Henrietta couldn't help but feel that things were steadily slipping out of her control.

That was both good and bad, for much the exact same reasons. Her team was growing more independent as they settled into their various functions, but that likewise meant that she was less likely to notice if something was going poorly, as had happened with Oliver.

He hadn't been wrong that they all needed to put their best efforts forward in these initial weeks and months, but that was contingent on them not collapsing from exhaustion in the middle of their tasks. Her latest assessment was that the Artificer had been working far more nonstop than the rest of them had been, pushing his body and magic to their limits with little to no recuperation, and that sort of thing just wasn't sustainable. Not at their level, not with his class.

If she'd been more attentive, then it wouldn't have gotten as bad as it did, and for all that Oliver was doing better at this point, she still felt like she had failed him. She wasn't certain how exactly you were supposed to measure lost productivity, but it seemed obvious to her that work done at your absolute limits wasn't going to be as good or as quick as work done at a more sustainable pace.

But doing that would mean she neglected her other tasks, and she didn't want to be the kind of leader that did nothing but assign tasks, then walk around all day providing unsolicited comments to everyone doing the actual work. She was closing in on getting a proper leather-treatment working, so that they could start wearing actual clothes, and when she wasn't actively working on that, she was working with Jacob on building their new elevated sleeping hut.

Alyssa, when not on an extended mission at least, was constantly in and out of the camp, gathering the supplies the rest of them needed. They were in a subtropical jungle, so food was comparatively abundant, but there weren't exactly cultivated fruit trees scattered throughout the forest, each of which could serve as a solid basis for a meal. No, the foods she found were small, tough, and oftentimes needed serious cooking just to be palatable. She was getting better at it, yes, but so too was she depleting their immediate surroundings of quality food, evening out her time commitments. At least their pond still had plenty of fish, though it had been getting trickier to catch them as of late. Then, when their food stocks were adequately full, she'd be off gathering reeds or firewood or the thousand and one other things that they needed.

In the long-term, they could make food much less of a concern by bioengineering a fruit tree and setting up farms, but those were highly impractical at the time, and would probably need to wait for either Alyssa or Clark to change classes a time or two first.

Clark… well, of all of them, he was the one Henrietta was least worried about. Even compared to Oliver, he was very out of his element, but he was more than capable in his current role as, to put it bluntly, housekeeper. Most of his time was spent tending to their cookfire and ensuring they all had enough food to actually eat took up a substantial amount of his time. He was also the one most likely to be grabbed for other jobs and assisting the others in whatever they might need. Low-stakes, low-impact.

However, Jacob was perhaps in the most frustrating position of them all. He'd done great work, harvesting firewood and reeds and acting as a secondary ranger-type. But he was the only one that could reliably kill the vinebeasts that had regularly taken to attacking them, so he was now confined to the camp.

At least within that, his Strength could be put to use in various ways. Most of his time was spent clearing out the area around Shelter, getting more distance between them and the wilderness, but when he wasn't doing so he was working on constructing their eventual sleeping hut.

Neither was bad work for him by any means, but they were each just so much less than what he could be doing, a frustration that Henrietta thought was decently likely the man himself shared. Them being at low level seemed especially grating to him, as some of the larger, more tenacious trees, which he could have once felled with a single blow now stood fast no matter how much he brought his blade to bear.

But they just couldn't risk not having him on hand for a vinebeast attack. Not yet, at least. The rest of them would need more levels or fortifications for that.

They were settling into a routine, Henrietta finally put her finger on it, getting comfortable, and slowly coming to grips with their new reality.

There wasn't anything inherently wrong with that… but the world around them wasn't getting any friendlier. The vinebeast attacks had been steadily getting stronger and stronger every day, to the point where it took even Jacob multiple well-placed strikes with his [Frostblade] to put it down. Their time wasn't unlimited, and Henrietta tried to hold herself to that standard, even as the siren call of putting her head down and just doing her job sang so sweetly to her.

But no, she was the Commander for this expedition, and Command she would. They couldn't afford for all five of them to simply exist, each lost in their own respective projects. She'd accepted her role, so she would take its responsibilities seriously.

That was, now as ever, not an easy task.

Ultimately, they had three principle goals at the moment. The first was simple survival, and improving their general quality-of-life as they did so. The second was safety, ensuring they could withstand hostile forces with a strategy more reliable than simply keeping their best warrior on permanent guard duty. The third was growth, getting their Systems into a more functional state, to the point where they could level, reclass, and manage their skills. Even personally, just a few points into Capacity would drastically improve how many inklings she could have active, something that they direly needed.

How can I best further all of those goals?

