I looked behind where the crash was and saw two enormous monsters. Each of them stood over 10 feet tall and had bulging muscles. Their skin was a grayish blue, and their heads had almost no hair at all. The brief glance I saw of their faces showed teeth that were large and

They were both screaming and punching at each other with fists the size of cinder blocks. No words I could understand, just loud grunts and rage. They were focused entirely on each other that neither saw me start to sprint away. As I ran, I heard more yelling from the two monsters and even trees breaking.

“Blink, stay put and be quiet,” I said over my shoulder as I felt her get tense. The last thing I needed was for her to jump as I was running.

I ran as fast as I could for the whole trip home. I was scared about that display of power. Either one of them would snap me in two if they had been after me, and as it stood, they were breaking the forest where they were fighting.

When I crossed the ravine where I picked up Blink, I slowed down. While they could cross the ravine if they wanted to, I felt like I had gone far enough for right now. I caught my breath and then started home at a slower speed.

I was about halfway back upstream when I heard a vast yelling bellow from above me. When I looked up the 70 feet or so out of the river bed, I saw one of the two monsters holding the other above its head as it threw it off the side.

I ducked in as close to the near edge as I could as I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself. The giant gray monster that was thrown flailed on its way down until it hit one of the boulders back first. I heard a crack and the monster stopped moving.

The one up above was yelling like he was king of the world, and I wasn’t going to argue the point. He was massive, and I wanted nothing to do with him at all. But he stood up there, yelled, stamped his feet for a few minutes, and then just stopped. I waited for a few more before moving again.

I made my way over to the dead monster and checked for a pulse. Happily, I couldn’t find one.

This guy was scary but dead, so I took a while to look at him. His fingernails attached like a humans but were longer and thicker. They were not claws but judging from the deep scratch marks on his body, they used them as such.

I had thought that perhaps I was seeing things when I first thought his fists were the size of cinder blocks, but I wasn’t wrong. His arms were bigger around than my legs. I needed to see what type of damage I could do to this guy. So I took my spear and slammed it into the body as hard as I could.

My spear slid in like I was spearing a tree. Just the tip did anything before I got stuck. I pulled back to see that I managed to just get passed the skin. These guys were tough, but they could be killed at least by each other, and I could hurt them. Just not much.

I left the body and headed home. I had things I needed to do, and there was nothing I could do with the body of that monster. So once home, I got my ladder pulled back up, and then I climbed up and got everything out of the basket.

After that, I went to work on getting my live plants into my garden and then used my water skin to take loads of water over to make sure they had water in their new homes. It was getting late, and I saw that the Sun was getting ready to pass over the cliff.

“Crap!” I shouted as I ran back to my camp.

I’d almost missed using my question, and I didn’t want to miss this as it was the only time I got info on how to do things. So I sat down and fired up the communication spell.

My body stood up on its own, reached my arms up like I just had a great victory, and I yelled, “Oh great and mighty greeter Sam, I the lowly Arn beseech you to answer my question.” Then I asked as blandly as I could before the blackness took me, “how do I get a larger mana pool?”

I felt my knees drop out from under me as I went down. As I passed out, I felt pain lance up my right knee, and then I was out. I came to feeling two things. One was a rock in my right knee, which must have been the pain I felt, and the other was that I had a cat on my back. But I didn’t have a cat, so it better have been Blink. I rolled over and heard a hiss which was Blink telling me I shouldn’t have moved. I checked my knee, and it was okay, no blood even.

I dusted myself off and then got to the last things I needed before going to bed. I got us a late dinner and stored my new food under my lean-to. I then wanted to try something out. I hoped that if I laid down and then charged a rock, I could get it charged and just go right to sleep. I also hoped that it wouldn’t mess with my sleep too much. I ended up being able to charge the rock while lying down, but I was tired when done. It didn’t seem like that would work as a way to get more done in a day. So I triggered my skill gains by choosing to go to sleep.

By your actions today

You have increased your level in

Tracking (level 4)

Survivalist (Level 6)

Power Imbuing (Level 3)

Primitive tool (Level 6)

Spear Fishing (Level 4)

Primitive cooking (Level 5)

Fitness Training (Level 7)

Tumbling (Level 4)

New knowledge has been granted to you!

Basket Weaving (Level 0)

Basket weaving, Grouping non-combative Craft:

Basket weaving is the skill to make baskets. Early levels are crude with large holes. With enough work and the right materials baskets can be made that are water tight.

I dreamed of Sam

I was back in Sam’s office again.

It was someplace that I was learning to hate with a passion. I knew that the guy hated me, but I wasn’t sure what I did that made him this way. If I could ever figure it out, I’d try to make it right because I truly didn’t try to make him mad. That being said, he was taking every bit of his hate. Out on me each time I came to his office.

