Chapter 15: Forest Day

“How worried should I be about this?” Arthur wasn’t exactly scared, but he was only several days into a new life. He didn’t want to find himself bleeding out on a forest floor because of some unexpected threat on what was supposed to be a nice trip.

“Hardly a risk at all. We won’t be that far from the city. It would have to be something that wandered in this direction, which is barely a chance at all, then decided it wanted to stay in the forest, which is barely a chance again, and then is fast enough that we can’t run away and strong enough that a dozen of us can’t take it.”

“What if it just overpowers us? Say it’s a level ten monster and we can’t touch it.”

The cat shook its head. “It doesn’t usually work like that. Numbers are a stat all on its own. You have thirty or forty stat points, right? So do I. So does Milo. If you put our whole group together, we add up to a crazy tentacle monster with dozens of eyes, arms, and weapons. Most monsters don’t have a way of dealing with that.”

“Oh, huh.” Arthur hadn’t expected balance to work that way. “So a sufficient number of people could take Karbo?”

“Kind of. Battle-crazy is also a kind of stat. But to answer your question, even he could never take a city by himself. Not even if all the strong fighters were away. Thousands of people are scary, they could defeat Karbo by just throwing rocks.”

Arthur grabbed another dagger from Milo, looking it over before tucking it into the cat’s belt.

“I told you, I have daggers!” the cat yelled. “Good ones!”

“Oh, shush. Just take it. It’s another backup. And it should make sneaking harder, right? You could put it real close to another dagger and try to control the clinking noise, or something.”

“Not how it works.”

“Still. It helps Milo out. And if you take it, I’ll let you close-range sneak on me as much as you want. You can try to breathe down my neck the whole trip.”

The reason the cat rarely got caught in his stealth was that he was barely allowed to stalk outside the class in the first place. Most people didn’t like the concept of someone sneaking up on them. And even with the class, the general rule was that Corbin could sneak, but only from a distance where it wasn’t possible for him to accidentally bump into someone and startle them. From what the mouse-girl had said, it slowed down his progress a lot, but kept prey-animal personalities like hers from feeling constantly hunted.

That rule changed, however, if someone was willing to give him permission.

“Really?”

“Really.”

The cat looked down at the dagger, then arranged it in his belt to travel better. “Deal.”

“All right, everyone!” Ix, the turtle-teacher, suddenly yelled. “Group up. It’s time to talk about safety. This trip is classified as minimally dangerous. As initiates, you could all take this trip by yourselves and probably come out all right. But just because a trip is mostly safe doesn’t mean it can’t be even safer. I’m going to go over a short list of rules, guidelines to keep you safe. The first and biggest of those is…”

Arthur never learned the first and biggest rule of field trip safety. As the teacher started to get into the nuts and bolts of the best way to not die on a pleasant nature walk, Milo suddenly nudged him with his elbow and nodded off to the right. Arthur looked and found himself immediately distracted by a late-comer to the group, one who settled into the group with all the fluid beauty of a moonlit lake.

“Don’t stare.” Milo hissed under his breath.

“I wasn’t.” Arthur was staring. It was hard not to. He didn’t understand what beauty standards demons worked under, but he really didn’t get how everyone wasn’t staring at Mizu all the time. He tried not to look at her too much, glancing out of the corner of his eye every now and again as she paid attention to the teacher’s instructions, apparently unaware Arthur was there at all.

“And that’s how you survive, both in safe forests and less safe places.” The teacher ended his lecture, dooming Arthur to possible future death from his own short attention span.  “Now, follow me. Do try to keep up. I’m not as fast as some, but I’ll be setting a brisk pace.”

Any thought of slyly making time to talk to Mizu was washed completely from Arthur’s mind after the first few minutes of walking. The combat students all seemed entirely able of making the pace, probably because they dumped their points entirely into stats that favored their physical capabilities. Corbin was also having no trouble, at least judging by the fact that he was nowhere to be seen. Mizu was gliding along in the distance, apparently unbothered as she easily kept pace.

Even Milo had some points in dexterity and strength, and was mostly fine as he huffed along.

But Arthur had all his points in perspective, and was dying as he tried to keep up. Off to his side, the mouse girl, Rhodia, seemed to be in a similar boat, working her short legs as fast as she could to keep up. He glanced at her, trying to beam over whatever sympathy he could spare, and she breathed heavily in solidarity as they struggled along.

A half-hour later, Arthur collapsed on a thick layer of humus, his lungs burning with relief as they finally saw their chance to get back on top of his oxygen deficit.

“All right. We’ve made pretty good time. The students who had a hard time keeping up might consider an investment in their physical stats, when it makes sense.” The teacher glanced at Arthur and the similarly unlucky crafting-class nerds strewn about the forest floor. “Otherwise, take a few moments to recover, then feel free to mill about. Just remember not to go too far.”

