Evolution Complete! Ash Heather

Style: Stalk and Slay

These cats might look like the softest pillows in the animal kingdom, but beneath that legendary fur lurks a body built tough. With brainpower just above the minimum threshold, they are somewhat capable of tactics and evasiveness as well.

I continued to be unsure why my System kept hammering in my lack of Intelligence and Wisdom, but whatever. This time I’d chosen that path, so while I felt nonplussed about it, I felt non…minused about it too.

But there were more pressing matters to attend to, like the question of how I was gonna spend the rest of tonight!

Reed’s footsteps buoyed me along. As night reigned, she and I made a winding way through the mountain’s woodlands. The rain had calmed down significantly, but it was still drizzling. Having been out in the rain for about two hours straight quite recently, I wasn’t bothered so much by the water at this point. Reed, however, was starting to sneeze.

“It’s totally my fault,” she’d said at the campsite, laughing it off. “I could’ve easily brought an umbrella or a poncho earlier.” Then her voice had grown distant. “I’m sorry…I was just…not thinking.”

When I’d proposed to her that we wrestle—by pointing first to her sword, then to my claws, then barking and rolling around at mach speed—she politely declined. She didn’t wanna wrestle precariously close to the fire. Nor did she wanna wrestle in the rain. But I was such an Experience hog that it was the only thing I really wanted to do. And I was restless enough, fresh off of a long slumber, that I wasn’t ready to just poke around camp.

“Oh!” Reed had said, pointing a modest finger in the air. “If you want some physical activity, you can go exploring.”

Yay! I jumped to my feet and made a beeline for the woods. Then I looked over my shoulder to make sure that she came alo—

She was still sitting there?

I was used to going alone, wasn’t I? So this was no big deal?

But…I liked the extra security, and…and also she was nice.

No, not just that! I wanted to see her in action! Not just running around or planting one blow in a shadow-beast, but some actual, sword-slinging antics! Maybe I could prod her to do some showing off.

I’d widened my eyes and lowered my ears, putting on my weepy look, and given her a come-along gesture with my paw.

“Aw, I didn’t mean for this to come off like a rejection,” she’d said. “Of course I’ll come along.”

My tail had wriggled in delight. Not like a dog’s tail, which is more of a wiggle. Like the shaking of a dangling noodle. You’d have to see it.

Now she was walking by my side through the forest, trying to hold her umbrella over the two of us and, for the most part, failing.

As giddy as I had been about the idea of facing off against Reed’s buster sword and seeing how much EXP she’d radiate, having her as an adventuring partner was the next best thing. I wondered if walking around without light was typical for her. I wondered if she frequently went hunting. I wondered what she’d been doing last night when she shot that wolf. Agh! Just a flood of random questions. All in due time, Taipha.

“Taipha”…

It occurred to me that in my sad struggle to share my name with Reed, I’d made a huge oversight.

I didn’t have to say my name, I just had to share it. I could really just write it. Maybe that would turn out easier.

The last time I’d tried reading human words beyond my System’s text alerts, it’d just looked like soup. Knowing that illegible things were letters, and letters that I’d seen before, had the potential to be massively frustrating.

But then I looked at it this way: reading letters wasn’t the same as writing them. All it took to write was to hold an image in my head and copy it. Step one was pretty much automatic for me, so—

A cackle came from the trees ahead. I stopped in my tracks and swiveled my head. Reed stopped with me.

“You wanna go after it?” she whispered.

I looked at her with my shiny yellow eyes and nodded.

“…You wanna know what it is?” she said, a little worried.

Um…yeah? Unless it was a big bad evil spirit, in which case maybe I didn’t wanna know? Why would she ask that?

I didn’t know how to express that. Reed was confusing me too much.

I turned toward the cackling and scampered. Too bad I couldn’t use my new Stealth Trait to go that little bit faster, not with Reed nearby—but now that I’d Evolved, I had an uptick in Speed anyway.

Reed followed a few steps, but no further. I heard her replace her “protective” umbrella with a sword. Backup. Although…maybe she should’ve found a way to keep the umbrella out too? Maybe balanced on her head? Colds aren’t fun.

I tried to help her keep a good idea of where I was. After running several meters downslope, I now stopped at the base of a pine tree, directly below the source of the sound. I had a theory about what had made it, and now I twisted my head and neck slowly from side to side, squinting, smelling, trying to test that theory.

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I couldn’t see anything through the pine needles, except for blurs that might have been either animals or more pine needles. But I heard a fresh cackle, and it’d moved higher up into the tree.

Okay, whatever kind of animal this was, they had to be baiting me. Tonight I was feeling strong and safe enough to take that bait. Yes, even with my SP still far below baseline.

SP 19% (36/185)

Skills Swipe

SP Cost: 50

Leap

SP Cost: 30

Catnap

SP Cost: 30

Guard

SP Cost: 15

Meditate

SP Cost: 15

On second thought, every single one of my usable Skills was a horrible option for close combat. I could Leap and manage a quick escape, but…darn, was I really limited to defensive and evasive moves?

