302: Chapter 302 Perhaps today is the chance to eliminate it.

Xu Zhixia did not answer immediately. She squatted beside the oil drum, pressed a stone into the slurry, and then spoke:

"Don't worry."

"An enhanced body's reaction speed, explosive power, and endurance are completely on a different tier from an ordinary person's."

"Even if those things have a whole nest, Lin Fan won't charge in recklessly. He has brains."

Song Ya bit her lower lip, pulling back slightly while clutching the corner of the plastic bag in her hand.

Xu Zhixia's words sounded confident, but Song Ya noticed that Xu Zhixia's movements of throwing stones into the drum were much faster than before.

Her fingers, wrapped in three layers of plastic bags, were still trembling.

While she said not to worry, the work under her hands was being rushed desperately.

No one had any certainty.

...

Deep in the dense forest.

Lin Fan no longer knew how long he had been running.

Ahead, that grayish-black figure shuttled between the tree crowns, its long arms gripping the branches alternately, the arc of each swing outrageously large.

Liu Feifei was tucked under its armpit, head hanging down, her limbs drooping limply like a piece of tattered rag.

It was unclear whether she had been scared unconscious and hadn't woken up, or if she had woken up only to be crushed to death by a tree trunk.

Yet this beast seemed completely unaware of fatigue.

Lin Fan's Triple Enhancement physical stamina had supported him in running for so long, and the muscle groups in his calves were already starting to ache.

But the speed of that thing up ahead never dropped at all.

From the start until now, there hadn't been a single deceleration or pause.

How far he had run, even Lin Fan himself did not know; he only knew that his current direction was heading toward the hinterland of the island.

Penetrating deep inland.

The more he ran, the denser the vegetation became.

The tree crowns overhead intertwined and overlapped, preventing even a trace of moonlight from seeping through.

The humus layer on the ground grew thicker and thicker; every step planted down was soft and mushy, and when the boot soles sank in and were pulled back out, they carried a strong, moldy odor.

Suddenly.

The gray shadow ahead swung three consecutive times, made a nearly right-angle turn, and plunged into a deeper, denser grove of trees.

Lin Fan cut in right after it.

He skirted around a giant banyan tree with exposed roots.

A layer of mist—completely without warning—a white mist rose from the ground.

The sea fog carried a salty taste, clinging to the skin with a damp texture.

This fog was dry, icy, and devoid of temperature; wrapping around one's body was much like having a bag of flour dumped all over oneself.

Visibility plummeted sharply: three meters, two meters, one meter.

The tips of his outstretched fingers were almost swallowed by the white fog.

Lin Fan abruptly slammed on the brakes.

That gray shadow had vanished just like that.

A second ago, it was still swinging fifteen meters straight ahead, but once the dense fog surged up, nothing could be seen.

Even the sounds were gone.

When that thing had just passed through the forest, the sound of snapping branches, the rustling of leaves scraping against each other, and even the dull thuds of its forelimbs striking tree trunks all dropped to zero the exact instant this layer of white fog descended.

Lin Fan stood in place, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

Logically speaking, his enhanced hearing shouldn't be unable to hear anything.

Yet right now, there was nothing at all.

The silence was somewhat deliberate.

Even if the monster stopped running, it was impossible for this dense forest not to have even the chirping of insects and frogs.

Unless all the creatures in this area were intentionally playing dead.

The very instant his sole shifted backward,

"Crack—snap!!"

The sound of wood snapping came from ahead.

Then came the deafening roar of numerous tree trunks being crushed simultaneously—that dense tearing sound superimposed with wooden explosions.

Then the ground trembled slightly.

[Notice: Giant Python ambush, dodge to the left immediately.]

Lin Fan instinctively rolled to the left.

Scarcely half a second after his entire body left the spot, an inverted-triangular head burst out from the white fog with a booming sound.

Its palm-sized scales were stained with decaying leaves and wood fragments, and its dark brown reticulated patterns were nauseatingly clear within the extremely limited visibility.

A giant snake.

That giant python was here as well.

The giant snake bit into empty air and swept its head sideways, snapping three bowl-thick tree trunks near the spot where Lin Fan had previously stood right at the roots.

Wood chips flew everywhere.

Lin Fan bounced up from the ground, exerting force from his waist and abdomen, and shot six or seven meters backward.

The giant snake's body was simply too thick.

In an open beach or river valley, this thing's speed would definitely be at a crushing level.

