Wild Gourmet: Chapter 20

Now Brand had finally found the string to follow in his thinking time, and it had produced two very odd little facts. His knife fighting skill was young, but it had already expressed its individuality. Not just that, but it had expressed it in two ways, each of which were vastly different than each other.

And, just like that, he was sleepy. Powerfully sleepy in a way he didn’t feel like resisting. Thankful that he had spent the few minutes it took to heat water and bathe before he got down to his class examination, he collapsed on his straw bed and bedroll, let his eyelids droop, and was out for the night.

Brand had once heard a doctor tell a recovering soldier that sleep was important, not just as a way to not feel tired, but for so many different elements of healing and recovery that even the best medicine classes had yet to plumb the depths of every aspect of its usefulness.

One of the things the doctor had talked about was something he called building a mind, the idea that sleep was when someone’s brain consolidated all the memories and actions they had taken that day into experiences they’d remember and draw from even if they weren’t actively recalling them. He said enough life lived and enough good nights of sleep were what separated a wise campaigner from the most ignorant of new recruits.

That night, dreaming, Brand was just aware enough that what he was going through was unusual to dimly recall what the doctor had said. If this was his experiences settling into his mind and remodeling things to be of use to Brand, then he was in for some big, big changes.

It was a feverish sort of experience, even if he didn’t feel sick or uncomfortable. Vague images of monsters, meals, and battles wove through his mind, bits and pieces of moments from his entire life making brief appearances before his dreaming eye before fading away to parts unknown.

It wasn’t random, certainly. Everything had something to do with cooking or fighting, no matter how far back in his history the memories came from. He saw meals at his mother’s table when he could hardly walk and the aftermath of battles that he both watched and participated in.

Eventually, most of the memories were more recent than that. He saw himself, knife in hand, clumsily fighting in a way that implied it was a miracle he was still alive. Now, in the dream, he could see where he had gone wrong. There was a better way to dodge here, a better place to stab there, and all in all a plan for each individual monster that was infinitely better than what he had done.

Whether that was what the system wanted him to get out of this experience or not, it was all he did get. Like falling asleep inside of a dream, the images faded and he truly knew nothing for the rest of the night.

When he woke, it was to the system again.

Class Expansion

A rare class is an uncommon thing, which often leaves the bearer of such a class less informed than they like. While a simple soldier or guard class can glean any fact they’d like from books or conversation, the rare classer pays for the potential of their class by having to forge their own path.

Your class is one that would under some circumstances start with four or five skills. Yours did not, if only because the system itself was reluctant to tell you the exact direction of travel in which your fate should carry you. You were given space to make decisions about the exact workings of your class, and even more space to discover what aspects of the still-developing class appealed to you.

You have selected one possible path out of hundreds, with perhaps thousands of forks in the road before you. Only you can decide what you one day become.

New Skills Added!

Your Butchery Skill has spawned two daughter skills, each focusing on different aspects of what your knife is capable of.

Cook’s Compendium

Every monster you slay gives you clues to how to best prepare its flesh for consumption. Every meal you cook teaches you something about the makeup of monsters, both those similar to what you have slayed and those different from anything you have ever seen.

As a whole, Cook’s compendium is a self-reinforcing guidance skill. You see your class as a cycle of hunting, preparing, and eating. While this skill can’t help you with the eating, it will slowly improve the way you think about the other two aspects of the loop.

At high levels, this skill will guide you to treat every monster as a favored, well-understood prey, and every improvised rule as if it were a longstanding, favorite recipe.

Hunter’s Barbs

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The knife you keep kills. The knife in the air wounds or poisons. In your prey, your thrown knives freeze joints, disable muscle, and disrupt even the most soberly laid plans.

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