Falus Forest never sleeps. But sometimes... it holds its breath.
Dex had been walking with measured strides for more than two hours, heading east toward the Lake of Silver Tears. The terrain had changed little: the same gnarled trunks that resembled deformed arms beseeching the sky, the same smell of sodden earth mingled with the reek of rotting leaves and rusted iron, the same strange sounds of unknown creatures growling and shrieking in the far distances. Then, without warning, silence fell over the forest.
Not a comfortable or serene silence, like the hush of temples-but a heavy, viscous, tension-saturated silence. The kind that precedes a devastating storm, or that lethal stillness that comes just before a blade finds its mark in the dark. The insects stopped humming. The rustle of leaves vanished entirely.
Dex stopped dead mid-stride and froze in place like a statue carved from ice. His heart began to pound violently behind his thin chest, driving blood with force through veins unaccustomed to this level of adrenaline. In this brutal world-in this cursed forest in particular-you did not need to see the enemy to know it was there. The survival instinct buried deep in human DNA screams its warning the moment death's breath draws close.
"One... two... three," Dex whispered in a voice barely above nothing, moving his left hand with extreme slowness to press his palm against a damp tree trunk beside him.
He was not using his Earth element to raise stones or reshape the soil. He employed something far more precise: a thread-thin as spider silk-of Earth Mana sent through his palm into the ancient bark, allowing his consciousness to extend through the network of wooden roots interlacing beneath the ground. He was reading the vibrations.
Three living masses were approaching. Their steps were not heavy like bears, nor swift and reckless like the wolves he had faced before. These were crawling steps-fluid and low, pressing close to the earth, their weight distributed across multiple limbs.
Dex opened his eyes and stared into the dense darkness between the tree trunks ahead. From the black shadows cast by the thick forest canopy, pairs of glowing eyes began to appear. Not yellow or violet-but deep, blood-red, like embers burning in a furnace stoked by hell itself.
The creatures emerged slowly from between the thorned shrubs. Acidic Gloom Lizards.
Dex recalled their entry in the novel's bestiary encyclopedia. Reptilian magical beasts of Rank E+, distinguished by a terrifying ability to alter the colour of their scales to achieve total camouflage with the surrounding darkness-making them perfect assassins in dense forest. Their bodies were the size of full-grown tigers, sheathed in glossy black scales that absorbed rather than reflected light. Six short limbs ending in hooked talons like sickles, designed simultaneously for gripping trees and shredding flesh.
One of the lizards-which appeared to be the pack leader by virtue of its greater size and the old scars across its scales-detached from the group and advanced with agonising slowness. It opened its wide jaw, crowded with transparent needle-like teeth, and a thick, phosphorescent green saliva began to drip from between them. The instant a single drop fell onto the scattered dead leaves below, a curl of white smoke rose accompanied by a faint hissing sound, leaving a scorched hole burned through the ground.
"Running is outright suicide..." Dex assessed the situation in a fraction of a second. Turning his back on a crawling predator with six limbs meant triggering its hunting instinct-they would be on his back before he covered ten metres.
He pulled up his status screen mentally in a rapid flash: Mana Remaining: 100% (courtesy of the rest period). Current Physical Strain: very high, due to muscular tension.
Dex stood there, encircled by three beasts capable of dissolving his bones with their saliva. His body was weak-Rank E-and his muscles were trembling. Yet his dark eyes were cold as ice at a mountain's peak. No panic. No cry. Only a chilling composure, and lethal mathematical calculations running silently beneath the surface.
This quality was not magic. It was not part of the noble body's capabilities. It was an inheritance from his former life as the Prisoner. Dex had spent fifteen years of his previous existence in one of the most dangerous maximum-security prisons on earth, surrounded by hardened criminals, gang lords, and psychopathic killers. In that concrete hell, he had learned a brutal lesson: when you are the weakest one physically, showing fear is an open invitation to be devoured. In prison, he had not fought the giants with his fists. He had fought them with his mind. He watched, he analysed the vulnerability, he waited for the moment his opponent blinked-then he struck with a concealed blade to the throat. And now, looking at these Acidic Gloom Lizards, he did not see terrifying fantasy creatures. He saw just another gang trying to corner him in the prison yard. The rules had not changed. Only the shape of his opponents had.
"They rely on numerical superiority and the acid venom," Dex thought, his mind spinning faster than a high-performance processor. "Their hides resist ordinary thrusts, and their low-slung frames make targeting their necks difficult. I need to break their rhythm."
