Bunny Girl Evolution [A Monster Evolution LitRPG]

81 – Fey Curses

It was the first time she had used the divine aether since her most recent evolution, and it seemed that her now four-digit Charisma affected even that. She felt that she had finer control than before, even when just using {Suggest}. With a simple thought, she froze all the monkey’s in their tracks, bringing a pleasant silence to her surroundings. She thought for a moment about what exactly she could test before settling on her newest tactic: emotional {Suggest}.

Fear! she sent to one of the monkeys.

[ You have slain Greater Giant Fanged Macaque, lvl 8 ]

Her eyes widened as the monkey’s lifeless corpse fell to the ground. Her ordinary sensation of fear had been amplified by the divine aether to the point that it gave the monkey a heart attack. 

This is dangerous, she thought.

A few seconds later, she did it again. 

[ You have slain Greater Giant Fanged Macaque, lvl 14 ]

Would this work on the warg?

Clearly, the divine power was making her skill so powerful that the monkeys simply dropped dead, but she wasn’t sure if that would be universal, or if it was just because the monkeys were weak or something like that. Maybe they just had really low Willpower, and something more powerful would be able to resist it better. Or maybe she really did just have an instant kill ability while using divine aether.

Either way, she didn’t have much time left with it, so she set her thoughts aside and moved on to the next skill she needed to test: {Fairy Dust}. She had only tested its healing capabilities before, and that wasn’t even one of the skill’s main functions. 

System, tell me what exactly it means when it says “blesses” and “curses” in the description for {Fairy Dust}, she commanded.

“I’m sorry, but we’ve recently detected a data breach from your local version of the System. Please hang tight while we work to resolve this.”

“...Oops,” she said aloud.

She had been so glad to get answers that she never considered the possibility that the System wouldn’t take kindly to being forced to give them. She worried for a few seconds whether she would get in trouble for what she did, but with no way to get answers, she had to stop. 

She turned back to the still monkeys and then flew above one of them. First, she tried the default use of reducing stats.

[ Greater Giant Fanged Macaque has been afflicted with {Cursed Fairy Dust}! The target’s stats will be reduced by 99.93% for the next thirty seconds ]

The monkey’s body went limp as all its stats were reduced to less than 1, and it fell forward. With less than 1 in Fortitude, its body wasn’t even strong enough to even handle a collision with a small branch, and it died before it even hit the ground.

This is overpowered.

Next, she tried a similar stat debuff, but when she released the dust, she thought about reducing its stats for as long as possible, rather than by as much as possible.

[ Greater Giant Fanged Macaque has been afflicted with {Cursed Fairy Dust}! The target’s stats will be reduced by 50% for the next 1056 days ]

The monkey seemed to deflate, its muscles seemingly no longer able to flex as hard, and it wobbled slightly on its perch, but didn’t fall. Elise was once again amazed at the sheer scale of the curse. It would be weakened for almost a full three years. Assuming, of course, that the curse didn’t weaken once she no longer had the divine aether. She left that monkey where it was so that she could see what happened to it after {Rune of Fate} wore off and moved on to the next one. 

Now, it was time for the more interesting things. Clearly, her ability to bless and curse did not work only in temporary stat changes. With the dwarves, she had been able to lengthen their beards. Back on Earth, she had read enough fantasy to know that fey magic was varied, and often nonsensical. Could she steal the monkeys’ names? That seemed more in the realm of {Fey Bargaining}. Maybe with the divine power, she could steal names. Maybe she could even do it without. She had no idea what she would do with something else’s name, but she wanted to test it. Too bad the monkeys weren’t smart enough. Unless…

On the next monkey, she dropped more {Fairy Dust}, but this time, with a blessing, and she focused hard on trying to make the blessing about making it more intelligent. 

[ Greater Giant Fanged Macaque has been afflicted with {Blessed Fairy Dust}! The target’s Intelligence has increased by 50 ]

This one left Elise legitimately dumbfounded. She could increase stats?? She could just sprinkle a little dust on something, and give it a permanent stat increase? There was no time limit associated with that one, so it must have been a permanent increase then. And if she could permanently increase others’ stats, did that mean she could permanently increase her own as well? 

She immediately tried dropping the dust from her wings on herself with a Fortitude buff in mind, but for some reason, the skill refused to cooperate. The dust clung to her wings like they were made of glue, refusing to fall on her. She tried harder, frustrated. She had a gut feeling that whatever was stopping her had nothing to do with the System, but rather with the one whose aether she was using. 

Titania can I please increase my Fortitude? she thought.

There was no response.

Can you at least tell me why in a dream later?

There was no response to that either, but she still hoped that her request was at least heard. With that, she turned her attention back to the now-smarter monkey. It actually wasn’t much smarter, since Intelligence affected memory and speed of perception more than anything else, but she hoped it would at least be something. She dropped more dust on it, this time thinking of letting it learn how to speak Fey like Emilia had done for her before, but she was met with disappointment.