No, scratch that—my biggest frustration wasn’t the selection, it was still my SP! After all that work trying to get wiser and stuff, I was still severely limited. I’d known what kind of risk I was taking when I Evolved into the Ash Heather, and now I just had to hope that in a few more Levels I’d get some truly incredible, offensive Skill that costed less.

But I quit chiding the System and chiding myself. What’s done is done. And I dismissed my sudden question of whether using Meditate might raise my SP temporarily somehow with the simplest answer of all: action. Direct and change-making action.

I got out my claws and stuck them in the tree bark.

No pretense of silent secrecy here, just the threatening thunk of wood punctured by nature’s daggers. I scaled the tree and felt like some rogue climbing up a guard tower.

With ATK this high, I might not need a Skill.

I remained kind of a slow climber, not only going down but coming up. At least my Evolution did, again, give me boosts. I felt like I was having an easier time navigating my climb, judging which part of the tree to scale next. Like all those points in Intelligence weren’t just for show after all.

I got higher and higher, and then I saw a flash. It was a reflective green eye, winking shut. To humans, it would have read as “angry.” But unless that creature was an ape or a bizarre magical creature, it could only have been the face of…

An owl! A little brown screeching owl who flapped their little wings and danced from foot to foot. I was just below their branch when they pranced over, stood just above me, and cackled in my face: “Cah-hah-hah-hah!”

I hissed loudly back—not just because the sound was annoying, but also in hopes of tipping a distant Reed off. The battle was here.

Hoping to shock the owl, I jumped off the tree trunk and onto the branch, my paws coming straight for them. The bird was half my size, definitely not as threatening as the worst of the owls I’d run from. But they were twice my Speed—they hopped to the side. I banged my legs against the branch, but I was prepared for the blow. Looping my paws around the branch, I swung my lower legs up, scrabbled upright—and then we were both steady on the battlefield, poised.

My typical strategy was to go fast and go far, but it dawned on me now that that wouldn’t work so well on such a fragile, thin stage. If I gave chase, the owl could come after me…or ignore me. The best tactic seemed to be to let this owl strike first.

The owl was more than willing. With a quick step back, they opened their beak wide. A massive, monstrous retching sound beyond anything I’d imagined that owl could make came pouring out, an echo that wrecked my ears. It rattled the tree itself—down to the roots.

I froze in utter shock as the sound swamped my ears and body. It felt way more devastating than it should have, adding new aches to my limbs even as I stood there doing nothing but enduring. What kind of weird attack was this?

HP 77% (177/230)

There was no physical contact, yet my Health went down… Was this what offensive magic was like when it wasn’t attached to claws and shells?

Huh. It wasn’t as cool as wolf fires and ice beams.

The owl kept screaming and my Health kept sliding down. I started moving forward, but was met with a surprise: a pressure like a strong wind, seemingly far too strong to have come from the puny owl it was coming from. These magic soundwaves doubled as a gale-force wind…no, a gale-force force keeping me in place.

I might’ve Leaped forward to bridge the gap, but I was so afraid of squandering my SP on a failure of a pounce that I held bad. And yet…ugh! If I couldn’t get close enough to Swipe, then what was the point?

Wait! I saw what the universe was trying to do. This was probably the perfect time for me to use Guard!

—Wait, no, not Guard, the magical Guard! Meditate! Phew, that was almost a disaster.

While the idea of pausing to enter a state of tranquility during pitched combat did scare me, I hadn’t yet hit half Health, so I was just willing enough to try.

Meditate.

Time seemed to slow down.

I knew it wasn’t any slower. This wasn’t the power of a rusty rock. This was a moment of clarity, a spark in the mind’s eye. It felt like a tiny aura explosion in my brain had snapped all my senses to full attention. That was the conscious change that Meditate made within me. The unconscious change was the way my body and breathing shifted. It was the way that explosion of aura seeped into every fiber of my being. All this was a power-up, but a subtle one. I guessed that was why it raised Wisdom and not something more easily quantifiable.

WIS 26 (+50%)

The sonic blasts hadn’t stopped, and they were still hurting me, but somehow they hurt a lot less. What once felt like a harsh wind had all the power of a breeze.

I no longer had enough SP to even use a Leap, but what I could do was double down on my ferocity and hope that the owl would be too scared to change strategies.

For a few moments, I played innocent, “suffering” under the “brutal” gust…and then I went for it. I sped forward, discovering that with the boost in Wisdom came a boost in my whole body’s resistance to this magical force. Though I felt like I was running underwater, that was way better than the old feeling of an irresistible wall.

With a tiny but determined feral-cat roar, I slashed the owl with all my might, and bared my fangs in rage.

The owl hadn’t seen it coming. My claws, slicing fast and frantic, scored their face and front, sending them spiraling off the branch. Their sonic attack was replaced by a single fading yelp, and then—

Plop.

EXP: 74% (1114/1500)

“Do you…want me to kill them?” Reed cried, hesitant, down below.

No need for that, thanks. I was already feeling accomplished enough.