Eren barely hunted anymore.

Kalina noticed it during the second week because every time she came to Evon expecting to find him covered in monster blood and swinging scimitars like the action hero she’d watched him become, he was instead standing on a half-rebuilt barricade hammering wooden stakes into gaps between stone walls. Or he was arguing with Thadric about where to position a new watchtower. Or he was carrying lumber with Oldir and Toris while the old elf smoked his leaf cigarette and gave directions like a foreman who’d been doing this for centuries because he literally had.

"Aren’t you supposed to be the strongest fighter here and the best chance to hunt that dragon? Why aren’t you hunting to get more exp?" she asked him on day eleven while he was mixing some kind of clay and straw compound to seal cracks in the inner wall.

He wiped his forehead with his wrist and left a streak of grey mud across his face. "I am. That’s exactly why I’m not fighting. If I go out there and die because a pack of something catches me alone the entire village collapses. Emily would actually kill me if she knew I was hunting solo. And.."

Eren looked like he was about to say something more serious for a second but stopped.

"Nevermind.."

It made sense the main arguments he said when she actually thought about it. But the last part the the small sudden worry on his face was weird.

So there is more to this world and the village huh..he is shielding it by himself whatever it is..

..

What he was doing these days mostly instead of levelling up was running a rotation system.

Every two or three days he’d open a portal and bring a group of elves from the village to Earth and then bring the previous group back. The elves needed exposure to Earth technology and language and customs and he was cycling them through like a corporate training program except the trainees had pointed ears and most of them had never seen a light switch.

Kalina was lucky in all of this because the constant portal trips meant she could tag along almost every other day. She’d cross into Evon in the morning or sometimes at lunch if she had work, kill a few creatures near the perimeter where the low-level things had started creeping back and collect the experience the system offered her.

All her stat points went in equal across the board. That was Eren’s rule, not hers.

"Spread them evenly until you hit Level 15 and get your class," he told her with the tone of someone who’d thought about this more than he’d admit. "You don’t know what class you’ll get yet so don’t bottleneck yourself into a physical build if the system wants to give you something mental."

She didn’t like taking orders about her own body from a man whose class was called Magician of Love but she couldn’t argue with the logic so she listened.

By Level 8 she noticed something odd. Her Mana stat was 1. She hadn’t put a single point into it and yet there it was. One lonely point of Mana hanging in a stat that should have been zero for someone who’d never used magic in her life.

She mentioned it to Eren and he mentioned it to Selena and within an hour every elf in the village who could understand enough English to follow the conversation was talking about it.

"That doesn’t happen," Eren said from the porch of Emily’s house where Selena was standing behind him running her fingers through his hair which Kalina tried very hard not to stare at. "My Mana was zero until I actively gained it through the system. The Clone’s was the same. For you to have a base Mana of 1 without investment means the system detected something in your biology that’s compatible with magic at a fundamental level."

Selena said something in Elvish that sounded excited and musical and even Lyra who was delivering bread to a nearby house stopped and turned around with wide eyes.

"They think you might unlock a real mage class," Eren translated. He scratched the back of his neck with the sheepish grin he got when he knew he was about to say something that would annoy her. "Which would be pretty cool actually because nobody in this village has one. The closest thing to a mage here is Rabbu-i and her class is all plants and nature stuff."

Kalina raised an eyebrow. "What about you? Your class literally has ’Magician’ in the name."

"I mean yeah, I’m literally a Magician but-"

The laughter started before he could finish. Selena covered her mouth but her shoulders were shaking. Lyra made a sound somewhere between a giggle and a snort that was way too cute for someone holding a basket of bread. Even two elves passing by on the stone path who’d been listening to the conversation started laughing and one of them, an older woman with silver braids, waved her hand dismissively and said something that made everyone laugh harder.

Eren looked personally offended. "I am a Magician! My class says Magician!"

Selena leaned down and kissed the top of his head while still laughing and said something in Elvish that Kalina didn’t understand but could roughly translate from context as "Of course you are, dear."

