Chapter Twenty: To Deny Reward is to Deny the Deed (Patreon)

The leopard mother moves closer and then...nudges me with her great head hard enough that I fall back into the chair. Then, withdrawing a little, she slumps back into her previous position and her cub scrambles over her making noises of complaint until it finds the teat again and resumes drinking. I grip onto the arms of the chair with white knuckles, not sure what I can do if the great cat turns threatening again, and once again wondering if her promise of safety can be trusted.

I’m not going to eat you, she huffs. Not today, anyway. So maybe tomorrow? Very reassuring. Not.

“Can I ask what offended you?” I ask cautiously. There’s a moment of pause before she replies thoughtfully.

Do you know how long I have dedicated to this cub? I shake my head. More than a hundred years, already, and I will spend at least half of that again raising her into an adult. I stare. I can’t help it. As far as I know, leopards don’t have anything like that in life-expectancy. She notices my look. My kind do not reproduce easily, and we grow slowly. It is the consequence for our power and natural longevity.

I thought I had cleared out the nest of malakaan near here, otherwise I would not have left my cub to hunt. I heard her cries of pain and rushed back as quickly as I could, but I would have been too late. Over a hundred years and the life of my cub would have been gone in a few heartbeats. She pauses and I sense pain radiating from her. I wonder if this has happened before, or something like it. To deny reward, is to deny the deed. To deny the deed is to deny its importance. To deny its importance is to deny my cub and me, and we will not be denied.

Her tone is implacable, as is the hardness of her gaze when she looks at me. I nod slowly, understanding where she is coming from. In a way, it’s not so much about what I did; it’s about what that means for her. She wishes to reward me as a way of helping her feel like the scales are balanced again.

“OK,” I say in the end, “but I want it made note of that my life is very important to me too, so a promise not to kill me would actually be a pretty good start, in my book.” At that, she huffs in a way that I take as amusement.

Noted. In fact, I wish to offer three gifts. The first, a gift of knowledge. While we are in peaceful contact, I offer you the response to any question about this valley that I am capable of answering. For example, I know you wonder why you have been attacked so often: this valley is sought after because it is the location of an Energy geyser. The Energy fills the valley and grows significantly denser as you descend closer towards the geyser. However, do not be too greedy as competition over it is fierce and there are beasts nearby that even I would be reluctant to challenge.

OK, not much that I hadn’t already wondered about, but it’s good to have my theories confirmed – and to know the reason for the increase in Energy density. I suppose it’s also useful to know roughly how strong the beasts might be. Actually, when I think about it, this offer’s an awesome one. I just need to make sure I think of all the questions I need an answer to before Ieaving – I don’t want to miss out on potentially vital information just because I wasn’t thinking carefully enough.

Second, I wish to offer a shelter, as that seems to be your current most-pressing need. If you wish, I can give you the location of a guardian not too far from here who you might be able to seek shelter with. You would have to bribe him or impress him sufficiently, but it’s within your capabilities, I believe. Alternatively….Here she seemed to hesitate a little. Alternatively, I maybe able to host you here if you are prepared to exchange oaths of mutual defense and a non-aggression pact. I shall let you think that over and give me your response later.

After another short pause, she continues with the final gift. Lastly, I wish to give you a gift of power. Come here. I do so, barely even hesitating this time – I’ve learnt my lesson about defying the massive predator. She lifts her paw, holding it out towards me. Place your hand on my paw. I do that, marvelling once more at the size difference between us. Closing her eyes, she seems to concentrate for a long moment. Then, something like a warm breeze goes through me and I get the nagging feeling that I need to check my notifications again.

The leopard flicks her paw towards the chair and I take the hint, sitting back down. Check your status, she tells me, sounding tired. Just before I do so, I see her placing her head down on her paws. Clearly whatever she did took something out of her.

Activating my status screen, I see several notifications waiting for me.

I hesitate for a moment, weighing up my desire to ‘save’ Energy for my level-up versus my complete lack of ideas on how to improve my Willpower stat organically. In the end, I decide that I probably need all the Willpower I can get, especially when it determines health regeenration. Sure, I think. No sensation accompanies this point, but I guess it isn’t anything physical anyway. I wonder when I gained it? Maybe it was when I managed to get the potion in my mouth despite being pretty far gone, I muse. Well, I guess I’ll never truly know.

The next message isn’t such good news.

Yeah, I think I’d figured that bit out, I think sardonically. Such a useful notification. Next message, please.

