Recovery

We went a few more days like this, just relaxing together, before we decided to start taking quests again. We couldn't exactly just sit around living off a steadily dwindling supply of money forever, after all. However, we were on edge.

We’d only grabbed a handful of quests - three gathering and one hunt. The hunt was the only D-rank quest, and all four quests were located within a day’s journey from the city. Our first night, neither Alicia nor Nero slept.

I gained Sleepless Night when I evolved, I said. It was a passive that let me go without sleep for several days in a row. Upon evolving, I’d gained that along with Telepathy and Intuition, another passive that allowed me to more easily sense the fastest path to my destination. It had a lot of limitations, and I suspected it’d been acquired because of the role Nero and I had played in mapping the dungeon. So leave keeping watch to me. You two should rest.

“I know,” Alicia said miserably, “but I can’t stop thinking… What if another dungeon appears?”

“That only happened because we had so many people with Hated by God with us,” Nero said, but he didn’t sound as certain as he probably meant to.

If it does, it’d be better for you to be rested.

“Thanks, Luna,” Nero said irritably. “We’re cured. Really.”

Since they didn’t sleep, they were little better than zombies the next day. We were near the city, so the level of the monsters around us was low enough that it didn’t matter, but I had to concede that they’d been right to stick with easy quests. If we’d been doing something at our level, we’d have been in trouble.

We reached the gathering location, and Heather and I watched bemusedly as our Masters grabbed handful after handful of weeds instead of the herbs we were meant to be collecting. They were similar in appearance, sure, but it wasn’t a mistake they’d ordinarily make. Maybe Heather was smarter than your average horse after all, because she snorted every time she saw Alicia pick up the wrong plant.

At least their exhaustion meant that they passed out soon after making camp that evening. I don’t know if you can understand me, but go ahead and sleep. I’ll keep watch, I told Heather. She didn’t indicate whether she’d understood or not, but she eventually tucked her wings in against her sides and dozed, so goal accomplished either way.

It was in the early hours of the morning that he appeared. Between one blink and the next, I went from standing vigil alone to sitting beside Fyth. He was just as disturbing-looking as ever, though the darkness made his appearance a little easier to swallow. He dwarfed me, though, since I was a cat now, and that made him a little scarier.

“You failed to kill one of them,” he said without preamble, resting his elbows on his knees and cupping his chin between his hands.

Are you going to punish me?

Fyth shrugged and grinned. I wondered if he was ever serious. It would probably be terrifying. “Your Master isn’t dead yet, so your deadline hasn’t passed.”

I’d expected as much. I'm not attacking an unconscious woman. If she wakes up, I'll worry about her then. 

"That sounds reasonable," Fyth said agreeably. He fell silent, leaving me in the unenviable role of having to continue the conversation if I wanted to get rid of him. 

So? Why are you here then?

“Can’t your true master come to check on his servant without needing a reason?” Maybe he meant to sound hurt, but he mostly sounded like he was laughing at me. Given the darkness that coated him above his mouth, I couldn’t say what his face looked like, but I was sure it was something eminently punchable. I refused to dignify that question with a response.

Fyth gave an aggrieved sigh and clutched at his chest dramatically. “I helped you save your Master, and this is the thanks I get. Humans are so ungrateful.”

I’m a cat, I pointed out.

“Human, cat, same difference.” Fyth glanced toward the tent where Nero and Alicia slept. “Very well. I came to give you your second task. There is no time limit, and the punishment for failure remains the same as ever.”

Which is? You never told me the punishment in the first place.

“Didn’t I?” Fyth asked far too innocently. “What an irresponsible master I am. My poor, poor Luna, having to work for such an unreasonable being. My heart goes out to you, truly.”

He notably did not answer the question. I stared at him for a long time, and he just grinned back like he had nothing better to do with his time. Maybe he didn’t. I broke first. Fine. What’s the task? I asked, looking away and swishing my tail agitatedly. I'd rather he stick to talking to me in my head rather than appearing like this.

