4.13

“You are too attached to your ideas, and it makes you wasteful,” Kalter said, staring him down. “You must be fluid in warfare; to be stagnant is to be dead.”

“You’re accusing me of lacking fluidity,” August scoffed, “Which of us is incapable of letting go again?”

Kalter leant forward as if to stand, but Rittan held an arm out between them.

“Fighting each other will get us nowhere—we shall attempt all three,” Rittan said, once again placing himself between them as the voice of reason. “A palisade will keep the smaller variety from being able to reach out camp and act as an obstacle for the larger ones. If we are attacked in the future, we can retreat to the traps and then into the forest.”

Rittan carefully sat back again when he was sure they wouldn’t start another argument.

“What weapons would you suggest we craft?” Rittan asked, forcing the conversation to follow in his wake. “August has made me a Great Bow, but we lack the materials to make a bowstring that will last more than a dozen shots.”

Kalter remained quiet for a moment longer before answering.

“Throwing spears are easy to make,” Kalter said, picking her unfished twine back up.

“I have no training in how to throw one,” Rittan admitted, “Is it difficult?”

“No,” Kalter said, eyeing him for a moment. “It isn’t.”

“I’ve seen you pick up half a dozen logs,” August said, forcing himself not to shut down again. “I feel like you could do some damage to that thing we saw.”

Rittan seemed to give it some thought.

“We can perform some tests to find the best-sized projectile,” Kalter said, eyes on her hands. “Your upper body strength is greater than my own, and I’m confident in my ability to throw something of size—you should have no difficulties.”

August added the fifth section to his twine, splicing it in as he went. There was something approaching an actual coil on the ground now. His fingers were working mostly on autopilot.

“Back home,” August said, frowning. “We had these lengths of wood you could use to add force to a spear; I’m not sure what they were called. They were about this long, with an area the spear could sit in.”

The knowledge from the [Basic Spear Blueprint] included a foggy outline of what might have been the spear-throwing tool, but he couldn’t see it clearly enough to know for sure.

Kalter remained silent.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Rittan admitted. “Could you recreate it?”

“I can try—I’ll put it on my to-do list,” August agreed. “We’re running out of daylight—maybe an hour left?”

The off-topic comment seemed to catch both Voithos off guard, too deep in their own thoughts.

“You said you ate one of those creatures in the shallows?” Kalter said, “We should use this time to collect some food—if they haven’t attacked yet, then we may as well use the resource available to us while we can.”

“August?” Rittan said.

“You don’t need my permission, man,” August said, placing his twine into his inventory. “If you want to go hunting, do it—I’ll get the fire started.”

“Thank you,” Rittan said kindly, pushing himself to his feet.

Rittan picked up the [Bamboo Spear] from its place, leaning against the structure. Kalter followed, leaving the twine on the ground and following him towards the lake. August remained where he was, before carefully standing up, just in case there were any leftover pains, but he seemed to be in the clear.

That was perhaps the strangest part of all of this—he’d gone from unable to move, with a high possibility of internal bleeding, all the way back to normal in the span of perhaps five hours, two of which had been where he was affected by boosted healing.

That was an absurd recovery rate, genuinely superhuman, and nothing in modern medicine could perform on that level. Cuts took days to heal, and broken bones took months—the damage Kalter had caused him had healed in hours.

Human bodies didn’t work that way; they didn’t just stitch themselves back together on the same day, and they didn’t heal impact wounds before the bruising had even shown up. The pains he’d experienced after every day weren’t even a problem anymore, washed away almost as soon as he woke up.

Maybe Kalter was right, and this was another experiment by the Gaians; maybe he was an experiment. Humans didn’t have access to Mana or the ability to heal grievous bodily injuries in hours. They couldn’t bend the minds of animals with a touch or summon people back from the dead. They didn’t see floating words or have access to an internal HUD. August wasn’t sure what else they’d done to him, but if his body had changed this much, if he’d deviated so far from the normal human experience—then could he even call himself human anymore? Maybe the human parts were already gone.

The fire crackled to life beneath his hands, warm and comforting. Some instinct from millennia ago drew him to gaze into the flames and left him entranced. They hadn’t managed to take that from him, at least.