Givelle's voice carried across the council chamber before Kaito had fully processed that the meeting was over.
"You may go," she said, not looking at him, "A servant will show you to your room."
Kaito considered making a remark, decided he had spent enough social currency for one afternoon, and inclined his head. "Yes your highness."
The servant from earlier was waiting just outside the doors, and led Kaito back into the long hallway without being asked.
His room was larger than he expected.
It occupied a corner of what he guessed was the castle's east wing. There was a desk, a wardrobe, a chair positioned near the window, and a bed in the centre of the room.
The servant bowed and left without speaking, and Kaito stood in the middle of the room alone for a moment, just taking it in.
He crossed to the wardrobe and opened it. It was full of clothes — fitted and folded, in dark colours and unfamiliar cuts, but recognisably functional.
Then he sat on the edge of the bed, and then he lay back on it, and stared at the ceiling.
How am I going to do this in a month.? He thought.
The problem was the timeline.
He had read enough manga to understand the basic structure of power progression in worlds like this one. You got stronger by going out, finding things that wanted to kill you, and making sure that you were the one who walked away.
Hunting. Levelling. Stat growth tied to kills and combat and the accumulation of experience in the literal mechanical sense. That was how this worked in every story he had read that resembled this situation, and he had no particular reason to believe his circumstances were dramatically different.
Which meant he needed to get outside as soon as possible, ideally, because a month was not a long time when measured against whatever Ryouma had just demonstrated in that council room.
But first he needed to sleep. His internal clock was still running on the time of his previous world, and it had been evening there, and his body had been through considerably more than a normal evening. He was in a new world with no acclimatisation period, he had been through a summoning and a council meeting and a fairly one-sided physical altercation, and he had also been sucked off by Givelle.
The point was that rest was strategically necessary, and not at all because the bed was extraordinarily comfortable.
xxx
When he woke, the light through the windows had shifted to the particular quality of late evening — still bright enough to see clearly, but lower, angled, the sky outside a deeper shade than before. He lay still for a moment and let himself remember where he was.
Then he got up, straightened his clothes, and went to find Givelle.
As he entered the throne room, he found her standing near the head of the room, reviewing something.
She looked up when he entered, and for a fraction of a second panic filled her expression.
"I'm not here for that," he said as he walked to her.
Givelle straightened slightly and something in her shoulders settled.
"You seem almost disappointed." Kaito teased.
Her chin lifted by roughly two degrees and a faint colour moved into her cheeks, but she held his gaze. "I am nothing of the sort."
Kaito decided to let that one go on the grounds that he needed something from her and antagonising her further probably wasn't efficient. "I want to know how I'm supposed to get stronger. What's the actual process here, how does it work."
The shift in topic appeared to be welcome. Givelle moved toward the table at the side of the room and turned to face him properly, back in the register of a queen addressing a practical problem.
"The easiest way is for you to hunt and kill beasts," she said. "The territories outside the citadel contain creatures of varying threat levels. Hunting them, killing them, advances your levels and builds your stats. The more powerful the beast, the greater the return."
"Then we should start now," Kaito said. "I want to go tonight."
"You will not be going with me," Givelle said. "I have a realm to govern. One of my generals will train you instead."
Kaito absorbed this. He had not thought about it specifically, but now that she said it, the image of Givelle in some forest at dusk, coaching him through combat stances while wearing that expression, had a certain appeal that he was going to miss.
Then she turned toward the door and said, in a carrying voice, "Inosi."
The woman who walked in was blonde.
And hot! Kaito swallowed.
Inosi was tall, she had long legs and massive boobs, and she moved with the particular ease of someone who had never once had to think about where her body was in space because it always did exactly what she wanted. She was carrying a spear almost absentmindedly.
Kaito kept his expression neutral through what he considered a significant act of personal discipline.
"This is General Inosi," Givelle said. "She will oversee your training."
Inosi looked at Kaito with clear golden eyes and said, in a voice that left no real room for discussion, "Follow me."
Kaito stood and looked at Givelle.
"I'll be back soon," he said, and waited until she was about to turn away. "When I'm back, I'll need more… guidance from you." He let the word sit for exactly long enough, and added a brief and entirely unnecessary wink.
Givelle's expression became cold and pointed, Kaito almost laughed on his way out.
The hallway outside the throne room was quiet, and Inosi moved through it at a pace that required Kaito to keep up.
"Where exactly are we hunting?" he said, mostly to have something to do with the silence.
"There are two forests accessible from the citadel's eastern gate," Inosi said, without slowing down. "The near forest is lower in threat level, it has smaller beasts, manageable risk, suitable for extended low-intensity training. The outer forest has a wider range." She paused. "Smaller beasts as well, but also more dangerous ones. Active predators. Higher threat density."
"Right," Kaito said. "So naturally we'll be going to the near forest, with the smaller beasts."
"No, we'll be going to the outer forest."
Kaito looked at her. "Why."
Inosi turned to him with a bright and entirely genuine smile and said, "It's more fun."
He stared at her.
The formal posture from the throne room was gone. She was walking with a kind of energy now that was almost bouncy, her spear swinging lightly in her grip, the smile still in place like she was looking forward to the next several hours.
Kaito looked at this woman, who had apparently just recommended a higher-risk hunting ground for a rank-zero beginner on the basis that it was fun, and thought, "is she a crackhead."
xxxx
The outer forest was dark at the edges and loud due to insects, wind, the sound of things moving through undergrowth just outside of sight. Inosi stopped at the treeline and handed him a dagger.
Kaito looked at it. "This is very small," he said.
"You can't handle anything larger yet," she said, cheerfully.
He looked at the dagger again, sighed, and held it properly.
"We will start small so you can get comfortable with the process before we escalate. Come." Inosi said.
She moved into the forest and he followed, and within a few minutes she had slowed to a crouch. She lifted her chin, and Kaito watched her nostrils flare slightly.
"There," she said softly, and nudged him forward with one finger.
Through a gap in the undergrowth, a hare sat in a patch of fading light, small and unbothered, its nose moving. It was a perfectly ordinary hare by every visible measure, and the system tagged it in the corner of his vision as F-rank.
Inosi nudged him again.
Kaito tightened his grip on the dagger, measured the distance — maybe four metres, he thought, manageable — and lunged.
The hare leaped away and Kaito's hand closed on empty air and then on the ground, he knelt there for a moment in the dirt.
Inosi crouched beside him, her expression thoughtful.
"I wonder," she said pleasantly, "whether an F-rank is too much for you right now. We could perhaps look for something weaker."
Kaito got up and brushed off his knee. "Is there anything weaker than F-rank."
Inosi considered this genuinely. "A fly, possibly. A large wasp."
He looked at her.
She looked back with the expression of someone who had made a sincere suggestion.
He turned and walked further into the forest.
It took longer than he would have liked, and involved considerably more patience than he was accustomed to, but the next hare he found sat in a clearing where the sightlines were clearer, and this time he approached from downwind, moving slowly and testing each footfall before he committed to it, and he measured the distance twice, and when he moved he moved low and fast and got his hands around it before it had fully registered what was happening.
He then killed it unceremoniously.
The system notification arrived before he had fully straightened up.
He checked the numbers. Twenty across the board, every stat, where they had been barely functional before. It wasn't much in absolute terms, but it was an improvement.
A growl came from directly to their left and They both turned.
The bushes along the clearing's edge moved, and something pushed through them that was not a hare and was not F-rank.
It was broad and dark and it lowered its head as it cleared the undergrowth, the horns catching the last of the evening light.
The system tagged it in the corner of his vision.
D-Rank.