"Your next task," Barbra said, her voice low and certain, "is to trap, ensnare, and hunt a hawk."

She let the words settle before continuing, golden eyes watching me with predatory stillness.

"By that, I mean using a bird snare—natural, crafted by your hands—to catch it. No assistance. No shortcuts. And then, you will butcher it. Methodically. Precisely. I'm not going to let you walk away without blood on your hands."

I stared at her, the weight of the statement hitting harder than expected. The warmth of the field, the rustling of tall grass, the peace of the moment—it all suddenly felt like a veil, one that had been pulled back to reveal something feral beneath.

Barbra took a single step forward. Her tone darkened, the softness replaced with something like conviction. "While you were correct before: a hunt doesn't need to end in blood, sometimes blood is what's required to fuel a garden."

My brow furrowed. "What garden am I fueling?"

She smiled then. Not the teasing, flirtatious one she'd worn earlier. This smile was slower… deeper. There was something reverent behind it—intimate, even. Her voice dropped to a near-purr as she answered.

"Mine."

The word landed like a weight in my chest. Her gaze didn't break. No metaphor, no abstraction. She meant it.

I swallowed. Not out of fear, but realization. There was something more at play here—some contract of nature I didn't yet understand. Blood as currency. Hunt as ritual. Growth born from death. Her garden… whatever that was… it wasn't just a patch of soil. It was spiritual. Territorial. Elemental.

A piece of her.

"Is this… symbolic?" I asked quietly.

Barbra tilted her head slightly. Her ears flicked once. "Does it matter? The hawk will still scream. Your hands will still be red. And something will grow from it."

She turned, the wind lifting her dark panthress' fur as she walked toward the trees. "You'll find vines good for a snare down near the creek bend. Make sure it holds. Hawks are strong, and they do not die gently."

I didn't follow her immediately. I stood there, trying to process the strange pulse rising in my chest. It wasn't fear. Not entirely. It was something closer to reverence. To stepping into an ancient rhythm—one written in claw, fang, and blood.

And somewhere in that quiet, primal cadence, Barbra waited. Smiling.

***

The creek lay about a ten-minute walk in the direction Barbra had pointed, the journey quiet save for the occasional rustle of hidden life in the underbrush. When I reached it, I found myself standing before a soft gurgling stream, hugged tightly by trees thick with age and burdened by vines. Dozens of them, long and coiled like sleeping serpents, hung from the branches like nature's ropes.

I reached up and tugged at one. It didn't yield.

It didn't budge.

There was tension in it, a dense, fibrous strength that no normal vine should've had. Unnaturally tough. Purposeful, even.

Crafted by your hands.

Barbra's words echoed, and I understood. It wasn't about bare instinct. It was about ingenuity. I wasn't forbidden from using tools—just forbidden from relying on ones already made for me. No horn-crafted dagger, no enchanted item, no summoned edge. If I wanted a tool, I had to make one.

So I crouched beside the water and scanned the creek bed until I found what I needed: a smooth, rounded stone, weathered by time and the gentle force of the stream. I tested its weight in my palm. Heavy enough to do damage, but soft enough to shape.

I brought it down against a nearby tree trunk.

Once. Twice. A third time.

A crack split the surface, and from it, jagged edges bloomed like teeth. Not a knife. I wasn't aiming for finesse. Not yet. I just needed something with bite.

The makeshift saw was crude—primitive even—but the moment it caught the vine's surface and dug in with a satisfying resistance, I knew it would work. Bit by bit, serration after serration, I wore the fibers down, sawing through it with patience, precision, and quiet focus.

Nock. Aim. Release.

Wait.

Watch.

Learn.

That mantra had taken root in me long before this place. Battle, strategy, even conversation—it all circled back to patience. But here, in the Hunting Grounds, it had shape. Breath. Weight. Every tug of the vine was like turning a page. Every grind of stone against fiber was a sentence etched into the muscle of my memory.

Patience wasn't passive here.

It was an act of pursuit.

