I woke up the next morning utterly refreshed. Thanks to my [soul cushion], all my aches and pains from the long walk were gone. It always made me sleep exactly eight hours and upon my awakening, I would wake up without feeling any need to dip back into sleep. It made sleep as unintrusive, efficient, and enjoyable as possible. I regretted not drinking and eating before I put myself on the sleeping device. Because I hadn’t, I ended up still feeling a little tired and thirsty.

I sat up and began daily stretches. Once a foreigner warrior had been a guest in my house. I’d walked in on him as he did morning stretches, and thought he was doing some sort of embarrassing private activity. He ended up teaching me the basics. Apparently stretching int e morning is entirely typical for desert-folk, including Joe. (although in this instance, unlike him, I was fully clothed upon leaving my bed, due to the fact that my sheets/[life cushion] are translucent)

Once I was finished with my morning stretches, Cobaltio woke up and began begging me for cobalt. He sat down in front of me and wagged his tail in a cute but polite manner as he jumped up and down excitedly. I entertained his request, of course, giving him a small meal of cobalt filings before beginning my notes on my dream, writing down the few details I could recover from my memory.

Then I began searching the premises of our camp for signs of tampering. The chances of someone coming across us was small, but if one of the villagers found me and I didn’t know, things could get messy. I unsurprisingly found nothing of note, bar a wild elecmint, which I gladly picked leaves off of and pouched.

After that, I decided to wake up Maladrain. It took a bit of whining on his part, but eventually, he woke up and got ready to move.

We traveled for two more days with little to no incidents. The boredom of traveling was getting to me, however. So, at the end of the second day, I asked Maladrain if we could have more swordplay training. Although he didn’t have the luxury of a [soul cushion], he had a lot more endurance than me, so he could afford to spend his energy training me.

We decided to fight in a clearing filled with small purple flowers. We were out of the swamp at this point, so the greenery was growing quite lush and bright, rising from the dirt once more as the springtime began to settle in. It was dark, with the sun setting beyond the horizon.

I found a spot that suited my fancy and took out my sword, mirroring Maladrain, who prepared his own sword, then took a neutral, informative tone, “Today we’re going to focus on technique. En Garde.” He raised his sword.

I raised my own and reciprocated with a grunt.

He rushed at me, holding his sword with two hands. He swiped to the left with it, keeping his strength and speed slow for safety’s sake, but also to keep the fight on equal footing.

I parried, defecting his blade with the flat of my own and hopping backward, keeping to the same speed.

After the attack, he stopped, “You shouldn’t be hopping back like that.”

I tilted my head.

“I mean, when you do that, you can’t retaliate at all. You’re just giving me the ability to push the offensive. It’s a lot easier to chase someone down than to walk backward in a fight. Let’s try it again, but this time, try to retaliate and push the offense. You can’t always stand your ground, but you need to try your best to.”

He went for the same attack, but I deflected the attack and went for a strike to his stomach, which he awkwardly parried with a strike down onto my blade. I ‘pushed the offensive’, reaching out with my sword to hit his arm. However, he turned my attack against me, threatening my outstretched arm with his sword. It forced me to reel back, and he quickly turned the momentum of the fight in his own favor by repeatedly trumping my own vyes for dominance in the fight into more and more successes for himself, eventually forcing me to take steps back until my back hit a tree, then abandoning the fight and walking back to his starting point so we could reset our fight.

“You’ve got a decent idea of the flow of battle, but you make a lot of risky moves that a good swordsman can easily exploit. You can notice my openings, but not the openings your own attacks have.”

Once I returned to my spot, he ran at me again and struck with an outstretched arm towards mine. I easily threatened his own arm, forcing him to retreat again. I only realized afterward it was the same attack I had made before. After he demonstrated the issue with the attack, we reset again. When we began once more, he went for a cleave towards my right, which I deflected away from myself easily, putting my own arm reeling, and forcing me to back off a little, then he turned his strike into the same attack he had just used before, attacking my arm, but he stopped midway.

“While that swing isn’t necessarily useless, you need to make sure your opponent can’t retaliate against it before you take the attack-otherwise it’s easy to counter.”

Our training session continued like that for the next thirty minutes. We would fight, he would beat me, then he would show me the flaws and benefits of the attack that lost me the fight.

You gained 1 Exp for putting your all into a training session!

After we returned to camp, I had a well-cooked meal and drank water, then went to sleep. Over the last few days, I had been piecing together a new memory of Sayanica’s (See the end of the chapter for the memory).

We had about a week to go before we reached the capital, so we began traveling on the main road. The next day, we came across a fallen tree that blocked our path.

