Farmer or Cultivator? Why not both?

"Another stalemate." Ren spoke.

The two had been drawing more frequently than ever. They usually stopped out of mutual exhaustion or to spare what remained of the surrounding forest. Of all their fights however, Ren still held the better record, with Rokku closing the gap steadily. The spirit animal only needed a few more wins to pull ahead, and since achieving flight, he had become considerably harder to deal with.

The three had dinner outside the house that evening. Ren had prepared roasted potatoes alongside a vegetable soup that filled the air around them with a warm, hearty smell.

"I wish I could fly like you, Rokku," Tuarine said.

The cold, almost unreachable woman Ren had first known had changed. He could see a warmer side of her now, something freer and more open. He could not have imagined it a month ago.

Rokku raised one wing, and Ren could already tell a lecture was incoming.

"It is not exactly flight. It is me utilizing my form, driving bursts of mana beneath my wings and pushing off the air. It is closer to jumping than true flight."

Ren rolled his eyes. It was flight as far as he was concerned, and there was no need to sand down something impressive with technicalities. The concept itself was not lost on him. He used the same principle whenever he needed to shift his position mid-air, but his body was simply not built generously enough to produce anything resembling what Rokku could do.

"Ren holds back," Rokku stated.

"Of course you both do," Tuarine said. "You do not want to level the forest or alert the soldiers. That is obvious."

"It is not the same kind of holding back. He knows what I mean." Rokku looked at Ren. "We do not hold back in the same way."

Tuarine raised an eyebrow. Ren kept eating, unbothered, as though the conversation had nothing to do with him.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean that Ren fights me only as a cultivator. He keeps the rest of his arsenal off the table. He is stronger than he shows, not dramatically more so compared to me, we are still equals, but he would have more wins if he used everything available to him."

"Ohhh! What other ability?" Tuarine shuffled closer to Ren with sudden interest. He leaned back instinctively and let out a laugh despite himself, then sighed. If Rokku already knew, there was no reason to keep it from Tuarine.

He got to his feet, walked a short distance away from the berry plant that had long since outgrown its original form and now stood considerably larger than any bush had a right to. He stopped on bare soil, raised his right hand above it, and paused.

"I call it Plant Whisperer." As he said the words, green woody vines crept up through the soil, moving and swaying in the direction of his hand like something half-asleep and newly woken. He raised his arm overhead and the vines surged upward. He spread both arms wide and they thickened and broadened in response, weaving together into the shape of a trunk, pushing out leaves, taking on the form of a young tree. Then, before it could fully establish itself, he stopped and drew them back into the ground. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

"Whoa!" Tuarine stared. Then she clapped. "That was beautiful."

"I suppose." Ren came back and settled down. "Though it would not give me as much of an edge as Rokku implied. The plants respond to me and I can direct them, but doing so is slow. Much slower than projecting mana directly and going at someone with your hands. If I leaned on it too heavily in a fight, it could become a liability rather than an asset."

"So it is not that you are holding back, it is that fighting with it is not efficient enough," Tuarine said.

"Exactly. It is better used for things like this." He nodded toward the berry bush turned tree beside them. "It was a small bush when I arrived. The skill is what changed it." He paused. "I also use it to repair the trees Rokku and I knock down during our spars, when I have the energy left to bother."

He sat back down and returned to his meal. The skill had come from a treasure chest earned by converting favor points. Over the past month he had accumulated well past three hundred of them, and from that chest had come this. It had proven genuinely useful. He simply needed to find a way to weave it into combat properly.

Tuarine dreaded going back to the village. She had made no secret of it over recent weeks. The soldiers had arrived and settled in with a kind of casual boldness that made her skin crawl. She hated the sound of their steel boots on the soil, hated the way they helped themselves to food and spoke to the villagers as though their presence were a favor being done rather than a burden being carried. Many of them had made aggressive advances toward her, and she had responded to each one in kind, with enough force and sharpness that word had spread. She was a Junjun expert. Forcing themselves on her was not a viable option. That reputation had held. It had not, however, extended its protection to anyone else, and while her father did what he could to curb the worst of it, it was never enough. She had stepped in more than once, and the animosity between her and the soldiers had grown into something mutual and barely contained.

She wished she could carry herself the way Ren did. He intimidated them simply by existing nearby, the quiet pressure of his mana enough to make most of them think twice before doing anything worth regretting.

"Perhaps the war will not start after all," she said, more to the air than to either of them.

It was wishful thinking, and she knew it. The war had already begun.