Three days passed by in the blink of an eye, but Marisol was no closer to being able to hack down a tree with a jumping spin kick than she was three days ago.

  While Kuku had spent the past three days running around the island, catching crabs for their daily meals, she’d picked a particularly thin tree at the edge of the clearing and made it her target dummy. The aim was to practice speed on the first day, the spin on the second day, and immediately master the kick on top of the first two elements on the third day. It was how she’d always practiced her dance techniques: breaking down and practicing a difficult technique’s constituent parts individually. She’d taught herself most of her mama’s techniques by simple observation and mastered all of them within a week at most.

  But something was different about the War Jump.

  It was midday. The blue sky was clear, sunlight burning across the verdant grass of the clearing. Standing thirty meters away from her target tree, she dragged a leg back, leaned her upper body forward in a Sand-Dancer’s starting posture, and exhaled coolly. Expelling all of the air in her lungs made her muscles tighter, and was essential at the beginning of every routine. It was common sense; the tighter her body was, the faster she could skate, and the faster she could skate, the faster she could spin.

  She let her head dip for a moment, as though she were about to nod off standing, and then took off skating. Her glaives carved through the hard soil as her forward-leaning torso gave her momentum, her swinging arms giving her balance, control.

  Gritting her teeth, sucking in a sharp breath, she launched into the air ten meters before the tree, clenching her thighs and folding her arms across her torso as she kicked her right glaive out.

  But she wasn’t controlling anything.

  She couldn’t see anything mid-spin.

  The world was a hazy, spinning blur as she twirled through the air, and she , before she even reached the tree, that her glaive wasn’t going to go through.

  Bracing herself for the painful impact, she winced as the sharp edge of her glaive slammed into the bark, and the impact reverberated through her entire body as she landed. Thank the Worm God she knew how to break a fall, because she landed on her back with her forearms hitting the ground first, all of the air knocked right out of her lungs. If she hadn’t stopped herself from going a hundred percent on the power, not only would she have failed to cut through the tree, she would also have broken her glaives for sure.

  Birds chirped around the clearing. The wind blew gently across the clearing, ruffling the grass beneath her. She stayed on the ground, staring up at the sky, her kicking leg pulled in and her hands wrapped around her throbbing glaive.

  She couldn’t stand right now even if she tried.

  ——

  In response, the Archive appeared clinging onto the tree, tapping the bark with its little water strider legs.

  it cut her off.

  Thankfully, the Archive didn’t finish the thought. She would’ve just felt even worse about herself, because the truth was, she know what the problem was.

  She was afraid.

  That speed at the moment of launch, that spin in the air, and that sensation of the world around her—turning into blinding flashes and sparkles of light—it was all too much for her. She was sure the speed wasn’t easier to control and endure with her attribute levels enhancing her body to inhuman degrees, but, more importantly… she was just afraid of going so fast.

  She was unconsciously holding back her full strength.

  She couldn’t help but think of what’d happen if she failed—if she let go and went fast and shattered her glaive against the tree. Would she have to sit here for an entire month waiting for it to heal? Would it take longer because it wasn’t a normal human leg? Would she become like her mama, never to take a step without limping ever again?

  But she afraid of turning out like her bed-bound mama, and there was no arguing about that.

  This was the jump that'd put her mama out of commission, but she to master this jump by the end of the day. There was no telling at which hour the marauders would decide to set sail for the open seas. She’d been scouting their harbor outpost the past few days, checking on their ship’s repair progress. Last she saw them this morning, their full sails were already unfurled and their mooring ropes prepared to be hacked off. If they left before evening, she only had around five, maybe six more hours before she had to kick them all down or die trying.

  So when Kuku burst through the clearing with a dozen crab legs held over his head, she immediately sat up and sent him a cheery smile.

  While Kuku got to work washing the bloody crab legs off in a nearby river stream—his hut was pretty close to the waterfall at the top of the cliff—she skipped over to the outdoor bonfire and got to work starting a flame. By now she’d gotten used to clicking her glaives together to start a fire, so Kuku returned to see her already kicked back on the grass, holding one of her glaives over the fire.

  He wasted no time slapping the crab legs onto her glaive and then plopping down next to her, waiting patiently for the food to cook.

  Admittedly, she’d grown a tired of eating nothing but crab the past three days. When the legs were cooked and the two of them picked out the largest ones to slurp out first, she immediately thought they tasted a hundred times better than those white lumps of flesh the Archive still couldn’t identify. It helped that crabs were technically ‘bugs of the sea’, too, so they gave her a fair amount of points to work with.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Not that Kuku could see her status screen that she’d always be staring at during meals.

  [Name: Marisol Vellamira]

  [Grade: F-Rank Giant-Class]

  [Class: Water Strider]

  [Swarmblood Art: ???]

