Chương 12: A Week of Progress

[NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── Current XP: 0 / 1000 The difference was immediately obvious. Fenwick threw one acorn. Just one. Then he said the name.

"Max." The hero turned. The movement was purposeful, from a being hearing something and registering that a sound had occurred somewhere in its general vicinity. A turn. Toward the sound. Toward Fenwick. The empty, glowing eye sockets found him with something almost like attention. Fenwick sat on the shoulder in the morning light and allowed himself a moment of something that was not quite optimism but was no longer its complete absence either.

"The mushroom people," he said, "are that way." He pointed. Max looked where he pointed. It was, by the standards of the past thirty-four days, extraordinary. After testing the new capabilities of the recently leveled Max, they continued. They had moved past the beginner path. The training grounds extended deeper into the Thornwood than Fenwick had previously ventured, the wooden signs along the eastern path shifting from cheerful encouragement to more cautious advisories the further in you went.

The undergrowth thickened. The light changed. The sounds were different here, more complex, layered, the ambient noise of something more genuinely wild than the curated beginner's clearing with its visible toadstool people and cleared sightlines. Fenwick had his acorn bag. He had Grayson's Sparkly Hands. He had a zombie who could now be redirected with moderate reliability by saying his name. Today was going to be a good day. The tree blight was standing in the middle of the path.

It had not been there a moment ago. Or it had been there, and neither of them had registered it, which was one of the talents of creatures made entirely of brown and grey sticks. It was roughly Max's height, angular, made of sharp branches and ambient malice, and it had turned toward them with focused aggression. Much bigger and meaner than the twig blights that had wandered onto the beginning level area. Max walked into it.

He was still looking at Fenwick and walked directly into the tree blight, not registering any danger from a walking tree. The tree blight grabbed him. Max grabbed it back. What happened next involved Max getting both hands around the tree blight's trunk, lifting it entirely off the ground, and introducing it to the path. The blight stopped moving on the third impact. The smashing did not stop. Branches shed with each blow. The shape of the thing changed.

Fenwick watched from the shoulder with the expression of someone witnessing something that defied easy categorization — the blight growing smaller and more concentrated with each impact, the extraneous branches breaking away, the core becoming denser and more manageable. Max stopped. He looked at what was in his hands. It was, roughly, a club. It was the right length. It had a natural grip at one end where the trunk had narrowed.

It was the shape of something designed to be held, because he had held it while hitting things until it became so. He had invented the club. Accidentally. He kept it. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +15 XP NEW CREATURE TYPE: x2 BONUS APPLIED TOTAL: +30 XP Fenwick stared at the club. Above Max's head: [🎉] ──────────────────────────── 🎉🎉🎉 New item acquired: Club The system's enthusiasm for this development, Fenwick felt, was possibly disproportionate.

Then again, the system had watched Max eat beetles for thirty-three days and had probably been waiting a long time to log something like this.

"Hm," said Fenwick. Max walked on, holding the club. The lizard minimen found them twenty minutes later. They were knee-high, green-scaled, moving through the undergrowth with focused aggression. The hero looked like an easy target — slow-moving and inattentive to all around it. There were four of them. They fanned out with the instinctive coordination of pack hunters, crude stone-tipped spears held at the ready. Fenwick assessed the situation. Four lizard minimen. Knee high. Pack hunters.

Stone spears that would do approximately nothing to Max but could absolutely reach Fenwick at shoulder height if one of them got the angle right. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"Max," said Fenwick. The head turned. The lizard minimen closed in. Above Max's head, a butterfly appeared on the screen — animated, yellow, wings moving with the slow, deliberate rhythm of something real. Sindy placed it directly on the nearest miniman's head. Max's hand shot out. He grabbed the miniman by the head and bit it off. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +15 XP NEW CREATURE TYPE: x2 BONUS APPLIED TOTAL: +30 XP The remaining three stopped. Then they attacked.

The spears hit Max in three different places. Max made a sound, not a groan, something with more volume behind it, something that started in the chest and came out with direction, and the club came around in a wide arc that found two of them simultaneously and sent them sideways into the path. He stumbled back a step. His boot came down on the third. The boot made its own noise as it met the opponent's body, with snaps and crunches that ensured it wouldn't stand again.

The hero, not noticing the twitching remains under his boot, grabbed one of the fallen ones and brought it to his mouth. A crunch on its neck meant the mortal life of the creature was over. Max dropped it and grabbed for the last, still on the ground, squealing in terror. Chomp. Drop. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +15 XP +15 XP +15 XP Total: +45 XP Current XP: 105 / 1000 Max looked around for butterflies and beetles. The last two bitten by a zombie began to rise again. The white paw came up.

