The snake moved faster than anything that size had any right to.
Luc was already running before his brain had finished processing what his eyes had seen — legs churning, arms pumping, the jungle floor rising and falling under his feet in a chaos of roots and mud and things he absolutely did not have time to identify.
"Shit — shit — shit —"
Behind him, the impact of the snake's body hitting the ground sent a tremor through the earth. A tree to his left exploded into splinters as the tail whipped through it like it was made of paper. The canopy above erupted — birds screaming, something leathery and large beating wings into the sky — and the jungle, which had been merely loud before, became something else entirely.
It became hostile.
Luc vaulted a root the height of his waist, landed wrong, kept going. The air behind him displaced — a wall of pressure, hot and rank, the smell of something ancient that had eaten many things and not worried once about any of them.
He glanced back.
He immediately regretted glancing back.
The snake's head was close enough that he could see individual scales. Its jaws were open. The inside of its mouth was the colour of old wounds.
Luc faced forward and ran harder.
It lunged.
He felt it more than saw it — the shadow swallowing the light above him, the rush of displaced air, the absolute certainty that this was it, this was the moment, this was how he died in a jungle with one sock —
He threw himself sideways.
The jaws snapped shut on empty air, close enough that the concussive crack of it rang through his skull. He hit the ground shoulder-first, rolled badly, skidded through mud and dead leaves and came up already moving — but not fast enough. The snake's body swept sideways in a correction, catching him across the back like a battering ram.
He went down hard.
The world spun. His palms tore on something rocky. He could feel a long scrape burning across his ribs where the scale had caught him — not deep, but a reminder. A promise of what the next hit would do.
He scrambled upright. Kept running.
Okay, said some distant, clinical part of his brain. Outmatched. Noted. Moving on.
"SYSTEM — HELP — I NEED —"
A pause. Then, arriving in his mind with the unhurried precision of someone correcting a minor grammatical error:
Clarify: assistance requested for consequences of poor positioning?
"YES — THAT — HELP —"
Understood. Processing.
"THEN PROCESS FASTER —"
Processing complete. Assistance denied.
Luc made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
He ducked under a branch, the snake's nose grazing the bark behind him, and kept going, lungs burning, legs starting to feel the specific wobbly quality that preceded total failure.
Observation, the System said, with the tone of someone narrating a nature documentary. Speed: insufficient.
"I KNOW —"
Conclusion: outcome predictable.
"THEN DO SOMETHING —"
Observation noted. Observation filed.
"THAT'S NOT — YOU'RE NOT — I SWEAR TO THE GODDESS IF YOU DON'T —"
The snake lunged again. Luc screamed, veered left, lost a shoe — his one shoe, the universe apparently committed to making this as humiliating as possible — and kept running on one bare foot and one sock that was no longer meaningfully a sock.
Task generated, the System said, without inflection.
Survive current predator.
Completion probability: low.
"THAT DOESN'T HELP!" Luc screamed at the inside of his own skull. "THAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF HELPING! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU —"
The snake closed the gap.
Luc made a decision entirely on instinct — threw himself behind a fallen log roughly the diameter of a small car and pressed flat against the far side, chest heaving, every breath burning.
Silence.
Or — not silence. The jungle was still screaming, still alive with everything that was not currently trying to eat him. But the immediate thunder of pursuit had paused. He heard the snake moving somewhere on the other side of the log, slow, patient, certain.
It knew where he was. It just wasn't in a hurry anymore.
Luc's back was against the bark. His hands were shaking. There was blood on his palms and mud in his hair and a very specific fear settling into his chest now — not the blind animal panic of the first thirty seconds, but the colder, quieter kind. The kind that meant this is real and it is actually going to kill you.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Opened them.
"Okay," he breathed. "Okay. At least — give me something. Stats. Anything. Just show me where I stand."
A pause.
…Granted.
The information arrived in his mind like a page turning:
LUC RENARD
Strength: 1
Speed: 1
Mana: 1
Perception: 1
He stared at it.
"Those are," he said slowly, "very small numbers."
Accurate.
"I figured I'd at least be — I don't know. A five. A three. Something that implies I'm a little bit special—"
Baseline human confirmed, the System said.
