This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

The lattice-bodied spiritual creature floated with disturbing stillness. Its arms twitched like puppet strings, disjointed and disconnected, flickering in and out of phase as if it were being rendered by a glitching system. And then, without warning—

It moved.

A flicker of light, and it was in front of Aegis.

Aegis barely brought his arm up in time to block, but the blow sent him skidding backward, with cracks webbing across his forearm. Kain’s breath caught in his throat. That hit hadn’t even been fast. It had simply… ignored the space in between.

It had even seemingly ignored the passive shield that formed around Aegis

“It has a secondary space attribute,” Bea explained, based on the memories she had gathered.

Aegis ground to a halt, flexing his cracked arm. His eyes narrowed, body tensing with alert recognition. It was rare to see him surprised.

Kyria’s voice cut across the arena, calm and surgical. “Elk, switch.”

The Mirrorhorn Elk leapt toward Vauleth, while the black-and-gold creature surged after Aegis again. The swap was seamless—surgical. The Elk barrelled toward Kain’s red dragon with a new, focused aggression, while Vauleth snarled and adjusted his wings to meet the charge.

The two collided with a resounding clash. Vauleth’s tail whipped around, sparks flying as it ricocheted off the Elk’s glowing antlers. The Elk absorbed the impact without flinching, its hooves glowing faintly as it generated a mirrored pulse that sent Vauleth staggering.

Although Vauleth was a red dragon (kind of), the strongest of the coloured dragons (except that he has a congenital deficiency that Kain was still helping him to make up), the level difference meant that he would naturally struggle against the opponent (or at least that’s what he preferred to attribute it to). Vauleth was certain that if they were the same grade, he would beat the stupid elk into the ground with one swipe of his claws (in his dreams, maybe).

Meanwhile, Kain’s gaze snapped back to Aegis. Although Vauleth was being pushed back, he wasn’t in any real danger aside from having his massive dragon ego bruised.

On the other hand, the ancient creature wasn’t simply strong. It was… wrong. Each of its movements bent the rules of space in strange, subtle ways. Attacks didn’t follow normal movements. They just happened and appeared on Aegis in a way difficult to defend against. Aegis raised his arm to parry and found the enemy already behind him.

Kain had fought powerful creatures before. Unpredictable ones. But this was different. This thing moved like it remembered battle from another era—or perhaps another world entirely.

And then Kyria moved again. Her four remaining green-grade contracts were still be her side and hadn’t re-entered battle, only occasionally dodging some Vespid attacks but not counter-attacking.

But soon they began to shimmer with light. And fused.

The transition was seamless. The Shellvine Sprite dissolved into motes of glittering sporelight, the beetle clicked and folded into itself, the clay golem melted and stretched like wax and the hybrid sprinted and disappeared into the expanding fusion light.

In their place, a single, towering spiritual creature emerged, standing on four powerful limbs, with a horned carapace, spore-moss fur, and crystalline growths where eyes should be.

It radiated stability. No loose pieces. No distortion. It wasn’t as overwhelming as Soren’s fusion skill, which had exploded with unstable power, but the precision and completeness of this fusion made it more… functional. Weaponized cohesion.

A true, perfect fusion. Peak blue-grade judging by the energy it gave off.

The skill was impressive as far as fusion skills go, but not as much as Soren’s, which even with the imperfect fusion, the 4 green-grade dragons reached peak blue-grade and if the fusion had been perfect, likely would have broken through to indigo-grade.

But it was whole. It wasn’t fraying at the seams. And its instincts felt honed, like it had been training as one beast its entire life.

The fused creature turned toward Queen and the Vespid guards.

And charged.

The battlefield split instantly.

Vespid guards launched themselves into a swarm, flickering through the air in tight patterns drilled into them by Kain. Queen sent a pulsing wave of healing across them, strengthening their bodies just before the fused beast’s first strike landed.

A dozen Vespids were blown back.

Three didn’t get back up.

The guards dove again. This time from multiple angles. Queen, using a technique not formed from a specific skill but her mastery of life attribute energy, condensed a ball of light attribute energy that went off in front of the fusion’s face, blinding it momentarily while the Vespids aimed for its knees and joints.

It was working—barely. But although under a lot of pressure, both Vauleth and the Vespids were holding their own against their opponents. Kain and Bea shifted their attention elsewhere.

The ancient sixth contract was giving Aegis trouble. Every time Aegis adapted, the creature phased, twisted, or outright bypassed his defence. There were no beams, no ranged attacks—just pure, precise, brutal movement. Strikes that bent space. Slashes that had no windup.

Kain could feel the frustration building in Aegis. As a creature that prided himself on being the ‘shield’ of Kain’s team, he’d never felt like his defence was so useless before.

“Bea,” Kain said mentally. “Help him.”

She didn’t need to be told twice, her Pale Thought Field extended toward the creature. Not to attack or control, but to contaminate. Neural Seepage. She began to inject corrupted memory-fragments—echoes of the cave where it had slept, of the centuries of silence. She had learned through past battles that, like during the first time using these negative particles to fight Soren’s fused dragon, they seem to work best when the negative thoughts are more closely related to the target. Fortunately, she had a little bit of information on the creature due to successfully reading the thoughts of the Shellvine Sprite.

At first, nothing.

Then the creature’s movements staggered. Just slightly. But Aegis saw it.

He moved.

With a roar, he slammed both fists together and brought them down like a hammer on the creature’s form. It flickered—glitched—but took the hit this time. It was forced to retreat, phasing backward in a jagged ripple that sent stones flying.

Aegis exhaled steam. It was the closest he came to a smile.

Kain grinned.

Chewy, meanwhile, hidden in Kain’s sleeve, was emitting soft pulses of ambient support. Whenever a Vespid began to slow, he restored its stamina. When Queen’s mana dipped, he transferred a pulse of clean energy. Even Aegis got a top-off.

Chewy was small, round, and nowhere near as flashy as the others. But when battles turned into wars of attrition, it was creatures like him that decided outcomes.

“Good boy,” Kain murmured.

The tide began to shift.

The fused creature in the Vespid sector began to slow. One wing of its carapace shattered under a full barrage from dozens of stingers at once. Vespids swarmed it with renewed fervor.

It howled. The sound was guttural and alien.

Kain was beginning to feel great about the outcome of this match again when Bea suddenly hissed:

“It’s adapting,” she warned, naturally talking about the unknown ancient contract. “Not just recovering. Learning. And even building up an immunity against me.”

Not just a mental shield. Immunity…