I glared at my menus, frustrated.

Pilus Horgson (Lv 9)

HP: 94/94

MP: 124/124

Status: Absorption (minor)

EXP: 381/900

Skills: 4-Point Magic(+), 5-Point Magic, 6-Point Magic(+), Appraisal(+), Brewing, Butchery, Cooking, Inventory(+), Literacy, Map, Needlework, Negotiation, Taming, Tanning, Unarmed

Familiar: Treehopper (Lv 10)

I was stuck. I had gained only a few dozen points of experience this week. Most of it had come from brewing lessons with Belat, and I was so starved for progress I had even started tearing out stitches from my clothing to sew it back up and get some needlework experience.

I tried to chill out on my progression obsession. Exercise, meditation, and study were all great ways for me to improve myself, whether or not my experience bar grew full. The allure of the next level and the SP that would come with it was a powerful siren’s song. Level 10 would mean 10 SP, which is enough to push any basic skill all the way through to advancement. I could catch up on 5-point magic, or advance my cooking skill, or my literacy, or my unarmed combat abilities, or taming…

Probably not taming. That remained at an impasse.

Missy had her babies, and the whole experience was truly special. Treehopper babies are very cute, and being babies, they hadn’t really learned fear yet. Missy had no problem with me handling her kids while she was tamed, and even when I decided to stop reinforcing the taming and let it wear off, she would still let me play with them, though she wasn’t otherwise particularly friendly with me.

Eventually, the babies grew up more, and they stopped being as comfortable with me. The longer I went between visits, the more afraid of me they were when I made it outside. Eventually, they wouldn’t let me come near them. It didn’t seem like anything came from letting tamed beasts breed, at least not in a single generation. I hadn’t really expected anything to happen; taming was magic of some sort, so breeding tamed beasts was not like selectively breeding incrementally more tame wild beasts. You could, in theory, tame the least human-friendly beasts in the world and make it obey you, but its disposition and temperament would remain intact beneath the magic.

It actually bothered me a bit with regards to Treepo. I had no idea if he liked me at all beneath the taming magic. I had raised him myself after finding him as a child, so I hoped he did like me, and I hoped that if I could one day evolve him that would also work in my favor and improve our true relationship, but I had no idea–and no idea how to find out, either. I did not think that was something people in this world cared about.

Summer was coming to an end and I had almost nothing to show for it. I gritted my teeth and cursed Nodel for sticking her nose in my business. Then I tried to relax myself, remembering that she was only a five year old kid. If I were actually just an almost-seven year old, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.

I rolled a small stone between my thumb and index, squishing it like soft clay and then rounding it back out. Since advancing my 4-point magic, these little tricks that I used to be able to pull off for 1 MP now didn’t cost me anything. They either cost fractional MP that replenished fast enough as to effectively be free, or I was able to directly pull the necessary magic out of the atmosphere or environment well enough to meet my needs without using my own magic at all.

The largest benefit of this was that it cost way less to fire off small stone bullets. Since shaping and floating them was basically free, and the cost of shooting them had dropped so significantly, I could shoot them with much more force. Or, I could shoot many, many more. It was like switching from a hunting rifle to a fully automatic firearm.

I couldn’t wait to show the next griffator I met my new skills, except that I hadn’t been able to get outside the wall in ages. Nodel had figured out that I liked going to the wall at the end of the beach and would always intercept me on my way or be waiting for me when I got there. I had started dodging her, hoping she got the message and would leave me alone, but she had persisted. I ground the stone I was playing with into powder in frustration.

I had to have a talk with that little girl.

* * *

I looked up at the town wall from the beach. The wall that kept the town safe was like a jail cell to me. I ran my hand over my hidden tunnel entrance, my lifeline to something beyond this quaint, sleepy little port town. Sure it was charming and a nice, peaceful place to live, but in a world with magic and beasts and levels to raise, peaceful just wasn’t what I wanted.

Speaking of peaceful, I hadn’t seen my annoying little shadow. I sat, leaning my head against the stone of the wall behind me, and sighed. She would turn up soon. My eyes gently shut, the warm air lulling me into a light nap while I waited.

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When I opened them up sometime later, and found myself still alone, my annoyance slowly shifted to mild concern. I glanced around, double and triple checking for any sign of the five year old girl. “Treepo, any sign of Nodel? Is she spying on me?” I whispered into my pack. I cast a minor invisibility illusion over him and he climbed out to sweep the area for me.

Treepo returned, grunted a negative response, and climbed up onto my shoulder. Something had changed. I stood, stretched, and headed towards the Church.

It was well after lunch, and the priests who offered soup to the under-tens had already cleaned up and were doing some other Church chores. I looked around until I found one I recognized and asked for a minute of his time.

“Have you seen Nodel today?” I asked the older man.