A form of intention.

When the first vine finally gave way, snapping free with a whip-crack of tension, I didn't smile. I just stood up, turning the length of it in my hands, checking its tensile strength, already considering how I'd braid and fasten the snare. Not for a rabbit this time—but for a creature of the sky. A predator.

I slid the mask over my face again.

The shift was subtle but immediate. Like dipping my mind into a stream of knowledge that ran deep, fast, and dangerous. My thoughts sharpened. Symbols and options flickered in the corners of my vision—skill names, costs, levels, and faint echoes of memories I hadn't lived. Not truly.

First up: [Flintknapping].

Level One. Six hundred Familiarity Points.

"Holy hells..." I muttered under my breath as the points vanished from my pool. "Was I ever going to learn this naturally?"

Somewhere, deep in the strange latticework of the mask's system, I felt a resounding no echo back at me.

The next purchases were far kinder to my balance. Four skills that practically felt like extensions of me already—like I was just…reminding myself I knew how to breathe.

[Archery]

Stolen story; please report.

[Origami]

[Machina Operation]

[Speed Reading]

All Level One.

The total cost? A mere fifty Familiarity Points. Combined.

Cheap, probably because I had a natural affinity. Like the mask recognized I'd already walked those paths before. The threads of those skills were woven into me even now, even sealed.

Still, it was strange to relearn things that felt so intuitive.

But the final purchases were more utilitarian—skills born not from identity or desire, but cold necessity.

[Fletching] came first. Fifty points. A fair price for knowing how to make an arrow that wouldn't spiral off into the void when I needed it to pierce something vital. I felt the knowledge settle behind my eyes—a hundred ways to cut feathers, shape shafts, balance weights. I could almost feel the twine in my fingers.

Then I hovered over the last one.

[Bowyery]

Nine hundred Familiarity Points.

I hesitated.

I could feel the weight of it, the resistance. This wasn't something I would've picked up naturally. This was the domain of craftsmen, of quiet, patient hands and minds who saw in a branch not firewood, but the curve of a perfect arc.

Confirm purchase?

"Yeah," I exhaled. "Do it."

Points drained. And with them, came something older. A sense of calluses, the smell of lacquered wood, the whisper of a string being pulled taut for the first time. Not memory—but the ghost of it. A resonance.

So that was it. My purchases for this part of the hunt.

[Flintknapping] – 600 FP

[Archery, Origami, Machina Operation, Speed Reading] – 50 FP

[Fletching] – 50 FP

[Bowyery] – 900 FP

Remaining Familiarity Points: 1,100

Enough for a few more useful tricks…maybe. But not to waste.

The mask pulsed slightly, the stream of skills still rushing past my vision, flickering, twisting, tempting. But I pushed the noise aside. There was a bow to build, arrows to craft, and a hawk to bring down.

And this time, there'd be blood.

***

"How's he doing?" Ria asked, voice measured, her eyes half-lidded with restrained curiosity as she observed Alexander through the ether-thread of the mask's vision.

Barbatos didn't glance at her. She was perched low beside the creek, crouched like a huntress in rest, knees up, tail lazily curled around her boots. Her clawed fingers tapped idly against the bark of a moss-covered root.

"Interestingly," Barbatos replied. "He's already internalized one of my foundational truths: survival is based on adaptation. I told him to build a snare, and now he's knee-deep in creek mud, smashing stones together to make an axe. Not a snare. But still—useful."

Ria's gaze flicked toward the forest, her arms folded across her midsection, silver cords laced through the cuffs of her coat catching the glint of filtered sunlight.

"Did you intend for that version of you to enter the play?" Barbatos asked suddenly, head tilting to regard her companion from the corner of her golden eye.

"No," Ria replied flatly. "I never intended to participate. I loathe my Arte."

Barbatos blinked. "Odd, considering how much of it he's now bound to."

