Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 13
The clouds hung low enough to press on the skull. Along the coast the air was thick with damp, and in Velen even an ordinary rain carried a weight that stifled the breath.
Across Velen’s land, towering trees that had grown wild for ages thrashed beneath the howling wind and dim light, swaying like demons showing off their shapes.
Yet no landscape ever outweighed what a man felt inside.
Under that sky of crushing black, a young man rode one horse and led two more, trotting along a broken path with an ease that bordered on delight.
He hummed a tune he did not know the name of, nor its key. Lannor rose and fell with Pope’s gait, as if the saddle were a cradle.
When the mood was light, everything came easy. Even the song did not matter.
To an untrained eye, the way he handled himself would seem the work of a Hakland rider born to the saddle.
No master horseman could imagine such riding rhythm from a youth who had mounted a horse barely a month ago.
He breathed with the animal, felt the shift of its center of gravity, and adjusted his posture without thought.
Even champions of regional races might spend their whole lives striving for no more than this.
And this pace of improvement, one that crushed the limits of a natural human’s learning ability underfoot, was merely Mentos’s biological intelligence core performing at a normal level under constrained computational capacity.
Training plans were drafted, progress monitored down to individual muscle fibers, results quantified with cold precision.
The Education Act of the Human Federation forbade the biological intelligence core from interfering with bodily movement before its user attained university-level knowledge.
That is to say, the intelligence core could not directly control the body.
Even so, under this system, Lannor rarely repeated the same bad habit five times.
It drove his technique upward, step by steady step.
He complained aloud that Mentos’s underlying logic lacked flexibility, that every training plan left his mind fizzing like a shaken bottle, but in truth he was grateful.
In a world like this, where a young man drifted rootless as duckweed, survival itself owed much to Mentos.
And now that “great benefactor” continued its steady prattle in a neutral voice.
“Sir, you have been humming the same tune for two hours, forty-four minutes, and six seconds. There have been multiple repetitions, pauses, and key changes. I sincerely suggest that if you have an interest in music, you should acquire some basic theory once your life becomes stable and prosperous. I believe I can provide appropriate assistance to your hobby.”
The easy smile on the young man’s face faltered, just a fraction.
He could not tell if he imagined it, but Mentos’s tone seemed hesitant.
As though it were choosing its words, especially when it tried to describe his melody. Of course, that had to be his imagination.
Creatures so pitifully concerned with their pride were prone to such suspicions.
The intelligence core drew everything from his own brain cells. How could his own brain reject a tune he himself was humming?
So Lannor spoke with finality from the saddle. “Mentos, remember this. Music is great because it carries the emotions of intelligent life. Rhythm and theory are only ornaments, a flower laid on top. They are dispensable.”
“Even so, your melody is somewhat...”
Whether illusion or not, Mentos’s sense of musical aesthetics, drawn from everything Lannor had heard in eighteen years, began to feel ... strained.
Not severe. Only as if something might crack.
“No need to say more.” The young man cut him off with a firm wave of his hand. “Just tell me this. Am I in a good mood?”
Mentos answered without pause.
“Based on hormonal levels and electroencephalogram data, you are indeed in a state of happiness.”
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