Then again, it could be customer service syndrome. Call center workers get that all the time. They answer the same question to different people, but they don’t know them, so they all get this kind of hate for people in general. So perhaps he just doesn’t have any reason to express that hate.

It started this time with the clicking of the clock again. If that wasn’t bad enough, Sam seemed to have a cold tonight. So every few minutes, he would blow his nose and cough loudly. Then he would sigh and sniffle and start all over. Now I don’t know if this was because of how much power he had or what but each time he would cough, the lights in the room would flash, and when he blew his nose, it would all be dark, and when he sniffled the room would get cold for a moment. It was all gross listening to; honestly, he should’ve stayed home from work today with how bad he sounded.

Now put all of that in that my back was to him. I was facing the back of the room, and with where I was, I’d to have been no more than a foot or two from the back of his chair this whole time. He never once bumped into me or touched me at all, but everything was right there. I’d hear the squeaking of his office chair as he pivoted to the side when he was blowing his nose and coughing. So for four hours, as the clock ticks, I was there listening to the mess.

“Arn, you’re finally asking smart questions,” Sam said in his normal snarky tone. “You must raise your intelligence to increase your mana pool.”

With that, I woke up. The sun had already come up a fair bit, and I’d have said it was close to 7 am. It was later than I’d been getting up, but still, it was early enough that I could get a good day’s work in. I’d things that I needed to do. I carefully moved Blink down to the sleeping fur as I sat up. She woke up and complained about getting moved, but she wasn’t too mad since I put her in my warm spot.

Yesterday I’d worked my way through some of my less-used skills learning how to do things, which was good, but I wasn’t sure how much power I would get with those single mana point stones. I could try something larger, but it took so much time and effort that I needed to find a better way or a good reason to do that again.

I needed to go and hide my rope, and I also needed to scout more. Now that I knew what was out there, it wasn’t just me verse nature, but something out there would likely kill me on sight.

I couldn’t think that those green monsters would even stop to be reasoned with, and now the big gray one too. I was still dealing with some emotions from my dream of Lorrie dying; not sure why since I didn’t know Lorrie in real life, only in the dream. Yet, somehow her death in the dream affected me like she was someone I cared for.

Blink and I did the morning exercises and fishing. Then I worked on my stone cabin, which seemed like it might never get done; we headed out to scout. Blink was back on my shoulder as we made our way down the river. I’d stop near every soft sandy spot to look for tracks, and so far, I’d not found any feet. That was one good thing. I knew that I was looking for feet, and if I didn’t see those, I was good.

I rounded a bend in the river when I saw a huge footprint. My tracking kicked in, letting me know that it was a recent ogre print. It was made when one of them jumped onto the sand. Looking back, it dawned on me that I passed by where there should have been a dead monster, which I guess was an ogre.

I checked it yesterday, and it was dead, but today it was gone, and it went downstream. So I slowly made my way downstream, keeping an eye on the huge tracks. It wasn’t moving like it was hurt or even that it cared about being followed.

That made sense, it was likely the second biggest baddest thing around, and so it wanted others to know it was here. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it went right back and picked a fight with the other one.

I made it to the path going up and saw that the ogre went in the same direction. As I moved up, I was slower. I wanted to know where this guy was heading, but I also didn’t want to pick a fight. I would lose a battle, but if I didn’t know where he was, I was going to be running scared my whole life.

I got to the ridge path and saw that the ogre I had been following was headed downriver but that there were older tracks of the other one going in the same direction. From what I could tell, the one that lost had been this morning while the other one was last night.

“Blink, looks like they might just have been passing through.” I said over my shoulder.

I turned and headed back upstream to where they had fought. There was a path of destruction through the forest. I followed their fight back the way they came. I didn’t know where they were going, but I knew that they weren’t here right now. Which meant that I could safely poke around some.

About an hour after I went into the forest, the broken path changed. It spread out to a massive area of destruction. My tracking was showing that there had been a big fight here. Littered around the area were several of those little green guys like the ones I had seen in my dream. Spears were everywhere, and I even saw bodies up in the trees.

I made my way slowly around the outside of where the fight had been until I found the tracks of the little ones. There in the middle of the feet from the small goblins, what a set of cloven hoof prints.

My tracking skills went off for me, letting me know that I was looking at the print of a boar. I slowed down my scan even more. I hadn’t seen this print in the fight. The prints went off in the direction that I came from, and so I started to follow them.

I hoped that the boar didn’t have a rider and that it wasn’t close by. So I tracked it back towards the river until I heard a snort.