Realizing that it was time to leave, Alice grabbed the supplies she felt she needed, such as food, and stored them in her basket. She also grabbed her spear, stone hatchet, and stone knife, because having some weapons on hand in case she ran into something else terrifying might be critical. She spared a glance at her cave, which she had slowly worked to transform into a somewhat cozy home, before she turned back towards the entrance. She didn’t feel regret over leaving it behind. It had been her home for four months, but she missed other people far more than she would miss her time in the wilderness.

The only other thing she brought along was her book on magic, which she had long since memorized. It had taught her magic, and also a language. She was reluctant to leave it behind. Besides, in less technologically advanced societies, paper was hard to produce. Alice had no clue whether books were easy or hard to produce in this world, but there was a chance she could sell her book for a fair amount of money when she reached civilization.

She left behind Taps, the pet rock that she had painted a face on a while ago. Before she left, she knocked him against the wall one last time. He could guard the cave for her and keep it safe. Then, she took one last look at the cave, before she turned to the sky above this world. Despite the fact that it looked similar to the sky back on Earth, Alice knew that she was looking at a completely different sky now. Her thoughts drifted back to home.

Sorry, mom and dad. I still don’t know how to get home. I wonder if you two are thinking of me right now? The cops must have declared this to be a missing persons case by now. They might have even decided I was dead. I wonder if they’ve stopped searching for me. I hope you’re doing okay. It might take a while, but I won’t forget where I come from. Someday, I’ll see you again. I’ll try my hardest to get back soon, so don’t feel too bad while waiting for me, okay?

After that, Alice grabbed her stuff, and began walking upstream. She didn’t see any monsters with {Sixth Sense}, so the creature that had been roaring earlier wasn’t close enough for her to worry about yet. Based on that information, Alice kept a pace that would make good time, but would keep enough energy in reserve to let her sprint away if need be. With how much tougher her body had grown during her time in the wilderness, she no longer feared her feet getting cut up by the wilderness, and any lingering remnants of winter and the cold didn’t pose any threat to her.

Another roar sounded in the distance, but as far as she could tell, it didn’t seem to be moving closer to her. Still, she felt uneasy, and picked up her pace a little in hopes of escaping the territory of the creature in the distance as quickly as possible.

A few hours later, she heard another one of the terrifying roars. This time, however, it was much closer, almost on top of her. She froze, her heart hammering in her chest as she scanned each direction.

Something massive stepped into the range of {Sixth Sense}. When she turned to her left, she saw a bear towering over its surroundings. Its eyes were an inky black color, and it was looking right at her. Alice paused in shock for a moment, wondering why the monster had locked onto her location so quickly, and then her brain unfroze. She began running for her life, following the river and hoping she could run faster than the creature. However, her hopes were in vain, and the creature quickly caught up with her. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that even the plants seemed to be quivering under the lumbering strides of the creature.

Then, a few blades of grass grew in length as they reached towards her ankles. Alice tore through them, since a few blades of grass couldn’t stop her from fleeing. However, ahead of her, larger, thicker cords of grass were forming. She realized that, somehow, the bear was controlling the grass around her.

Shit! That’s not one of the four basic magics!

Alice heard another roar, and she glanced over her shoulder, seeing the bear grow in real time as it rapidly closed the distance between them. Then, she realized it was literally growing. Before, it had stood two and a half meters tall on its four legs, but now it was closer to three. Panicking, she felt her stomach churn with dread as she realized she was going to die here. She was still trying to run away, tripping over the cords of grass and vegetation, but she wasn’t going to make it.

Half-blind as she struggled to focus, Alice took a misstep in the wrong direction, and crashed into the thawing river. The ice shattered, and freezing water snapped her out of the primordial terror that had torn into her brain moments ago. She saw, in a brief moment of lucidity, the bear seem to shrink instead of grow, but before she could process what had changed, the bear also jumped into the water to keep chasing her.

Suddenly, she felt much heavier. At the same time, she realized that {Sixth Sense} was now picking up on the presence of two monsters, instead of just one. Her eyes flicked down, and she saw a fern-like creature scuttling along the bottom of the river, its three-meter long plant maw filled with teeth opened wide as it pointed its mouth directly at her and the bear. She extended some tendrils of magic towards her makeshift toga and dragged herself upwards, desperately trying to stay away from the river-monster below. The creature’s mana felt like it was squirming around, and Alice realized that she hadn’t been imagining things earlier – the creature was somehow dragging her towards its mouth. However, the bear was much closer to the creature and much heavier than Alice.

