THIS BEAST-TAMER IS A LITTLE STRANGE

The journey through the tunnels was slow, filled with eerie silence and the occasional distant echo of something unseen shifting in the darkness.

Thankfully though, they hadn’t managed to run into any threats.

Kain couldn’t help but recall Malzahir’s impressive feat of traversing this relic for days—maybe even weeks or months, since they’d lost track of time—and not running into a single threat.

Now his good luck seemed to have extended to Kain and Serena.

‘Luck truly is such a crazy, intangible thing…’

Yet, as Kain pocketed another faintly glowing fragment, a sharp pulse ran through him, a fleeting moment of nausea followed by something worse—a whisper of hunger. It faded as quickly as it came, but the taste of it lingered at the back of his mind. It was happening more often now.

Each time they stumbled upon another core fragment, Kain took it without a word, knowing that when nighttime arrived it would bring another opportunity to improve his strength.

When night came, Malzahir was once again placed into an enforced sleep. Kain wasted no time, retrieving the numerous small fragments he had gathered throughout the day. As soon as they touched his skin, the familiar sensation flooded him—an urgent pull, an insatiable hunger that had begun to feel more and more outside of his control.

One after another, he absorbed them.

Each fragment felt like a drop in an endless ocean, disappearing into the waters with barely a ripple.

Instead of feeling satisfied, Pangea only seemed to grow hungrier, like a beast roused from slumber with the promise of a feast, only to be met with scraps.

The more Kain fed it, the more he felt the creeping awareness that something wasn’t quite…right.

The next day, they pressed forward with more urgency.

Hours stretched into what felt like an eternity, the monotony only broken by the occasional fresh markings on the walls left by other explorers—Kain and Serena suspected to be their lost teammates. But they never found the ones who made them.

Until they did.

It was a gruesome sight.

Two familiar bodies, slumped against the cold stone, their spiritual creatures collapsed lifelessly around them. Kain recognized them immediately—teammates from the mission. Their wounds were not fresh, but they hadn’t been dead for long either. The air around them was thick with an unnatural energy, one that made the skin crawl and the mind recoil instinctively.

Corruption.

Not the ordinary abyssal kind, but the same strange, twisted variation that had afflicted Idrias and Serena before. Their bodies bore wounds that should not have been fatal—scratches, deep gashes, but none that alone should have ended them.

Yet, their bodies told a different story. Despite not too much timing appearing to have passed since their deaths, the skin around their shallow wounds was rotting at an incredible rate.

One of the fallen was Sonny, a Pathfinder Kain had casually spoken with while traveling through the desert to the relic site.

The other, a Starchaser woman named Elfie, had been one of the unfortunate people that had been poisoned by the scorpion venom previously and since healed with the antidote brought back, in part, by Kain and Serena.

Though neither had been particularly close to Kain, he still felt a hollow sense of loss at seeing them like this. They were technically some of the best young talents the Empire had to offer, and they just died silently like this.

Sonny’s face was frozen in an expression of quiet agony, his usually tanned skin gone deathly pale.

His spiritual creatures, all large cat-like beings, lay curled or stretched out at his side, their bodies unnaturally stiff as though they had turned to stone.

Elfie fared no better. Her body had slumped forward, golden hair matted with dried blood, her hands still clutching the wound at her side as if she had fought to hold herself together until the very last moment despite all healing methods clearly not working for her, she appears not to have lost hope.

Her spiritual creature, which resembled a large golden hawk, had covered her with its wings, almost like it used the last moments of its life ensuring her comfort.

“More of those strange experiments,” Serena murmured, stepping closer, eyes scanning the bodies with a detached scrutiny. But her voice lacked its usual crisp detachment. There was something else in it.

Kain clenched his jaw. If their teammates had encountered the same experimental abyssal creatures, then that meant…

There were more of them.

And they were incredibly lethal.

Not because of their brute strength—after all, they had several high-level tamers on their team—but because their attacks left wounds that refused to heal, slowly sapping the strength and will to fight from their victims until they inevitably succumbed to the corrupting energy infiltrating their bodies.

Even Serena, despite her legacy status surely granting her access to top healing elixirs and items, as well as having the cheat-like Balens, had been utterly helpless in front of the corrupted wound left by her opponent. So far, the only method of healing seemed to be the special items prepared by this civilization, which were likely not charged. Not to mention that their teammates may not even recognize the items as healing tools.

If these creatures were still lurking somewhere in the tunnels, that would suggest that these were likely not the only dead teammates they would find down here.

Serena knelt beside Elfie, inspecting the wounds more closely. Her fingers brushed over the ruined flesh, and for the first time since they found the bodies, a flicker of something crossed her face—not quite grief, but something close to it.

She had known Elfie longer than he had. Even if they hadn’t been close, there was a familiarity there, a connection rooted in their both being Starchasers and potentially going on missions together in the past.

Serena exhaled softly, a sound so faint Kain almost missed it. But then, just as quickly, the mask returned.

Kain exhaled sharply, forcing down the coil of unease tightening in his chest. “We need to move.” His voice was tight. They had already lingered too long, and the last thing they needed was to draw the attention of whatever had done this—assuming it was still around. After all there were no remains of whatever had attacked them.

Serena gave one last glance to the fallen before standing. She turned away without another word.

Malzahir, who had been silent up until now, swallowed hard. He looked between the bodies and his new allies, as if wanting to say something to comfort them but thinking better of it. Without a word, he followed.

Kain couldn’t help wondering how many of their original team will be left behind forever in these ruins.

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