A tentacle sliced through the air at knee height, forcing me to jump to dodge: it was far too long to evade by leaping backward out of range. Besides, that would take me further away from the monster's main body. I needed to get closer, not run away.

  Alas, a second tentacle scythed through the air in the opposite direction, this one at neck height. That required me to duck, but the manoeuvre was manageable. I just needed to belly-flop forward, shove off the ground with a hand, and flip myself back to my feet.

  It was the third tentacle that was the issue, hammering down in an overhead blow, launched only after I'd jumped into the air. Committed to my dodge of the first pair of attacks, there was nothing I could do to evade.

  "Lightning Strike!" I shouted, aiming my magic straight up as I rolled in mid air. The tentacle flashed yellow and blue as the electricity grounded itself through it, continuing through the monster's main body and into the ground. My lightning wasn't doing much in the way of damage, but it did force the tentacle to contract. The attack fell short, slamming into the ground in front of me.

  That gave me a few seconds of breathing room. Enough to finish my approach to the monster's main body; a two metre tall pulsating white sac without eyes, mouth or any other recognisable features. It contracted and expanded rhythmically, as if it was breathing. Or maybe a beating heart would be a better analogy.

  "Stab!" I shouted as I rammed a dagger into it. The thing shuddered as a fountain of clear liquid burst from the wound, but rather than respecting gravity, it slowed and hovered in the air, rapidly turning milky. A crust formed over the top, as if it was freezing. It started to twitch.

  Thank goodness for the bestiary. Without it, I would have had no clue what was happening. Thankfully, I did, and while [Lightning Shock] didn't seem to be causing the monster lasting harm, I did at least have high hopes for it here. "Lightning Shock!" I shouted, aiming it at the half-formed tentacle. This time, the effect was rather more spectacular. The milky appendage tried to contract, but half-formed as it was, the crusty layer shattered, the liquid within escaping the monster's control, falling from the air and splashing harmlessly on the soil.

  The sac soundlessly shuddered again, but the way its beating sped up combined with the way the sunlight glistened on its wrinkled surface somehow managed to convey a feeling of rage.

  This was certainly one of the weirder monsters I'd fought, but as with most other monsters, it had well-defined attack patterns. It made horizontal or vertical slashes with its tentacles and did a decent job of coordinating them so that dodging one blow would push me into the paths of a second or a third, but it never tried mixing things up. Once it became obvious that I was avoiding its attempts at entrapment, it should have tried other things. Spinning its body to force me to track which tentacles were joining or leaving play would be a start. If it was sufficiently desperate, it could use its main body as a bludgeon, which would put it in harm's way, but the size would make it harder for me to dodge.

  Heck, if it was sensible, and realised it couldn't kill me, it should run away. But it couldn't. It was a monster, so it attacked me. The caterpillars had run, but they'd run from this, not me.

  The bestiary was helpful and all, but I was starting to feel that the way monsters' attack patterns could be documented so precisely and strategy guides written to defeat them was kinda odd. The only time I'd seen monsters try something new wasn't when the old method was obviously failing, but when they took sufficient damage. Yes, there was some correlation between the two triggers, but even so, going the damage route didn't seem very sensible. And even if they did add new attacks to their rotation, they were still well defined.

  I'd thought monsters made no sense practically since my first encounter. Dungeons made no sense, either. Nor did a lot of things. At least, not to me. I had to accept that the problem was, to a large extent, on my end. That many of the things that didn't appear to make sense were down to a lack of knowledge on my part, and that, with a deeper understanding of the world, there was some underlying logic.

  I was slowly forming a hypothesis that fit the known facts, and within the framework of which monsters and dungeons made perfect sense, but I didn't particularly want to be right. Calling the implications concerning would be the grossest of understatements.

  Perhaps I'd find out soon. I was on my way to a big version of the small device I'd destroyed in Terminus Septem. Past-me had called that small device a System repeater node. That raised the possibility that the big version wasn't just a repeater, but the original source. Then again, Sir Galahad had mentioned the theory that the dwarfs were the creators of the System, and Terminus Nihil didn't appear to be a dwarven structure. Perhaps the theory was correct, and the device in Terminus Nihil served a completely different purpose. Certainly I didn't see what the System had to do with tying two worlds together.

  In any case, I had no idea how I was supposed to stop the collision of worlds once I was there, so I imagined I'd end up with a greater understanding of the device whether I wanted it or not.