Maladrain noticed something strange about it immediately, “A half-melted tree...” The tree wasn’t broken like it had been struck by lightning, but instead, the broken end of it was a melted mess of wood, looking like a melted candle.

{did a monster do this?}

He looked at my slate, “Yeah, probably a fell bat.”

I tilted my head.

“It’s like a battim, the giant bats large enough to be ridden on, but more..monstrous. It’s a really big hazard when it’s in a populated forest like this one because it’s an invasive species. They are way stronger than the nearby monsters, and any fell bat that can melt a large tree like this needs to be killed before it can level up too much.”

{So what should we do?}

“Report it to the nearby hunter’s guild and call it a day.”

I gave him a bored expression, holding my slate slackly.

He rubbed his head and sighed, “...You want to fight it, don’t you...?”

We tracked it through the forest, which was easy because of the way that it had sewn collateral damage through its path. Corpses of dead monsters and animals, broken and melted trees, and dribblets of stale acid and dung littered the ground. It was fairly easy to spot the creature’s tracks, and Maladrain’s by no means inadequate tracking skills made the process of tracking it quick and easy.

If we couldn’t find it by the end of the day, I agreed we would make our way to Hannem, a city on our path to the capital.

“Fell Bats normally reside deep in caves, but if any find their way out, they can put up a stink and lose their way, scared by the sunlight. Cave-dwelling monsters are usually much stronger and higher leveled than forest monsters, so when they come out of the cave, they end up slaughtering everything until they inevitably die for one reason or another, or adapt...It’s best to get rid of them before they get too strong so they don’t wreak even more collateral damage on the ecosystem, or get to a town and wreak havoc.”

{Or you could let it level up so that you can kill it for more Exp.}

He gritted his teeth at that comment, “Devious and dangerous, champ...We should be close to its resting spot. That puddle of acid isn’t base yet.” He pointed to a tiny crater filled with clear acid that looked like drool. Some black gas was still slowly rising from it. We began moving at a much slower pace, ending our hunt conveniently(though not unexpectedly) during sunset.

We came upon a heavily forested part of the woods, so Maladrain signed that we move even slower. We spent a few minutes slowly walking through the woods, looking out for the bat. Suddenly, he put his hand in front of me and put a finger to his mouth. Then, he pointed to our left.

Three large trees bent and grew together to create a very dense set of branches, allowing the escape of no sunlight beneath their veil of leaves. On one of their branches, I saw the fell bat, hanging upside-down.

Imagine a bat, except it's as big as a donkey, has one eye instead of two, two teeth so big they could only be considered tusks, as it sleeps it drools acid that melts through the dirt beneath like it’s nothing, it has a single reptilian foot, and its wings are spotlights, then you will know what it looks like. It Hung from a branch with its eye open, scanning its surroundings as it pivoted on its foot, its wings lighting the area around it in harsh light. Some monsters don’t sleep, but instead meditate, giving them the ability to observe their surroundings even during their rest, this was evidently one of those.

“Before we fight it, put Cobaltio in a snug and safe location.” Cobaltio followed us with my cushion on his neck, easily keeping up with our pace with the energy stored from the cobalt he ate earlier. I simply commanded the cushion to turn into a full pillow, and he didn’t hesitate to rest on it without moving. I had plans for Cobaltio later in the fight, so I made a note to discuss that with Maladrain before we fought.

“Next, we are going to lasso this thing. Flying creatures like this tend to fly away when startled, so keeping a hold of them is important. I’ll take care of that part since you’ve got no training with it. You’ll use my crossbow to shoot at it until it comes into melee range. We will adapt from there, got it?”

I nodded. I made sure to tell him my plan with Cobaltio with my slate, and he approved.

We got prepared quickly, exchanging my rope with his crossbow, then hiding behind the bushes and trees, beyond its sight. Maladrain finished typing my rope into a lasso then held up his hand

1

2

3

He ran out of the bushes at incredible speed, causing the bat to quickly wake from its trance, and try to fly away, then he waited for it to get into a convenient position, and threw the lasso at it while it panicked, tugging on it as it looped around the bat’s neck, securing the lasso in place. The fell bat began trying to flutter out of the canopy, and away from us, its wings lighting the whole area in flickering, chaotic spotlights. I stood up and tried to shoot, but the light blinded me. Realizing there wasn’t any way to shoot it from the front of its wings, I ran to the opposite side of it. As I had guessed, Maladrain’s [balanced footwork] was ridiculously strong and stopped the fell bat from toppling him over with its intense horsepower. No longer on the receiving end of its spotlight, I easily aimed at its torso and fired.

It shrieked and fell a few feet down before trying to fly away with even greater vigor, but it still wasn’t enough to knock Maladrain off his feet. I spent some time reloading, then shot, causing it to writhe in pain again, then flap its wings in one more attempt to get away. I reloaded another bolt and shot for the third time, hitting square in its torso.

