"Damn it! What the hell is that?!" The scream tore out of my throat, laced with frustration, as if I were spitting fire.
I had only gone out to hunt down other competitors, take advantage of the chaos, steal a few eggs, but in the end, I fell straight into a trap. Some damned mage, whose face I never even saw, had me caught in this sick game, manipulating the entire forest as if it were his own flesh and blood. Every branch, root, or leaf seemed to obey an invisible command.
And, as if that wasn't enough, now there was a thing—a demon, a colossal abomination, whatever this creature was crushing everything around it with a fury impossible to describe.
None of it made sense. A monster like that had nothing to do with the level of this competition. We were being used as bait, like rats trapped in a maze with no way out.
Electricity was already coursing through my body without me even asking for it, running across my skin in waves that felt like caged thunder. There was no room left for distractions: survival was the priority, finding an opening and getting back to my cave alive. But the world seemed to conspire against me. The ground shook, a brutal earthquake tearing roots out of the soil, making the earth tremble like a war drum.
I didn't need to look behind me. I felt it in the bone of my soul that the creature was coming straight for me.
And then, before I could escape, the ground ahead rose up. Earth, branches, roots they all intertwined, forming a colossus over five meters tall. From the chest of that pulsating mass, as if it were a living heart, the silhouette of a hooded figure emerged. The cloak was faded green, almost blending with the moss, and the face was sunken deep into the shadows of the hood.
My blood froze. If it was already impossible to deal with the demon behind me, and if this mage decided to face me now, I would be eliminated without even having the chance to react.
I braced my muscles for the worst, but then I saw—the golem wasn't coming for me. No, quite the opposite. It twisted its heavy shoulders and ran too, every step shaking the earth as if it wanted to carve its path by sheer force. Fleeing, just like me.
That was it. That bastard was afraid of what was behind us too.
Fate is often a bitch that comes back to bite you, and this time it sank its teeth deep.
I had spent the last minutes dodging that living forest, searching for the wretched mage who controlled it and, ironically, when I opened a portal in a hurry to escape, I reappeared right next to him. My breath caught in a nervous laugh, a mix of despair and relief.
'You've got to be kidding me!' I thought, running as if the gates of hell themselves had just been thrown open behind me.
I ripped open rifts in sequence, teleporting in short bursts, trying to put distance between me and that colossal sand monster that had appeared in my hunt.
My only hope was simple: that the creature would focus on the other competitor. I wanted to believe the golem would be a more appealing target than me, but the nature mage didn't seem to share that same faith.
He ran right on my heels, shrieking in panic with a shrill voice, as if his pride had evaporated along with his composure.
"Help me! I don't want to be eliminated by the Behemoth!"
His scream echoed through the trees, hysterical, carrying such a raw note of despair it would have been laughable if I weren't trapped in the same hell.
I glanced over my shoulder and felt my stomach drop.
The golem advanced like a living avalanche, its legs not moving with any natural cadence it was as if entire dunes rolled and reshaped themselves with every step, dragging tons of compacted sand in an unstoppable motion.
"Get lost! Leave me alone, you bastard! This is all your damn fault..." I muttered through clenched teeth, breathless, as the pressure of that colossus suffocated me.
But before I could finish the sentence, everything tore apart.
A colossal blade of wind cut across the field like an invisible lightning bolt, slicing trees, rocks, and the very air. The impact was brutal. A gash nearly three meters deep opened in the ground under the force of the gust, and the left side of the sand golem simply imploded, pulverized into grains that scattered into the wind. Behind me, a cry of agony resounded—the nature mage shredded by a strike from the beast made from more than a kilometer away.
I managed to gain some distance for a few moments, my heart pounding in my chest and my lungs burning as if the entire forest had decided to swallow me alive.
Behind me, however, I heard a metallic sound, like the grinding of rocks being crushed. I glanced back and saw, from inside the gigantic golem I had partially destroyed, a smaller form tear away from the glowing core. Not exactly small it stood around two and a half meters tall but compared to the monstrosity from before it looked almost like a "cub."
Even so, the thing began running after me with heavy steps that made the ground quake.
"Get lost, you bastard! Go chase someone else!" I shouted, trying to throw it off with erratic movements through the trees.
But to my misfortune, I wasn't the only one it was after. The nature mage—that bastard who had ambushed me—was stuck to me like he was my escape partner.
"THERE'S NO WAY!!" he bellowed, gasping, stumbling but never stopping. "That creature will chase us until it eliminates us. We have to find something else to draw its attention!"
"From where I'm standing, the only thing that'll distract it is leaving you behind to die!" I snarled, narrowly dodging a fallen trunk.
"That won't work!" His voice came out almost hysterical. "It's following your scent—I marked you with my plants, there's no way to shake me off. If I'm eliminated, you'll be too! Please… please… please..."
The desperation was real.
And deep down, as much as I wanted to tear that mage's head off right there, something told me he wasn't bluffing. The Behemoth wasn't just after me or him—it was after the combined trail. Two ants running from its domain. I could feel it in the way it moved, hunting us both.