Ix set himself up on a fallen log, propping his apparently unneeded cane against the bark and popping open his book. Various members of the combat students paired up and moved out, looking to take full advantage of the opportunity to run patrols and perhaps beat up some unlucky forest creatures if they proved aggressive.

“You gonna be okay?” Milo asked, looking down at Arthur. “I thought you were going to die. You didn’t puke, at least.”

“Not yet. I didn’t puke yet.”

Arthur forced himself to a sitting position and took a better look around the forest. From what he could see, it wasn’t that different from forests back on Earth. There were very good trees, a bunch of shrubby little plants growing in the protection they provided, and not a whole lot else.

“I’m going to go off with Rhodia. She’s looking for interesting clay, and I’m looking for rocks that might have interesting metal. There’s a synergy there. You can come along if you want.”

“I think I’m... I need a few minutes. Plus, there’s a mushroom over there that’s calling my name.” There really was. His food scientist skill was twigging slightly on a lot of things around the forest, telling him that it would be a good idea to go and inspect them further. “I’m not sure how far I’ll get from here, honestly.”

“Got it. Well, have fun.” Milo glanced at the water elemental, who was moving around in circles around the glade, glancing at the ground as he did. “And try not to be too… you, I guess. Try to be only moderately yourself.”

After everyone had left and Arthur churned through several more lungfuls of air, he pushed himself painfully to his feet and began examining the plants. His skill wasn’t giving him full, screen-based descriptions of what he saw, which Ella said might be a possibility at higher levels. But it immediately gave him the idea that a few mosses and plants might be useful as additives for teas, and that the mushroom he had seen was probably either poison or medicine, depending on how it was used.

He had picked up a few sacks from a weaver-vole in the class. In fact, once she found out he actually intended to use them for actual scavenging, she basically forced them on him.

Within a few minutes, he had dozens of different materials sorted into “poisonous” and “probably not poisonous” groups. There was plenty to collect, and it was oddly entertaining putting his own skill through the paces of telling him whatever it could gather about the materials. The class was spending hours here, and originally, he had wondered how he’d pass the time. Now, it didn’t seem like nearly so much of an issue, especially when his skill suddenly ticked up another level.

Food Scientist (Level 4)

You understand a bit more about the world around you than most. Other people might be able to manipulate it better, but you comprehend how things should be when it’s not being manipulated at all.

That knowledge grants you a better understanding of various aspects of ingredients, tools, and cooking conditions. At level zero, this skill helps you gather preliminary information about your resources and predict the effects of various cooking techniques slightly better.

This skill has reached an improvement threshold. Further improvements to the skill will move it to a new tier of function, potentially granting it further capabilities.

“Yes! Awesome,” Arthur said to himself, quietly. Glancing in his bag, he confirmed that every ingredient he had gathered so far was giving off a slightly stronger signal to its potential use, with more than one mushroom now confirmed as fully poisonous and unhelpful to him. With renewed enthusiasm, Arthur started walking away from the grove in a spiraling pattern, trying to identify as many new ingredients as he could.

After another fifteen minutes, his bags were starting to fill, but his progress was starting to slow. Most things he saw on the forest floor were now duplicates of plants he had already collected. He accumulated some more of the particularly promising mosses, but otherwise left enough space for anything new he might find as he milled about. With any luck, he’d have full bags by the end of the trip, and despite the fact that his legs were still complaining at him, he was determined to make that happen by the end of the trip, pain be damned.

All that determination flew out the window in a second when Mizu came back into his field of view, right as he stooped down at the base of a large conifer to scoop off some of its sap with his dagger. He froze, just aware enough of himself to decide not to take the opportunity to stare at her. The water-wisp had given him exactly no indications she was especially interested in him, and the last thing he wanted to do in this new life was be the kind of guy who would make someone like her uncomfortable.

As he began to force himself to look away and go back to his work, she stopped him from doing so by suddenly smiling.

Most of the time, Mizu didn’t make many facial expressions at all. If he had to put a word to it, she was stoic. He had seen her look mildly interested at other people’s training, and she had seemed slightly pained and embarrassed when she had apologized for hunting his people, which as far as he knew, she hadn’t actually done.

This wasn’t a big smile, but it was genuine, and a kind of reaction he hadn’t seen from her before. As much as he wished it were aimed at him, it wasn’t. Mizu’s gaze was focused on something behind him that made her happy, something that had managed to crack her cool demeanor.

Arthur looked behind him and found a flower blooming, a speck of vibrant blue standing out on the forest floor. When he turned back, Mizu was in front of him.

“We pursued your people through the hills, armed and fighting.”