“How’s that?” I asked, holding a pair of stone knives in my hand.  

New Title: [Novice Stonesmith] 

“Eh? They’re pretty shit. The blade’s lumpy, the handle isn’t straight, and the point isn’t a point,” Tilde said, criticizing me. “But that’s good for someone totally new to it. Keep practicing, but don’t forget to register it with the arsenal.” I did what she said, but I wasn’t angry. I knew the first attempts would turn out like shit. After registering both knives, I placed them in [Storage] and smiled because it felt good to make something. I was actually being productive with my time. But I knew I couldn’t become complacent and rely on this sparse success to impart false confidence.  

My sharp ears picked up the ugly buzzing of maggots disgustingly feasting on my first prey, which broke me from my thoughts. A boar was snooping around, and I ordered Sekh to restrain this sacrifice because I wanted to experiment.  

The lowly lesser porcine was no match for her grip. She slammed into the beast from behind and used her strength to break its hind legs. Next came the front, and I slowly approached the trembling thing as my hand morphed into the head of its kin. The mouth opened wide, saliva falling in anticipation of devouring my prey as the powerful jaws bit down on the squirming boar’s head. 

It desperately cried out as I increased the biting force. The skull cracked, removing any resistance I was facing. It didn’t take long after to completely chop through a quarter of the animal’s face, and I smoothly started to assimilate it. 

“I’m glad you’re taking to your abilities quite rapidly. It’s a good omen,” Sekh said. She simply watched as I ate, the smile on her face as bright as the sun until it suddenly resembled a wilted flower.  

“MASTER!!!” Sekh and Tilde cried out at the same time. Right when her voices left their lips, something rammed into me from behind, piercing my wooden chainmail and goring me through my lower abdomen. I was thrust forward, barely missing Sekh’s head as I tumbled through the grassy plain. A stream of thick, dark blood trailed behind me as Tilde and I screamed until our throats were raw. I slowly came to a stop; my blood smeared all over. 

What?! GAAAHH!!! It… It burns!!!! What? Tilde? Fuck! It hurts so goddamn bad… Is she feeling this?! 

“RRRAAAHHHHH!!!” I heard Sekh shout as a series of loud, dull thuds rang filtered in my ears. It was like someone was punching a mattress filled with flesh. In a painful daze, I tried to push off the ground and turn around, but my hand was still transfigured. In this panicked state of mind, it wouldn’t revert to normal.  

New Title: [Boar Slayer – Protector (I)] 

Is it dead? 

A set of hands soon grabbed my back as the emerald grass was replaced by a sky of blue. Sekh’s bloody face stared into my eyes, commanding me to use biomass to heal myself. 

“GODDAMN IT! DO IT ALREADY!!! IT FUCKING HURTS!!!!!” exclaimed Tilde.  

It...hurts? 

My thoughts were strangely slow and calm. My eyes closed since it hurt to open them, but Sekh shook my shoulders as a pair of small, weak hands touched my cheeks. “Master! Think of your body as viewing it from an outside perspective. Focus on the area where you feel the pain! Please, hurry! Your HP is dropping fast! It’s almost gone!!!!” she shouted, shaking me even more. Her voice was dull. Very dull. And quiet, like the whispers of a dying mouse.  

My...HP? That...green bar? It’s empty... No, almost... I... I don’t want to die... 

But… I had to do what she said. Keeping my eyes open, I did my best to view myself from above. There was the long honey-blond hair… The set of nearly lifeless eyes blankly staring up at an emotional Lionfolk… The hole in— 

Hole? No, that’s not right. Fill it with biomass. 

Something warm bubbled up. Then something snapped into place, extending out…  

Muscle? Sinew? Fat? Blood? Stomach? Abdomen? 

“Eh?!” Sekh exclaimed. Her gaze moved from my face to my stomach and stared hard at a startling sight. I couldn’t see it, but I felt my stomach repair itself like magic. The yellow bar drained faster than the green one filled up. 

“The pain’s disappearing… Keep it up, Master,” Tilde said, her voice far less coarse.  

The organs were fixed first. The skin regenerated second and enclosed the wound. As I felt that happen, the color, clarity, and audible noise returned to my eyes and ears. I transformed my hand back to normal, then sat up and touched the healed wound, but my hands encountered Sekh’s head.  

She kissed my stomach and rubbed her cheeks, endlessly apologizing for forgetting to mention the protectors. “What attacked you,” she whimpered. “It was the Protector of Forest Boars. Wildlife monsters have a system to prevent overhunting. It suddenly spawned behind you... I’m sorry!” Sekh cried and wiped her eyes on my bare flesh, but I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her up for a hug.  

“It’s fine,” I told her. My hands went to her back and softly rubbed. “I was going to be hurt eventually, so I was going to have to learn how to heal myself. Sekh, look at me.” Her tearful eyes glanced up, meeting my own as a pair of hands caressed her cheeks. We touched our foreheads together, and that was enough to calm her down. I took the lead in standing up, and together, we walked back to the protector as Tilde berated me harshly for not keeping an eye on my map. 

Yeah, I had no excuse, and I apologized. She lifted her dress to show her healed stomach, and she said it was no big deal since this was literally my first day on the job. I asked if she realized she just flashed me, and she smugly grinned and said if I wanted to see more, I had to pay for it. I just groaned and looked at the dead animal Sekh had killed.  

Her viciousness was on display. The large beast’s stomach was brutally carved open, and the smell of singed meat permeated the air. “Lv. 3?” 

“It was,” Sekh said, her voice back to its normal tone. She wiped her runny nose and spoke about fighting things above your level. The difference wasn’t as extreme at lower levels, where you could fight without much risk. But a Lv. 99 dragon against a Lv. 80? Not a chance. But fifty Lv. 80s against that same dragon? That was more of a fair fight.  

