[EoR] Chapter 81

“Up!”

I scooped the small Sheowon child and tossed her into the air, causing her to burst out into a fit of giggles. After a few throws, I set her back down, but she raised her arms back up to me.

“Again!”

“Only if you ask nicely, Mowala,” I said.

“Up, please!” the little girl said, making grabby hands.

“Well… okay then,” I said, scooping and tossing her again.

It was a few years after Ibriya and Shappi’s Bonding, and not much had changed in my life, save for the introduction of Mowala to it. That hadn’t taken very long at all—as soon as the next mating season hit after they were Bonded, Shappi was pregnant, and Mowala entered the world later that year.

Despite not being a surprise, it did force me to reevaluate my plans.

Ibriya and Shappi had developed their Blood, though not as fast as they would have with another pair of Sheowon in their Bond. Considering they didn’t particularly require Blood to run the smithy, the fact that they put serious work into developing it, just to Bond with me, was nothing to scoff at.

Still, I continued to decline the Bond, and I was glad that I did. I needed to return to my people to fulfill the All-Bonded’s mission, but with Mowala in the picture, things were different now.

Returning to the Uli homeland had always been a dangerous prospect, and even more so for a Sheowon. I was not all-powerful, and I could very well end up facing problems I couldn’t protect others from. Once we were bonded, any threat to my Bonded family was a direct threat to me. Bonded or not, had Ibriya and Shappi joined me despite the risks, it would be because they were adults and made that choice themselves. But there was no way I was dragging Mowala across the ocean.

The fact was, I would almost certainly wind up needing to fight to establish myself when I got home. I didn’t want to kill anyone, but it was the way of life for the Uli. In order to make change, I would almost certainly need to defeat one or more chiefs, if nothing else. I didn’t want to expose my friends to that, or risk them. Even if I could protect Ibriya and Shappi, there was a chance I could be killed in a challenge against a superior foe. That means abandoning my friends to the Uli, and if we were Bonded, it would mean taking them down with me.

Even ignoring the danger, there were problems I hadn’t considered until I really started thinking it through. There was no turf to harvest where I came from, and while I could digest raw meat, the Sheowon were used to cooking their food. They probably could manage to survive with stuff like raw fish, but they risked getting sick. At best, they would still likely be miserable about it, and there just wasn’t a viable alternative. In general, the living conditions of the Uli were far worse than those of the Sheowon, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to subject my friends to that. I definitely didn’t want Mowala to have to grow up like that, when she could grow up among the Sheowon.

The more time that passed in the Sheowon village, the more established Ibriya and Shappi got. I had largely passed off the smithy to them, as after my discussion with the admin, I had started much more seriously focusing on my training. They had apprentices who they were training, but all three of us leaving the village would set Sheowon metalworking back quite a bit.

I had considered simply waiting. The admin hadn’t rushed me, so we could wait until Mowala was grown and Bonded to her own family. Though, they would likely have more children, and we would have to wait for them to grow as well. And then there would be grandchildren to consider. While I appreciated Ibriya and Shappi’s support and loved them for it, I didn’t want to tear them away from this life.

So I began to distance myself, slightly. I was always available to babysit Mowala, but most of the time, I was further out from the smithy and training the stats and skills I reasonably could. My Blood was stuck, without Bonding or farming retaliation, as I had no way to use more than I had to push it forward.

After hearing the admin talk about other methods, I briefly considered bloodletting and drinking my own blood, but the issue with that was it took too long for my Blood to recover before I could drink the blood and expand my baseline. I didn’t have the technology to seal up and refrigerate my Blood while I recovered, and the Blood coagulated and spoiled without. Also, in my attempt to make Bloodbound daggers, the energy dropped dramatically once it was separated from my body. Blood drinking to develop the stat really needed a donor and fresh Blood, and there was no way I was risking introducing that to Sheowon culture.

My Blood was high enough, especially with my Will, to tank a lot of damage with [Blood Augmentation] already. The main benefit of having more Blood would be for attacking, but I had other ways of inflicting damage.

Despite my Bloodbound daggers being failures—just regular iron daggers with no special properties at all—they were still weapons in a world that lacked the development to counter them. In fact, I had probably been thinking about them backwards in the first place. Blood couldn’t carve iron, hence the Sheowon name for bog iron. It wasn’t that iron resisted Blood, it was just too tough and durable. Those same properties made iron the best material for me to get through Blood-based defenses.

Part of my training was just developing my Brawn stat, since I was fully grown now and could push my body to its limits, or even farther thanks to [Blood Restoration]. With access to metal and stone and no one really questioning what I did, I was able to come up with ways to train myself far harder than I could just with calisthenics. I heaved a ton of weight around, conditioning my body to the breaking point, until I adapted and pushed even harder.