The bear suddenly seemed to shrink into itself, and one of the trees from nearby tried to extend a helping branch towards the bear. The beast’s size continued shrinking as it desperately tried to swim away, until its height shrank to two meters. Then, its head dipped below the roiling current, and even its angry growl vanished beneath the waves. As Alice used her nonexistent swimming skills and Kinetic Magic to keep her head above water, the massive bear sank lower and lower into the water. Finally, the plant-monster’s mouth snapped shut, and the vinebear stopped thrashing. The plant monster stopped using whatever magic it had available, and Alice popped straight out of the water as her kinetic magic dragged her upwards.

For a brief moment, Alice flew out of the water, her kinetic magic launching her out of the stream like a cork from a bottle before her momentum faltered and she flopped back into the water. Alice struggled for a moment to get back into a swimming position, before She looked down one final time. Whatever was at the bottom of the river was working on swallowing the bear whole, and didn’t seem worried about her any longer. Terrified, Alice quickly swam back to shore, eager to get out of the way of the plant monster before it got hungry again.

After a brief swim she collapsed onto the sandy riverbank, exhausted and terrified. It had only taken the blink of an eye for the newly awakened monsters of this world to nearly kill her. Even though her physical abilities had nearly doubled since she had come to this world, she had barely survived. She couldn’t help but shake as she remembered how hopeless she had felt when she was being chased by the bear, as well as the strange abilities of the plant monster.

She took a few minutes to relax, just breathing in and out, before she finally checked her System notifications, realizing that this encounter had finally pushed her to level 35 in [Survivor]. She examined her surroundings to make sure she was safe, before looking through her new Perk options while praying they would give her new tools to survive the monsters she had just encountered.

Alice quickly knocked out {Hardy} – even though it would be useful to someone who already had some level of survival ability when fighting a monster, Alice was pretty sure that would just end up with her taking longer to digest inside of a monster’s stomach. Her bones and physical abilities were so lacking compared to the creatures she had just seen that the Perk was useless – even with a 20% bonus to Endurance and extra resistance, she would still die in one hit.

{Sense Hostility} was kind of tempting – even with the 200 meter detection radius of {Sixth Sense}, the bear had been much faster than she had thought it would be. {Sense Hostility} had only bought her a few extra seconds to run. If she hadn’t been so close to the river, and if the vine monster hadn’t eaten the vinebear and ignored her, she would have died. Furthermore, {Sixth Sense} was obviously more geared towards sensing monsters, and would probably be useless when she got back to civilization. Having {Sense Hostility} would be a useful backup for letting her know when humans had bad intentions towards her.

{Ambush Predator} seemed more geared towards some sort of stealthy attack, which Alice also felt would be useless. She didn’t have the combat proficiency to contest the bears she had seen earlier, and attacking one would just be suicide. {Slayer of Monsters} was the only other major consideration she had – its effects were… odd. The other three perks had no real activation conditions – they were basically always on, and always at least potentially useful. {Slayer of Monsters} was interesting, but also had the requirement of having slain a monster in the last 7 days. Alice wasn’t sure how useful that would be while she was trying to survive reaching a town, though – she needed survivability now, and she had no idea whether or not a week had passed since her last spidercrab kill. Increasing her stats by 15% also felt like it may or may not be useful – after all, the only stats she could really rely on when fleeing for her life were [Dexterity], [Perception], and [Magic].

After some consideration, Alice decided more forewarning was the most valuable Perk, so she grabbed {Sense Hostility}. The moment she grabbed the perk, there was a stinging sensation in her eyes, and then suddenly everything was much clearer. She hadn’t had much growth in any of her mental stats so far, so this was her first time really understanding what [Perception] did. Alice had thought it might do something like make her eyes better, or improve her hearing, or something like that, but after the 20% increase in the effect of the stat, she realized that was only part of what [Perception] did.

Every single point in the Stat seemed to slow down the world around her, making her feel almost as if she had been watching a video and switched to playing it on 90% speed. It made sounds and sights crisper and clearer, allowing her more time to think and making it easier to notice things happening around her. She staggered, feeling slightly drunk as she tried to command her body to move, but even though she knew on some level that she was moving exactly as quickly as she had been before, it suddenly felt like her body was slow and unresponsive, unable to keep up with her new perception. Then, as she got more used to her new senses, she began walking back up the stream, wishing that her [Dexterity] and [Strength] were higher. Right now, she certainly didn’t feel like she was fully using her new [Perception] effectively. Her body just couldn’t keep up with it. However, the boost to her [Perception] did also help her scan her surroundings, as she had hoped it would. Noticing a monster before it noticed her and hiding seemed like the most reliable way to survive, so Alice resolved to hide anytime she felt threatened.