My mind raced in a thousand directions. 'Damn it... if I don't come up with something now, I'll be shredded along with this bastard.'
"Damn it... Damn it... Damn it!" I growled, trying to keep control. "What are we going to do then?"
The nature mage's voice came out rough, almost desperate:
"We need to find other players or another beast just as strong, because defeating this creature is impossible!"
"Shit!!!" My throat burned as I shouted, while my body darted through the trees.
"Give me a few seconds and try to stall it!"
The closer the danger loomed, the sharper my senses became. It was as if time slowed for a moment: the leaves suspended in the air by the shockwave of the exploding earth behind me, the fragments of rock flying in perfect arcs, the deep, drawn-out sound of trees collapsing. I felt it all, absorbed it all, as if my entire body were just a receiver for the catastrophe forming around us.
Behind us, the world seemed to shatter. Entire trees were ripped from the ground and hurled skyward, while my new escape partner made columns of earth erupt like furious geysers, spewing incandescent stones in every direction to try to slow the Behemoth.
Each blast reverberated in my chest like thunder within, and the forest, once a green sanctuary, was now nothing more than a battlefield in ruins, constantly reshaping itself.
I felt the ground quake under my feet with every step, as if nature itself had turned against us. The words of Master Silas flickered in my mind like a spark in the middle of the chaos, echoing directly in my skull:
'Everything is noise. Clear your mind. Look for the fluctuations. Focus on the gravitational oscillations to aid your echolocation.' The grumpy, firm, acidic voice of the old man—maybe the most important person to help me get out of this alive.
As for the Behemoth, nothing seemed capable of stopping it.
"GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR"
Its eyes blazed blood-red, locked on our backs, and with every roar the air around it warped as if reality itself feared its existence. Running was an act of defiance against despair, because I knew at any moment it could close the gap and crush us.
Then its mouth filled again with that black, viscous liquid, glistening in the trembling light left within the chaos. The sound that followed wasn't a roar—it was a supersonic crack, like a thousand blades cutting the air at once.
A chill froze my spine.
There was no time to think, only to react.
A wall of stone rose before us, vast and solid, like the last barrier a titan could raise. But it lasted no longer than a breath. The black surge pulverized it into dust, leaving nothing but a gray cloud hanging in the air, as if that wall had never existed. The impact reverberated in my skull, deafening my senses for an instant, but also brutally reminding me of the truth: time was a luxury we didn't have. At this pace, we'd be wiped out in seconds.
I forced my body to obey, detached myself from fear, and sought what couldn't be seen by the naked eye. I emitted a faint gravitational pulse, rippling outward first a hundred meters, then thousands, like a wave rolling across the sea.
Nothing.
Again.
"PING"
Nothing.
"Come on... come on... come on..."
"PING"
When my hope was fading and the Behemoth was already upon us, I felt it.
Faint, distant, but unmistakable: a gravitational fluctuation that didn't come from the Behemoth, but from another beast somewhere in the forest. It was massive and heavy, its gravitational axis weighted, the propagation of its movements dense and steady.
"Yes!!"
The moment I found the other beast, I moved closer to the nature mage. Her clothes were shredded now, revealing her face.
"A woman? ... Fuck it, I don't have time for this!"
I closed in, grabbed her arm. The instant I took hold, I didn't think twice. My Nexus was already primed, pulsing like a heart gone mad. Magic exploded forward, tearing the air open in front of me, a jagged portal of irregular edges twisting like it was made of blades. Without giving her time to react, I yanked her with me into the dimensional rift.
We crossed in an instant, but what seemed like a safe jump turned into another threat.
Something followed us.
A residue of the Behemoth's strike, just a fragment of its energy—a lingering blade from its monstrous claws—cut through the portal after us. There was no way to avoid it.
The slash tore across her back. Blood sprayed in an arc, splattering against my arm and staining the trees around us as we emerged two kilometers away, in the heart of the forest.
"AGRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" she screamed in pain, the shrill echo scattering among the twisted trunks.
Before I could even stabilize our position, the deafening sound of a roar burst behind us.
The Behemoth hadn't given up. It leapt from the ground, crushing the distance in one brutal motion, as if the weight of the entire world was channeled into that jump. The earth quaked. It came like a meteor, a colossus of muscle and destruction.
But the impact never came. A new shadow, even more gigantic, rose from the horizon. A massive lizard, armored in solid plates with a tail ending in a spiked sphere, intercepted the Behemoth's leap.
The reptile, like a titanic ankylosaurus, twisted its body and swung its tail with cataclysmic force, striking the Behemoth's torso midair.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM"
The clash of the two beasts was catastrophic.
The shockwave roared like thunder. The impact was so overwhelming the nearby trees exploded into splinters, the ground cracked open in fissures, and a cloud of dust swallowed everything. My ears rang, and we were thrown clear of the region, spinning uncontrollably through the air.
Before we smashed into the ground, I stabilized our bodies with gravity and landed on a tree. I looked at the mage draped over my shoulders and let out a breath.
"Let's get the hell out of here!"
Electricity exploded across my body, and at maximum speed, without looking back, I ran as far as I could from the battle of titans raging in the forest's heart.