Ria didn't flinch, but her fingers tightened around her opposite arm. "Reading reminds me too much of my mother," she said, the words barely above a whisper but sharp as cracked glass. "She was a scribe for the lords of the Lowlands. Worked herself sick trying to fill their hollow shelves with prettier lies."

Barbatos made a soft, thoughtful sound. "That explains the bitterness. But not the gift."

Ria was silent for a breath, then another. Her answer came slow, and without any particular conviction.

"I gave him The Compendium of Vex's Works because I thought he'd crack it open, dive into a ballad or hymn, maybe steal a chorus, maybe misinterpret some ancient poem about lust and turn it into a cashable tale. Something he could fence to a guild-teller. That's what he wanted, after all. Treasure."

Barbatos smiled with all the sharpness of a fang. "And instead?"

"He opened the wrong verse," Ria said, half bitter, half impressed. "Stumbled into the index stitched into the lexicon instead."

"You could say that's his Arte's influence," Barbatos mused. "A transactional boy, caught in the business of truth and value."

Ria exhaled through her nose. "When are you going to show him the six skillcubes he forged with that Arte?"

"When he finishes my task," Barbatos said with a grin that didn't reach her eyes. "He's still thinking he's here to make a bow. Or catch a hawk. Poor boy doesn't realize—he's here to kill something inside himself."

Ria gave a single nod. "Then I'll keep watching. Let me know when he's ready for the truth."

***

I forgot one of the most important parts of a bow.

The string.

Without it, a bow is nothing more than a carved stick. Elegant? Maybe. Functional? Not at all. A dead limb pretending to be a weapon. Luckily, I still had material. Plenty, actually. The bark of these trees—thick, fibrous, wiry—was practically begging to be twisted into thread.

It wouldn't be great. Hell, it wouldn't even be good. I knew that before I even started. A string like this would reduce the draw weight, make the bow sluggish, the arrow flight unstable. But I wasn't building perfection. I was building function.

Twist. Dry. Twist again. Dry again. On repeat.

Time lost its grip on me. In this place, it was always both dawn and dusk. The light never fully rose, never truly fell. Every shadow moved. Every leaf rustled. Every beast, bird, and crawling thing stayed in motion—hungry or hunted. And me? Somewhere in between.

Over and over, my fingers spun and knotted the bark fibers, guided not just by muscle memory, but by [Bowyery]. Even at Level 1, the skill whispered to me: when to wet the fibers, when to dry them, when to tighten or loosen my pull. It was subtle. Gentle. Like being corrected by a master who never raised their voice.

Eventually—finally—I had it.

A bow.

Crude. Primitive. Mine.

It wasn't much to look at. Just a roughly carved stave from a dry branch, curved slowly with effort and heat. Not greenwood, thank the moons. The string: bark-twisted and slightly uneven, but taut. It hummed when I plucked it, like a nervous heartbeat. The arrows? Even worse. Just straight sticks, carved to a point with a jagged rock, fletched with scavenged feathers I glued on using a mix of dung, tar, and clay. It smelled like hell. But it worked.

Was it perfect? No.

Was it even good?

My skill practically screamed no in the back of my mind, like a disappointed instructor behind a closed door.

But would it fire?

Yes.

And that was enough.

Fifty-five pounds of draw weight, maybe. Weak. Pathetic. Like trying to breathe power into a whisper. But it was mine. Built by me. Not summoned. Not conjured. Earned.

A craftsman's pride burned in my chest as I picked up an arrow.

I nocked it to the string. Took a breath. Aimed.

Release.

The arrow arced through the dusk-lit air and smacked into the side of a mossy stump. Not deep. Barely stuck. The shaft bent slightly. A splinter cracked near the fletching.

But it hit.

That was my arrow.

Fired from my bow.

Built from nothing but bark, stone, instinct, and skill.

I stepped forward, retrieving the shaft, eyes drifting skyward.

Time to reinterpret the word snare.

Maybe a rope wasn't what Barbatos meant. Maybe a snare could be the flicker of motion, the whisper of tension, the flight of an arrow catching a hawk mid-swoop.

Time to find out.

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