It was meal time, and I glared at the chunk of what was essentially raw meat in my hands.

  The biggest problem with having no wood wasn’t the lack of staves for my [Spearmanship] skill. It was the lack of fire. We could gather the low-lying shrubs, let them dry, and burn those, but it wasn’t sufficient for regular cooking. The land would be stripped bare within days.

  I was a bit surprised that this level of civilization had even been able to form without fire, but Uli didn’t seem to need it. It was quite hot where we lived year-round, and as far as I could tell, we digested raw meat just fine. My thoughts on the matter aside, I didn’t even find it unpalatable; my mouth enjoyed the taste and my stomach appreciated the food without complaint. It was my head which was worried about parasites, bacteria, and spoilage, especially because of the heat.

  So far, I hadn’t seen any of the kids fall sick from this food, so I sighed and tore off a chunk with my teeth, chewing the uncooked protein as best as I could before swallowing. In the Uli’s defense, the meat was very fresh.

  My meat chunk had come off a massive haunch that had been delivered to the creche and the mothers were hacking up with sharp bits of stone and handing out to the kids. Given that the creature it had come from must have had six of such haunches, I could roughly extrapolate the size of the beast: pretty fucking big.

  That was likely why the tribes had organized, as it was a group effort to hunt such megafauna.

  Between hunts, my chunks of raw meat tended to be heavily salted. One of the reasons we lived on the coast appeared to be the use of the tide pools; the pools furthest away from the water were protected and used as a brine-based meat storage. The females also sometimes harvested fish and crustaceans that lived in the pools to supplement, but the core of our diet was the megafauna meat.

  Whatever the creature was, despite being huge and six-legged, it was an animal, not a monster. With no mana, this world didn’t have monsters, as best as I could tell; correspondingly, I had no level in this world, secret or otherwise. It was only killing monsters in my last life that raised that, and it was simply absent in this one. There would be no shortcuts to stat points in this life, then.

  It would have been nice to ask the local administrator, but the Uli didn’t seem to worship or pray at all. There was no service or temple, no statues to kneel before, and as such, I still hadn’t met this world’s admin. I tried praying anyway, by myself, but that didn’t seem to be enough, which I already knew was the case from attempting the same in Argadia; I had needed to visit a temple to bridge between reality and the metaversal borderland.

  This all added up to me having a lot of questions. Some of what I thought I had established in my last life didn’t seem to be the case in this one. The previous admin had mentioned conflict to promote stat growth in souls, but aside from heading inland to hunt for meat—and very occasionally defending the camp from predators—life seemed fairly peaceful.

  There had been some inter-tribe conflict, a couple of years prior, though I had been kept within the creche and “protected”, so I didn’t see it first-hand. All tribes were a bit nomadic, but the aggressor was more of a roving tribe, whereas ours was fairly settled, only moving as necessitated by seasons and seeking out new, teeming tide pools. There were some deaths on both sides, from what I overheard as gossip.

  After the battle, though, some of the mates of the dead tribesmen were claimed by the victors, both ways. While brutal, the true function of the conflict seemed to be more about refreshing the gene pools.

  It was certainly nothing like the large-scale devastation of a human-demon war, as described to me in my last life. This was only one small corner of the world, though, and I had no idea what the history was of my new people, nor what the wider world held. Perhaps our civilization had been knocked back to this level after a war, or perhaps I had just been born in a remote part of the world that was far behind the curve.

  “Hey,” a voice said, interrupting my thoughts. I glanced up to see one of my older brothers, Bar-al Uqami, standing over me. “Give me your meat.”

  Bar was a bully, and I didn’t like him. He was also a child living in pretty rough conditions, based on my sensibilities, and I could hardly blame him for trying to acquire more resources so he could survive. It was what all animals, sapient and otherwise, needed to do to thrive.

  Though, he had just eaten his own share of meat. He was a growing boy, but his survival wasn’t currently in question.

  “No,” I said, taking another bite and glaring up at him.

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  Bar tended to work his way through his siblings, claiming his tithes, never focusing too much on any one child. Before Bar, it had been another older sibling doing the same, who had since left the creche. After Bar, there would likely be another child doing the same. I had given Bar some meat last time, just to avoid the conflict, but—like most children did in the creche—I had eaten quickly at the time and hadn’t had much left. Eating slowly was a good way to get targeted.

  Sometimes, the mothers stepped in, but they were still preparing the rest of the haunch to brine. Even if they hadn’t been, they tended to let the boys wrestle it out, only stepping in if there was a serious disparity between the two.

