After our fight with the moderators, and after Hati lost his beast aura, the guards slowly started to feel more at ease. Grym was the first to recover enough to command his subordinates to take care of the dead beasts, which had to be disposed of. For this purpose they got wagons, to more easily transport the large beasts, and brought them somewhere they could burn them, downwind of town.

All the while, we kept chatting with Hati, though he seemed worried about the state he found himself in. He said he felt weaker, and he looked like an ordinary wolf right now, albeit twice as large.

“Can you describe what feels different?” I asked him.

“Uhm... my legs feel weak. And my body is tingly.”

Yea... That won’t get us anywhere.

“Does it feel bad?”

“Hm... Not really. But it’s weird.”

“That’s good. Listen, I think you will turn back if I undo what I did, but would you mind staying like this for the moment?”

“Okay...”

While Hati still resembled a beast, anything that felt terrifying about him was nowhere to be seen right now. This would not only make the guards feel better, but also, hopefully, make it seem a little less crazy that we were sitting here, talking to a beast. Though the only ones who were interacting with Hati without reservations were me and Riala.

“Hati...” Tomar said. “Do you eat humans?”

When someone else suddenly addressed him, or perhaps because it was a Sourcerer who hadn’t said anything yet, Hati flattened his ears again.

“Sometimes... They don’t taste good though...”

“We... we don’t...?” Tomar asked, perplexed, which elicited a chuckle from me.

“Some beasts like humans, but I don’t.”

Little by little, the others got more relaxed as well, and we asked one question after the other, while staying right outside the town walls. We learned that Hati had memories of being a normal beast, but one day, not long ago, he somehow developed a more elaborate consciousness. The moderators then found him and took him in, explaining that he had been chosen, and that he would be working for the gods from now on. It was apparently a good deal, because they were organized and protected each other, so he readily agreed, without thinking twice about it.

Many of the concepts he had been told about he didn’t truly understand though. He didn’t know what the gods were exactly, and he had never seen one. He also knew little to nothing about anomalies, except that they were hunting them. There would usually be a few beasts in such a hunting party that were somehow able to feel anomalies, and the others simply followed their commands. It appeared to be very difficult to track them, however, especially if they were moving around, like I had been.

We also learned that Hati had not been part of the group that raided Cerus. The party leader had decided to get reinforcements after determining that they had to go to Alarna, and that’s when Hati had gotten this assignment. It was actually his first time.

“How many moderators are there?” I asked him.

“I’m not good with numbers...”

“Hm. You know how large your group was. Are there more than that? Maybe twice?”

“No, there are more. My group... and another... and another... Four groups! I think...”

Seriously...? Eighty moderators? Well, sixty now, but still... That seems excessive. Especially if they don’t typically lose.

Hati didn’t know what other kinds of anomalies might exist though, only that there are many things that “shouldn’t be there,” and maybe this amount was actually reasonable for the job they had to do.

“Hey, Lilly...” Tomar said. “What about that last thing the leader mentioned?”

“Right...”

“Like the creator,” the beast had said in response to hearing my name. I was a little wary to ask Hati about it for some reason. But I had to.

“Hati, your leader said something about a ‘creator.’ Do you know anything about that?”

“Hmmm. No, I haven’t heard that before.”

Of course not. It couldn’t be that easy.

Technically, “creator” could refer to the creation of absolutely anything. In the context of everything that was happening here, however, and because the beast had said that this presumed coincidence was curious, I felt like it meant more. Whatever it was referring to though, my name appearing in relation to anything in this world was weird. What were the odds that there was someone here, who had any kind of significance, who was named Miles?

We hadn’t planned on taking any prisoners, because just fighting these beasts was difficult enough, but now I was regretting a little that we hadn’t tried. The leader seemed far more knowledgeable than Hati after all. Then again, he also seemed more mature, and maybe he wouldn’t have told us anything at all. From that perspective, we might be better off with Hati, who readily told us whatever we wanted to know, as long as he knew the answer.

“You said the moderators protect each other, right? What do you need protection from?”

“Like... humans and strong beasts. I was sometimes scared when I was still a wild one.”

“Oh... Are you scared of us?”

“A little bit. Your mana is strong. But you’re nice!”

“Our mana...”

I asked him about this term, but he had simply heard it from the other beasts and couldn’t tell us any more about where it came from. However, he did explain what mana auras looked and felt like to beasts, and this was very interesting. It seemed like beasts used them to determine how much of a danger someone was. To my eyes, the auras of all the beasts I had seen didn’t vary much, but there were apparently subtle differences in how it was emitted and moved. It was not only about quantity, but also about control. A wild, uncontrolled aura instilled more fear, which explained why humans were instinctively scared of beasts. Aelene’s “godly” aura meanwhile was impressive in quantity, but it was calmer. It didn’t invoke fear as much as it did reverence in him. And then there was our new aura, which he curiously described the same way Berla had, as “powerful.” The moment we removed our control scripts, Hati thought that they didn’t stand a chance, and if he had had a choice, he would’ve never approached us. He trusted in his leader though, and attacked as commanded.

