The next morning, Penelope wakes Jojo up at dawn and drags her out of the city and into the neighboring forest. Gentle sunlight pours through the leafy canopy like a watery soup, coating the dew-kissed ground. Morning birdcalls pierce the crisp air, and gentle breezes whistle through the spaces left behind.

  Jojo yawns and stretches as the two walk deeper into the woods. “So, what are we doing out here? I kind of thought we’d take some work at the guild or something.”

  “We’ll get to that soon enough,” Penelope says, “but first I wanna see just how strong you are. Plus, you need a weapon!”

  “I have a sword, though.”

  “A sword you borrowed from someone. And you wanna act like a healer, right? What kinda healer hangs out on the front lines?”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Jojo admits. “So, what did you have in mind?”

  “This!” Penelope spins around grandiosely and grabs her carrying bag. She reaches deep into it and pulls out a fairly small wooden bow, along with a quiver and a bundle of arrows, all of which she hands out to Jojo with a proud smirk on her face.

  “Uh… Yeah, I guess that works,” Jojo says, taking the equipment. She slings the quiver over her shoulder and tests out her grip on the bow. “Why this, though?”

  “I have my reasons,” Penelope says. “First, though, we should test out how well you shoot! Try hitting, um… That tree over there.” She points to a random tree some thirty feet away, fairly skinny but far from an impossible target.

  Jojo nods and readies an arrow. She’s never fired a bow before in either life, but it always looked simple enough. She notches the arrow on the string, pulls it back, points the arm holding the bow out in front of her, and tries to aim. She closes one eye, maneuvers the bow so it looks like the arrow is pointed towards the tree, and lets go of the string.

  A sharp twang rings out into the air as the bowstring snaps forward. The arrow goes absurdly wide and low, embedding itself in the soil a few feet away from where Jojo stands. Jojo doesn’t even notice that, though, because she’s too busy rubbing the welt on her arm from where the string scraped against her uncovered skin.

  “Gah! What the heck!?” Jojo rubs her arm a bit more, then remembers she has magic and tries piping a bit of healing magic into the sore spot. The pain vanishes instantly, along with a few points of her MP.

  A few feet away, Penelope has her hands clamped over her mouth to hold back laughter. “Y-Yeah,” she stammers, “that’s about what I’d expect from someone with no experience. Did you get anything for it?”

  “Yeah, a rash,” Jojo grumbles. Then, she sighs. “I got the Archery skill up to level 2.”

  “Not bad!” Penelope coos, sounding genuinely impressed. “Y’know, for a single totally missed shot, at least. Try it again!”

  “Alright…”

  Not nearly as enthusiastic, Jojo hesitates a little before pulling out another arrow. She prepares it like before, and… It feels different. Simpler. It’s like her body just knows things it didn’t know before. It’s small things, where to nock the arrow, how to hold her arms so that she doesn’t hurt herself again, but it makes a major difference.

  This time, when she releases the arrow, it actually flies where she wanted it to. It sails gracefully through the air and lands in the tree she was aiming at with a satisfying thunk.

  “Woo!” Penelope cheers behind Jojo. “Yeah, that was great!”

  “Wow,” Jojo says, “that was a lot easier. I was expecting to struggle more.”

  Penelope laughs. “Yeah, well, archery would kind of suck if you had to be, like, level five to hit anything. A hammer hurts at level one, y’know?”

  “Yeah. That makes sense,” Jojo nods. She goes and pulls her first arrow out of the dirt and stows it away in her quiver. When she tries to retrieve the second arrow, though, the arrowhead snaps off and remains embedded in the tree. “Oh, dang. Am I gonna be needing to buy arrows nonstop if I want to use a bow?”

  “Actually, that’s part of why I wanted you to try the bow,” Penelope answers. She skips up beside Jojo and digs the arrowhead out of the tree, examines it, then shrugs and slips it into her pouch. “Archer Jobs get a passive skill that keeps their arrows from breaking. I was wondering if you’d get it if you used a bow.”

  “Hm. Well, no sign of it yet,” Jojo says. “Maybe if I get my Archery level up or something? Or I might just have to break more arrows.”

