Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 38: THE SYSTEM CATCHES UP

The notification came on the walk back, not at the wall.

He was on the path behind the group with both beasts riding, Nyx on the shoulder opposite Miasma, its head against his neck.

The group of forty walked slower than they had come, looking back. He was the last person on the path. The wall was behind him. The system had said nothing at the wall, nothing while Nyx went through it, nothing while Percival made the sound, nothing while the proctor said bring it with no ledger to write it in.

It said something now.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[ BEAST CLASSIFICATION ]

Beast: Nyx (designation accepted)

Form: Shadow Pup

Affinity: Void

Tier: 1

Lineage: anomalous → D

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 0.5 Years ]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He stopped on the path.

He read it once. He read it again, slow, for what the maker had and had not put in.

Designation accepted.

He had named it Nyx four days ago, on a breath that was only for that, with its head on his hand. The system had not acknowledged the name then.

It had said Beast: unnamed. It said Nyx now. Designation accepted. The name had sat unrecorded for four days and then been written in, after, on the system’s own timing, the way the lifespan figure had trued itself in the chamber on its own timing.

The system did not accept names. He had named Miasma in a gutter. The system had taken it inside the bond-forming notification, in the same breath as the contract.

That was the system logging what a contract did. This was different. This was the system holding a name it had no reason yet to write, and writing it only once the thing did something it could resolve.

Affinity: Void. Form: Shadow Pup.

The dash was gone. Four days the affinity field had been a dash. The mark that meant the word did not apply.

It had a word now. Void. The form field had been the same dash. It had a word too. The system had not had a word for the thing. The system had filled the fields the way a man filled in a measurement after he had finally got the tool against the work.

Lineage: anomalous → D.

He stood on the path with that one for longer than the other two.

The lineage axis was the one the system was surest about. It had put F on a dying rat in the time it took to form a contract.

Anomalous had been the system declining to put a letter, telling him the thing was not the kind of thing the axes measured. Now the axis held. D. Not awarded the way Miasma’s E had been awarded by ancestral resonance.

The system had not raised Nyx from anomalous to D. The system had watched Nyx go through an unbreachable wall and had then been able to say, looking backward, what Nyx had been the whole time, which was a Shadow Pup, D-lineage, Void-affinity. It had always been.

He had read every notification for a month. This one told him a thing none of the others had. The system did not give Nyx a number. Nyx had the number. The system caught up to it.

They couldn’t read you. You went through a wall and proved the tool wrong, not yourself. You were a D the whole time.

He looked at Nyx on his shoulder.

It looked back at him. At him, the pale eyes on his face, the light still sliding off the rest of it even here in the open morning. The look that had the corner in it for three days and did not have the corner in it now.

You’re a D. They couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see it. You knew.

It put its head back against his neck.

The thing he had held down at the wall, with no one to perform to, came back up his throat. He let it.

There was still no one on the path behind him, the group ahead not looking at him, and a man got to let it come up when there was no one to hold it down.

He did not go straight back.

The group went up to the annex and dispersed. He let it.

He had a Live Combat Assessment in eleven days and a route he still walked for three copper. He had two beasts on his shoulders, one a Tier 2 Vesperian the room’s predators tracked, and one a Tier 1 Void D that went through walls, and he needed an hour with that before the day made him spend the hour on something else.

He found a low wall at the edge of the lower grounds, out of the yards, where the Academy’s drilled beasts were not worked and the path did not carry anyone.

He sat on it. He took Nyx down off his shoulder and set it on the stone beside him. Miasma came down to his knee on her own.

The three of them sat at the edge of the grounds in the late morning while he added it up.

A Void affinity. He had no taxonomy for it. The cultivation manual he had read three times had a section on every affinity the Academy recognized.

Void was not in it, the same way Venomspine Stalker had not been in it, the same way Shadow Pup was not going to be in it either, the same way the chamber had not been in the drainage report.

The Academy’s books did not have the things he kept ending up with. He had stopped expecting them to. A man who had been told zero on the array did not look to the array’s books to explain what he was holding.

A D lineage. That one he could read against the rest. Miasma was an E, raised from F by an ancestor’s heart, working toward D by a trial the world had not handed him yet.

Nyx had started at D. Resolved, not raised. The thing he had paid sixteen months and the herbalist’s father’s face for, on a thousand-to-one shell, had come out of the egg already standing on the rung Miasma was still climbing toward.

He sat with that and did not feel the way a man was supposed to feel about a win.

One in a thousand and it came up my side. A D-lineage Void Shadow Pup that goes through walls.

And half a year, a streak in my hair, and a Vane heir with eleven days and a reason.

The win and the cost sat next to each other on the low wall the way the boy’s innocence and the father’s guilt had sat next to each other on his floor. They did not resolve into one thing. He had stopped, somewhere back in the basement, trying to make the things that sat next to each other into one thing.

Miasma pressed her weight against his knee.

Nyx, on the stone, did the thing it did. Put its head down, against his thigh this time, the small real weight, the cold not coming.

He sat on the low wall at the edge of the lower grounds with a beast on his knee and a beast against his thigh and the system’s lines still in his vision.

He let the win be a win for the length of the time it took the morning to move the wall’s shadow a hand’s width across the stone, because the cost was going to be there when the hand’s width was done. The win was only going to be there if he let it be there now.

He let it be there.

A D. A Void. A Shadow Pup. Through a wall. In front of all of them.

He did not file it. Filing it would have put it in a column, and the column would have made it a fact among facts.

Not yet. It was the thing he had bought with the streak, and it had come up his side of a thousand-sided coin, and a man got to sit on a wall and have it before the day came back for it.

He looked up.

The system fired one more time.

The notification arrived as it always did: already there once he stopped moving. He read it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[ LIFESPAN CONTRACT — TRAIT UNLOCKED ]

Source: Nyx — Shadow Pup (Tier 1, lineage resolved)

Trait: SHADOW STEP

Aiden may blink three meters in any direction. Once per thirty seconds.

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 0.5 Years ]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He read it again.

A piece of the thing on his shoulder, written into him. Not a gift. The receipt for the year and a half he had paid into a grey shell on a thousand-sided coin. Three meters. Once a half-minute. The system had given him a clock for the first time, and the clock was his.

Mine.

He looked at the far end of the low wall, three meters away across the stone.

He pressed the new shape in his mind the way he had pressed Miasma’s back.

The world folded.

One step became none. Cool air brushed his face. He was standing at the far end of the wall, heart loud in his ears.

The disorientation was small but real, like missing a stair in the dark.

He blinked back. The return felt smoother.

Three meters. Once every thirty seconds.

He sat down again between the two beasts, breathing through the faint vertigo. The tool worked. The tool was his.

Then the shadow finished the hand’s width.

He stood up.

He put Nyx on the shoulder opposite Miasma. He picked up nothing because there was nothing to pick up. The kit bag was empty.

He went up the path toward the annex and the eleven days and the route that did not care, with the win folded down small where he could carry it and the cost folded next to it, both of them on him, the way he carried things now.

Behind him the low wall’s shadow kept moving on its own clock, the way the figure had, the way the egg had. None of them had ever been on his.