The rest of the day was a blur. I was exhausted despite my body telling me that I was mostly fine. Whatever mother did to us, it fixed our physical exhaustion but I figure it didn’t recover our mana. I didn’t just use 100% of the mana saved in my lungs on my desperate “breath” attack, instead I had used 100% of the mana in my entire body, or at least, close enough to it. From the feel of it I squeezed dry every cell I had just to kill that measly rabbit. Sure I got a bit of a boost from that core I ate after, but it was barely enough to keep me moving.
Mother was going to let us die, probably. I’m guessing it’s to weed out the weak early on. Doesn’t matter, I need to eat. I turn to the corpse of the largest one and start devouring it. I managed to stop myself from eating its guts and other more disgusting organs, but everything else was gone. Not even a pile of bones was left of it. I was full, but I didn’t yet feel satiated so I went by the lake and laid there, breathing in the mana.
That was my last memory of that day. I think I just fell asleep just like I expected before. However I didn’t go on to wake up and fall asleep multiple times in a row, I woke up the next day, back in the nest, seeing things had changed a bit. The nest was expanded, more riches were brought in to accommodate the size of our nest and everyone else was asleep. I jumped out, observed the newest treasures, of which the only special ones were a very beautiful stone, similar to a jasper, but in various shades of red. Scent testing it only made me get very angry. I let out an involuntary growl and noticed that my siblings shifted in the nest.
Going to need to test this out more, but I hear mother’s stomps, so I rush over to as many red crystals as I can find and start breathing in the mana.. My siblings woke up, stretched a bit, then squeaked as she came into the room and picked them up. I was a bit reluctant, but I did go up to her. The trip barely took a few minutes and we were back at the lake, with the wall prepared. The wooden cage was there again, so I prepared myself for a fight the second she put us down.
She opened the cage and inside.. Were two rabbits. Only one was horned and the other was just a normal one. I looked over at her, a bit confused, but she just sank into the lake. So… She toned down the difficulty? I observed as my siblings stalked over to them, but the two bunnies saw themselves being overwhelmed and ran away. Of course there’s massive walls of wood stopping them from actually escaping, and they don’t seem too able to climb, so this is little more than an endurance run around the place Well, they could theoretically go through the slow river, unless mother thought about that and made wooden grates, but I doubt they are smart enough to figure that option. The “hunt” ends swiftly as when they finally finish a lap, I am sitting here, unmoved and cut off their path with a flame breath and with my body. I kill the horned and tail whip the other into my siblings. I’m still confused… Were we just so bad she decided to make things easier? Well, either way this was an easy kill and an easy meal.
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The following day my musings are somewhat answered. Since we’re not sleeping weeks at a time anymore, we can afford to eat less but more often. So now we’re placed face to face with three rabbits. All normal ones. Once again, easy hunt and kill. My siblings cannot keep up with them, but I can outrun most bunnies, and a bit of fire is enough to push them in the direction I want. Once again, we have an easy meal that we share.
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I should be worried about how easy killing has become. My instincts are basically beating me with a bat over the head every time I even insinuate I am not going to kill them, but still, it shouldn’t be so easy to just end a life considering how much trouble I had with this in my previous life… I am changing and not all of it is for the better. I still enjoy my meat but I am trying to analyze my behavior better.
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Next day is all the same. We get a bit of time to wake up, then we get taken out to hunt much easier prey than before. It’s annoying that she decided to be more gradual now. Had she done this from the very beginning we wouldn’t have been one hit away from dying. Still I enjoy our fifth serving of rabbit. They do taste amazingly, but I think they’re causing me to change faster. I’ve been growing after each meal. Small scale, but still growing. Each time I ate a core filled with meat, blood or bone, I would find my body either stronger or tougher, so I am guessing the respective mana is being used passively to accelerate my body’s growth.
Bone and meat are probably the best ones for that, since I think my scales, horns, claws and actual bones are part of that category. It just feels right, so I think it is. Meat or flesh mana on the other hand encompasses my muscles, so a balance is needed. At first I didn’t understand why blood mana is separate or what it could be doing to help, after all growing and improving my bones should help with the blood creation. Turns out the blood mana is actually the one that stirs up the marrow, since when I ate just flesh and bone cores and meat, I ended up getting tired much easier the next day. A balance is needed or I might end up growing deformed in the end.
