Don't speak to me of fear, boy. You can exhort my men until the swallows lie still and yet not a one will follow you. My people have long memories, and we still sing of when the giants last marched to war.

This very river we now sit beside froze, stopped in time until their rumbling steps passed us by. The Panyera hasn't stopped flowing since before the Hasta walked this earth, and yet it did that day. The cliffs shook with their throat-song, and the mammoths stilled in their migrations. You may think the world hangs in the balance, but I tell you this earnestly: it does not.

If Tsanderos can survive the giants marching to war, unified under a single banner, then it can survive the politicking of your tiny kingdoms. Your world may hinge on the outcome of this or that campaign, but ours does not. I will not send my men and women to their deaths for your world when you continue to encroach upon ours.

Your armies are indeed mighty and so I will not contest your presence, but I do not give you my blessing to walk these lands. The giants will measure you as they see fit, and they abide no untruths. If you hear thunder from the east but see no clouds, then speak no more lies until you have left these lands.

- Excerpt from the oral history of the Loquintha tribe – 'the Matriarch speaks' as recorded by Scribe Juven Al'Samise

'Pain and pleasure' was an old mantra of mine. As I ran through the endless valley, my wounds healing with each day and my journey shortening with each stride, I was reminded of it constantly.

Just as the system had said when assigning my class, the low hills were a land of contradiction, and within this strange land, the pain was easy to find. So easy, in fact, that I didn't even need to look for it. It would seek me out, worm its way into my mind at the worst moments. It would follow my steps doggedly, leaving me wincing with every misplaced footfall. It would slither into my muscles come the morning to leave me as twisted as the roots of the forest. It would flare its hood at me like some great cobra, reminding me of past injuries whenever I stretched too far without thought.

And as was ever the way with pain, I had to take it. I learned over the next few days to greet it like an old friend. I welcomed it in, let it sit in the back of my mind. I was a poor host, for it never sat comfortably, but I tried to be gracious and let it jabber away, filling my mind with its stories. A niggle here, an ache there. But I knew pain. It was a flighty thing and would move ever onto new topics. I just had to endure long enough that it got bored with one and started on another.

The endless valley held pain in abundance for any enterprising traveller, but it was also stocked full of pleasure. It was just better hidden. I had to look for it, but it was there, and once I looked in the right places it was clear to see. The babbling brook at mid-morning, the canopy of sparkling emeralds filling the sky and dappling shade across my skin, the soft crunch of the leaves underfoot and the understated bravery of the wildflowers standing silent vigil in the meadows.

These subtle pleasures drowned out the pain when it got too loud. They rose in their hundreds, tinkling and crackling and susurrating into a melody that captured my soul, leaving no room for pain's bitter mumbling.

Days passed, and I accepted the pain that the hills doled out with a smile. Not out of masochistic desire, but simply out of recognition of a worthy trade. I couldn't run through sweeping mountain vistas without my muscles burning. I couldn't experience the high of a successful hunt without a few scratches in turn. I couldn't reach my destination, without accepting the pain of the path that led there.

The next couple of days and nights in the endless valley threw the delicate balance of pain and pleasure into disarray. Other than the corpse whose belongings I had appropriated, I'd not seen a single person. Untouched by human hands, the forest stretched for untold miles, blanketing the valley floor in a glorious dappled green. The emerald valley snaked ever onward but each moment felt unique, the mad chaos of the forest ever shifting with new patterns and details.

And my enhanced attributes made the pain a minor thing now that my injuries from the brutal battle with the wolves were mostly healed. I could travel twice the speed I could before with half the effort. Food was plentiful now that I had the Skills and confidence to catch it. I ate well each night, preparing spits of food to roast over large open fires, and kept choice cuts to break my fast with each morning. I would eat throughout the day whenever I came across berries or other forage to keep my energy up as well, and I found the diet of fresh meat and sharp berries to be very agreeable.

I bathed regularly in small streams and rivers, and with new confidence I strode and ran the trails and paths that criss-crossed the endless valley towards its mouth and the plains below. I had faced an entire pack of wolves and lived, and while there were definitely stronger creatures littered throughout the land, I so far had not had a single negative interaction with one since I arrived. I saw evidence of their existence but since I passed through their domains quickly, they seemed to have no issues with my presence.

It was an easy three days filled with pleasure and lacking in pain. There was hard work, but it was varied. Hunting as I did with my weapons and ambush tactics kept my mind engaged and thrilled me more than I cared to admit. It was one thing to revel in the hunt, but to experience such satisfaction at success was a little distasteful when that success was intimately wrapped up with another creature's death. Not distasteful enough to stop me though.

But as it always did, the world eventually sent pain to balance my days of pleasure.

On the third day since my injuries had settled – the sixth since I had culled the pack – I walked into an ambush. It was some sort of tree-dwelling snake with two dexterous tails that rattled against one another as it launched itself down at me. Two massive fangs protruded from its yawning mouth, and a scything talon attached to a fleshy appendage atop its head flicked out at me at the same time.

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It felt very much like overkill, as without my Skills I would have been killed outright, enhanced attributes or not. The valley had made its mark on me, though, and I reacted with lightning reflexes. Activating Check-Step, I halted and leapt backwards, my momentum changing in less than a heartbeat and causing the jury-rigged backpack lashed to me to slam into my back from the change in direction. As I initiated the movement, my reflexes were heightened, and I used that state to take in the details I had previously missed.

