Chapter 48 - Following the Map

Max delved deeper into the forest, holding a very peculiar map. There were three types of monsters. There were the old [Tauroid] that had gained some levels, but had not undergone an evolution, making them essentially harmless, as Max could shoot them dead with a single bullet.

No, his map was the panthers. There were two kinds. The ones that were normal and the ones that had the (???) at the end of the system message. Whenever Max killed some, he went to the direction they had come from.

Max killed a good fifteen panthers, before night came. His Stamina was still healthy, and his expenditure of Mana was so minimal that it was not a consideration. The panthers were vicious if they got the jump on him, but with a little care and foresight, they were not an issue.

He still wanted to keep going. Max wondered if his advancement in Cultivation was giving him more energy. It did seem like that at a first guess, but Max didn’t want to make any conclusions yet. He didn’t want to end up in a situation where he had stayed up the whole night and would face whatever was causing the attacks in a sluggish state.

So when the first signs of fatigue did start to show up, Max decided to lean into them, instead of pushing them aside and soldiering on, which was his modus operandi.

With that, he set up his hammock and went to sleep.

                                                                 *

After what cannot have been more than five or six hours, Max woke up, feeling adequately rested. Maybe the advancement had actually done something to his body. Now that he let his mind wander around his body, he did feel more… acute.

It was hard to describe. He seemed ever so slightly more alert. A little bit stronger, a little bit faster. His sense of Mana in his body was especially keen. Max felt good. Great even. It was as if whatever change he had undergone yesterday with the Cultivation stage advancement had solidified itself during Max’s sleep. Now he felt powerful.

He got up and put the hammock in his inventory. It seemed that Maverick was sleeping again. He hadn’t even Cultivated during the night. Funnily enough Max actually missed his ridiculous remarks right now. He could feel Maverick’s soul thrumming as it rested. It felt more potent too. Max smiled to himself, knowing the gun would be excited to feel more powerful once it woke up.

It didn’t take long for Max to find more mutated panthers. They were easy pickings for the most part. Max racked up the kills and followed his map. Everything was going swimmingly as the panthers moved in packs of two mostly. Except for when they didn't.

Max saw four of them approaching. They came at Max from the direction Max had been going. The panthers with (???) in the system messages were getting more prevalent. Max saw them from afar, which was his lucky break, because if he hadn’t they could have caused serious trouble for him.

The four panthers moved in synchrony, walking side by side. When they noticed Max, they split into pairs and vanished into the bushes opposite sides to each other.

Max looked around. There was a sturdy tree behind him, some five yards away. Good target to use for tethering himself for evasive maneuvers. There was a thick bush to his front right. He was almost certain the other pair would jump at him from there. A well timed [Gravity Well] should do the trick. As for the other group he—

The pairs attacked in perfect synchrony. Max quickly executed his half-baked plan in half a blink. Two of the panthers got caught swirling in the air by the [Gravity Well] at the same time as he slid towards the tree behind him.

One of the panthers missed, and the other clipped him with a claw. Max lost 20 Health. Not too bad.

But they attacked again, and even when Max [Tethered] them, they managed to keep moving, as Max had observed before. They pounced on Max and ripped at him. His vision flashed red several times, and as he used a repelling [Tether] twice on himself he shot at them, creating a third repelling tethering on the ground where they stood, pushing them even further away. Max gritted his teeth and shot at the pair. They fell. When Max went towards the pair he had left swirling in the air, he noticed they weren't there.

Damn it. Where are they?

Max huddled up against a thick tree branch, [The Maverick] at the ready. He listened and made his best effort to strain his senses. He gave a quick glance at his Health Bar. Over 200 Health lost. A big chunk of his Mana gone too. These panthers weren’t pulling their punches.

Max waited and looked around, listening for the faintest crumple of dry leaves or crack of a fallen branch. Nothing. Just the sounds of the forest. Had the two panthers… Retreated?

Surely not. Beasts can’t do that. But these were an intelligent sort of beast, that much was clear. Max carefully moved towards where he had used the [Gravity Well] on the two panthers. They weren’t in the bush waiting. That was good. Max tried to look for any track marks on the ground. He thought he saw a paw print or two leading away, but it was hard to tell. He had no woodcraft to speak of.

But it did look like there were some faint marks on the ground leading away exactly to the direction the panthers had initially come from. That was as much of a map for Max as he’d ever get in this situation.

He sat down for a moment and drank from his waterskin and ate the rest of his dried meat, he’d been holding on to since almost the start of the games. As he ripped at the tough meat with his teeth, he still listened, still watching, in case the panthers wanted to be sneaky. Nothing happened.

Max noticed that the panthers weren’t the only things that had changed. The forest had grown. It was much thicker, much more rich and Max could swear it spanned a longer distance in every direction now than before. It hadn’t crept towards the river, but who knew what the reason for that was.

When Max was finished with his meat and his ponderings, he carried on. Still a little wary he might get jumped on by the two missing panthers, he tread on carefully. But nothing happened. Where had they gone to and why?

Curiously enough Max did not face any more panthers. He was sure he was going towards the direction the trail of panthers had led him. Had the missing panthers warned the others about Max? Were they preparing for some mass attack somewhere? While his mind wanted to initially brush the thought off as preposterous, Max had to admit that he was in a pretty crazy reality, and the panthers clearly had some intelligence.

He carried on, keeping [The Maverick] at the ready. He hadn't felt the need to cast [Alter Gravity] on the weapon for now. The extra Strength from Cultivation advancement helped of course.

But he had also developed a very stringy and toned right arm, since arriving at Alpha Ludus. His whole body overall had undergone some change. He was stringier and well toned all over. But the right arm compared to the left one definitely stood out.

Turns out these gains weren’t Framework related. That didn’t stop Max from smiling to himself. He’d really come a long way in many a way since coming here.

Abruptly, Max sighted a panther ahead thirty yards away. That snapped him out of his musings faster than jumping into icy water would. Max prepared, his mind focusing. They never moved alone. There would be some in the bushes nearby. They could—

The panther was acting very, very strangely. It sat down and tilted its head, tail swishing behind it almost as if impatiently.

When Max approached, it only looked at Max with those lamplike yellow eyes and sniffed the air. Max came closer, still vary of the myriad of possible traps that could be sprung on him, but if this was a trap, it was a stupid one.

Max stopped a good fifteen yards away. The panther sniffed the air again, turned and looked over its shoulder at Max.

It wants me to follow it?

The panther yowled, definitely impatiently this time, and it walked a few paces, watching over its shoulder to see if Max followed.

Wary as he was, Max was also curious. He kept his distance, and when the distance grew too large for the panther, it sat down, licking at its paw, waiting for Max.

Max followed it for a while, until he came out of the woods into an opening. A little stream trickled across the opening and a cave that let off a foul stench was near it. A panther cub peeked out of the cave, before its mother came and snatched it from the back of its neck and carried it inside. In the middle of the opening was a large boulder, a mossy giant, reaching up to ten feet high in the air.

A top the boulder, smiling in that easy, slow smile of his, eyes giving a twink of mischief, leaning on a spear, stood the Stranger.

“It’s been a while,” he drawled. “Has it not Max?”