Myles’ POV

The tribe had ninety-four people, excluding Myles, and stick bugs were roughly the size of a large dog, so, unsurprisingly, the meat (if one could call the gooey thing he was served, meat) didn’t go very far.

They would need to go hunting again. Soon.

That would come later though; for now Myles was telling a story.

It was to the whole tribe (no alone time with Atakarr for now, unfortunately), and while Myles didn’t really mind it, especially with the [Storyteller] skill making him sound more like Morgan Freeman with each successive level, the kinds of questions he often got asked tended to make him an interesting mix of weary and frustrated.

“So the robot went back in time to kill her because her son would be the leader of the resistance?” Someone, a girl, asked, interrupting Myles mid-sentence.

It had taken Myles almost thirty minutes to sufficiently explain time travel, and another forty-five to cover robots, and now this.

“Uh, yeah, pretty much,” he said. At least he thought that was why the terminator was sent back anyway. Myles couldn’t really recall the plot of the movie all that well, so the story he was telling was maybe two parts recollection and one part imagination.

“Why didn’t he just go back to before she was born and kill her mother instead?” The same girl asked.

“It doesn’t matter when the robot goes back to,” Myles said, “the resistance would just send a protector too.”

The girl rolled her eyes. “Yes, but the protector couldn’t be John’s father if his mother wasn’t even alive yet,” she said in a tone of voice that screamed ‘duh’.

“What I don’t get,” another person said, “is why all the robots didn’t just go back to before the resistance was formed.”

“To be honest I’m still stuck on what exactly robots are,” a guy said.

“Fake people,” someone else explained.

This just confused him even more. “Why would fake people want to rule the world?”

A kid in front spoke up then. “Um, do robots pee?”

Myles sighed. “Somebody save me,” he muttered.

Elder Raad did. “Alright, everyone, that’s enough storytelling for now. I’m sure Myles is exhausted and needs his rest.”

Myles sighed in relief. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Elder Raad said wearing an amused smile.

“Don’t worry, Myles, I liked the story,” Atakarr said walking to them.

“No, you didn’t,” Myles said, smiling. Atakarr preferred real (or at least realistic) stories, because she would often stop him to ask for details about the places in the stories and their customs, which she found fascinating. That was why a fair percentage of the stories he told Atakarr were actually news articles or historical accounts he’d read. “Thanks for trying to make me feel better though.”

Atakarr smiled, and Myles fell into step with her as she walked, even though he had no idea where she was headed.

“How many light-rocks do you have in your inventory?” Atakarr asked suddenly, and Myles frowned in bemusement, then took a second to check.

“Five.”

“Get more,” Atakarr said, pointing at the pool.

“Why?”

“We’ll be needing them.”

Myles shrugged and obeyed, searching in the fringes of the pool for rocks that had been kept there to soak in its luminescent waters.

Myles picked ten then made to stand but Atakarr shook her head. “More,” she said. “And take water too. A lot.”

At sixty-two light-rocks and what was probably several gallons of water, Atakarr finally thought they had enough, then led Myles out of the cavern.

The walk took over half an hour, and led to a very dark, clearly unused part of the subterranean network.

“How big is this place?” Myles wondered as they walked.

“We’re not sure, but we think it runs through the whole island. We’ve never been able to use all of it, not even when our population was at its largest.”

“And the only parts that lead outside are the entrance and that tunnel you showed me?”

Atakarr shook her head. “There are seventeen others that we know of, but, fortunately, the entrance is the only one that leads above ground; the others all come out at the sides.”

They kept walking for a few more minutes, and Myles was just getting impatient/curious enough to ask again where she was taking him when they arrived.

It was a cavern, as big, if not bigger, than the one with the pool, and the sole light-rock Atakarr held barely even lit a portion of it.

“Light it up, Myles,” Atakarr said, and Myles obeyed, tossing light-rocks around as far as he could manage.

All the lights from both their inventories were enough to light the chamber, but only just, leaving the ceiling and upper parts wreathed in shadows.

“We’ll have to bring more next time,” Atakarr observed.

“Atakarr, why are we here?” Myles asked.

“For training,” Atakarr said.

Myles cocked his head in confusion, then realisation dawned. “Right, we can practice [Parkour] on the walls, and there’s enough space on the ground for sparring and stuff.”

“Precisely.” Atakarr nodded. “But more importantly, I need to unlock the skills you have. And preferably not do it while my head is about to be taken off by a stick bug.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” Myles said, swallowing at the recollection of Atakarr’s near miss.

“So,” Atakarr said, “let’s get started.”

*****

Training with Atakarr was fun. Exhausting, and painful, and downright scary sometimes, but fun.

They’d worked on [Parkour] first, using the walls of the cavern, and this was when Myles had learnt that Seena were apparently very good climbers, their hooves able to somehow find traction on the smallest imperfections on a vertical surface. Then they’d worked on [Fleetfooted], and Myles had learnt that Seena were also very good runners, even though they had a rather comical loping gait.

By now Atakarr had also gotten [Regeneration], [Nimble], and [Physical Exercise] due to the work she’d put into getting the first two skills, so they’d decided to go for [Tough Cookie] and [Pain Resistance] next, and this time, Myles had learnt that Atakarr could be something of a slave driver.

