With a bellow and a yell, Kai and Dandelion charged the swaying tower of skeletons resting against the warding hedge of the menagerie. A skeleton lancer, who seemed to be in charge of the entire operation, tried to intercept them, but Kai deftly maneuvered his barkbody beneath its bony lance and continued on. Dandelion wasn’t quite quick enough to dodge the backswing, and the fiend went tumbling as the skeleton knight’s spear hit it squarely in the chest.
“Keep going,” Dandelion yelled as it got back to its feet, apparently uninjured, and swung a haymaker at the mounted minion. “Got to make sure they don’t get out!”
Kai knew that, but it wasn’t particularly helpful to hear, and he scowled as he pushed his barkbody to even greater speed. The construct’s feet slapped across the ground, and with a mighty leap Kai crashed into the skeletons. He knocked the tower down and landed hard on the ground, listening carefully for the sound of something snapping – his barkbody had been getting knocked around too much lately – and was relieved when none of his indicators went red. He had enough to do today as it was.
Pulling on his control vines, Kai stood his barkbody back up and raised its fists. The skeletons looked like they were itching for a fight, and the bonsai treant’s sap urged him to oblige. Spring was in the air now, and Kai could feel his Green Spirit getting stronger by the day.
They needed to learn that their attempts to escape were doomed to failure, he decided, so he’d knock some sense into the troublemakers before getting to the rest of his work.
A skeleton knight advanced, its sword and shield raised and ready, but it was too slow to be a proper threat. Kai danced out of range by the time it swung, then darted inside its guard and landed a quick jab on the skeleton’s chattering jaw. It fell backwards, rattling on the grass, and the [Menagerie Caretaker] dealt with some of its friends the same way. He bobbed and weaved until he was surrounded by a collection of fallen skeletons. Of course, he hadn’t hit them hard enough to cause any real damage, but it should deter them from causing any more trouble that day.
Dandelion successfully unseated the skeleton lancer and commandeered its horse and weapon, riding the clackety creature over to help its master subdue the rest of the minions. The fiend was grinning as it swung and swept the lance, and the two companions fought back to back until the mob of skeletons decided that they’d had enough and stopped attacking them.
Kai watched them skulk away and sighed with relief. While that’d been a fun little distraction, he couldn’t afford to waste time with more skeleton shenanigans.
He used [Shift Consciousness] to exit his barkbody, and received a collection of notifications as he emerged from the top.
[Congratulations, you are now a Level 17 Barkbody Pilot!]
[Might +1]
[You can now use the Perfect Spacing skill!]
The bonsai treant grinned. [Perfect Spacing], huh? Now that sounded pretty nifty! He had half a mind to call the skeletons back over so that he could properly test it, but he didn’t. His sap was sweetening now that his thirst for battle had been slaked.
“You should give the lancer back its horse,” he told Dandelion. “The poor thing looks totally lost without it.”
That was true; the lancer in question was just…standing there, as dejected and pitiable as it was possible for a skeleton to be.
The fiend hurried to obey, stabbing the lance into the ground and sliding down from the mount. The bone horse returned to its owner and the skeleton hopped back on, looking as if everything was right in the world once more.
“They’re getting better,” Dandelion said as it sagged down to the ground to rest. “Thought they were going to escape there.”
“Same here,” muttered Kai as he looked up at the graying leaves atop his warding hedge. Winter had gone on too long; the power inside his barrier was slowly starting to bleed away, which emboldened the minions into thinking they had a chance to get out.
He’d have to give it another infusion of Green Spirit sooner rather than later. If he had any to spare after finishing his rounds he’d do it that evening. Maybe Dandelion could help.
A trio of absolutely gigantic ghost slimes floated past, their shimmering bodies inflating and deflating as if they were breathing. For reasons he still didn’t understand, their diet – which was almost entirely refined ectoplasm now – made it so that they regularly changed size. That morning, for example, those three had all been no bigger than Kai was. He watched them bob up and down like apples in a bucket of water until they bounced off the warding hedges, then gestured for Dandelion to follow him in the opposite direction.
“Come on, let’s go check on the frost slimes.”
