The last few drops of blood dripped into the human’s mouth, and the wolf turned its head and dropped the rodent on the stairs, pinning it in place with one paw so it wouldn’t slide out from the gap under each step, and started tearing out chunks of it at a time.

It quickly ate the rat, and then moved to lie down just a step above the human, towards its injured side.

Right now it just wanted to try speaking like humans did. After a few moments of playing around with its tongue to test its dexterity more properly, it decided to try.

“Aaaannhhhuuuu.” It started, the sound coming off more like a low howl than anything resembling human speech, much less the ‘thankyou’ sound.

The human didn’t react at all to its howl besides slightly turning her head, likely more out of curiosity than anything else.

It tilted its head, racking its brain.

That didn’t work at all.

Deciding to take the sound and break it into three different parts, like ‘tha’, ‘nk’, and ‘you’, it started practising.

The results were less than stellar, even as hours passed by with nothing but broken, strange howls and growls coming out of its mouth while the dim lights from above illuminated the shifting clouds of flies around them.

Speaking in human tongue had three components. Their larynx, that was essentially long, smooth bands of muscle on the front of their throat that helped shape their voice, in a structure that was almost identical to the wolf’s, their vocal cords, which added inflection, depth and complexity to the sound, and their tongue and mouth, which shaped the more precise, intricate sounds that they couldn’t make purely with their throat.

The main problem the wolf had was about that last component. The length of its mouth was one difference.

If it wanted to blow out air while positioning its tongue the right way to make the hissing sound of ‘th’, it would have to exhale a bit harder, because its throat and the front of its snout were much further apart than it was in humans.

Another difference, a bigger one, would be its tongue.

The ‘nk’ sound wasn’t much easier. It had a snappiness to it. The wolf had to hum while trapping air in its throat by spreading out its tongue to form a seal, thus making the ‘n’ part, then stop humming and exhale while suddenly pulling its tongue flat on the bottom of its mouth, releasing the pent up air to form the ‘k’ in a sort of clicking sound. And that was really hard. There was barely enough muscle in its tongue to properly do it, and it required a lot more effort than the wolf would have expected.

The ‘you’ part was relatively easy to do, thankfully.

So while it believed that it could communicate simple sounds like ‘thank you’ once it learned how to make and cobble those various smaller sounds together, it had realized that speaking in complex sounds like a human would be harder than it had anticipated.

But far from impossible. It would have to expand its throat, make its tongue bigger by adding more musculature for finer control, and practise a bunch, and then it could speak exactly like a human, if with a bit more growl in its sounds.

With that thought acting as the closing note to its efforts for the moment, it decided it was done for the day, and could really use some sleep.

It really wanted to speed up its body’s progress, even if the sensation of new things suddenly being put inside it was mildly uncomfortable. The changes were so fast that its body wasn’t able to entirely ignore them, so it could feel several inert tendons stretch ever so slightly with every movement of its torso.

After a session that was several hours long, its head felt like someone had cracked its skull open to stuff it full of hay. Mental exhaustion was no new feeling, but it was still highly unpleasant. In contrast, its body was well rested, so it got up, and cautiously leaned its head down to bite into the human’s garment again.

Despite the headache that her sounds were whenever anything disturbed her, it wasn’t going to leave the human down here, simply for safety’s sake.

Two loops of stairs left to go.

With its eyes nailed onto the human’s left hand for the merest twitch, it activated [Bloodrush], and heaved back.

“Fuck…” The human groaned out in pain, a rather simple sound, which the wolf decided to learn how to say later.

The task and its completion were rather mundane. It had to stop multiple times to wait for [Bloodrush] to return before resuming, and besides feeling like its teeth were about to fall out of its gums and its legs feeling like they were made of slime, nothing of note happened. It left the human resting on the steps and trotted a little further up the staircase, went to the edge where the slabs of iron were the widest, and laid down on its side to sleep. It was out like a light within moments, the symbols quickly forming in its mind.