His own wives don’t take him seriously. I shouldn’t find that this comforting but I really do.

..

The language of Elves, the mystical language of fantasy genre of Earth, came faster than she expected to her.

On day sixteen a notification appeared in her vision while she was listening to Selena explain a recipe to Lyra in Elvish. She wasn’t even trying to learn, she was just sitting at a table in the restaurant eating stew and letting the musical stream of their conversation wash over her like background noise.

[Congratulations! You have learned: "Basic Language Learning"]

She blinked and pulled her hand away from the clay cup she was holding. The notification faded after three seconds but the effect was immediate. The Elvish conversation that had been pure melodic gibberish suddenly had shapes in it. Not full words yet but patterns she could feel her brain trying to grab onto, like hearing a foreign song enough times that you start anticipating where the next syllable falls.

Two days later a second notification appeared while Eren was translating a conversation between her and Thadric about livestock management.

[Congratulations! You have learned:

-Basic Elvish - Comprehension Based Language Skill]

It wasn’t fluency. It was more like someone had installed a very rough filter in her ears that caught about one word in five and let the rest through as noise. But those one-in-five words were enough to follow the general direction of a conversation and fill in gaps with context.

Kalina stopped walking when she processed what had just happened.

A passive skill that let you acquire languages just by being around people who spoke them. No classes, no textbooks, no tutors, no grammar drills. Just exposure and time and the system did the rest.

She turned to Eren who was still talking to Thadric about the best grass for Yaksha grazing as if the most revolutionary educational technology in human history hadn’t just casually installed itself in her brain.

"Eren."

He looked at her.

"Did you know this would happen? The language skill?" 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"Oh yeah." He waved his hand casually. "I got Advanced Language Learning ages ago as a gift. It’s how I speak Elvish and Beastin. The system just kind of gives it to you once you’ve been exposed enough. Pretty useful."

Pretty useful. He said "pretty useful" about a skill that could make every language school, every Duolingo subscription, every university foreign language department on Earth completely obsolete overnight.

Is he really stupid..?

This man had been walking around with what was basically a trillion-dollar language education business in his pocket and he described it as "pretty useful."

She thought about all the other things Eren had casually mentioned over the past two weeks and dismissed as unimportant. The healing properties of certain plants. The fact that elf-brewed tea could give humans a four-hour energy boost without caffeine. The way the system’s stat points could theoretically be applied to Intelligence which could... what? Make people smarter? Permanently?

What else has he been ignoring that he didn’t think was worth mentioning?

She decided right there standing on a dirt path in an alien forest that she needed to revisit every single thing Eren had told her since day one. All of it. Every throwaway comment and casual observation and "oh yeah, that too" detail that he’d treated like background noise while she was busy being distracted by his abs.

The Totem’s barrier kept shrinking and the area outside the village was getting worse.

On day nineteen a creature she’d never seen before, something with six legs and a head like a cracked boulder, wandered within fifty meters of the outer barricade and just stood there staring at the village for twenty minutes before turning around and walking back into the tree line. Nobody in the village had seen that species before and Thadric spent the rest of the evening sharpening his knives without talking to anyone.

It was around this time that Eren brought up the land.

"I found a property," he said one evening while they were lying on the floor of Emily’s house because Kalina refused to use the bed and Eren didn’t push it.

Her head was on his chest and she could hear his heartbeat which was slower than a human’s by about fifteen beats per minute, something she’d counted because counting things was what her brain did when it had nothing else to process. "On the Gallipoli peninsula, near Canakkale. North side, right on the coast. Huge piece of land with a farmhouse on it."

"Is it big?"

"25 acre, Is that enough for 200 people..?" He paused and muttered with curiosity.

That is huge..!

There is something wrong with his head.

His handsome face..

I hate that confident and grinning stupid mouth.

But I guess kissing that lips wouldn’t be bad..

Kalina lost her irritation with a deep frenchkiss Eren shared with her when she demanded. She was truly happy these days.