*Ribbit!**Ribbit!**Ribbit!**Ribbit!* *Ribbit!* *Ribbit!**Ribbit!* *Ribbit!**Ribbit!**Ribbit!**Ribbit!* *Ribbit!**Ribbit!*

The three monster frogs that Shirou had summoned hopped about on the grass, their combined voices creating a more than irritating noise as they all used the 'Taunt' skill at once.

It had been about two hours since they started, but finally, something took the bait.

An albaheron, a massive condor-like monster that was more than 7 feet tall with a 20 foot wingspan, flew down from the sky, ready to silence the frog monsters.

But right before it's dive bombing reached them, an arrow came whistling through the air, piercing its skull, knocking it off course, and leaving the creature screeching. While this somehow didn't kill it in an instant, four more arrows followed the first, quickly finishing the D-rank monster bird.

"They are becoming more scarious." Shirou mumbled as he ordered the frogs to stop their noise as he went to inspect his kill.

It had taken him his estimated month to complete his bow and make a few arrows, and by that time, November had come. Now it was April and in the last 25 weeks, Shirou had been putting the bow to use.

With the Taunt skill of the frogs, the G-rank Insect-type summons (seriously Goddess? Frogs are insects?) that he had unlocked when he became a level 2 summoner, could attract prey straight to itself.

He had managed to hunt a total of 10 horned rabbits and 63 albaherons during that time. With each horned rabbit giving +12 EXP and each albaheron giving +100 EXP, Shirou had gained 6420 EXP (plus the +10 EXP from the first horned rabbit that was shared with Krena), or enough to grow to level 4. Which had caused his max Magic Energy to increase, which helped him train his skills.


[Name] Allen/Shirou

[Age] 3

[Occupation] Summoner

[Level] 4

[Lifeforce] 35 (115)

[Magical power] 42 (140) +135

[Strength] 16 (52)

[Durability] 16 (52) +6

[Agility] 31 (103) +6

[Intelligence] 45 (150)

[Luck] 2 (8) +135

[Skill] Summon 3, Create 3, Synthesis 3, Enhance 2, Expansion 2, Delete, Swordsmanship 1, Archery 1

[EXP] 430/4000


- Skill Level

[Summon] 3

[Create] 3

[Synthesis] 3

[Enhance] 2

- Skill EXP

[Create] 412/100000

[Synthesis] 715/100000

[Enhance] 150/10000

- Create-able beasts

[Insect] FGH

[Beast] FGH

[Bird] FG

[Grass] F

- Holder

[Insect] H 0, G 3, F 0

[Beast] H 0, G 0, F 0

[Bird] G 0, F 0

[Grass] F 27


Shirou was satisfied with his progress, though he realized that if it wasn't for the fact that he required 100 times as much EXP to grow levels, he would already be level 20, instead of level 4.

Oh well. Couldn't be helped.

Shirou grabbed the body of his latest kill, used a bit of magecraft to strengthen his body, and started to long track back home.

With his maximum magic power increased by leveling and the 'Blessing' effects of his 27 'Apple' summoning cards, he had allowed himself to use some of his reserves for magecraft, even if most was still set aside for training his Summoning skills. It was more effective than decreasing the number of Blessings he was using to increase his magic power in order to increase his strength that way.

Between his level increasing and the Blessings he kept equipped, Shirou had over twenty times as much magic power as he had when he had fought that first horned rabbit. The Apple also had the ability that, when planted, it would grow into a small tree that produced an aroma that caused anyone who smelled it to recover magic power 20% faster for 24 hours, and caused other plants to grow more quickly.

It was actually a little disappointing to him just how useful all this the extra magic power was. It meant he barely ever used any of his other summons. Not that he ever wanted to summon a giant leech, but the F-rank Beast-type summons was a medium sized dog, and it would have been nice to have a family pet. But he couldn't justify taking up the slot to do so, not when it wasn't strong enough to serve any purpose in combat or out of combat.

At the moment, he only had 30 slots, 10 times his Summoner Level, and 27 of these slots were dedicated towards Grass-type summon cards to increase his magic energy, while the last 3 were used by the frogs to attract enemy attention and would be cycled in order to expend magic power for the sake of training skills.

"You're back!" Krena cheered as she saw Shirou approaching with the massive bird being dragged behind him.

"I'm back." Shirou said, patting the cheerful girl's head. "Would you help me hang this thing up?"

"Yeah!" Krena cheered.

Even if she was only 3 years old, like Shirou himself, Krena seemed to have around 24 strength. More than double that of a normal full grown adult at level 1, and more than Shirou had at base. So she was very helpful in tying the giant bird upside down from a tree so that they could start to drain its blood.

God, this thing really was big, though, from the stories that Shirou had heard, they weren't always this way.

A little more than fifty years ago, for some unknown reason, all the monsters in the world grew much stronger, which resulted in most of them doubling in size. The reason why something like a simple rabbit monster could be as strong as a full grown tiger from Shirou's previous world.

Though for Shirou, that just meant they had more meat on them. Plenty for both his and Krena's families. And they could use the improvement to their diets, especially with the babies on the way.

"I'm home." Shirou said as he entered the mud hut that was his home.

"Welcome back, sweetie." Theresia said with a smile as she stood slouched over the firepit, one hand holding her large stomach.

"Mother. I thought I told you to stay off your feet." Shirou scolded the woman, immediately grabbing a chair and moving it over to her so that she could sit down.

"Allen, I'm fine. You really shouldn't fret so much." Theresia said, though she did take the seat.

