I slashed out with my shortsword–really, just a bowie knife–and the vicaw screeched, falling to the ground. With its wing cut, it wouldn’t be able to get airborne again. “Finish it off, Nibbles,” I told the polerat, who ran over and tore into the grounded bird. I slid my blade into the leather sheath I had made which was attached to my magic circle belt and watched the polerat earn some experience.
Back out in the jungle, I was doubling up my training. My primary concern was practicing with actual weapons, dealing with taking combat damage more effectively, and generally getting better at being a vanguard. I was bringing in experience again now that I was fighting with novel methods, but that would taper off quickly. While I was at it, I had tamed a few different beasts and was training them to their plateaus in order to learn more about evolution. If I could ensure it was safe and consistent, I would consider trying to evolve Treepo as well, since I could now just make him invisible while in town and hiding him was easier. My other tamed beasts lived full-time out in the jungle, and in the worst case Treepo could too given how strong he had grown. Training tamed monsters brought in some extra experience, but I figured evolving a few would give me bigger boosts.
If I could make them strong enough, maybe they could help me in the dungeon, as well. Although if I really wanted help in the dungeon, I would have to target some bigger and stronger beasts and tame those. I would probably need to advance my taming skill before I did that.
The real problem was that I had difficulty not being too soft on my familiars. I treated Treepo like a pet, not a fighter, and I knew if he got killed I would feel awful about it. I still carried some guilt about killing the flying nodmouse I evolved, even if it was for science. I was trying to maintain a professional distance between myself and the new tamed beasts, knowing they might get killed in the dungeon, but it was hard the more time I spent with them.
If I trained one to be sufficiently strong, its death would also become a large setback for me. Not as much of a setback as my own death, obviously, so the benefit of having a beast army was worth the risk. By fighting with weapons, I should have the MP reserve to heal beasts so long as they were only near-death, and not dead, a benefit most tamers wouldn’t have due to 6-point magic being forbidden. That was probably a big part of why there weren’t more combat tamers in this world, at least as far as I could tell.
Evolving beasts was also a form of information gathering. I wanted to know if beasts evolved identically every time and if done with a tamer compared to how they seemed to evolve within a dungeon, and if so, I could learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of the beast I would encounter. If not, that was information I wanted to collect as well. Evolution like this, as opposed to natural evolution over generations, was entirely magical, so I couldn’t assume anything about the rules of how it worked. There could still be other methods of evolving beasts I wasn’t aware of, for that matter, and those methods could yield different results too.
I sighed. There was a growing part of me that wanted to further advance my appraisal skill, even if it would be a huge setback to my magic and combat skills. Appraisal was the only means I had to gain more information directly from, and about, this world. I hadn’t managed to trigger anything from my metasystem to cheat any new advancement, but when I last cheat-advanced appraisal, it had been a substantial boon. 100 SP to improve my appraisal ability enough to advance again was expensive, but might unlock the ability to appraise more outside of my inventory, which could be a huge help in dungeons.
Nibbles the polerat came over and sat down in front of me. Truthfully, the little guy wasn’t much fun to look at. Treepo was adorable, but Nibbles was… awkward. He–or she, I had no idea–was basically just a large rat, but the facial features were a bit like if a rat and a horse had a baby. The only reason I was training him was to get a look at him once evolved. I had seen what I assumed to be evolved polerats in the dungeon but couldn’t really get a good look since they avoided the light. The evolved nodmouse had been really cute, but nodmice weren’t as ugly in the first place.
Nibbles was closing in on his experience cap, so I would find out soon. I was having him earn the experience from battle, rather than eating high value beast meat. Treepo had earned experience slowly because he started as a baby, but Nibbles was already full grown when I tamed him so it was going much faster. Maybe I would try to evolve another polerat, using food as the primary method of gaining experience, later on to see if there was a difference.
“Let’s go get another one,” I told the beast, who sneezed in response.
* * *
I surveyed the four beasts. Treepo looked up at me expectantly, eager to return to my shoulder, his usual spot where he would perch and lord over the others.
Next to him was Nibbles the polerat. I think he was trying to look cute, but mostly he was just… present. I made a face and looked to the next in the lineup.
My third familiar was a vicaw who I called Birdo. I was not a particular fan of birds, either. Birdo was here primarily to compare to the fire-breathing bird I saw in the dungeon. He preened his colorful feathers as I looked over the lineup. In the same way that singbirds were basically just small Earth birds, the vicaw was basically just an Earth parrot–or, maybe, a macaw, but I really didn’t know much about birds. Its feathers were red, yellow, and green, and its legs were black.
