Taking care of all the kids didn't turn out to be that bad. All of them were well-behaved and there weren't any that were really young, so no babies or toddlers. The youngest one out of the six kids was Lily's younger brother who was 5 and my nephew Josh was only a little older at 6.
Anna turned out to be the most troublesome and wouldn't stop bugging me all day. I was in charge of watching them so I had to keep them in sight, it also kept me in sight of them. I had been practicing my magical skills while turning my skills on and off to train wisdom. I didn't have an axe to swing so that left [Fortified Body]. The side effect of turning [Fortified Body] on was that mana illuminated my body as it was used to strengthen it. As soon as she saw that it was like a shark to blood.
"Come on Uncle Topher! I wanna see you glow!" She would demand.
"Glow!" and sometimes it was just a command.
I looked to Jonathan for help since it was his daughter and he just gave me a look that said, 'That's your problem buddy'. The other kids liked to see me glow too, but Anna loved it. She thought it was the coolest thing ever.
The day all went well until after lunch and I heard Jonathan shouting. I walked over to see Anna crying and Jonathan yelling at her. I lingered at a distance to not intrude, but I was curious as to what happened to make Jonathan angry. He was usually a chill guy and rarely raised his voice. It ended not long after and Anna ran crying away towards where I was.
"Come here, sweetie." I knelt and beckoned her over.
She took my invitation and walked into my arms. Lifting her was awkward with one working arm but I managed. It took her a minute to calm down and peel her face away from where it was buried in my shirt. The whole time I was making soothing gestures and saying calming words.
"There there, it's alright. Why don't you tell me what happened?" I asked after she calmed down.
"I -hiccup- don't know. Sniffle- I found Daddy lying down in our tent (cough) and I wanted him to play with me. I ran up and jumped on him to get his attention and he just started yelling at me." She was still working through her emotions so it was hard to make out the words from the sniffling and coughing.
Ah, I know what happened. She wanted her dad to play with her so she ran up and jumped on him to make him get up. Ran and jumped full force onto his leg... which hadn't healed yet. That must have been painful.
"It's ok honey. He's not mad at you, he's just not feeling good right now." I said while patting her on the back, "It's not your fault, you just have to be more careful."
It took a moment for her to calm the rest of the way down, and by that point, a handful of people had made it back to camp for our group training. I spotted Austin walking in and got an idea.
"Hey, Anna." I whispered in her ear.
"What?" She said back.
"You know who else can glow." I said. That got her to perk up.
"Who?" She asked excitedly.
"Cousin Austin." I answered.
By that point, I had made my way over to him with Anna in my arms. He couldn't hear what we were saying so he had no idea what was going on. He gave me a questioning look when he saw Anna had been crying but I just shook my head to have him drop it.
Anna whipped around so fast I almost dropped her before shouting at Austin, "You can glow too!"
"What are you talking about, I can't glow." Austin looked confused.
"Activate [Fortified Body]." I told him.
He still didn't quite understand what we were getting at but he complied with my request. After activating the skill he started to subtly glow from the mana.
"You liar! You can glow!" Anna chastised.
"Huh, I guess I can. I never really noticed it." He said while looking down at his hands.
"How come he glows a different color than you?" Anna said while pointing at Austin.
Now that she had asked I realized I didn't have an answer for her. I had noticed it before and at the time I hadn't really thought much about it. Being in the middle of a battle with a boar took my attention away from the odd detail. Later when I would have thought more about it, I had already forgotten. It was not at the top of my list of importance. I couldn't just tell her I didn't know either so I had to come up with something. If I just said 'I don't know' not only would it shatter my all-knowing persona, it would have her guess at the reason for hours. There was no telling when she would get distracted and focus on something else.
Racking my brain for anything that could be remotely plausible resulted in nothing. I had no clue why it was different colors, the only thing that I kept coming back to was that our mana was different colors. That didn't really fix the issue though, if I said that our mana was different colors she would just ask why, which would bring us right back to square one. I looked to Austin for help but he was useless. He looked like he was more confused about it than Anna was.
I went with an answer that could only satisfy a child-
"It's because I'm better than him, that's why I glow in a prettier color."
That was entirely subjective, but it was true. I glowed in a nice light blue color which was pleasing to look at. Austin glowed yellow. If we weren't fighting for survival I might have made fun of him for looking like a sunflower. The way the mana expelled from his head framed it in a circle around his face that looked like a sunflower, which was pretty funny. It was entirely my own opinion, but blue was better than yellow.
Anna just nodded like what I said was fact and was not just made up on the spot. Austin looked aggrieved when Anna just agreed with me and put his hand to his chest in mock hurt.
"Yellow is a way better color than blue. It's the color of the sun and what's prettier than the sun?" Austin pleaded his case but Anna wasn't having it. Her favorite color was blue, so it was a losing battle. He would never convince her yellow was better.