Then, she began creeping along the edge of the river again, hoping that she would reach civilization soon.

* * *

Two days into her journey, she was starting to realize just how good of a decision it was to take {Sense Hostility} together with {Sixth Sense}. The two seemed to feed off of each other, giving her the ability to sense monsters in a certain radius around her with much greater efficiency than either of the abilities alone would have provided. On top of that, she could detect when monsters were looking at her, which gave her a much better idea of when she should just sit tight with {Camouflaged} and hope they didn’t spot her and when she needed to run for her life.

This was even more useful than she had first expected, because during another monster encounter Alice had learned that even spidercrabs were a threat during spring. Apparently, spidercrabs being alone only happened during winter. She had no idea whether or not spring was mating season or something, but after the snow had started to melt, Alice hadn’t seen a spidercrab travelling on its own even once. Instead, the little monsters travelled in packs of at least six and sometimes up to ten monsters. She was pretty confident in killing them one on one – even two on one was pretty manageable for her these days. However, fighting six spidercrabs at once was suicide right now, even if she climbed a tree first. Her Magic seed didn’t hold enough mana to kill all six yet.

In short,{Camouflaged} finally became an incredibly useful Perk, saving her life in areas were the trees were less dense by keeping her out of fights with all of the monsters she was running into as she travelled.

She had also seen another one of the bears in the distance, but this time, it didn’t manage to detect her. Since this might be one of her only chances to figure out all of this thing’s abilities, she had observed it from a distance. Eventually, she had finally understood why the creature had shrunk and grown during her fight with it. The bear had some sort of ability to manipulate fear. Whenever it roared, her body would instinctively flinch, cowering and waiting to die, and the bear seemed to magnify the size of its body whenever its victim got a face-full of fear magic. When Alice watched it hunt a pack of spidercrabs, the creatures scattered upon hearing the bear roar while the monster seemed to grow in size. Afterwards, the bear would leisurely truss up its prey using some sort of plant-controlling magic, before grabbed it and chowing down. Alice decided to call them vinebears. They were the kings of the land, as far as Alice could tell – when they found spidercrab packs, they could simply stroll up and slaughter an entire pack without any tension at all.

She also noticed that monsters seemed to be able to detect her if they were close enough, regardless of whether or not she was camouflaged. For now, Alice wasn’t sure why this was. Fortunately, when she had discovered this, she had been close to a tree, so the spidercrab pack that had suddenly turned on her hadn’t been able to eat her. After tearing off tree branches and pelting them with sharpened stakes for a while, she had managed to kill one and injure a few more before they finally backed off.

These days, she also stayed away from the edge of the water. After her experience with nearly getting killed by a plant monster, she knew that the river was just as dangerous as land.

* * *

Another two days passed, and Alice’s hope of finding civilization finally bore fruit. One day, as she climbed to the top of a tree to escape a pack of spidercrabs, she spotted a giant wooden wall in the distance. Even as she looked at the group of spidercrabs below, firing a sharpened tree branch at them whenever her mana recovered enough, she began smiling happily. Soon, she would be back in civilization. She would have people to talk to, and she wouldn’t be alone anymore.

* * *

After that, she began travelling towards where she remembered the town to be.

In addition, as she was travelling, she got a surprising System notification.

You have gained an achievement!

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

You have managed to survive a winter away from civilization with no help from other humans. You are truly committed to survival!

+15% class experience for the [Survivor] class and any further evolutions. Your body is able to handle temperature 10 degrees Celsius lower than before. +15% growth to the Endurance stat. During the months of winter, the effect of your Endurance stat is increased by 10%.

She looked at it, shrugged a bit, and dismissed it. It was useful, but nothing groundbreaking. She was much more interested in when she would reach civilization. The walls were now visible in the distance, and they were getting easier and easier to see as she moved closer. Furthermore, as the walls grew closer, the monsters seemed to grow less active. Clearly, the humans here had put at least some effort into clearing out the nearby monsters, and so even though Alice hadn’t run into people yet she was increasingly sure that she would soon. It was also getting easier to move around, since she had to spend less of each day fleeing or hiding from monsters.

* * *

After a few more days of travel, Alice was finally in range of the walls. She could see, in the distance, humans in uniforms wielding bows and standing on top of the ramparts, and she hadn’t run into a monster in the past few hours.

The trees around the walls had been chopped down for several hundred meters, making it difficult for any monsters to approach the walls unnoticed. About half of the distance between the walls and the trees was also filled with farmland, and people worked on clearing out more land and planting crops as Alice observed the area. They primarily seemed to be using iron or steel tools, as far as she could tell, and looked just like normal humans.

