For 12 grueling hours, Mike maintained a furious pace through the desert, jogging up hills and sliding down them one after another. Every three dunes, he took a moment to check on the cubs, who were completely silent while traveling, but yipped happily each time they saw him. While he was unable to take them out and play with them as he would like, he did give them a piece of wurm jerky, which they ate voraciously. While they ate, he took in the surroundings, remaining alert while also studying them. They were both a dusky goldenrod with small red highlights around their feet and noses. He felt the tension in his shoulders ease somewhat as he watched them chew. It was good to not be alone. The first time he fed them, he gave them a piece of jerky no bigger than his thumb, but by the end of the night, he was giving them pieces as large as his hand. With each iteration, as soon as they had finished eating, he stowed them away once more, conscious of the need to get as far away from the shelter as possible.

An hour before sunrise, he stopped to make a shelter. Using the wurm-hide made it very easy to camouflage the top of the structure, which freed up some of his usual preparation time to add depth. This, in addition to his new Burrowing skill, made it possible for him to build a very respectable shelter. It wasn’t as large as others he had made, but it was large enough and deep enough to keep the whelps cool throughout the day, as well as giving them space to play.

The same uncomfortable pressure built in him once more, but similar to previous skill advancements, gaining a level in Burrow was devoid of pain. Instead, the energy was sucked in from around him, feeding the energy into the rune that he was beginning to recognize as a marking for the skill, before disappearing. The two points to Strength were happy additions, even if his fundamental understanding of how the System interacted with his being was changing. Did the System create these runes? Was it possible for him to create them himself? Where was the energy coming from that filled his body and Leveled-Up the runes? There was so much he still didn’t know.

His exhaustion eventually overcame his curiosity, and he allowed himself to drift off the pleasant sounds of two fox cubs happily wrestling.

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Small yipping noises awoke him sometime later, interspersed by rough, wet tongues licking the skin of his fingers. He remembered his mother saying that babies only did two things, eat and poop. While he had never had kids of his own, he had raised enough animals to know that the saying applied to all baby animals, and in some cases, it applied to adult animals as well. Since they bothered to wake him, he could only assume that they were ready to eat again, and a pungent aroma made him aware that they had done the other thing too, so it appeared that he would need to muck out the shelter a bit.

With that done, he decided to do something special for his charges. Normally he would push himself to train during this part of the day, but since he hadn’t had enough time to build a separate area for training, he allowed himself a bit of time to pursue his true passion, cooking. He still had quite a bit of raw wurm meat, and a decent amount of spices to go with it. After giving the two a small piece of jerky as an appetizer, he set a few rods of Quicksilver outside to begin heating. He then dug a small alcove into the wall, leaving the sand visible so that the heat wouldn’t transfer into his shelter’s floor. After searing the meat, he added it to a pot and filled it with water, adding a generous helping of sweet potatoes as well. He would need to save the remainder for planting in the future, but he had enough for a single meal, and he felt like the cubs could use something special after the day they had just experienced.

While the stew sat, he took the opportunity to learn more about the cubs. He had already determined that they were both female, but he had been too busy to do much else. When he attempted to Analyze one of them, he was met with a prompt:

[Unnamed monster cub found. Locating parent to assign name….]

A spike of fear caused his heart to start palpitating and a light sweat to instantly bead upon his forward at the thought of an angry parent tracking down the creature that had run a few dozen miles away with its cubs. He wasn’t sure if it was the mother or father that had died in the fight only a day earlier, but either surviving parent would be able to finish him off near instantaneously. Before true panic could set in, another notification appeared:

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

[No parent found. As a boss monster, you are assigned to name the cub.

Please provide a name now.]

What would have previously been an arduous task of figuring out how to use the System to assign names took only a few moments, proof of his burgeoning adaption to the post-System world. Staring at the text box where he could mentally enter a name, he paused in thought. Naming an animal was a special experience, and there were many factors to consider. Should he go with his favorite foods, thus blessing the creatures with health and happiness? Should he go with epithets that described who he wanted them to be as adults? Remembering the small chihuahua, Gidgette, he had growing up, he settled on naming them as he had any other housepet–a human name that worked with animals too. Though they looked almost identical, one of them had just a touch of grey to their orange coat, which he named Ash. No sooner had he put the name in, then the fur began to change. What had once been only hints of grey, became true highlights, the color matching an ash tree almost exactly.

“The power of a name.” he murmured in wonder, remembering the sermons he had heard growing up.

The other cub he named Autumn, and her fur changed from a solid orange to having hints of red–the once nearly identical cubs were now easily distinguishable, and he was grateful he hadn’t followed through with his joke of naming them Cub 1 and Cub 2.

With names assigned, he was finally able to Analyze them successfully. Both were Level 20, and aside from their names, their stats were identical.

Name: Autumn

Monster Type: Fleetfoot Fox Cub

Level: 20

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 40

Intelligence: 40

Charisma: 30

Toughness: 10

Luck: 20

Abilities: Dash-Gain massively increased Dexterity for a short duration. Wind Ax-Propel a sharp gust of wind through the air.

They seemed to possess an ability very similar to Footsteps of the Wind, although it didn’t have the drawbacks of dropping their Dexterity after use. Their Wind Ax ability must have been what their parent had used in their defense the day prior. It had been a devastating attack and wasn’t that far off from his Aeromancy ability. With any luck, he would be able to learn from them.

What puzzled him most about their Character Sheets was them being only Level 20, since even the wurmlet had been Level 75, and the System itself had said that this Zone was only supposed to spawn monsters at that threshold or higher. Though their Strength and Toughness weren’t amazing, their other attributes were similar to his own. Their high Intelligence also gave him pause, seeing as it exceeded his own Intelligence, when clearly he was far more capable of coping with situations. The thought caused him to think back on his interactions with the wurm. Clearly that creature had had a far higher Intelligence attribute than his own, and yet he had managed to defeat it. Maybe Intelligence wasn’t a measure of how smart or capable at problem solving a being was? Instead, maybe it was a measure of how easily they could use their brain to interact with the System abilities. This resonated with him, as he had finally had his breakthrough in the kata after he had reached a sufficient Intelligence score.

When the stew was finished, the cubs each at a large portion, before curling up to nap. Mike took a moment to meditate some more, before the sun began to set and he packed up and set out again.

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For two days, Mike fell into a routine that mirrored the first day: travel, sleep, eat. His shelters remained small, and he pushed himself as hard as he dared each night. Nothing changed until the third morning, when an hour before he usually stopped, he detected a blanket of clouds blacking out the sky to the east. Within ten minutes, it had almost completely closed the distance to him forcing himself to stop and build a shelter as fast as he could.

He had barely dug the foundation of his shelter when the storm reached him, with winds strong enough to force him down on his hands and knees. Instead of rain, the storm brought an onslaught of sand that caused any of his exposed skin to chafe instantly–which, due to his recent mishaps destroying his clothing, was the majority of his body. Hunkering down over the foxes, he pushed himself past the pain and erected a small tent out of Quicksilver, encasing them in complete darkness as the world screamed around them.