Monster Girl Uprising

The next month was painfully uneventful. There wasn’t even an immediate threat to worry about, leaving the dread over the upcoming conflict time to truly settle in. The lack of threats didn’t mean that Maia was idle, though; Alexis, Galiena, Lily, and Minerva kept her plenty busy. On the boat ride back to near the place where Alexis’s soldiers were holed up, Galiena, Lily, and Minerva spent a significant amount of time giving Maia as best an education as they could.

As someone fated to be the leader of the monsters, Galiena said that it would behoove Maia to know as much as possible so she could more effectively weigh in on issues that came up. And Maia had never received any sort of formal education, so there was a lot of ground they had to cover in a short time.

Maia had been surprised at how…simple it was. Yes, at first it was material for noble children, but even after she got past that, it seemed she progressed faster than most. Once she understood the basic concepts, she was able to quickly grasp its applications, and she ate through the material provided to her at a rapid pace. So rapid, in fact, that Minerva apparently couldn’t help but say something about it.

“Are you sure the goddesses didn’t give you any information or anything when they transformed you?” She had asked.

“Well, I didn’t feel anything like that, but I suppose it could have happened.” Maia replied. “I don’t know.”

“It is highly unlikely.” Galiena said. “It did not happen to Queen Maia the First, and it would be an odd use of their power at this stage of our conquest. That power would be far better spent increasing our combat strength so we do not fold immediately.”

Minerva sighed. “I suppose Maia is just an unprecedented genius, then. I certainly wish I was this fast at learning…I mean, she knew nothing about this a few weeks ago, and she’s already getting pretty competent.”

“Is it that much of a surprise?” Lily asked. “Maia has to be exceptional to be the goddesses’ champion, so I think it would be more of a surprise if she was average. And do remember that as part of the lucky few to be educated, our worlds are relatively small. People aren’t stupid just because they aren’t wealthy enough to learn, and in my ministering, I’ve met many people who I am confident would run circles around most nobles intellectually, were they given the education to do so.”

Minerva hesitated. “Then why aren’t they ruling?” She asked. “Isn’t it because the nobles are smarter and stronger that they were put in charge?”

“Absolutely not.” Galiena said. “That is a classic line of reasoning many nobles use to rationalize their positions as being something other than being lucky at birth. In my experience, the vast majority of nobles are far less suited to their position than even many village leaders. The village leaders are usually chosen by experience or skill, and nobles are effectively chosen by chance.”

“Then why are nobles usually more physically capable than peasants?” Minerva asked. “you can’t deny that.”

“I cannot, but it has little to do with birth and everything to do with upbringing.” Galiena said. “If someone is starved while growing, they grow smaller and weaker than someone who was adequately fed. Furthermore, nobles often have better opportunities to defeat monsters and absorb Mana. It is a self-perpetuating cycle unconsciously used to keep nobility in power.

“Fortunately, transformation into a monster girl rectifies any nutritional deficiencies one had while growing, so I think you will find that suddenly many peasants will be more physically capable than nobles. The jobs they will go back to are often more physically demanding than what nobility are used to, and they will retain the musculature given to them by the transformation better.”

“But…” Minerva said weakly, “why does what someone ate ten years ago affect how strong they are now? That doesn’t make sense.”

“The years during childhood are the most important for growth. They form the foundation for how the body will be in adulthood, and the body simply does not grow as well after puberty ends. At least, that is what we had concluded, given the evidence we saw in our own populations.”

“Monster girls might just grow differently though, right?” Maia asked.

“That is what we had assumed at first, but the disparity between those who were transformed and those who grew as monster girls while underfed was impossible to ignore.” Galiena said. “The goddesses agree with this assessment, from what I understand.”

“I…need to go think.” Minerva said, standing up. “Sorry, this is throwing a lot of things I’ve been taught into question and I need to re-examine things.”

“Please do.” Galiena said. “Remember, no group of people is intrinsically better than others. The goddesses created us as equals, and it is only artificial divisions that change that.”

That conversation had been the one that Maia had the most vivid memory of during the entire boat ride. She hadn’t been aware that nobles claimed some sort of right to rule, or that it was anything other than a coincidence of birth, and Minerva’s clear distress over it had made it all the more memorable.

In all honesty, she hadn’t thought about nobles all that much before; her village had been so isolated that they were a distant thing. They only really mattered in the rare occasions that the country collected taxes, and otherwise the village just governed itself. She had heard that they were annoying and often overbearing, but it had never mattered to her so she hadn’t paid them much mind.

And then the two groups had parted ways, and Maia’s daily routine changed once again. Lessons in math, science, history, and politics were exchanged for lessons in strategy, tactics, and hands-on combat. And, while strategy was something Maia wasn’t accustomed to, she was surprised to find that tactics weren’t as foreign as she thought they’d be.

On a small scale, tactics were little different from her hunts. Both essentially boiled down to correctly identifying the opponent’s weaknesses and how best to exploit them. And that was something she had quickly grown accustomed to; in most places, hunters could get used to their prey’s behavior over years of hunting that species, but Maia rarely had the luxury of hunting something she was intimately familiar with.

The Deepwood’s inhabitants were ever-shifting and had an incredible variety in both form and function. As such, Maia had quickly learned to identify broad “categories” of creatures, and military units were simply an extension of that. She could think of mages as a monster with natural magic, cavalry as swift predators, infantry as those with particularly fierce claws or fangs, and so on.

Then, just as she would assess a monster’s strength in each of those areas, she could assess a unit of troops the same way, and formulate a plan. The only issue was scaling up to account for Maia’s troops; Maia had not hunted with a partner in quite some time, and though it was easy to add a few extra people into the mix, once the number began to get higher than twenty or so she struggled.