-[Restful Awareness] has Leveled Up. Level 5 → Level 6

-[Iron Stomach] has Leveled Up. Level 6 → Level 7

-[Bloodrush] has Leveled Up. Level 2 → Level 3

-Removed Traits:

Timid (1 / 5): You have fled from danger equal or lesser to yourself multiple times. You are slightly faster when defending, and are slightly slower when attacking.

It thought about the removed trait with a sense of dissatisfaction. That added speed when defending itself or running away was far more valuable than removing the penalty it took when attacking. Because realistically, it wouldn’t be attacking things all that often, and self-preservation was more important than killing.

Its rather haphazard plan was to go to the place with the toxic rivers and ambush humans to eat, or simply go around visiting the various trash pits full of rodents around the city. That was all it really needed to do. If anything, Timid was more helpful than it was detrimental, so its loss was rather grating to the wolf.

The [Devourer] Skill activated, but rather than showing it a deconstruction of what it had consumed, it was taken straight to the portion where it observed its body.

It had, assumedly, nothing more to learn from rats, which was understandable.

It looked around for something to improve, but could find no reasonable alterations it hadn’t thought of, so besides quickly toughening up its gums and healing them a little bit from the strain it put them through, it simply settled for checking its progress. Then, it decided to give itself a bit of a reminder on the progress of the symbols, bringing up all of its achievements with a thought.

-Species: Wolf

-Name: None

-Path: [Hound of The Keeper] Level 8

-Base Attributes:

Strength ( +0 )

Speed ( +0 )

Dexterity ( +0 )

Endurance ( +2 )

Perception ( +1 )

Resolve ( +1 )

Intelligence ( +3 )

Soul ( +1 )

Available: 0

-Racial Skills: [Pack Hunter], [Quick Learner], [Devourer]

-Acquired Skills:

[Pain Resistance - Level 17]

[Infection Resistance - Level 8]

[Poison Resistance - Level 12]

[Corrosion Resistance - Level 5]

[Disease Resistance - Level 4]

[Magic Resistance - Level 4]

[Mental Resistance - Level 28]

[Electricity Resistance - Level 2]

[Restful Awareness - Level 6]

[Tough Skin - Level 2]

[Iron Stomach - Level 7]

[Mana Perception - Level 3]

[Mana Manipulation - Level 3]

[Soul Perception - Level 2]

[Echoes of Oblivion - Level 1]

[Bloodrush - Level 3]

-Acquired Titles:

Witness of Divinity: You have seen a being of divine nature in their own realm. Your illuminated gaze shatters all illusions, and pierces through any and all falsehoods.

Glutton Beyond Compare: You have eaten multiple times your body weight over a single uninterrupted period of consumption. You gain +1 to Strength and Speed while your stomach is adequately filled. Bonus is doubled when your stomach is filled to the brim.

-Acquired Traits:

Enduring (1 / 5): You have felt the chill of death multiple times, and survived. You are slightly tougher.

Hunter (1 / 2): You hunt living creatures, whether it is for survival, sport or personal gain of one manner or another. You are slightly harder to notice when intending to hunt, and are slightly easier to notice when intending to scavenge.

Its memory refreshed, it started prodding ‘Witness of Divinity’, to try and find a way to turn it off or get rid of it entirely, before eventually giving up at the lack of response it was getting. Its glowing eyes would just keep being a problem that the wolf would have to work around, whether it liked it or not.

Its consciousness slipped back into limbo, and it rested soundly.

The canine was gone, and so she was left to her own devices for the moment.

If one could call sitting perfectly still in silent agony ‘devices’, that is. The dizziness, constant sensation of her intestines squirming in protest inside her, weakness, and severe need to pee, were just the cherry on top.

She wasn’t exactly sure of why the monster, or perhaps just Awakened dog, was helping her, but she couldn’t deny that at the very least, a heavy weight had lifted off her chest. Immediate death wasn’t hanging over her head anymore, and she was almost certain the beast would have eaten her by now if it was planning to do so.

After a bit of struggling and maneuvering, and a fair amount of pain, she had managed to tie the bloody cloth around her head like an oversized bandana with a knot on the back of her head, covering all the important places she wanted covered like her ears, nostrils and mouth.

