Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 9
A witcher’s body is shaped by magic. Their lifespan far exceeds that of ordinary men, and even their heartbeat runs far slower.
Bordon’s bleeding is slower as well.
Even so, with a halberd driven into his abdomen, a witcher’s blood still spreads beneath him into a widening red pool.
Lannor and Bordon both know his time is short.
The stench gathers, monster blood caught in the seams of armor, human blood, the damp loam of trampled grass, all mixing into something foul.
Not long ago, Lannor would have retched bile within three breaths of such a smell.
Now his boots stand in the pool, stirring its copper stink into ripples, and he feels nothing.
There is no denying it, this world has changed him.
“You, from the very start, you endured the mutation whole.”
Bordon speaks with effort.
“You still have your emotions.”
Halting words, but startling enough that the halberdier nearby, who is gathering their captain’s body, stares in disbelief and pulls his companion farther away.
A normal man would already be at death’s door by now. Witchers truly are mutants.
Lannor does not mind the filth. He drops down and sits across from Bordon on the mud soaked through with blood.
It is the most at ease he has felt in a month.
He smiles, loose, unguarded. “Yes. That is right.”
As he speaks, he taps his temple with a finger.
“I was fortunate. The mutation did not take anything from me.”
Bordon’s thick-haired head nods stiffly, but the disbelief churning inside him is his alone.
Turning a common man into a witcher is agony beyond human endurance.
Most witchers grow strange in temperament. That comes not only from physiological change, but from minds warped by excess pain.
And yet, that young man, after seven days of mutation, had immediately formed a plan and buried his emotions.
What kind of jest is that?
Numb with shock, Bordon recalls the first time he met Lannor.
That youth with skin so fine it would stir envy in noble ladies. That youth who went weak at the sight of a severed head.
That was not a man who had known hardship. That was not even one who had seen the world’s cruelty.
Bordon had long believed Lannor to be some distant noble’s kin, cast here by accident through a misfired portal.
But a man who has known no hardship does not possess such will, such thought.
Bordon himself endured mutation. In his memory, even the fiercest and proudest warrior’s sons were reduced to formless wrecks under it.
But Lannor...
“You are not the son of some distant noble house, are you?”
Blood still trickles from Bordon’s lips, yet he stares hard at his student, speaking each word with care.
“Even if you were the whelp of Foltest, I would not believe he could produce someone like you ... like this...”
Foltest, king of Temeria.
A man of immense power, able to grant his heir the finest education in the world. Even so, Bordon cannot believe such breeding could yield what stands before him.
Not even close.
Mind, patience, resolve, there is a gulf there, something ancient, something that reeks of blood.
From the very beginning, he understood his position, and in the same instant, found a way through it.
No king could teach that through experience alone.
Lannor gathers the Alchemy Sack in his hands and shrugs.
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