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The frost slime enclosure was a shallow pit on the far end of the menagerie, surrounded by a fence of cheap wood and broken bits of stone that Vee’s orchestra had collected at Kai’s request. It wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it was effective at corralling the ever-increasing number of frost slimes that were held inside, and Kai was grateful for it.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to fix it up and make it prettier as soon as he could, of course. Once spring arrived properly, look out! His plans were as big an ancient oak was wide, he just needed the last bits of snow to finally melt and the weather to be a bit warmer so that he could put them into action.
He stared down at the ooze and squinted. There were…more frost slimes than there’d been that morning, even though Pretzel hadn’t given birth to any that day.
That meant they had to be splitting.
Right now, that wasn’t too big of a deal, as the dungeon needed more minions than it had and the menagerie had plenty of room. However, if the trend continued long enough, they wouldn’t have enough space for anything but slimes, and Kai knew that Vee didn’t want Crestheart to just be a slime dungeon. He’d have to talk to the [Dungeon Master] about it and see if he could get him to increase the amount of frost slimes the dungeon threw at adventurers each run to make sure that didn’t happen.
Now of course, it’d be just as bad if Crestheart used too many slimes, so Kai and Vee would have to work out the – what had the elders back in the grove called it? Oh, right! – the maximum sustainable yield of the ooze.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Kai groaned as he tried to recall the various calculations that went into such a thing, because the first thing he thought of was that he needed to start taking notes about how fast the slimes were reproducing.
He hated taking notes; he’d always hated taking notes. During the long winters back in the grove, he’d made every duty trade he could to get out of having to work as a scribe for the elders during their meetings. It’d been so boring that the few times he’d been forced to it had caused him to nearly rip out his leaves in frustration.
Still, it was his job to manage the menagerie, and Vee needed to know how the slime population was changing. Kai believed in doing his job. He reached up and plucked a leaf from his upper branches, then readied some sap and started writing.
Population of frost slimes increasing. Needs observation. As soon as possible.
There. That was probably good enough for starters. He’d have Dandelion actually count the frost slimes – telling himself that it’d be good for the fiend to get some more practice with its numbers and figures so that he didn’t have to face the reality that he just didn’t want to do it himself – and once they had a few periods of growth data to pull from, he’d start actually crunching numbers.
But enough slimes! Kai was eager to go check on his other project. He jogged through the slush to reach his makeshift shed and looked up at all the potted plants resting on the shelves. A warm sensation of pleasant excitement radiated toward him, and Kai couldn’t wait to meet all his new friends when they started to bloom. Just a few more weeks until they started arriving, and then he could get to work moving them to their new homes. It was going to take a couple years of good, hard work, but Kai was certain that he’d eventually transform “abandoned” Westown into something beautiful.
Humming happily, Kai climbed up to inspect each individual pot. He poked and prodded, making sure that roots and stems were where they should be. Since there were so many plants and he still had more work to do, the treant only spent a few moments looking at each one, though he did spare some extra time for the roses, which were every bit as fussy and attention-demanding as they always were.
They’d be worth it in the end; Juniper had given him some lovely varieties that were sure to make his Verdant Construction as pretty as it could be. There were big red ones, and small orange ones, and tall yellow ones, and short blue ones, and fat purple ones, and…truthfully, too many to even count.
Sadly, a few of his other new flowers didn’t seem to be thriving the way they were supposed to be, so Kai and Dandelion infused them with some more Green Spirit. Though he felt a little drained thanks to still being Snowsapped, Kai carefully pressed some health watchers into the soil of the plants that he felt needed them most. The tiny parasitic seeds would let him know if the Green Spirit failed to take effect on the intended recipients.
In such a case, he’d have to come back for a more direct intervention, though he hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.
In the back of the shed was a large worm box and a few compost bins. After convincing Vee that there was a marked difference between soil and dirt, Do and the other [Dungeon Maintainers] had built the vessels for Kai, and the treant had plans to get several more. Juniper was giving him her food scraps from the Lobby, but Kai needed more organic matter to break down. After all, trying to grow a garden without healthy soil was like trying to pilot a barkbody without [Shift Consciousness].
Impossible.
