Chapter : 13
A Fateful Encounter (1)
With a loud crash, Suhyun rolled across the ground. The taste of blood filled his mouth. His entire body felt as if it had been violently shaken.
“Ugh…”
He couldn’t tell if he was lucky or unlucky. Without his enhanced psychic powers, by now his bones and flesh would have been torn apart and scattered in midair. But a female Kalkata gorilla? It was almost unbelievable how unlucky he could be.
The moment it struck, he had used all his strength to shield his body with psychokinesis. Thanks to that, it seemed he had avoided injuries severe enough to stop him from moving. Though, of course, his gun had been destroyed—and now he had to face a perfectly healthy Kalkata gorilla as well.
Suhyun had never fought a female Kalkata gorilla before. Among the already scarce Kalkata gorillas, females were even rarer. He had heard that while male Kalkata gorillas roamed wide territories in search of prey, females tended to stay near their nests.
Though still disoriented, Suhyun tried to quickly assess the situation. The fact that the mate of the male gorilla he was fighting had appeared from behind meant he had gotten close to the gorilla’s home.
Of all the places in the vast Kalkata jungle, he had to end up at a gorilla’s nest. Suhyun swallowed a bitter laugh.
‘Was I really this unlucky?’
Bang! Crash!
Before he even had a moment to think, another attack slammed into him. Suhyun sprang to his feet and bounced backward. The female Kalkata gorilla, enraged at the loss of her mate, charged at him with murderous intent. The spot where he had just been was now grotesquely cratered.
Suhyun flung anything he could grab into the air to create distance and leapt. But the female was different from the male. The male had charged straight at him and taken his attacks head-on, but the female twisted her direction, tearing out trees and hurling them at him instead.
“!”
She threw trees to control him in midair while simultaneously closing the distance. From the very method of attack, she was different from the male he had fought before. Only now did Suhyun understand what he had heard before:
‘So that’s what they meant by female Kalkata gorillas being much harder to deal with than males!’
Unlike males, who would attack immediately if provoked, females used their wits. With the distance already shortened and her taking such precise action, Suhyun was in serious trouble. Kalkata gorillas weren’t clumsy monsters; if he stayed in midair while dodging a hail of trees and rocks, he would eventually reach his limit.
“Damn it!”
And if he paused even briefly, the gorilla pounced. Persistent and relentless—it was just like the males. Suhyun thought to himself that it didn’t have to be the same in every way and twisted his body.
If leaping through the air became too difficult, he would stick to the ground and flee. He would have less control over distance, but so would she.
Bang! Crash! Crackle!
From behind came the loud sounds of destruction. The gorilla was smashing everything with brute force. Suhyun clicked his tongue. He didn’t have time to waste.
With his gun destroyed, psychokinesis was his only weapon—but he was already drained from the fight. The only outcome he could think of was mutual destruction. Suhyun absolutely could not afford to go down with a single monster.
‘Endure.’
It was an excruciating flight. Knowing a furious monster was chasing him with intent to kill was like having one’s sanity sliced with a knife. In such situations, people usually made one of two choices:
Run until caught and die, or stop and attack in despair. Suhyun chose neither. No matter how painful or difficult, his method was to cling on until the situation changed.
The Kalkata jungle was vast and deep. If he kept moving, a variable would eventually appear.
‘It has to have a weakness. I need to find it!’
No monster was truly without a weakness. Every monster in the world had one. The female Kalkata gorilla was different from the male, but it surely had vulnerabilities.
It felt like hours of chasing and being chased. Suhyun’s back was drenched in sweat. The situation was getting increasingly dangerous. To capture the gorilla, he needed time to recover and recharge his psychokinesis, but it relentlessly pursued him, giving him no time to recover.
He couldn’t rely on it tiring first. Monster vitality was never worse than a human’s; if anything, it was better. At this rate, his own stamina would run out first, and he would be captured.
Of course, he had made some progress. He had discovered one weakness:
The gorilla’s sense of smell.