Finally, there was Gregory, my new flying nodmouse. It had been easy to evolve another, the same steps leading to the same results. I wanted to see if I could trigger further evolution.
All four beasts were fully leveled up, which had taken far more effort than I expected. Particularly Gregory. He was not much of a fighter, and a glutton. I had to watch how much I fed him so he didn’t get fat. Flying nodmice could glide with their patagium, the flaps of skin that connected their front and hind appendages, but that would probably fail if they became obese.
“All right, Nibbles,” I said, choosing the polerat first. “Eat this,” I said, handing him a magic crystal. The polerat handled it a bit with his little rat paws and then shoved it in his mouth.
The rat started to glow and grow, as the nodmouse had. I watched as his legs and neck lengthened and body stretched, his tail thickening, taking on a paddle shape and growing slick and black. The rough, gray-brown fur that covered the body had become smoother, changing into a brighter, chestnut brown. His ears grew larger and rounded out. His face thickened up more, squaring off a bit at the jaw.
All said and done, Nibbles was now about four times as large as he had started. He looked a bit like a tiny hunchbacked moose without antlers, with long rat appendages and a beaver tail. He looked up at me proudly. “You look ridiculous,” I said. Nibbles dropped his head. “But, you don’t seem quite like what I thought I saw in the dungeon,” I continued. It was dark, but those rats seemed a bit more canid, maybe, and less… whatever this is, I thought, looking at the downtrodden beast.
“Ok, Birdo, you’re next.”
After evolving, the vicaw had roughly tripled in size, and its feathers had split into a multitude of prismatic colors. It had a large feathered crest at the top of its head and its tail was almost as long as its body, or would have been if the feathers didn’t curl back on themselves. It flapped its wings, showing off its impressive wingspan. Its black beak was sharply hooked, looking much more intense than it had before, as was true of the talons. It was gorgeous–for a bird–but definitely not what I saw in the dungeon.
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I appraised my evolved familiars. Nibbles was now called a “giant polerat,” and Birdo was now a “rainbow vicaw.”
The next experiment would be trying to evolve Gregory again. “Here you go, Gregory,” I said, handing him the magic crystal. He looked at the turquoise stone, then back up to me. “You’re supposed to eat it,” I told him.
He looked at it again, cocked his head, and then shoved it in his mouth. I waited and watched, but the evolution glow didn’t appear. Nothing happened.
“Do you need more?” I asked. I handed him another crystal.
The flying nodmouse just stared at me.
I sighed. “Eat it, please.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the flying nodmouse swallowed the second crystal. Still, nothing happened. I fed him a third, then a fourth, and finally a fifth before I gave up.
“I guess you can only evolve once,” I said to the little furry blue beast.
Gregory looked at me, cocked his head to the side, then threw up the crystals.
“Gross, dude.”
Either beasts only had one stage of evolution or a second stage required something else, perhaps a further concentrated dose of magic. Maybe if I could stuff Gregory full of enough crystals, before he threw up, that would work. Or maybe it took time before an evolved beast could evolve further, and Gregory had evolved too recently. I had no idea.
Gregory walked up to my legs and pulled on my pants. I looked down, and he raised his hands up to me. Sighing, I summoned a piece of meat and handed it to him. He squeaked happily and ran off to eat.
I looked at my long-time partner. “So, Treepo,” I said. “We gonna try this, or not? Your choice.”
If Treepo got too large, he would probably have to stay in the jungle instead of returning to the city with me. So far, most of the beasts had grown two to four times their original size when evolving. Treepo was roughly the largest of them to begin with, but not by much. If he got any bigger, he wouldn’t be able to ride my shoulder anymore, at least not until I grew into a more adult body.
The treehopper I had raised from his childhood looked contemplative, then seemed to come to a decision. He looked at me and I felt like I got a sense of his determination. Squatting down, I placed a crystal on the ground in front of him. Treepo sniffed it, and then cautiously took it in his mouth. I met his eyes, and he swallowed.
I held my breath as Treepo began to glow. I watched his body expand, doubling in size, growing thicker and shaggier as his fur grew out. The dirty beige he had been before became richer in saturation, turning into a shade somewhere between orange and red. His horns grew out another fifty percent or so, corkscrewing just a tiny bit as they grew. His face got slightly chubbier but his snout grew a bit longer, and his ears thickened up and grew a little longer. They would have dragged on the ground at this length before, but now he was larger and stood taller, too, his legs thickening with muscle. The fur on his extremities darkened a bit, as did the tail, which developed a minor ring pattern.
