Not long after we had returned to the temple, while we were still discussing “mana scents,” there was a knock on the door of the office.

“Yes?” I said, prompting Garn, one of our guards, to open the door and step inside. Usually I would sit straight ahead at the desk if I was in here at this time of day, so he went in that direction, until he came to a sudden stop when his eyes didn’t meet mine, but those of a wolf, sitting in the center of the room, between the door and the desk.

“So it’s true...” he said with wide eyes.

“Hello!” Hati said happily.

After greeting dozens of people on our way here, this was one of the first things he had learned in Alarna. That he was expected to greet people. Although this lesson had been kind of accidental, because I only needed him to say something to demonstrate his ability to do so. Maybe it wasn’t actually a bad idea though, since this immediately took away some of the tension.

“Hello...” Garn said, as he looked the wolf up and down. “Fascinating... You don’t feel like a beast at all.”

“I’m a wolf!” Hati said, happily correcting him.

“Is that so...” Garn said with a wide grin. “Alright then.”

He was easily the most relaxed of our guards, and accepting this situation was on brand for him. Out in the Wildlands, he had been responsible for tracking and looking out for beast activity, so he was no stranger to beasts and what they could do, but if he had heard that we brought Hati into town, he would almost certainly trust that it was safe.

“Garn, this is Hati. Hati, Garn.”

Hati and Garn... almost sounds like Garm. Curious coincidence.

“Nice to meet you, Hati,” he said.

“You too!”

“Everything okay?” I asked him after the introductions.

“Oh! Yes. I mean, no... I’m actually not sure,” Garn said. “Why is there nobody outside the office?”

“Ah, that’s fine, Bren and Brie are home, you guys can just take your posts.”

“Oh, alright. I also have a report from the prison. Hayla Varant has asked to speak with you.”

“Hayla? Did she say what she wanted?”

“No, she didn’t.”

Hayla was one of the Rulers we had locked away for the moment, and as part of the inner circle of the previous administration, she was still there now. After Berla had become a Fighter, Hayla, her cousin, was apparently the next candidate to succeed the king, so she was basically the princess.

“Hm... How are the king and the High Priest behaving at the moment?”

“I heard they calmed down over the past couple of days,” Garn said.

“Alright. We’ll go to the prison tomorrow. It’s about time we talked to them. Today we’re going to relax though.”

“Understood, I’ll inform the prison and take up my post then,” he said, saluted, and left the room.

“Thank you,” I said as he closed the door behind him.

I glanced at Berla, knowing that her family was a difficult topic for her, but she seemed unperturbed, so I felt comfortable broaching the subject.

“Do you know what Hayla might want?” I asked her.

“No,” Berla said, “but she probably wouldn’t ask to meet with you if she didn’t have a very good reason. She admires my uncle and she really wanted to become queen.”

“Hm. I guess we’ll see tomorrow. I’m done talking for the day.”

“Oh...?” Berla asked, acting dejected.

“Except for you guys,” I said, while kissing her on the cheek, which elicited a giggle from her.

“Humans are curious,” Hati said, watching our every move.

“And to a human, you are curious,” I said in rebuttal.

“Really? That’s interesting!” he said in understanding.

“Anyway, where were we?”

“The white trees are like myunuuu!” Riala said.

“Right... birches,” I said. The trees we had a hard time scripting on with white chalk.

Somewhere along the line, we had kind of gotten off the rails, and Hati and Riala started to list what various things felt like to them, in an attempt to make us understand whatever it was they were perceiving. It wasn’t going very well. Though if you tried to explain what something smelled like to someone with no sense of smell, that probably wouldn’t quite work either.

“Well, I don’t think we’ll understand it this way,” I said. “Thanks for trying to explain it though.”

“But why did your mana scent change?” Hati asked. “It’s not supposed to change... That’s weird.”

“That’s what makes me an anomaly I guess.”

“Oh! That makes sense,” he said.

“Actually... Hati, have you ever heard the term ‘Split One?’”

It was a shot in the dark, but if the High Priest had suspected Tomar of being one, and I was supposed to be inside a beast’s body, maybe there was some kind of connection. Unfortunately, he didn’t know anything about it.

“No,” he said. “What is that?”

“I was hoping you might know,” I said.

Maybe the High Priest would tell us tomorrow, though I wasn’t too hopeful. Based on the reports, he had been the most unpleasant and uncooperative of our prisoners, even before the ones who tried to attack guards.

“Well, I’m... kind of two humans in one,” I said. “That’s why my mana changes sometimes.”

“Is that why you have two names?” Hati asked.

“Yea, exactly. But just call me Lilly for now.”

“Okay!”

Originally, I thought Hati didn’t have much more information to give to us, but I was obviously mistaken. Had we not invited him to come with us, he wouldn’t have noticed me and Lilana switching places, and we might not have learned about “mana scents” anytime soon.

One of the things I had definitely still wanted to ask him though, was what the social structures of wild beasts looked like. Nobody knew exactly where they even came from, and I wouldn’t believe that the trees spawned them somehow.

“I have another question too,” I said. “Can you tell me where beasts come from?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, were you born? Do you have parents? And maybe siblings?”

“Oh! I don’t know if I have siblings, but I probably do. Wild ones have to fend for themselves after they’re born. I don’t know my parents.”

“Only wild ones? Is it different for moderators?”

“Yes, the moderators raise their pubs, and they’ll usually become moderators as well.”

“Hm, but they are born without being able to talk?”

“Yes!”

