Just when I expected Chora to take a soul-deep breath and sprint back to the cabin to get food for our journey, sweat flying in her wake, I remembered that yeah duh people have Inventories. She’d most likely done that already. Hers was hovering around both her ankles. Or maybe within them.
She simply bent down the way you might to tie your shoe, then pulled out a bottle of water with seamless, disturbing ease. No smoke or anything, much like Reed. She offered me a drink. Luckily, I was still in catgirl form, so I could just take the bottle with my human-y hands and glug. I did handle the bottle as if I was wearing mittens, but I was getting better and better with my hands, even if by a trickle every time I tried.
“You look like you might be confused by this—this Inventory,” she said.
I handed her back the bottle—half-empty—and half nodded.
“Yours is natural, right? Bound to you?”
That sounded rightish. I nodded.
“Humans don’t have that. I don’t think anyone else has that besides the soulbound, and maybe legendary creatures. But for us humans, Inventory comes from cantrips. There are many different kinds, so people generally personalize them to their tastes and styles. Reed has a piercing in her back, for instance. Bayce has lots of little attachments all over her, and they’re all for different things, which I think is ridiculous, but I suppose we’re all different.”
Eugh. She was really making a career out of feuding with Bayce.
“I keep my Inventory on my ankles as a challenge to myself. Like if I really need it, I should be willing to stop for it. If I’m running long-distance, for example, do I actually need water, or am I just saying that because I’m giving up early? Am I reaching my full potential? That sort of thing.”
You’re a very intense girl, Chora, and I think there’s a lot to appreciate about that. I poofed into a cat again, trying my best to show her a solemn appreciation by simply sitting calm and still.
Chora whistled out another sigh, took a look around the seemingly empty woods. “What shall we do now?”
I curled up, yawned, and embarked on a nice, restful nap. Not a Catnap, technically. Chora would guard me. She would need to guard me for hours.
“Am I…guarding you?”
“Mmmeow.”
***
HP 46% (151/325) SP 60% (161/270)
I must’ve awakened about four hours later. The world still felt fresh, but now the sky had definitively turned its normal blue. Thin, slithery clouds trailed and looped across. The tweets of benevolent birds filled the air. So did Chora’s somewhat aggravated breath. Good thing she was good at bottling up her aggravation. Or at least decent… Look, some people didn’t even try, so it’s the comparison that counts.
She was sitting cross-legged not far from me, so that as I woke up and straightened upright, I saw her slight but muscular frame in dramatic shade in front of the risen sun, casting a shadow over me.
“Welcome back,” she said, barely turning.
In response, I barely nodded. Then I took a look at my stuff:
Inventory: 5/5 Chora’s Crystal Ring
Robin Corpse
Debug Blade
Koi Corpse x2
Plimpberry Pancake
I took out the robin corpse and feasted upon it. It was nourishing! It healed no HP or SP.
After that, I forced down the pancake. It…didn’t actually heal that much SP after all, and it wasn’t worth the taste.
SP 78% (211/270)
Hm, so that gave me back…about 50 SP, didn’t it? Math truly was the way.
I wasn’t totally refreshed, but I had enough, at least I hoped so. Things would be easier with a battle partner by my side.
Then we were off.
The woods were hilly, uneven, and even a little dry and bare here. Dusty clumps of rock punched through the tall grasses, giving me lots of tiny valleys to dart through and Chora something like an obstacle course. For a human, she was doing an admirable job. The way she moved was unlike Reed and definitely nothing like Bayce: she was neither an artisan of the woods nor an urbanite who occasionally took wilderness photos, but self-consciously athletic. When she stumbled—which was rare—she cinched her eyebrows for a moment, as if cursing herself for the failure. When she succeeded, she looked effortlessly cool. She wasn’t a natural hunter, no. She was well-practiced, which I guessed was the closest to untamed instinct a typical human could get.
Chora was also curious about the forest in a way the other humans hadn’t seemed to be. Her head swung erratically to catch sounds and sights. She felt tree trunks and branches and hanging vines as we passed them, as if those things were never known to have thorns.
Eventually the path became almost zigzaggy, almost mountainous. Patchy grass turned into patchy dirt, then roadlike dirt paths that started nowhere and ended up in dead-end thickets. Sharp rocks were common, rearing up like baby mountains.
Dragonflies, regular flies, and even a few glittering butterflies kept passing through. I loved springing up with a spontaneous jump and just—barely missing them. Missing nine butterflies makes the one catch sweeter.
On the tenth, successful time, I hit the ground on my side with a dusty thud. I still had enough HP to absorb the blow.
HP 45% (145/325)
EXP: 63% (1313/2100)
Plus, apparently the butterflies were substantially more powerful than other insects, because they were giving me a bit more Experience. Maybe there was a pecking order: flies, beetles, dragonflies, butterflies, those horrifying crickety chirps…and then the monstrous insect-behemoths that I had no proof of but was positive had to exist in a fantasy world such as this one.
Anyway, the butterfly twitched and died under my paw. Its beautiful yellow wings, spotted with luminous orange, calmly settled onto the dirt.
“Nice,” said Chora. It must’ve been the first word she’d said in two hours.
Now she looked back and forth between me and my catch, expecting something.
…Deep down I did wanna eat it, but if it killed me and sent me on my fourth life, Sierra would never let it go, so…
I decided to put the butterfly’s body into my Inventory. The way Chora’s eyes dwelled on it told me that humans found butterfly corpses as attractive as I did, even if they were corpses and therefore gross and morbid.
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With that, we forged ahead—and stopped within seconds.
From the top of a modest, stony hill, I saw a battle that I wasn’t sure I wanted to interrupt.
Turning to Chora, I did a cat impression of a human raising a finger to their lips and shushing. Did it look ridiculous? I won’t say that it didn’t. But it made Chora hesitate, so whatever works.
