FMH ~ 18!

- Luke -

Luke scraped at his combat perch stone and grunted. The last two-and-a-half years had been intense, and was basically a blur of killing goats and testing his battle prowess. A diet of only protein hadn't been great for his system, but he wasn't malnourished in the slightest. In fact, between the constant combat and the huge number of hides he wore into combat to prevent getting beaten to death by goats, he had gained an impressive amount of muscle mass.

He was scraping at what he had thought was stone for a simple reason. Earlier today, it had cracked and flaked when it was hit by a leaping goat. When the top layer of grime had flaked off, Luke had been able to tell that this wasn’t rock at all. It was bone. 

Goat-bone tools had been the norm for well over a year after his dagger got too dull to handle the tasks he needed it for. So when he saw so much bone as a single item, he got both excited and a little nervous. First, he already had a use in mind for this. Second, what had been so large in this world that its bone could be mistaken for a rock for over two years?

Luke had started digging, and found that the mindless task was a nice change of pace. When the bone was fully unearthed, Luke was still confused. It didn't look like any bones that he was familiar with, such as a femur or fibula. No, this was a crooked teardrop that was flat on one part of the wide side. About halfway down its length, there was a spar of bone that jutted out perpendicular to the rest of it.

“Hello, new weapon.” Luke spoke flatly, not having the mental energy to get excited about something like this. “Well… now I get to learn how to use a two-handed club. That should give me something to do for the next few years. A new hobby might be nice, heehee… though digging was interesting as well!”

Luke took the bone back to his base by the water and started using some bone and rocks to smooth and carve into the large teardrop. It was a dense bone, so this took some serious doing. That made him happy, as it meant that it would survive heavy usage. Days later, when he had a place to wrap leather for a grip on both the tapering end as well as the spar, Luke decided to wash off all the excess dirt in the pool. He stood, dragging the oversized weapon behind him. When he was ankle-deep in the water, he dipped the club in and started washing.

When he was done, the bone gleamed like the pearls he had been saving up. It was a beautiful blue-white, and it almost looked like the water had left a film on the bone. No. Wait. Yes. The bone… a few of the scratches, nicks, and blemishes had vanished from the surface. That meant… this bone absorbed water to repair itself! “So cool! The water impacts even dead things!”

Intent on testing this phenomenon, Luke fit the leather onto the bone and held the entire thing underwater. As he suspected, after about ten minutes the bone was entirely fixed up. Bone had grown around the edges of the leather, holding it in place better than sinew ever would. Luke hefted his new weapon and gave it a few test swings. “Good enough.”

Still, he had to frown at the item. It really was familiar, but he had no idea why. “Let’s go looking at bones, then. Ha! There’s a phrase I would have never been able to say around… hmm… what’s his… it was… Andre! Wonder how that guy’s doing.”

Luke walked to where today's meat was waiting to be processed, and carefully dismantled the first goat. When he was butchering it, he found nothing that looked even remotely like the bone that was now sitting next to him. Luke pulled out the pearl and added it to his bag with a *plop*. He had given up one of his waterskins specifically so that he could fill it with water and hide the pearls. It was effective, and at full capacity could hold a few hundred of the tiny pearls. Not that it ever needed to do so.

He had gotten to a point where there were almost a few hundred pearls in his waterskin, but one day the water had started churning when he dropped a few in. He had waited a few minutes, then dumped out the water and found that he had a bunch of the third-rank pearls and only two of the first rank ones. At least he would know when they upgraded, the process was somewhat violent as they got stronger. Luke sighed and shook his head. 

A third-tier pearl made him sad, because that meant that he had killed yet another twenty-five hundred goats and added their pearls to his collection. Currently he had forty-eight of the tier threes, and twenty-six tier ones. Relatively soon he would be able to witness a tier-four pearl, and he wasn't sure if he should be sad at all the killing he had done, or excited to have a goal. To make a single tier four pearl… fifty of the first, second, third… that would be exactly one hundred and fifty thousand goats that he had managed to pull a pearl out of.

If the goats hadn’t been carnivorous, he would have been drowning in blue goat meat. Also, instead of the population dropping like he had expected, there had been a population boom. At least, for the left herd. Since their competition had been killed off to the tune of over a hundred thousand deaths, and most of the meat was left for them to eat… 

“There it is! Oh… Celestial Feces.” Luke had finally found the bone that matched the large club. He held it in his hand, which was shaking slightly; mainly due to the realization he had just had. The bone in his palm was almost the exact same shape as his new oversized club. He had pulled it out of the goat’s skull; specifically the ear. “You are a malleus… the ‘hammer’ portion of an ear bone. Also known as the smallest bone in the body.”