I ran past the bud farm, where squirrels were growing rations for the war effort, and the medical area, where other squirrels helped restore front line combatants who didn’t have enough Love to heal themselves.“Cheokit!” a voice called, and I caught sight of a squirrel waving me down. I turned in that direction and trotted over.Like most of the squirrels I had come to know since going through my training and joining the war effort, he had exclusively functional transformations. No cultural embellishments, and no patagia, since at this height, falling from the tree meant a squirrel was almost always doomed to the miasma. Instead, he was growing basic crystal armor to protect his vitals. Battle damage could be healed, but only if a squirrel survived.My patagia and antler shards spoke of my history from higher up on the tree, but my own armor had come a long way as well. I probably could have been fully protected in mere days after joining up, but that would have made me a bit too much of an outlier. Instead, I bled off some of my daily Love with [Metatransmutation] and grew my armor day by day like any other squirrel, though still slightly faster than rank novices, since I had leveled up [Transformative Growth] and would have already increased my Love stat from years of growing the things which made me stand out among my peers in training.The squirrel who called me over, Kukeoti, was one such peer. At first, being an older female in training, the young male had been dismissive of me, but when I easily beat down every squirrel in my training unit, he and some of the other new recruits came to look up to me.Training had largely been a way for the squirrels to gain a handful of stat points in Form, enough to actually have an effect in combat rather than just be sacrificial lambs sent to slaughter. The recruits were pushed quite hard, because squirrel lifespans weren’t long enough to take a slow and steady path to strength, and training (...)