Fifty

"Those aren't better," Kon said, staring at the vermin crawling over the corpse of something that was nothing more than a series of bones held together by the last remnants of sinew. Stringy rust red bits of meat hung in dribbling strands from each curved rib, as furry black six-legged creatures scuttled about, eating at a voracious rate. Kon had no doubt that in the next few minutes there'd be nothing left of the carcass but nibbled bones.

"They're F-Grade and not bugs. We need the protein and you need the cores. Have fun," Diur said, slapping him on the shoulder as Kon looked over the scurrying horde. There were a lot of them, dozens of them crawling around. They had long, narrow teeth that stripped bone as easily as it did meat.

"If I get swarmed, I'm screwed." Kon walked closer to the remnants of the giant body, dragging his long club behind him. He swatted the club against the tree with a loud thwack that rang out. Only a few of the monsters turned to look at him, beady black eyes glinting in the light. The first of the rodents lunged at him, flying through the air with large paws stretched out, thin claws extended.

Kon swatted it out of the air with a baseball swing. The thick piece of wood caught the creature's skull cleanly, something cracked loudly and blood flew as the rodent rolled to a standstill. It tried to get to its feet, wobbled for a second, and then collapsed to the ground. Kon walked over and crushed its skull at the base of its neck.

More eyes turned to look at him as the sound of crunching bone echoed out. A lot more eyes. They glared at him with rapacious hunger. A wall of fur and teeth burst forth, snarling and growling as they charged him. Kon gritted his teeth and began to kill.

Each of the rodents was the size of a medium sized dog, nearly thirty pounds of feral rage and hunger. Kon shattered his club on his fifth beast, then he was left with just his feet and fists.

Teeth scraped at him, claws tore furrows, but every blow he took from the beasts, he returned with deadly force. Kon ran as he killed, running up and down the area as he jumped and lashed around himself. He led the horde in a circle, his superior speed and dexterity allowed him to keep ahead of the heart of the horde. He ran up the side of trees, leapt from branches, and even ran across the rib cage of the giant, dead beast.

They didn't give up. They kept coming in a thinning tidal wave of destruction. Kon crushed and killed with ease, not a single one of them a contest for him. Kon turned it into training, pushing himself to the full extent of his physical abilities as he ran, a sweat working into a lather.

"Finally done?" Diur asked minutes later as he killed the final F-Grade rodent with a swift kick that sent it to break against a tree. Kon's chest was heaving as he sucked in as much oxygen as he could.

"Yeah. We don't all have nice swords. Some of us are stuck in a more primal state of weaponry," Kon said finally, lifting his bloody hands up in the air.

"Some of us don't throw our weapons away when we're frustrated," Diur said as she walked over to him. She frowned and bent down to grab something off the ground. It was a feather. Bloody and partially eaten, it was nearly the length of her entire arm from shoulder to wrist.

"That from this thing?" Kon asked, nodding to the large skeleton that had been being eaten. Diur frowned at that, but looked over to it and walked over to the corpse, peering over at it with an inquisitive eye.

She sniffed the torn up feather and then the bones themselves. She worked her fingers over the gnawed on bones, her frown deepening. Her eyes swept back and forth over the remnants of the feeding frenzy.

"I…I think this is that bird," Diur said slowly as she looked around herself. Kon froze as he heard those words, thinking of the giant bird that had swooped up the peak D-Grade beast from the plateau cliff walls.

"How? That thing had the bug dead to rights," Kon said. He walked over to the remnants of the bird and tried to see what it was that Diur could see or sense.

"I think the bird was an E-Grade. Or a very weak D-Grade, it's hard to tell. Its core was eaten before the rodents got here."

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"Guess they had a good meal then," Kon said, kicking one of the dead beasts over with the toe of his foot.

"Beasts can push their way through to the next tier if they can consume enough energy dense matter. It wouldn't surprise me if this large of a meal would have been enough to push them into E-Grade in a day or two once they finished consolidating their power."

"We can eat them though? Without, you know, blowing up?" Kon asked.

"We'll be fine. Let's start processing them, but we'll cook some here and take the cores back to our camp and have you absorb them there. I don't want to have the food out in the open attracting attention."

Kon nodded as he walked over to the first of the rodents and flipped it over. He grabbed it by its muscular tail and flipped it off to the side, the start of a pile. It took ten minutes of the two of them to gather all the rodents and Diur began to cut, her sword slashing with precision, pulling out the cores and stacking them to the side.

While Diur did that, Kon gathered up dry wood and dug a shallow pit for the fire. Diur's sword sparked against a rock and she left Kon to slowly work the smoldering fire into a real blaze as she walked off to finish her butchering work. The pile of F-Grade cores were large enough that Kon felt a bit intimidated, but he started to think over the rune he was going to have to imprint.

Reinforce bone. It was vague and broad and Kon loved it. He could feel how the cultivation had helped make him sturdier and stronger, but he had yet been able to quantify it. With this node and his muscle repair node, he'd have a great base for himself once he built the rest of his network and eventually layers. Alice's words rang in his head.

"The armor enhances what's already there." Kon wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but building his body up to a level that even Alice was impressed by couldn't hurt anything.

Cooked rodent meat wasn't the worst thing they'd eaten, but it by far wasn't the best. They ate in the shadow of the dead bird, the stink of its decomposition stinging their noses.

"Shower," Kon said suddenly. Diur looked at him and raised a silent eyebrow in question.

"It's what I'm going to look forward to the most," Kon said.

"Grains and vegetables," Diur said as she ripped at the bloody piece of meat she was eating. Her fingers were drenched in blood, dirt, and offal, but the dissolution of their hygiene standards had happened a long time ago.

"Fresh clothes. That cover everything," Kon retorted.

"Feather bed," Diur countered.

"Never been in one. How is it?" Kon said.

"It's like sleeping on a cloud," Diur said dreamily.

"Doesn't sound good for your lumbar," Kon said with a straight face. Diur looked at him and slowly shook her head.

"How old are you?"

"It's never too early to start looking after you back," Kon said. It had been something his grandmother had said to him frequently enough that it had embedded itself in his brain.

"Good entertainment. I have lost at least two seasons of new plays," Diur complained. Kon looked at her and cocked his head.

"My clan patronizes several troupes of playwrights and actors. During the summer on the continent they premier their creations for us. Oftentimes there is a central story that goes on, tangentially connected tying all their pieces together for several seasons," Diur explained in between bites of meat. Kon had finished off several skewers, his node hardly noticing the low grade meat. It was converting the energy, but it was nothing like eating an E-Grade beast.

"I'm sure someone, somewhere, recorded it for you to catch up on," Kon said.

"My grandfather was the one who took me. My parents are often away on business and only grandfather was available. It was our thing," Diur said quietly, the mood turning solemn.

"I don't think he'd want you to stop doing what you enjoy," Kon said after a minute.

"It's not fun by yourself."

"I'll go with you. I've never seen a live play before," Kon offered. Diur froze, stick of dripping meat hanging over the fire, her eyes met his and he felt a shiver roll down his spine.

"You promise?"

"Yes."

"The plays can last days. Only the endurance of a cultivator is able to withstand it."

"Days? As in plural?"

"You promised," Diur said, her smile suddenly predatory. Kon felt like he had just blundered into a trap.

"Did you bait me into making that promise?" Kon asked after a moment. Diur didn't say anything, just continuing to eat as Kon let his mind drift away for a few minutes to think about what life would be like after he got off the planet.

"Who knows, I doubt the Knights will let me just fly off to some Ulmna planet."

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