The leader had seemed a little shaken as well at first, but I guessed that your aura probably wasn’t everything. Even if it could be trusted among beasts, we were humans, and while our scripts and our tactics had improved since we first got mana, our “magic strength” hadn’t really. I had also told him that we used scripts on the trees, making it obvious that we understood a thing or two about Omega. He might’ve simply thought that our aura was no reliable indicator for our strength, and that’s why they attacked us regardless. It was still good to know that beasts as strong as these had been wary of us though.

All this also explained what was going on with the dispersed aura we had been using. There was nothing wild about it, and it was barely even visible to us, but it was all around us, flowing calmly, which apparently triggered a kind of “regal” feeling in others. It was too bad that we couldn’t sense these things anymore ever since we got mana. I was curious what it would be like.

One thing that was still unclear was why dispersing Hati’s mana had essentially made him become a normal wolf. This didn’t remove the mana from his body, it only changed how it surrounded him. Maybe mana somehow worked differently for beasts though, affecting them more from the outside than the inside, which would be kind of the opposite from us. And this theory might not actually have been so far-fetched either. After all, there were other differences, such as us not being able to sense mana, and our eyes not becoming a glowing red.

We kept talking, until, eventually, the bells in town rang eight o’clock. It was already noon, so we had sat out here for hours. Looking at the top of the wall, even most of the onlookers had apparently either gotten bored by this point, or Grym had sent them back to their posts, because there weren’t a lot of guards left up there.

While Riala asked Hati questions about what he liked to do out there in the woods, I thought about how to proceed from here. We had probably gotten the most important things he knew out of him by this point, so we would soon be able to finish up, and earlier than expected. That meant I would have to decide what to do with him though. I had told him that I would let him live if he talked to us, and I wouldn’t go back on my word. However, whether we should just let him walk away was an entirely different matter. If he were to go back to the moderators, they might come here in full force next, which would be quite troublesome. Would any alternative to that be viable though?

“Hati,” I interrupted him while he was explaining to Riala how to catch rabbits most efficiently. “You will go back to the moderators once we’re done talking, right?”

“No,” he said decisively.

“... You won’t?” I asked.

“Hunting anomalies is scary... I don’t want to do that again.”

“Huh... Won’t they be mad if you don’t come back? What if they come to get you, like they did before?”

“You think they’ll be mad...?” he asked worriedly.

Seriously...? Literal puppy eyes...

I was working in hypotheticals here, but if they gathered all the talking beasts they could find, and, to a degree, forced them into this job, I couldn’t imagine that they would look kindly at someone who decided to not do it. Another question was what exactly turned them into talking beasts. If souls were used in that process, it was possible that a god had a hand in that, and this might even explain a part of the job Celeth had. As the “god of beasts,” he could very well be responsible for managing the moderators, as well as creating them, which would also somewhat fit the story the temple had been telling. Would Celeth let them run around freely afterwards though?

“Well... I assume that they would want you to keep doing this job. Have you ever met a beast that could talk that isn’t a moderator?”

“Yes! Once!”

“Hum. Maybe I’m wrong then.”

“That beast was very, very strong. Even our leaders were scared.”

“Oh? Was it scarier than us?”

“Yes!” Hati said, nodding vigorously.

Wouldn’t want to meet that one...

“Do you know if it was a moderator before or something?”

“No, I’ve never seen it before. The leaders just wanted to ask it something.”

It wasn’t clear whether there was more than one way to become a talking beast, but if this strong one was on the upper end of the powerescala, it was quite possible that they couldn’t get it into their fold, even if they wanted to. And that would mean Hati knew of exactly one “free” talking beast, which was strong enough to fight for that freedom.

Hm... a strong beast that is able to converse with people and might potentially be strong enough to stand against mods and “admins”... I thought. This, too, reminded me of that story about Celeth that Lilana had told us, and how this god had supposedly lost to a beast. I was very curious to learn more, and maybe Hati would even be able to tell me where to find this beast, but I was relatively sure that approaching it would not be a good idea.

In any case, even if he wasn’t going to go back voluntarily, I had to assume that they might come for him. They would then presumably learn about what happened and come here with even greater numbers. And after today’s fight, I knew we wouldn’t be able to handle that. If he didn’t inform them, they would keep searching for me, and maybe come here again, but hopefully with a smaller group. In the end, it would be in our best interest to either kill him or keep him around.

“I’ll be honest, Hati, I’m a little worried about what will happen when you leave. You say you won’t go back, that’s good, but I doubt that they’ll just leave you be.”

“Oh...” Hati said.

I was having trouble making up my mind about a path forward, when Riala suddenly interrupted my thoughts.

“Lilly, can’t he stay with us?” she asked.

“Hm...”