The System note project was simple enough. Oliver was working on the finishing touches for his staff and Alyssa had been sent off on a quest to find a suitable location for their impending tower. Until their Ranger returned, there wasn't anything else to be done on her part.

Safety and survival, though…

It was almost tempting to say that they should be safe. After all, vinebeasts were reliably dispatched by their Warrior, and otherwise the greatest danger any of them had been in for at least the last week had been Alyssa's run-in with her mistfur. But Henrietta didn't trust should. Personally, she suspected that the very same toothtongue whose tongue she now utilized constantly was responsible for that. Perhaps it had been an apex predator of sorts, and consequently no other creatures had learned its prior territory now stood empty.

That wouldn't last forever, and even if it would... the toothtongue was certainly not the scariest creature on this world. They'd caught a brief glimpse of gigafauna, a beast the size of a mountain off in the distance, and that meant there would be megafauna they would need to contend with at some point.

Survival-wise, they were doing rather alright. Hunting and gathering food for just the five of them was eminently manageable, but there was a finite amount of time that the five of them could truly stand to be in full survival mode. They needed some amount of comfort, a bathroom better than a latrine dug out a short way into the woods, and a bed more comfortable than a pile of moss and leaves.

Morale, more than anything, was going to be their greatest obstacle. Even in the best case scenario, this would take them a decade, and not even humans had that much endurance.

A brief thought passed through Henrietta's mind about them utilizing Oliver's tower as a new shelter, but she dismissed it a moment later. She'd need to speak with the artificer to be certain, but she knew enough magical theory to know that a space for living didn't always play nicely with spaces for magic. That much was evident from how the main Shelter had been dedicated towards the latter, and now no longer worked very well as a sleeping-place. Besides, the tower hadn't even been started yet, she couldn't count on it being convenient for their needs.

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Still, being thirty feet in the air did make for excellent defense against ground-based threats, which this far had been the only ones they had really encountered.

Well, there had been a few fairly vicious-looking aerial predators that Henrietta had noticed while flying about, so that was probably just selection bias at play. They were on the ground, so the ground was where they found their enemies.

Regardless, thinking about a defensive tower made her reassess the elevated platform they'd been making. It was about seven feet off the ground, held up by a dozen reeds the size of her leg, and large enough to easily hold all five of them. It could act as an excellent defensive fortification simply because of its elevation, and all that they'd really need to do was to ensure it would be easy to retreat into should a threat come about.

Right now, the platform was essentially usable, albeit with larger gaps than she'd want for the final product, and the walls and roof were fairly basic, a starting weave but with lots of work still needed before they finished.

"Haleford!" she called out. The Healer emerged from their existing shelter. "What are you working on right now?"

"Well, I'm cooking up some fish ma'am."

Henrietta nodded, then pointed at the elevated platform, "Okay. I want you working on that. You know how to weave?"

"Yes, commander. In and out, in and out, right?"

"Correct, good to hear. Weave the reeds tight, I want it to be wind-proof without needing to rely on enchantments. Do you need help getting up there?"

"I can climb up on my own."

"Alright, get up there. Smith," she added as she poked her head in the shelter. The Artificer was intensely focused on his gleaming staff, tracing glowing lines through the air with it. He looked over to her as she asked for him, and she continued, "Are you able to tend to the cookfire, making sure things don't burn?"

"Is my highest priority still the staff?"

"It is. Now, if the answer is no, that's perfectly acceptable. We have enough food to not need extra cooking for a day or so."

"...I can tend to it."

"Excellent. Veeran," she turned to the final man, "Switch priorities. Hut first, clearing second. I want us to be all able to be sleeping fully off the ground by the time Ride returns. I'll get us some more reeds to make sure we stay fully supplied."

The Soldier gave a curt nod, and Henrietta didn't stick around after, using her flail to pull her towards the riverbank.

With the hut now their full-time priority, it didn't take long for the structure to take shape. It also helped that Henrietta could, with her magic, harvest and carry loads substantially larger than Alyssa was capable of.

Yes, she was far slower than the Ranger, but even if one trip took twice as long, bringing five times the material more than offset it.

The hut itself was nothing especially outstanding, but it didn't need to be. It was well above all of their heads, held in place through a combination of lashings and smaller reeds being inserted through their larger, but still hollow, brethren. The walls were made by utilizing the exact same support beams as poles, which they wove the younger and more flexible reeds around. Given it was roughly ten feet to a side, that meant they went through a lot of those smaller reeds, but those were in abundance.

The roof was a simple a-frame-type construction, where they lashed some reeds to a central support beam, then wove reeds slightly more loosely to provide structure while enabling them to harvest large leaves from the surrounding trees and slip them into place, layering them to create a thick roof that could keep water out just as surely as light.

