The thoughts kept worrying me until it was time for me to head out. Cellestra helped me get outside of her home once again, and I waved with a leg as I went out and continued my hunt for a bear.

I had asked Cellestra during breakfast if she knew of any place where they could be, but she replied that she didn’t know either. Thus, with no better lead, I decided to stick to my earlier plan.

These fish tasted pretty good. I hoped bears thought of them the same way as me. Knowing something would taste good was an important factor in hunting, I assumed.

I decided to travel as fast as I could from the get-go. I imagined that if bears would be out fishing, they would remain in the same place for a while.

Hours went by again, and my frustration grew by the minute. I was still moving quickly and had covered more distance than the day before, thanks to my added speed, but I had yet to run into a bear.

While I was taking a break and drinking some water, I saw a wolf enter my field of vision. I skittered away to the nearest tree, but the creature had already spotted me.

And apparently, it thought I was suitable prey… for whatever reason.

I have no meat on me wolf! Get lost!

I quickly climbed the tree while the wolf pounced on where I’d stood just moments earlier. Of course, I had both my barriers activated, but if this wolf wanted a piece of me, I’d show it!

While on one of the branches, I observed the wolf. It seemed this wolf wasn’t in the same kind of bloodlust that I had seen from the ones closer to Cellestra’s home, as it simply sat beneath my branch and growled.

I was not planning on killing it before, but it did not seem to have the intention of leaving, so I did not really have a choice.

I lined up my lightning arc spell at the growling wolf. If anything, this would help me gauge the strength of the spell. I started the channel.

A small stream of lightning instantly shot to the wolf. If anything, this spell was fast, incredibly fast. The channel did not seem to hurt the wolf much, but its growling grew in strength and it started walking away.

I lowered myself on a thread and chased after the wolf while keeping the spell going. The small lightning arc grew in intensity and radius at an astonishing rate. I also felt my mana drain faster, but it wasn’t much at all, for now. Once I hit the ground, the wolf turned around and leaped at me again. I simply leaped out of the way while still managing to keep up the spell. I was surprised at how easy it was.

The beam grew stronger and stronger, sparks started flying left and right as the beam started to turn from blue to white. Soon enough, the wolf collapsed and a message appeared. I instantly stopped the spell.

Well, that was anticlimactic. This spell seemed far too powerful. I didn’t even get near a point where I felt it would actually drain me — far from it.

The fact that I didn’t get any experience from this wolf at all was not something I had expected. Normally I would get reduced experience from a given type of animal for one evolution before they stopped yielding any. This time, I just got straight-up nothing.

Then again, it turned out that killing this creature had been incredibly simple.

I shrugged it off and continued my trip. This battle hadn’t taken long, so I didn’t lose much time. I reckoned I could still travel a bit further out and then return home before nightfall.

After another twenty minutes of walking upstream, I finally got a view of what I had been after all along: a bear.

There, next to the stream, on the other side, stood a brown bear. It was fishing, and effectively too. Every few seconds it swiped its paw through the water. While some swipes were unsuccessful, several of them managed to remove reaperfish from the water and make them land in the grass where the bear promptly ate them and continued fishing for more.

Since the bear was on the other side, I had two options. The first was to hit it with my lightning arc from this side of the stream and hope the water would buy enough time for the spell to grow strong enough to finish it. The other was to use my water walking ability to get to the other side,get its attention and climb a tree.

I opted for the latter, not risking a miscalculation where it turned out bears were quite fast swimmers.

Since I had not used this spell before, I took several moments after casting it to make sure that it worked the way I thought it worked. I carefully placed my front two legs on the slow-moving water in the stream and found that the water felt like solid ground. After moving several more legs onto it and making sure I wouldn’t sink like a rock, I quickly skittered to the other side.

I then moved over to the bear, which was still fishing, and lined up my lightning arc spell. I had no trouble using it while on the move before, and was more or less forced into doing the same thing again since the nearest tree wasn’t in range for me to cast the spell from it.

The bear was oblivious to my presence as it continued fishing, and I took a moment to make sure everything was in order. My barriers were ready and my mana reserves were almost at their maximum capacity.

I started the channel. Almost immediately, the bear turned around. As soon as it did, I started skittering to the tree, slowly at first as the bear didn’t seem to charge at me with its top speed. As the spell grew stronger, it appeared the bear knew what I was doing as it initiated a full charging attack.

I was prepared and skittered to the nearest tree as fast as I could before climbing it, all while keeping the channel on my target.

The bear seemed angry that it couldn’t reach me. It tried to climb up after me, but only succeeded in scratching at the tree’s bark. Its body mass was too heavy for its claws to support.

It would seem I had overestimated a bear’s ability to climb trees, at least for this one.

The spell grew in intensity and soon enough, I had a white beam of electricity connected to the bear.

The creature seemed to give up as it growled in obvious pain. It ran away from the tree as it realized it was fighting a battle it could not win.

I am sorry, bear. I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you.

Goddess forgive me for this.

I skittered down the trunk and followed the bear as the beam of lightning grew stronger still. The lightning arc was now the diameter of a person’s fist and sent sparks and smaller tendrils of electricity flying all around it. I started to feel the mana drain kick in as the spell’s power intensified.

I wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever…

Fortunately for me, it didn’t take much longer for the bear to fall. The damage this spell did after a while was ludicrous. In under a minute, my spell had killed a bear that when standing on its hind legs would be about seven feet tall.

At last, it was done. A bear was unfortunate enough to encounter me and it had paid the price. I was now one step closer to the final evolution I would need to complete my goals.

All this killing and slaughtering was slowly eating away at my sanity, and I knew it. I would never have done this if I didn’t have to. I was a staunch advocate of ‘Live and let live’... unless it killed innocents. Then I would have no problem with taking it down.

It made me look forward to when this was all done and over with. I couldn’t yet imagine how life would look when I went out on my actual quest… or even what I would do after, but I sure hoped it wasn’t… this…

I started my long journey back home as I tried to figure out what was going on with me once again.

Judging by the behavior of the bear and wolf, these were no longer in range of Cellestra’s curse, which meant I wasn’t either, yet my feelings were unchanged. I still wanted her to be happy, see her smile, spend time with her, hug her…

Was this…

It couldn’t be that… right?