The rest of the time, I focused on my skills. With four daggers, I started adapting everything I had ever learned about [Swordsmanship] and [Dual Wielding] to using all four of my arms. It wasn’t easy, and I cut myself more than a few times as I worked away at it. It wasn’t until I started incorporating some of what I had learned in training my [Grappling], having acquired that as an Uli, that I started to come up with ways of making it work.

What really made it click was when I started mixing up my grips, using reverse grip on one of my pairs of arms. Using reverse grip with my lower arms helped me to avoid accidental self-harm, so I could focus my damage on my enemy. Flipping both, so that my upper arms were the ones using reverse grip, allowed me to strike like pincers or fangs.

The Sheowon weren’t really fighters, so I took to the wild in search of a foe to test myself against. The island the Sheowon lived on was fairly peaceful, but there were predators that attacked livestock, hence the livestock guardian animals. My encounters with those, and applying what I had come up with, allowed me to acquire [Quadral Wielding].

I didn’t get a second skill similar to [Ambidexterity] for the upper-lower arm split, but it wasn’t clear to me if that was because [Ambidexterity] already sort of covered that or because there wasn’t enough I could do to push myself to develop a similar skill. It had taken the loss of one of my hands and learning to do everything in my life as Tovar over again with my off-hand to acquire that skill, and I wasn’t willing to chop off two of my four hands in this life to see if it would result in the same thing. [Quadral Wielding] my daggers already put far me ahead in terms of mundane combat. I even gained a level in [Swordsmanship] from adapting my techniques to the shorter blades.

Overall, I had made pretty good headway.

It was hard to compare my progress so far in this life, as Mali, to the progress I made in my first few decades of life as Tovar. My Blood skills were far more general than my spell skills, so they were less numerous, but also quite a lot higher level than any of my spells had been at that age. I had gained fewer stat improvements on the whole, but each one pushed me to far greater heights than the stats I had gained as a child the first time around.

In terms of Brawn and Brain, I was pretty sure I was now comparable to any Roba. They didn’t have the resources I had, nor the lifespan. They would have higher Blood, but my Will rounded that out, and most importantly, I had [Missionary of the All-Bonded]. All my stats would get a slight empowerment when I returned to the Uli to bring back the All-Bonded’s teachings. When it came to my training, I was as ready as I’d ever be.

Mowala broke into a wobbly run, and I shook myself out of my reverie to chase after her until I noticed Ibriya and Shappi approaching. Ibriya raised a hand to wave at me, and I waved back. Their daughter slammed into them, hugging their legs and babbling about her day.

I sat on a nearby rock and watched fondly for a while, then sighed and looked down at the ground. I wanted to see Mowala grow up, and continue to spend time with my friends—my family, really, even if we weren’t Bonded. I wanted to see their other kids, and how the village would develop, and what else we could accomplish working together towards that future.

And I probably could. The admin wasn’t forcing the issue. But every year that passed, I would become more and more entangled with the people here. It would get harder and harder to leave, and it would give me less and less time to help improve Uli lives and try to save the species from slowly self-destructing.

A shadow fell and I looked up to find Ibriya standing over me. He frowned, studying my face.

“…You’re leaving, then,” he finally said.

“Reading my mind?”

“Your face is easy to read. We might not be Bonded, but I know you, Mali.”

I bared my tusks and stuck out my tongue. Ibriya chuckled, then sat on the rock next to me.

“Mowala’s going to throw a fit when you leave.”

“Yeah.”

“And the smithy won’t be the same without you.”

“Sorry.”

Ibriya shrugged. “Well, I guess we knew this day was coming. Especially after you kept refusing to Bond.”

“I’ve got a mission, but you’ve got a life here,” I said. Ibriya didn’t argue. He had likely already come to the same conclusions.

We sat in silence for a while, watching the breeze play across the dark grass.

“You and Shappi should find others to Bond with,” I began, but Ibriya shook his head.

“We’ll wait for you to come back.”

I frowned. “I’m not—”

Ibriya bumped his shoulder into me. “We’ll wait. Someday, when you finish your mission for the All-Bonded, come back to us. We’ll be here.”

There was no point in arguing with him. When Ibriya decided something, he didn’t change his mind easily. Just like how he decided to help me with the completely unproven ideas I had about forging metal, years ago, despite his parents’ protestations.

“Stubborn,” I chuckled.

“Giant,” Ibriya shot back, then stood and stretched. “Come on, then. Mowala’s probably hungry, and you always are. Let’s have dinner.”