“You still there, girl?” Deckard’s voice, echoing in my head along with my instincts screaming at me what to do, caught me off guard and almost cost me a chunk of my wing. Yet to hear him brought a bit of comfort to my mind instead of fury. He cared.

Thumbs up. “Still here!”

Was it weird, I found formulating the words a tad more difficult? Hmm...Not really. Not when I had to suppress my urges pretty hard. It was like sitting at my desk at school again, trying to concentrate on the lecture, but my mind kept drifting to what I was going to do after the last class.

I know, a silly analogy that rather made me homesick, if nothing else. It was how I felt, though. Talking through the union rings while straining my will in an effort to keep my wits was challenging to say the least.

“Impressive. For a moment there, I thought you wouldn’t dare...”

“I was...terrified.” Perhaps a bit exaggerated and hard to admit, not far from the truth, though.

It took him a while to answer, waiting for the right moment, as he didn’t want to distract me too much from the fight. “It would be odd if you weren’t.”

Not the answer I was expecting. “Why?”

“Crazy people...not now, girl. Later. Focus on the fight.” Deckard said. “You’ve done well so far, met my expectations. So keep it up, go far beyond them and kick the guy’s ass.”

Well, easier said than done.

Stab, slash, swipe, chop, sweep, the guardsman tried it all, and I dodged everything he threw at me. Attacking him back was out of the question, though. The human wasn’t giving me much room to breathe and blocked every attempt I made, just like before. Against all the risks and pain I’ve been through, the deeper beastification didn’t help that much.

However, the truth was, I was still struggling with the changes.

While having a hard time describing it and without a chance to look at the notification, no doubt informing me about the tier-up of the [Beast], I felt I could do more, be faster, hit harder. It was just a matter of getting used to my transformed body.

My new anthro legs? No problem. Whatever shape they were, it felt natural, like I was born with them, yet...they were different. Plus, I was bigger, more robust, and with a wider wingspan. When I flapped my wings now, oh man...they propelled me with so much force. Sadly, it still wasn’t enough to allow me to fly.

What brought me the most anguish was that I didn’t eat before the fight. I should have asked, insisted, because seriously, I was starving. And it was driving me crazy, or should I say, my instincts.

[Beast] wasn’t some magic skill that transformed my body using mana. No, it didn’t use that magical substance at all. It was a physical skill that dragged to the surface a beast hidden for generations and centuries deep within people. It brought back to the light what people were, what they came from, and what they had long forgotten.

There was just a tad more inside me.

I needed to eat...I needed food, something to stuff myself with it. Damn, I needed it so badly as [Beast], with everything it did to me, took almost all the energy I had to do so.

If it weren’t for [Tireless Machine], which let me push further past my limits, and [Indomitable Will], allowing me to suppress those cravings, I would probably give up the fight.

So I soldiered on, determined to see it through to the bitter end.

Stepping aside, I dodged a thrust and hit the pole of the glaive just centimeters away from the pissed-off human’s hand. No, I didn’t go crazy or give in to my instincts. At least not entirely. It was the intention. All I had on my side was speed and strength, a lot more of it after the change. And frustratingly, I still couldn’t get past his defenses. Thus, I simply gave up. Instead of going against the tide, I chose to go with it.

What did that mean?

Simple.

Just pummel him with punches. I mean, given his defenses, hammer his weapon. Yeah, I chose the brute way. First of all, it went better with my instincts. Whatever cocktail of beast essences Dungreen had injected into my veins, the sneaking one wasn’t among them. They were all bloodthirsty beasts.

Sorry, Esu, but it’s true.

It really was. If he hadn’t stopped that young mossbear after almost every fight, the beast would have ripped me to shreds and filled its belly with me.

What I wouldn’t give to stuff my belly right now....

“Grrr...” That wasn’t me but my starving gut, issuing a warning order to the others to bring meat.

However, no one moved, and that annoying human, Clay, was not food. I could get to the meal if I beat him. So I tried my best.

This brings me to the second reason I chose this fist-numbing way to beat the guardsman. And there was a reason behind it, not just instinct-driven urges. Every time I hit the pole of the glaive, he struggled to hold his ground. More than once, he had to take a step back, or even two. Though it seemed impossible to shatter the weapon, every blow I struck vibrated it, sending tremors to the guardsman’s hands.

Oh, and mine.

Bloody hell, it hurt so much every time I hit that thing, but it was the only way to do any damage to the human. Just as his cuts were sapping my strength, I hoped that each of my punches was draining his, a little by little.

