The herd of nine deer move into the clearing. Off to the side the Snarltail tenses up ready to pounce. Jason, a few trees back tenses as well. Seconds trickle by as the deer situate themselves in the clearing and start to graze. The Snarltail crouches even lower to the ground in preparation to attack. A slight twitch runs down its leg and Jason attacks. He charges out from behind the tree and aims a flying kick at that leg.

The Snarltail is part way through its pounce when a sudden force slams into its back leg. Not enough weight behind it to budge. However the blow strikes at the right moment to interrupt its attack. Instead of a great leap at one of the deer it instead stumbles. The Snarltail whips its head around to discover a young human is the cause. As it turns to face him its back leg cramps. Its roar turns into a howl of pain. In the background the deer all flee away from the battle.

Jason recovers himself from the jump as the Snarltail howls. A jump kick is not the most stable of moves to use but it does put all his weight behind the attack. The angered cat rears up and tries to rend him with both its claws. Its injured back leg slows the attack down and allows Jason to dodge to the left. As he circles around the Snarltail, he slams an elbow blow into its hurt leg.

The Snarltail tries to turn and maul him but the leg gives out on it. Jason continues to circle the cat and this time throws a Blast Punch to the kidney. The strike causes the cat to collapse to the ground.

With this chance Jason goes in to finish the fight. Blast Punch rain down on the Snarltail. Not all of them connect but enough do. Through his effort Jason has crippled the front right leg.

While this is happens the cat tries to strike back. However Jason dodges back and forth away from the Snarltail’s bite attempts. Now unable to move the cat is at his mercy. Jason much to the cats sadness has none for it. With it immobilized he jumps onto its back. From there he once again throws one Blast Punch after another. This time the target is a bit more vital and soon the Snarltail falls to repeated blows to the head.

Jason steps back from it and slaps himself. He grumbles to himself, “I messed up. The only reason I just won is the element of surprise. If the cat had not been so injured, it could have attacked me with its tail mouth. I might have done that without taking damage but that means nothing. With its high level if that tail chewed on me I would not last long. Next time I might not be as lucky.” Then aloud he queries the System for his progress in Blast Punch and level.

Blast Punch (Variant) - Novice Level 8 - 35.69% [+5.01%]

Level: 9 - 5.72% [+5.2%]

“Good progress in Blast Punch. I have to be careful though. If I continue to attack so rapidly, the System might add that as a feature of it to the description. While I can’t stop people from attacking as fast as they can I don’t want it pointed out to them it is possible. At least with others their energy resource will limit them. I just need to worry about not using too many different abilities at once. Good thing my Energy is four and can support my movement skill and Blast Punch. Besides my punch the xp wasn’t bad either. About 5 percent will get me to the bottleneck with only 20 SnarlTails. I have to say Fern scares me even more now. She guessed or maybe knew just about what I would need. That was without me telling her about my xp penalty. Well, one kitty down and 19 more to go.”

Jason returns to the tree he left Lily at and climbed up. As luck would have it, she was still sat there up in the canopy. While Jason had been sure nothing would happen to her this forest was weird. There had to be a reason he could find no smaller animals and Jason wouldn’t put it past the game for the trees to be carnivorous. He knew that if Lily died, then he only needed to wait a few ingame days. Pets, even combat ones, can be brought back at a temple. This is not limited to players either. The locals can bring their pets back as well. Apparently this was the only way the System could keep enough of them interested in it. Being an animal tamer is a lot harder with levels and such. Not that people would stop attempting it but not enough to pass down higher level knowledge to the players. Though it caused some interesting rules on how you can give pets to others. People have not understood all the rules even to this day. In general it seems to reset the pets level to ten below the new owner if it was too powerful. However this varied with player level, skills, the pets level, and even how well trained the pet was. Overall, the results are agreed upon as fair even if some still complain about it. In the end everyone else is just happy any old enough clan does not own an army of realm capped battle beasts. Not that they don’t have one or two around. Just that those are owned by someone of a similar level.

Though all this thought about pets reminds Jason of a funny story from when the game first was being developed. Right after they introduced resurrecting pets the devs were happy with the adoption rate of taming professions. To test it the world was fast forwarded only 50 years. When they checked back in on it, everyone had become almost exclusively tamers. Honestly, a result that in hindsight should have been expected. Who would risk their lives when they could just make a pet do it? This was fixed up soon enough with a wait time in days equal to the pets level. That and a hidden ‘relationship’ rating that could cause the pet to run away if it died to much.