“Silthen, I am one hundred percent positive that dog was Awakened.” Aitra insisted with a huff, gesturing to the entrance of the Bone Pits to their right with her kite shield.

“It literally just walked out of the Bone Pits while looking like something an [Animator] raised from the grave, then proceeded to break through my level sixteen [Control Beast] spell like it was tissue paper, then clearly activated something and ran! Also, its eyes were glowing, if you had looked at it you would know. It’s either a doppelganger, or a decently leveled Awakened!” She reasoned, feeling like she was a moment’s away from just walking away to find the damn dog herself.

Silthen groaned as he ran a hand through his brown hair, his eyes half-lidded from annoyance, then spoke, gesturing with his hands.

“Aitra, okay. Even if it is, what do you expect us to do? Chase after some small dog in a goddamn labyrinth Dungeon city? We’re more likely to get lost trying to get the damn thing for you, we don’t have a tracker, and The Factory teleporters open soon and we might lose our chance to be among the first batch going in. And even if we did get it, what the hell would you do with it? You’re a [Spirit Summoner], not a [Corporeal Summoner], and you won’t be for likely another couple years. You want us to just lock the thing in our inn rooms until it’s able to have enough intelligence not to hinder or outright get us killed in the Dungeon?”

Curse him and his reasonableness!

“We could at least sell it to some fat fuck noble for a couple hundred gold crowns! That’s multiple times more than we’d make by killing some weak ass golems and digging their cores out!” She protested, inwardly drooling over finally having a little bit more change in her pockets.

For a moment, her teammates' eyes light up a bit, appearing skeptical for the first time, only to be shot down by Silthen again.

“If. We catch it. If we don’t get lost, then there’s the fact that we’re not going to get any levels on our Paths or progress for our Skills by chasing some starving mutt around like idiots. We’re not chasing it, that’s final.”

Ankhan, the feather-headed Corfid, nodded. “Yeaaaaaaaaaaah, I’m with Silthen on this one. I can barely find my way back to our inn even after a week, and every time I leave I feel like I’ll turn a corner and turn around to find a wall behind me. This place is a goddamn maze. Also… the locals are fucking scary. Have you seen how they glare at us?”

Nakim snorted from atop her crate, where she was swinging her legs back and forth, her innumerable needles, darts and daggers so well concealed even Aitra couldn’t tell where she’d shoved them into this time.

“No, they glare at you, because you look like a rich boy peacock. Nobody gives a shit about you down here unless you look or act rich or annoying, and you act and look like both.”

“It’s not my fault I’m dashing. I’d look like a king wearing a potato sack.” Ankhan shrugged, and Aitra watched Nakim’s teeth grit, her fingers tensing with the desire to throw a dart into his forehead.

While she didn’t share the animosity Nakim had for Ankhan, she could agree that he was if nothing else, making them look bad in the eyes of the locals. Wearing a gaudy brigandine colored bright red in the dirty slums was already stretching it, layering on a cape for no reason was just making him look like a prick. Especially considering that the only reason they were down here was because the teleport distance was shortest here, and thus the cheapest, only being one silver per person to enter.

Maybe if he was a high level adventurer it wouldn’t seem as pretentious, but he definitely couldn’t back up his wealth with power. He had no notion of ‘saving’ and it seemed like that extended to more than just conserving his mana.

Being the youngest member of the team however, and already feeling a bit chastised after being denied the chance to find that Awakened dog, she said nothing.

She just couldn’t get over how quickly they just discarded the idea of capturing that little stray. As an aspiring [Corporeal Summoner], a dog was the perfect thing to bind as a first summon.

When the old Academy found a way to breed the [Devourer] skill out of wolves, followed by the systematic annihilation of said wolves, things had been smooth sailing between the newly made creatures called ‘dogs’ and humans. Until a couple centuries later, where through the selective breeding, or perhaps some other factor, it was theorized that they were too far from their origins in the eyes of the system, and that changed their Awakening requirements so much and so drastically that nobody could figure out what they even were anymore, or if most dogs were just locked out of the system by default.

Humanoids roughly tended to have to reach a certain level of intelligence, which everyone but the most mentally disabled could pass by the time they were six or seven years old.

Dragons were just born with access to the system, seen as animals, people, and monsters, because the world was unfair.

Dogs?

Nobody knew, and that was part of what made an Awakened dog so valuable. There were plenty of other tamed creatures for people to bond with, or create summons out of, but none were ever so compatible and easy as dogs. They were literally made to be companions to humanoids, unlike a raptirid, any one of the various species of elemental salamanders, or the tiny thraklings that people were hankering after just for the pride of having something that was sort of like a wyvern or a drake on their shoulder, if about the size of a small dog.

They were all fine and all, but they were difficult, and Paths that dealt with summons, familiars, or god forbid, soulbonds, they all had the common issue of the bond between the human and the animal they were with.

