Chapter 10: Revoke

「…There…！」

Carefully, carefully parting the forest’s branches and leaves, I finally spotted our prey. A deer.

Though calling it a deer isn’t quite accurate by the standards I know. Geometric patterns run over its whole body, and its antlers jut like bolts of lightning—stout enough to topple a small tree.
What can I say—between me and the armored bear, it feels like combat ability is excessive across the board in this world.

「Ai. Think you can do it？」
「Yes…!」

I whispered to Ai on my back, felt her nod, and the trees ahead of the deer began to stir. It was clearly different from wind-blown rustling; the deer sensed it and reflexively sprang backward.

—Which is to say, toward where we were.

At that moment I burst from the thicket and swung my claws, but just before they connected the deer pivoted nimbly and slipped past them.

「Damn it!」

I spread my wings and a whoosh of wind roared out. The deer staggered for an instant in the gusts, but vanished deeper into the forest before I could give chase.

「Missed again…」
「I’m sorry, sensei…」
「No, no, it’s not your fault, Ai. I’m the clumsy one.」

I’ve never been much of a hunter to begin with.
Wind magic is only good for making them stumble at best, and fire is so strong I can’t just use it in the forest.
A dragon’s body has the specs to trade blows head-on with an armored bear and win handily, but catching a fleeing herbivore depends on how you handle that body—and I’m apparently terrible at it.
If I succeed even once in ten, that’s about as good as it gets.

Thanks to Ai, that’s up to maybe one in seven now, so her contribution is by no means small.

It isn’t—but still.

「Even so… what should we do…?」

Given our current way of life, that won’t do.
Ai’s village numbers sixteen in all. Add me, Nina, and Ai, and that’s eighteen people—and one dragon.
At my current success rate, I can feed two people and a dragon, but keeping that many mouths fed is difficult.

Of course, they’ve been surviving in this world up to now. Nutritionally inadequate as it is, they can hunt for themselves and get by.

But there is absolutely no such thing as leeway in that life.

At dawn they go out to hunt, and at dusk they sleep—that’s almost the whole of it. Even then, meals are touch and go. Days with no catch and no food are common, it seems.
Half of the sixteen are small children; in practice only five adult men support the group. One illness and hunting efficiency plummets. A single serious injury on the hunt could bring the whole group down.

It really drives home that education is something a society can afford only when it has surplus.

「No helping it. Let’s call it for today and head back.」
「…Okay.」

I glanced up at the sun near its zenith and called out to Ai.
In the end, today’s haul was the nuts Ai gathered, the fish I’d caught in the morning, and shellfish. Compared to hunting large game these are far more reliable to obtain, but they spoil quickly, so we can only bring back what we’ll eat that day. The sea is far, and even with my wings it costs quite a bit of time.

「I’m back.」
「Welcome back.」
「Welcome baack!」
「Welcome back!」

When Ai and I returned to the cave, Nina and the children came out to meet us. The lively shower of greetings made me smile despite myself.
Children’s capacity for learning truly is astounding. We haven’t been based near this cave for long, yet they’ve already started picking up simple words.

「No big catch today either, huh.」
「Yeah… sorry.」
「No, it’s fine. I’m just saying.」

Nina took the fruits of the hunt and quickly put them into a jar.

「Maybe I should just go with you after all?」

At her words I let out a thoughtful groan.

Indeed, taking her would improve our hunting efficiency dramatically.
Nina is practically a child of the forest.
She senses living presences sharper than any wild animal, slips up without even insects noticing, and uses every tree around to seize the prey. With her along, even I can get our success rate up to around one in two.

「Well, let me try a bit longer with Ai. I’d like you to handle things here.」

There is a reason I don’t take Nina with me despite that.

「Watch over the kids for me.」
「Fiiine.」

Puffing out her cheeks in displeasure, Nina still agreed.
If an outside threat attacked this settlement, only she and I could do anything about it.
Having both of us away from the settlement made me very uneasy.

