Again and again, the beetle crashed into the tree, shaking its branches and nearly causing her to lose hold of her position. Still, the trunk of the Ironwood stood firm.

The beetle gave one last cry and shook itself, withdrawing from its assault.

“Holy shit.”

Palms slick with sweat, Liz lowered herself back onto a thicker branch, surveying her situation. The beetle looked up to her with obvious contempt, but it looked like it didn’t have any way of getting to her.

She thanked the Void that it didn’t move faster, either, or else she would have already been trampled into a paste.

That wasn’t to say that she had come out completely unscathed, though. A long gash traveled down her right leg where she had tripped, and it was bleeding enough that she was starting to worry for her health.

“Ack.”

She forced herself to calm her breathing and apply pressure. Panicking would just speed up her blood loss, but it was hard to stay collected when her lifeforce was literally slipping through her fingers.

If she didn’t stop it now, she might have to apply a tourniquet, which would mean…

She slapped herself. “Get it together, Liz. It’s not that bad.”

She wasn’t even scared of the injury — just of the irrational thought that somehow this shallow cut would lead to her becoming disabled again.

She closed her eyes, banishing those emotions from her mind. She needed to think logically.

“What to do, then…” She grabbed her shirt and used her knife to rip off a piece from the bottom. That would have to be her gauze for the moment. It was a bit dirty, but it would be easier to heal herself once she got some food in her.

She sighed.

Actually getting out would be the hard part. She gingerly tested her leg, and while she could put a bit of weight on it, she certainly wouldn’t call it peak condition. And as the Colossal Beetle continued to wait at the base of the tree, her health would only get worse.

Why was it still there? She had probably infringed upon its territory, but they had to have passed some other creatures in their chase. For whatever reason, it seemed determined to get to her, and her alone.

She examined it, trying to come up with a solution.

Could she sneak away?

She slowly moved closer to the trunk, and the voidspawn followed, never taking its eyes off of her.

“Oh come on! Don’t you have anything better to do?”

The beetle gave an enraged screech and once again rammed into the Ironwood Tree.

“Okay, fuck you too!”

She gripped onto her branch and maneuvered back to her original spot.

Really, she just needed healing. With her leg healed and the blue aura around her, she felt confident enough that she could outpace the beetle long enough to escape. It had caught her by surprise last time, but if she could get a solid head start, she’d be able to run away enough that it’d tire out.

Was there anything up here she could eat? The Ironwood Tree really just seemed like a ginormous tree made out of metal, and while there were fruit, they looked just as inedible as the rest of the plant.

That gave her an idea, though…

Could she drop something on it?

The fruits were certainly big enough to do some real damage. A moment later, she shook her head. Aside from the fact that she didn’t have any way of dislodging a fruit, the beetle was constantly watching her. It wouldn’t just stand there and let her kill it.

Well, whatever. She’d save that thought for later. The more pressing issue was her healing.

“Stupid Void, not letting me regenerate without food.”

She clenched her jaw. No matter how hard she thought, she couldn’t find a feasible idea, and each thought was more ridiculous than the last.

Swinging down on a cord of rope would just set her back in a disadvantaged chase.

Trying to ride the beetle would surely end up getting her killed.

Nabbing a random bird both relied on pure luck and could get her food poisoning, considering that she didn’t have anything to cook it.

“How ironic. I’m stuck in a giant tree and I can’t make a fire.”

Plus, any birds she found would most likely be voidspawn, meaning they’d leave behind nothing but a few useless credits.

She briefly considered eating herself, but other than the absolute atrocity of it —

Her eyes widened. Actually, maybe she was onto something. Yes, physically consuming her own flesh was gross and would most definitely do more harm than good, but her body ate itself all the time.

Every time that her glycogen stores dipped, her body switched to using fat for fuel. And when her fat dipped, it’d switch to muscle.

That was an oversimplification of it, but it sparked a thought in her brain.

Back when she had first woken up in the Void, she had been emaciated. She had thought that that was the Void taking away her talent, but talent wasn’t the same as physical prowess. Once her muscles were there, they should have stayed.

Instead, she had woken up nothing but skin and bones with a mist of healing energy diffusing her body. Healing energy that was sustaining her.

If she had been unconscious for enough time to become severely dehydrated, whatever was left of that dense spark she had used in the beginning must have been used up.

Which meant that the only place the healing energy could have come from was her own body, as a self-preservation mechanism.

Your understanding of the Mark of the Healer has reached the Intermediate Level.

“Yes!”

She immediately sat down, opening up her sixth sense.

Yes, there were some holes in her theory, but the System’s notification seemed to point to the fact that she was right.

