It wasn’t long before the two travellers were peering over the edge of a short cliff at their target.

It looked just like a hill, covered in small bushes that were growing dozens of little white-red fruits. Only looking very closely revealed that what looked like a dead tree was actually an ear that twitched occasionally, and from there she could just about identify its head from where it was tucked under its tail.

“Alright. This is a Heart-Herb Armadillo. We’ll need to . .” Keldryn trailed off, looking at Mikayla. “What?”

“I haven’t forgotten the conversation we had yesterday,” she reminded Keldryn.

His tail bristled. “This is my job. Any one of these beasts could grow up and become another Monster King. You’ve been here for less than a week, you do not have the right to tell me that what we do to survive is wrong,”

“That’s not what I’m trying to say,” Mikayla pacified him, holding her palms up. “I don’t believe I’m wrong, but you are also right. Where I’m from, we have the luxury of treating animals with compassion, but that’s not practical in this world. So, until and unless we find a better way, I’ll accept killing the Kaijus so long as we do it as humanely and painlessly as possible,”

“Oh. Well . . good,” Keldryn lamely nodded. “Killing them painlessly? That’s not something I ever really considered, but . . sure, I can try that. Um. As I was saying. Heart-Herb Armadillos masquerade as hills with fruit growing on them. When something smaller comes to eat the fruit, the Armadillo eats them,”

“Right. So we get giant and stomp on it?”

“That’d take all day,” he denied. “I picked this one for you to practice controlling that sword. Its armour is strong, by the standards of normal swords. But Blade Cores like yours have incredible cutting power. We’re gonna get in close and you’re gonna stab it with a giant sword. It’ll get riled up and expose itself, then I’ll hit its vitals. And try not to brutalise it too much, I want to harvest this corpse. Make up my quota,”

“Okay, got it,”

Within minutes, Mikayla, clad in the Black Knight, was advancing towards the small crack that Keldryn denoted as the location of the armadillo’s head. It didn’t react at all to her approach, as expected. Why would it? She was a potential meal, after all, and it didn’t want to scare her off.

Keldryn had explained that it monitored its prey by sensing their footfalls through tremors in the earth, so it didn’t matter what Mikayla did as long as she didn’t take too long or run away. If the Armadillo got too impatient, it might try to chase her down.

She focused, directing her Mana, and her sword manifested. Its form wavered slightly, but she closed her eyes and focused on controlling her breathing, and when she opened them again it had solidified.

She brought it up and aimed at the bulge of the Armadillo’s eye, then carefully directed her Mana into the Goliath subsection of the Core’s internal circuitry.

Triggering a Core’s Goliath function was even harder than making it work in the first place. To build on her earlier metaphor about the engravings that guided the Mana being akin to a group of dark rooms, the Goliath engraving was more like a disco ball where she had to monitor and balance both how many of the lights were on and the intensity of their glow. But now that she’d surmounted the hurdle of making her Mana do what she wanted at all, it was just a matter of developing the skill, akin to learning how hard to press on a car’s gas pedal to coax out exactly the right amount of acceleration.

And there was room for error.

She raised her hands, and the blade exploded outwards, stretching and swelling, the force of its growth driving its tip directly through the Armadillo’s face. Mikayla gauged the distance, estimating that she’d pushed it to about twelve times the base size when she’d been going for ten. Well, that was what practice was for.

It didn’t matter, because the results were still plenty gory. The Armadillo reared up, bellowing in pain, but held in place by the sword sticking through its face.

“It’s not dead yet!” Keldryn warned as he leapt in, a blur of green and orange coming down towards its neck.

“I gathered that!” Mikayla hesitated. She didn’t know what to do. Pull the sword out? Try again? Let Keldryn handle it?

The choice was taken from her when the Armadillo’s leg lashed out, caught her in the chest, and sent her flying.

Mikayla slammed into a tree, limbs sprawling outwards. She groaned, managing to slide down and catch herself on her feet. The Armadillo was fatally wounded, but its death throes were violent and explosive.

She advanced, sword coming up again, and focused, channeling a carefully controlled stream of mana into the sword as she brought it down in an overhead swing, making sure to aim away from where Keldryn was ripping its back open. Doing something was better than being paralysed by indecision.

