As Reed approached the dot's position, he activated his environment sense to get a look at what it was.
What he discovered left him a little confused.
'Is that a snail?'
He drew within a hundred meters of the creature and looked towards its position.
'It is.'
That revelation had him questioning this event.
'Why? That doesn't make sense! A human-sized snail is too slow to catch a man, even if a human kept up a jog it couldn't up, and this is just half the size of an average man.'
With questions in his mind, he crept closer, and channeled his mana, and the bits he had added to his suit started to glow softly.
The sounds of his steps disappeared as he climbed up a tree.
Now at a higher position, he jumped from tree to tree without a single sound emanating from him.
He got a direct line of sight with the snail.
'Could it be poisonous?'
[Dream snail] [Tier 3]
[The smell it emanates can put creatures to sleep]
[Threat level: Mixed]
[Resistant to: N/A]
[Weak to: Fire]
'I see.' Reed was a dozen meters away from it and decided to leave it alone.
'My mask is still untested, and this is not the time.'
He left it alone and made his way through the forest.
As he walked, he found all manners of creatures.
Giant spiders, giant bugs, felines, bears, deer, etc, but none of them attracted his attention.
'There was nothing special about them to waste my time on.'
Reed walked for 6 kilometers before he found anything that interested him.
'Is that?'
[Shattered-wing butterfly] [Tier 3]
He had recognized it before he used the identify function to confirm his guess. The multicolored, shining wings had done little to disguise it.
It had struck him as different from the others in the book.
The book had said that it could reach tier 8, with only one case being recorded. It had caused a disaster with over four hundred thousand casualties, it had taken a tier 9 to step in to resolve it.
The powder from its wings could do a lot of things as it got more powerful, but its voice was equally dangerous.
A film of mana covered Reed, he wasn't taking any chances.
When it was facing away from him, he lifted his arms, and a stream of mana erupted from them and surged towards the butterfly.
Before it could realize what was happening, it was surrounded by a ball of mana.
It realized that it was under attack and let out a shriek.
It didn't affect Reed, who was surrounded by multiple sound absorption fields.
He conjured up a few glass tubes of different colors as the mana moved to restrain it.
He stuck a bottle into an opening in the ball, and the mana moved over a part of the wings and swept the powder off it and into the open bottle, which was promptly closed and put away into his storage.
He repeated the procedure with the other wings, separating the powder from different parts and putting them away.
He looked at the butterfly which was still struggling.
The mana making the construct moved, and its head detached from its body.
Reed stripped off its wings and put them into his storage as well.
He set fire to the corpse and recharged his mana while it burned, then he destroyed the cell before continuing his journey.
He walked for another thirty minutes before coming across a river.
He looked at the radar, which showed that nothing was within five hundred meters of his position.
'Good place to take a rest.'
Reed decided to take a short break and sat down with his back to a tree.
***
Lyn was not having fun.
Somewhere along the way, the descent had become quite steep, and that meant that she had to take every step carefully, while also being on the lookout for anything that wanted to harm her.
She slid on some loose dirt and let out a grunt.
"Hmgh!"
She managed to make her way down safely, but almost got her right foot lodged in between two rocks near the base.
She gingerly lifted her leg to maneuver her foot out of there when she heard something and looked in its direction.
It was a bear, charging towards her.
She didn't panic, a bit of training with Reed had prepared her for this, but she did feel a little nervous.
She dropped her leg and raised her arm, and a pit appeared out of nowhere, taking the bear and surprise and making it fall inside it.
Lyn removed her stuck foot and walked over to the pit, she looked at the bear for a moment as it growled.
She brought out a sword and raised it above her head.
"Goodbye." She spoke one word and swung her sword down, releasing a wind blade from it, and cutting the animal in two.
She buried the corpse and continued her journey.
***
Reed lay on a mattress, two meters underground with a small lamp providing light.
He had started to make this temporary bunker when the sun was about to set, and it took him less than an hour to do.
He used a series of hidden pipes and meshes for ventilation, with one pipe burrowing through a tree. It had a small heating system attached to it, making sure that continuous movement of air was present.
He thought about the day's events.
'Aside from the butterfly, nothing caught my interest.'
He huffed. He had walked a total of 35 kilometers from his initial starting position, and while the enemies had certainly grown stronger, they hadn't been anything special.
'I wanted to find more interesting things.'
He turned to his side, cushioning his cheek with his palm.
'I hope I can find them tomorrow.'
With that last thought, he fell asleep.
The next morning, almost two hours before sunrise, he jumped out of his resting spot and buried its contents.
He washed up, took out his breakfast from the contraption he had made when he entered the event, ate it, and threw away the empty box.
A few minutes after an hour had passed since he started his walk, something happened.
His radar appeared in his vision, accompanied by a rapid beeping sound.
'Huh?'
A black dot streaked through the screen and disappeared in two seconds.
Reed was shocked as his mind calculated its speed.
'That was faster than the speed of sound! Was that really a player?'
Reed turned the direction where the dot had streaked through, and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
'If that was coming at me... I couldn't even dodge it.'
Reed knew that if it had been coming at him, by the time his brain processed that he was in danger, it would have already been at his position.
He shook his head and removed those thoughts from his head, continuing his journey.
He managed to get out of the forest after a few more kilometers, but what he saw next left even more doubts in his mind.
It was a field of short grass, as far the eye could see, with creatures just out in the open, not hidden in the slightest.
Reed dragged out the ground underneath him, lifting it into the air to form a twenty-meter-tall pillar made from rock and dirt.
With [Celestial vision] he could see the creatures just moving around on the grass.
The ground was flat, almost impossibly so, as he could not feel a single bulge or pit that would normally be present due to rocks and such, but he wasn't complaining.
He jumped down and raised his hand to the side. A large object appeared under his palm.
He climbed onto his motorcycle and started the engine.
'This should help a lot.'