The numbing pain? I couldn’t even feel it after a while. The damage and tremors the impacts sent through my arms? That was taken care of by [Never-Dying] backed by my constitution. That in itself was another thing I couldn’t put a grasp on, intangible, yet it was there.

It was so annoying that I couldn’t read the notification. Yet even without it, I knew my constitution received a solid boost, as did my strength. Sadly, not the finesse.

If the fight started as a duel, I wouldn’t call it anything but a street brawl now. A cheering crowd, the ground soaked in sweat and blood, and two morons at each other’s throats, definitely brawl. The first one I ever participated in, one of a few I’ve witnessed.

Back on Earth, it wasn’t really my thing. I used to go to bars and pubs, of course. Every now and then, at least. Only, I've been frequenting the decent ones, where fights were...let’s say a very rare event. Not the kind I was looking for, and I watched it with disgust from afar when I witnessed one. It usually ruined my whole evening.

So how did it come to this?

How did I end up like some kind of savage beating up a guy? Okay, that made it sound like I was winning, which I sure as hell wasn’t. With this change of mine, I became bolder, lost a tad of caution, and went for attacks I would have thought twice about otherwise. Ever since I delved deeper into myself, I primarily acted on instinct.

Not that I let them control me, not exactly.

Again, it was hard to describe. I didn’t gain extra combat knowledge with the change, which would be a totally awesome, easy way to get stronger. But no, that wasn’t the case. I was still moving the way I had learned, which wasn’t much. I was an amateur, and Deckard hadn’t taught me any of his tricks yet, though I didn’t think too much about what I was doing.

Hmm...maybe it could be described as in business, when you cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. In this case, my brain was the middleman I cut out. An overcomplicated way of saying I went with my gut.

Deckard must have been thrilled.

“Fuuuck!” cursed the human when I struck his weapon for perhaps the hundredth time. It called for another blow, pushing him further. Yet his response was swift, faster than I could dodge or create a barrier.

My scream turned roar escaped my throat as he left another cut on my body. How many was that? I stopped counting at two dozen.

Like the other wounds, this one stopped bleeding shortly after the blade left the sliced skin and the muscle underneath. My regeneration, built on my now even more massive constitution, worked wonders. The downside was that there were so many wounds that I found it impossible to boost the regeneration of all of them. I actually gave up completely due to my struggle with instincts and the fact that the accelerated regeneration was sapping my strength all the faster. It was eating up the energy I was lacking in the first place.

Suppressing the urge to lick the wound, I pounced back even before my throat stopped quivering. There was no other way. I needed to end this struggle quickly. However, as frustrating as it was, it just wasn’t how battles of attrition ever ended. So we were locked in a bloody and painful dance that dragged on.

The only plus I found in it was that I didn’t dance to his beat any more than he danced to mine, as neither of us was able to gain the advantage that would end this farce or have the will to give up. It was no longer about the prize for winning. For the guardsman, his pride was at stake. For me...Bloody hell! What was I actually fighting for?

Food?

Nah, if I really wanted to, I could give up right now and fill my stomach. There was no reasonable cause for me to continue starving. So what was the reason that drove me to keep going through it? And why the hell couldn’t I put my finger on it?!

Then it hit me.

It was pride, too. Something I once had as a florist. Back then, I was proud of my blooming flowers, of what I could create with them. All lost in that cellar where I wasn’t given a shred of human decency, or so I thought. The human I was may have forgotten, but the beasts that slumbered inside me had pride of their own, a lot of it. And that didn’t let me lose.

If I did, I’d be trampling on what I am, denying it, and I was long past that part.

Another cut, another roar. That bastard went mainly after my legs, trying to slow me down. I’d love to say it didn’t work, but with dozens of wounds covering my thighs and calves, he was taking more and more of my speed away.

In contrast, the human didn’t have a single injury on him. Not one drop of his blood was shed. Yet to say that my blows didn’t affect him would be a lie. Though almost imperceptibly, his hands trembled, and the grip on his glaive loosened. His attacks still had the same fierceness as before, but there wasn’t as much power behind them.

Dodge and punch only to have to hit again right against his slash. The bastard took no regard and went for the uppercut right through the middle of me. The attack was hard to deflect with a barrier, even harder to dodge aside. The easiest way out was the one I didn’t want to take, a step back. Something he tried to force me into. Move that would allow him to catch his breath and continue with attacks. In turn, it would make it harder for me to punch him.

I simply couldn’t afford to put any more distance between us. And since I didn’t want to end up with a split crotch, I struck down against the pole of his glaive, cautious of the blade.

