My Werewolf System

Chapter 1587: The Two Tales of Unzoku

Gary, Kai, and Lupus had been living in the camp for a considerable amount of time now, long enough for a new, creeping anxiety to settle in: the uncertainty of time itself. As days bled into weeks here in this mysterious past, they began to seriously worry about what was happening back in Slough. A part of them wondered if the time passing here was synchronized with their own timeline, meaning their present-day allies were struggling without them.

Or, perhaps, when they eventually completed their quest and returned, would they be returning to the exact point in time of when they went missing? They knew the quest they had been given didn’t seem to have a strict time limit, but the unknown was a heavy weight on their minds.

Despite this worry, as they interacted and met with people in the camp and on missions, all three of them shared the same compelling feeling: the world they were in felt undeniably real. The people’s reactions, their emotions, the physical resistance when they struck and attacked, all of it felt extremely, viscerally real. Whatever truths they found out or learned in this world, they could at least be certain it would be genuine information.

With this grim determination, they were ready to hear the truth about Unzoku.

Steve looked at the three of them, his gaze firm but serious. “I told you before, about how I had spent years searching for stories about Unzoku,” he began, his voice dropping to a low, intense register. “I didn’t move the camp from the hidden valleys down the mountain for a long, long time. I wouldn’t risk my people until I knew full well the true nature of the threat that Unzoku posed.”

He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “So, I searched the oldest settlements, the farthest regions, looking for every tale and legend of the man. But I found something incredibly intriguing, something that defied all the current warnings: not all the stories I heard about Unzoku were bad.”

This came as a genuine shock, especially to Gary. In their time, Unzoku was practically a monster, a tyrannical figure who had established the rules of eternal conflict, setting it so the Alphas of different packs would fight against each other no matter what the cost. If they resisted this fate, Unzoku would personally intervene to force the action. The fact that this being could effortlessly turn other Werewolves into Alphas and place strange, powerful curses upon them made Gary feel like they had no choice but to accept the claim that Unzoku was essentially their Werewolf god.

“The few positive stories I heard about him,” Steve continued, “came from small kingdoms that had existed for an incredibly long time. These were places that managed to avoid being entirely swept up by the large empires or getting too deeply involved in the constant, bloody wars. This isolation and longevity was the similar pattern for the few good storiesI managed to hear about Unzoku.”

There was one more crucial detail, a thread of evidence that added to the mystery. “The tales about him being good were told by people who were incredibly old. Most of them were practically on their deathbed; in fact, a lot of them have already passed away since I spoke to them.” Steve sighed heavily. “So there is a very good chance that if I were to search for these good stories or information about Unzoku right now, not a single good thing would be said about him.”

This observation led Steve to a single, powerful conclusion: “This led me to one thing. Unzoku is not just a myth; he is someone, a single being, who has lived an incredibly long life. And from the ancient stories I learned, he was like us, a Werewolf. This led me to assume he might even have been the first of our kind.”

That assumption, that Unzoku was the progenitor of their entire species, a being who had survived for untold ages, made chilling sense. “That explained why a powerful Werewolf like Rogan would be so utterly scared of someone like that,” Steve reasoned. “And a Werewolf which had lived for so long surely possessed large, almost inconceivable amounts of power as well. It was logical.”

But the history got even stranger. “The stories, though, when they spoke about the benevolent Unzoku, seemed to be before the time of Werewolves as we know them even existed,” Steve revealed, his eyes searching the faces of Gary, Kai, and Lupus for their reaction. “In fact, the way the ancient men told the tale, it was the story of the Were Man.”

The “Were Man” was described as a human who could transform into a beast, and he was known across the land as the only one of its kind. But the stories they told were not horror stories meant to scare children. They were incredible, heroic tales of how the Were Man was able to protect the towns and guard the cities from the terrifying, mutated beaststhat roamed the world. He was even strong enough to help sway away some of the territorial dragons. The stories told were acts of heroism, of how the Were Man, known only by the unique name of Unzoku, had come to save them.

“I was left profoundly confused when learning all of this,” Steve confessed. “Because the more I searched, the less I understood. There seemed to be nothing in between these two vastly different stories that linked the change in the person, the massive shift in character. Well, apart from one thing.”

He paused, letting the silence hang heavy. “The heroic story told of the Were Man, a being that could transform into a Werewolf, named Unzoku. And then the later stories that told of the dread of Unzoku, it was a being trappedpermanently in a Werewolf form, and described as more of a primal, terrifying beast.”

“I started to even wonder if they were two different beings or people altogether,” Steve admitted, “but with such a uniquely specific name like Unzoku, I had to believe what the legends suggested: they were the same person. In the end, I never found Unzoku, nor any more concrete information about him. I never learned why he changed from a hero to a monster.”

“I didn’t want my people’s lives or the camp to suffer indefinitely from a being we had never even seen,” Steve concluded, his gaze sweeping over the valley below them. “So I made a difficult decision. I decided to risk it, and I opened up the camp that is now what you see down below, making ourselves visible to the outside world. And that’s exactly when Unzoku had finally paid us a visit.”

*****

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