  “Who knows.” Penelope shrugs. “It’s time for step two, though, and the other reason I gave you a bow.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, see, archers also get, like, a bunch of active skills. So, it seemed like a good way for you to figure out how to get those!” Penelope grins wide. “Good idea, right?”

  Jojo smiles back. “Yeah, not bad. Did you have one in mind?”

  “Yup! It needs a target, though, so let’s go find something for you to shoot!”

  Penelope struts forward into the woods, and Jojo chuckles and follows after her. It’s all quiet for a few minutes, both of them keeping silent and watching out for prey, until suddenly Penelope stops in place and shoots an arm out, signalling for Jojo to do the same. She points off towards a tree in the distance, and Jojo follows her hand with her gaze.

  A fair ways off, sitting on a branch and chewing on some kind of nut, sits a fat red squirrel, blissfully unaware of their existence.

  “Okay,” Penelope whispers, “try and use Sure Shot to hit that thing.”

  Jojo nods and readies an arrow. She isn’t really sure of what she’s supposed to be doing, so she just tries to focus on the idea of a skill, and on what it might feel like to activate one. She tries to visualize the idea, and pictures a vague, nebulous energy swirling through her body. She pictures the energy flowing into her arms, then her hands, then into the arrow itself, and that’s when she fires.

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  The arrow flies forward and slams into the squirrel, knocking it backwards off the branch. It lands on the ground below with a soft thump.

  Jojo frowns. “Was… Was that it?”

  “Whaddaya mean ‘was that it?’” Penelope growls and smacks Jojo’s arm. “You didn’t even try to use it!”

  “What? I totally tried!” Jojo pouts. “I tried, like, picturing myself using a skill, then let the arrow go.”

  “You—” Penelope huffs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Right. You’re new. Look, Jojo, forget all that… Whatever you were just making up. Skills are easy, okay? If you wanna use a skill, you just say it! Like Identify! You say it, and it happens. Easy peasy.”

  “Oh.” Jojo looks at Penelope blankly. “That’s… That’s it?”

  “That’s really it.”

  “So… Wait. Hang on a second. I need to try something.”

  Shaking her head, Jojo walks over to a nearby tree and sits against it. She crosses her legs, gets comfortable, and clears her mind. Like every attempt before, nothing happens, until…

  “Meditation.”

  And her mind goes blank. It’s like her senses all just shut off, leaving her in a perfect void, bereft of thoughts or stimulus. An eternity passes, but at the same time it’s only a second.

  Then, she opens her eyes again. She checks, and her MP is back to full.

  “Wow. I feel dumb now.” Jojo frowns and looks up at Penelope, who doesn’t seem to have moved. “How long was I meditating for?”

  “Were you meditating? You just kinda sat down and blinked.” Penelope shrugs. “It was, like, five seconds maybe.”

  “Huh. That’s going to be useful, then.” Jojo stands up, brushes herself off, and starts wandering over to where the squirrel landed. “Hey, why hasn’t the squirrel disappeared like slimes do?” She asks.

  “What? Oh, it… Only monsters do that,” Penelope says. She jogs after Jojo, grabs the squirrel, and shoves it haphazardly into her pouch, arrow and all. “Hey, you gonna explain what just happened?”

  “Oh, right!” Jojo laughs awkwardly. “Sorry. I figured out why I couldn’t get the meditation skill before. I didn’t know you had to say the name of the skill!”

  “Ohh, that makes sense. Well… Mission accomplished, I guess.”

  “Yup! I got that passive arrow skill when I hit level five on archery, too, so I think that solves that mystery!” Jojo grins wide and puts a hand on Penelope’s shoulder. “Thanks for all the help. This partnership is already working out great, if you ask me!”

  “Uh, yeah…” Penelope averts her eyes. Under her breath, she mumbles, “don’t really feel like I helped all that much, but… Yeah.”

  “What’s up? I couldn’t quite catch that,” Jojo says.

  Penelope shakes her head. “Nothing. Let’s just do some hunting, get your archery skill up. Sound good?”

  “Oh, sure!”

  The next few hours go smoothly. They wander the woods, looking for squirrels and birds that Jojo can use to train. She unlocks Sure Shot, which more or less guarantees her arrow will hit as long as she can see her target, and it isn’t long before her archery skill reaches level seven, leaving it on par with her swordplay skill. They even bag enough animals that, according to Penelope, selling them would put the two of them on par with a brand-new hunter’s income. It’s not much, but it’s something, and it leaves Jojo feeling proud and confident for the days to come.