Suddenly, without any warning growl, the leader lizard launched itself like a bolt of black lightning. The driving force of its six limbs sent mud spraying in its wake, and its open jaw-dripping acid-was aimed directly at Dex's knees, intending to topple him first.
Dex did not strike with his weapon. He did not retreat with a wide backward step. He knew that a single miscalculation in distance would cost him his leg. Instead, at the precise moment the lizard was midway through its blind charge, he shifted his weight onto his right foot and poured a concentrated pulse of Earth Mana into the soil directly before him, whispering a single decisive word:
"Earth Element: Protrusion."
He did not create a massive stone wall-that would have drained him dry. Instead, from the soil emerged a single stone spike, no more than fifteen centimetres tall, conical in shape with a serrated tip. It appeared at the exact spot the lizard was about to plant its front left claw to anchor its weight.
CRACK.
The sound of shattering scale and stone piercing soft flesh tore through the forest's silence. The stone protrusion drove into the underside of the leader lizard's paw. It was not a killing blow by any measure-but its physical consequence was catastrophic for a beast moving at full charge. The momentum of its sprint meant that a single stumbling limb destabilised the entire mass.
The massive lizard pitched forward onto its face and its armoured body skidded across the mud, passing Dex by mere centimetres and carving a small trench in the wet earth. The lizard let out a sibilant shriek filled with pain and fury, its acid saliva scattering wildly and scorching several nearby tree trunks.
These were the golden seconds he needed.
Exploiting the leader's stumble, Dex drew his black poisoned dagger from his belt in one fluid motion-a motion he had rehearsed a thousand times in his mind. He did not settle for the cold metal blade alone. He quickly retrieved the small leather canteen hanging from his wide belt. He opened the wooden stopper and, poured only a few drops into the air. He channelled Water Mana into his palm, and sheathed the dagger's blade in a thin film of water. With rigid willpower, he set that water sheath spinning around the metal at furious speed.
Hwiiisssh...
The spinning water emitted a sharp sound like a small electric saw. He had activated his new technique: the Water Momentum Blade.
While the leader lizard struggled to rise, dragging its punctured paw free of the stone spike, Dex did not rush in to finish it.
"No," he thought with cold severity, suppressing the novice body's instinct to end the fight quickly. "If I bend down to kill it now, I'll be completely exposed from behind. The other two will not stand there and watch."
And indeed, exactly as he had anticipated, the other two lizards began to move. They did not attack him directly-instead they split apart, circling him with cautious speed in a wide arc, attempting to flank him on both right and left and cut off every avenue of escape. Their crimson eyes tracked every movement of the spinning dagger without blinking.
"I cannot waste what little Mana I have on random thrusts or acrobatic dodging," Dex assessed his position, watching the phantom Mana gauge in his mind drop to eighty-five percent the moment he had used the protrusion and activated the Water Blade. "I have less than three minutes before my body burns out from Mana exhaustion. If they attack from two different directions simultaneously, I cannot hold them both. I need to break their formation... I need to draw them all into a single point of my choosing."
Dex began retreating slowly, one step at a time. He performed panic and confusion. He made his breathing audible and ragged, let his shoulders drop slightly, suggesting to the beasts that he had lost his nerve and his energy was failing. In the world of predatory animals, displaying weakness awakens blind hunting instinct and dulls tactical caution.
He was retreating toward a location his Earth Sense had mapped seconds before the battle began. Twenty metres behind him lay a very small water spring-barely seeping through gaps in the rock-but sufficient to have turned a circular area four metres in diameter into a deep, yielding muddy patch, concealed beneath a treacherous carpet of fallen leaves.
He continued his gradual retreat, eyes never leaving the three lizards. The leader had finally risen to its feet, both eyes blazing with hatred after the injury, and rejoined its two companions to form a coordinated triple assault formation. The lizards began a terrifying collective hissing, their green saliva dripping freely, preparing for the simultaneous pounce that ordinarily ended the life of any naive Rank E adventurer foolish enough to enter their territory.
"Come on then..." Dex whispered inwardly. The heel of his right foot finally touched the edge of the wet, sticky soil. He bent his knees slightly into a posture of desperate defence, while a faint smile-cold and lethal-formed at the corner of his mouth.
"One more step... and I will show you the magic of concrete."