Within minutes, he had climbed the rear incline of the hill, slipping silently into a dense patch of dark green foliage roughly thirty yards behind and to the right of where the spies were perched.

He pulled his knees in, tucked his battleaxe tightly against his chest to prevent any metallic glare, and went completely still.

He didn’t look directly at their location, knowing from his own combat experience that high-perception entities could occasionally register the physical pressure of a direct gaze.

He kept his eyes lowered, tracking their movements through his peripheral vision.

For nearly fifteen minutes, nothing happened. The forest was dead silent save for the occasional moan of the wind through the high canopy.

Uhtred stayed still where he was, his breathing shallow and synchronized with the rustle of the leaves.

If it weren’t for the two glowing red dots still clearly showing on his territory screen, he would have sworn the space was entirely empty and that the spies had abandoned the ridge long ago.

Then, right at the fifteen-minute mark, the red dots on his panel finally moved.

Uhtred focused attention on the empty patch of brush ahead. He still couldn’t see a damn thing with his bare eyes. But on his map, he saw the two dots descend from the hill cautiously.

They were heading straight down toward the base where Uhtred had established the perimeter of his territory.

As they reached the flat ground, the two dots separated.

One drifted toward the far western corner of the half-acre square, while the other moved toward the nearest point where Uhtred had driven the first landmarker rod.

Uhtred slipped out of his hiding spot, moving like a shadow through the brush as he silently claimed the higher ground they had just vacated. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

He dropped low, examining the disturbed dirt where they had been crouching for the last half hour. His eyes scanned the soil with microscopic precision.

Near the base of a rotting log, the damp moss had been slightly compressed, and a single wild fern had been bent backward against its natural growth pattern. There was also a faint, lingering trace of an unfamiliar musk in the air.

There truly were people here. He wasn’t crazy, and neither was his territory panel glitching.

The likelihood of these intruders being ancient variant scouts shot up to eighty percent in his mind.

He moved silently down the slope, positioning himself behind a thick cluster of boulders that overlooked the flat clearing below.

Down on the field, the two red dots were weaving directly around the locations of his territory rods.

Uhtred narrowed his eyes, staring intently at the exact patch of space where one of the dots was. For a split second, he saw something like a slight shimmer, followed by a weird, unnatural twitch of some of the brushes.

The figure down there seemed to be running their hands along the empty air, searching for the physical boundary rods Uhtred had planted earlier.

But their fingers found nothing. The moment Uhtred had confirmed the purchase and activated the territory setup, the four iron landmarkers had completely disappeared from view.

It seemed to be some sort of System security feature to protect the position of the rods themselves.

One could imagine how it would be if a territory could be dissolved simply by some scout walking up and yanking the rods out of the ground.

The entire concept of a system-enforced territory would be a complete joke.

Realizing they couldn’t locate the physical mechanism of the barrier, the two spies abandoned the edges and glided back toward the center of the clearing.

They passed directly in front of the dungeon portal, pausing for several long moments before the blue light as if checking for signs of movement from within.

Eventually, the two turned away from the portal and began ascending the hill again, passing right by their old observation post before heading down the hill on the other side, traveling away from the dungeon entirely.

They were heading deeper into the uncharted wilderness of Zone 1.

Uhtred stepped out from behind the boulders, his eyes fixed on their position as they moved. He knew that the moment they crossed out of his territory, they would vanish from his panel entirely. He would be completely blind.

To prepare for the transition, he spent the last few minutes carefully analyzing the precise mechanics of their movement through the brushes.

He watched exactly how the grass parted. He stared intently, noticing every small visual cue despite how good they were at masking their presence.

The moment the two red dots touched the edge of his map, they blinked out of existence.

Uhtred didn’t hesitate. He vaulted over the low brush and trailed after them into the northern woods, relying entirely on his raw senses and raw intuition.

The hunt was completely manual now. The ancient scouts were incredibly skilled at their craft, moving with the experience of apex predators born in the wild.

They left almost no trail, making Uhtred’s job very hard, especially because he maintained a strict, fifty-yard distance between his position and theirs.