So that’s what happened with my eye, because as far as I can work out, everything else is healed. I’ll have to test whether Lay-on-hands does anything, but something in me doubts it from that whole ‘resistant to magical healing’ thing in the previous message. Still, I suppose I’d better be grateful that the default-if-no-response option is to go ahead with the healing potion, otherwise I’d definitely be dead right now.

Let me think about that...duh! Constitution keeps me alive – no way I’m turning that down after my recent experience! Sure, I know I’m trying to accumulate Energy for levelling up, but I have to still be alive to level up. My recent encounter with the wolvezard has definitely shifted my point of view on that. I move onto the next message.

I close the message and access my status screen.

From a paltry four, five with my earned point added, my Willpower has now jumped to eighteen. Doing the maths, I work out that the twenty percent was applied to the whole of my base stat, that is, after the ten points were applied. Looking at the way it’s laid out on the status screen, I have to wonder whether it will affect future Willpower points too, because if so… Well, that could make it pretty overpowered. Already, it’s three times both of my highest stats, and it’s sixtimes my lowest.

I also notice something else: although I increased my Constitution by a point, my health pool has only gone up by five points. My maximum used to be ten times my Constitution; now it’s five points less than that. Unless the ratio has suddenly changed, I guess I’ve got my answer about a chopped off limb or something – even this new world can’t do miracles. I really, really hope that this blindness is temporary, or that I find something which will heal me: the middle of this kill zone is nota place where I want to be disabled. I make a mental note to add some more points to Constitution. As soon as I level up, that is.

And that’s another choice I need to spend considering once more – direct all my effort to levelling up and ignore any other stat increases offered, or accept stat increases at the risk of delaying my levelling up? In a way, it would be easier to decide if I know I have a safe place to sleep or not. That brings me onto the choice I’ve got to make. Stay here with a killer-leopard, follow her advice to try and bribe some ‘guardian’ to let me stay with them, or set out on my own?

There are certainly risks associated with staying anywhere near a killer-leopard, rather obvious ones given the description. Though, if that message about a blessing is anything to go by, she might actually be a ‘nunda’ or ‘prime nunda’ or something like that instead of a leopard. Actually, given the fact that she is several times bigger, and can do magic and telepathy, thinking of her as a separate species is probably helpful. So, nunda it is, until I’m told anything different.

Anyway, back to the topic. So yeah, there are risks of becoming leopard-chow if I stay anywhere in the vicinity, but there’s one major thing that makes me hesitate: do those risks go away if I leave? I mean, I’m not a big cat expert – and even less of a nunda expert – but as far as my absorbed tracking knowledge tells me, predators tend to have a pretty large territory in which they hunt. A giant cat probably has an even larger one. I might have to travel for days, even weeks to get out of it. And there’s no guarantee that she couldn’t follow me out of her claimed area if she particularly wanted to. So, in short, although the risks are lower if I leave – out of sight, out of mind – they aren’t eliminated.

That said, if she wanted me dead, she’s had ample opportunity to make it so. Not that I could stop her from killing me now, but all she would have had to do earlier was simply not give me my health potion. I was already more than one foot in the grave when she arrived, thanks to the wolvezard. Moreover, she’s given me a gift already which is a significant upgrade to my Willpower – that’s not the action of someone planning on eating me as a snack later.

No, in a way, my main worry is that she might change her mind at some point in the future; without warning, there would be absolutely no chance of me doing anything about it.

However, set those concerns against the potential of the cave as a shelter, especially if the nunda...what was her name? I quickly check the message again: Kalanthia, apparently. So yeah, if Kalanthia allows me to make some screens or something against wind and bring in bedding, it could make the cave pretty comfortable. Certainly a much easier and better shelter than anything I’ve seen so far, I can really see the potential for this place becoming a proper base.

Plus there’s the other aspect: just as much as a giant predator is scary to me, it’s probably scary to almost all the other animals around here. The fact that she had left her cub here alone to go out and hunt is evidence of her belief in the den’s safety. Of course, it turned out that that safety was misplaced, but when I think back to her words, she seemed to be unaware that there were any more of those wolverzard creatures – what did she call them again? - around to pose a threat. Now, does that mean I would never be attacked again here? No, but it does seem to reduce the possibility for sure.

Does that mean that staying here is the best option, even though I would potentially have the equivalent of a sword of Damocles hanging above my head every day?