But that was a problem for another time. Leaving the shed, Kai and Dandelion made their way over to the elementals pen. Along their route, they passed the large empty enclosures that would soon hold the dungeon’s new bone hounds once they arrived. Kai still wanted to beef up the wall a little bit so that they couldn’t jump over or dig under too easily. He was starting to believe that all skeletal creatures were troublemakers, and combining that with the natural mischief dogs tended to get into seemed like a worrisome proposition. He just hoped that he’d be able to get it done before they arrived.
“Well, how are we looking?” Kai asked at the gate to elementals pen. He liked letting Dandelion handle this check on his own; the elders back home had always taught him that good leaders let their underlings take responsibility for a project or two of their own.
“Fire elementals are good but think the frost elementals are stuck together again,” Dandelion said as it walked up to the fence and peered over. It pointed down. “Big clump there isn’t moving.”
Kai shook his branches in frustration. “Seriously? That’s the third time this week! Impossible!”
“See for yourself.”
Dandelion bent down and picked Kai up so that the bonsai treant could see that, yes indeed, the frost elementals had frozen to one another.
“I don’t get it,” Kai said. “Why does this keep happening?”
“Unsure, master. Apologies.”
Kai had explained the concept of a rhetorical question to his apprentice more than once, but the fiend still struggled to identify them from time to time. He didn’t bother doing so again.
“What do you propose we do to get them separated?”
“Maybe use fire elementals to loosen them, then go break them apart?”
“Good idea,” Kai said. “You go ahead and get started on that while I go get my barkbody, and then once we’re done separating them we’ll build some dividers or something afterwards too so that this doesn’t happen again.”
Dandelion nodded. “Understood, master.”
It climbed up over the fence to get to work while Kai headed back to where he’d left his barkbody. He didn’t mind the wasted time at all; if anything it was good that he wouldn’t have to be around the fire elementals while they were spitting their sparks. He’d gotten better at keeping his cool around fire, but it was still something he wanted to be away from as much as possible.
Once he was back inside his wooden construct, Kai made his way over to the scrapwood pile and started looking for pieces that would serve as suitable deterrents to future frost elemental amalgamations. The dividers didn’t need to be too thick, but Kai wanted them to be straight and sturdy. He picked up a few here and there and started making a new pile, only to drop everything when he heard a familiar clattering sound near the warding hedges behind him.
“Dandelion!” he yelled as he realized what was happening. “Forget the elementals for now! The skeletons are trying to escape again!”
Picking up one of his wood pieces to use as a cudgel – how he missed his barkbody mallet! – Kai sprinted over in the direction of the sound and saw the skeletons arranging a crude ladder made of bones and sticks. Now how had they built that?
A few seconds later he had it, thanks to [Assess Situation], one of his newest – and most useful – [Menagerie Caretaker] skills. They’d used their weapons, scraps they’d scrounged up here and there…and one of the lancer’s horses, if Kai’s eyes weren’t playing a nasty trick on him. The treant swore.
“You stupid skeletons need to learn your lessons!” he cried. “You. Are. Not. Going. To. Escape!”
He charged in, hoping that the skeletons could put the horse back together again once he foiled their efforts; he didn’t think he and Dandelion would be able to do it on their own, and skeleton lancers weren’t cheap!
Far behind the scrum, a lone skeleton lancer stood by itself. Its horse was currently the rungs of the makeshift ladder, but it didn’t seem to mind. A scrap of faded cloth was wrapped around its shoulders, flapping in the breeze.
Kai's and Dandelion's Character Sheets:
Kai Ginficus:
Primary Class: Menagerie Caretaker (Vee Vales), Level 19
Secondary Class: Barkbody Pilot (Pachi Palmatum), Level 16
Tertiary Class: Verdant Builder(Self), Level 8
Might: 15 (+1)
Wit: 6
Faith: 14
Green Spirit (Snowsapped): 24 (Normally 34)
Adventurousness: 11
Guts: 11
Citizenship: 5
Mentoring: 8
Patience: 6
Dandelion
Primary Class: Menagerie Caretaker’s Apprentice (Kai Ginficus), Level 13
Secondary Class: Gardener (Kai Ginficus), Level 6
Might: 12 (+2)
Wit: 10
Faith: 8
Endurance: 10 (+1)
Green Spirit: 6
Bashfulness: 4
Citizenship (Bound - Vee Vales): 1