Multiple beasts approached us from every direction. Tomar, Riala, and I immediately raised our arms to fire at those approaching us from the front and the back, with Berla and Reurig defending our right flank.

“Ahh!!” Aelene screamed, alone on the left, as she shot down two beasts herself. Just like our raw mana attacks, her hits didn’t cause any visible injuries, but it was more than enough to hold the beasts back a little, and they did seem out of it for a second.

Too bad we didn’t have time to get water stones and prepare her.

Three beasts had fallen dead to the ground within those first seconds, but with each one, the others seemed to become more careful, moving more randomly, and becoming harder to hit. While Riala and I kept focusing on the front and the back, Tomar started firing at the beasts who were attacking the others.

Berla and Reurig were each able to keep one beast occupied for a moment, and with them being distracted, it was easy for Tomar to kill them with precise and practiced shots, from having fought like this before.

Five down...

After the initial wave, they stopped attacking for a moment and collectively growled at us, as a few of them circled our group. When we tried to shoot one, it was as if they could see exactly where it would go and evaded the attack within a split second.

The start was promising, but this doesn’t look so good...

I really wished we had some area-spanning attack that didn’t originate at our bodies right about now, to simply blast them away, but that wasn’t feasible with the scripts we had. And using up all of our mana on one or two large streams of water could be our end if we still missed.

Given how easily they were evading our attacks after seeing them only a few times, I was impressed that Aelene had been able to hit two of them on her first try like that.

Unless... they can’t evade mana as easily...?

Since we didn’t have a need for mana attacks anymore, ever since we became able to use water scripts without stones, neither of us had prepared any, aside from the snap script, which would affect everyone around us equally.

“Aelene...” I whispered, “try to hit one.”

“O-okay!” she said, took aim, and fired, hitting two beasts simultaneously. This was the starting signal for the second round, as another wave of beasts rushed at us, while the ones Aelene hit hadn’t even touched the ground yet. I aimed carefully, shot, and took them both out. As one beast jumped over its fallen companions and came straight at us, seemingly having gotten a little carless, I was able to hit it straight in the head as well.

Eight...

Glancing around, I saw that the others had somewhat split up into two pairs, with one giving its best to defend against the incoming beasts, while the other shot them down. Almost simultaneously, Riala and Tomar took out one beast each, but with the remaining beasts all swarming us at once, we started to be at the risk of getting overrun.

“Ria!” I yelled, as one almost got her from a blindspot, but I managed to hit it just in time, and while it wasn’t dead yet, she quickly finished it off as she turned around.

“Got i— Ngh!” she said and grimaced. She had reached her pain threshold. From now on, every script would hurt more and more, until she would eventually collapse. She pulled through though, and kept firing when she had a clean shot.

Next, Reurig got overwhelmed, trying to defend against two beasts at once, while Tomar was desperately trying to hit an incoming beast, but with Aelene protecting my back, I was able to take those out as well, just as Tomar rushed towards the evading beast and hit it straight in the face, fractions of a second before it would’ve gotten him.

Fourteen...

Six beasts remained, who gathered in one spot, to rush us at once. The only beast who hadn’t moved during the entire fight was the leader I had talked to. He watched out every move, and I didn’t like the idea of him potentially trying to run and take any knowledge with him.

“Tomar!” I yelled, gesturing for him to take out the leader, while I hurried to put myself between the remaining group of beasts and the others, and switched to the highest output script I had in my arsenal.

After seeing our attacks, the beasts must’ve believed that we could only take out so many of them, hitting them one by one, that coming at us in a group might’ve seemed like a good idea, believing that at least one or two of them would get through and finally take out the squishy Sourcerers. However, with the beasts all bunched up, and more or less running straight at us, I unleashed a three meter wide stream of water that took out four and grazed one of them enough to make it stumble at fall.

“Ugh, fuck...” I said as I felt a sharp pain shoot through me as well.

The beast rolled over on the ground twice before coming to a stop and getting hit by another, smaller stream of water from my hand, killing it.

Panting, I looked around and counted. Sixteen... Seventeen... Eighteen... Nineteen... One left, I thought and swiveled around in the direction of the leader. Instead of seeing it standing there, watching, I was looking at its behind, fleeing, with Tomar giving chase while throwing water balls. After a few misses, due to the beast making sure to not run in a straight line, one ball finally hit its right hind leg, and I felt like I could hear it breaking apart.

They are like cannon balls...

As it fell and rolled on the ground, Tomar caught up to it and finished it with one clean shot to the head. All of us frantically looked around one last time, at the beasts strewn around us, but none of them were moving anymore. Riala and I let ourselves fall on the ground to rest, as soon as we realized that they were all dead.

“It... it’s over...?” Aelene asked carefully.

“Yea...” I said, still panting. “You did great... Good job. Is everyone okay?”

“Yup...” Riala said, sitting at my side, huffing.

“All good,” Reurig said, still watching the beasts.

“I’m fine,” Berla said as she sat down next to us and looked me up and down. “What about you?”

“I’m alright,” I said.

I took a few deep breaths, which finally brought my pulse down a little bit. Twenty beasts... Six humans... Two Fighters, four Sourcerers... and we barely won.

“Any luck injuring them?” I asked Berla and Reurig.