  The monster's attack patterns grew repetitive enough that I had the leeway to ponder all that while dodging and stabbing, and I managed to poke a few more holes in the sac. Each time, some of its contents spilt out, the main body shrinking and growing more wrinkled with each loss. The beating sped up again, now sounding very much like a heartbeat rather than the slow sinusoidal rhythm it had started with.

  "Lightning Shock!" I shouted, destroying another forming tentacle, then sprinting in between its counterstrikes. "Stab!"

  The monster shuddered, gave one final beat, then fell still.

  With all the experience bonuses, it was getting hard to keep track, but that had probably been double the base experience of an acid moth, despite taking far more than double the time to kill. There was definitely a trade-off. When farming monsters for experience, it seemed best to stick to the strongest monsters that could be taken out quickly. Pushing myself to fight monsters close to the edge of my capabilities seemed to have no advantages, at least in System terms. I had to admit that the non-System experience was good—[Dagger Mastery] hadn't changed in a while, yet I suspected current-me would be able to outfight the me of last week for reasons that went beyond Stats. Practice was important. Nevertheless, while the System obviously wanted people to work for their gains, it didn't seem to reward significant risk taking.

  At least, not at my current level. I was reminded once again of the kill experience Grysk Khris had given, and how it had been rather more than I'd expected.

  Perhaps that played into my hypothesis, too. That the System wouldn't want to encourage the young to place themselves in too much danger, but it was happy to encourage that sort of thing in older, high-levelled individuals. Not that it was worth thinking about, just yet. I still didn't have enough information.

  Instead, I dealt with the swarm of acid crawlers and acid moths that descended upon me the moment the groping pulsator had died, spending mana like water as I spammed [Lightning Shock] to thin the crowd. It had built up significantly while I'd been fighting, leaving me needing to make another fighting retreat. Thankfully, with them approaching only from the jungle, and with plenty of clear space behind me, there was no threat. Across open ground, the crawlers were slow, and even the moths couldn't fly at the speed I could sprint.

  Despite the death of the horde, I continued to retreat. Whether by the length of the fight or its volume, we'd attracted attention I didn't want, and some of the roaring from within the jungle was getting uncomfortably close.

  Not that I was going to let that interfere with my experience grinding. I skirted further around the forest without waiting to see what, if anything, emerged, and then, once I'd put a safe distance between myself and the previous fight location, I once again crept back into the jungle.

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  An acid crawler once again attempted to drop on my head.

  "Stab," I intoned, thrusting upward and spearing the thing before it could land.

  "I'd complain about you lot needing to mix it up a little, but I suspect that you can't. Besides, you're dead already, so too late for you to learn."

  And so continued my day. Twice more I entered the jungle, drawing the attention of the local monsters and rewarding that attention with death, then retreating back out of harm's way before anything too dangerous turned up to reciprocate. Aside from a few more groping pulsators, the only other monster type I encountered was a small group of braccus raptors, which were rather similar things to what I'd fought in the Raptor Steppe.

  The earlier bigger dinosaur was named a braccus tyrant, which raised a new pile of interesting questions about naming schemes. Monster names were obviously 'official' in some way, given that they showed up in System messages. It couldn't just be the name I had for the monsters, because there were things I'd killed before knowing their real names.

  Place names usually didn't show up in System messages, at least that I'd seen, so presumably the jungle was named after the dinosaurs?

  In any case, I'd gained three more levels from the fighting, so the single day of training had brought me all the way to level fifty-one. At that rate, getting all the skill points I wanted within a week shouldn't be difficult.

  Retreating well away from the jungle, I set up camp for the night. Camping was another area of this mad escapade that seemed rather likely to get me killed. Sleeping with no-one to keep watch, while surrounded by a jungle of monsters? The idea was insane on its face, and while my equipment included an enchanted repellent and small magical barrier that was supposed to let me rest undisturbed, I wasn't certain how much I trusted it. I still hadn't addressed my snoring problem.

  Well, I had a bunch of skill points now, didn't I? It didn't matter much what order I spent them in, and [Danger Sense] would go some way toward helping me wake up in case of trouble.

  I had enough stat points for a bunch of extra Marks, too.

  As expected, a minor and largely superfluous set of additions—I'd never had issues with disease or poison that a duration reduction would have helped with, for example, except perhaps for a little less lingering nausea after leaving the Black Burrow—but they were nevertheless upgrades across the board. I certainly wouldn't object to [Hardy II] further eliding my need for sustenance and sleep, or [Quick-Witted II] meaning I was less likely to miss a hidden threat.

  And with my nap time made ever so slightly safer and shorter, I set up the repellent—a crystal on a necklace that flickered with a faint light when twisted—and went to sleep.

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