  In fact, it might have her a little overconfident, because she completely misses when Penelope freezes in her tracks and frantically motions for Jojo to do the same.

  “Jojo, stop!” Penelope hisses as quietly as she can manage while still being heard.

  “What?” Jojo asks, whirling around to see Penelope with a look she hadn’t yet seen on the small girl: Fear. “What’s wrong?”

  “Shh! Don’t—”

  “CAW!”

  A high-pitched call shoots out through the woods like a bullet, slamming into the girls like a sudden heavy wind. Penelope crouches down and braces herself, but it knocks Jojo straight off her feet and face-first into the dirt.

  “Guh!” Jojo groans. She pushes herself over onto her back and looks at where the noise came from.

  In front of her is an old, wide, dying tree. No leaves still cling to its branches, and its bark is ashy and falling apart. The only reason she didn’t notice the tree before, standing out against the lively forest around it, was that its branches are covered in something else: Birds. Hundreds of them, a massive flock of black and brown birds stuffed so thick that out of the corner of her eye they looked nearly identical to the shady underside of a tree at dusk.

  Looking closely at one of them, the bird almost looks like a normal crow. Sleek black feathers, keen, beady eyes, and a wicked-sharp black beak. However, these crows have straw woven between their feathers in intricate patterns, thicker in places a crow would typically be weaker, layered almost like padded coats worn for armor.

  Jojo Identifies one.

  “Get up,” Penelope whispers harshly. “We need to get out of—”

  “CAW!”

  Another crow calls out, slamming the two of them with another wave of force. Penelope clamps her hands over her ears, but Jojo, looking right at the source of the attack, takes the full force of it. It’s like a mental battering ram, the force of a migraine in a single pounding strike, and for a moment her ears ring and her vision goes white.

  Jojo covers her ears after that, but she can feel blood already dripping down.

  When her vision clears, she sees Penelope frantically waving for her to move.

  She tries. She pushes herself to her knees, then her feet, and takes a grueling step away from the tree.

  It’s too late.

  “CAW!”

  “CAW!”

  “CAW!”

  More cries slam into them, and both girls crumble. Penelope curls into a ball, instinctively trying to cover herself, but there’s little she can do to stop the sounds coming at her.

  Jojo sees Penelope curl up, and it drills into something inside of her. She can’t help her mind spinning up. It’s my fault she’s out here. She’s here to help me. If she dies, that’s my fault, too. I killed her. More crow calls slam into her mind, but the flood of thoughts almost pushes the cacophony out. She coughs and tastes iron, but she knows she can’t stop.

  If she stops, she dies.

  If she dies, Penelope dies.

  She can’t let that happen.

  She glares up at the flock of birds, straining to even look at them through their barrage of attacks. She struggles to think of what she might be able to do, how she could possibly stop them.

  Then, she has an idea.

  She looks down, at the tree. The decrepit, dying tree. And she pours out her magic. As much as she can, all she can give, she pumps life magic out and across the expanse between her and the tree to give it what it needs.

  For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happens. More noise pounds against her brain, and she feels like she’s going to lose consciousness if it goes on any longer.

  Then, the tree explodes.

  Green life shoots up from the ground and into it, past its bark, through the soft fleshy wood, and suddenly it’s alive, it’s thriving, and it grows. In an instant shoots up ten, twenty feet, and all the birds sitting on the branches are slammed from below with the force of its growth. At the same time, new branches grow, and stretch, and split, and the thousands of little tiny spikes of life stab out into the birds pretending to be the leaves it now flourishes.

  All at once, the crowing stops. Instead, the sound of gentle wind and peaceful leaves fills the air, washing over the girls like springwater.

  Then, a thump as a battered, perforated crow hits the ground.

  Followed by another.

  And another.

  And, totally spent, surrounded by the sound of raining bodies, Jojo looks back at Penelope. A few feet away, she can see the girl stirring, starting to rouse herself up off of the ground. She’s shaky, clearly injured, but…

  She’s alive.

  Jojo smiles at that as unconsciousness finally takes her.