At least, if every farmer had taken lessons from professional bodybuilders and had minor supernatural powers. Every single farmer she saw had something unusual available to them. Some of them threw seeds into their farmland, only for the seeds to start sprouting at a pace visible to the naked eye. Others had fences that repaired themselves anytime they got damaged. It was obvious that Perks, Magic, or some combination of the two were so widely used here that it was practically universal.

In one case, Alice saw a [Farmer] fall off the roof of the house he was constructing. Rather than become seriously injured, he just seemed annoyed, despite the fact he had just fallen nearly twenty meters. After shrugging it off, he climbed up a wooden ladder and got right back to it, paying no mind to the shattered log he had landed on. Below him, what she assumed to be his daughter cheered him on, laughing as a woman gently patted the little girl’s head while lifting up a beam with her other arm. Alice hadn’t ever seen someone on Earth lift a giant construction beam with one hand the way a random ordinary civilian could in this world, which was a pretty good indicator of just how different the two worlds were.

So this is what society looks like with a levelling System, Alice thought, dumbfounded as she watched the casual superhuman feats happening everywhere around her. It was with some relief that she noticed that, at least in her own age group, she wasn’t astoundingly weak – the other few teenagers she could see weren’t casually doing superhuman nonsense left and right, at least. They moved faster and more gracefully than her, but she saw one of them at least get injured when a log landed on him, and needed some help staggering towards what she assumed was a [Doctor] after a bad injury. She didn’t notice anyone move with superhuman grace either – even if the people here displayed a level of balance and dexterity that would have been hard to match on Earth, it was only around the level of a competent dancer. Which was still incredible, but nowhere near the level of casually shrugging off serious injuries.

As she observed the little farming town more closely, she realized that the age of people seemed to directly correlate to how superhuman their actions were. People around 30 and below still seemed somewhat similar to a mediocre Olympic athlete, while those between the ages of 30 and 50 seemed to be the ones who could give Olympic athletes a run for their money and also had a few supernatural abilities slapped on top of that. She also saw a few older people helping out, although they seemed notably weaker than the younger ones. Apparently, even the System didn’t prevent the physical deterioration brought about by old age.

Still, the casual superhuman strength everyone displayed with was astonishing for Alice to see. While they were all significantly slower and weaker than what she had seen from the bears that controlled plants and fear, they were much stronger than her. Alice had no clue what the soldiers of this world looked like, but if these people were average [Farmers] she should probably expect something far more ridiculous from people actually trained to fight. Despite this casual superhuman ability, the [Farmers] still kept one eye on the forest at all times, making Alice wonder if they were afraid of vinebears or monsters creeping up on them and attacking them.

As she walked closer, she could also see that there was a [Guard] post of some sort outside one of the walls. A group of wagons approached the guard on duty, resulting in some gesturing before the guard began moving to check the wagons. Some sort of tariff, perhaps? Wondered Alice as she observed the exchange. The wagons were pulled by horses, and she couldn’t find a single hint of automation or machinery anywhere. Therefore, the world she was currently was somewhere in the middle ages. This was important information, and made Alice somewhat more hopeful about the prospect of selling her book for some survival funds later.

Meanwhile, a large number of other people in plain clothes labored near the river, digging at the area for some reason. Back on Earth, the digging probably would have taken hours, or even days, while here it took mere minutes for visible progress to come from each [Laborer.] She was a little astonished to see the means of this new world at work as she watched some of the piles of dirt fling themselves away after people had stopped touching them, sliding away from the working site as if they were ice skating on dry land.

Alice took a deep breath, before trying to look as natural as possible and hoping nobody would accidentally squish her in passing. Considering how strong these people were, Alice felt that a casual fistfight with a regular inhabitant might crush her ribcage or kill her on the spot. Then, working up her courage, she kept walking towards the town, homing in on the [Guard] station.

Now that she was closer, she could see that the people around her weren’t quite as superhuman as she had first thought – while the [Farmers] and [Laborers] were, without question, far stronger and more durable than she was, she didn’t see people moving fast enough that she struggled to track them, or anything of that sort. Putting together what she had seen from her own perks beyond level 25 in [Survivor] and her rudimentary understanding of Stats, she quickly realized that most of these people were probably several levels higher than her in some sort of [Farming] class, and that probably gave them several boosts to [Endurance] and [Strength]. At least, that was her best guess about why these people seemed to have such stilted physical attributes – their dexterity was definitely higher than hers, based on speed they moved, but the difference didn’t seem to be overwhelming.

