Starting Out As The God of Beasts

The cold air in the western sector of the slums was heavy with the smell of charcoal and wet dog fur.

Ivon moved like a shadow against the crumbling stone walls, her hand tucked deeply inside her wolf-pelt coat, her fingers wrapped tight around the hilt of a bone-handled dagger.

Her large, triangular ears twitched under her hood, catching every faint echo from the crowded alleys nearby.

She was a crimson-furred Wolf-kin, sleek and built for endurance, but right now every muscle in her body was coiled like a spring.

Three hours ago, in the lower keeps she had received a grim report: Nurex was caught by the Ogres.

The heavy cleaver fell.

He is dead.

Yet, a coded Mandraxx letter had just reached her personal co-ordinates, calling her to this exact, abandoned tannery.

Only Nurex who was the head of this infiltration knew their locations.

It was either a ghost, or a very poorly laid Troll trap.

She slipped through the rotted wooden doorframe, her amber eyes cutting through the gloom of the rafters.

”Stand down, Ivon,” a low, familiar voice murmured from the dark corner of the room.

Ivon didn’t lower her guard.

In a flash of crimson fur, she lunged forward, the tip of her dagger stopping barely an inch from the speaker’s throat. ”Nurex is dead. I saw the blood in the snowbank myself.” she growled.

”Who gave you his skin, Troll?”

Nurex didn’t flinch.

The blade was close enough to shave his whiskers, but his expression remained completely serene—a calmness that didn’t belong to the weak, uncultivated spy she had known yesterday.

He looked healthier, his posture straighter, and an unmistakable, heavy resonance of mana hummed beneath his grey uniform.

”The cleaver did fall,” Nurex said softly, reaching up with two fingers to gently push the flat of her blade away. ”But death doesn’t stick when the Architect decides when your role is finished.”

Ivon’s amber eyes widened as she felt the faint, residual pulse of a divine signature radiating from his chest. ”You... you’re a cultivator? How?”

”Apostle Jarden is here, inside the city walls,” Nurex whispered, the sheer, fanatical devotion in his voice making Ivon’s breath catch.

”Lord Varanus pulled my soul back from the dark, healed the seam on my neck, and blessed me with the power of a Martial Warrior.” he grinned.

”The God of Beasts has not abandoned us, Ivon.”

Ivon slowly lowered her dagger, her mind racing as she processed the impossible truth. ”The Apostle himself... here? Then isn’t the infiltration compromised?”

”Our network is burning from the inside,” Nurex corrected, his slitted eyes turning cold. ”The Trolls knew exactly where my location was.” he clenched his fist.

”We have a traitor selling our locations to the high command. The Apostle has already set a trap, and he needs you to help pull the thread.”

Nurex reached into his coat, pulling out two small, sealed parchment scrolls encoded with distinct spatial markers. ”The Apostle is calling a mandatory assembly for the remaining nodes.”

He paused for a moment

”But Yuri and Elijah will not be receiving the same coordinates. Whoever leaks their location to the Troll’s Vanguard... will be designated as the traitor.”

***

A mile away from the western sector in the slums, the scent of the city changed from roasted pheasant to the heavy, iron tang of raw lard.

Yuri sat in the dim, grease-stained loft of a butcher’s shop in the lower commercial ring, methodically rubbing a strip of coarse whetstone against the edge of a curved bone cleaver.

She was a Hyena-kin, her gray-brown fur coarse and patterned with dark, irregular spots, her frame short but densely muscled.

Unlike the quiet stealth of the foxes or the swift stride of the wolves, Yuri’s presence in the network was defined by a brutal, survivalist pragmatism.

She had the role of a beastman slave in Norona City.

And what she was forced to cut was her fellow beastmen who were slaughtered by Orcs and Ogres.

Her ears, broad and rounded, suddenly swiveled toward the small, rotting wooden shutter that looked out over the alleyways.

A tiny, gray carrier-bat squeezed through the warped slats of the window, its leathery wings flapping once before it dropped a small, wax-sealed parchment capsule directly onto the wooden chopping block in front of her.

