August felt his ankles begin to burn as the incline began to grow steeper. Maybe catching an Otrogon just to use as a makeshift horse would be worth the effort, if only to avoid having to walk up and down the island. Less effort expended on something like travelling across the island by foot would mean more energy for other tasks—and it would probably be faster, considering how large the creatures were. He just wished the things weren’t so terrifyingly alien.

Seriously, was there not a single experiment that was cute or one that didn’t look like it was going to chew his leg off? Halfway to the lip of the crater, his mana had come back up to full, and he withdrew the bone from his inventory, calling up [Etch] to do another pass over it. He shaved the rounded edge away, flattening out what would become the saw itself. The curve of the bone now ended at a point that would serve as the final tooth on the blade—

Etch has reached proficiency level 2.

August pulled his finger away from the bone, cancelling the spell in case the level-up caused it to grow stronger, or cover more area, or something else unexpected that might end with him cutting himself in half. He brought the menu up as he was walking, finding the skill and actually spent a moment seeing what the increase actually did.

Etch(Lv2) – 0/1100

Use mana to carve runes into surfaces, 1 MP per 6 seconds. +1 second per level.

More time per unit of mana spent was a decent enough upgrade, even if it was only a single second. He closed out the menu and returned to his work, flattening out the rest of the blade before giving the back edge a cleaner finish. August used up the last of his mana on the handle, cleaned it up, and then left it alone—he’d need to be sitting down to handle the teeth on the blade, something for when he’d returned. Reaching the top of the incline and getting eyes on the lake again came with a surprising amount of relief.

For all that he’d wanted to set out and get what they’d come for, he’d felt quite a bit more anxious than he’d expected. Not at the danger of the Otrogon roaming around or the odd intrusive thought about somehow tripping and falling over the cliff edge—something that had never been closer than twenty meters, and thus an impossible danger—but of how everything that they’d built might up and vanish the moment he took his eyes off it.

Not that he could see it yet, with the treetops in the way, but if the lake hadn’t taken his inattention as an invitation to up and leave, then surely the Lakeside Hovel hadn’t grown legs either. The idea that Rittan, Kalter and Haiko might have packed everything up before running away certainly existed, however ludicrous the idea probably was—because surely they wouldn’t have left Boko behind.

“How deep do you think that gap is?” Boko wondered, staring at the distant cliff again. “Think it goes all the way to the water?”

“It looks like it’s a fjord from here,” August said, “But it’s possible that this side is actually connected to the cliff, just below our line of sight—the cliff does seem really close from here.”

“Fjord,” Boko repeated, “What is that, a river?”

“A gap formed between two masses of land where water is passing through,” August said, “I suppose that would actually make these two islands instead of just one if they aren’t actually connected.”

“Devil’s Nests,” Boko wondered. “Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?”

He wasn’t wrong. The lap around the lip of the crater seemed much faster this time, whatever hesitance they’d bore with them on the journey away from home gone now, and it seemed to lend them a decisive speed. The Lakeside Hovel came into view not too long after, looking much the same as it had the last time they’d seen it—although there did seem to be a series of newly downed trees stacked in a pile. The area where the unfinished garden beds had been having also undergone a transformation, the other bushes he’d left behind were now planted in their own individual garden beds.

The descent from the lip of the crater felt oddly dangerous, the long grass had represented a handhold to ascend, but now it represented a brake—one which wasn’t quite as reliable, considering the lack of control involved. Still, they made it back down, first to the flat ring and then down the rest of the slope to the base of the crater.

“Not the best route, is it? We’re adding at least half an hour to our travel time circling around the forest like this,” Boko wondered. “Though, I suppose it’s nothing we can really fix right now.”

“We might be crawling in the dirt now, but technology has a way of springboarding forwards at times,” August said, trying to ignore the pain in his legs. “Who knows where we’ll be a week from now.”

“Hopefully not dead again,” Boko said, folding a pair of hands behind his head. “I wonder if this Melon girl managed to learn as much about runes as Haiko seems to think—that sounds like a pretty springy board to me.”

“You’d know better than me,” August offered. “My knowledge of runes is basically non-existent right now—I know how to write a few of them, but I don’t actually know how to use them.”

“Well, hopefully, she has some experience there,” Boko said, bemused. “Everything I ever interacted with was an automated process—the bodysuit, security systems, doors, lights—a lot of them had a voice command system that integrated with the PDI, but I couldn’t tell you how they work.”

August hummed at the words.

“Just learning how to store mana and retrieve it would go a long way,” August said, “Taming is time-consuming purely because of how little mana I seem to have and how long it takes to come back, but if I could store up a bunch in advance, I could probably dump it all at once and instantly tame something—or at least in a few minutes, instead of hours.”

Being able to use Etch whenever I wanted would also be a massive upgrade because waiting for my mana to regenerate a dozen times to finish a single tool was infuriating. If Melon didn’t know how I’d probably just have to risk it and start experimenting with what I knew already. The Lakeside Hovel grew upwards as we approached, the twelve pillars looming bizarrely above everything else. Haiko was sitting with the kick wheel, hands sliding over the lumpy mass of clay between her fingers, and she tracked their approach unerringly.