Fairy Queen and Dragonnewt

Now that we were grinding levels for our new summons, I suddenly felt a certain sympathy for Michael. At the time, I'd thought that at least he was still getting experience, unlike the others, but now I realized the other side of it. Watching my experience tick up in invisible increments as we killed level five horned rabbits or level ten wolves felt agonizing. I would almost prefer to get nothing rather than this torturous slog through level forty.

Almost.

Alicia and Nero stopped by the clinic to visit the human Fay regularly. Alicia spent the visits recounting everything that had happened since their last visit to the comatose woman, while Nero listened silently, providing moral support for her. On one trip, Nero asked the doctor, "Now that we both have two summons, does that mean this can't happen?"

The doctor nodded. "I won't say you'd be fine losing one of them. They're connected to your soul, and having a piece of your soul ripped out is always serious, but it's rare for such a loss to result in such utter disability." He reached out to offer me some pets. The staff at the clinic had gotten to know us well since Fay’s admission, and they always had pets or a treat for me.

Since it had gone so well for us, we decided to power level Justice and Fay. It took us only a couple of days to bring them both to level 30, and we immediately started looking for quests that would let us evolve the pair of them. By the end of my first full year in this world, Heather and I were level 41, Alicia and Nero were fourteen years old and level 71, and Justice and Fay needed a few more items for their first evolutions.

It was... nice. Peaceful.

It was midwinter when Justice and Fay evolved.

In video games, you didn’t usually have seasons, so the types of monsters you encountered weren’t affected by the time of year. That wasn’t true for this world. Fall was a time for Flufferpuffs and Pumpkings, while in Spring Dryads and Treants became more common. Fire Elementals and Melting Lilies turned up further north during Summer, and Winter summoned Frost Elementals and Abominable Snowmen.

The most abominable thing about Abominable Snowmen, I thought, was that they weren’t Yetis. They were literal snowmen - two balls of snow stacked atop one another. The only difference between them and what I’d built as a child was that Abominable Snowmen contained a real person inside them, someone whose corpse had frozen and become encased in snow. When they moved, which they did with small hops, the snowballs that made them up separated slightly, giving a glimpse of the undead within.

Even a normal person could handle an Abominable Snowman if they had a big enough fire. The undead were weak against fire and light magic, while ice creatures tended to be weak against fire magic. Since Abominable Snowmen were both undead and ice creatures, they were super weak against fire magic. The biggest problem they presented came from their numbers and the fact that, if you didn’t burn the body within to ashes, they would eventually reform. During blizzards, entire companies of Abominable Snowmen encroached upon the borders of villages and adventurers’ campsites.

That meant parties like ours that had access to fire magic were in high demand. We could only take one day off to evolve Justice and Fay and get them used to their new forms.

Fay evolved from a Fairy to a Fairy Queen. It was an extremely useful form. Fairies could evolve in several different directions, and the Fairy Queen was one of the most useful possibilities. It didn’t change her intelligence in the slightest. She remained, in essence, an extra creepy doll. Although she gained the ability to speak, it was in the way that a parrot could speak. She might be able to repeat phrases, and she could even be trained to say those phrases in response to certain situations, but she didn’t truly understand language.

It didn’t change her size, either. She was no larger than me, which I admit was kind of nice. I didn’t like being the smallest.

What she did gain was light magic, including buffs, healing, and purification spells. She could cure most status ailments, increase our natural Health and Magic regeneration, reduce our cooldowns, and perform AOE heals. Offensively, there was little she could do alone unless she was against dark-aspected monsters, but her buffs and heals were so powerful that they made us feel unstoppable.

Although I initially thought it was unfair that she got so much from her evolution, the feeling was tempered by the knowledge that, as a Rare summon, Fairy Queen was her final form. Alicia assured me, when she noticed me sulking over it, that final evolutions tended to give greater rewards than other evolutions.

Justice became a Dragonnewt. That was, according to Mathew, the most common evolution for a lizard. They could, occasionally, become Dragons, but that was exceedingly rare. Like, so rare it got national attention.

As a Dragonnewt, Justice was big. He towered over Alicia and Nero, and he was a full head taller than Heather, too. He had a beak-like mouth and reptilian eyes, but although his hands and feet were clawed, his hands were distinctly human-like, with four fingers and one opposable thumb each.

Justice had fire magic, naturally, since he’d evolved from a Fire Lizard, but Dragonnewts were inherently earth-aspected creatures, so he gained some earth magic spells alongside his evolution. He had high defense, and we celebrated at last having both a proper healer and a proper tank.

“We were in a party with a female Dragonnewt named Dragon and a Fire Elemental named Justice,” Nero explained to Justice after he’d evolved and could understand language better. “The party wasn’t made up of very good people, and they all died, but I named you to honor their summons, since you were a Fire Lizard, and I knew you’d probably become a Dragonnewt. If you don’t like it, though, we can change your name.”

“It… is fine,” Justice said slowly in a deep, gravelly voice that sounded like he was gargling rocks. “Thank you…for the choice… Master.”

Though he spoke slowly, Justice seemed to be every bit as intelligent as Heather or me, and we happily included him in our group. Justice was always careful to be gentle with us, and he and Heather spent their days off together.

“So… what do you want to do?” Nero asked the rest of us one afternoon. We were taking a break from a C-rank quest. “We can either finish leveling Luna and Heather to fifty, then focus on evolving them, or we can work on getting all four summons to level fifty and then evolve Luna, Heather, and Justice one after another.”

I want to evolve, I said promptly. I was tired of being a cat. Let me evolve.

Alicia bit at her lip and looked downcast. “I’d rather finish leveling everyone,” she said quietly. “Because to evolve, we’ll have to…”

She didn’t finish, but we all knew the problem. The second evolution would require that we start going into dungeons.

Justice told us it didn’t matter to him. He was easygoing like that. I occasionally caught sight of him on his days off with Heather, and they were almost always doing whatever she wanted. He just followed her along, tail slowly swaying in peaceful contentment.

“I think we should evolve,” Heather said. Alicia shot her a wide-eyed, betrayed look, which Heather placidly held as she said, “By the time Luna and I are level 50, Justice and Fay will be level 45, more or less. Given the rarity of the drops Luna and I will most likely need, and the increased experience dungeons give out, there is a good chance that they will reach level 50 in the course of obtaining Luna’s and my evolution materials. It would be most efficient to proceed in this manner, then.”

None of us bought her explanation for a second. Heather wasn’t efficiency-centered. If anyone was, it’d be me, Justice, or Nero. Heather and Alicia cared more about feelings than logic.

Which meant that Heather was giving a logical excuse because she wanted to be considerate of Alicia’s feelings. She couldn’t say outright that Alicia needed to face her fears, because Alicia refused to admit out loud that she was afraid in the first place, even though all of us knew it.

“I agree,” Nero said firmly after a moment.

Alicia’s jaw clenched, and she fisted her shaking hands. She took several deep breaths, but eventually she nodded. “Alright. That’s the vote, so… Yeah. We can do that.”

Having made the decision didn’t change anything about our lives for a few more months, though, because getting to level fifty took a completely ridiculous amount of time. I didn’t even want to think about how long it would take to go from fifty to eighty. We continued to pick up C-ranked quests, having silently and unanimously come to the simultaneous conclusion that we should let Alicia put off her first dungeon for as long as possible as a sort of compromise.

As such, it was late April by the time we were ready to set off to get our evolution materials. We briefly debated whether we should wait and see if we’d get any new party members, but although Alicia argued fiercely, the rest of us were firm. It was time to evolve again.