my swift withdrawal, I apparently wasn't quite in time. [Sixth Sense] pinged again, warning me of an incoming attack from behind. Another quick twitch, nudged by the combo of [Sixth Sense] and [Dagger Grandmastery] resulted in a second spine safely thudding into a thicker part of my armour.

  It would have been a pretty good manoeuvre, really, had it not been for spines three through six.

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