Having only experienced his growth from inside, Terry found it fascinating to watch Kelima’s steady increase in power. If he’d had a computer, the proper software, and access to a gym, he expected it would make for some interesting graphs. It wasn’t following a linear curve or an exponential curve. It was more like punctuated increases, like she was installing better hardware into a computer. Not that the noble girl seemed aware of the changes. Nor had Terry bothered to mention it, because he thought it was kind of funny. The monsters kept getting stronger the deeper they traveled into this poorly explored area, so her understanding of her growth wasn’t keeping pace with the reality.

  Case in point, Kelima was slumped over the carcass of something that might have been an ostrich back on earth. At least, it would have been if ostriches grew to be fourteen feet tall, came equipped with a carnivore’s fangs, and had feathers on the tips of their wings sharp enough to cut down trees. He tried to decide what to call the vicious birds. Velostriches? Doom Fowl? No, those aren’t right. He tucked the problem away for later consideration while he focused on the still-slumped Kelima.

  He almost made a crack about her sleeping on the job. She’d done the lion’s share of the work, though, even if he’d needed to slow it down with a carefully thrown rock. Laming the creature had given her enough of an edge to finish it off. Not that she was showing him the slightest bit of appreciation for his assist. No, she was glaring at him like he'd done something wrong, which just seemed patently unfair to him.

  “What’s with that look, Crabby McCrabbypanties?” Terry asked from where he leaned against a tree.

  “You could have helped a little more, don’t you think?” she wheezed at him.

  “I helped you as much as you needed,” observed Terry. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”

  She glared even harder at him.

  “Your generosity of spirit is overwhelming,” she said in a tone that made him suspect she might not mean it. “And did you just call me Crabby McCrabbypanties? What does that even mean?”

  “It’s what you call someone when they pout-glare at you like a five-year-old who didn’t get that special MacGuffin they wanted for Christmas.”

  Kelima slowly got to her before she said, “It’s amazing how I didn’t even understand half of that statement, yet I still know you’re being an ass.”

  “Well,” said Terry thoughtfully, “you’re not wrong. But setting aside my virtues, we should clean that thing and have some of it for lunch.”

  Kelima groaned.

  “More monster meat? Can’t we just eat some of that dried stuff you brought?”

  “I thought you said it was bland.”

  “I changed my mind,” Kelima said in a rush. “It’s wonderful. Delicious! Wonderfully delicious!”

  Terry responded to that by walking over to the monster corpse. Kelima kept giving him despairing looks, but he soldiered on. She wasn’t the only one suffering from eating the monsters. It had been worse for him than for her, since she was seeing actual gains from it. For him, it had just been deeply unpleasant food. This bird monster was the first one he thought might boost him enough to notice at all. He made a point to retrieve the core and check it. He sighed when he realized it wasn’t one that he could absorb. Pocketing the thing, he turned his attention to cooking some of the meat. Kelima perked up when the smell of the meat cooking was actually appetizing. When he judged it was cooked through, he put some of the meat onto plates and passed one to the noble girl.

  “Here. Enjoy your murder-bird.”

  She stared at him with a somewhat slack-jawed expression before she asked, “Did you just call this murder-bird?”

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  “It was a big bird. Seemed pretty murder-y to me. So, murder-bird. It’s catchy, right?”

  Kelima just closed her eyes and said, “My head hurts.”

  “Yeah, fighting murder-birds will do that.”

  “Stop calling it murder-bird!”

  Silence reigned for five seconds before Terry spoke.

  “You understand that I’m going to call it murder-bird forever now, yes?”

  “I knew as soon as the words left my mouth,” admitted Kelima, squeezing her eyes shut even tighter.

  “Just as long as you know. Now, get to chewing. That murder-bird won’t eat itself.”

  After the meal, which was shockingly palatable for the first time since he’d instituted his Monsters for Meals program, he tossed her the core. She looked at it blankly for a moment before shifting her gaze to him.

  “It’s a monster core,” she said.

  “Obviously. See if you can absorb it.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “You just, you know, do,” answered Terry, the words sounding absurd and lame even to his own ears.

  “So informative,” Kelima muttered.

  Terry frowned as he tried to remember how he did it the first time. Except, it usually just sort of happened on its own.

  “Try touching it with the energy from your core,” he suggested.

  “Core?” asked Kelima.

  Do people here have cores? Terry asked other-Terry.

  Hmmm? Cores? Yeah, they do. Most of them probably don’t know that they do, but they do.

  So, everybody here is a cultivator?

  Oh, heaven’s no. But they do all have cores. Not that knowing this will ever matter for you since you’re the luckiest asshole alive and inherited a body with a cultivator core, but cultivators have to get their cores the hard way.

  That stirred something in Terry’s memory.

  Oh, that’s the whole thing where you have to compress your qi and get hit by lightning seventeen times or something. Then, if you eat the right kind of fruits and poisons, you get a core, right?

  Other-Terry was silent for a long time before he said, There are so many things wrong with that, but sure. Let’s say you’ve got the gist of it. Anyway, eventually there’s another process, but you probably won’t need to worry about that for a while.

  But Kelima doesn’t have one of those kinds of cores?

  Nope. The people in this part of the world just get a core around the time they hit puberty. They don’t process exactly the same kind of energy as yours, but it’s close enough for government work.

  What are they processing?

  Do you really want to get into the semantic differences between what people call the shit that powers their magic.

  Terry thought that over for a few seconds before he admitted, Not so much.

  That’s a surprisingly good choice. Anyway, back to something that might be relevant someday. The people here don’t know they’re getting cores. They just think they’re… Oh hell, what’s the local term they use here? Awakening! They think they’re just awakening their power. The people who awaken, which is just fancy talk for gaining partial awareness of their cores, become adventurers and the like. The people who don’t awaken, meaning they don’t develop an awareness of their cores, pretty much just live like ordinary mortals. You know, aside from some of the side benefits like being more attractive, living longer, and being less prone to illness. Epidemics aren’t really a thing here, though. So, that’s a win. Fuck plagues and all that.

  Fuck plagues, indeed, Terry agreed.

  Now, since they don’t know what they’ve got, they don’t do a very good job of advancing their cores. They’re kind of like monkeys with sticks trying to build combustion engines.

  I feel sort of offended on behalf of basically everyone who lives on this planet.

  Why?

  Not sure. Just feels like I ought to, answered Terry.

  Well, you do you.

  Okay, getting back on topic. Can someone who has a core like Kelima’s absorb the power in monster cores like I do?

  I can’t think of anything that would stop her from doing it, technically speaking.

  What does that mean?

  I mean, just because her body and core are capable of carrying out the process, the odds are ridiculously low that she’ll ever actually figure out how to do it.

  “I did it!” shouted Kelima.

  Terry focused on the girl’s hand long enough to see the last of the core disappear.

  Other-Terry asked, Did I just get kicked in the balls by a trope?

  You did just make a proclamation in a douchey, I’m-smarter-than-you way. So, I don’t know for sure which trope got you, but I’m going to say yes. You just took a trope boot to the testicles.

  That was way more obnoxious than I expected it to be.

  Welcome to my world, said Terry, not even trying to hide his schadenfreude.