  [Aura: 581]

  [Points: 36]

  [Strength: 3, Speed: 3, Toughness: 2, Dexterity: 2, Perception: 3]

  [T1 Mutation | Striding Glaives Lvl. 1

  [T2 Mutations | Basic Gills | Basic Hydrospines Lvl. 2

  … Neither she nor Kuku were able to find another single ‘point fruit’ the past three days. Considering eating that one giant white lump gave her sixty-one points to work with, she’d Kuku, being a local, would know where to find more of those, but when she’d gestured to him about it, his response was a very adamant shake of his head. In fact, he’d even seemed a little when she told him she’d eaten a point fruit—almost like she’d eaten something she wasn’t something to eat.

  But it wasn’t exactly ideal eating crabs instead of those tasteless point fruits, and part of it was because there was a soft limit to how many crab legs she could stuff down her stomach per meal—that limit being her stomach size, of course.

  As a Sand-Dancer, and a poor one on top of that, she’d never gotten into the habit of indulging in more food than absolutely necessary for her day-to-day jobs. If she were a rounder lady with a thicker belly, maybe she’d be able to double her point gain. As things stood, though, she really couldn’t stuff more than a dozen crab legs down her throat a day before she’d start feeling sick.

  She was sure she was a bit allergic to crabs, too. The first time she’d shared them with Kuku, she woke up in the middle of the night to vomit in the shrubs. The morning after she’d felt sick to the bone, so even now, she was hesitant to eat more than six or seven legs per meal. She’d fill the rest of her stomach with the vegetables Kuku picked as side dishes.

  the Archive muttered as she kept staring at the numbers, her eyes blank and far away.

  the Archive said plainly.

  She cracked down on another crab leg, forcing herself to chew on the juicy flesh as she glared at the tree that glared back at her—taunting her to try putting a dent in it again.

  she thought, lips twisting.

  Quite suddenly, Kuku tapped her on the shoulder with his pincer and made her look his way.

  His crab helmet was still as expressionless as ever—if his jiggly protruding eye stalks counted as ‘emotion’, then maybe that wasn’t true—but as he skipped over to the tree and started climbing it, she thought he seemed a little excited. A little giddy.

  She watched, brows furrowed, as he climbed to the very top of the gargantuan tree, nearly twenty meters overhead. Now, she wasn’t worried about him falling—they’d both climbed higher before without any harnesses—but she couldn’t help being a bit worried seeing him wave down at her all cheerily.

  She waved back, if not only because it was the only reasonable response, but if she knew he was going to jump off, she would’ve absolutely shaken her head ‘no’.

  She shot up to her glaives and tried skating over to catch him, and she made it just in time—Kuku jumped right off and did a front flip on the way down, landing in her arms and making her knees buckle.

  Then, he laughed and flung his arms around her neck, nuzzling the top of his crab helmet against her cheek.

  She let him off. She waited until he stabilized himself. Then she grabbed his shoulders and shook him , gritting her teeth and twitching an eye in irritation.

  “Why’d you do that?” she snapped. “What if I didn’t make it over in time? What if I was bloated from all the crabs you’ve been feeding me? What if I decided to blink and missed you jumping off? What would you have done if I didn’t catch you?”

  In response, Kuku thumped his heart with his pincer, puffing his chest out as though to say, ‘I knew you would catch me’.

  the Archive said idly.

  Letting out a shaky, shuddering breath, she let go of him and turned around, putting her face in her hands.

  She didn’t understand, still.

  Was that what it meant to be ‘fearless’?

  Putting her own life in someone else’s hands, even though Kuku had only met her three days ago and had no idea how strong she actually was?

  Wasn’t that just ‘recklessness’ more than anything else?

  the Archive said.

  She rubbed her brows, trying to rub all the tension out of her face.

  And the Archive responded so quickly and so confidently that, for a second, she blinked and stared blankly through the forest.

  The little water strider shrugged on her shoulder.

  She was about to ask what it meant by that when she heard the familiar, heavy footsteps through the forest again, and she whirled to see silhouettes hacking through the clearing on the other side.

  While Kuku jumped and skittered behind her, she backed away from the hut and eyed the bonfire she’d left unattended. The winds were blowing faster, fanning more air into the flames and making the kindling burn harder. As a result, the smoke that she’d usually be paying attention to was allowed to waft far, far overhead—the marauders must’ve been patrolling nearby to begin with. The moment they saw the smoke…

  Marisol didn’t even want to see them cutting through the clearing.

  Pointing up at the trees to tell Kuku to start climbing, she whirled and started skating the other way, purposefully carving through the grass as loud as she could to divert attention away from the little boy.

  Half a moment later, the Blackclaw Marauders burst into the clearing with a chorus of bloody shouts.

  the Archive said.

  [Objective #6: Defeat the Blackclaw Marauders]

  [Time Limit: 6 hours]

  [Reward: Departure from this landmass]

  [Failure: Indefinite residence on this landmass]