Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 46: Broken Chains Beside The Lake
Cannibal cult.
Kidnapped children.
Mrs. Donna. White.
For one frozen instant, Lannor could not tell whether the cold spreading through his chest came from rage or guilt. It swallowed him whole all the same.
An ordinary hunt. That was all today had been meant to be. He and Bernie had worked the lakeshore with practiced rhythm, and then strangers had appeared smiling, perfectly calm while trying to murder them.
Cannibals. Bernie shot through the gut. Seventy percent proficiency forced into his brain until it felt ready to burst. Dragging a dying man back to the village. Surgery performed through splitting pain.
Lannor had thought he had managed to save his friend.
His thoughts had been a tangled storm: today was a fucking disaster, tomorrow I’m hunting down those crossbow bastards by scent alone, but tonight I’m not leaving my bed no matter who asks.
Then the stitches had barely closed over Bernie’s belly before old Aaron brought this news.
Like thunder from a clear sky.
Like a bucket of freezing water dumped over his head.
The witcher stood there unable to tell what he felt anymore.
Guilt?
Yes. Plenty of it.
He had come to Auridon because he wanted the widow of a man who once spoke for him to live well.
Now her last child was gone.
Taken.
Why?
Because the boy had gone gathering those damned alchemical ingredients for him.
What other reason could there be? Lannor could not imagine a child made prematurely cautious by hardship wandering outside the village for nothing. White knew better than anyone how dangerous the world beyond Auridon was.
And now, from the little cloth bundle in Madam Donna’s lap, the fresh scent of white crape myrtle drifted plainly through the air.
Anger?
Of course anger.
To Lannor, stealing children belonged beside cannibalism in the hierarchy of evil.
But stronger than rage was urgency.
Fuck. Fuck! Fuck!
Why did every disaster choose the same damned day?
Back in his old world, criminal investigators had found that the first forty-eight hours after a disappearance were everything. Recovery rates. Survival rates. All of it collapsed after that window closed.
And that was in a civilized world thick with technology.
Human traffickers there could not afford to lose their merchandise by the wagonload anymore. That belonged to centuries past.
But this was Velen.
A land where people died like flies every day.
In Velen, stepping outside your door already meant gambling your life. Being abducted?
Every second mattered now.
Lannor surged to his feet from the dock planks so violently that the wood groaned beneath nearly two hundred kilograms of armored weight.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?!”
The witcher’s face twitched with fury as he strapped his steel bracers back on and pulled the studded gloves tight. He glared at old Aaron.
The old man’s features crumpled together. “You were saving a life.” He pointed toward Mrs. Donna. “Donna wouldn’t throw herself at you screaming like a madwoman while you worked, even if fear’s already driven her half there.”
Mrs. Donna.
At that name alone, Lannor forced the misplaced fury back down his throat.
Of all the people in this world, she was the last one he had any right to lash out at.
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