Lone awoke to a heavy sensation on his body. Without even opening his eyes, he already knew the source of this unusual weight.

'Should I just make a king-sized bed instead of two singles? I have a feeling she'll crawl into my sheets to cuddle my tails regardless of if she has her own bed or not,' Lone thought as he gently pushed Sophie off of himself.

Gently shaking her shoulders, Lone greeted the sleepy girl. "Good morning."

Rubbing her eyes and not minding the fact that she was sat on Lone's lap with two of his tails in her arms, Sophie replied, "Good morning."

"You really like my tails, huh?" Lone commented as he smiled warmly.

Sophie's cheeks flushed before she let go of the fluffy limbs and looked embarrassed. "Sorry... They're just really soft..."

Lone laughed a bit before he got up off of the bunch of blankets that were on the floor and stretched. "It's fine," he said while thinking, 'She's just a kid, after all. It'd be immature of me to punish her. It's harmless anyway.'

"Mmm," Sophie mumbled as she weakly nodded her head.

The pair soon left the half-built cabin after fixing their hair and shaking off their drowsiness. Thankfully, none of Lone's alarms had been triggered last night.

'Are the goblins scared of me, or do they not know that I'm here? But what about the goblins that got away during our first encounter?' Lone shook his head. it wasn't worth thinking about it any further for now.

Sophie tried to cook breakfast for the two of them using some of the boar meat after Lone took it out from his Dimensional Storage, but much to Lone's horror, it would seem that Sophie was even worse at cooking than his younger sister was, and she usually cooked poison whenever he visited the family home back on Earth.

"I'm really sorry!" Sophie yelled with tears in her eyes.

Lone just sighed and smiled wryly. "It's my fault. I should have known that you can't cook since you didn't need to eat for almost a thousand years."

"Still..." Sophie felt bad for ruining some of the precious boar meat.

"Don't worry about it. Maybe if I keep cooking I might get a skill from it," Lone joked as he took some more meat out from his Dimensional Storage and a few herbs he had gathered yesterday.

As a person from modern Earth who lived by himself, he knew what a few edible plants that worked well as seasoning looked like, thankfully. It was also a blessing that this world, Altros, shared some of the same plant life as Earth.

Sophie watched Lone as he began making a meal for them and a thought entered her head. "Lone, can't you use your Creation Magic to make food for us?"

"I tried that while you were sleeping yesterday. It uses up way too much MP, so while we're still here, we can't afford to risk me being without MP. You never know when I'll need to create something in the middle of a fight," Lone explained.

Sophie had an impressed look on her face. "You can use Creation Magic while fighting?"

"I dunno," Lone shook his head. "But I think I can. I tried to create some simple items in less than a second and it worked, but it seems to use up more MP since I don't have a clear image in my mind."

"You're amazing..." Sophie absentmindedly muttered.

Lone grinned. "Says the thousand-year-old little girl who can teleport."

Sophie pouted and squeezed one of Lone's tails hard enough to make him wince. "I'm nine-hundred and seventy-one, not a thousand."

"Sorry, sorry, think about the tails!" Lone's cried out.

Congratulations! The host's passive skill [Physical Pain Resistance] has levelled up! It is now Intermediate Level 3.

Sophie promptly apologised for accidentally hurting Lone and she continued to caress and show love for his fluffy limbs as he cooked their breakfast.

The host has developed the passive skill: Cooking Mastery.

"So there was a skill for that, huh?" Lone chuckled at that fact that his joke had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He inspected the skill, but it did nothing more than simply make every dish he cooked ten-percent tastier. It was nice, but hardly what Lone wanted in this situation.

After their meal, Lone got geared up in his survival gear and helped Sophie into her boots before they set out to explore the full size of the island.

Lone's plan was simple for today. He didn't know how many goblins inhabited this island, so he was going to walk around the entire place and create a rough map of the island's borders so he could get an estimate on their numbers based on the habitable land.

Of course, this would not be an accurate estimation. It was impossible for him to know the goblins breeding rates, life expectancy, living conditions, so and so forth, however, this would, at the very least, give him and Sophie some idea of what they were up against.