Even so, at first Alexis had been nearly as shocked at Maia’s proficiency with tactics as Minerva had been with Maia’s unexpectedly swift academic progress, but once Maia explained her thought process and experience to her, Alexis’s surprise had changed to respect. “I don’t think I truly realized how different the Deepwood is.” She had admitted. “I had known it was a dangerous place in theory, but the stories had always been…well, stories.”

“Lots of people don’t.” Maia said, shrugging. “Amy always told us about expeditions that went into the Deepwood whenever they happened, and the fact that people were sending expeditions at all told me they didn’t get it.”

“Surely they must have tried to hire people like you as guides, right?” Alexis asked. “That seems the most obvious step to take.”

“Often.” Maia replied. “No one ever took them up on it. Or, at least, no one with actual significant experience with the Deepwood ever did, maybe there were some people who claimed knowledge who tried it. Anyone competent enough to be a guide would know that taking a large group of people who are unfamiliar with the Deepwood through it is courting death.

“You get blamed for the inevitable heavy losses the Deepwood will inflict on the unit, die a normal death inside, or get targeted by the Deepwood for being the guide and die that way. Whatever the option, your chances of making it out unscathed are abysmal. Plus, at least in our village, there’s not too much those nobles could really offer us; money, sure, but we mostly bartered between ourselves and used any money we chanced across to buy stuff from Amy.”

“You could probably have made an incredible living teaching people how to fight monsters.” Alexis said. “Or telling stories about the Deepwood. Some academics I know would kill to get their hands on the sort of stuff that must be in your head.”

Maia raised an eyebrow. “Would they have listened? I’m just some random peasant from a village; they would sooner write me off as lying or imagining things than they would learn from me.”

“Probably not.” Alexis admitted. “A shame, too. To think, if not for all this, you would probably have spent your whole life outside of public view…Miral was sitting on a brilliant commander to-be and they just didn’t know it.”

Maia blushed embarrassedly. “I don’t know if I would go that far…”

“I would.” Alexis replied firmly. “Now, come on, let’s go get to axe training, shall we?”

The combat training that Alexis gave was comprehensive, covering everything from sword combat to fighting as part of a unit, and Maia excelled in this area as well. Alexis was a fantastic teacher, and Maia had been forced to become flexible in how she fought in order to contend with the Deepwood’s inhabitants.

And, finally, strategy training was slower going than any of her other studies, but she made progress nonetheless. She had initially been down about how much worse she seemed at it than everything else, but Alexis had assured her that she was learning at a more or less normal pace. In fact, Alexis was impressed that she was keeping up as well as she was, given that she didn’t have a lot of the background knowledge most students normally had.

As for people, Alexis’s soldiers were more than happy to welcome Maia as one of their own, acting as sparring partners during the day and sharing their stories with her over meals. Anya and the two witches who were broken had gone with the group going to the fortress, and while the two witches showed significant improvement, Anya hadn’t. Even after a month she had only reached the level of eating and drinking without being ordered to do so, and the other witches had started doing that after a couple of days.

The therapy process was…unique. It was a mix of both magic and social interaction, using a highly specific blend of light, dark, and healing magic to attempt to undo the destruction that had been wrought upon the mind and then going out and doing everyday things in an attempt to get the people to feel again.

The spells were ones that Galiena had known how to cast without tomes, and she had taken a couple of evenings to teach Maia how to cast it herself. It was far more difficult to learn without the aid of a tome, and the goddesses’ strengthening of Maia was the only reason it was even possible for her, but Maia eventually got it down.

Fortunately, one of the witches that they had saved had been the unit’s tome scribe, and once Galiena had taught Maia the spell, she got to work teaching the scribe so she could make copies for individual use. And, after a few days in the fortress, she had produced a working tome and Maia no longer had to personally handle the magic every time.

The outings were difficult too, but in a different way. Maia had expected them to be mostly positive experiences, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, they had started with things that practically felt like abuse; they would use dark magic to heighten the woman’s emotions and then berate her or occasionally even physically injure her.

As Galiena had explained, it was much, much easier to induce intense negative emotions than it was to induce intense positive emotions, and getting them to feel anything at all was the first step in the healing process. She had likened it to excising rotten flesh so that healing magic could regrow new flesh, and Maia supposed there was some truth to that.

Even with heightened emotions, it had taken a lot to get a reaction out of the women. Then, once they had gotten their reaction, they change course, hit her with a light spell that was meant to provide comfort, and encourage her. They would apologize and tell her that it was okay to feel those feelings, that she was right to do so and that she should keep doing it in the future, and if they had hurt her at all, they would heal her.

Most importantly of all, they stressed both before and after sessions that if the woman wanted it to stop, all she had to do was say so. And, the moment the woman said stop, they would, and shower her with praises for it. Once the woman had showed any emotion at all or a few days had passed without any sign of improvement, they would switch things up and go do what Maia had expected them to do from the start.

They would have the woman try various activities, eat a bunch of different types of food, play her music…basically anything to try and get a reaction. And, if she ever said she liked or disliked something, they would either stop doing that thing or add more of it into the routine. It was slow work and often unpleasant work, but seeing the progress of the women was undeniably fulfilling.

After a month and a half, the other group had found its way to the fortress. Maia had been relieved to see that the villagers and soldiers hadn’t suffered any casualties while they had been living in the Deepwood, but there wasn’t much time for reunions. Once everyone was back, they left most of the villagers and a small contingent of guards, then took the rest and headed west. It was time to confront Minerva’s parents.