Devin had been hesitant at first to fly, but before long he was urging Milo to go faster and faster as he skimmed just above the ground in the small clearing that housed the primitive cottage. Milo wound up using nearly ten mana giving the kid rides.

Julie had tried as well, though she was significantly more cautious and tended to scream whenever Milo took her much past a walking pace.

It wasn’t long before Julie announced that they needed to get back to work. Surviving in the wild was a full time job for her and her son, and, though she didn’t state it explicitly, things had obviously gotten a fair bit harder with her husband out of the picture.

Milo volunteered to help. Julie accepted enthusiastically, giving him a woven basket to carry. She and Devin each had one as well. Hers had a strap that she slung over her shoulder so she could keep her bow ready for use. They set off promptly. She began filling him in on their lives while they walked to her current gathering spot.

“I started out as a Forager,” she said as the three of them walked through the trees to her current gathering region some twenty minutes away. “My first class, I mean. It was so scary, waking up on our beds in the middle of the forest with weird messages in our vision. And we had nothing, unlike you. Other than the bed, I mean, and our pajamas. We spent a couple hours basically just freaking out. We didn’t understand what was going on, with the System and everything. I still don’t know why we’re here. Anyway.

“We quickly realized we were going to starve to death if we didn’t do something. I was a couple months pregnant with Devin at the time, and I was worried about losing him if I didn’t get enough to eat. I used to gather wild mushrooms where I grew up for fun sometimes, so even though I didn’t recognize any of the plantlife, I went around looking for mushrooms. The system offered me the Forager class, which helped sooo much. My first skill helped me to know what things were edible and where to find them.

“Eric—that’s my husband’s name—focused on getting our shelter together after that, once he helped me get a headstart on gathering food. He used to work construction, back on Earth, did handyman stuff on the side, so he was good with his hands. He didn’t have any tools, though, so it was slow going. We each only had one Skill to start. Mine was Forage, his was Improvise. Made him better at figuring out how to do what he wanted without all the tools he was used to. He was a Primitive Builder, by the way. At first.

“We scraped by for a while. I worked all day gathering and preparing food while Eric got a roof over our heads, got fires going, things like that. He actually built that cottage in the first month. Kept meaning to build something bigger, better, but there were always other things to do, you know?” She smiled wistfully.

“It’s amazing what you can adjust to. After a couple of months we had a good routine, and we’d built up a nice little stockpile of food. We decided to explore, before I got too pregnant.

“What happened next was a...mixed blessing. We had decided to go straight inland, which was probably a mistake. On our second day of travel, we got attacked by a puma raptor, same as you did. It was the first one we’d seen; they don’t seem to come too near the coast, usually. I was hurt before Eric was able to kill it with a wooden spear he’d made. Still have the scar from it.”

She lifted her shirt partway, showing Milo a nasty scar on her side, along with a tantalizing amount of tanned skin. Milo did his best to play it cool.

“Looks nasty,” he said.

“Yeah, it was awful. Hurt to breathe, hurt to walk. We abandoned our journey and went back. It was good that we had extra food, because I wasn’t up to doing much for a few days.

“But like I said, it was a mixed blessing because it increased our level cap up to 2 and let us get our next Skills.”

“Two?” Milo said, surprised. “I’m pretty sure my puma raptor was level 3. Was it a juvenile, maybe?”

“Hm? No, it was level 3 like yours. We figured out later that, when you kill something together, it doesn’t increase your level cap as much as when you kill something alone.”

“Oh. Huh. Didn’t know that.” I guess that’s a point in favor of solo leveling. Still probably better to go in a group, though. I wonder what the exact rule is? Creature level minus one? Does it matter how many are in the group?

Julie was continuing on, though, not giving him time to ponder.

“Yeah, so like I said, I was out of commission for a few days. Eric got pretty excited about the fact that killing creatures could increase our level cap. We didn’t know yet that killing them only increases it to a maximum of the level of the creature you kill. Anyway, he decided to fuse his class into a Trapper so that he would have a better chance at killing more. It was really great, because that meant he was able to have five Skills all of the sudden. You know, with Legacy Skills? So—”

“Wait a second,” interrupted Milo. “Trapper must have been a Journeyman class, right? So if he got the extra slot for Journeyman, along with the slot for level 2, plus the extra Legacy slot, that’s only 4.”