After assimilating most of the boar and filling my biomass from 17% to 100%, I refrained from eating the tusks because I had plans for them. I also realized the protector and its wards were considered different species. 

New Skill: [Piercing Thrust (Lv. 1)] 

I wanted to test out the skill the big pig used to gore me, but my torn clothes came first. Since we were near the temple ruins, we walked over there. After gathering some vines and a large handful of crispy leaves, I began to poke a small hole in each to weave the vine through until I made a patch. I stripped down to my leafy bra, retrieved some sticky sap, and did the repairs. The knowledge gained from [Nature’s Workshop] worked wonders, but the overall result was amateurish and sloppy because I didn’t have any supporting skills to draw knowledge from. To make up for my inexperience, I created about four more patches to assure the hole was fixed.  While I did that, Sekh took some water from my canteen and washed away the dried blood on my skin and pants. 

The chainmail was fucked, but that was fine. I used my stone knife from [Artificer’s Arsenal] to cut off long, thin strips of wood, then sliced those down to size while using the sap to keep the repairs in place. The problem was that the other links were round, and I was using straight pieces to fix it. 

But I didn't care. If it looked a little weird, it didn’t bother me.  

After getting dressed, I looked at my map and found two boars not too far away. They looked to be crossing the road, and I figured they would be the perfect test subjects for my next experiments.  

Upon transfiguring my hand into the protector’s head, I was ready to try out my first skill. Mastery Menu finally had something populating it, and [Piercing Thrust] had a small bar that measured my progress. As we walked to the boars, Tilde told me something interesting. As a chimera, I was a monster, and they had the innate ability to use skills wordlessly without chanting. 

For some reason, something told me to take aim with Reina’s gun. When I did, I was alerted to something very interesting. 

New Skill: [Chimeric Armatization]  

Reina’s pistol shimmered a glowing silver, changing its appearance to suit the color scheme of a simple iron spear. The front sight went from a silver rectangle to the pointy tip of a lance, and the cherry wood grip became a deeper shade of brown. Power resided within the barrel when the trigger was pulled, draining me of mana and biomass while blasting a bloody hole through my closest target’s side. 

Rushing forward, I stored my pistol within my mana and used [Piercing Thrust] with my transfigured hand. 

The tusks glowed white, and I brought my arm back and punched forward, lodging them into the second pig’s head to puncture the skull and destroy the brain. I hastily transitioned into devouring them in a smooth movement.

Sekh asked about my gun changing forms, and I really didn’t know what happened. I just had that new skill to go on, so I told her about it. Tilde was drawing a blank, so I opened the Skill Menu.

• Chimeric Armatization 
  • When the user uses a skill while wielding the same type of weapon that is their Soul Weapon, it will change form to empower and enhance the skill. [Chimeric Armatization] requires biomass in addition to mana. If the weapon uses ammunition, the user must provide it if {Mana Link} is not available. 

Tilde dove into another lecture, citing that Soul Warriors had protections preventing them from turning into a chimera when the conditions were met. Since I was a 0-Star soul, I had nothing like that. It was extremely rare, but [Chimeric Mastery] must’ve done something to my Mastery Menu and [Soul Armatization] to produce [Chimeric Armatization], a Divine Armament. Sure, it was nice to have, but if I used Reina’s gun, mana and biomass would be drained from me. If I had a regular gun that used ammo, both would still be used, the former at a lesser rate, until the skill was mastered. At that point, mana was the only resource if I used real ammo, not biomass. At least, I thought it worked like that.

That’s just another thing I’m going to have to think about. It’s no use trying to dive right in when I’m clearly wading through the deep end. Just take it one step at a time. 

“And with that, I’ve tested everything out,” I said, swallowing the last mouthful of boar meat. We walked back towards the main road while setting off towards Ria. Tilde led the way as she sat on my shoulder. 

We spoke about my new skill and how best to use it. Until I had [Piercing Thrust] mastered, I had to transfigure into the boar to have its mana flow through me. Eventually, I believed I could remain in my current form and channel [Piercing Thrust] through my gun without needing to transfigure. But transfiguring made the skill more powerful because the mana from the monster the skill came from flowed through me. The question was this: was the additional biomass worth the added damage? Sekh said figuring that out would be the key to reaching my full potential.  

Along the way, I stopped to cut off a branch and started to whittle it into a general spear shape with my stone knives. Sekh and Tilde silently observed as I stored that in my storage and retrieved a tusk. With Yaekira’s daggers, I straightened it out and sharpened it as best as I could before I used some leftover vine to tie the tusk to the spear. I was having trouble, so I hollowed out the bottom innards of the tusk and thinned out the top of the spear to make the two pieces fit better, and I tied it all up. Once done, a display appeared, and I named my new creation. 

Boar Tusk Spear (0/0) 

I handed the makeshift, shoddy weapon to Sekh, and she took it with a smile. I knew she would rather have a mace, but I didn’t have the skills to do that. Still, she appreciated the gift and kissed me on the cheek as she stored it on her backpack. After picking up a few more rocks, we walked the rest of the way in idle conversation as I tried to craft a better version of my stone knives. 

RuggyRuggy

Yes, this chapter is kinda short, but if I combined it with the next one, it would've been over 5k words. One of my goals for this story is to keep chapters at a reasonable length, which would allow me to release more, hence the 3x-a-week upload schedule. But even if the pacing is fine, to me, at least, when I'm reading it all at once in the word document, I realize it might be slow if you have to wait for an upload every other day.

So!

Next week will have daily uploads, which will bring us to Chapter 18, and that following Monday will go back to 3x-a-week.

Depending on my progress with writing further chapters of this story and the rewrite of Interconnected, I might do a third week of daily uploads a week after that. 

RuggyRuggy.