Its sense of smell was clearly weaker than the male’s. When he vanished from sight, the male would charge straight without hesitation, but the female stopped, shaking her head rapidly. If she relied solely on smell, that movement was unnecessary.
‘She’s definitely using sight and hearing to relocate me.’
If he could disable her senses even briefly, he could shake her off. The problem was finding a way…
‘Come on, come on. There’s got to be a way!’
When you wished desperately, sometimes it worked. Suhyun’s plea seemed to be answered as he heard a faint sound in the distance—the sound of falling water. A waterfall. In the Kalkata jungle, cliffs with steep drops often had waterfalls.
‘Yes!’
Suhyun pushed his psychokinesis to its limits, increasing his speed. Though he couldn’t see her, he could feel the gorilla hesitate.
Tat-tat-tat!
The jungle blocking his path vanished, and he saw the open air. He had leapt off a cliff.
The target, determined to kill him, suddenly accelerated and vanished below. If the gorilla gave up just because of that, it wouldn’t be a Kalkata. True to form, she leapt after him with a roar.
Bang!
Water splashed as she turned her head quickly. The unique sound of human movement was gone.
Krwarr!
The confused gorilla tried smashing the terrain around her to force a reaction. If someone were hiding here, they wouldn’t survive this indiscriminate attack.
Yet there was no response. She had to accept that she had lost her target.
Krwraaaah!
‘Damn it. So noisy…’
Lying on the cold cave floor, Suhyun focused on recovering his depleted psychokinesis. If he had assessed his powers earlier, he could have used them more skillfully. Not doing so had led to this mess.
He had overused his powers against the first gorilla, so against the second, he could only run.
If it weren’t for the terrain, he might have died. He sighed, thinking about it. Fooling the gorilla had been a simple trick.
He had intended to leap off the cliff, ride the waterfall with psychokinesis, and cling to the rock behind it. The waterfall would mask his scent. But as he passed through the waterfall, he discovered a cave entrance.
A small stroke of luck. Clinging to the wall until the gorilla disappeared was exhausting enough—after sprinting through the jungle for hours at full speed, he was utterly drained.
He had shaken her off, but wasn’t certain it was complete. He had to recover his psychokinesis as quickly as possible.
Psychic powers were convenient but not omnipotent. Like physical stamina, they drained with use and required rest to recover.
‘Good thing I brought something sweet.’
He took a piece of chocolate from his waist and slowly ate it. The sugar seemed to soothe his exhaustion. As his mind cleared and he recovered slightly, Suhyun sat up.
‘No damage to the internal organs… and no broken bones.’
After being hit hard by a Kalkata gorilla and moving frantically, he didn’t know what injuries he might have sustained. But fortunately, nothing major.
With some breathing room, he started thinking about the problem at hand.
‘When should I go out?’
The gorilla’s obsession was famous. And he had effectively killed her mate. This wasn’t just grudges—it was serious. While he had hidden and temporarily shaken her off, he wasn’t certain she was gone.
Moreover, the female was smarter than the male. With his knowledge, he had to be cautious in judging her behavior. If unlucky, leaving the cave could put him face-to-face with an ambush.
“Ugh…”
Suhyun stood and scanned the cave. In his haste, he hadn’t thought much when entering, but in fact, the Cameron planet caves weren’t particularly safe. He couldn’t know what monsters lurked inside.
Thinking of potential monsters, he turned on a light. He intended to go further inside. Any monsters in the cave would be less threatening than the gorilla outside. Suhyun was confident he could handle them.
‘Above all, I need food.’
Aside from a few supplies and snacks, he had lost everything during the ambush. Normally, he could survive in the jungle by finding edible things himself, but trapped in the cave, his food options were limited.
What he thought was a small cave unexpectedly had no visible end. As he walked, an ominous feeling crept over him. Rarely, some caves had no life at all. In that case, he would have to survive a day or two on only chocolate.
‘I don’t want that…’
By now, his psychokinesis should be fully recovered, but fighting in a hungry state was out of the question. Hoping for something useful, he continued deeper into the cave.
“?”
