Three hours later, Edge found himself hiding within a mound of tall grass.

He was careful not to move a muscle or make a sound while the buffalo crossed the plains a hundred yards ahead. It was a sizable herd, big enough to make the ground tremble beneath his boots. By his count, there were twenty stage-one adults, seven stage-zero calves, and a stage-two bull leading the march.

While buffalo weren’t predators, they were one of the most dangerous beasts on the plains, especially when traveling in a herd.

Even a stage-one bull was a fearsome opponent. They were fifteen feet tall at the shoulder, covered in dense muscles that rippled as they walked, and armed with wickedly sharp horns as long as his body.

Edge was sure that they already knew he was there. With that many beasts working together, several were bound to have skills that boosted their perception in one manner or another. The alpha can probably sense my presence without them, just from my scent and the sound of my breathing.

If he didn’t do anything to annoy them, the herd would probably leave him alone. Buffalo had a live and let live philosophy unless you got in their way. At least he didn’t have to worry about frightening them into attacking. There was no way that a single beast would see him as a threat, let alone a score.

Even most monsters gave the herds a wide berth, though the most mindless and crafty hunted calves on occasion. When their natural power was combined with the various charging skills that all buffalo developed, not to mention multiple attribute-boosting auras they could stack when threatened, those horns could punch straight through steel plates. Flesh and bones wouldn’t even slow them down.

If you were foolish enough to harm a member of the herd, you wouldn’t just be facing one of the giant beasts, you’d suffer the wrath of them all. On the Ivory Plains, if you messed with the bull, you got the horns. A mistake that few creatures made a second time, if they managed to survive the first.

Watching the giants cross the grasslands, forming a solid wall of muscle and horn, it was hard to imagine that they had begun as simple animals, not much bigger than the average Earth cow. Like many of the beasts that now called Ord home, the buffalo had migrated from one world to another, becoming something else entirely after generations of absorbing the planet’s magic.

It all began back in the early days of the age of expansion. Just a few decades after a comet rich in magicyte deposits crashed into the Earth, triggering an evolutionary change in every lifeform on the planet and rewriting the rules of the universe as we knew them.

Within a generation, magic had become a way of life, spells and magtech replacing existing technologies in any number of ways. Why bother to design a ship that could sail between the stars when a portal could take you there in the blink of an eye?

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The AIs were an exception to that rule. Not only had they survived the onset of magic, they had thrived in the years that followed. Able to cast spells of mind-boggling complexity, Earth’s AIs were able to do the one thing they never could before, directly influence the physical world. They began using magic to supplement their computational abilities, establishing themselves as the dominant force on the planet in less than a decade.

Working in concert with their digital overlords, humanity had learned how to access the intragalactic teleportation network. Those ancient energetic conduits, whose origins are shrouded in mystery to this day, let us cross the space between worlds in seconds instead of centuries. They granted access to thousands of inhabitable planets, which brought Edge back to the subject of beasts.

Back then, we would travel from one colony to another, without following any of the contamination protocols that are in place today. Many animals from Earth, both intended and not, made their way to Ord by hitching a ride on the shipments we sent through the portals.

After being exposed to the planet’s concentrated magic, the survivors evolved the capacity to ignite cores, gradually transforming into the beasts we know today. Although there were some for the first few centuries, all uncored animals eventually died off. Organisms without cores simply couldn’t compete, since all life native to Ord was cored from the start.

In modern times, the word animal refers to a stage zero-beast. Creatures just starting out on their transformative journeys.

Beasts don’t have the same type of power cores that people do, but they serve the same purpose, transforming magicytes into mana to power a vast range of skills. Instead of a magtech implant, they can grow their own, core-like organ without requiring the System’s intervention. It’s the reason why beasts transform over time, growing stronger with each new stage.

These mutations enabled domesticated beasts to become a powerful tool for settling the planet. They provided highly nutritious, magicyte-containing food and could defend uncored colonists from dangerous critters. With beasts at their side, humanity was able to protect the capital and the surrounding biomes, kicking off a century of prosperity before the System arrived and changed everything. But that was a story for another day.

By now, the herd was only thirty yards in front of him, but they had already turned and weren’t heading his way. Edge still had a few minutes before it would be safe to move, and any nearby predators would remain hidden until the buffalo were gone.

It meant that he had a moment to himself when he didn’t have to watch his back so closely. He took advantage of the opportunity to ponder a problem that he hadn’t been able to solve. He still needed to decide what he was going to tell everyone when he got back to town.

It was important that he didn’t do anything that would make people suspect that he’d found a unique core. Someone might try to draft him into their service or decide to kill him before he grew strong enough to become a threat.

Edge was going to have to hide the existence of Skill-Eater, or he’d wind up finding trouble that he couldn’t talk his way out of. But how should I craft the deception? It wasn’t just his ultimate that he had to lie about. Showing more skills than most people could slot would make it plain as day that something strange was going on.

Even shadow step would draw unwanted attention. Obtaining a rare skill was unheard of for an early stage-one individual, let alone a stage-zero, especially considering all the other commons and uncommons that he’d acquired.

Edge rubbed his chin while watching the buffalo graze, trying to fashion a lie that would stand the test of time and keep his head on his shoulders.