And if there was anything that she had learned from her years of training, it was that with enough training, nearly any function of the body could be mastered.

She could feel the void in her spirit, the empty space in which her healing energy would normally rest. She could feel her body’s desire to produce more, its memory of the incredible rush of power she had felt when was had been one with the Void.

But also its reluctance to do so without fuel actively coming in.

Of course. The body never wanted to draw on its reserves of fat or muscle when it thought that there was food already available. Early humans had needed those reserves for when they were hunting prey over dozens of miles. In the relatively cushy environment that was the modern world, her body was content to demand more food to fuel its endeavors.

But now she was backed in a corner, in a life or death situation similar to the ones that her ancestors had faced.

And if she wanted to survive, she needed to run.

Something sparked in her spirit, and she pulled on it, willing her body to perform as it had after her stasis.

It hurt her to think that she was burning herself for fuel, but right now it was the only option she had.

And it worked wonderfully.

A golden-green aura burst around her, and healing energy flooded into her system, smoothing over countless minor injuries in a breath. In the next, it concentrated on her leg, sending a wave of euphoria through her flesh as the skin closed.

She closed her eyes, reveling in the bliss. Not only did this new technique draw far more energy than her passive renewal, but her increased understanding seemed to directly affect her usage of the energy. It flowed smoother than before, and even as the volume increased, so did the density.

By the time that her leg had finished healing, she hadn’t expended even a tenth of her new stores. She reluctantly shut off the aura, hesitant to waste more of her precious energy standing around.

She examined her wrist, and sure enough, she thought that it had gotten just the tiniest bit skinnier. That made sense, she supposed. Conservation of mass, and all that. However, the difference wasn’t enough to be noticeable, and she would more than make up for it with the use of her blue aura.

She opened her backpack, bringing out the Voidspawn Encyclopedia.

Now it was time to prepare.

* * *

Liz silently dropped onto the ground, immediately hurling one of her medals off into the distance. The beetle looked towards the thrown object for just a second, and that gave her the opportunity to land and start sprinting away.

The bright hue of her blue aura instantly drew the voidspawn’s gaze back onto her, and she cast a brief glance back, making sure that it was following her.

A long stretch of rope was wrapped around her arm, and it trailed along behind her, rising up into a large knot around one of the tree’s lower branches.

The rope would be a crucial part of her plan.

As expected, the beetle was mindlessly charging towards her.

“Come and get me, you big bug!”

Healing energy circulated through her limbs, letting her just barely outpace it as she ran up to the edge of the clearing.

About fifty meters out from the Ironwood Tree, she stopped, quickly pivoting and sprinting directly towards the beetle.

The action only served to enrage it more, and it barreled towards her with all the subtlety and force of a charging bull. And, like a matador, she threw herself out of the way, tumbling to a stop and pulling the rope taught around the beetle’s carapace.

If it had wanted to, it could have easily torn the rope from her hands. However, it just slowed to a halt, turning around and beginning its charge once more.

And, as it again began its furious pace towards her, she threw herself out of the way once more.

Her muscles ached with the exertion, but with the blue aura flared around her at full force, they just barely managed to fulfill their duties.

It was working!

Four more times the beetle charged, and four more times she dodged to the side. By then, the rope had created a loose web of string, but the Colossal Beetle’s legs were far too powerful to be stopped by her feeble pulling. So she hadn't tried.

Instead, every time that she had dodged, she had made sure to leave a large amount of loose rope between the creature’s legs. They were currently all arranged parallel to the beetle’s torso, but as she completed her fifth and final dodge, she threw the entire spool of rope underneath the beetle’s body and out the other side.

Then, as she retrieved the spool and rushed over to the tree, she finally pulled. The beetle was rushing towards her, but the blue aura helped her pull it faster than the beetle could run.

Twenty meters from the tree, the rope finally grew taught. Two of the beetle’s hind legs were bound together, and though the force of the creature’s struggling yanked to her to knees, the damage was already done.

As the voidspawn noticed the hindrance in its limbs, it instinctively pulled them outwards, trying to free them from the taut loops binding them together. Yet, the more it struggled, the tighter the rope got, until it finally made a mistake in its gait.

A mistake which released the final amount of slack in the loop.

Liz gave a final pull of the rope, and the beetle fell to the forest floor, struggling against its self-imposed prison.

Liz rushed over to Colossal Beetle, quickly tying another few knots around the affected legs. It furiously tried to shift itself onto her, but without the use of all of its legs, it was useless.

“It actually worked!”

She breathed a sigh of relief, silently thanking the Voidspawn Encyclopedia for its knowledge. The Void might have been able to magically create a creature far too big to exist naturally, but it hadn’t abolished the square-cube law.