A giant hammer struck my mind.

At least, that’s just how it felt to me. One moment, I was baring my teeth at the mind-twisted female; the next, my mind exploded in pain, unlike anything I’d ever felt, ripping a terrifying howl from my lungs. Darkness clouded my eyes; a ringing filled my ears. The whole world turned upside down.

Then, the sickening smell of my own vomit mixed with the putrid stench of a concoction the shoelace bitch had downed punched my nose.

My guts twisted even tighter, and I barfed again.

The nausea hit me hard, harder than anything before. And so, when the mind-twisted female tried to put my free hind leg in shackles again, instead of slitting her throat with my claws after swinging my hand - a paw, all right - at her, I clumsily rolled off the table. Not exactly an elegant demonstration of my predatory grace, but a way to avoid being shackled, nonetheless.

Admittedly, though, the dizziness may not have been entirely to blame for my lame display.

After living my entire life on two legs, finding myself on all fours was quite an experience. And it wasn’t just my beast legs giving me a hard time getting used to; my whole body was different, longer, beefier, bigger - even worse, if I was not mistaken, still growing.

On the bright side, my strength was quickly coming back. Whatever that vile concoction did to my heart, be it the weird connection of it to the Beast Core lodged under my belly or the mana flowing alongside my veins, it was boosting my regeneration to the point that all previous damage to my body seemed to be gone . . . and so did the beast.

‘Shit. I mean, SHIT! The beast was gone.’

Not gone like me turning back to being human.

I guess that would be too much to ask when I owed that regeneration to the beast I had become. No, whether I liked it or not, I was still a beast in body struggling to stand on my own four feet. However, the feral pull from deep within me was gone.

There was no one else in my head but me ... and the array, and the collar, and quite possibly even the shoelace bitch.

Come to think of it, my brain was quite a frequented place. However, as annoying as I found it, what mattered was that the traffic seemed to be down by one uninvited visitor. Joy swept over my body while terrible nausea shuffled through my guts once more.

The stench of half-digested food aside; that mental punch, or whatever the shoelace bitch hit me with, cleared the beast of my mind.

Unfortunately, as much as I would have enjoyed rubbing it in the shoelace bitch’s face - the fact she fought off the beast, not the vomit, although the idea was appealing too - getting out of here took priority.

The chains rattled again, this time by my doing. Alas, that was all I managed. Much to my annoyance and horror, the shackles held tightly around my legs and the chains even tighter to the floor. Regardless of what that beast pride tried to convince me of, I’d be a fool to think I was anything more than a weak girl who found herself down there in the cells one day.

“You brain rotten imbecile; get up. Get the fuck up!”

“B-but...she’s...a...a beast...,” the deranged asshole babbled, pointing his finger at me, trembling like a little rat who finally realized it was standing in front of a cat. The tables had turned. And it was...oddly satisfying.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

»GROWL«

“S-stay away from me!”

What a stupid mistake to bark at him was, no matter how enjoyable, I realized as soon as he yelled the words. Awoken by his command, the slave collar tightened its mechanical grip around my mind while the array pushed me to heed my master.

And I did.

It was a simple order to follow, after all. Such held the tightest grip over the mind. Yet, for something I should be used to, the force it bound me with took my breath away. Before, just faint echoes at the back of my mind; now the array and the collar kept me away from that deranged asshole with the force I remembered from my first days in this nightmare. Back then, I had no idea where I was, what had been put around my neck, what the Lattice stood for, and what the array the asshole had made me choose meant. Above all, I didn’t have a weave like Indomitable Will to protect my sanity. Back then, my mind was simply defenseless.

And much to my horror, it seemed to be the case now, too.

The reason? No doubt, the bitch and the way she struck my mind. The nausea was sickening, rendering any effort to muster a resistance an impossible chore.

“Oh, excellent. You’ve finally made yourself useful,” the shoelace bitch grunted with effort, wiping the blood from under her nose. Annoyingly, the moment of my weakness did not slip by her. “Tell the mutt not to move.”

“Wh-what...why don’t you do it? Wh-why are you so pale, and what’s with the blood...?”

“For mind’s sake, shut up and do as I say.”

The shoelace bitch sounded tired and smelled sickly. Whatever she hit me with, it took a toll on her, too. However, having learned from my previous mistake, instead of barking my glee in her face, aware that this might be my last chance, I forced myself through the nausea, mustered my will once more, and tried to break free of the shackles.

My legs moved, but the chains merely rattled.

“Come on, you brain-dead imbecile!”

“S-stop. Do not move.”

With the command spoken, I froze in place, unable to move a muscle. Yet again, that deranged asshole had deprived me of free will, and worse, this time he wasn’t the only one to do so. Seeing me standing still, the bitch didn’t hesitate to act. Wary of me, far more than before, she shackled my right hind leg in no time, leaving me with only my front paw free.

“Where’s the last one?” she barked, only to cringe in disgust when her eyes, like mine, fell on the chain lying in the puddle of piss the asshole was sitting in.

“Urg...you put that one on her.”

“M-me? But she...”

“...is under your command. You have nothing to worry about.”

A blatant lie. The apprehension of me in her voice was unmistakable. Not even the fear-stricken asshole missed it.

“W-won’t it be safer if you control her? I’m not sure if...if the collar and the Slave Array work on beasts...” he said, his eyes going wide with each word as the full realization of my transformation sank in, his voice trailing off. “She is a beast. She turned into a real beast!”

“For mind’s sake, you act like you’ve never seen a shifter take their form before.”

A shifter? Was that what I was now? Did that mean there were more people like me, like the freaks downstairs? So many questions, no answers.

“N-no, you don’t understand. She is a beast...a true beast with a core. I mean, she must have accepted the core, right? Incredible. Can you imagine the possibilities? The mages...”

“... Certainly won’t be thrilled with the idea that to possess a Beast Core requires becoming a beast. Now, get off your ass and shackle her before...” she stopped short, cursing herself under her breath for saying too much.

“Before what? Wait, what really happened? W-why is your nose still bleeding?”

“Fuck!” the bitch swore, wiping away the blood, downing another concoction. “Listen carefully, you imbecile, because whatever she’s turned into, it’s not some ordinary fucking beast. That thing...I hit her with enough force to make her a drooling tit for a month. Instead, the beast nearly shredded my mind. So either you get up and shackle her, or I’m getting out of here, and you can do whatever you want with the mutt.”

‘Holy fucking shit.’

The bitch wasn’t just wary of me; she was downright afraid of me, or to be more precise, of the beast that dwelt within me.