Rather than leaping at me in an all-or-nothing gamble, the snake's lower body was actually wrapped tightly around the tree branch above, and after failing to catch me in its first attempt, it was already in the act of winding its body back upwards to perch on the branch again.

I was not about to let my prey go, so I reached out to snag its neck. It tried to dance away, but I had the advantage in speed over this creature when it wasn't coiled taut like a spring in preparation for a leap. I easily grabbed it, and a quick wrench snapped its neck. A few moments later heralded a faint ringing in my mind;

You have killed a Lesser Horned Leaping Snake (level 6). Experience gained.

That was a surprisingly low-levelled creature to be attacking me considering my size. Weak too. Perhaps it should serve as a poignant reminder that strength is not everything. I, a level 19 creature weighing in at near two hundred pounds, was almost killed by a level 6 animal eighty times lighter.

An unwritten rule I had discovered in my first few days was that while the world was far more bloodthirsty than expected, and creatures seemed to have less respect for a predator/prey dynamic – or put more plainly, it was a bit of a free for all with creatures of every type killing each other left and right – most wouldn't pick a fight with something much larger than them.

Ambush predators were more likely to than others, but it was still fairly uncommon, at least in my experience, to be attacked by such a small animal. No use crying over spilt snakes though. I almost activated Heart of the Hills to crush the scathing thoughts my inner critic provided in response to that 'joke', but then I worried that without the inhibition provided by that part of myself, I would probably become pretty insufferable.

Rather than chalk this up to a weird coincidence, I decided to treat it as an omen of things to come and moved with more caution as I travelled onwards. It turned out to be a good decision, as I was the victim of more ambushes, and drew the ire of more creatures than ever before, as I moved on. None were of particular concern now that I was looking out for them, and I used my remaining javelin and the horn to great effect.

I kept trudging, fighting the occasional low-levelled creature until I was nearly killed by a mountain lion of some sort. That was one of the toughest fights of my life, and I emerged victorious but injured. One arm was left hanging limp due to a dislocated shoulder, and various deep slashes marred my chest. I earned another level pushing me to 20, and I invested three points into endurance and two into perception. After my recent near-death experience, I badly wanted to expand the range and acuity of my senses, although my injuries demanded I use most of my level's bounty to aid in my recovery.

As a torrent of new information flooded into me, my brain struggled to process the sensory data, but what I slowly began to comprehend left me more terrified than ever before. I was surrounded. Not by a couple of low levelled creatures, or even a few predators far above my current power, but by a swarm of lesser creatures.

I heard a thousand legs scuttle along the forest floor towards me and saw the rustling of foliage heralding the approach of a swarm of insects no matter which way I looked. Ants were skittering towards me in a carpet of chitinous, carapace-covered horror. They flowed over the corpse of the mountain lion that had nearly killed me, and a frenzy of movement erupted as massive hand-sized ants set to work devouring the carcass.

I trembled with terror, my mind completely overcome with fear. I could – and had – faced my death at the hands of another animal, but I was uniquely scared of insects. Not even insects specifically, but anything small, skittering, and moving in swarms. There was something fundamentally wrong with multitudes of small creatures with many legs that set me off.

I was aware it wasn't a rational fear. You could argue – and I did – that fear of insect swarms was probably rational, but I knew my terror was not connected to personal risk or some abstract concept of preservation. I did not feel the same bone-shaking panic at the thought of a swarm of gorillas or wolves or dogs, despite the danger being much higher. A swarm of rats or hamsters was a scary thought, but cockroaches? No. Please god, no.

So when I realised my position was in the centre of an ant swarm, I did what any rational primate would do when confronted with its worst fear. I shut down. Completely and without hesitation.

Survival instincts or general common sense would have told me that if I simply sprinted through the swarm I would probably get through the dozen or so meters of forest floor carpeted by ants with only a few managing to cling to my boots. But survival instincts and general common sense weren't in charge of my brain at the moment.

Instead, I simply stood still, mouth agape and pleading in silence for a quick death. I prayed to gods I didn't believe in and even tried screaming for help to the divine being that had apparently brought me to this world. I felt tears spilling over my cheeks, and my back hunched with the force of the sobs wracking my body.

As I watched the swarm approach, moment by moment as if through the enhanced timing of Check-Step, something broke inside me. A dam, some final barrier placed in my soul to safeguard me from strain, collapsed in on itself and everything behind that barrier was released.

I felt that space that was so often full of something, that pool of potential deep within myself that allowed me to activate my Skills, abruptly vanish. Drained in an instant. There was no steady trickle, no careful flow of energy through the metaphysical construct of my soul and into the waiting repository of a Skill.

One moment there was a space within myself, half-empty and re-filling slowly, and the next there was nothing. No energy, no pool, no potential, and most terrifying of all, no space. But I was not interested in the details of the soul-rending agony that I was in the throes of. I was interested in only one thing – the creeping terror of the swarm carried towards me on a thousand thousand legs. I could think of nothing else, could focus on nothing at all except the pure fear of the swarm and the animalistic desire to get away, to have them leave me alone.

The agony vanished as quickly as it had arrived, and I was left drained entirely. My body was an empty husk. Like a puppet with its strings cut, I hit the ground. The final image my eye saw was of a large feline skeleton, completely stripped of all tissue, and a procession of massive ants scurrying directly away from me back into the foliage from whence they came.

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Indomitable Prey has gained in Level. Indomitable Prey – level 2.

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