"Just let the boy pamper you if he wants to." Krena's mother, Matilda, said with a giggle. The woman looked exactly like an older version of her daughter, proving that Krena inherited solely from her mother's genes, with her bright pink hair and shining blue eyes. She was just as energetic as her daughter was, and just as abnormally strong, even without a 'talent'. She was also pregnant to the point where fieldwork was impossible, but didn't complain when Shirou told her not to do housework either.

Krena and her mother had been coming over to their place nearly every day for the last week, ever since both Theresia and Matilda's pregnancies reached the point where they could no longer do normal work.

After getting Theresia into a chair, Shirou picked up where she had left off, preparing the potatoes and working the fire. There were also a few fruits and vegetables that he spent the money he earned from hunting monsters to buy, in order to help balance out their diet.

Sighing, Theresia leaned back in her chair. "So, you caught another one today?"

"Yes. That's right." Shirou said with a nod.

Theresia had been horrified at first by her child's seemingly unlimited propensity for getting into fights with monsters. But after a few weeks of him coming home without a scratch and dragging his catches behind him, she gave up on worrying and just learned to accept it.

The food and money that Shirou was bringing in was really helping the family, even if there was a 60% tax on everything he managed to catch.

Seriously? Taxing a three year old? He supposed he should just be glad there were no poaching laws when it came to monsters.

The tax was something placed on Serfs, though even with a 60% tax, it still was less total money that a family of three Commoners would normally have to pay.

Normal Commoners had to pay 3 gold coins per adult and 1 per child under the age of 15 in order to maintain their citizenship, or else fall to the status of Serfs. Rodan and Theresia managed to make about 20 silver coins a year farming potatoes and another 1 gold coin from hunting 10 Giant Boars, before taxes.

Not enough to pay the normal tax for a single person to begin with.

With a gold coin seeming to be roughly worth 100,000 yen, the average commoner household was paying 1,200,000 yen annually. Not only was this more than you would expect for low income households, the tax seemed unreasonably high when there wasn't any health care, city maintenance costs, public education or any other public services that Shirou was aware of. Maybe all the money went to monster suppression funds for the army. Still, it was a debilitating tax in a world with no such thing as a minimum wage.

All the monsters that Shirou had hunted put together netted just 1 gold coin, after taxes, but that was still a substantial amount of money for any Serf family for just 4 months work. If he could continue this year round, with the extra meat and money he brought in, he should be able to help provide for his family… or so he thought.

"I'm surprised you managed to catch another one. I would have thought that albaheron would have migrated back north by now." Theresia said.

"...Migrate?" Shirou said in surprise.

"It's what they call it when animals don't stay in the same place year round. When Winter comes, albaheron move further south, to where it is a little warmer, then they move back north as summer approaches." Theresia explained. "It wouldn't surprise me if the albaheron you caught today was one of the last stragglers that we will see this year."

"Is that so?" Shirou said, disappointed.

Most monsters couldn't find their way past the village's walls, making albaheron one of the few monsters that Shirou could get access to. There would still be horned rabbits that sometimes slipped in, but finding them was much more inconsistent inside of the village's walls.

If this was a normal migration pattern, Shirou wouldn't be seeing any more of his prey for another six months.

Six months… What was he supposed to do to keep himself occupied for six months?


That night, after Shirou was fairly sure that Rodan and Theresia were asleep, he got up out of bed and left the house.

With his time hunting coming to an end for the Spring and Summer, he needed to find something else he could do to pass the time, as simply sitting around as a baby was unbearable, and not something he wanted to return to.

There would always be training his summoner skills, but that took about ten minutes out of every five hours. Not exactly something that fills the day, and it didn't earn any money to help out the people around him.

So, he decided on a few activities that could keep him busy, and prepared to create the infrastructure in order to allow him to do them while no one was looking. Would it be suspicious? Yes, but Shirou was beyond caring about being abnormal at this point. He was already a three-year-old who periodically hunted D-rank monsters for food and pocket money.

First, he used Structural Analysis to find a good spot in his family's backyard, where there would be an underground water reservoir, before going into his spellbook, deleting the three frogs and summoning three moles in their place.

The G-rank Beast-type monsters were rather large moles, the size of an especially fat housecat, and could dig a fair bit faster than normal moles.

"Alright, you guys start digging right here, and put all the soil you dig up over there." Shirou instructed them, and the moles happily got to work, digging up massive amounts of dirt.

While they were doing this, Shirou went through the unearthed soil himself, using basic alchemy in order to separate out the clay from the rest of the dirt, which he then used to make bricks.

Hours passed and as his current magic power dipped, he exchanged the Grass-type summons that were increasing his max magic power for more moles to speed up the digging.

At what Shirou would guess was two in the morning, the well had been dug out, five feet across and over twenty feet deep.

Shirou then instructed the moles to loosen the soil around one half of the backyard, which Shirou was planning on turning into a garden. He had more than a few seeds from the fruits and vegetables that he had purchased and having his own garden produce would be a nice subsidy for the family diet.

Meanwhile, he had created enough clay bricks to construct his own large furnace.

With his Unlimited Blade Works, becoming a blacksmith felt like a natural choice. And while that would require him to buy specialized tools to get started, he could make use of the furnace to make pottery and to cook until he had everything he needed for blacksmithing.

By the time morning came, Shirou had finished his brick furnace and was planting seeds in his new garden when Rodan and Theresia finally woke up.

"Allen, wh...what have you been doing?" Theresia said in shock as she looked down at her mud covered son and her completely transformed backyard.

"...Gardening?"


Got an email from the professor telling me I was only supposed to do 1/4 of the questions across all the homeworks, not the whole thing...

Damn I'm good!

Though I could have spent an entire 4 less hours on that class. That is 4 hours of my life I could have been sleeping or staring off into space. (Just so you know, I do research in the field that the class was covering. I knew my shit going into it.)