The Beast Tamers Hidden System

CHAPTER 3: THE PRICE OF HUNGER

By morning the shadow was just a shadow.

Adrian had spent the night against Mina’s wall with his eyes open, waiting for it to move again. It hadn’t. When gray light came through the curtains, Nyx stretched on the blanket with the grim dignity of a creature who had never asked to be alive, and its shadow stretched with it, small and cat-shaped.

Blood loss, he told himself. Bad lamplight.

He didn’t believe it. But he didn’t say it aloud either.

[ Companion essence: 2% ]

[ Main Mission 1: 57:12:44 remaining ]

A whole point gone overnight, just from lying still. The System had put it plainly when he checked: Critical condition. Essence loss continues until stabilization. Exertion accelerates loss. Nyx was running on whatever it had left, and that wasn’t much.

Mina padded into the kitchen with a library book hugged to her chest. Nyx followed two paces behind her, stiff-legged, like an unwilling bodyguard.

“Dusk moths,” she said, and slid Field Anatomy of Minor Beasts across the table. “Grade F. They carry clean essence cores, about the size of a lentil. Three would get Nyx to twenty percent, if the System counts it the way the book does.”

Adrian read the entry twice.

Low threat when approached with preparation. Wing dust induces drowsiness and paralysis. Do not inhale. Bright light causes swarming. Avoid.

“They live in the Sump Gardens,” Mina said. “The drainage greenhouses under Cutler Row. The lichen crews work there all day, so you’d have to go after they leave.”

“Tonight, then.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Her breathing had the careful, measured rhythm she used when she was pretending it didn’t hurt. He knew every note of it.

“Come back before morning,” she said. “Please.”

He prepared like someone who believed preparation could be a substitute for experience.

A cloth mask from a laundry stall, four marks. A hand-lamp with a metal shutter, nine. A coil of rope. Harlan’s spare rubber gloves from the night locker. He drew the plan on the back of a receipt: Shutter lamp to a pinhole. Move slow. Take them one at a time while they roost.

It was a good plan. It would have worked, if he’d been calmer.

The Sump Gardens were longer and colder than he’d imagined. Vaulted tunnels, strings of dim yellow lamps, trays of pale lichen glowing in rows along the walls. The air tasted of wet clay. In the shadows between the lamps, gray shapes hung from the pipes in clusters, folded and still.

Nine. Ten. More beyond.

He’d shut Nyx in Mina’s room with a saucer of water and a sharp mental stay. The bond had given back a flat, cold impression that he’d decided to read as agreement.

He took the lamp out, set the shutter to a pinhole, and crept into a side branch where the moths hung thickest over a pool of standing water.

It wasn’t enough light. He couldn’t tell the cores from the shadows. He could see wings and pipe and wet stone, and nothing that looked like the lentil-sized glint the book described. Behind his sternum, the bond fluttered faintly, a candle in a drafty room. He checked the corner of his eye.

[ Companion essence: 2% ]

Still there. For now.

Just one look, he thought. One second. Open it, see where the cores sit, close it.

He knew what the book said. He had read it twice. But his hands were shaking, and the timer was ticking, and Mina was home counting her breaths. For the first time in his life he had something worth saving, and it was dying a point at a time.

He opened the shutter.

The beam cut hard and white down the tunnel and hit the wet pipes, and the light shattered. A hundred bright points skittered across the ceiling, and every moth in the branch opened its wings at once.

The sound was soft, like a held breath released. Then gray wings poured off the pipes in a rush and the air filled with beating velvet. He swung the pipe at the nearest, and it burst against the wall in a puff of silver dust.

[ DING! ]

Dusk Moth defeated.

Experience gained.

System Level 2 reached.

A new function is being prepared.

He didn’t have time to read it. The dust reached his face.

It slipped in around the edge of the mask, sweet and faintly warm, and the first thing it took was his hands. His fingers stopped closing. The pipe slid out of them. The second thing it took was sound. The wings dropped to a muffled hush, as if he were underwater, and his own heartbeat went slow and heavy in his ears.

He tried to run and his knees folded. The wet stone came up under his shoulder. The lamp rolled away, still lit, throwing frantic white circles across the ceiling, drawing more moths down.

I read the warning. I read it twice.

His tongue wouldn’t move. He couldn’t call out. He lay on his side and watched gray wings fill the tunnel and thought, with terrible clarity, Mina is going to find out I was stupid.

Then the dark came.

It rolled down the tunnel like smoke across water, and the lamp went out as if the dark had pinched it shut. The wings faltered. In the sudden quiet, small claws clicked on stone, and a pair of violet eyes opened above his face.

You were supposed to stay. He couldn’t say it. It came out as breath.

Nyx stepped over him and opened its jaws. The darkness drew itself into its mouth, and when it exhaled, a ripple of cold went out through the tunnel. The moths fell one by one onto the stone, silent as leaves.

[ Companion essence: 1% ]

[ Warning: Dark manipulation consumes essence. Critical threshold. ]

Adrian watched the number fall and felt something worse than the dust.

Nyx had known. It had followed him through the drains on two percent, and it had spent a point of what it had left to haul him out of a mistake he’d made himself.