“No... I tried a few times, but I just couldn’t pierce their skin,” she said.

Nobody was injured, so the battle was an overall success, but our Fighters had once again been unable to injure these beasts. Without Sourcerers, fighting them would be madness. Fighting such a group with only one or two of us, would be madness. And if I hadn’t taken Aelene with us in the spur of the moment, we would almost certainly have died.

“Still, you were great,” I said to Berla.

One might think that she wouldn’t be able to fight properly with only one leg, including herself, but her agility and dexterity were unbelievable. I had never seen her fight before she lost her leg, but if you watched her do her thing now, you would inevitably wonder why Fighters were supposed to even need two legs. She probably wasn’t as strong as before, but she could still hold her own. Especially if paired up with a Sourcerer.

“Movement!” Reurig yelled all of a sudden.

I snapped back to attention and got ready to stand back up, but when I followed his gaze, it was just one of the beasts Aelene and I had taken out, twitching slightly.

“Tsk, did I miss one?”

Tomar, who was on his way back to us, switched to a light run and approached the beast. When it finally raised its head slightly and noticed Tomar approaching, however, it changed its posture and started talking.

“Wait! Please don’t kill me! I was just following orders!”

“As if,” Tomar said, while he slowed down and took aim.

Hm...

“Tomar, wait!”

“Huh?”

I struggled to my legs and walked over to where the beast was lying on the ground. It was pressed against the floor, its ears flattened. It seemed submissive, just like the teddy bear before. Looking it over, it didn’t seem to be injured badly, though there was a bloody streak at the side of its head. So that’s where I hit it...

“You value your life?” I asked the beast.

“I do... Of course I do...” it said.

“Attacking us wasn’t the best idea in that case.”

“That’s what they told me to do... I didn’t have a choice...”

“Is that so... Well, what’s in it for me if I let you live?”

Tomar looked at me in surprise, but didn’t say anything. Meanwhile, the others gathered behind us, listening to our conversation. Riala in particular seemed very curious about the beast.

“I... I don’t have anything I could give you...” it said.

“How about information?”

Bren had been furious when I let the category six escape. People would’ve probably called me crazy if I had suggested that I didn’t even want to let it go back then, and instead would’ve rather studied it. However, a talking beast would probably be a different story. It might say it doesn’t have anything to give, but even if it didn’t know any spicy secrets about this world, just learning more about the beasts in general would be valuable. Contrary to what it said, it would potentially have a lot it could give us.

“I-information? I’m still new, I don’t know anything...”

“And yet, I just learned something new,” I said.

It was new, and the leader had said I belonged with the beasts. This suggested that it hadn’t always been a moderator, and that it remembered a time before that.

“What did you learn...?” it asked.

“Unimportant. But I’d like to talk more with you.”

How to handle this though...

This thing was dangerous, and as submissive as it appeared right now, given the chance, it could kill any one of us in the blink of an eye. We could hardly handcuff it, and building a cage that would be able to hold it wouldn’t be a simple task, especially seeing how these things had presumably broken through the gate in Cerus. And a jail cell, with its wooden doors, wouldn’t work either, for the same reason.

“You’ll let me live if I talk with you...?” it asked.

“That’s the basic idea, yea.”

“I... I can do that...!” it said, sounding happy.

“Hm... out of curiosity, would you be able to get past the town wall?”

“The wall?” it said, glancing to its side. “Past it? I could go over it.”

“Really...” I said. That explains how they are able to get inside I guess. I’ve wanted to confirm that for a while.

This also meant that we really had no way to protect anyone from it though. I didn’t want to let it go yet, but if we couldn’t lock it up anywhere, and it would even be able to go over the high walls somehow, how would we keep it in check? As I thought this over, I briefly looked away, when Tomar suddenly yelled “Riala!”

I quickly looked back at where she had been standing, but she was gone. Shifting my gaze in the direction of the beast, I could see how she plopped herself down on the ground, practictically nose-to-nose with the beast. Tomar was about to grab her for obvious reasons, but the beast wasn’t moving a single muscle as it looked at the little girl in front of it.

“Wait, Tomar,” I told him, raising one arm to signal for him to let her, and the other in the direction of the beast, in case anything happened.

“Hi! I’m Riala,” she said.

“Uhm... Hello,” the beast said, sounding confused about what was happening. The only one around who didn’t look perplexed right now was Riala.

“Are you bad?” she asked.

“I... don’t think so.”

I looked on with curiosity, while hoping that Zara would somehow never learn about this moment. Maybe I was imagining things, but this beast seemed in no way aggressive, and based on my previous experience with the category six, I felt like it was fair to assume that it wouldn’t suddenly launch at us once more. It had lost, its companions were dead, and even if it thought it could maybe kill one or two of us, it would most definitely not get out of here alive if it tried.

“Can I pet you?” Riala asked.

“What is that?” the beast asked.

“This!” she said and petted its head.

I stiffened briefly, but once more, the beast didn’t do anything.

“That’s fine... I guess...” it said, sounding more and more confused by the second.

“So fluffy!” Riala exclaimed.

I smiled at the surreal scene. I didn’t know how I would do it yet, but I wanted to keep the beast around for now and get as much information as I could. Is it weird that I wish we could domesticate beasts? I miss my dog...