While Riala was petting the beast, and I considered where to go from here, I heard the gate open in the distance, and Grym approached with a squad of guards, weapons at the ready.

“Lilly...” he said as he came to a stop a few meters away from us. “What is going on here...?”

“Hm... We captured an enemy so to speak.”

“An... enemy...? That’s a beast!”

“Right... Hey, could one of you get me some ink?”

“Ink?? What for!?” he asked, bewildered.

“You’ll see.”

Despite his confusion, he motioned for one of the guards to go back and get what I asked for. Keeping the beast in check was one potential issue, another was that, well, it was a beast. And people didn’t react well to those.

“Uhm... Miles...” Berla whispered to me. “Are you sure about this?”

“More or less. It will probably be fine,” I said.

I had told her about wanting to learn more about beasts before, and I had also mentioned that I was curious about scripting on a beast’s body once. She could probably guess what I was thinking of.

It’s kind of tiring to think about it as “the beast” though...

“Hey, what’s your name?” I asked it.

“I don’t have a name.”

“Well, that’s inconvenient... How about you think of something we can call you?”

“Like... what?” it asked.

“I don’t know, like...”

“Fluffy!” Riala blurted out.

“Hahaha, yea, like that,” I said, laughing.

“You want to call me Fluffy...? That sounds weird...”

Hm... Good thing programmers don’t have a complex about naming things... “i” anyone? “foobar” maybe? Ugh... Wolf... Black... Night... Hmmm...

“You’re male, right? How about Hati?” I said.

“Hati...? Hm. Okay,” he said.

“Alright. Hati. I’d like to make you a deal. I want to learn everything you can tell me. Like, literally, everything. As long as you tell me, and you don’t hurt anyone, you get to live.”

“Everything...? Even unimportant things?”

“Yup. Everything. You might not know what could be interesting to me. And I also want to test a few things.”

“Won’t that take a long time though?”

“You tell me, I don’t know what you know. Until then, we’ll simply stay here.”

“Okay,” he said.

Hati was pretty relaxed for essentially being interrogated by the people who just killed his companions, who were still lying all around us. I doubted that they sympathized with the humans they killed, but I would’ve expected a reaction to his friends dying.

“Say... do you hate us? For killing your pack?”

“Hm? No. Why would I?”

“Maybe they were important to you.”

“Hm... Not really. They die all the time.”

“Do you mean beasts in general?”

“I mean the wild ones, not the mods.”

Wild ones... huh.

“What do the mods do exactly?”

“Uh... they fix anomalies. Like you!”

Kind of knew that already...

“And why do they do that?”

“Because the admins say so.”

The gods tell them what to do...

“Hum. Hati, is it a problem that you’re telling us all that?”

“Huh? I don’t know. Is it?”

“If you don’t know, it’s surely fine.”

It probably made sense that Hati didn’t know of any rules regarding talking to humans. By all appearances, Fighters, the strongest, traditional humans, weren’t a danger for these “mods,” and even if they could hurt them, the beasts were still faster, more intelligent, and coordinated their attacks, completely unlike the “wild ones.” If their job was to get rid of anomalies, they would have to be strong enough to best anyone in a fight. And if you believe that your combatants are guaranteed to be victorious, why make plans for the opposite case?

“Ah, excuse me,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the guard return with ink and a quill, and I briefly stepped away to intercept him, while Tomar kept watching Hati like a hawk. When I walked past Grym, he addressed me again in a whisper.

“Girly, that’s a beast you’re chatting with there! You need to kill it!”

“Grym, have you ever talked to a beast?”

“Of course not!” he said in a hushed voice.

“Exactly. Think about that for a second. Oh, and I doubt whispering will get you very far. I’m pretty sure beasts like Hati have good hearing. You heard what he said, right?” I asked Hati, lying a good ten meters away.

“Yes,” he said, glancing over to us, Riala’s hand still on his head.

“See?” I said with a chuckle.

“I pray to the gods that you know what you’re doing...” he said.

‘Already on it...’ Lilana added.

“O ye of little faith,” I said, and took the writing utensils from the guard. “Thank you.”

“Hey, Hati,” I said as I came back, “can you control your mana?”

“Control it? What do you mean?”

“Hm... like, make it smaller.”

“I don’t know...”

“You can see it though, right?”

“Yes!”

At times it sounded almost like he got excited when he answered my questions, as if he was proud of his responses. If you managed to forget that he had tried to kill us ten minutes ago, he sounded kind of innocent.

“Aelene, could you show him what I mean?”

I looked at her, but her eyes were entirely fixated on Hati, her mouth hanging open in wonder.

“Uhm, Aelene?”

“Huh?” she asked as she looked at me in a daze.

“Could you reign in your aura for a second?”

“I... Uh... Lilly... Is this normal out here...?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re having conversations with beasts... then you fight them... then you have conversations again... That... that’s not normal, is it?”

Oh dear, we broke her again...

“It’s all good, Aelene. This is unusual for us as well.”

“Uhu...”

“Uhm, your aura?”

“Oh, yes. Of course,” she said, and lowered her mana output, to a level that looked similar to Oryn’s.

“This. Can you do that, Hati?”

“Ohhh. No, I can’t... How do you do that?” he asked with curiosity.

Both of us looked at Aelene expectantly, who took a moment to realize we were waiting for a response from her.

“Huh...? Ah. I... can’t really explain it. Oryn wanted to know as well, but I... just do it... somehow.”

Just like Riala creates Callings signs without stones somehow... Too bad.

“Maybe we can figure that one out later. Anyway, I want to try lowering your mana output manually, Hati. I’ll have to shave you a little though.”