Without waiting, the creature turned and slipped back into the freezing sleet outside.

Yuri didn’t move for a long moment.

The bone cleaver rested against the stone, its edge catching the dull orange glow of a single tallow candle.

Rumors of Nurex’s brutal execution had already reached the butcher’s stalls, and the air in the city felt hot, tight, and dangerous.

She picked up the capsule with her calloused, black-clawed fingers, snapping the distinct Mandraxx seal with a sharp crack.

Unrolling the parchment, her yellow, slitted eyes traced the narrow lines of the message.

It wrote: ’Emergency gathering. All remaining nodes report to the abandoned iron foundry near the Northern Gate at midnight. Mandatory presence required.’

Yuri stared at the location—the old iron foundry.

’Only Nurex knows my location, what is going on?’ she thought.

Her jaw tightened, her thick lips pulling back slightly to reveal a row of sharp, jagged teeth.

It was a completely different sector from where Nurex had reportedly been taken, but in a city fully garrisoned by Martial Warrior Trolls, any assembly right now was a massive gamble with her life.

She held the edge of the parchment to the candle flame, watching the ink bubble and turn to black ash before dropping it into the dirt.

”Midnight,” she muttered, her voice a low, gravelly rasp that sounded like grinding stones.

She picked up her cleaver once more, testing the edge against the thick pad of her thumb until a tiny bead of dark blood appeared.

There was a leak in the cell—she could smell it in the way the Ogre patrols had been shifting their routes.

If this meeting was a trap set by a traitor, she would make sure her blade found their throat before the frost giants found hers.

Slipping the bone cleaver into the leather sheath at her lower back, Yuri pulled her grease-stained hood over her ears and vanished down the rickety stairs into the dark.

***

While the freezing wind howled through the narrow alleys of the western slums, the atmosphere inside the high upper balconies of the Grand Frost Sanctum was suffocatingly warm.

Elijah reclined against a pile of plush, white silk cushions, a small, silver-plated fork hovering near his mouth.

”Yummy....this is delicious” he munched on the meal served by the maids.

The small, red-furred Rabbit-kin was a stark contrast to the massive, blue-skinned Troll guards standing by the gilded pillars.

On the low table before him sat a roasted mountain pheasant and a goblet of expensive, imported spiced wine—luxuries that no beastman slave in Norona City could ever dream of touching.

His ears twitched happily as he chewed, a thin, satisfied purr rising from his chest.

This was the price of his betrayal.

While Nurex and the others rotted in the mud for a distant, silent god, Elijah had bought his comfort with a single, well-placed whisper to the Ogre vanguard.

A soft tap-tap against the balcony window broke his concentration.

Elijah blinked, setting his wine down as a small, grey carrier-bat fluttered through the lattice, dropping a tightly rolled parchment capsule onto the silk cushions before darting back into the winter night.

His twitching nose lowered, sniffing the seal. It was the distinct, encrypted wax of the Mandraxx signature.

With a small, sharp claw, he sliced the seal open and unrolled the text.

His dark eyes scanned the lines, a slow, greasy smile spreading across his red whiskers.

The message read: ’Emergency gathering. All remaining nodes report to the old copper refinery near the Eastern Transit Gate at midnight. Mandatory presence required.’

”So foolish”

Elijah chuckled, a high-pitched, mocking sound that was swallowed by the crackle of the hearth.

He carefully rolled the parchment back up and slipped it into the inner pocket of his wolf-pelt coat.

”To think this idiots would expose themselves to me without having to stress myself” he grinned, ”I should thank their corpses later”

”Stupid, stubborn beastmen,” Elijah muttered to himself, reaching for his goblet once more. ”You never learn when to doubt yourselves”

”This is why the new Tempest City would never win against Norona, against the Troll King”

He stood up, brushing the stray feathers from his silk tunic, ready to take the short walk to the Troll King’s private war room.

The harvest wasn’t over yet, and the palace was always willing to pay a premium for more northern blood.