[Spell Cast] ──────────────────────────── Grayson's Sparkly Hands. Pink smoke. Glitter. Tiny crackling lightning. Fenwick lowered his paw.

"Well," said Fenwick. The week that followed was different from every week before it. Max responded to his name. Not always, not reliably, not with anything approaching understanding, but enough — enough to redirect, enough to redirect again, enough to keep him pointed at targets rather than butterflies with a consistency that would have been unimaginable a week prior. The acorns still helped. The dancing figures still helped.

But the name was the thing that worked when nothing else did, and Fenwick used it constantly, without self-consciousness, in the same tone he used for everything else.

"Max. Left."

"Max. The blight."

"Max, not the frog, the other frog, the one that is actively biting your boot, Max—" The XP accumulated in a way it never had before. Twig blights. Lizard minimen in groups of three and four. A vine blight that required considerably more club work than the others and generated a notification that made the dancing figures very happy.

The frogs appeared on day three — dog-sized, mottled brown, lurking near the small stream that ran through the intermediate zone — and the first one's tongue made a committed attempt at Fenwick before Max's club intercepted it with a sound like a very wet snap. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +10 XP NEW CREATURE TYPE: x2 BONUS APPLIED TOTAL: +20 XP"Thank you," said Fenwick, with great feeling. By the end of the week, the pattern had settled into something almost resembling a system.

Max moved through the Thornwood with Fenwick navigating from his shoulder, the club preceding them both, the name used as a correction mechanism when attention wandered. The system's dancing figures had taken on a different quality — still present, still necessary, but now working in concert with Fenwick.

When Max used his bite to finish a fight, Fenwick's job was immediate — the white paw coming up before the twitching stopped, Grayson's Sparkly Hands keeping pace with Max's increasingly frequent kills as the groups grew larger and the encounters came faster. Sindy continued to read to him every night as he sat staring at the wall, listening to his stories. The XP bar climbed. The morning of the seventh day started like any other. Fenwick renewed Flower Scent. He climbed into the harness.

They reached the Thornwood by mid-morning, and the first encounter came quickly, as it had all week. The white paw came up. Pink smoke. Glitter. Tiny crackling lightning. The level-up notification appeared. Fenwick looked at it. He looked at Max, who was already moving toward something in the undergrowth with the focused attention that meant another encounter was imminent. He could not confirm the level up. Not here. Not with Max mid-hunt and anything he bit needing immediate attention.

Thirty seconds of inattention was thirty seconds too many. He did not confirm the level-up. The memories of his desperate lizard hunt a couple of weeks ago were still fresh in his mind. He grumbled about this from the moment the notification appeared to the moment they walked through the door that evening, a continuous low-level commentary directed at no one in particular and everyone simultaneously. Max killed four things.

Fenwick killed three zombie frogs with Grayson's Sparkly Hands and received nothing for it except the quiet satisfaction of not starting an outbreak. They walked home as the sun went down, Max carrying his stick, Fenwick carrying his grievances. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── Current XP: 487 / 1000 Almost halfway. Fenwick confirmed his level up the moment they walked through the door.

He stood there for a moment in the doorway of the Aphid Barn, the notification resolving, the new spell slot was available, and his mind was able to understand something just a bit more complicated. Max faced a wall. Outside, the Thornwood was quiet. Fenwick sat down on his bed — the one with the ridge, the one he had been losing negotiations with for forty-one nights — and looked at his hands, white paw and reddish brown paw, and thought about things he did not usually let himself think about. He had leveled.

Not the way he had imagined leveling, once. Not in a library or a tower or at the culmination of some elegant intellectual achievement that would make his Order proud. He had leveled by casting a candy-colored lightning cantrip at partially-eaten reptiles enough times that the universe had decided he had earned something. A second silver sprig had appeared on his robe, catching the lamplight. The enchantment in the fabric had updated itself quietly, without ceremony, while he was still grumbling in the Thornwood.

He looked at Max, facing the wall.

"Max," he said quietly. The head turned. Fenwick looked at him for a moment.

"Good work today," he said. The head turned back to the wall. Fenwick lay down on the bed, ridge and all, and closed his eyes. [SYSTEM PRIVATE LOG] ──────────────────────────── [Entry 41] Day 41 in the fantasy realm. The small wizard leveled today. He grumbled about it for eight hours. He said good night to Max. Progress.