What followed was the most childish argument ever. It had a lot of 'nuh-uhs' followed by 'no blue is better' countered by 'no yellow is better'. It worked to cheer her up and that was the purpose of it. It got so far as her having us stand next to each other to compare who glowed better. How one could 'glow better' I had no idea, but she was determined to find the answer.
Austin and I continued playing around with Anna and the other kids joined in when they saw us playing and it turned into a mosh pit of little kids trying to tackle us. It was a nice way to blow off some steam and release some of the tension that was in the air after yesterday. It came to an end when something unexpected happened. It started raining.
I don't know why it was so unexpected to see it start raining, but it was. When you think of all the fantasy movies and books it seems to never happen. Rain was a natural process that happened all the time but it just felt weird to think about it happening now.
Our play session came to an end and everyone who was in camp hurried to put anything that couldn't get wet under a roof so it could stay dry. By this point, we had made a number of different 'tents' for everyone to sleep in and people were stashing food, clothes, and perishables in them to keep them from getting ruined.
I hesitate to call them tents when they were essentially tee-pees. We took several planks of wood, leaned them together in a cone shape, and tied them together at the top. We then covered the outside with the various hides that we had dried from the previous waves. Some of the tents had cloth that we bought from the store when we ran out of usable hides that were dried.
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It took a lot of effort to scrape the skinned hides clean before setting them out to dry and involved a liberal use of [Cleanse] to make sure there was nothing left behind. The tents made it so people had their own private space to sleep at night and get away from people for a while. The family's tents were a little bigger to accommodate the extra people that they needed to house. Mine was small. I was one of the few who were alone and my tent reflected that. Austin was another who was alone and had a small tent and we made the joke that we should conjoin ours together to make a super tent but we never got around to it.
Dinner had to be moved to the bunker that we made for the kids since it was the only thing big enough to cook in that was sheltered from the rain. It forced everyone into a cramped space to eat but that was manageable. It also forced the people who were bickering yesterday into close proximity with each other.
Nothing ended up happening which was good, the tasty meal might have something to do with it. The deer was delicious. Hal wasn't the only hunter in the family and this wasn't the first time that we had cooked venison for a family gathering, and that was reflected in the meal. We didn't have any stoves or any modern kitchen appliances but the chefs made it work with the skillets and pots that we had.
After dinner, the total points for the wall were tallied with the result being 2,976/5,000. The first wave had 211 points towards the wall, 945 for the second, followed by a whopping 1820 for the third. We only had about 2,000 to go. If the trend continued we would get it next wave and have some left over. Seeing how close we were lifted people's spirits and lessened the pessimism going around.
Any time a healer was full on mana they would use their skills on the four of us that were still wounded. Ashley ended up getting [Meditation] for her third skill and she proved how effective it was. She was using her skills at least 25% more than the rest of the healers. She could only use [Meditation] so often throughout the day or that percentage would be higher.
Abigail was the one whose healing did the most for my arm but the other's skills still worked. Abigail rotated through healing Scott, Mitchell, and me so all of us would get some healing. My vitality stat wasn't high enough to reduce the time it took for a broken bone to heal to hours but I could feel it working. If there weren't any healers I think it would have taken a month to heal on my own. It was an extremely quick time given that it would have taken three or four months before the tutorial.
Jonathan was the first to be completely healed and after there were only three patients to four healers, it went a lot faster. The sling was removed after dinner but I still had to be ginger with it and limit strenuous activities. I couldn't go lifting boulders or anything.
When it came time to go to bed, I was so happy that someone had the great idea to make cots so we didn't have to sleep on the ground. They weren't comfortable or anything, but what they were, was elevated from the ground. The cots were made for the cold rather than the rain but it worked for both. Since it was still late winter/early spring there was still a chill in the air. I wouldn't say that it was freezing, but the first night was particularly unpleasant. The cots got us off the ground so that we could retain our body heat better without the ground sucking it out of us. The hides that were in the best shape were sewn together into blankets which helped. The kids got the blankets first but after the second wave, there were enough to go around to anybody that needed one.
Some people spent some of their points to buy a blanket since they found the hides uncomfortable. I wasn't of the opinion that it was a good use of points so I refrained from doing that. I didn't say anything since it was their points, they could do whatever they wanted with them, I just thought it was a waste.
The rain broke over the course of the night and I woke to the clear skies of Day 9. There was a notification for an increase of four stats this morning which was a lot compared to previous days and a great notification to wake up to. I even got my first increase in acumen from the magic training I did yesterday. Fortitude and vitality got an increase from all the healing I had done over the past day bringing them to 13 and 15 respectively with wisdom and acumen reaching 8 and 7. I guess bones really do grow back stronger.
I had to check the tutorial screen for the timer to confirm what day it was. All of the days seemed to blend together. It was surprising to realize that there would be another wave tomorrow. It felt like we just got done with the last wave yesterday. Losing one of the two days in between waves to healing sucked.