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Another day, another… deer? It’s just a deer. We’re goddamned ankle biters, mother, and I know for a fact a deer can kill us with a stomp. Argh, my siblings aren’t even bothered… They’re just pushing forward.. So I go from the flank, roar to draw its attention, then posture up with my wings open. I’d like to say, with the deer for comparison, that I am the size of a medium to large dog, while my siblings are small to medium. I guess, technically, we could take it down, but it’s still troubling. At least this one doesn’t have horns, and by the smell of the mana, doesn’t seem to be that modified.
It seems spooked, both by me and by the others, causing it to jump and sprint every which way. Sadly it jumps over Spots and gets away. My siblings chase but I know we can’t catch the damn thing. So, instead I just settle in the tall grass and wait. My eyes have a bit of a downside, as seeing something right on my nose would be hard, but they do have the upside of making it easy to see taller things while I am low to the ground. It’s the favorite eye shape of things like snakes and cats after all, perfect for a small predator. So I act like one and when the deer comes close to me, but out of my bite range, I let out my breath and cover its right side with lingering fire.
It screeches and tries to run off, but the fire affected it too much. The deer runs a bit, then falls and tries to snuff out the flames in vain, then turns to go towards the lake, but the sight of our mother’s head stops it frozen. It’s too late, it didn’t know what to do and ended up stopping just enough for me to catch up and jump on its back. I dig my claws in, ignoring the small flames still burning its hide, and start taking bites out. I would have gone for the neck if I was bigger, but I’ve seen how a gazelle or wildebeest can stomp on lions while they go for the neck, and I’m not going to test if deer can do that too.
In the end, the deer dies of shock, at least I reckon that’s what does it. It is terrified, half burnt, has its back filled with bite marks, it tries to shake me off but simply can’t, so it collapses, barely breathing. Either way I chomp its neck, breaking the bone. The meal is hearty, even if the core was pathetic, and it had so many tastes I don’t think she even had a specialized element of some sort.
Another good meal, and this time we get some play time too. While my siblings run and play fight in the grass, I go to the water and start taking a dip. Mother looks at me a lot, probably afraid I’ll start drowning, but I just stay by the edge of it. I can sort of float, but I don’t have the doggy paddle muscle memory required for actual swimming, so I don’t tempt fate.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
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This is how things continued. Mother would bring in prey and we’d hunt. More often than not I had to be the strategist, and since I couldn’t tell my siblings plans, I just had to hope I can adapt to what they do. One thing to note is that after about seven hunts we would get a couple days of just sitting in, getting to absorb more of the mixed mana does help in some way, and since I don’t feel so sleepy if I don’t eat, I get to test out some things in these days.
What I am currently trying to do is figure out magic. Actual magic, not just my breath attack, or whatever defense RT used that first time. I haven’t seen him use it since, and I don’t feel like taking a hit just because, so I leave that thing on the back burner. The magic I am attempting to get the hang of is mother’s runic magic. I couldn’t see the tiny runes on her horns, but the runes she conjured for her spells I could observe and memorize. I also have the light rune to look at, but I cannot figure out how to even start conjuring one. Mother gathered a lot of magic, spoke words that held power, and only then was able to make the magic happen, which consisted of bending everything plant and fixing our bodies perfectly.
I am not dumb enough to not realize that any one of those acts would require absurd mana amounts, so I am starting small, light rune type of small. I already got light breath and even though I am still only able to shoot a flash instead of a beam. It might be a mentality problem rather than an energy one, since my very first use of it was a flashbang.
Regardless, back to the light rune. I have imagined it, but nothing happens. I tried imagining light mana flowing and forming it, but nothing happened. I even filled up my lungs with it, then tried to breathe it out and imagine it forming into the pattern, but nothing happened! It’s annoying, but I think I’ll need to wait for mother to teach us…
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A week passes, then a month. We grow fast, my siblings are even starting to catch up, though they still grow in their shapes rather than modifying too much. I become more spiky, and bigger, my current form being plenty useful. I do try to focus on imagining myself with separate tails and with better muscles and more dexterity on my “hands”, but if that influences something, it’s slow.
We’re not even eating just deer or rabbits anymore, mother started giving us fights too. Wolves, boars, I’m just happy she didn’t send a bear our way. However despite the growing difficulty, we’re managing. Mostly because our growth is not just about size. I kept trying to figure out magic in our free time, but nothing worked, at least until I woke up and it clicked. The answer was simple, I was too young. If I have an organ that manipulates mana, that organ is currently baby sized and baby trained. So I just needed more use and simply to be bigger for some things to start working. My breath attacks are what helped me realize that in the end. It has been carrying me and my siblings during our fights, as we started needing less mana to get better results.