It shrieked again, then turned on us, flapping manically to blind our eyes.

“Dodge it!”

I leaped to the side, vaguely seeing acid spray the ground where I had stood through the flickering lights. Guessing that Maladrain had dodged the other direction, I loaded the crossbow while trying to find the other side of the fell bat. Once I got out of the flickering spotlights, I saw Maladrain with squinted eyes, trying to tug the panicking bat to the ground as it spat acid repeatedly at him, which he dodged with his second to last [fast steps], though his speed wouldn’t last long, so I needed to ground the bat quick. Seeing an opening in the bat’s awareness, I ran to it and jumped up in an attempt to cut it from below. Had I still had my [life wing], I could have leaped onto it and wrestled it to the ground, but I didn’t, so all I managed was a small cut on it.

Realizing my current strength wasn’t enough, I activated [dead as nightfall] then leaped up higher than I could’ve without it, thrust my sword into its torso, and held on to the handle for dear life. The fell bat flapped uncontrollably, rotating crazedly in midair, and spouting acid from its mouth as it did. With my increased strength I easily held on to its back, resulting in it struggling for a few moments, before finally losing the strength to fight against Maladrain, and falling to the ground, mostly dead. From there I had Maladrain restrain it so that I could bring Cobaltio over to get participation in the kill. I threw him right at the writhing, drooling beast, and he activated [draconic imbuement] and, for the first time, [fire breath tier 1], flying away from the creature, then shooting [fire breath tier 1] at it. Cobaltio shot a fireball at the bat, and the shot exploded into magma, searing the creature. It was enough to count towards contribution, so I called Cobaltio back down, and Maladrain finished the fell bat.

You gained 18 Exp!

Daily Memory:

Sayanica! Come here, look what I found!

I treaded down a steep hill, where a stream fell from the top. Slowly, I made my way to the ground, where Zatchel stood, above a dug-up hole, holding a piece of paper.

It’s a map! Someone must have written it before us!

I smiled, what is on it? , I signed.

Let’s see...it’s a map of our reality, and there’s a line that starts where we are, with a big, red X at the end of it. Let’s follow it!

I nodded enthusiastically.

We traveled for about thirty minutes, taking care not to break or harm the dead plants we walked through. Eventually, at the end of our travels, we reached a small spot, where the X was. It was at the edge of our reality, a mirror that surrounded our small world, taking the place of a sky. There, with sticks and stones, we dug.

After a few minutes, Zatchel pulled a golden pebble from the ground Woah! Saya, it’s gold! We’re going to be rich!

I nodded with vigor, playing along, why don’t we go sell it to the shopkeep?

We made our way to our little castle, where we went inside, past people frozen in time, candles that never shone, bricks that never crumbled, and banners that would never wave in the wind. Finally, the two of us made it to a cat who sat on the duke’s desk.

Zachel placed the pebble on the desk and spoke in an over-the-top formal manner to the cat, Sir, I would like to sell you this pebble of pure gold!

I walked to the other side of the desk, then pulled out a pen and paper from it, and wrote, oh? That’s a pure piece of gold you have there! I’d buy it for twenty gibbhons! then placed it on the desk and walked back beside Zachel as if nothing had happened.

He looked at the paper, WOAH twenty gibbons?! We are going to be rich Saya! Then he grabbed my hands and jumped up and down with me, pretending to be filled with glee.

Of course, it was all fake. I made the map, buried the pyrite, and acted the shopkeep. But, in a world where it was just us, we didn’t need to be sane. We just needed to have fun together, no matter how artificial our glee.

~

Cobaltio has leveled up!

New skill: [shared expirence]

[shared expirence]: this creature will gain extra experience when sharing experience with other creatures.

Str: +0 Dex: +1 Con: +0 Wiz: +0 Int: +2 Cha: +0

Cobaltio: Age: 1 month

Neutral Good

Patron: Drakonis, Maophas

Class: [dragonborn] [mutant]

Race: [cobalt drake]

Level: 2

Exp: 10

Base Stats: Str: 11 Dex: 13 Con: 12 Wis: 7 Int: 22 Cha: 13

Stat Growths: Str: 35% Dex: 15% Con: 30% Wis: 20% Int: 120% Cha: 50%

Inherent skills: [blessed of maophas] [minevore] [draconic leniage] [drake lineage] [draconis’s fate] [deaf] [infernal resistance]

Trained skills: [noble presence] [language]

Equipment:[natural armor tier 2] [death wing]

Magics: [fire breath tier 1] [draconic embuement tier 1]

March 3rd