“What’s shave?” he asked.

“It means taking away some of your fur, so I can put something on the skin under it.”

“Why do you want to do that...?”

“You’ll see. I’ll just need to get on your back for a second, okay?”

“Uh... okay,” he said, and I got closer, to climb onto him.

“Uhm... Lilly...?” Tomar said with worry.

I had reached a point where I was fairly certain that nothing would happen. Hati seemed calm and relaxed, and he did not give the impression of being a great actor. Maybe he was secretly plotting to take revenge for the other mods, and he was just waiting for a good chance to rip me apart, but I doubted that. And if that wasn’t his plan, the best course of action was cooperation for the moment, which was exactly what he was doing.

“It’s fine,” I said to Tomar. “And up...! I... go... Dear gods, you are fluffy. Wow.”

“Right!?” Riala beamed.

“Is that good...?” Hati asked.

“Very good,” I said with a chuckle.

Really makes you want to cuddle this killer machine.

“By the way, do you drink? Like water or something?”

“Drink? What is that?”

“It’s similar to eating. That you do, right?”

“Of course! I like rabbits!”

“Heh, that’s good to know.”

I was getting giddy. For the past two months I had wondered how animals and plants survive without water in this area. Tomar told me that it almost never rained here, especially in the summer, and there was certainly nobody walking around the Wildlands watering the forests. There were supposedly also no natural sources of water nearby, such as a lake or a river, and wells apparently only existed in regions that had a lot of rainfall. The farmers used water from water sources to make their plants grow faster, but that was about it. However, since all living things seemed to have at least a little bit of mana, from a large beast down to a little flower, I hypothesized that they were turning mana into water internally somehow, and since Hati didn’t know what drinking was, he apparently didn’t have a need for it. He was a goldmine.

“Alright, I’m gonna start. Maybe it will feel a little weird,” I said and started cutting away some of his fur.

From afar, the beasts sometimes looked pitch black, especially at night, but from up close, the fur looked more like a very dark gray. Though it was darker down at the roots. I was able to cut the hair with my knife without issues, and I uncovered a patch of about five by five centimeters of skin, which I proceeded to shave carefully. It wasn’t exactly a small bald spot, but with the fur having a length of at least seven centimeters, the surrounding hairs would cover it up a little.

“So far, so good,” I said and put the knife away. As I started drawing a script onto Hati’s back, in a spot where he wouldn’t be able to reach it himself, I briefly thought about how absolutely insane all this must’ve looked to the guards who were watching from nearby and from the walls right now, but I was too excited to care about them.

The second I finished the script, Hati’s aura started to change, dispersing, until it was barely visible anymore. The mana control script works on beasts!

“What did you do...?” Grym asked in amazement as he stepped closer. “Is it... not a beast anymore...?”

“He didn’t really change, only your perception of him did,” I said.

Beast auras were a peculiar thing. Anyone who was exposed to them felt an instinctual fear, even if it was coming from a human, which was the whole reason we had developed this script. Fighters weren’t as affected by beast auras, but they still felt them, and they naturally reacted to them by feeling the need to eliminate the threat. Just like Berla had once rushed to our side when we accidentally made a tree emit a beast-like aura.

Without his mana running wild, Hati would no longer feel dangerous, though he still was. Even if we were able to talk to beasts, their aura would’ve always been a barrier.

“I feel weird...” Hati said.

“Oh? How’s that?” I asked.

“I think I’m getting weaker... What did you do!?” he asked in a panic.

“Hey! His eyes are changing!” Berla said.

I jumped off Hati’s back and walked around him to look at his face. His eyes had looked like glowing, red orbs before, but the glow was lessening, and bit by bit, his eyes were turning into normal, ember-colored wolf eyes.

“Wow...”

Suddenly, Hati got up, standing at about my height, and stared me in the face. “This is strange! What is this!?”

“Hati! Get Down!” I said.

“But I—”

“Down. Right now.”

Reluctantly, he sat down, but he kept examining himself. “Everything feels weird...” he said.

Initially, I assumed he was just feeling the mana around him shift, but after a moment, something else started to change.

““Whoa!””

All of us looked on in amazement as his fur transitioned from a very dark gray to a rather light one, and even white in some areas. After about half a minute, he didn’t look like a beast anymore, but like a super-sized gray wolf.

“It’s over...? Please tell me what you did...” Hati pleaded. He seemed uncomfortable, but I didn’t actually know much more than him right now.

“I wanted to get your mana under control a little, so humans aren’t afraid of you anymore, but this evidently had an unintended side-effect... How do you feel?”

“I feel... weak. Even weaker than before I became a mod...”

My eyes immediately snapped in Grym’s direction, fearing that he might’ve seen his time come, after Hati said he felt weak, and presumably vulnerable. However, he didn’t even have his sword at the ready anymore. He was holding it loosely at his side, staring at Hati slack-jawed.

Beasts were believed to originate from forests and trees. This was perhaps natural, since they were a type of animal after all, but early on I had wondered whether the exposure to the woods and the trees’ mana might turn the predators into beasts. That hypothetical seemed unlikely by this point, but I still got confirmation that the mana was affecting them, and without its effects... they were apparently normal animals.

I guess that script didn’t just change our perception of him after all...

I felt like we were on the verge of the world opening up to us all over. Were beasts really as dangerous as people believed? What were the gods, or “administrators,” doing exactly? What kind of anomalies were the moderators tasked to take care of? And would a bear beast be just as fluffy as Hati? There was no telling what we would be able to learn from him and from doing more experiments, and I was far beyond excited to find out.