“I want those two to remain friends.”

My head whipped back around to face him. What?

“Or, more specifically, keep them from turning against each other. Separate them if you must. Kill one if you must. Whatever you need to do to ensure they never become enemies.”

That was a distinctly… not evil-sounding task. Why? I asked, but Fyth was already gone. I spent the rest of the night pondering that, trying to decipher what Fyth’s goals could be that they involved such a wholesome-sounding task as ‘make them stay friends.’ I came to no conclusions.

Morning came, and Nero and Alicia exited their tent. “Morning, Luna,” Nero mumbled sleepily.

“Good morning, Luna, thank you for keeping watch,” Alicia said.

Did you sleep well?

“Yes, thank you,” Alicia said. She set about cooking breakfast while Nero struggled to wake up. He gathered me in his arms and petted me while we waited for Alicia to finish. It was kind of adorable the way his head kept falling forward before he caught himself and straightened again, only for it to repeat a moment later.

Now that they were rested, they did much better. We finished the gathering quests easily and moved on to clearing out Pumpkings from a farming village. They were monsters that looked like pumpkins but used their vines to ensnare and strangle their victims before dragging them underground to be slowly digested.

Do you have Jack o’Lanterns in this world? I asked Nero as we worked. I used to love making Jack o'Lanterns with my daughter. 

“Whatses?”

I described the practice of carving faces into pumpkins and setting a candle inside them. Nero stared at me, bemused. “Not that I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “Why would you do that?”

It was one way of celebrating Halloween. Um, that’s a Fall holiday that was mostly about eating sweet treats and dressing up in costumes.

Nero cocked his head curiously. “What’s a holiday?”

I tripped over my own feet. Did this world not have holidays? A day that people spend celebrating every year?

Nero just stared, uncomprehending. “Huh,” he said eventually. “Your world sounds weird. We celebrate when there’s something to celebrate. We don’t schedule it to happen year after year, though.”

Like Goblins, this was a difference I struggled to wrap my mind around. What about birthdays?

"The day of our birth?" Nero hummed, thinking carefully. "I guess we acknowledge that it happened, but we don't really celebrate it. Oh, except for when we turn thirteen. It depends on the village, but where Alicia and I grew up, everyone who turned thirteen that year goes to get their first summon on October 21st."

That wasn't the same thing at all. I quietly mourned Halloween and Christmas, my two favorite holidays, because decorating was fun.

I’d known it would happen, but the reality of leveling after evolution was far harsher than I’d expected. I guess bosses gave extra experience, because I still hadn’t leveled again. I was still level 31, and despite killing dozens of monsters, my experience bar wasn’t even close to 32. Admittedly, we were killing monsters several levels below me, but I got the feeling that it wouldn’t improve much even once we were able to fight monsters at our level again.

Fighting with just the four of us was another adjustment. We’d been with Crimson Rain long enough to get used to their style of fighting, which didn’t work anymore. We couldn’t use Dragon as a tank, and neither Heather nor I was well-suited to it. Alicia ended up playing the role, even though she didn’t have any relevant skills. Instead of relying on her ability to tank attacks, we did our best to get better at dodging.

We also no longer had a scout, but Nero and I filled that role well enough. He’d obtained Stealth and Future Sight shortly after we started performing quests. The latter was much less exciting than it sounded - at level 1, it did nothing more than tell him what the next monster he encountered would be. Even so, between that and my Intuition, we could serve as passable scouts.

Strangely, I noticed that we were getting stronger. It wasn’t something obvious at all, but I didn’t think it could be explained only by experience. I wondered if there might be other stats, hidden ones, that changed independently of level.

More importantly, Nero and Alicia’s confidence returned. By the time we returned to the city, they no longer had trouble falling asleep. They took turns keeping watch, and we developed a rotation that worked reasonably well for us in which I kept watch two nights in a row, and they each took half of the third night. Heather provided me company sometimes, but we mostly left her out of the rotation, though Alicia had high hopes for her summon’s evolution.