The Armadillo flung itself out of the way, showering blood everywhere. Keldryn was flung off and into the air.

“Go for its throat!” Nocturnus commanded as Mikayla retracted her sword and tried to line up another strike.

Instead she had to frantically swell it into an impromptu shield to put between herself and the monster’s massive jaws as it lunged for her. Pungent saliva sprayed from its mouth and splattered her projected equipment.

The ground gave way as she braced herself against the beast’s weight, and she stumbled. Those massive incisors slid over her head and tried to close around her back, sinking into the back plates of the Black Knight. Mikayla screamed as the feedback entered her nerves, seeing her Health bar dip. [HEALTH: 911/1200]

“Stab upwards! Upwards, star it!” Nocturnus bellowed.

Adrenaline flooding her veins, Mikayla wedged her knee against the lower jaw of the beast, ignoring the way the teeth dug into her, and released her sword to free it from where it was pinned under her own weight.

The way she’d improperly manifested the sword earlier to summon only the blade flashed into her mind.

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Her hand went up and a malformed sword erupted from it. Mikayla sprayed her Mana across the Core’s Goliath enchantment, pleading for it to do something, anything, that would free her from this predicament.

The Core reacted to her clumsy prompts, and the half-born blade burst through the roof of the Armadillo’s mouth and crushed its brain against the inside of its own skull.

The pressure loosened, and Mikayla frantically clawed her way out of the mountain of gore that the monster’s head had become, shaking blood and saliva off herself like a dog. “Every damn time! Something tries to eat me and I stab it in the mouth and I get covered in blood! Why does this happen every damn time?!”

“It’s not a strategy I would use, but if it works,” Mikayla couldn’t tell whether or not Keldryn was joking.

A moment later, she’d finally cleaned herself off enough to address the notification floating in her vision.

[YOU HAVE EARNED XP POINTS FOR KILLING A HEART-HERB ARMADILLO!]

[LEVEL UP! CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE NOW LEVEL 12!]

Mikayla let the level-up wash over her. By now it had happened enough times that it wasn’t worth reacting to.

“You froze,” Keldryn frowned in her direction, ears lowered and arms folded.

“Sorry . .” Mikayla couldn’t meet his gaze, shame bringing a flush to her cheeks.

“Kill it painlessly, huh?”

“I’ll do better next time . .” Rather than engage with his judgemental look, she reached down and inquisitively picked up one of the small white fruits that had fallen from the clusters on the Heart-Herb Armadillo’s back.

Keldryn slapped the fruit out of her hand. “Don’t eat those,”

“Why not? Are they poisonous?”

“Nah,” He stabbed it with one of his wrist blades and it exploded into a splatter of steaming goo that began eating away at the grass with phenomenal speed. “Acidic. They’re called Heart-Herbs because they’ll melt your chest and make your heart fall out on the ground,”

Mikayla gulped. “Love the nomenclature sensibilities. Really,” She quirked an eyebrow. “So you said we were going to harvest this thing? If you didn’t mean the fruits, what is there to harvest?”

“I’ll show you,” Keldryn pulled out a knife and sliced the monster’s belly open. She flinched back from the spray of viscera as he kept cutting, expertly ripping its guts out and tossing them away, parting the meat until he came to what looked like a pale white bladder the size of his hand. Mikayla watched from a distance, wincing in anticipation of more grossness as he sliced the organ open - but, instead of pus or blood or anything else she had expected, the flesh peeled away to reveal a solid core of pink-tinted crystal. “This is what they call a Kaiju Pearl. A condensation of the Kaiju’s Clutch. I’m supposed to harvest as many of these as I can, and I haven’t met my quota for this trip yet,”

“They grow gems inside their bodies?” Mikayla asked in morbid fascination. The gemstone was tiny in comparison to the building-sized Armadillo. It was impressive that Keldryn had even been able to find it

“Sort of. I hear there aren’t any Kaijus beyond the Kaiju Coast, and the only reason we get them here is because of the Clutch. It’s a sort of Mana sickness, and it’s so widespread that every animal and monster in the Coast is born already infected,” Keldryn kept talking as he stripped and cleaned the gore off the crystal. “Over time, they absorb more and more of the Clutch from the environment, and this organ gets bigger and in turn makes them bigger and stronger and meaner. Apparently there’s some kind of law about cubes that the Clutch lets them ignore, but I don’t remember what that was,”

“The square-cube law?” Mikayla guessed with an incredulously raised eyebrow.

