Overlord Tamer: All My Pet Monsters Have God Potential

Chapter 217: Taming Them To Equals

The eighth terrace opened into something closer to a jungle than a crater floor, canopy so dense that daylight came down in broken shafts, and the ambient energy here was thick enough that John could taste it on the back of his tongue.

"Slower pace from here," John said, dropping down from Pymon’s back. "We’re not hunting anymore. We’re asking."

"Asking things the size of houses to be our friends," Yuna said. "Sure. Normal Tuesday."

"It’s worked before," John said, grinning.

’Brother John,’ Chuthulos said, his voice threading quietly into John’s mind as they walked. ’A word of caution, since you’re about to start negotiating instead of fighting. Everything past Calamity-rank isn’t just strong. It’s sapient. Fully. They think, they reason, they remember, and every single one of them has watched their own kind get chained by people who called it taming.’

’So they hate us.’

’Some do. Most, honestly, would be entitled to.’ Chuthulos’s tone stayed level, careful. ’But intelligence cuts both ways, brother John. A mind sharp enough to hate an entire species on principle is also sharp enough to recognize when one member of that species doesn’t fit the pattern. Don’t expect trust. Expect judgment. There’s a difference.’

John absorbed that in silence for a moment, then nodded once, more to himself than to Chuthulos.

’Judgment I can work with.’

They spent that first day tracking rather than fighting, following claw marks and broken foliage and the occasional flare of Soul Energy too controlled to belong to something feral. Late in the afternoon, Terravax froze mid-step again, the same stillness he’d used to find the Marrowvein.

Ahead, half-hidden behind a fall of luminous vines, stood a beast with crystalline plating fused into its fur, built like a great cat but standing with a stillness no ordinary predator bothered with, eyes tracking every one of them with open, calculating awareness.

[Rank: Calamity-3.]

’Another chain-bearer,’ the cat’s voice slid into John’s mind, unhurried, edged with a wariness sharpened by long practice. ’Or does this one intend to ask first and take offense later, once the asking proves inconvenient?’

John held very still, more caught off guard by the fluency than by the intrusion itself.

’No chains,’ he thought back, letting the bond carry the words. ’Not now, not later. You don’t owe me anything for existing near me.’

The cat’s tail flicked once, unreadable.

’Pretty words travel faster than proof,’ it said. ’Every Dranvok mouth that’s found me first has offered something remarkably similar.’

’I’m not Dranvok.’

’No,’ it agreed, studying him with an intelligence that felt entirely unhurried, entirely its own. ’You’re something else. I haven’t decided yet whether that’s better.’

A scream tore through the canopy from somewhere north, high and raw and unmistakably in pain.

The cat’s ears flattened, and something like grim recognition passed behind its eyes.

’That scream is not mine to explain,’ it said, already retreating into the underbrush. ’But how you answer it will tell me more than anything you’ve said to me so far.’

Then it was gone.

"That wasn’t a monster’s roar," Jibril said, already turning toward the sound. "That was someone hurting something on purpose."

John’s face went hard.

"Move," he said, and Pymon was already dropping from the canopy to scoop them up before the word finished leaving his mouth.

They found it in a clearing scorched black at the edges, three figures in dark, chain-worked armor standing over something enormous and pinned, a beast with wings like folded storm clouds, its body wrapped in glowing restraint-chains that hissed and bit deeper every time it strained.

"Keep it down," one of the armored figures barked, driving a rune-etched spike into the creature’s shoulder. "Will breaks faster when the body’s already broken."

The beast didn’t beg. Even mid-scream, its voice cut through the bond-sense sharp with fury rather than pleading.

’Break my body as much as you please,’ it snarled into all their minds at once, loud enough that even John flinched at the edges of it. ’My name will never be yours to write in your ledgers.’

"Dranvok," Azelis said, voice flat with disgust. "Beast-breakers."

"Yeah," John said, and something in his tone made even Alfred’s hackles rise beside him. "We stop them. Remember?"

He didn’t wait for confirmation. He was already moving.

The nearest beast-breaker turned at the sound of displaced air just in time to see John’s Feralsteel claws close around the spike before it could drive deeper, black starlight crawling up his arm as Voidspace folded the weapon out of existence entirely.

"Who the fuck," the man started, and never finished, because Alfred hit him from the side with the full weight of a Ruinmaw Tyrant’s charge and put him straight through a tree.

The second breaker spun toward Jibril, who was already three steps into a sprint, Razewater condensing into a whip-thin blade around her fist as Tidereign screamed overhead and dove.

"Rune of Calamitous Whips," Jibril snapped, slamming her palm flat against the scorched earth, and ten water-whips erupted from the ground in a fifty-meter radius, one of them catching the breaker across the chest hard enough to fold him in half.