“Ah, the young lady Nodel has fallen ill again,” the priest said with a sad twinge to his voice. “One of our clergy is at the lord’s house now, treating her.”

I thanked the priest, leaving the Church. Poor kid. She must have overdone it with all the running around outdoors. I wanted to be left alone, but I didn’t wish her ill. I wandered back towards the beach, surprised by how worried I was, but excited at the opportunity to head back into the jungle unobserved and gain as much experience as possible.

The ramhogs would be heading south soon, and with them, the griffators. I planned to add several of each to my inventory before that happened.

* * *

I stared at the vile horror before me from my hiding place in the bushes. The last time I had encountered it, I cast an invisibility illusion, a cone of silence, and ran without stopping all the way back to the wall. The papery mass attached to the tree was like a tumor, an evil growth in an otherwise healthy body. The buzzing sound filled the air, making me shudder involuntarily.

A beehive. A giant, monstrous, beehive.

Logical or not, I never could control my emotions when it came to bees and wasps on Earth. It didn’t matter if the sting was actually that painful or not. The idea of being stung by those little demons filled me with dread, and I would always run from anything yellow and black.

These bees were not yellow and black, which helped. They were solid black, and as big as grapefruits. That did not help. They had giant, spiny legs that reminded me of a tarantula and the wings were almost raven-like rather than insectoid. The stingers were like spearheads. I could barely look at them long enough to see how else they diverged from their Earth counterparts before I started feeling nauseous.

I wanted what was probably in that hive, though. I needed wax. Now that I had both stronger water magic from advancing my 4-point skill and leather from my tanning skill, I wanted to make some waterskins to be able to carry larger amounts of water with me. Having it in my inventory was easier on my MP than needing to form it out of moisture in the air, and I could use it as a pretty powerful jet now. I also thought I was close to making a water blade, and I could probably add that to my repertoire with some practice and some more skill points.

The ability to drown things on dry land was also pretty useful.

Beeswax would help seal the leather waterskins so that they held water properly, if I recalled correctly. Trying to recall what I knew from Earth, I was pretty sure I could pull the bladder or stomach out of the offal for water storage, but I wasn’t sure what I needed to do to make that work. Fergus had leather waterskins at his shop, so I knew that would work, if I could get wax.

I could have just bought wax through Fergus, but no, I wanted to be frugal and self-sufficient.

I had a plan, at least. Now that my 4-point magic was stronger, I had much better control over wind currents. I was pretty sure I could make a fire and direct the smoke into and around the hive, trapped in a vortex, keeping it contained below the canopy to not alert the town guard. Hopefully, monster bees from this world were subdued by smoke like honeybees on Earth.

The pile of dry leaves, with some greener ones mixed in to produce extra smoke, was prepared under the hive thanks to an illusion-protected Treepo. That treehopper was braver than I was, sometimes.

Here goes nothing.

* * *

“It almost worked,” I said to the soaking wet treehopper, who was grunting loudly at me. He shook, ocean water splashing everywhere.

I pulled the water out of my clothes and tossed it back into the ocean, which was now full of the floating bodies of dead monster bees, although the metasystem called them “stingknights.” I collected a bunch in case they turned out to be useful. They dismantled into stingknight chitin and stingknight stingers. The chitin might make an impressive set of armor if I could collect enough.

I looked over the sea of dead bobbing beasts. Fortunately, they drowned easily, and they were good experience. If we were lucky, that was all of them. Treepo was rubbing his face with his front paws, trying to groom his fur dry. I lightly blasted him with some air, blow-drying him a bit to help. “Come on bud, let’s go back and see what needs mopping up.”

The fire had mostly gone out, and I wasn’t sure how much time I had before the guard showed up, assuming they saw the smoke after I had lost control of the situation and booked it for the ocean. There were only a handful of stingknights patrolling the outside of the hive, which were easily taken care of with some air blasts and stone bullet strikes. I dropped those ones into my inventory as well to hide any evidence. Once the coast was clear, I pulled enough water out of the air to quench what was left of the smoldering fire. I shot off a couple blasts of soundwaves at the hive, hoping to disturb any last holdouts who might be inside, so I could drop the whole thing in my inventory.

Somehow, I forgot beehives have queens.

Unfortunately, I did not get to collect the stingknight queen’s corpse and see if it had any useful components, because I burned her to ash while screaming in abject terror. I managed to not light the entire jungle on fire, but that would have been an acceptable price to pay to send that demon back to hell.

It was an eventful day, even for me.

When I got back home later that day with more than enough stingknight hive wax for my current and future projects, I found myself shivering even before the night had started to descend. The days were cooling off, which meant summer was almost over. It would be another birthday for me soon and then another winter. I looked up at the sky, and found myself worrying about Nodel. I hadn’t seen her since she fell sick, and being chronically ill over winter didn’t sound like a very good time for anyone.

I wouldn’t end up seeing her again until the following summer.