We’re becoming better with each passing day, with each change to our bodies. Mother has been feeding us only animals with the three mana types that boost our growth, so maybe we’ll soon be big enough to actually use power like our mother’s.
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More time passed, I stopped bothering with counting days. My siblings grow smarter, wittier and stronger. I’ve also gotten to the point where I can fight even a heavily mutated wolf by myself, mostly because I’ve gotten to the size of a large wolf. My tails are now three quarters free of each other and my wings have been growing nicely. My breath attack is now an actual threat that can cover an enemy in flames or slow them down with frost, or even outright kill something if I manage to bite it and let out electricity to flow through them.
As I wake up after a longer nap than usual, I come to realize that I changed more than just by physical aptitude, as I start detecting mana better than ever before. I can literally see a sort of mist around our pile, and even an outline around my body that I am sure is mana. It’s very faint and I need to focus to notice it, but I can now feel the actual mana, not just hallucinate that I do. I can’t differentiate the types unless I get to sniff them, but hey, i can see mana! That should be worth something…
And it turns out it is, because now that I see the mana, I notice the way the pattern looks is not the entire story. The light pattern, while it looks like a sort of ribbon turned and twisted to make a complex geometrical shape, I see that the mana causing this is far more complex, looking like a sort of scaffolding keeping the ribbon from collapsing.
I follow the example, first by filling up my reserves with light mana, then by imagining it moving into the shape of the scaffolds. I breathe out and I can see the mist taking shape. It starts to dissipate, but then it gets fixed back up when I focus harder. I feel my chest hurting as the shape finishes and it suddenly lights up. It’s tiring, and a bit painful, but I manage to make the rune! And it even continues shining, though I need to keep focus on it. The mana I weaved into it lasted about half a minute of normal light output and honestly? It’s a start! Especially since I realized, thanks to the fancy scaffold, that I can modify the rune without ruining it. I do just that in my next try, and despite my chest hurting a bit more, I manage to make it light up brighter, though for shorter.
I can make runes. I can cast magic! I do feel.. very tired, like how I did during my first couple flame breaths, actually even worse, but that’s probably because I am doing this earlier than I should. I don’t care, I am happy to finally get actual spells going!
Mother doesn’t let me celebrate too much. I hear her and go straight to preparing fire mana for the coming fight. Who knows what she’ll bring us this time around, especially after a growth spurt? So I am ready with two thirds fire, one sixth air and one sixth electricity, just in case.
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The flight is swift and when we get there I realize something is different. The mist, the scent, the mana that is coming from that crate-like cage now has entirely different scents. I guess we’re big enough because I don’t feel the bone, flesh or blood of beasts, or rather not just that.
I smell fire, actual fire, nature mixer with earth, a different feel than mothers for sure. I smell water and ice, then shadows and a sweet poison, and finally, the one that smells like flesh and bone, but more than that, smells like a beast, like a true predator.
My mouth is watering, my muscles tensing. She brought us actual food, not just for the growth of our body, but for the growth of our mana. She opens the crate fully and I feel ecstatic, as do my siblings. It’s easy prey. Two of them are young, one a child, and one barely qualifying as an adult. The youngest also seems crippled, missing two limbs and an eye, far too easy to devour as the others run.
Another is too old to be of worry, it might have the most mana, but with a body so frail it will die to a tackle before getting any use out of it. The last two might be of concern. Two proper adults, thankfully we are in luck. Both of them are tied with cuffs, and the one that smells like a predator is bound in chains. This isn’t really a hunt, it’s an offering to us.
We approach, ready to swiftly end them, to devour that precious core in their chest, but as I get ready to jump, teeth flashing, saliva dripping like from a fountain, I do not jump on one of our meals to be. I jump on Red Tail, the only one close enough to also attack them. For the others I spew flames and sparks, scaring them off. RT tries to bite me, but I slap his side with my tail twice, sending him away. I pace between my siblings and our prey, then let out a clear roar.
“MINE!”
I claimed without care for perceived injustice from my siblings, because this is the only way. I claim the five as my hoard, because only then would I be able to keep them alive a while longer.
Why go so far? After I killed without mercy whatever mother threw at us? After I used my intelligence to kill innocent beasts, why protect them now? Because these aren’t beasts.
They’re people.
And it was so fucking hard to stop myself from becoming an actual monster.
And... it keeps getting harder....