Ayla did not go to find Kenji. That decision was not simple for her to make. It was a brutal mental strain, especially when she was constantly hearing the repetitive systemic chime in her head informing her that he was getting killed over and over again in that distant city.

Every time his body failed, the regression prompt would glare in her vision, and every time she would forcefully contain herself from going to him. That put a heavy mental pressure on her.

Ayla was starting to understand how important he was to her. She wanted him to feel the same way about her.

She suppressed the intense biological urge to run to his side. Instead, she channeled her growing irritation directly into the local ecology.

Ayla cleared another entire species of the native monsters in the deeper sectors of the woods. This time, her targets were the Shadow Cats.

They were the premier stealth predators of this ancient forest, creatures that moved like liquid ink between the gnarled roots and rarely left any physical footprints behind.

Hunting them was a tedious process in her spider form because those cats were smart enough to hide from her.

But Ayla quickly found another method to find them. Since the boars were their prey, she took the boar form and thus the hunting became efficient again.

She systematically absorbed their dark biomass into her core, extracting their stealth-oriented attributes one by one.

Just like before, she forced the identical properties to compress and fold within the bottomless void of her Mimic biology.

The repetitive synthesis process was a complete success. The compression refined her Shadow Stride to higher levels. It upgraded into the Rare quality threshold and transformed into an A-grade trait.

[New Trait Synthesized: Abyssal Shadow Blink (Rare-A)]

The original movement trait had merely allowed her to blend into the darkness. The new upgraded version was entirely different.

It allowed her to instantaneously teleport to any physical shadow that her eyes could visually reach, completely bypassing the physical terrain between her and the target destination.

Currently, she was maintaining the newly harvested Shadow Cat form. She looked like a remarkably cute, furry black cat with sleek midnight fur and large, dark golden pupils that shimmered with an eerie intelligence.

Her visual senses in this specific form were extraordinarily powerful. She could zoom her vision up to a maximum distance of five miles with absolute clarity. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

That meant if she truly wanted to, she could use her new blink trait to instantly cross the distance to the academy walls without a single native guard or defensive array noticing her entry.

But she held back. She forced her small feline paws to remain firmly planted on the mossy ground.

Ayla knew that going to the city right now would severely hinder her long-term growth. Her non-human logic was operating on a specific, flawed calculation.

Since Kenji was dying this easily and this frequently within those white walls, her mind concluded that the native people residing inside the academy must be incredibly, overwhelmingly strong.

If he could be slain in a matter of hours despite his advanced military martial arts, then the current environment was far too hazardous.

She believed that if she went there in her current state, she would be completely useless to him. She would be an extra burden rather than an asset.

So she suppressed her urge to go to him.

Poor Ayla had absolutely no idea about the actual reason behind Kenji’s continuous failure.

She did not know that his physical strength was being forcibly restricted by the system, or that his Protagonist role was operating like a literal magnet for every jealous bully in the sector.

If she had known that he was simply being trampled by common, low-tier human teenagers because he wasn’t allowed to use his core bone fragment, she would have long since abandoned her principles and marched into that city to paint the white walls entirely red with her acid.

But without that specific data, her mind remained fully occupied with a single, overriding objective: she needed to increase the total percentage of her Bronze core to one hundred percent as quickly as possible.

She looked inwardly at her sparse status display to check her progress.

[Current Status]

Identity: Mimic Slime (Matriarch Faction)

Role: [Bystander]

Rank: Bronze (9.5%)

Active Traits: Perfect Assimilation, Corrosive Abyssal Fluid (Rare-A), Abyssal Shadow Blink (Rare-A), Earth Armor (Rare-C+)

Giving a final, highly reluctant glance toward the northern direction where the majestic academy structures floated, the black furred cat turned its back to the light and melted directly into the deep, dark forests to continue the slaughter.

The following days became a living nightmare for the wilderness. The supreme forest transitioned into the private, highly optimized hunting ground of an absolute apex predator.

Ayla did not rest. She did not sleep. She simply moved from one beast territory to the next, devouring entire populations to harvest their traits and fill her bottomless stomach.

The total number of monsters residing within the outer rings of the forest began to dwindle considerably. The ecological vacuum was so sudden and severe that the higher-ups within the Supreme Beast Academy finally started to notice the anomaly.

The situation was growing critical because the newly enrolled first-year students could no longer find any low-level beasts to hunt for their mandatory practical lessons.

Currently, a group of old men sat around a long, polished wooden table inside the high tactical tower of the inner sector.

These individuals were the elite first-year teachers of the academy, men who had trained thousands of Beast Masters over the decades.

The head dean of the first-year department, a stern old man named Alistair Vance, leaned forward and placed his heavily scarred hands flat on the table.

He surveyed the anxious faces of his staff.

"Do we have any clear clues regarding which high-level monster descended from the deep inner rings to cause this devastation in the outer perimeter?" Dean Alistair asked, his deep voice carrying a sharp edge of administrative stress. "The student registration numbers are peaking, yet the wilderness training grounds are completely empty."

A female teacher sitting across from him shook her head slowly, her face pale as she slid a thick stack of research reports across the wood.

"Our scouting teams did not find a single high-tier monster signature," she explained, her voice containing a noticeable bit of worry. "But they found evidence of a group of them. The truly bizarre thing is that all the tracks point to completely different monster types operating in perfect sequence."

Alistair narrowed his eyes. "Explain the sequence."

The female teacher took a deep breath to steady her nerves.

"The research team found a highly disturbing pattern in the killings. The devastation started from the Slime Valley. Every single common slime within a ten-mile radius completely disappeared in a single night. The residual mana indicates the initial work of a high-ranked slime matriarch. But that matriarch too seemed to have been entirely eaten by a massive spider creature."

She flipped to the next page of the report, pointing to a series of charcoal drawings depicting deflated beast hides.

"Then, this spider creature was the one that systematically hunted and dissolved the earth boars in the lower basin. And according to the track marks left yesterday, a high-level boar with earth-reinforcement traits was the exact entity that hunted down the stealthy Shadow Cats in the western trees. It is like a chaotic chain.

The specific monster that was hunted in the previous sector becomes the active hunter for the next species. It is as if a single entity is changing its shape after every meal, continuously upgrading its form to hunt the next tier of prey."

The room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence as the reason for their meeting was now flying across the sky, screeching in happiness.