Before I could try to understand what that [System] notification exactly meant, I patted Oncli on his unwounded shoulder. “I’m not sure what came over me, or why I did that. Are you ok?”

“I feel… better.” He stood tall as he responded, and I noticed that he was indeed holding himself higher, his arm didn’t seem to pain him as much, and Oncli had seemed to recover a bit. He still limped and wouldn’t be a front liner for a hunt any time soon, but he’d continued to regain mobility and had seen some recovery through my speaking of the “First of the Words of Power of Nievtala”.

And who was Nievtala?

[Nievtala is the one that was worshipped as the goddess of Victory, Conquest, and Power by the Saharlian Empire.]

As I retreated from the rest of the pack, I mused over that. I’d never heard of that empire. Or any, for that matter. Or any specific gods. All the tribes I’d ever met in the Martanimi jungles hadn’t worshipped any specific deity and I’d never met a people calling themselves member of an empire. The people I’d known had only sworn by the suns and stars, and that was far from deifying the glowing things in the skies, but just from the fact that celestial bodies are constant. The four lesser suns orbit the primary one, the moon comes in its patterns, the stars can be used to navigate and so on. There… aren’t really gods, right?

[The Administrative Body assures you that there are beings so far beyond your comprehension as to be effectively divine to you. The Administrator scoffs and insists that the Body simply agree that there are gods, Nievtala among them. The Administrative Body retains silence.]

So, there’s something up there, or somewhere. But these Words of Power were far different from the ones I’d spoken as a person, and weren’t used to Call anything, so far as I could tell.

[The Words of Power of a deity are vastly different from the Words of Power of manipulating the base magics of the world that the user is familiar with.]

Which, compounding with what I’d heard before, meant that I couldn’t use the Speaking ability I’d known before, and that there was something special about Speaking, but I couldn’t tell what that was. Nothing beyond that was told me, so instead I turned my attention to the instructions on how to receive the “magic manipulating organ”.

[Continue to develop your magical manipulations. The user has manipulated magical energies three times thus far, with two different elements. However, due to the keelish’s innate predisposition against magic, in order for a keelish to develop a magic manipulating organ, they must effectuate a magical phenomenon instead of simple magical manipulation before the development of said organ.]

Then it was going to be nearly impossible to develop this “magic manipulating organ”. To my understanding, the differences between “manipulating magic” and a “magical phenomenon” were like that between the brightness of the stars and the suns. A child’s ability to make the flames flicker with a Phrase was a manipulation, and a student’s ability to cause the flames to surge in power was a phenomenon. Was that correct?

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[The Administrator reminds you that your “Magic” stat is still quite low, and there are physical advantages to your form.]

Yes, the body of a reptile that is built for killing mostly harmless frogs. Great.

I shook my head and took myself out of the narrow focus that I’d found myself in after hearing “magic”. The Administrator was right, my strength right now was that of pure physical violence. That was what was serving me in my hunts, and while magic would be an additional leg up, I didn’t have it and I couldn’t slow myself in the hopes that I might get it. After all, I was only eight days post my hatching, and four days away from the next Stats boost. I needed to get the rest of the pack hunting new prey so that they could become [Exceptional Individuals] in time before the next “growth”. Then, I would be in a position to subjugate the rest of the swarm.

…

Three days passed in a flash as I finally forced Sybil and all the more reticent members of the pack into hunts. They were mostly uneventful, with me, Took, and Foire leading smaller packs out into places where we could find new prey that wouldn’t slaughter us. Foire was lucky enough to locate a dulgar colony, which I immediately had every member of the pack hunt individually and I hoped that that would provide sufficient growth for most individuals. The discovery of the colony itself had come with a near death from one of the weaker members of his pack, but fortunately there hadn’t been any casualties.

Dulgars were a strange subterranean creature, living in places where the ground was firm enough for them to carve out extensive burrowing networks. They weren't scaled like us keelish, but were still armored. Instead of fur or scales, Dulgar had thick skin that covered its body almost like plating. Their narrow faces were well built to fit into tunnels, and their powerful claws were a deterrent, but they weren't warriors by any stretch of imagination.

Still, they were deceptively strong, and hunted by laying rudimentary pitfalls above their burrows, from where they would drag their hapless victims. Sybil had observed a couple of hunts and then had rather easily dispatched one before looking to me in the hopes of being dismissed back to the comfortable and safe den. It wasn’t to be, and I’d dragged her and a couple others into a nearby stand of trees where I’d suspected a hultzi lived.

If we’d all still been the size of hatchlings, we could easily have been picked off by our prey, but with our size and a couple of the pack willing to hide in the branches above, we could bring the creature down. Full grown, a hultzi was about the size of an average adult’s torso and deceptively heavy despite their ability to fly. Thus, I was relatively sure that Sybil and others in that pack would qualify for the [Skill]. I’d recommended the signs of a hultzi to the rest of the pack, especially Foire, in the hopes that they would be able to take one down but had yet to have any luck.

Regardless of my meticulous planning and hoping, I couldn’t guarantee that any of the pack had qualified for [Exceptional Individual] beyond Oncli, Took, Treel, Foire, Vefir, Sybil, and Brutus. I thought that at least half of the rest had, but I could only hope. Regardless, we would go on one hunt after the “growth” before initiating the absolute takeover of Shemira’s pack. Then, hopefully, we could ensure that most of the stragglers caught up before the next six days passed.

And so, I laid to sleep with hopes of the pack’s growth on my mind.