Raptirids were smart little bastards, but they were greedy as hell, had a nasty temper, and were more than a little difficult to control. You couldn’t chastise them too much without building resentment, and they felt entitled to rewards even if they knew they didn’t do the command right. They were also overactive, every minute of sleep being paired with twenty minutes of constant yelling and flying about. You had to have a damn leash on them at all times or risk losing them the first couple years. And despite their intelligence, it was extremely rare for a raptirid to genuinely bond with their owners, limiting the communication and teamwork of the summon severely despite their natural predatory abilities.

Salamanders had the opposite issue. They were extremely easy to bond with, but they were stupid, and barely did anything. Getting a fire salamander to spew a bout of flammable liquid at something hostile was an exercise in futility if it wasn’t feeling directly threatened. You had to have a low power control spell on them constantly, or else they wouldn’t feel the tiniest bit motivated to move. They were pretty cute though.

And thraklings were like raptirids, if you made them twice as big and gave them the attitude of a psychotic pyromaniac.

A standard dog was perfect. It was weak on the spectrum of available summons, especially when technically there were thousands of different animals one could get, but they were by far the most stable and reliable. They absolutely adored their owners if they were treated well, and that bond let them flawlessly communicate and understand the summoner without even a word being spoken, almost like a permanent telepathy spell. Paired with some Skills like [Elemental Summon Infusion], they could be a surprisingly diverse summon, able to act as artillery, infantry, or a shock troop, rushing in and out of battle with [Haste] buffs and shields.

She was still far away from becoming a [Conjurative Summoner], but she still felt like she’d just lost an amazing opportunity. For a stray to either have learned [Peace of Mind] or [Mental Resistance] at a level where it could break her spell so easily, it must have been absurdly strong for its age and size.

Maybe if she hadn’t relied on her Skills so much and approached the little thing with some meat in her hands, that whole fiasco could have been avoided.

She sighed as she leaned back against a metal wall, wondering when the doors would open and they’d get to step through the teleporters so she could let out some of her frustration by throwing spirits at the golems.

Thinking about The Factory definitely didn’t help her mood, unlike what she’d expected. She had been to other dungeons before on the opposite end of the continent, but comparing them to The Factory was downright insulting, in both size and complexity. The Factory was almost half of the space of the largest city of all four kingdoms, with over half of the capital’s population living in just three floors out of gods knew how many this place had.

And they were going to go straight inside very soon.

It was a little terrifying, the fact that the Bone Pits were so lethally toxic that they had to build warded military facilities around all the entrances to the active floors of the Dungeon below, with the only way in or out being a bunch of teleport platforms and portals. The possibility of something breaking the teleport magic and the purification wards would all lead to a scenario where they would be stranded in a dead, city-sized labyrinth of metal covered in poison fumes from top to bottom, or at best, stuck in a warded facility, waiting for rescue as food supplies dwindled.

Not that any unfortunate fate waiting in the dungeon would be much better, but thankfully, few were psychotic enough to go lower than the topmost active floor of The Factory, and her team wasn’t a part of that small percentage.

When the wolf woke, it was around the time the light crystals would dim, in what it assumed humans did to tell the time by counting light cycles. It stretched its forelegs and dipped low to the ground with a jaw-popping yawn. During its nap, it had confirmed that roughly three fourths of the human still remained as a blob of gore stored… somewhere, and had tried to prod around its body to better understand how it worked, to varying success. It had tried to toughen up the insides of its throat, but even during the process it somehow knew that it wouldn’t be much of a change, and would increase chances of inflammation, making it choke, so it dropped the idea quickly.

It turned and walked through the open area, most of the humans congregating around the wooden carts and going in and out of the glass-covered buildings as they gave things to each other, allowing it a surprising amount of ease in its navigation.

Yet, as it went to curve around some female human’s legs, the woman crouched low on her ankles, her coat pooling around her feet, extending an open hand towards it, palm up. The wolf stopped in its tracks, curious yet cautious, and as it examined the woman, she reached into the basket she was holding under her other arm, and with a bit of fiddling, pulled out something vaguely white and…

Smelling like food. Good, human food.

Then she held it out to the wolf, making some odd sort of cooing noise.

The wolf eyed the taller human female standing behind the woman as she looked around, wary but not nervous or aggressive, and it decided to go for the food. Extending its neck out as far as possible, and with its legs in a half-crouch, it slowly sniffed the delicious scent of the fluffy yellow-white food, the human’s hand, and even proactively set [Bloodrush] in a corner of its mind to be used if the female tried something.

As its teeth closed around the edge, it made them not cut and only pierce a little, and quickly dragged the piece of food out of her hands, and chomped it down in a single bite, licking its chops. The woman moved the corner of her lips up, and cut out another piece, which the wolf ate with increasingly less suspicion, until it barely sniffed them before throwing them down its gullet, and until it was eating out of the human’s hands.

The taller female glanced at them, and her expression tightened.

“My lady, please do not debase yourself by letting mangy, dying mutts lick your hands.”

The woman moved her shoulders up and down once as she reached for an entire loaf of the white stuff, and laid it down just below her knees, extending an empty hand towards it, which it licked once, twice, and then nosed in gratitude, before quickly moving forward to take the food away from the woman by stabbing a canine through the corner and dragging its body back. With its eyes on the women, it pinned the food with its paws and started tearing it apart with gusto.