She hid behind the rock I was standing on and peeked around it at the clearing.
The attacker: a magpie. Twice the size of the sparrows from my old home, lithe and nimble on their feet like a crow, the bird hopped in half circles around their foe: a raccoon. Under the raccoon’s front paws was what appeared to be an orange peel speckled with age and grime. A streak of other human trash stretched behind the raccoon, and clearly most of its valuable leavings had been eaten already. Or stolen, maybe, by the magpie?
Though my memories of the battle from earlier were kind of hazy, on account of the absolute mayhem it was, I knew that raccoons got a Skill that made their teeth red-hot and almost drill-like. (Did their teeth literally spin in their skulls? Hopefully not, because that’d be disgusting.) If that raccoon hooked their claws into the magpie and got a decent bite in, the match could end then and there. But clearly the magpie had, in addition to distance, more agility.
The magpie hopped forward, stabbed their beak into the raccoon’s side, and fluttered away almost in a single brisk moment—and all the raccoon could do was snap at the air with useless teeth.
Chora looked at me, and I locked eyes with her. There was a question in her eyes, the simplest of all questions: not “what should we do?” but “…should we do?”
While I didn’t want to get hurt at all right now, at least not by anything more nefarious than passing dragonflies or my own fool self, I did have some pretty insatiable curiosity. Was there anything rascally we could do to these two? Any trap, any means of finding out the true powers of a magpie?
Hm, maybe if I looped around and took advantage of their blind spots…assuming they had blind spots—
Eh?
Oh. As I was thinking through that idea, I idly swirled my paw in the air a little. Chora had been watching me, and she took that as a signal—she was already rubbing her hands together in preparation. Y-you do you, I guess!
Then she flicked her right arm to the side, away from me. A ripple of air magic arced away from her hand, flying in a great curve like a boomerang toward the two opponents.
It hit the ground with the impact of a small pebble, and less damage.
Both the magpie and the raccoon looked its way. They found nothing. Better yet, they were looking a full ninety degrees away from us.
Both were cautious, and more importantly, both were still ours to potentially toy with.
Y’know, there was a chance—even if a slim chance—that I could take them on some way.
I was calculating it now. One Leap from me couldn’t clear the distance from here to there, and it couldn’t even get me close enough for a strike right after. Too risky. But! I could make it in a single bound if I was a little larger, like, say, human-sized. As long as my Leap got a little longer to match, that is.
But if I failed, I had Chora here as my personal janitor.
Sierra—dethroned! I had a new life manager now!!
The magpie lunged, pecking the raccoon’s face, and that was when I went for it. Transforming and Leaping at almost the same moment, I hurtled through the air.
Yyyeeeeeahrgh! I latched onto the raccoon with ease. And then it became less easy because this raccoon was so much smaller than my humanoid form—it was more like tackling a football. When I say I “latched on,” I really mean that I sort of cradled the raccoon from above, caging them with my body.
Then I tore into their hide with a Slash! I had kinda missed using all the limbs at my disposal. I growled and scratched with all my might. The raccoon under me tried to defend by curling up and glowing white, but it was no use, and they soon flopped over, tongue lolling, giving up.
Level Up!
Lv. 14 → Lv. 15 EXP: 0% (5/2250)
HP 100% (353/353) SP 100% (293/293)
ATK 56
INT 37
DEF 41 (+1!)
WIS 29 (+1!)
SPD 49
New Skill! Air Cutter: Sends a current of air toward your opponent.
SP Cost: 45
Sierra’s Tip: This move relies on INT, not ATK. It’s not going to be that strong for you, to be honest, but it’s good to have a ranged option or two, isn’t it?
That was a lot of info to process when I had a set of magpie talons headed straight for my face.
Quickly I swung my head to the side and countered with a near-instinctive Slash. Hoping to cut their midsection, I instead got the legs. A caw of pain filled the air, and the bird swerved away. They landed farther away from me, shaky on their injured feet. The claw marks looked like stripes across both legs, filling me with a rush of animal pride.
Not too far behind was Chora, peeking from behind the rock, my own audience. I would’ve turned and given a signal somehow that I was doing okay, but I bet she could tell. Not that her face showed it.
I couldn’t resist trying the new Skill. I flicked an air current at the magpie—almost like Chora would—and nicked their wing. Sierra was right, it really didn’t do much or even get much of a rise out of the magpie. It was so weak, in fact, that it raised the magpie’s spirits. They hopped a bit closer.
Here I was with a sample of my next enemy: one magpie out of what could’ve easily been a whole flock. I leaned back on my haunches (which I’m guessing is not the appropriate term when you’re a human, but…). And I gave the magpie a death stare. Honestly, it was more like an aggrieved pouty face—I wasn’t used to human faces at all, and unemotive cat skulls made this kind of thing so much simpler.
The magpie, in exchange, tilted their head.
And flew away…
But not before giving me a jackhammer-force peck behind the head.
“Raowr!” Turning and flailing my claws around did not secure the bird. They escaped, possibly to alert their family and friends. Dang. We really should have stuck to watching from afar.
HP 84% (297/353) SP 54% (158/293)
I changed into cat form and, with a slow sigh, walked back over to Chora. She stood up, dusted off her shins, and said, “Good work.”
I was nonplussed. “Meow.”
“I know. We’ll get back at them soon.”
At least getting a new Skill felt like a victory. Not only that…
image [https://imgur.com/cX4Aw3L.png]image [https://imgur.com/t0PxPiX.png]
Current Location: Maggie Rocks (S.B3)
…but it just occurred to me that we were one square away from where two lycanborns got me killed.
Werewolves, magpies, and the raccoons from earlier. Three birds with one stone?