Getting up to work revealed that the ground was still wet from the weather yesterday but that wasn't anything we couldn't handle at this point. It did leave a slight fog that had rolled in when the temperature dropped but that should go away over the course of the day. There was a pleasant smell of damp grass mixed with the chill in the air that made me want to stay by the campfire curled up with a blanket.
With my arm healed I didn't have that option which was unfortunate. I was once again relegated to tree-cutting duty. We had used all of our lumber to make the spike walls we deployed and since they had worked so well we planned to make more before the next wave came. By this point I could chop trees with my eyes closed, I had been doing it so long and it freed up my attention to practice the magic exercises while working. Since I didn't have the chance to train my physical skills yesterday I took the time to get a workout in during the day and did dexterity tricks to train agility when I could. I didn't bother with perception training deciding to focus on strength and agility before the wave tomorrow.
We still couldn't be 100% sure that tomorrow's wave was going to come from the north but we were reasonably sure it would. Most of the spikes we built were positioned already facing that way and if we had to move them, then so be it. We also added some traps so that when the beasts came up the hill they would have to contend with those as well. We didn't have the time to dig a trench but once the wall was purchased that was one of the first things that we were going to use our manpower for.
The traps were basically potholes along the path coming up the hill from the north. Some had spikes at the bottom but most didn't. We didn't have the time to dig them and line them with spikes and it was decided the holes were more important, so we focused on those. None of the Rangers picked a trap-making skill so it was all just good old-fashioned hard work and elbow grease. Hal, Austin, and I were all digging one of the holes together and Austin made a joke about it to Hal. Saying we wouldn't have had to do this if he picked a trap-making skill. Hal then divulged what he picked for his new skill and we couldn't much blame him.
He picked [Tracking(Common)] as his first skill before he knew he wouldn't have to hunt for food. He thought he was going to be sent off to a forest where he would have to survive alone and based all his decisions on that. The bow for hunting and [Tracking] to find prey. After knowing what the tutorial entailed he picked [Precision Shot] for his second skill and had two different skills he had to decide between for his third. One of them was [Power Shot] which -much like my own skill- added strength to his arrows by infusing them with mana. The other skill he was debating with was the skill my Aunt Carrie took, [Splitting Shot].
"Why is it between those two? Why don't you pick something else like Kyle, he hasn't picked a bow skill at all." Austin said after Hal mentioned his skill choice.
"That's because Kyle isn't thinking right. He keeps fantasizing about what he wants to do and what he wants his class to evolve into without thinking about surviving the next wave. He took [Ranger's Eye] so he could find an animal to tame and he picked [Forager's Sense] because my Dad talked him into it. We had no other food sources besides meat and needed to know if the plants in the forest were edible and that skill was one of the only ones that would do that. He also refused to get a bow skill because he didn't want it influencing his class evolution." Hal basically spat out.
I could tell that he had strong feelings about his brother's skill choices.
"Does he even know what level class evolutions are at? I wasn't even thinking that far ahead yet." I said.
"Oh you know Kyle, he'll sit and math anything out with enough variables. He questioned his guide extensively to get as much information as possible to min/max his choices. He found out that you get 6 skills per class rank and since we got a starting skill at level 1 and our next at levels 2 and 4, he extrapolated out the next 3 skills at levels 6, 8, and 10. With getting the last skill at level 10, he figured that's when the first class evolution is." Hal sighed and shook his head before adding, "It's a wonder how his mind works but he uses it for the weirdest things."
Austin and I both laughed at that. Kyle was an odd one growing up. He loved video games and puzzles and he was always doing one of the two until his Mom would drag him away to join in the family activities. I once asked him how he was doing at Christmas and he then took the next thirty minutes to describe, in great detail, the way an engine worked. How we got on the topic of how engines work I'll never understand. The funniest part was I already knew how they worked.
"Well don't leave us in suspense, what did you pick." Austin said.
"[Power Shot] is a better single target skill and that's not what we have to worry about for the waves so I picked [Splitting Shot]. Aunt Carrie walked me through how it works and it seemed like the best choice. You use your mana to split the arrow mid-flight so when it comes down it can hit multiple enemies. Aunt Carrie can already split it into 4 arrows from all the practicing. I can only split it into 2 still." Hal said.
That was a great skill to have for the waves. With our lack of rangers, we missed out on killing some of the beasts at long range before they got to us. If Hal and Carrie could both split their arrows into 4 then we would have 9 arrows per volley instead of the 3 we started with.
After Hal told us about his new skill, Austin and I both told him about ours. Austin got [Extended Strike] which added length to his spear strikes so he could stand behind the spikes and stab through them into the beasts without having to leave cover. After Jack had mentioned he could use both his skills at the same time when we went hunting, it prompted Austin to get the skill to use with the skill he already had [Piercing Strike].
We continued chatting while working and soon it was time for dinner. Thinking about the dinner yesterday had my mouth watering and I may have rushed a little on my way back when I heard it was ready.