Three words. Flat. Factual. Delivered with the warmth of a medical chart being placed face-down on a table.
You are exactly as capable as the species you belong to. No more. The world you currently occupy is not calibrated to your species' average. Adjust expectations accordingly.
Luc absorbed this.
"So when she said she chose me—"
She chose a baseline human for an experiment in a world that contains creatures such as the one currently circling your position. Yes.
Something crashed into the far side of the log. The entire structure shuddered. Bark rained down. The snake had found patience and discarded it.
Luc moved.
He ran again — but something had shifted, some small stubborn gear turning over in the back of his mind.
The panic was still there. His legs were still failing. His ribs still burned where the scale had caught him.
But he was looking now.
The snake was large. Which meant it was fast in a straight line, but the turns cost it — he'd seen that in the first chase, the way it had overcorrected, swept wide, needed a moment to reorient. And the jungle was dense.
The trees were close. Small gaps that his body could thread that the snake's would have to push through.
Okay, he thought, ducking under a vine, eyes moving. Think. You've read this scenario a hundred times. What does the terrain give you?
And then he saw it.
Forty meters ahead, maybe fifty — the treeline broke. The ground dropped. He couldn't see the bottom, which meant the drop was significant. And the approach was narrow — a ridge between two ravines, the earth tapering to a path barely wide enough for one.
Too narrow for something the width of a city bus to corner on.
Maybe.
He turned directly toward it.
The snake accelerated.
It had apparently decided that patience was a resource it was no longer willing to spend. The sound of it coming was enormous — not just movement but mass, the jungle itself getting out of the way, trees bending and cracking, the ground trembling in a rhythm that matched Luc's heartbeat beat for beat.
Forty meters.
He pushed harder than he thought his legs could manage.
Thirty.
The shadow fell over him — close, too close, the air thick with that rot-sweet smell —
Twenty.
He felt the displacement of the strike before it landed and threw himself flat —
The jaws closed on air.
He was already rolling, already back on his feet, the ridge ahead, the drop ahead, the gap between the ravines so narrow he almost missed it
He hit the narrowing at full sprint.
The snake followed.
The earth at the ridge edge crumbled under the snake's weight where the ground could not hold what the jungle floor could. He heard it — the shift, the crack, the long terrible moment of imbalance — and then a sound like the world exhaling, and then nothing.
He stopped.
He turned around. The ridge was empty.
From somewhere far below, a distant crash of undergrowth. Then silence.
Luc stood at the edge of the drop, chest heaving, one sock, bleeding palms, mud covering approximately seventy percent of his body.
The jungle settled slowly back into its ordinary noise.
He was shaking. He noticed this the way you notice weather — distantly, as a fact about the world rather than about yourself.
He was alive.
He was, somehow, alive.
…Task completed, the System said, after a moment.
Efficiency: poor.
Survival: marginal.
Reward: +3 stat points. Distribute at will.
Luc let out a long, unsteady breath. Closed his eyes. Let the adrenaline begin its slow, aching retreat from his bloodstream.
"Three points," he said quietly. "I almost got eaten and I get three points."
Correct.
"That snake was the size of a building."
Irrelevant to point allocation.
He opened his eyes. Looked out at the jungle. Let himself, just for a moment, feel something that wasn't quite pride but was in the same neighbourhood — the specific satisfaction of a person who had been told the outcome was predictable and had declined to cooperate with that prediction.
He'd done it. No help. No stats. No special ability.
He almost smiled.
Then the System spoke again.
…Additional observation.
"What?"
A pause that felt, somehow, considered.
Sensors indicate host exhibits loss of bladder control under acute stress.
Luc went very still.
Recorded at: approximately forty-seven seconds into initial pursuit.
"That's — I — that was sweat —"
Conclusion: unimpressive.
The jungle hummed around him. Something distant called out from the canopy, cheerful and indifferent.
Luc stared at nothing.
"I'm going to find the Demon King," he said, very quietly, to no one and nothing in particular. "And when I do, I'm going to be so powerful that nobody — nobody — will ever mention this moment again."
Probability: low, said the System.
But noted.