It wasn't properly dark inside without a door, as the empty space they'd left open to allow access to the hut was more than permissive with the bright daylight, but once they had a solution to that, Henrietta felt that it might reach a level of almost oppressive darkness.

Then again, they had just hand-woven reeds as the walls, so it wasn't unlikely that there would be a lot more light let through than she was imagining, but it was still unlikely to be a space for anything other than sleep. That selfsame sleep was only going to be further aided by the bunks they'd created. Though in practice little more than shelves, the young and thin reeds they were using for said shelves gave a bit of a spring to it that made them far more comfortable than the hard stone and dirt they'd been on thus far.

As a bonus, it gave each of them a small measure of properly personal space. That hadn't been too much of an issue yet, but Henrietta was quite aware that people needed a place that they could truly call their own, somewhere to stash what personal affects they would slowly accumulate, and somewhere that they could have the certainty of constancy.

Oliver, at her direction, began working with his new staff to get the thing warded, both because they did need some protection from wild magic and to give him a field-test with the tool. Clark had collapsed into his bunk pretty much as soon as it had become available, but Henrietta was confident that Oliver knew better than to do anything that the other man would find disruptive.

As was daily tradition, a vinebeast had attacked them partway through construction, but while it displayed no indication it would be able to reach the elevated platform, that could have simply been due to it instead focusing on the Shelter itself. What, exactly, it was seeking inside was a question left unanswered, as Oliver had still been inside the Shelter at the time, and as a result she and Jacob had needed to dispatch it before the [Erudite Enchanter] was in any danger. However, even though the exact timeframe between attacks varied a fair amount, it was always about a day between assaults. All combined, the earlier attack was rather relieving, as it allowed Jacob to take something of a break even without a dedicated sentry. Besides, even if something did attack, their vulnerable teammates were safely ensconced in what was practically a fortress.

"It is fortunate," Jacob remarked as she and him settled around the campfire, "That it was weaker than they have been as of late."

"The vinebeast?" she confirmed, "I hadn't noticed, but you have been the one primarily dealing with them. Weaker in what way?"

"The vines weren't as difficult to cut through today. And it seemed slower than I've gotten accustomed to."

"You're certain it wasn't simply your sword leveling?"

"Yes. I only resummon the blade every three days, and any benefits I gain from leveling would only apply once I use the skill again."

"Why so rarely?"

"It's an expensive skill, and Generation is a minor stat for my Class," he shrugged. "It may not matter when just at base stats, but zero is zero, and my natural Generation never recovered after a particularly bad curse from the war. Every three days is about how long it takes me to recover the mana needed."

"Really?" Henrietta practically couldn't help herself, "Apologies. I was simply surprised."

Jacob waved her on with a bit of a wry smile, "Ask, Commander. I won't report you for your curiosity."

Henrietta shook her head, "I was merely surprised that the Jump hadn't fixed whatever old injuries you had. I had a few magical blockages that it cleared up for me, it didn't do so for you?"

"Hah," he barked, "Maybe if it were a normal wound. But the big bastards are a bit beyond that. 'Twas in a fight with The Cerulean One, and the damn spell barely clipped me, but it tried to sever me from magic altogether, like I was some old mudkin. It wasn't an injury so much as it rewrote who I always was. The fact I can even touch mana is thanks entirely to the System and some really impressive healers."

Henrietta assessed Jacob with a new eye. "I didn't know you were on the field with The Cerulean One. It wasn't on your file, just that you saw deployment against a few demis."

"Officially, I wasn't," Jacob wryly replied. "But enough about me. Didn't you meet any of the bigs during your last one?"

"Well…" Henrietta began, "When we first arrived, I… do you smell that?"

Jacob sat up instantly, "Damp forest and fresh earth. What is it?"

She took a deep breath, "Musk and oranges… oh, that's mana. I don't recognize the scent."

"I might hear something?" Jacob rose to his feet, fingers closing around the hilt of his [Frostblade]. "Whatever it is, it's subtle. Wolves, perhaps?"

Jacob moved like a man possessed, and Henrietta was hot on his heels as the two of them left the shelter with weapons drawn and readied. The scent was definitely getting stronger, and no easier to recognize for Henrietta. That was one of the major downsides of utilizing scent and taste as her mana sense – determining what a given blend of mana types was composed of gave little information into the how of their combination, and unfamiliar scents rarely came with the information needed to guess what they were.

She didn't need to wonder what might be going on for long, as the undergrowth rustled and a half-dozen dragons stalked out from the bushes, obviously on the hunt.

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