The third turned to run, and found Azelis already there, Shadow Ink pouring off her fingers in tendrils that wrapped his legs and yanked him flat to the ground while Volkia’s plated wings clipped the air above him in warning.

"Don’t," Azelis said, voice cold enough to match the shadows binding him. "Give me a reason. I’m having a bad week."

The fight, if it could even be called that, lasted less than a minute.

The chains took longer to deal with than the men had. Levi’s void-threads worked into the restraint-runes one by one, carefully unpicking the lattice without triggering the punishment-loop woven into every link, while Terravax stood close enough for the trembling beast to feel something solid and unthreatening beside it.

When the last chain fell away, the beast didn’t attack. It didn’t flee either. It only lay there, wings torn and body scarred, breathing in shallow, ragged pulls, watching all of them with an exhaustion too deep for fear, but not too deep for thought.

’Free,’ it said finally, the word thick with something between disbelief and contempt, projected to all of them at once. ’Your people use that word so often it’s lost all its weight. Free until I’ve healed enough to be worth chaining again. Free until it becomes inconvenient.’

"I understand why you’d think that," John said, kneeling just outside its reach, hands open and empty. "I can’t prove it isn’t true with words. Only with what happens after this."

’Then let it happen without an audience,’ the beast said. ’I don’t perform gratitude for spectators, human.’

John nodded once and stood, waving the others back several respectful paces.

Selenroot’s healing tendrils extended from Monster Paradise’s edge, offered rather than pressed, and the beast eyed them for a long moment before allowing them to touch its ruined wing, saying nothing more.

It took three days before the beast, who called herself Vaelirash when she finally deigned to share it, spoke to any of them at length again.

She spent most of that time watching, John noticed. Not resting so much as observing, cataloguing who came near and why, who stayed and who left, filing every one of them into whatever ledger she was keeping in that sharp, patient mind.

Jibril was the one who kept returning. Not to speak, mostly, just to sit a respectful distance away, mending gear or humming half-remembered songs her mother used to cook to, offering nothing and asking for nothing in return.

On the third evening, Vaelirash finally spoke first.

’You keep coming back,’ she said. ’Most of your kind only returns when it wants something.’

"I don’t want anything from you," Jibril said, not looking up from the sleeve she was mending. "I just didn’t think you should be alone while you healed. I know what that’s like, a little."

’Do you.’ It wasn’t quite a question. ’Explain, then, since you seem intent on staying regardless of my answer.’

So Jibril told her, plainly and without dressing it up, about parents who’d been murdered for standing between her and men who wanted to use her, about a stranger who’d become a brother in every way that mattered, about a family stitched together out of people and monsters who’d all been broken by someone before finding each other.

Vaelirash listened without interrupting, and when Jibril finished, she was quiet for a long moment.

’My kind remembers every one of yours who ever wore a chain like a gift,’ she said finally. ’It would be simple to hate all of you for it. Simple, and also foolish, since judging an entire people by its worst members is precisely the kind of thinking that put chains on me in the first place.’

’So I watch. I judge one creature at a time, slowly, and I have found it is usually the more accurate method, even if it costs me the comfort of easy hatred.’

"That sounds exhausting," Jibril said quietly.

’It is,’ Vaelirash agreed. ’I am very tired of it. I would not mind, I think, being tired of it somewhere that felt less like waiting for the next chain.’

On the fourth morning, she lowered her head to Jibril without being asked, one healing wing extended in an offer that needed no translation at all.

"Are you sure?" Jibril asked softly. "You don’t have to. Not for me, not for anyone."

’I have watched you for four days,’ Vaelirash said. ’You asked for nothing and took nothing back. That is either patience or an extraordinarily long con, and if it’s a con, I find I no longer care enough to keep testing it.’

’I am choosing this. Remember that, if it ever seems otherwise. I choose which chains I wear, since the world seems unwilling to let me wear none at all.’

Jibril’s hands shook as she pressed her palm to the offered feathers, and the contract-light that bloomed between them was quiet and warm, nothing like the domination-runes still smoking in the clearing they’d left behind.

"Vaelirash," Jibril said, tears she didn’t bother hiding slipping down her face. "Welcome to the family. Your name stays yours. I wouldn’t dream of changing it."

’Good,’ Vaelirash said, something almost like warmth threading through the word. ’That, more than anything else you’ve done, is why I chose you.’

Far to the east, in a fortress carved from black mountain stone, a Dranvok commander received word that three of his beast-breakers had failed to report in from the Godsgrave Expanse, and for the first time in a very long while, felt something that might have been the beginning of concern.