The creature swayed, righted itself, and lay down against his ribs. The bond went quiet, a small steady pulse, as faint as a held coal.

[ Companion state: Dormant. Essence loss halted. ]

Then the light behind his eyes went out.

He woke to the taste of lichen and a green glow on the ceiling.

His head felt like a bruise. His limbs were slow and heavy but his own again. The clock in the corner of his vision read 31:48:09. Thirteen hours had passed.

Nyx lay across his chest, limp and warm, barely breathing.

He sat up. And then he saw what was around them.

The darkness hadn’t left. It pooled across the stone in a loose ring, the exact size of a sleeping creature’s reach, and where it lay the lamplight slid off it like water off oil. From the main tunnel, anyone passing would see a patch of dark wall and nothing else.

That’s why nobody found us. The lichen crews started at eight. They kept to the main loop. Nobody walked the dead branches. And Nyx’s dark, whatever it was, had folded around two sleepers and held.

He stared at the small black shape on his chest.

“You idiot,” he whispered, and his voice cracked. “You absolute idiot. You could have died.”

Moths lay scattered across the stone, gray and still. Seven of them. In the silver dust beside the nearest, something small glinted, round and dark as a lentil.

He found three cores, warm in his shaking palm.

[ Item acquired: Dusk Moth Core (Grade F) x 3 ]

[ Main Mission 1: Cores recovered 3/3 ]

He opened Nyx’s jaws with two fingers, gently, and set the first core on its tongue. It slid down without the creature waking.

[ Core absorbed: +6% essence ]

[ Companion essence: 7% ]

The second.

[ Companion essence: 13% ]

The third.

[ Companion essence: 19% ]

[ Bond stabilized. Resonance contribution: +1% ]

[ Companion essence: 20% ]

[ MAIN MISSION 1 COMPLETE ]

Reward: Bond Points x 50. Skill Seed (Unidentified). Companion Codex unlocked.

Violet eyes opened. They were clearer now, brighter, and absolutely furious.

“I know,” Adrian said. His throat was tight. “I’m sorry. I ignored the warning, and you paid for it.”

Nyx stared at him for a long moment. Then, with enormous reluctance, it pressed its nose against his knuckles. Once. Briefly.

And pulled away as if it had never happened.

He laughed, and it came out wet.

The climb up the maintenance ladder took ten minutes. His arms shook the whole way, and Nyx rode inside his coat, silent and offended. A new tab pulsed in the corner of his sight, unread. The System had said a function was being prepared. It would have to wait.

When his head cleared the lip of the shaft, the first thing he saw was a pair of dirty sneakers.

“Well,” said a bright voice. “That’s one way to harvest lichen.”

Adrian froze.

The boy crouched beside the hatch had a canvas sack of glowing moss over one shoulder, a grease-stained jacket, and the pleased expression of someone who had stumbled on something far better than lichen. Curly dark hair, quick eyes, a copper badge pinned to his collar: Appraiser, Provisional.

“Tobin Marsh,” Adrian said. They’d shared two classes. They had never spoken.

“Tobi. Everyone calls me Tobi when they want something.” He grinned. “Cross, right? F-rank. I was in the hall.” He said it as a fact, not an insult. “I also know the crews don’t start until eight, and I’ve been picking moss out here since six, and I haven’t seen anyone come down that hatch. Which means you came up from the Gardens with no one knowing you’d gone in.”

“I needed lichen for a project.”

“Sure you did.” Tobi tilted his head. His eyes dropped to Adrian’s coat, and the pleased look sharpened into curiosity. “That’s a very cute fox.”

Nyx’s head had slipped out through the collar. Only for a second, ears flat, violet eyes wary. Now it withdrew. But not before Tobi’s gaze had landed and stayed.

“I’m E-rank,” Tobi said, almost to himself. “Appraiser, provisional. I don’t get the full picture. Just a whisper. Value, age, whether something’s alive.” He rubbed his thumb along the badge. “I can usually guess an item to within ten marks.”

“It’s a stray.”

“Mm.” Tobi’s grin had gone quiet. “Here’s the funny part, Cross. When I touched the whisper on your fox, it came back empty. Not low. Not weak. Empty. Like pressing my hand against a wall.” He frowned. “That shouldn’t happen. Everything gives off something.”

Adrian’s mouth had gone dry. “Maybe your talent’s just”

“Limited? Sure.” Tobi waved a hand. “It’s E-rank. It misses things.” He wasn’t looking at Adrian’s face anymore. He was looking at the ground behind them, where the low morning sun threw long shadows across the stone.

“But shadows don’t lie,” he said softly.

Adrian turned his head.

His own shadow lay stretched across the pavement, thin and gray. Beside him, Nyx sat perfectly still on the flagstones, small and black, tail curled around its feet, not moving at all.

Its shadow was moving.

It lengthened across the stone, slow and smooth, away from the sun and toward the open mouth of the maintenance shaft, as if something at the bottom of the dark were pulling it home.

Tobi’s grin had gone completely. “Cross,” he whispered. “Your fox isn’t moving.”