The sword went on growing stronger.
He worked out that the country around him was divided into levels, and that the further he went the worse the things living there became. He fought a lesser wyvern and took damage doing it, but the experience and the skills were worth the dents, and self-recovery closed him up again afterward.
When he had gathered enough abilities he went for the boss of the area: the gluttonous slime king. It came at him hard, a great heaving mass with no obvious place to put a blade — until he used appraisal and found the weak point. He combined telekinesis with magic and launched everything he had at once, blew the core apart, and the slime king came down.
Out of it he took evolution points, instant regeneration, and dimensional storage, which meant that from now on he could carry things.
He went on. He killed the double snake, the blast tortoise, a saber-tooth tiger — long fights, all of them, and out of each one he took skills. By the end he was a considerably more dangerous object than the thing that had woken up in the grass, and he decided to leave the area entirely and find enemies worth the trouble.
He crossed the boundary, and his telekinesis stopped working.
He tried it again. Nothing. He tried other skills, and they failed too — the ground under him was drinking them, absorbing everything he put out, and he could not so much as lift himself an inch.
Three days went by. He could not move, and he could not recover mana, and it occurred to him that this was probably why there were no monsters anywhere in sight.
Three days became a week. A week became weeks. He grew desperate, and then he grew frantic, and he began to wish very hard that somebody — anybody — would come along and rescue him. He imagined it in detail: a hand closing on his hilt, a boot braced against the dirt, the pull. Nobody came.
A month passed. He began to despair, crying out into an empty plain for someone to pull him out of the ground.
Far off, on the road, the slave carriage was attacked by a two-headed bear.
The guards did not fight it. They abandoned the slaves where they stood, left them as bait, and ran. The beast waded in among them, and the black catgirl, watching it come, understood that she was going to die. It knocked her down. She refused to stay down. She got hold of a stick and swung it at the thing, and it overpowered her without effort.
And as she lay there facing her death, she heard a voice calling her.
She looked around. There was a sword in the mud, half sunk, the hilt standing up out of the ground. She reached out and closed her hand on it.
The moment her skin touched the grip, the voice came again — clearer now — and the sword realised that this was how it worked. Touch. He could speak to whoever held him.
She pulled. He did not budge. She hauled at him with everything she had while the monster turned toward her and came on, and at the last possible moment the ground let him go, and she went sideways with him in her hands and the blow passed over her.
She barely knew what to do with a sword. He could feel it in the way she gripped him — the basics, nothing more. He told her to hold him with a strong will.
She did.
He accepted her as his wielder, and everything he had went into her.
She lifted him and went at the beast. She struck it, and struck it again, driving it back, and then she put the last blow through it and the two-headed bear went down dead in the road.
She thanked him. Then she set him aside to leave him where he lay, and he asked her to take him along.
Right then her guard came back.
He looked at the wreckage of the road, and at the dead bear, and worked out that the little slave had killed it. Then he saw the sword in her hands and demanded it, and when she did not hand it over he attacked her, boasting all the while that he could do whatever he liked with her, that the slave contract meant she belonged to him.
The sword killed him with telekinesis. Then he destroyed the contract, and the collar around her neck came open and fell away.
He felt, for the first time in a month, entirely free to use his own power.
He asked the girl to be his wielder.
At first he thought she had refused him. Then he understood that she had agreed. He warned her about what that would mean — danger, and a great deal of it — and she accepted anyway, because she wanted to become stronger. No black cat, she said, had ever evolved. Not one. She wanted to do what her parents had not been able to do.
That moved him more than he expected. He agreed to help her grow strong.
He asked her name.
She told him her name had been taken from her when she was made a slave. It used to be Fran.
Then it was Fran, the sword decided, and he called her Fran. And in return she named him — Teacher — for making her strong.
The pride of the beastkin lies in evolution. To rise, to change form, to become something greater than the shape you were born into: that is what they strive for. It was for that reason that Fran's parents had taken her travelling when she was very small. But her tribe, the black cats, had never managed it. Not once in their history. Her parents died on the road before they found the key to it, and Fran took up their journey and made it her own mission.
So she carried the sword, and with Teacher's help she cut her way through monsters, levelling slowly, picking up skills as she went. She trained in sword work and in magic and learned all of it easily. Above everything else, she was considerate of her weapon — she kept him clean, always, without being asked.
The sword was grateful beyond words to have her, and swore to himself that he would spend his life keeping her safe.
Then Fran's ears went up sharp, and she started running toward something she had heard.
On the road ahead, a carriage was under attack by goblins. A single adventurer was struggling to hold them off. He was losing — and then a sword came through the goblins in front of him and a small black catgirl landed in the middle of the fight.
Goblins came around behind her. The sword finished them with an aura attack before they got close.
Afterward, Teacher forbade Fran from letting the man know he could talk. When the adventurer offered her a ride into town, Teacher suggested she offer to escort them instead, and so Fran agreed to escort Randall to the town and climbed aboard the carriage.
On the way, Randall explained the trouble. Something had stirred up the Maru Plains and the beast activity there had risen; his own guess was that territorial disputes between the larger beasts were driving the weaker monsters out toward the town.
Teacher listened to this with a certain sinking feeling. So the place he had been living was called the Maru Plains. And the disturbance was him.
There was also a rumour, Randall added, that the S-rank monster Fenra had died out there, and everyone knew that monsters grew stronger the further you went from the centre.
Fran asked whether he knew anything about a sword out on those plains. He did not.
Having watched her take goblins apart, Randall assumed she was at least an E-rank adventurer. Monsters were ranked by strength, he explained, S down to G, and the people who subjugated them were called adventurers and ranked the same way. Fran was immediately, visibly interested. All she had to do, Randall said, was register at the adventurers' guild, and she could make money doing it.