Alex looked at the fox, then at the old woman's face, and understood — with real irritation — that he'd already lost.The fox wasn't dying. That would've been simpler. A dying thing he could argue himself out of.This one was just old: one back leg curled wrong from a break that had healed badly years ago, wheezing thin and soft, like a bellows with the leather gone."Please." The old woman's nerve had run out on the first try. Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "He's all the company I've got left."Behind her, Monica wasn't even trying to hide her smile.Alex exhaled through his nose. "Inside. Not out here where the whole street can watch."He worked fast. No ceremony this time, no long search for the heart by feel — he knew where it sat on this body now.Three needles. A thin thread of inner force, in and gone again inside a minute, just enough to unknot old scar tissue and settle the lungs. The fox jolted awake, blinked up at him with wet black eyes, and immediately tried to bite

Alex didn't say it out loud to Yolanda. He turned the question over instead, quiet and careful, the way he turned over everything that mattered now.Could this skill be taught to humans, too?"Monica." He kept his voice low. "Can beast skills be taught to humans?"She looked at him like he'd asked whether water was wet. "Of course. Every skill can be taught. The real question is whether the human's any good at learning it. Some people take five years for something simple. Others take decades. Mostly it comes down to the bond — how close you are to the beast."Alex nodded, but his mind had already moved on. Collect everything. As many skills as he could get his hands on.He found his first target without leaving Willowmere.The town had one licensed healing house — real fees, real credentials, and behind the counter, something rare: a Driftlichen. A floating tuft of moss that trailed spores like smoke and closed wounds in minutes. Champions came here when their own healers weren't enou

A hundred shelters. Fencing that wouldn't hurt anything that leaned on it. A vet station solid enough that even Petrie would have to believe it. And a two-story house — he still hadn't found the sentence that walked that back.Alex studied the map of the Regent branch land. Forest. Governor land, technically unclaimed. His, if he did this right.He waited until the shop went dark. Monica and Yolanda had gone home.He shut the door. Closed his hand around the ring on his finger — plain, forgettable, the kind of thing nobody looked at twice — and reached into the space folded behind it.The drone came first. Palm-sized, matte black, curled shut like a fist that hadn't opened in years. Then the housing unit, wardrobe-sized, hit the floorboards with a thud too heavy for something that had just come out of nowhere. Last, a strip of something thin and skin-soft, weightless, which he pressed to the back of his neck. It settled in like it had never left.Core reconnected. Systems synchronizin

That night, once the shop had gone quiet, Alex sat with Grim's head against his knee and called up the skill.Skill on record: Bloodrend. Compatible target found. Teach?Grim was awake, ears already up, watching him with the particular stillness of a dog that knew something was about to happen to it and had decided in advance not to flinch."Yes."Cost: 300 mana. Cooldown: 48 hours.The pull came sharper than Windshear had, a cold drag behind his sternum that didn't let go for a full ten seconds. Grim's whole body went rigid, then shuddered, then settled — and when he lifted his head again there was something different sitting behind his eyes, a weight that hadn't been there an hour ago.He tested it without being told to. A short, low swipe at the empty air, twin motions folded into one strike. The old fence post nearest him didn't so much break as disagree with existing."That's yours now," Alex said. "Don't waste it on fence posts."Grim's tail didn't wag. It thumped, once, like a

Dorian double cabin truck dropped the three of them at White Field a little after eight, the terraces already visible from the road, brown-edged and sunken where something had been eating the roots out from under them for weeks.Dorian had brought two people. He introduced them without much ceremony — Kass, wiry and quiet, with a badger-shaped digger pacing low at his heel; Bram, heavier through the shoulders, his beast a hooded, dust-colored viper coiled loose around one arm like a bracelet that had decided to wake up.“Citizen quota,” Dorian said. “They’re short on theirs as well. Thought we’d clear it all in one go. Team quota—more hands, the better.”"Efficient," Alex said, and didn't ask anything else.Kass's eyes moved once over Grim, cataloguing, then moved away too fast to be casual about it. Bram didn't look at Grim at all, which was its own kind of tell.A farmer met them at the gate with the tired relief of a man who'd stopped expecting anyone to actually come. "North terrac