  I was growing well, presumably thanks to my Brawn stat, and outpacing the growth of the other kids my age. Bar was older, but I was catching up on size. I wasn’t worried about winning a fight—that was a given—but rather if I could convincingly win without hurting him too badly, and not jeopardize his future growth and standing in the tribe.

  The boy growled, nostrils flaring as he bared his lower tusks at me. “Give it to me or I’ll hurt you and take it anyway.”

  I swallowed my bite, slowly, maintaining eye contact with the boy. “How about you go sit down before you embarrass yourself, Barbar.”

  The boy lunged, and I tossed my meat aside to intercept.

  With four arms, hand-to-hand combat was a bit weird. In theory, I had twice as much striking potential, but against another four-armed defender, they had twice as much blocking potential to deal with. In practice, it was quite hard to break through a solid guard with jabs or punches, and I hadn’t really done much of that. Some of my [Swordsmanship] training was generalized enough to combat that I could look for weaknesses and openings, but I wasn’t really all that good at throwing a punch. I couldn’t really risk it, anyway, with my Brawn stat.

  In any case, Bar wasn’t coming in with fists swinging. The main way young Uli fought was wrestling, and grappling the opponent's many limbs until they submit. There might be a few blows in the process, of course, but it rarely got bloody, not that it totally stopped the kids from developing internal injuries like breaks or torn ligaments.

  Bar very literally couldn’t hurt me, though, with the disparity in our stats, so I let him do his thing, learning by doing. Twelve limbs flailed between us as he positioned me into a complex lock, and when I was firmly wedged in place and had a decent idea of what he had done, I yielded. He took his won meat and wandered off, and I sat down to mentally review what he had done.

  “You should have just given it to him,” Nadi said, sidling up next to me. “Are you okay?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah,” I said, trying not to get distracted while I internalized my lesson. “Never better.”

  Over the coming weeks I continued to antagonize Bar, using the cutesy diminutive of his name, which drove him wild. Each time, he showcased another grapple, and I slowly fleshed out a sense of how it worked, trying to establish how much effort it would require on my part to do the same.

  In addition to the stat advantage, I had a minor bonus from [Ambidexterity] which helped me out. If I learned something on one hand, I could do it equally well on the other. Interestingly, that applied to both pairs of left and right hands, but it didn’t apply to my upper and lower hands. There were still certain actions and combat moves I could do better with my upper arms, which were my dominant pair, and others I could do better with my lower arms; it would require more training to see if I could gain a new skill that balanced that out.

  * * *

  Bar was growing up fast, and soon he would be leaving the creche, so before that happened, I strode up to him during a mealtime before he had finished eating.

  “Give me your meat,” I demanded.

  The older boy looked at me in surprise, then laughed. “After so many defeats, you challenge me? There must be something wrong with your Brain.” He stretched out his four arms, then brought them together before him in a doubled fist-clap. “I’m not going to go easy on you this time, Mali.”

  “Bring it,” I grunted, taking a stance, and then lunging forward.

  His upper arms moved to lock mine, and I rolled them out of his grasp while reaching with my lower ones to his waist. Bar twisted to the side, swinging his arms down together to break my grip, then lifted a knee to make distance. I spun around it, stepping to his inside, bringing both my left arms in and forcing him to respond, while reaching down with my lower right arm for his knee, then sweeping at his other leg.

  Bar hopped back, and a look of consternation crossed his face.

  I grinned, baring my tusks slightly, and stepped forward to re-engage.

  Feints and parries followed in sequence as we each tried to get the advantage and take the other to the ground, and I finally let him take me down so I could switch to focusing on my ground control. I heaved out of a hold and swung around to try and get my legs around him, batting away his arms with mine, until finally getting a leg lock around his mid-section and proceeding to pin down his arms with mine until he had no recourse but to buck helplessly or give in.

  “Arg! I yield,” Bar finally spat out.

  And the months of “training” finally paid off with my first skill of this new life.

  I released the bigger boy. Hopefully I didn’t completely ruin his reputation, but to be fair, he had brought it on himself by throwing his weight around and taking food from all his siblings.

  Standing up and leaving him rubbing his shoulders, I walked over to the piece of meat he had dropped to wrestle me and brushed the dirt off it. I didn’t really want to eat it, but leaving it for him would be even more embarrassing for the boy, so I’d take it and share it with Nadi or something.

  “Thanks for all the lessons, Barbar,” I said to my half-brother, sauntering off with my pair of prizes.