Taking Ai alone along is one thing, but we can’t very well go hunting with eight kids in tow—two of them are infants.

「Well, Ai’s getting better and better at magic. Things will turn around before long.」

As long as we keep breathing, things will gradually improve.
I chose to be optimistic. All the more reason I absolutely could not allow the children—already so prone to dying—to be killed.

「All right, lesson time.」

When I said that, the kids all threw up their hands and answered, “Okaaay!”

The nuts I pass out after lessons probably help, but they’re fundamentally very eager. Having Ai—someone who’s received instruction and learned magic—already among them is likely a big factor too. Even when I’m away they greedily learn words from Nina, and some can even manage simple spells.

「Sensei! Fire, came out!」

The quickest to grow among them is a boy I named Ken.

「Oh, nice, nice. Well done, Ken.」

He’s a little younger than Ai, I think.
He doesn’t have Nina’s exceptional grasp, but he’s quick to catch on to the knack of things. He takes what I teach and slips it straight into practice. The concept of “energy” seems especially hard to grasp—most kids can manage no more than a leaf twitch—except for Ken.

While the children attack learning with gusto, the problem is the adults.
Part of it is that hunting keeps them busy, but they make no effort to learn words. As for magic, they not only show no interest, they even seem to shun it.

To be fair, our current magic isn’t much use. Nina’s level is a different story, but Ai’s magic doesn’t amount to much on its own. If the men want trees to rustle, they can just do it with their own arms, and her fire can’t even light kindling. The only ones who can produce flame that actually catches are still just Nina and me.

That said, at least the language—I wish they’d learn it…

I learned their words from Ai, but it hasn’t helped much.
How do you move during a hunt, what’s your daily routine, what do you do in situations like this—without stockpiles of such know-how, memorizing words alone is meaningless.

They all live together and share most of their lives. That’s why simple signals suffice. There’s simply no need to voice words to explain things to one another.

You can’t pick up those subtle nuances overnight—and even if I did, it would be pointless. My build is too different from theirs. As a non-human, even if I lived as they do I wouldn’t feel the same things. We can’t share the same senses.

All the more reason I want them to learn a language that lets people with different values understand each other—but people who don’t know language can’t be told the utility of language. A dilemma.

「Fire! Come out! Fire! Come out!」

While I was stewing over it, Ken was gleefully making fire appear and vanish over and over. Kids love playing with fire, it seems, no matter the world.
Come to think of it, when I’d just reincarnated into this body, I had fun with the flame leaking from my mouth and kept blowing it too, didn’t I.

「Ken, even if it isn’t hot, don’t—」

Even so, it’s not exactly praiseworthy behavior.
I started to chide him—then I froze.
The flame he’d produced carried far more heat than usual.
If Ai’s flame is lukewarm water, this was hot water.

「Ken!? How did you do that!?」

Startled by my shout, Ken snuffed the fire out.

「It’s okay—I’m not mad. Can you try bringing out the fire again?」

Ken nodded and timidly produced a flame. What floated over his palm, however, was no different from Ai’s—or rather, even cooler.

「Huh? You can’t make it like before?」

He pulled a troubled face.

「Why…? Did you run out of MP or something…?」

I’d never really thought about it, but it’s hard to imagine magic can be used endlessly with no cost. Maybe his mental strength, or mana, or something like that ran low and weakened the output.

「Isn’t it because he wasn’t saying ‘Come out, fire’ while doing it?」

As I fretted, Nina said it casually while scraping scales off a fish with a stone knife.

「No way it’s that simple… is it?」

Half in doubt, I still urged Ken to say it out loud.

「Fi— Fire, come out!」

Flame surged up from Ken’s palm, powered by his shout.
Not a fake of mere heat and light—the real thing. Fire.

「I see… so that’s it.」

How did I miss something so simple?

「This is an incantation.」

It looked like we’d been omitting the incantation all this time.