The host has developed the passive skill: Cartography Mastery. Congratulations! The host's passive skill [Cartography Mastery] has levelled up! It is now Beginner Level 2. Congratulations! The host's passive skill [Cartography Mastery] has levelled up! It is now Beginner Level 3.

The pair of odd adventurers had almost returned to their campsite at this point, so Lone filled the rest of the map in based on his existing knowledge and put it away in his Dimensional Storage.

Sophie noticed this, and asked, "How big is this place? My feet don't hurt like they did when we went into the forest, so it must be pretty small, right?"

"Clever girl," Lone praised, making Sophie smile. "Your feet hurt mostly because of the uneven terrain and the fact that you were wearing new boots, but you're still right that this place is small. I'd guess that it's no bigger than three miles from end to end."

"Miles?" Sophie tilted her head at this unfamiliar word.

Lone slapped himself mentally for forgetting that this measuring unit wasn't used by any of the countries that Sophie had lived in during those times, so he simplified by saying, "Roughly four-hundred and eighty-two of our cabins lined up from end to end."

"Woah!" Sophie's eyes sparkled. "That's a lot of cabins!"

"It is, isn't it?" Lone casually replied. "By the way, Soph."

"Hmm?" Sophie looked at Lone.

"What would be your prefered weapon if you had to fight in close-combat?" Lone asked seemingly out of nowhere, but since there was the threat of the goblins, Sophie decided to answer seriously.

"I trained with two short swords as a child all those years ago. It was just for fun more than anything else. My parents never expected me to be a warrior or anything. I've pretty much forgotten it all by now, but if I had to choose, it'd have to be that," Sophie said.

"Here," Lone abruptly said as he took two of the short swords he had claimed from the goblins out from his Dimensional Storage and handed them to Sophie.

They looked almost brand new, which puzzled Sophie. "I spent my mana on repairing the daggers, swords and axes that we looted off of the goblins before we went to sleep last night. Repairing metal seems to be far cheaper than out-right creating it."

"Oh... Thank you!" Sophie enthusiastically held her new weapons with affection. 'He did that for me, didn't he? After all, he likes the spear, and none of the goblins had a spear...'

"Try your best to get acquainted with them. You might need to use those swords in a minute. Worst case scenario, rely on your teleportation as a weapon," Lone suddenly ordered.

"Huh?" Sophie cocked her head adorably.

Lone took his wooden spear out of his Dimensional Storage and a serious look enveloped his expression. "I thought I could hear people. Now that I'm used to this body, my ears are actually quite sensitive. So while not as accurate as your mana sensing, it seems that I have more range... for now at least."

As soon as their cabin was back within their vision, both Lone and Sophie could see several figures carefully snooping around and inside of it.

The distance was too far for Sophie to see them clearly with her mana sensing, so these people were quite blurry in her blind eyes. "They're not goblins... They have so much mana... Lone, what are they?"

"Well." Lone tightened the grip on his spear before saying, "If Earth mythology proves to be accurate again, they appear to be some kind of elves."

"Elves?" Sophie had never heard of this term before.

"Yeah. Pointy ears, beautiful faces, most of them seem to have bows and arrows on them... They look really dirty though. Not exactly picture-perfect elves," Lone joked in a quiet voice.

"... Beautiful faces?" For some reason, this single piece of information stuck with the small girl.

"Yeah, though there are only men. Weird. Maybe their culture disallows women from being scouts," Lone commented. As a history teacher, this all fascinated him, even if he was both scared and anxious right now.

Abruptly, one of these elven men turned his head to where Lone and Sophie were slowly approaching from and spotted them.

"Shit," Lone muttered.

The elf looked alarmed. He drew his bow and yelled, "Who are you?!"

"What...?" Lone was so dumbstruck that he forgot to answer. "Did he just speak English?"

Sophie was frightened, but she caught Lone's words. "What's 'English'?"

"What?" Lone's mind was spinning. 'Is the world translating our words to each other or something?'

"I asked you who you were!" The elf's voice filled the beach once more. At this point, his companions had joined his side and were also aiming their weapons towards Lone and Sophie.

'I guess I can save it for later, for now, I need to de-escalate this or prepare to fight...' Ideally, Lone would like to make some friends on this island with the ever-present danger of the goblins, but he was more than willing to take drastic measures if these people proved to be hostile to him and Sophie.