With my fists so numb, I considered the severe pain a thing of the past. Man, I was so wrong! My bloodied fingers with bones exposed in parts weren’t damaged enough to spare me the agony of my fists colliding with the guardsman’s weapon mid slash.

The roar mixed with a whine I let out and echoed around the training ground drowned out the guardsman’s pained hiss. The bastard nearly let go of his weapon. Just a little bit. If I had put more power into the blow, this fight could have been over.

But, no, he spun his weapon, attacking immediately with its metal butt to keep me away from him, giving me no chance to strike back. Not my intention, nor did I avoid his bash. Instead, I grabbed for his weapon.

It took a bit of skill, but it wasn’t that hard when I didn’t have to keep my eye on the blade. Even easier now that there was less power behind his attacks. It was a chance to wrest the weapon out of his hands. The chance my instincts didn’t agree with and so against the human’s expectations, I just held the glaive in place and threw a punch at him.

Something neither of us, and most likely not even the watching city guards, expected happened, and my strike connected for the first time in the entire fight. Instead of the pole of his weapon, I hit the human in the ribs. It was so sudden, and his pained roar so sweet to my ears, that for a brief moment, no longer than the blink of an eye, I stood there frozen in shock.

Then the crowd erupted in cheers so loud I had to flatten my ears. It made us both aware of the gravity of what just happened and gave us a reason to move. The guardsman tore the glaive out of my hand and took a defensive stance. Instead of striking right back, he chose to observe while taking heavy, painful breaths. A sight that brought a grin to my lips and made me bare my fangs in joy.

Not for long, though.

Seeing the human re-evaluating his approach, I was taken aback. So far, I’ve had the feeling that he was acting out of rage. What I saw behind his eyes now was a reason, though.

Did I beat sense into him?

Certainly not something I meant to do. I needed him angry, pissed off, not measured, and focused entirely on the fight.

“Fuck!” I growled as a chill ran down the back of my neck. My body there screaming danger at me as the human fixed his eyes on me again after he swung the glaive around. His way of letting me know he still had a firm grip on his weapon and was in full control, that my efforts were in vain.

It worked, stopped me from pushing him further, and made me waste the edge I fought so hard for.

Was I scared? Of him?

With my roar echoing around the training ground, I showed my disapproval. It was just the weak human part of me he spooked, not...me!

Still, in all our time fighting, I never once got that feeling from him. So what was it? Skill? Some ace up his sleeve that made him stronger? Hardly, he would have used it a long time ago. So...?

Ah, the presence.

The thing I thought was the domain of the strong...and me. After all, I was a beast, a freak...of nature. Was he one too? That’s why they let him fight me?

No, no matter how much I looked at him, he was only human. Perhaps the class evolution he went through was the cause. In the end, it didn’t matter. It may have briefly reminded me he was the stronger one based on the levels, but it didn’t change a thing.

His grip on the weapon was still weak, and his breaths painful. The presence did not give him strength or speed, it only showed his resolve to see this to the bitter end. Despite the fierce hunger, I shared the notion. There was simply no other way.

He shouted. I roared.

The next second, we were back at each other’s throats. I went under his brisk sweep, striking with every ounce of my might. A repeat of my previous success would be great, perhaps even smarter to use the claws next time. It was nothing I had counted on, though. So, sticking to my brute strategy, I only hit the pole of his weapon.

When my punch knocked the guardsman’s glaive out of his hands, the whole training ground went silent. He couldn’t hold onto it any longer. The weapon slipped from his trembling fingers and skittered a few steps to the side.

Like him, it took me a while to realize what had happened.

I won. I beat him.

Without a weapon, he was defenseless, just a human waiting to be thrashed. All I needed from him was to admit defeat, and what easier way than to throw a few punches. Remind him how painful blows from me are.

Only... I couldn’t.

I was unable to move, to muster any strength, and it wasn’t because of his skill or presence. I simply reached my breaking point. With that last punch, my body used up all the energy I had. There was no more left in me, and even [Tireless Machine] couldn’t push me further.

So, I stood there, the only thing I could still do, and hoped he would accept defeat, that he’ll swallow his pride and admit that I beat him.

The bastard didn’t. Instead, a new glaive appeared in his hands.

It was...hard to find words for what I felt at that moment...betrayal, anger, frustration... it was unfair, so unfair. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.

Not the end my pride allowed, and so by force of will, I mustered every last bit of strength and withered one last roar. The roar that expressed to everyone how I felt, betrayed, tricked, but as a winner, nothing else.

Then I slumped to the ground face first.