The thing that reached him first was small.
That was the most unsettling part about the discovery. He had braced himself for something large, something predatory. He had imagined, in the three seconds, between seeing the shape at the base of the tree and watching it start to climb, something proportional to the fear it had produced.
But the creature that pulled itself onto his branch was roughly the size of a cat, dark furred and low bodied, moving with the flat efficiency of something that had been climbing since before trees had began to exist.
Its eyes were an amber glow. The light came from inside them, steady and maintained, and when they fixed on him, they didn't move or blink.
He kicked it.
A deliberate one at that, heel first, the way you love when hesitation becomes a luxury between life and death. It caught the creature in the midsection, and it went off the branch without a second, dropping through the dark below.
Then it screeched.
The sound tore through the forest silence, and the silence didn't come back. Because the dark below him answered with a low hum. Light escaped below along with the guttering sounds, amber eyes opening one by one between the roots and the undergrowth, arranging themselves in a loose patient ring around the base of his tree. He counted seven beerire he stopped counting.
'Ohh…this is bad. This is really bad…'
He looked down at his feet. Looked back at the eyes below. Picked up a dead branch from the crook where it met the trunk and hurled it at the cluster of them.
They didn't scatter as he expected. Rather, one of them sniffed the branch. Another stepped over it, while the rest didn't move at all.
He threw his shoe next, already half destroyed, sole separating the upper, and it was a mistake he understood the moment it left his hand. One of them caught it before it hit the ground.
The sound it made chewing through the rubber was methodical and unhurried, the sound of something demonstrating a point. One that he clearly understood.
He was left with one shoe and a tree branch and seven pairs of amber eyes that had nowhere else to be.
He had been in bad situations before. He had a taxonomy of them, the kind where waiting helped, the kind where making yourself small helped, the kind where the only move was to endure until the thing doing the damage got bored or distracted.
This one didn't fit any of those categories. These things weren't bored. They weren't going to get distracted either. They were just waiting for him to come down or fall down, whichever came first.
The panel appeared without being summoned.
『✦ GOD OF FORGOTTEN THINGS ✦』: You're going to die without shoes. That's almost pathetic.
He looked at the panel, still hovering at the edge of his vision.
"Then give me something," he said in a low voice like he was talking to himself. The words felt strange, not because asking for help was new, but because he had stopped doing it so long ago that his mouth had almost forgotten the shape of it.
After his words came out wrong, without sounding nice, everywhere went still. For a whole moment, Mildred was sure he had just somehow pissed off a deity, a bored one at that!.
'Oh boy!..'
Then:
『✦ GOD OF FORGOTTEN THINGS ✦ HAS GIFTED: 50 SHOP POINTS』
『✦ GOD OF FORGOTTEN THINGS ✦』: Don't waste them recklessly.
'Woah?!..'
"Thank you…"
A new interface unfolded in front of him, wider than the others, organized into rows of items rendered in grey, locked, unaffordable, requiring more points than he had.
He scrolled through them with his eyes, the system responding to his attention, and most of it was useless to him right now. Weapons he couldn't afford, armour he couldn't afford. Things whose descriptions he didn't understand yet.
Near the bottom, one entry was lit.
『OBSERVER'S EYE (F-RANK) — 50 POINTS』
『For 30 seconds, see what others miss. Cooldown: 5 minutes.』
He read it twice, carefully understanding the description to avoid an unusual or weird purchase. Or worse, a useless purchase! That would put him in more danger than he needed.
Below him something began testing the bark again, claws finding purchase in the same gouges the first creature had left.
He bought the skill without further thoughts, at this moment this was his best shot at survival.
The points dropped to zero. For a moment nothing happened and he had the brief specific humiliation of having spent his only resource on something that didn't work, which would have been a very on-brand way for his life to continue.
Then his eyes changed.
The world simply became more informative than it had been a second ago. Lines and indicators overlaying the dark below him, the movement patterns of the creatures traced in faint amber like they were leaving visible trails, each one showing him exactly where it was going before it got there.
He saw the cluster of four that had gathered under a branch two trees over, their combined weight already stressing wood that had been dead long enough to go grey.
He saw the gap between the third and fourth tree to his left, a path where the undergrowth thinned and the ground was clear and beyond it, maybe forty meters out, the dark was less dark, a gradient shift so subtle he would never have caught it with ordinary eyes.
Then he saw light, somewhere through the trees, he saw light.
According to the system, he currently had thirty seconds.
He looked at the branch below him, looked at the gap. Looked at the dead branch across from him sagging under weight it wasn't going to hold much longer.
He stood up on his branch.
Twenty seconds.
The creature climbing toward him was six feet below and closing. The ones at the base were adjusting, reading his posture, beginning to reposition.
He didn't wait for them to finish.
He jumped.