I reached out and petted Treepo on the head when he was done. He chittered, slightly lower pitched than before, but it was recognizably Treepo.
“You’re still adorable, bud,” I said with a smile.
Looking him over in full, he had only grown roughly two and a half times as big as before. He would be heavy if I had to walk around with him on my shoulder now, but spread across both shoulders I could probably manage, and by the time I was grown it wouldn’t be a problem. Though I described him as a rabbit-lemur before, the evolved treehopper had elements of red panda now, if a red panda had a rabbit nose, lop bunny ears, a prehensile tail, and twisty horns.
I pulled up my menu to see what he was now called, and read that he was now a “high treehopper.” As I was looking at my list of familiars, I saw the giant polerat, Nibbles, disappear from the list.
“Ow!” I cried, looking down. The giant polerat had bit my leg. “What the hell, Nibbles.”
I kicked my leg and he flew off, landing a short distance away. He roared–calling it a roar is generous, at his size, but roaring seemed to be the intent–and he charged me.
Treepo landed on him, hard, and proceeded to beat the life out of him. Birdo watched, cawing, and Gregory snored, long since falling asleep after eating his piece of meat.
“I guess I hit my limits as a tamer,” I said, rubbing my leg, casting a small heal on myself.
* * *
Laying in bed, Treepo curled up next to me, I considered what was next for us. I had left Birdo and Gregory out in the jungle and told them to look out for each other, and that I would be back soon. Treepo was too big to carry but not too big to sneak around town, so he came home with me. I glanced at his new stats.
[Treepo] High Treehopper (Lv 1)
HP: 44/44
MP: 11/11
Status: none
EXP: 23/100
He had grown quite a bit in evolving, but it still said nothing about skills or magic. His growth rate was now a lot more like mine had been, requiring 100 EXP to reach level 2, suggesting that he would need 1000 EXP to max out his last level, but then he would be stuck like Gregory if there wasn’t a way to evolve again.
I pet the thick, reddish fur, and Treepo chittered lightly in his sleep. Not that he needed to evolve again to stay with me. This was plenty nice as-is.
It seemed like beasts had strength tiers. Gregory, as a regular nodmouse, needed a miniscule amount of experience to reach his plateau, and upon evolving only required the same amount of experience that Treepo had needed before. That was the same as what Birdo needed. Upon evolving, Birdo and Treepo now were in the next tier, needing a comparable amount of experience to what I had needed at a low level. Gregory could never catch up now that he was maxed out.
Presumably, there were stronger beasts out there which started out needing 100 EXP to first level up. I would wager beasts like the ramhog, vipis, and griffator would be like that. They would probably reach an even higher strength tier upon evolving. I would need to become a much stronger tamer before I could experiment with that, since at my current skill I had already failed to maintain one of my familiar bonds.
I thought about the dungeon, which was called a “rank D” dungeon. It had an evolved ramhog in it, and would probably have more evolved beasts like that deeper in. If it had nothing stronger, though…
I worked backwards from that. That would make an unevolved ramhog rank E, which is what I assumed Treepo and Birdo were now. If that was the case, then regular treehoppers and vicaws and polerats–and Gregory–would be rank F. Anything weaker, like a normal nodmouse or singbird, would be rank G, then. What about insects? Not something like stingknights–those were probably rank F or even rank E–but like the bugs I used to crush in the garden. Are those even really beasts at all? I got experience killing the first one, but only a single point. If a nodmouse was rank G, those bugs would be rank H. What about microorganisms? Rank I? It seemed silly to extend this idea that far.
It was probably simpler to assume everything weaker than rank F was just “unranked,” since they were something a child could easily kill with no skills and were worth so little experience. Most kids gained their early levels just living their lives. The only reason I had even benefited from hunting those tiny bugs and beasts was because I had started at three and a half years old and was grinding, trying to cheat the system and get ahead of my peers. A grown kid or an adult would have no need to ever bother with beasts that small. They barely even gave any meat so they weren’t really worth hunting. I only managed to claim a morsel of meat from nodmice and singbirds because my inventory dismantled them perfectly, otherwise it wouldn’t really be worthwhile. They were, at best, prey to feed rank F beasts.
My eyes drooped as I thought through the finer details of this world. I briefly realized that if I was right about ranks and they followed the same pattern all the way up the chain, a rank A beast would need one million experience in its first level and ten million for its last. It would be three orders of magnitude stronger than the strongest thing I had seen so far.
I drifted off to sleep, remembering the legendary beasts of myths from my world. Perhaps one day I would meet similar beasts here. I hoped I would be ready.