The next morning, he decided to go deeper.
He'd been hugging the tree line for a reason — safety, caution, the knowledge that his control wasn't good enough for a real fight. But the edge of the forest was thin. The prey was small. If he wanted better food, better materials, and better practice, he needed to push inward.
He crossed the boundary and entered the living forest.
It swallowed him. The canopy closed overhead, cutting the sunlight to scattered coins of gold on the forest floor. The air was thick and warm and alive — a wall of humidity and scent after a week in the dry, dead wasteland. Moss. Bark. Flowers he didn't recognise. Something sharp and mineral underneath it all.
And sounds.
The edge had been noisy. The interior was loud. Calls and shrieks from things he couldn't see. The crack of branches under heavy weight. A low, rumbling groan that could have been wind or could have been something breathing. Every direction held a new sound, and none of them were comforting.
The place was teeming with danger.
He advanced carefully. One step at a time.
Something roared.
Deep. Guttural. Close enough that the sound vibrated in his ribs. It came from the left — maybe fifty metres, maybe less. Heavy footfalls followed. Something big was moving through the trees, and it wasn't being subtle about it.
Another roar, this one from a different direction. Farther away but just as deep.
Multiple large predators. Territorial calls? Hunting?
A branch snapped somewhere behind him. He spun. Nothing visible — just dark undergrowth and the trunks of massive trees.
His heart rate climbed. The forest suddenly felt very small and very full.
This was stupid. I'm not ready for this. I've been here a week and I'm wandering into predator territory like an idiot.
He turned back. Moved quickly, not running — running in a forest full of predators was an invitation — but not lingering either. The dead zone was maybe ten minutes behind him. Safe ground. Empty ground.
He was almost to the tree line when the undergrowth ahead of him exploded.
It came out fast — a blur of orange and black, striped like a tiger but scaled up to something absurd. Shoulder height was above his head. The body was four metres of coiled muscle and dense fur, built for ambush and power. Fangs the length of his forearm. Eyes like polished amber, fixed on him with absolute focus.
It had been waiting. Sitting at the edge of the dead zone, between him and safety, like it knew exactly where he'd run.
Smart. It's smart.
The tiger-thing snarled. The sound rattled his teeth.
Yuki's back was to the forest. The monster blocked his path to the dead zone. Nowhere to go but through it.
Fear hit him — real, primal, animal fear. The kind that bypassed rational thought and went straight to the legs. His body wanted to run. Every seventeen-year-old instinct he had was screaming at him to turn and bolt into the trees.
He didn't.
He planted his feet. Raised his hands. Pushed mana into his body — reinforcement, full-system, as much as he could manage with his still-developing control.
The tiger lunged.
It was fast. Genuinely fast. Four metres of apex predator covering the distance between them in a single explosive stride, jaws wide, claws extended.
Yuki threw himself sideways. Not gracefully — a desperate, stumbling dodge that barely cleared the swipe of a paw the size of his torso. The claws passed close enough that he felt the displaced air on his cheek.
He rolled, came up, formed a wind bullet — bigger than the one he'd used on the rabbit, denser, more mana packed into the compression. The tiger was already pivoting, faster than something that size had any right to be, coiling for a second lunge.
He fired.
The wind bullet hit the tiger in the centre of its chest. The compressed air detonated on impact — not a sonic boom, not a crater, but a focused concussive blast that drove straight through fur and muscle and bone.
The tiger's lunge stopped mid-air. Its body seized. Its legs buckled. It hit the ground with its momentum still carrying it forward, sliding across the undergrowth in a tangle of limbs, and came to rest against a tree trunk with a heavy, final thud.
It didn't get up.
Yuki stood there, hands still raised, mana still flowing, waiting for it to move.
It didn't.
He counted to thirty. Then sixty. The tiger-thing lay motionless. The amber eyes were open but empty. The massive chest was still.
One shot.
He'd killed it in one shot.
He lowered his hands slowly. The fear was still there — adrenaline flooding his system, hands trembling, breath coming in short gasps. But underneath the fear, a different thought was forming.
That thing was huge. Fast. Clearly a top predator. And I killed it with a single wind bullet that I formed in less than a second.
He walked over to the body. Up close, the scale of it was even more intimidating — the paws alone were bigger than his head. The striped fur was thick and lustrous, layered over muscle so dense it felt like touching packed rope. The fangs were ivory-white, curved, flawless.
The pull started. That same automatic absorption — energy rising off the corpse and flowing into him. More than the rabbit. Noticeably more. A warm, steady stream that his body drank in without asking.
When it faded, Yuki crouched beside the tiger and ran his hand along its flank.
This fur is incredible. Thick, flexible, probably resistant to all kinds of damage if the creature was as tough as it looked. The fangs — hard as stone, maybe harder. The claws...
He extended one from its sheath with his fingers. Dark, curved, sharp enough to score the ground. Dense material. Not bone — something tougher. Closer to the blue metal he hadn't discovered yet, though he didn't have that reference point.
These materials are valuable. I don't know what currency looks like in this world, but a creature like this — its parts would be worth something to someone. Armourers. Alchemists. Whoever this world's version of a monster-parts merchant is.
He got to work.
Skinning the tiger was a different challenge than the rabbit. The thing was enormous and its hide was thick — but his mana-reinforced hands and sharpened wind edges made the cutting manageable. He worked carefully, trying to preserve as much of the pelt as possible. The fur was too beautiful and too obviously useful to waste with sloppy butchery.
It took over an hour. By the end, he had the pelt separated in one piece — heavy, supple, and large enough to use as a blanket. He cleaned it as best he could with water condensed from the air. The fangs came out with some careful mana-assisted extraction. The claws he removed individually, each one as long as a knife. Certain organs looked different from what he expected — denser, faintly luminous, probably magical in nature. He kept everything.
He bundled the materials, hefted the meat he'd carved, and walked back into the dead zone. Camp was a grey, featureless clearing under an open sky, but after the claustrophobia of the forest it felt like a relief.
He laid out his haul and looked at it.
A pristine tiger pelt. Sixteen claws. Two fangs. Several organs he couldn't identify. Enough meat to last a while, assuming he decided to keep eating.
Not bad for his first real hunt. And the monster had been — what? His first real combat encounter? A creature that would probably terrify an armed group, and he'd dropped it with a single compressed air bullet after less than a week of magical training.
Am I strong? Or are the things in this forest just weak?
He didn't have an answer. Not yet.
He cooked the tiger meat over a mana flame, ate until the act of eating felt normal again, and stared at the pile of materials beside him.
Somewhere in this world, there were people. Merchants, craftsmen, cities. And he was sitting on a stockpile of monster parts that — if fantasy fiction had taught him anything — would be worth real money.
Something to think about. Later.
For now, he had training to do. The tiger had been a win, but a sloppy one — he'd panicked, dodged desperately, fired reactively. If there had been two of them, or if the first dodge had been a half-second slower, things might have gone differently.
He wasn't good enough yet. Not by a long shot.
He cleaned up camp, stored the materials in a makeshift cache under a flat rock, and went back to practising wind bullets until his mental image was so crisp he could form one in his sleep.
The forest watched from the edges. He'd be back.