But in the dense forest, its water vat-thick torso was tightly jammed by the trees.

Every step it moved required brute force to crush the surrounding tree trunks.

Accelerate and sprint? There was no space. Flexible turning? No possibility.

Perhaps today is the chance to eliminate it.

The giant snake raised its head, its dark-yellow vertical pupils emitting a cold light in the white fog, its scarlet tongue darting in and out rapidly.

It launched another attack.

Its entire body twisted into an S-shape on the ground, its head carrying surrounding wood fragments and mud as it smashed toward Lin Fan's direction.

Lin Fan dodged to the right, his toes tipping against the ground, and squeezed himself through the gap between one large tree and another.

The snake's head brushed past his back, and Lin Fan turned around and drew his dagger.

"Crack..."

Another burst of shattered tree trunks.

But this time it wasn't the giant snake.

The commotion came from the left-rear.

Lin Fan turned his head.

In the white fog, a silhouette was closing in.

Low, broad, and flat, its four stout short legs moved rapidly against the ground.

Its tail was long and thick, flattening all the low vegetation as it swept across the bushes.

The Giant Lizard—it was those few that had appeared last time.

Rough, dark-gray scale armor covered its entire body, and its bifurcated yellow tongue rapidly probed the air.

[Notice: The Giant Lizard's saliva contains a massive amount of bacteria; after being bitten, the risk of infection and death is extremely high.]

Lin Fan pressed his back tightly against the tree trunk.

Front and back, the snake and the lizard formed a pincer attack.

Lin Fan pressed his back tightly against the tree trunk.

The snake was on the right, and the Giant Lizard closed in from the left-rear, both blockade lines tightening simultaneously.

The retreat route on the ground was gone, and at this moment, with a rustling sound above,

a few leaves carrying some foul-smelling thing slammed onto his shoulder.

Lin Fan looked up.

In the white fog, seven or eight black figures leaped among the branches; their body sizes were more than triple that of ordinary macaques, their forearms disproportionately thick, and their fangs flashing intermittently in the mist.

[Warning: Mutant macaque group attack; every macaque has been enhanced, and all their abilities have been upgraded. Immediate avoidance is advised!]

Lin Fan gritted his back molars hard.

Snakes, lizards, monkeys.

Three types of predators appeared in the same area simultaneously.

In a normal wild ecosystem, these apex predators would occupy their own territories and not infringe upon each other.

Unless this place was their territory.

No, this place should be their shared nest area.

That gray monster had brought Liu Feifei and run here, then vanished at the exact moment the dense fog rose.

It was no coincidence.

It had long since discovered someone tracking behind it and intentionally lured him in.

A meticulously designed counter-hunt.

The giant snake's body tightened in the dark, preparing for a third charge.

The Giant Lizard's four short legs pushed against the ground, accelerating its approach. The group of monkeys overhead converged from all directions, their screams overlapping into a cacophony in the fog.

Lin Fan did not hesitate.

He turned around.

His Triple Enhancement leg muscle groups detonated entirely in an instant, his sole shattering a section of exposed tree root on the ground.

His entire body catapulted back in the direction he had come from.

He wasn't going to fight anymore.

Entering a nest of monsters' territory for a solo fight? That wasn't called bravery; that was called courting death.

Tonight's intelligence was already sufficient; these things had a nest, and there was more than one species.

That gray monster possessed human-level counter-reconnaissance awareness.

Branches whipped across his face, decaying leaves flew everywhere, and Lin Fan ran at full speed through the dense forest.

After running about five hundred meters, the sounds of splintering wood, shrieks, and the heavy panting and crashing of the lizard behind him all stopped; those things didn't chase after him.

Lin Fan slowed his pace and stopped beside a dead tree strangled to death by vines.

He looked back; the white fog was still suspended behind him.

Thick, congealed, and motionless.

The boundary of that fog layer was exceptionally neat—not looking like a natural diffusion, but rather cut off by a visible straight line to the naked eye.

On this side of the fog was normal tropical rainforest.

On the other side of the fog should be their territory.

They guarded their own turf, and any living creature that broke in would be hunted and slaughtered.

Lin Fan straightened his upper body from beside the dead tree. The shirt on his back had long been soaked with sweat, clinging to his spine, and when the cold wind blew, it felt sticky and itchy.

With Liu Feifei's life or death unknown, he retreated back along the original route, the characters on his retinas still not having dissipated...