The tension was immense, causing a thin bead of sweat to roll down his temple beneath the cloak. He had no way of knowing if one of them had stopped to look back, or if they were traveling in a straight line.

A single misstep, a dry twig snapping under his boot or a sudden rush through a thick bush, would instantly expose his presence to an enemy that could be staring right at his face through the trees.

He pushed his Level 17 body to the absolute peak of its dexterity, balancing his center of gravity with every stride.

Ten minutes passed. Then thirty. Then an hour. Then two...

By the third hour of the continuous trail, a deep mental weariness began to settle behind Uhtred’s eyes. The strain of maintaining that level of hyper-focus without a single break was exhausting.

The scouts weren’t heading directly toward a base as he had initially assumed. Instead, they were moving in an erratic, haphazard zigzag pattern across the zone, executing a series of minor reconnaissance duties along the way.

At times, it would look as if they were heading towards the direction of Zone 0, as if to check for signs of human expansion, then, they would pivot sharply and plunge back into the deeper valleys of Zone 1, tracking game trails and analyzing beast migratory patterns.

At several points during the second hour, Uhtred was entirely convinced he had lost them. The forest had gone completely still, the subtle visual cues vanishing into the general movement of the wilderness.

Then, without warning, a sudden, violent disturbance had erupted through the brush forty yards ahead, the sound of heavy limbs crashing through the thickets at a full sprint.

Uhtred’s heart had leaped into his throat, thinking his camouflage had failed and that he was being ambushed.

That had been the most intense, blood-freezing moment of the entire day.

But as he caught up, he realized they hadn’t spotted him at all. They had simply been running down a Level 6 iron-hide boar, trying to hunt down the beast.

However, the simple chase had been a bust. The creatures’ stats were heavily geared towards speed, so it outran them despite the fact that they had the element of surprise with their cloaking device.

They moved on though, and eventually, after what felt like an eternity of blind tracking, the direction of their trail finally became stable.

They were moving in a straight line toward the northernmost parts of Zone 1 — more than halfway through the total breadth of the zone on his world map.

Uhtred’s anticipation returned, his focus tightening. The scouts were finally heading home.

The pace of the two invisible figures slowed significantly, their movements becoming lighter and more deliberate.

Up ahead, the terrain began to shift dramatically. The thick, low-lying shrubbery and berry bushes of the southern parts of Zone 1 gave way to a dense, oppressive forest of tall, ancient trees.

There was almost no green grass on the floor here, the earth was completely carpeted in a thick, dry layer of fallen leaves instead.

Uhtred paused behind the massive trunk of a dead pine tree, his eyes scanning the empty clearing ahead.

He scanned the leaf-carpeted floor very closely, but he spotted no sign of compression whatsoever. It was as if the two scouts had disappeared entirely.

Or had he lost them at some point?

Had he spent the last few minutes chasing the random movements of the wind through an empty forest?

Fuck!

Uhtred cursed violently in his own mind, his fists clenching around his battleaxe.

Should I have just ambushed them back at the hill?

Smacked one into the ground, ripped his cloak off, and let the other run back exposed?

If he had truly lost their trail now, then what was the use of his entire three hours of tracking? All that time of hyper focus, for nothing?

However, before Uhtred’s internal doubt could completely take root, the air roughly one hundred feet ahead of his position suddenly ruptured.

The space across the leaf-covered floor shimmered with a weird distortion.

For a brief fraction of a second, the light-bending effect of cloaking devices clashed against an external barrier, exposing the silhouettes of two Homo erectus figures.

Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the shimmer stabilized, and the figures vanished completely from sight.

Uhtred’s blood instantly began to pump with a burning excitement, his grin returning to his face.

Holy shit! I’m still on track!

The distortion he had seen just now looked as though the frequencies of two different shrouding mechanisms were clashing as the Homo erectus scouts crossed what looked like a barrier...

There’s no mistaking it... That’s exactly like a territory barrier.

He had successfully trailed them back to their base!