And so she was left alone with her thoughts, which eventually turned to her oldest and best friend.

Gods, she missed Katherine. Not for the servitude and convenience she brought forth as a dutiful maid, but as a friend. As an unflinching pillar of support and strength, covered in whip marks that Emhreeil would spend long, sleepless nights treating. She wondered how she was doing now. She’d spent the majority of her personal wealth to buy Katherine her freedom after she’d disowned her family, so she wondered if she was at least living free and happy.

She really hoped so.

But as despair slowly flit away with her musings of easier times, and acceptance snuck to the forefront of her mind, she was left with the choice of continuing to hate herself and the world, inwardly rage at her dead teammates for being so irredeemably stupid, or at least try and struggle through her wrecked state and do something.

And seeing as physical actions were out of the table, she was left with an old friend, a tool that was the object of frustration and wonder in equal measures throughout her relatively short life thus far.

Mana.

She inhaled deeply through the blood-covered cloth on her face, used to the smell by now, and started circulating the energy through her mana circuits, feeling the phantom veins running through her body flare to life.

The mana responded willingly to her commands, as easy to command as a limb, albeit a weak one that she barely felt.

From her navel, and out towards her legs.

The connection between one’s mana circuits and the body was not entirely a physical one. One couldn’t cut open another humanoid and extract their circuits, as they were not a tangible thing without high level magic being involved. But there was a connection regardless, and that academic statement only solidified in her mind as a fact when she felt her mana enter her broken legs.

The circuits were… malformed, shrunken. Off, in a sense.

Usable, but in a way that would no doubt be more akin to forcing mana out, rather than excreting it with just a thought, which is what she was used to doing as an elf. Forcing mana out was more in the realm of humans, or any other races that didn’t have [Attuned]. Yet, there was little she could do about the state of her legs, so she focused on guiding and circling her mana, focusing entirely on the amount rather than the technique.

Sometimes she’d excrete just a little bit of mana out of her palm, feeling it conform to the shape of the metal just an inch away from her skin, like a phantom sense of touch, but generally, she focused on simply forcing large quantities of mana out of the core in her navel, up to her usable hand, keeping it there, and then forcing it back down.

If it weren’t for [Attuned], the process would no doubt be multiple times as difficult and painful, but for the first time, that didn’t bother her. She used to feel insecure all the time about her racial Skill, wondering if every magical advancement she managed without a single resource was due to her own talent or because of the Skill that made all elves like herself attuned to the world by nature. But when faced with her survival, that line of thought simply didn’t register.

Still, the harrowing experience of getting covered in rats and tossed down from a nine story staircase did make her realize that up until she left her home, she was… almost pampered, despite all the psychological torment her parents put her through.

She may have never been allowed to touch a spellbook or read even basic magical theory before her parents were certain they had brainwashed her to be the perfect noble elf, something that had never come to pass, but never had she felt true pain before.

Not quite like this.

Maybe that line of thinking was productive.

But it felt like it wasn’t, and thus she discarded it, focusing on the flow of mana, the life force of the world, that little piece of starfire that ran through everyone’s veins.

It was a mindless task, but that was alright. She didn’t particularly want to think, so she just continued. Mana, or ‘arcane’ circuits as academic snobs referred to them as, were remarkably similar to a muscle. The more she strained them, the bigger they became, so long as she didn’t strain them too much, too quickly, and tore them apart. Even so, simply to feel less helpless, she focused on power, on the amount, dancing on the thin line between ‘just enough’ and ‘too much’.

Maybe it was because she was already laying with one foot in the grave, or maybe it was because she just couldn’t give a crap anymore, but she didn’t follow her usual exercises and patterns. She wasn’t calm nor rational enough to meditate and slowly work on her control, her efficiency.

She was simply looking for power.

-

(If you are reading this story on any website that isn’t RoyalRoad.com, you are reading stolen content from a free site that runs no intrusive or obnoxious advertisements. Just google "RoyalRoad Fleabag" and you'll get to my story on the site it was meant to be hosted on.)