“Two Legacy slots,” she corrected him.

“But it says you get one extra at the Journeyman level.”

“Yeah, one extra. It assumes one to start.”

“But you can’t have a fused class that’s Basic, right? So how would anyone ever have just one Legacy slot, in order for ‘two’ to be ‘one extra’?”

Julie shrugged. “Yeah, it’s a little confusing, I guess.”

“Why isn’t there a freaking instruction manual?!” Milo mock-raged, shaking his stump at the sky.

Julie eyed him askance. “Why are we here at all?”

“Good point,” Milo sighed. “This is good news for me, actually. That means I’ll have four Legacy Skills at Master instead of the three I thought I was going to get. It just would be nice to have a little clarity from the System about how everything works.”

“Yeah,” Julie said. “Yeah. Anyway, like I was saying, he got a bunch of new Skills that helped us finally get meat on the table; we’d been living on mostly root vegetables, seaweed, and shellfish. There are these creatures called ‘forest grazers’ we would see from time to time. Real skittish—Eric could never get close with a spear—but with his new Skills he finally killed one! And, oh my god, it was so good.”

“Anteater-looking things?”

“Exactly! You’ve seen them. Taste just like lamb.”

Milo made a face. He hated lamb. Julie missed it, though, and continued talking.

“So I recuperated while we lived off the food I’d collected before and the forest grazers he caught. He wound up catching so much that we had to dry a bunch of it so it wouldn’t spoil. And then, a couple weeks later, we went exploring again, but now with way more food since we had all the meat. Lots of calories in meat. Never thought I’d be doing everything I could to get more calories, you know? I used to be a bit overweight. Anyway, this time, we traveled along the coast instead.”

“And that’s when you figured out it was an island?”

Julie shook her head. “Not quite. It’s a pretty big island. Oblong, north to south. Our cottage sits on the west side, but we’re pretty close to the northern shore. It starts to turn less than a day’s walk from here. We walked for four days—one mostly headed north, two east, and one heading back south, just following the shoreline. We figured it was either a peninsula or an island at that point. Later, when we explored south, is when we figured it out. That was a much longer trip. It took us over a week to find the south shore.”

“So you walked all the way around?”

“Well, no,” Julie admitted. “We turned back as soon as we found the south shore. I was starting to have a hard time, with the pregnancy, and we were running low on food. Eric went all the way around on his own, though. After I had the baby. What a horrible two weeks. I was worried sick.”

“He left you alone?”

“I suggested it,” she said defensively. “I hated not knowing, you know? Maybe there was a town somewhere. People. Civilization. I missed it. He didn’t want to leave me alone with the baby, but I made him go.”

“You still miss it?”

“Of course,” she scoffed. “But I’ve gotten more used to being out here on our own, over the years. And, here we are.”

Milo looked around, a little mystified. “What?” Their surroundings looked pretty much the same as everywhere else on the island.

“This is where we’re gathering food.”

“Okay,” he said dubiously. “What am I looking for?”

“Here,” she said, bending down to show him a low-lying plant with broad leaves. “These are what we’re here for. The roots are edible, and the leaves are good for cooking with.”

“Cooking with? How?”

“I’ll show you later,” she said with a smile. “For now, just go ahead and find as many of these plants as you can and put them in the basket. Be careful when you pull them out, though; the roots are brittle and will break if you pull too hard or fast. And don’t take too many all from one spot. Rule number one of foraging is you always want to leave enough for the plants to grow back.”

“Got it.” That explained why they’d ventured so far, despite the fact that he’d seen plenty of the plants along the way. She must cycle through different parts of the forest, only taking some from each, then moving on to the next and letting the area recover.

Milo looked around, vaguely dissatisfied with the situation. He’d been looking forward to leveraging Skim to instantly become an all-star forager, but finding the plants was stupidly easy. Apparently the hard part would be getting them out of the ground. Having only one hand meant he would be disadvantaged here.

He did his best. Julie made him look like a complete amateur, getting more than three times what he did. Even Devin, at his tender age, got significantly more than Milo. The little brat lorded it over Milo, too, before being scolded by his mother.

“It gets easier with practice,” she said, noticing his bruised ego. “Ready to head back?” she asked brightly.

Milo nodded, not mollified in the least.