[ Error. The target does not meet the requirements to receive this blessing. ]

It must have been because the monkey wasn’t sapient. It might have gotten a higher Intelligence, but it was nowhere near powerful enough to earn that. She frowned as well as she could with her rabbit mouth, then left it to move onto the next one. 

This time, she tried a physical alteration. She wasn’t entirely sure how that would work, but she had been able to make the dwarves’ beards grow. Why not more with the divine aether?

She first tried to simply lengthen its fur, and that worked magnificently. From a relatively ordinary-looking monkey, it turned into what looked like a giant puffball. It’s face was still mostly visible, but its limbs were completely hidden under the thick fur with only its long tail poking out the back. The System message told her that she had successfully applied the “blessing” but at that level, it seemed more like a curse.

Either way, that had been a success, so she went further with the next one. This time, she thought about making its tail longer. To her surprise, not only did that work, it made the tail more than double in length. It had already been as long as the monkey was tall, but now it hung down a full ten feet below the branch, getting tangled in the leaves of the branch below it. 

She followed that up by cursing it with a short tail, and the tail shrunk back to less than half the size it had been originally. Next, she shortened its fur, and the fur receded back until it looked like someone had given it a buzz cut, and its pale skin was visible in between the follicles. She tried “no hair” and “no tail” next, and while the “no hair” curse did make the hair fall out, the “no tail” one simply shortened the tail to a stub, and when she tried to re-apply to get rid of it entirely, nothing happened.

I bet I could get rid of it fully with {Fey Bargaining}.

She could sense that her time with the divine aether was running short, so she then moved on to the last set of blessing and curse tests, which was more vague and with less obvious results. She cursed one with hunger, and one with blindness, and blessed another with improved vision and a fourth with more robust leg muscles. The second and fourth had visible effects, with the blind monkey’s eyes turning cloudy and the other’s legs getting thicker. 

The other two, she would have to see once the divine aether wore off, which she could feel would be in just a couple seconds. With the last of it, she tested the opposite of the stat blessing she had done on the earlier one, reducing its Strength by 50. With that, the divine aether left her, and the monkeys which had been frozen by her periodic uses of {Suggest} were freed and, as usual, leapt to attack her.

The fight went much the same as all her other fights, with only minor differences caused by her experimentation. The “smarter” monkey leapt for her just as it normally would have, and she blocked it with {Suggest} just as she normally would. It reacted a bit more quickly than usual, but still not quickly enough to avoid the {Magic Missile}.

The blind monkey located her by smell, apparently, and then made its own leap at her. It was way off, and she didn’t even need to dodge it. It missed every branch on its way down and died when it hit the ground. The weakened monkey tried jumping at her, but didn’t seem to realize how weak it was, and it fell short, also crashing to the ground and dying. The strong-legged monkey was a little bit faster than usual as it leapt at her, but nothing she couldn’t handle. The one with better vision was not noticeably different. 

The monkey she had cursed with hunger surprised her by leaping for one of its uncursed brethren and taking a bite out of its shoulder. A violent melee ensued where each ended up battered and bloody. Elise didn’t get to them until she had finished dealing with the others, but when she got there, the hungry one was gnawing on the uncursed one’s severed arm. Elise put both out of their misery with a {Magic Missile} to the head.

She didn’t gain any levels from the battle, but she did gain the satisfaction of knowledge. In the past fifteen minutes since activating {Rune of Fate}, she felt like she had learned more about her skills than she had in all the time since coming to this world. The description of {Rune of Fate} seemed almost complete, and she understood the limits of her blessings and curses much better. She had learned about the existence of aether, and tied it to her existing knowledge and theories to create what she felt was a solid basic understanding of the mysterious energy. 

She looked down at the carnage below, her eyes ultimately settling on the bald, nearly tailless monkey. Her satisfaction slowly gave way to horror as she thought further about what she had just done. 

I’m a monster.

Sure, the monkeys were violent monsters that didn’t hesitate to try to kill her on sight, but wasn’t what she had just done worse? She had used her power to force them to remain still as she performed unethical experiments on them. 

Not unethical, she tried to tell herself. Necessary. I needed to know these things.

She hovered in the air almost completely still as she mentally wrestled with herself. It definitely was essential knowledge. She couldn’t keep going around without understanding the full capabilities of her skills. And she would have killed the monkeys anyway. She didn’t really even hurt most of them. Probably. She doubted the hunger curse felt pleasant, but she did need to know if she could actually do that.

Besides, was it really that much different than what she would have been doing back on Earth? Her goal was a job in the medical field. If she didn’t end up working in a hospital, she might instead have been developing drugs in a laboratory and testing them on animals. Was that wrong too? No, it was necessary. Using humans as test subjects for questionable things? That was bad. Animals? As long as she wasn’t being unnecessarily cruel, it was good. It might even let her save lives in the future.

But it still felt wrong.

Why? she asked herself. Why does it feel wrong?

She tried for a few minutes to come up with an answer, but drew a blank. She had no idea why it felt wrong. Just a gut feeling.