Atakarr’d had the brilliant (and admittedly, it was brilliant) idea for them to kill three stones with one bird by holding nothing back during their spars, so that they could level [Tough Cookie], [Pain Resistance] and [Spear Handling Proficiency] all at once.

So as to not accidentally maim each other, they’d scraped the tips of their spears blunt, which had given both the [Stoneshaper] skill:

Stoneshaper_ Lv. 1/50

Type: (passive)

Manipulate stone with greater ease per skill level.

Which they had unanimously decided to set aside for now, and the [Staff Handling Proficiency] skill:

Staff Handling Proficiency_ Lv. 1/150

Type: (passive)

Increases your aptitude for staff handling per skill level.

This had merged with the [Spear Handling Proficiency] skill to create:

Pole-arm Handling Proficiency_ Lv. 1/250

Type: (passive)

Increases your aptitude for handling all pole/staff weapons per skill level.

And because Myles was an idiot who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, he had idly commented that they could make even more progress in a short time if they fought with their eyes closed, thereby also levelling [8th Sense].

Atakarr had liked that idea.

Myles’ body hadn’t.

Four days had passed this way. Four days of seven-hour training sessions, and countless bruises, and sleeping on hard ground, but, most importantly, four days of nothing but magic water that somehow kept him from starving but did absolutely nothing to sate his hunger no matter how much of it he drank.

Myles felt like he was breaking.

Atakarr had offered to let him off once, saying that she could train and hunt alone, but Myles had been unable to accept and sit back when he knew that his being there might mean the difference between living and dying for her, and he’d said so; Atakarr had given him a look that made him feel warm and tingly all the way down to his toes, and she hadn’t brought up the topic again.

Ding!

Congratulations! [Physical Exercise] has levelled up.

Physical Exercise_ Lv. 28-->29/250

Myles laid on the ground panting (he barely noticed the hardness through all the other pain these days), Atakarr beside him, her breathing not quite as hard, though it was a near thing.

“Did you—?” Myles asked Atakarr through his puffs.

“Yes. You?”

“Uh-huh, level 29,” Myles said, then sat up with a groan, his arms feeling like jelly. “Maybe the one thousand speed pushups thing was not the best idea.” It had been his.

“Agreed,” Atakarr said.

Neither had finished it of course. They hadn’t even gotten close, collapsing somewhere in the 480s. Still, considering Myles couldn’t have done ten pushups before the System, this was a very impressive feat.

“I must say though,” Atakarr continued, “it was effective.”

“Of course that’s what you focus on,” Myles said, rolling his eyes good-naturedly.

“No pain no gain,” Atakarr countered. “You said that yourself.”

“Yeah, back before I knew I was signing up for marine boot camp.”

The sound of approaching footfalls (hoof-falls?) interrupted Atakarr’s comeback, and they both looked to see Elder Raad walking into the cavern.

“So this is where the two of you have been spending all your time,” Elder Raad observed, and Myles instantly felt like she’d caught them doing something wrong, which was silly of course, because they hadn’t.

Had they?

Well, whichever it was, the fact was that seeing someone else here besides he and Atakarr felt weird.

Atakarr, on the other hand, seemed perfectly calm as she said, “Elder Raad, did you need me for something?”

The older woman hummed in agreement. “Both of you actually,” she said as she came to sit with them.

“We’ll do it,” Myles said before the woman could even begin, and Elder Raad cocked her head in puzzlement as her ears did that twitching thing Atakarr’s often did, though they didn’t have quite the same effect. “Oh, um, you were going to ask if Atakarr and I could go hunting again, right?” Myles asked, wondering if maybe he had misread the situation.

Elder Raad nodded. “I was.”

“We’ll do it,” Myles said again. “It’s actually what we’ve been preparing for the last few days.”

Elder Raad frowned then, and she and Atakarr shared a long look that seemed to hold an entire conversation, Myles did not know what that was about.

Eventually, Elder Raad looked back to Myles, an expression he couldn’t quite place on her face. “Thank you,” she said, and it seemed to Myles like she was thanking him for more than just agreeing to the hunt. Which was definitely odd since Myles had no idea what else he had done that was deserving of thanks.

Knowing answers would not be forthcoming though, the young man shrugged it off.

“Just give Myles and I some time to clean up, and we’ll get going,” Atakarr said.

“Very well,” Elder Raad said rising. “Good luck you two.”

As the elder left, Atakarr made her way to a corner of the cavern and began to rinse herself off with water from her inventory, and though hesitantly, Myles followed suit.

The first time he had finally stripped in front of Atakarr (or anyone for that matter) was three days ago, after Atakarr had finally cracked and given him a three-minute speech on just why he was being ridiculous about his aversion towards being seen in the nude, when after a training session he had wanted to walk all the way back to the public bath area (a patch of tunnels that had cracks in the ground that conveniently drained water out of sight and therefore out of mind) to bathe.

And now here he was.

Myles sighed. Some guys might think that living on an island where the women went around naked was some kind of fantasy come true, but really it just made you fucking uncomfortable.

“Shower” done with, Myles donned his worn—something was going to have to be done about that smell—clothes and failing shoes.

Then he and Atakarr set off.