Hati described what his life as a wild beast had been like, and it seemed like they were almost always lone wolves. This was somewhat curious, because wolves on earth usually lived in packs, like the moderators. They cared for each other, worked and hunted together, and raised their young as a group. Maybe it was the influence of the human souls that changed them, which I assumed they received. However, it was also possible that merging with these souls made them act more like their counterparts from earth.

“Are there other kinds of beasts with the moderators? Or do they all look like you?”

“They’re all black wolves!” he said happily.

He seemed to really like that definition for some reason, maybe because it gave his beast sub-species a more unique identity, differentiating it from the bears and other predators. All moderators being wolves could be a hint though. I didn’t know a lot about bears, but I had never heard of bear packs before, so I had to assume that they didn’t typically live in larger groups, and maybe that disqualified them as moderators, because they wouldn’t fit in. They were also not an animal species humans typically domesticated, and maybe wolves were simply more loyal workers for the gods.

“Do you know anything about bears? The larger, burlier beasts?”

“I think I know which ones you mean, but I always stayed away from those... They’re strong, and they really don’t like when others hunt in their area.”

“Staying away from them is definitely a good idea...” Berla said with a sad smile.

Sometimes I thought it was a little silly how she put herself down for her missing leg, seeing how capable she was despite this handicap, but then I thought about how good she must have been without it, and how restricted she must have felt. She would never blame us for this, but it did suck that it had happened while she was chasing us, and I had been wondering for a while if there was some way to fix her leg.

If this world was supposed to be a giant RPG, with knights, and mages, and monsters, one thing was conspicuously still missing. Healers. There could be many reasons for that. Maybe the kind of healing powers I imagined would simply not be possible, despite this world’s wonders. Or maybe they didn’t exist in this region for some reason. After all, this world didn’t consist of only Alarna and Cerus. I didn’t know how large it was, but for all I knew, there could be tens, even hundreds of thousands of people, living out there somewhere, with Callings nobody here had ever heard of.

Another potential explanation was that healers were part of the mage tree, however, which was also kind of missing. It seemed obvious to me that this entire Omega scripting system had been developed with magic in mind, allowing people with activated mana circulation to do things that would otherwise be impossible. And doing something like, say, restoring a missing leg, would definitely fall under that umbrella. Since mana, mages, and clerics were oftentimes closely related in games, with one simply using “holy magic,” it was a definite possibility that both would appear once we figured out why there seemed to be no magic users. Whenever that would be.

Unless...

“Hey, Hati... are there beasts with special abilities? Maybe... shooting water like we do or something along those lines? Anything unusual?”

“Hm... I don’t think so,” he said.

Yea, guess not.

“Oh! But the very strong beast I mentioned before can stand on two legs!”

“Is that so? I guess it’s a bear then?”

“No, it’s a wolf!”

“... A wolf that can stand on two legs? How does that work?”

“I don’t know. It moved strangely, and then it stood up like a human!”

“It still looked like a wolf otherwise though?”

“Yes! That was definitely unusual...”

“Sounds like it...” I said.

A humanoid wolf... What was it called...? A Wulver?

“You said your leaders wanted to ask that beast something, right?” Berla asked. “Do you know what it was?”

“No, they didn’t tell us. But it seemed really important.”

“What is it with leaders in this world not telling their people what they’re doing and what their orders are about...” I grumbled.

I had always hated the concept of blindly following leaders and orders, being someone who wanted to know exactly why he was doing something. Not necessarily so I could reject an order, but to have context and be able to act more efficiently. What good is telling an agent to look into someone when you don’t tell them what to look for? And if there’s a beast you need to ask important questions, why not inform your pack why this is so important? That information would surely be useful to them.

Berla simply shrugged at me. “I know you find it weird, but it never bothered me. I mean, the job was to track people and report their actions to the king or the High Priest. We didn’t always need to know why they wanted to learn about what our targets were doing.”

“Yea, I know... Still.”

I wished I had some killer argument for my position, but it was really just something that bothered me immensely.

“Anyway,” I said. “About this beast. Do you know how far away it lives?”

“Not exactly... but it’s not far. It’s in the woods south of here. Less than a day away.”

““Less than a day!?”” Berla and I said in surprise.

That information was kind of a bombshell. Apparently there was a very strong beast with very unusual properties living just hours away from here. This ran counter to everything I had ever heard about strong beasts near Alarna before, where category fives were supposed to be the strongest you would encounter under normal circumstances. If we used Hati’s running speed for reference though, this beast presumably lived less than fifty kilometers from here, and while the hunters and guards wouldn’t usually travel that far, especially not deep into the woods, you would think that someone would know about this.

“How is that possible...?” I asked Berla.

“I don’t know... Reurig doesn’t know anything either, I’ve talked to him about category tens before... He would’ve mentioned a strong beast living near Alarna...”

“You think it’s a category ten?” I asked.

“I mean... I can’t be certain, but... Hati, is that the strongest beast you’ve ever seen?” Berla asked.

“Yes,” he said, nodding vigorously. “It’s insanely strong.”

“If it’s as strong as he says, I guess it would probably be an eight or above. And Reurig would’ve definitely mentioned that. He’s really worried about stronger beasts, otherwise he might have deserted years ago and tried his luck in some other town.”

Maybe this mysterious beast just didn’t have any business in this area if nobody had ever encountered it and it had never found its way here. However, the fact alone that it was out there, not far from here, made me uneasy. And while I was relatively confident in our strength by this point, Hati had said that this wolf felt much stronger than us. I would rather not find out whether it actually was. Since it would presumably not be bothered by our mana wall though, all I could hope was that it would simply never find its way here.