With the rabbit meat mostly finished, Loran began pouring dirt onto the fire to smother the remaining embers. At first, he grabbed a stick to loosen up the dirt, but then he realized that he could probably shape some mana into a shovel and did that instead.

He had discovered the rope spell by accident when trying to improve the shield spell. The reason his first attempt with the shield had failed was because flattening the mana actually reduced its defensive capabilities, focusing the energy to the edges to create a sort of cutting edge. This was why the tripwire worked, since stretching it out also weakened its stability, but could also reduce its damaging capabilities.

Through his experimentation, Loran discovered that the best way to shape mana for a shield was to either make it concave like a bowl or to only slightly flatten it. Concave mana gave it more defensive power, but only on one side and was harder to control, while the slightly flattened shape was easier to maintain and was equally strong on both sides, it could only block half as much damage as the concave shield.

‘Using an Ability Point on the stronger shield was definitely worth it, but maybe I should try thinking of the weaker version as less of a shield and more like building material?’ he wondered. ‘I wonder if I can just summon weapons like this…’

He did manage to make a shovel just now, but he wasn’t too sure how effective a weapon would be, since most weapons used their weight for damage, and objects made from mana (‘Mana constructs?’ he thought idly) were weightless.

Loran let his mind wander as he considered new spell possibilities, his hands working on autopilot to put out the fire. Soon he was finished and he returned his attention to the three wolves behind him.

They had eaten most of the rabbits he had given them but left one untouched. Two of them were now chewing on the bones while the injured one was lying down.

Loran began crawling towards the injured wolf, hoping to be as unintimidating as possible. The two wolves growled again, though a bit less aggressively. Loran frowned as he tried to think of a way to convince the wolves he wanted to help when he remembered the bite he received from one of the other wolves.

Sitting down, Loran unequipped the armor around his leg and rolled up his pants leg, revealing a fairly large bruise.

Making sure the wolves were watching, Loran started healing the damage and the bruise began to fade. In just a few seconds, the injury was completely gone.

Loran gestured to the injured wolf before moving again, and this time there was no growl of warning. Now sitting next to the injured wolf, he could see that its face was swelling slightly. Loran let the mana flow from his hand to the wolf’s body.

Right now Loran’s healing magic was just stimulating the body’s natural healing abilities as if energizing the cells. This was why he could only accelerate the timer on his debuff and not heal it outright. Perhaps if he had the medical knowledge he could find a spell to realign the nerves, muscles, and bone, but for now, this was the best he could do.

Fortunately, it didn’t seem like anything was broken, so the damage was healing quickly. In a matter of seconds, the wolf was back to full HP, and the swelling on its face disappeared soon after.

With its HP restored, the Moss Wolf immediately perked up, moving over to its packmates to show them it was healed. It then turned back to Loran, staring at him appreciatively. He gave a small smile back, careful to not show his teeth as he vaguely recalled that baring your teeth was seen as a threat by most animals.

*DING*

‘Did I do it?’ Loran hastily pulled up his menu. ‘I can’t imagine I’ve fully tamed these guys, but did I get a taming Skill.’

Reading the notification, Loran wasn’t too surprised to see that the Skill was already named, although the name itself left him with more than a few questions.

[ACTIVITY {Effective Non-Verbal Communication} PERFORMED]

[RELEVANT VALUE(S) {Level: 30}{PER: 30} SUFFICIENT]

[WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN THE FOLLOWING SKILL?]

[GOAT WHISPERER] Lv.1

(Passive) Increase the efficacy of non-verbal communication with beasts.

[YES] / [NO]

“....Why Goat Whisperer?” Loran asked out loud, causing the wolves to stare at him. ‘I guess it’s from the same players that named the Mountain Goats, but why did they have to name this after the goats?’

As silly as the name was, he couldn’t just pass up on the Skill, so with a sigh, Loran chose yes and [GOAT WHISPERER] was added to his menu. He quickly raised the Skill to Level 10 and turned his attention back to the wolves.

The effect was immediately apparent. Even as the Moss Wolves barely moved, Loran could tell that they were feeling cautious of him for having killed their packmates, but also curious and open now that he had spared and healed them. Tiny facial cues and body language that didn’t mean anything to him before were now easily understood.

‘I wonder if I can use this to predict attacks,’ he thought. ‘...I guess I’ll find out eventually. For now, can I convince them to follow me?’

Before Loran could think of a way to convey his intentions, this formerly injured wolf picked up the uneaten rabbit and the three wolves began to walk away. Loran raised a hand to stop them, but one of them looked at him before glancing at one of the two dead wolves.

‘Right. Even if I did heal one of them I can’t imagine they have a particularly high opinion of me.’

It had been in self-defense, but it wasn’t as though they were going to forgive him so easily. He had killed their kin, and that was what stood out. Still, Loran tried to look apologetic as the wolf stared at him. It seemed to understand him, but that didn’t stop them from leaving him alone in the small clearing.

‘Well, at least I got this Skill. Maybe it's better this way. I still want to head west, and if the far west is as dangerous as the east, those three would just get hurt.’