Keldryn nodded. “Yeah, that. It’s not all bad. These Kaiju Pearls are the world’s best renewable resource for making Cores out of. Harvesting these is one of my three duties as a ranger. There are always new recruits needing Cores,”

“Hold on, what was that about this Clutch being a sickness?” Mikayla focused on a detail that Keldryn had brushed over. “Is it contagious? Are we infected?”

“Don’t worry. Sapients are immune. I’ve never heard of a person turning into a Kaiju, at least. I did hear a theory about how, for us, the Clutch just collects in our bodies and never gets used for anything, and that’s why Kaijus prefer to eat sapients over other Kaijus. But I dunno if that’s true,”

“Gotcha, gotcha,” She paused. “What about farm animals? And pets? You said your aunt ran a farm. Did any of her animals ever turn into Kaijus?”

Keldryn’s face darkened, ears drooping, and for a second she worried she’d triggered what she was increasingly suspecting to be a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder. But then he shook his head, banishing the thoughts. “Nah. That was a problem for the first few years after the Collapse. I heard horror stories. Sheepdogs that turned on their flocks and then their owners, stuff like that. But then some alchemists figured out an antidote, a potion we can mix into livestock feed and suppress the effects,”

“Oh. Well, that’s good!” Having to subsist on a diet of entirely Kaiju meat sounded like a literal recipe for disaster.

“Not really. The main ingredient is sapient blood,” Keldryn rolled up his sleeve to expose the veins on his wrist evocatively.

Her relief abated, and Mikayla had to stifle a sudden urge to vomit, retching into her hand.

“. . you are squeamish, huh?” the Ranger dryly observed.

“Don’t play innocent, you know exactly why that’s messed up!”

<=====}—o

“So, do you do that often?” Mikayla questioned as they resumed their trek.

“Do what?”

“Y’now, like, specifically go looking for Kaijus to kill, to grind out levels. It seems unnecessarily risky, but . .” She focused, summoning up sparks of her red mana in her hand. It was amazing that she could do that now. That she was doing real magic. And from what Nocturnus had said, there was still a lot of growing that she could do.

It still hurt to think about, but perhaps if she stayed in this world for long enough, she would reach the triple-digit heights of Level 100 and above like he once had.

“Lahlee encouraged me to be proactive about killing anything I found that I thought I could defeat,”

“Who?”

“Oh, she’s the Branch Head at Cliffwatch. My boss,” Keldryn summarised. “She said doing a patrol in this region, at this time of year, would be good experience for me. And she’s right, I’ve gotten two levels in the past month and I’m most of the way to a third,”

“. . Is that good? I’ve gotten eleven in the past week, but I acknowledge my experience is kinda skewed,”

“You have been using antique masterwork weaponry made by two of the greatest crafters in history to punch way above your weight class, and risking yourself much more than most do. One level a month is about normal up until level 40,” Keldryn confirmed. “Besides, it’s not that hard to find good targets, even when I’m avoiding the things that’re too strong for me. Everything’s active during summer. It’s when winter comes and half of them settle down to hibernate that the pickings are slim,”

Mikayla stopped dead as the terrifying implications of that sentence sunk in. “What do you mean, ‘when winter comes’?”

“Y’now, it gets cold, snow starts falling, animals hibernate -“

“I thought it was already winter! You’re telling me that this,” she gestured incredulously at the frigid tundra around them, “is what passes for summer in these parts?!”

“Yes? Why, what sort of summers are you used to?”

“Mate, I’m Australian. My winter is warmer than your summer. Summer is when there’s so much heat in the air that if you step on a rock it’ll burn your foot. The forests get so warm and dry that they’ll go up in flames at the slightest provocation. Sometimes we have to ration our water. Oh, and don’t leave home without your sunblock because we’re right near the hole in the ozone layer and the sun might give you skin cancer,” She gestured wildly at the sky to emphasise that last point.

Keldryn looked pale. “Mikayla, your world sounds terrifying,”

“The literal professional monster hunter has no right to tell me that MY world is scary!”