Finally, she reached the guardhouse. The people there were wearing leather armor and holding long, metal pikes. Alice nodded to herself, more sure than before that the industrial revolution had yet to reach this world. Then, she marched towards the second guard outpost, trying her best to seem normal while she fabricated a story. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do on short notice. Before that, she had to wait in line, since the guard was apparently still checking the wagon in front.

While she waited, a group of kids playing scrambled by as Alice watched in bemusement.

“Tag! You got eaten!”

“Ahh! I got eaten again! That’s no fair!”

Another kid showed up, wearing a yellow armband. “Bzzt! I got the monster!” he said as he touched one of the other kids.

“Aww!”

“All the monsters are dead! Civilians and Mages win the round!”

“Who are the mages this time?”

“I want to be a monster!”

“I got eaten three games in a row! I want to be something besides a civilian!”

The group of kids drifted off while Alice pondered. At the very least, it doesn’t seem like Mages are hated here. That’s a relief. Although, if normal people can do this much, what the heck killed the guy whose body I found? I might have suspected a vinebear before, but there’s no way he got killed by a monster even I escaped from if this is what an average civilian looks like. There must be much scarier monster than just vinebears somewhere around here. Or scarier people. Alice shivered.

The guard finally finished checking the wagon in front of her, collected some silver coins from the group, and waved them through. Alice stepped up to the guard.

He looked at her, and seemed surprised for a moment. Alice winced. Her ‘toga’ was definitely weird compared to the other clothes she had seen – most people wore tunics and pants, or dresses and skirts, depending on gender. She hadn’t seen anyone else wearing what looked like a clumsily folded piece of cloth. At least, although there were a few holes and bite marks here and there, it still covered everything, but her attire definitely stood out.

“Name? Occupation? Actually, do you have an occupation? What’s your reason for travelling here?” Asked the [Guard] giving her a suspicious look. It was probably more than Alice deserved, considering the fact that she had shown up looking like a filthy beggar, but the [Guard] didn’t seem to mind.

Alice took a deep breath before launching into her pre-prepared story. She wasn’t sure if the guard would be able to tell from the minute twitches of her body or something equally ridiculous if she was lying, so she kept her statements as close to the truth as possible.

“My name is Alice. My father was a [Merchant], but I encountered misfortune, and I’ve been surviving in the wilderness alone ever since. I am here because I have been looking for a town or some other bastion of civilization, and I saw the walls from the distance.” Technically, everything she said was the truth – her father worked to sell electronics, which was a kind of [Merchant]. She wasn’t interested in divulging the fact that she was an {Outworlder} until she knew more about her situation – it was best to pretend to be a local for now. If she needed to run, she was pretty sure she had zero chance of escaping the civilians here, so she really needed to blend in… as much as she could when she walked slower than the average twelve year old and was covered in a few days of mud and dirt. At least her dunk in the river while fleeing from the vinebears had worked as some kind of bath and helped her clean up a bit, and after she had figured out how to boil water she had begun occasionally wiping herself down with a wet cloth to stay clean, or she might have smelled like a marsh monster. If she hadn’t, Alice wondered if the [Guard] would have chased her away before she could even enter the city.

The guard raised an eyebrow, and suddenly Alice felt as if he could see through her for a moment. Then, the feeling faded as he shrugged and waved her forward. “Do you have any Perks which allow for the storage of items?”

“No?”

She felt as if the guard was looking inside of her again, although {Sense Hostility} still didn’t pick anything up. She tried to identify what was going on, and after a moment, made a guess. Some sort of lie detection Perk? It does seem to be in-flavor for a [Guard], at least.

Please read this statement out loud.” He handed her a block of stone with some words carved into it.

“I am entering this city while bearing no hostile intentions towards the city, nor do I anticipate my intentions changing before I exit. I do not intend to physically harm any person within the walls, nor do I anticipate my intentions changing before my exit. I am not a spy of the Sigmusi Empire. I am not a spy from any other nations. I have no outstanding arrest warrants, and do not intend to take any illegal actions while within the city walls.” The feeling of the guard seeing through her returned. After a moment, he nodded.

“Good enough. Go to the guardhouse just inside the gates and talk to the receptionist.” For the first time, Alice saw a hint of sympathy in the man’s gaze. “If you’re interested, at least. He can help get you caught up with whatever you’ve missed, and possibly help out a bit with getting familiar with the area. At the very least he can offer you some information.”

Alice nodded, trying not to think any more about her parents that she might never see again. For now, at least, she was in the company of humans for the first time in months. She had finally reached a town, and it seemed like monsters avoided this area. She stepped through the gates, filled with a mixture of nervousness and hope.