Getting off the ground, Loran continued his trek west, leaving the dead wolves in the clearing. He thought about taking them for food and medicine, but he decided against it. He did feel bad about killing them when he probably didn’t have to.

With a sigh, Loran got to work rebuilding the tripwire perimeter while thinking about tomorrow.

‘I’ll just have to be more careful with the next pack I come across.’

~~~~~

Unfortunately for Loran, finding a suitable wolf pack for taming was easier said than done. He didn’t find any more wolves until three days after his first encounter, and that pack was even larger than the first. Subduing that many wolves without killing any was difficult, and he realized that he had been lucky when he basically gave that other wolf a concussion.

There were simply too many for him to restrain with just magic and his hands, and trying to beat the wolves into submission usually just pissed them off or dealt enough damage to kill them outright.

He probably could have found a smaller pack if he was looking for one deliberately, but he already had a target. Taming wolves could wait for another day.

Additionally, either wolf packs were in short supply, or the other beasts of the woods chose this week to be out in full force. In the time it took him to find the second wolf pack he managed to stumble across three herds of Spined Deer and two groups of Hell Pigs.

Fortunately, all of them were easy enough to deal with. Spined Deer were already fairly passive, but now that Loran had [GOAT WHISPERER] he could practically walk right up to one without any cause for alarm. Even as the bucks watched him for any signs of hostilities their interactions were more peaceful than ever.

Loran had thought the Hell Pigs might give him some trouble, what with their [HARDENED SKULL] Skill and all, but it turned out he was worried over nothing. Just as with the Moss Wolves, he accidentally killed one of the pigs with a single spell. Using [ANALYSE] he discovered that the Hell Pigs’ signature Skill had been greatly nerfed by the introduction of magic, as the description now specified that it only reduced physical damage.

As a result, Loran spent four days out in the woods, with the greatest threat to his health being his own cooking. But in the mid-afternoon he found it.

His first Demon Bear.

~~~~~

After having seen the Mountain Goats and the Iron Ant Drones, he thought that the Demon bears wouldn’t be so intimidating. However, bears were often terrifying in reality, and the enhanced beasts of New Eden Online were far worse.

Loran moved quietly through the foliage as he got closer to the bear, standing on its hind legs to swat a bird's nest out of a tree. All he could think about was that the secondhand description he had received of them several weeks ago (that they were just normal bears with an additional set of legs) didn’t do them justice.

For starters, the beast in front of him was not only ten feet tall but also looked to be at least half as wide, with a thick body and broad shoulders that stood out when compared to their real-world counterpart. It clearly weighed at least 1000 pounds, and Loran knew most of that was going to be muscle.

Its claws were similarly oversized, easily being 2-3 inches in length while its forearms were also much larger than normal, carrying enough power to tear a branch off of the tree with hardly any effort.

Most threatening of all was its stats, which certainly lived up to the hype.

[NAME]: N/A

[SPECIES]: Demon Bear

[LEVEL]: 30

[STATUS]

{HP}: 1840/1840

{SP}: 1840/1840

{MP}: 50/50

[ARMOR]: 46

[END]: 92

[STR]: 76

[AGI]: 62

[DEX]: 45

[PER]: 44

[INT]: 5

[SPT]: 5

[SKILLS]

[TOUGH HIDE] Lv.10

(Passive) Increase Armor by 50% of END.

[DESCRIPTION]

A large omnivore and apex predator of the valley woodlands. While they mainly operate as scavengers, they’ll never shy away from an easy kill if something is unfortunate enough to stumble across its path. However, with arms strong enough to knock down Birch trees, hide thick enough to shrug off attacks from anything that isn’t another Demon Bear, and considerable speed despite its tremendous bulk, everything is an easy kill… [EXPAND]

‘Alright, a bit tougher than I was expecting, but whatever. I didn’t think this was going to be easy anyway.’

Feeling that he had time to prepare for the fight, Loran concentrated and formed a single foot-long mana spike floating next to him before extending the spell to last for around 16 minutes.

This was possibly the most broken exploit Loran had managed to discover during his experimentation. His 15 INT was supposed to be a limit on how much mana he could manipulate, but using [EXTEND SPELL] made the system think he wasn’t controlling it anymore. The spell still required him to direct it to attack and he needed to weaken the spell slightly, but now instead of casting a single Mana Spike with 15 mana, he could prepare 15 Mana Spikes, each containing 13 mana.

‘Theoretically at least,’ Loran thought as he made his fifth Mana Spike. Controlling multiple spells was getting exponentially harder, and right now five was the most he could control comfortably.

On top of that, preparing spells like this drained his MP tremendously since he was doubling the cost of each spell. Even if he could control another spell he didn’t want to risk having 0 MP, especially being this deep in hostile territory.

And so he waited for his MP to regenerate while watching the Demon Bear like a hawk. The spells would last long enough for about 100 MP to come back. All he had to do now was stay out of sight for the next few minutes.

…While maintaining his concentration on five large glowing lights…while hiding from an apex predator… that was only 50 feet away.(1)

‘...Maybe I didn’t think this through…’