They beat me the way you handle an object: no anger, no hurry, as though checking me off against a price list.
Brutus's boot lifted me off the ground. My back hit the wall of the dead end, and for a few seconds the pain took my voice. Rain ran down my face, mixed with the blood and washed it into the gutter. Thunder over the roofs drowned out the city, but I could still hear the enforcer's unhurried steps through the puddles.
Brutus did not like working in a rage. First he broke something that did not matter, then he named a sum, and on his way out he explained what the next visit would cost. I had known the routine since childhood. Today he had not come to remind me about the debt.
That morning the whole academy had watched me disgraced.
In Skyfall City a man's future was decided by his awakened beast. Rich families raised dragons and war spirits, the guilds carved up the Wildlands, and the academy taught children to command creatures that could burn down a house with one breath. A strong beast opened any door. A weak one left you where you were born.
Of my previous life only fragments were left. I remembered a world with no awakened beasts, and so, until the ceremony, I had been certain a second life owed me compensation for the first. What I got instead was the northern slums, three million of my parents' debt and a grey stone egg that lay on the altar for half an hour without giving a single sign of life.
The egg was declared stillborn. I was declared a student with no future.
Brutus pinned my wrist under his heel.
"Great day, eh, Rex? No money. No beast. As collateral you're worth less than your own boots."
Behind him an ironfang boar scraped at the ground with its hooves. The D-rank beast was the size of a cart; knives left nothing on that hide but white scratches. The boar was waiting for a command while its master chose which tusk would go in under my ribs.
"I'll take you apart," Brutus went on. "At least I'll make the interest back."
I looked at his throat and memorised the spot under the jaw. A useless habit: hunting for a weak point when you have nothing to strike with.
Brutus caught the look and raised a metal bat.
I jerked aside. The edge split my brow, and warm blood fell onto the grey shell. The egg slid out from under my jacket into the mud.
The blood did not run off it. The stone drank it to the last drop.
In my fading consciousness a level voice spoke:
"Compatibility confirmed. Host's life under threat. Forced awakening permitted."
The shell cracked. No light, no thunder. Out of the narrow split climbed a black and red creature the size of a fingernail, shook out its thin wings and hung in the air.
A mosquito.
The boar was already charging. I had no time to invent a command, I only wished for it to stop.
The red speck darted to meet the beast. It did not strike the armoured forehead: it went round the tusk, ran along the snout and disappeared into the ear.
The boar stopped dead in mid-charge. The fury in its eyes turned to terror. It shook its head, slammed into the wall and went down in the mud. Black blood ran out of its mouth.
Brutus felt the beast die through the bond and recoiled.
"What kind of weapon is that?"
The mosquito flew out of the ear canal and settled on my finger. Her abdomen glowed crimson, and her thin legs were unexpectedly warm against my skin.
"Styx," I said, not understanding myself where the name had come from. "Her name is Styx."
Two lines appeared in front of my eyes for a moment: armour penetration and lethal venom. The System's voice offered to continue the hunt.
Brutus threw himself at me with the bat. Styx launched off my finger.
The enforcer's arm froze above my head. First he felt the cold at his throat, then he stopped controlling his legs. The bat rang on the stones. A few seconds later Brutus was lying beside his own beast, gulping for air.
I could have stopped Styx.
I did not.
The enforcer's body dried out inside his clothes: Styx seemed to have drawn out of him not only the blood but the years. The System credited ten points for the man and fifty for the boar in the same flat voice.
With his last heartbeat someone else's fragment came into me: Brutus's hand turning the pages of a debt ledger, a fingernail running down the line with my surname, and at the bottom the red seal of the Li family.
The memory vanished so fast that I took it for a trick of the mind.
I searched Brutus, stopped my own bleeding with his own powder and took the money. Styx came back to my finger. She could have killed me too by then, but she calmly cleaned her proboscis while I tried to work out what had happened.
The boar's death had felt simple: a hostile bond snapped, hunger arrived, the System named the reward. With Brutus it was different. Movements I had never made stayed behind in my head. I knew which pocket he kept the key to the debt office in, though I had not seen him hide it. I remembered the smell of cheap tobacco in a room I had never been in. On my tongue was the taste of being afraid of a man who wore the Li signet ring.
I dropped the key.
Styx turned her head. There was no remorse in her attention and no pleasure. Only fullness, and the wait for the next move.
That was the first time I was frightened not of her venom but of how easily the System had turned a killing into a reward. All the same, beyond the walls of that dead end a weak man really could be sold off in pieces. I was not going back to where I had been for the sake of a clean conscience: Brutus would have left me neither conscience nor time.
I covered her with my other palm. Hardly any rain reached into the dead end; it was not the water I was hiding her from.
That day it seemed to me that nobody would ever take Styx away from me.
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