UNBOUND: THE DEVOURING TAMER

Unknown Beast

# Chapter 7: Unknown Beast

The wolf slept for six hours straight.

Ethan waited it out in the maintenance room, fox curled against his side, both of them listening for any sign the lab-hound had found the tunnel entrance. It never did. Eventually the light through the vent shifted from gray afternoon to the deeper gray of dusk, and Ethan allowed himself to breathe a little easier.

He used the time to bandage what he could—wrapping the wolf's ruined foreleg in strips torn from his own shirt, cleaning the worst of the gashes with water from his canteen. The wolf let him. Didn't growl, didn't flinch away, just watched him work with those dark, unreadable eyes, occasionally letting out a small huff when he pressed too hard on something tender.

"You're being weirdly cooperative," Ethan muttered, tying off the last bandage. "Considering you tried to bite my hand off an hour ago."

The wolf's ear twitched, which Ethan chose to interpret as acknowledgment.

By the time full dark settled outside, the wolf could stand—wobbly, favoring the bandaged leg, but upright. It took two experimental steps toward him, sniffed at his bandaged forearm where its own teeth had grazed him earlier, and then, astonishingly, pressed its head briefly against his knee before pulling back like it had surprised itself doing it.

Ethan went very still, unsure what to do with that.

"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay, we're... doing that now. Cool."

Getting out of the outpost took another hour of careful, silent movement, wolf limping beside him, fox riding in his jacket again, both animals tense at every distant sound. They found Dez waiting nervously just past the checkpoint gate, pale and clearly having spent the last several hours convinced Ethan was dead.

"You're—you're alive—" Dez's eyes went wide at the wolf. "What is *that.*"

"Found it," Ethan said flatly, in no mood to explain the soul-contract, the failed system readout, any of it. "It's coming with me."

Dez didn't argue. Dez, Ethan noted, also didn't offer to split the meager haul evenly after abandoning him to a corrupted lab-hound, and quietly disappeared into the night after handing over Ethan's cut with a mumbled apology that didn't sound like it meant much.

Ethan walked home in the dark, wolf limping at his side, and didn't think about any of it too hard until he was back on his rooftop, door locked, city noise murmuring distantly below.

That's when the system finally finished processing.

Text bloomed across his vision, no longer fractured or stuttering—clear this time, deliberate, like something had spent the last several hours running calculations it hadn't been prepared for.

**[SOUL-BOND STABILIZED]**

**[REATTEMPTING SPECIES CLASSIFICATION...]**

**[CLASSIFICATION FAILED — NO MATCHING RECORDS]**

**[UNKNOWN BEAST DETECTED]**

Ethan's breath caught. He'd seen those exact words once before—glimpsed, buried, gone in an instant beneath the gold F at the Awakening Hall. Seeing them again, deliberate and unmistakable this time, sent a cold prickle down his spine that had nothing to do with the night air.

**[STANDARD EVOLUTIONARY PARAMETERS: INVALID]**

**[BEAST DOES NOT CONFORM TO ANY RECOGNIZED TAXONOMY]**

**[RECALCULATING...]**

The wolf, curled at his feet on the rooftop, lifted its head and stared directly at him, like it could somehow sense the words scrolling in front of his eyes even though they weren't visible to anyone but him.

Ethan swallowed. "You feel that too, don't you."

The wolf didn't answer, obviously, but its ears pinned forward, alert, waiting.

**[HIDDEN FUNCTION UNLOCKED]**

The words hit like a physical jolt. Ethan sat bolt upright, pulse spiking.

**[HIDDEN FUNCTION UNLOCKED]**

He stared at the phrase, at the strange, sharp-edged symbol that flickered briefly beneath it—the same black mark he'd glimpsed at the Awakening Hall, the one that had vanished before anyone else could see it. It didn't fade this time. It hovered, steady, waiting for him to acknowledge it.

**[SYSTEM FUNCTION: DEVOUR & EVOLVE]**

**[STATUS: LOCKED — REQUIRES BEAST-CORE INTERACTION TO INITIALIZE]**

"Devour and evolve," Ethan read aloud, voice barely above a whisper. "What does that even—"

The interface offered nothing further. No explanation, no tutorial prompt, nothing beyond that single cryptic line sitting stubborn and glowing at the edge of his vision, refusing to expand no matter how hard he mentally pushed at it.

He looked down at the wolf. At the fox, who'd gone very quiet, watching the wolf with an expression that had shifted from wary rival to something more like cautious deference, as if some instinct buried deep in its small body understood exactly what it was looking at even if Ethan didn't.

*Beast-core interaction,* Ethan thought, mind racing back through everything he'd salvaged from the outpost. He still had two of the cracked, dull monster cores Dez had shoved into his bag before things went wrong—worthless junk-tier cores, barely worth a few copper at any trading post.

Worthless to a normal Beast Tamer, maybe.

He pulled one out of his bag now, turning the dull gray stone over in his fingers, and looked back at the wolf—at its dark, patient eyes, at the fractured crystal shard still faintly visible beneath the fur of its chest, the one piece of it that had never stopped glowing since the moment he found it.

"I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing," Ethan admitted quietly. "But I don't think either of us has anywhere better to be right now."

He held the core out toward the wolf, hand shaking slightly, uncertain if this was the stupidest thing he'd done all day or the first genuinely smart one.

The wolf's nose twitched. Then, slowly, deliberately, it leaned forward and closed its jaws around the dull gray stone.

The moment its teeth broke the core's surface, the entire rooftop lit up bright enough to wash out the stars.

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