I’m just not used to it, she thought. As long as I don’t get all weird and sadistic about it, I’ll be fine.

She wasn’t quite certain of that answer, but it was the best she had. Logically, she couldn’t see a reason why what she had done was wrong. She would need to do more testing in the future as well. She had found out what divinely powerful could allow her to do, but beyond her basic healing, she didn’t have a baseline for how much more powerful it was than what she could normally do. If she wanted to be fully prepared for the rescue mission, she needed to fully understand what she could do, and that meant more experimentation. It was just something she would have to live with. The feeling of wrongness would fade over time.

With that thought, she turned back toward the outer areas of the jungle. The Greater Giant Fanged Macaques gave her more experience, but the normal variants would be much more useful for testing, since they were slow enough that she would actually be able to apply {Fairy Dust} without risking her life. 

She flew out, dodging around a few groups of the stronger monsters until she finally found what she was looking for, then, after taking a deep breath to steel herself, she flew in, wings at the ready.

***

Hans was deep in the Jungle, closer to the Blood Syndicate’s headquarters than to the outside. He was well beyond where the others could reach him, but with his speed, getting back before nightfall would still be simple. 

This far in, the ordinary versions of the regular monsters were gone entirely, leaving only variants and variants of variants. A few days prior, he would have been hesitant to go in so deep, but now, he had no worries. The small rabbit who had seemed so weak proved to be much tougher than he initially thought, and no longer held any doubts about her ability to survive on her own.

It was actually a bit frightening how quickly she had progressed, both in skill, and in mentality. In their first encounter, she had been too nervous to fight a group of weak monsters a tier below herself. By the end of that day, she was diving in without hesitation. By the end of the next day, she was starting to get bored of even the Greater variants. 

Initially she had struck him as an upjumped house pet, and he wondered how she had even made it to fourth tier, but after a few days with her, he understood. She was not a house pet. She never had been. She had simply told herself she was for so long that she started to believe it. Deep down, she was just as ruthless and ambitious as any other fey. Of course, he couldn’t tell her that, but he had been trying to subtly steer her thought process in that direction. It would be such a waste of talent if she never managed to break out of her shell.

It will be dangerous though. 

She was not at the level where she could be a threat to him… yet. At a full three tiers below, she would have had to be a dragon in disguise for that to be the case. However, after another evolution? Hans wasn’t so sure. Her Charisma was abnormally high, even for a Legendary species, and even more abnormal was her seemingly endless ability to use Charisma-based skills. He doubted she would be stronger than him once she reached the fifth tier, but he would no longer be absolutely confident in his ability to defeat her.

Of course, it would never come to that. They were allies, and he didn’t see any reason for that to change. Still, he was glad that she was on his side, and not working for the Blood Syndicate. Even without evolving again, another few weeks of practice and training would turn her into a force to be reckoned with in a group battle.

He turned his thoughts away from his new pupil as he heard the sound of monkeys screeching ahead of him. There were over thirty, and while they were all sixth tier, their sheer numbers would at least let him get some good practice in, and keep himself from getting rusty.

The battle that ensued was drawn out a bit more than it needed to be, but Hans wanted to make sure he worked all his skills. He flickered his wings on and off and formed small mana platforms to push off of as he weaved through the crowd of angry monkeys, making it through the entire group without a single feather being touched. He repeated this a few times, then coated his hands in incredibly sharp mana and did it again, this time slashing as he went.

A dozen unfortunate monkeys lost fingers, hands, and even entire arms to his first onslaught, a dozen more to his second, and by the fourth, none were left uninjured. 

None of them were even close to fast enough to match his speed, but there were a few Greater Giant Fanged Macaque Blinkers which could teleport short distances to try to cut him off. That kept the battle interesting, forcing Hans to make quick directional changes to avoid crashing into them head-on. He was definitely stronger than they were, but he also definitely had lower Fortitude, so a mistake could be deadly. 

The monkeys tried their best, but they still never managed to hit him even once, and after a few minutes, when they were all bloody and starting to slow down, Hans decided it was time for his finishing his move. He dove into the center of the group, then flew straight up, spinning around rapidly. Cursed feathers flew out in all directions, momentarily freezing the monkeys in their tracks. That moment was all he needed. In less than five seconds, he slit the throats of every single one, and they all fell to the ground, dead.

No, not all of them. He didn’t see any remaining monkeys, but he did sense something else watching him. No, someone. He waited a few seconds to see if they would approach, but instead, they retreated. 

Hans couldn’t allow that. Anyone this deep in the Jungle was either a powerful monster hunter, or a scout for the Blood Syndicate. He placed his bets on the latter.

Very few people in the world could successfully escape from Hans, and this person was not one of them. It wasn’t even ten seconds before he caught up to them. It was a blond woman in a simple red dress, and while her Agility was quite high, it was nothing compared to his own. He shot past her and turned around with his arms crossed, trying to look intimidating. The intimidation effect didn’t last long, as it was ruined by his expression of surprise and confusion when he saw who it was.

“Maia?”