“Katherine.” The woman started softly. “Can you not see that its eyes are glowing? Don’t alarm it.” She added on quickly as the wolf continued staring at them, biting chunks out of the rapidly diminishing food in front of it.

The woman in the back suddenly nailed her gaze on it, and it stiffened slightly, its lightly wagging tail going rigid.

“Awakened.” The woman in the back breathed out. “Or something an [Animator], [Infuser], or some type of summoner lost.”

The woman in front bobbed her head, then extended the basket behind towards the tall woman, who quickly took it. She muttered something, and a thin film of white covered the hand the wolf had been eating off. Then, just after the wolf finished the odd rectangle of food, she extended an open hand towards it, and the wolf tilted its head as it licked its chops. After staring at it for a moment, it moved forward, gently nosed it, and started wagging its tail as the human got closer, rubbing its snout, head and under its chin.

Humans were dangerous and scary, but if they were nice, the wolf loved nothing more than to let one pet it. After getting progressively filthier and bigger, that quickly happened less and less frequently, so even if it kept its eyes open and [Bloodrush] in its mind, it luxuriated in the hands of the human quite easily.

“What do you wish to do? Do you want me to capture it?” The woman in the back questioned the one on the front, who shook her head side to side.

“No, we will do precisely nothing. You know that even if I brought this little guy home, they’d take him from me and give him to my father, or brother. Can’t have the bastard child running around with an Awakened guard dog by her side. I’m just going to heal it a little, and leave it alone. Someone that actually lives down here could use its companionship more. And, we still have to visit the red light district and the orphanages.”

She spoke softly as she scratched, an oddly pleased air about her, and the woman behind her bobbed her head mutely.

After a couple moments of the wolf enjoying a pleasant head massage by the odd human, she put her fingers onto its infected ear, and before it could even flinch, an odd tingling sensation washed over both its surface and its insides, and a moment later, the pain vanished as the dog jumped back, startled. Neither of the two humans moved as it moved one of its paws to gently poke its ear, finding that it still hurt, but less than before, and all the itchiness had disappeared.

Hesitantly, it approached the crouching human that hadn’t moved, and nosed her hand. She touched its foreleg this time, and the wolf watched in fascination as the scabbed wound healed a thousand times faster than normal, its skin visibly growing to cover and consume the scabs until all that was left was the faint marks of a scar.

Although still guarded, the wolf let the human poke its ear a couple more times, each time making it less painful and itchy, until eventually, it was barely able to feel anything. Relative tingles of numbness, sure, but that was all.

“Alright, let’s go.” The woman in front of it said, and regretfully retracted her hands, the odd white film over her hands disappearing into thin air as she brushed her paws down her extra coat of skin that hung loose down to her ankles. “Used up a lot more mana than I expected, so let’s take our time for me to recover a bit.”

The woman in the back bobbed her head, and they turned around to leave.

The wolf followed for a bit, both curious and hoping that if it bumped its nose into the food basket enough, the human would give it more food, but eventually, the woman turned and barked out a “No!”, and the wolf cowered back, knowing that it had pushed the human’s patience.

Adding that round open area into its mental map of the human’s nest, it stalked through the streets, for some reason drawing a lot more stares and double-takes than it was used to. It sped up, moving as far away from human noises as possible, and made its way to the trash area of the human’s nest, where humans would throw unwanted stuff into a large pit that periodically made everything disappear. The rats with their small bodies could stuff themselves in and out of bags quickly, allowing them to easily traverse the human’s waste, something the wolf could not do.

But the rats tended to mostly steer clear of the large, turning gears that crushed the waste bags, staying on the more stable ground around the base of the hole, where the occasional human would go and check up on the machinery down there.

Of course, the only way to get to the bottom was by walking down a giant spiraling staircase, at least for itself, so that was where it headed.

Following the more foul-smelling pipes for human waste tended to lead to the waste pits, or at least relatively close to them, as humans separated their bodily waste and other waste, for some reason.

As long as it gave the wolf a vague sense of direction, it didn’t particularly think about it too much.

The usual sights flit by its eyes as it wandered around. Humans mating in alleys, some fighting and killing each other in very similar alleys, rowdy giant groups of humans howling together and knocking together some metal liquid holders, gathered around some odd boxes and machines that spewed distorted sounds and melodies, the occasional spot where humans would give each other things stuffed between living blocks, until eventually, its eyes turned to an alley much like any other, and recognized by smell that it had found its mark.

The fact that the alley led into a small protruding walkway of metal without a railing, but some strange hooks, framing a gargantuan cube-shaped hole definitely helped. It moved out of the way of some human as he pushed a foul-smelling cart towards the hole, and watched curiously as it put the hooks around one of the two pipes on the bottom of the wheeled cart, and then pushed the cart over the edge, the trash spewing into the hole while the cart stayed upside down just under the walkway.

A very sturdy one, thankfully.

The human yanked a lever on the side the wolf hadn’t noticed, and the hook curled into the platform, placing the cart back to its spot, and the owner simply grabbed it and moved past it once more.

Well, it had definitely found the trash pits.