This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange - Chapter 947 - 947: The Aftermath

Silence settled over the battlefield in a way that felt almost unnatural.

Not the peaceful kind—there was nothing peaceful about what remained—but the exhausted stillness that followed catastrophe, when even the world itself seemed to pause and take stock of what had been lost.

High above the fort, the 9-star tamer hovered motionless, his gaze sweeping slowly across the ruins below.

From this height, the damage was impossible to ignore.

The northern section of the fort no longer existed in any meaningful sense. Towers had been flattened into jagged foundations, walls reduced to rubble and scorched stone. The ground itself had been torn apart and reassembled so many times by overlapping domains that it barely resembled terrain anymore. What had once been a defensive bulwark was now an open grave.

There were no survivors there.

Not among the defenders.

One hundred percent casualties.

The west and east were scarcely better.

Entire battalions of mid- and high-grade beast tamers had been wiped out holding the line or, in the initial attack by the Wrath abyssal, had been converted into the enemy themselves.

Defensive formations had collapsed under abyssal pressure, leaving only scattered bodies and broken contracts behind. Even among the elite, survival had been rare.

Seventy percent of casualties on the Western Front.

Closer to ninety in the east.

The eastern line, in particular, had paid a brutal price for buying time against the liquefying abyssal demigod. Many of those who had held their ground there had done so knowing full well they would not live to see the outcome.

The 9-star tamer clenched his jaw.

Then his gaze shifted south.

And there, the contrast struck him like a blade.

The southern district—furthest from the abyssal portal in the north, shielded by distance and terrain—still stood.

Not intact, not untouched, but it was like heaven and earth compared to the other districts.

Rows of residential structures remained upright. Windows were shattered, roofs damaged, streets cracked—but they were livable. And more importantly, they were filled with people.

Ordinary people.

Unawakened civilians who had been too weak to flee across the treacherous terrain surrounding the fort, too poor to hire protection, and too far from the central continent to be considered worth the effort of evacuating.

Ironically, the ones least integral to the fortress were the ones who had survived.

The fort’s original population, when viewed in terms of strength, had once formed a broad U-shaped distribution.

At one end were vast numbers of ordinary, unawakened civilians. At the other end were large concentrations of mid- and high-grade beast tamers who had chosen to stay and defend the fort out of duty or necessity. The lowest point of that curve—the low-grade tamers—had largely fled long ago: strong enough to survive the brutal journey away from this northern fortress, yet too weak to meaningfully influence its continued defence.

Now, that distribution had collapsed into a slanted line that mostly only contains the weak population and a few beast tamers.

Of the original population’s \\_/ shape, the left side remained heavy with civilians, but the right side—where the fort’s strength should have been—had been violently shaved away (\\__).

Thousands of civilians still lived.

But most of the five- to seven-star beast tamers who had sworn to protect them were dead.

Even many eight-star tamers—pillars of the fort’s defence—had fallen during the battle, particularly in the eastern district.

The imbalance left behind was grotesque.

The fort still existed.

But its spine had been shattered.

The 9-star tamer exhaled slowly, the sound heavy with restrained fury.

He had known the losses would be severe.

But seeing them laid bare like this made something inside him twist.

His earlier exaltation at finally receiving the coveted ‘God’s Eye’ inside the relic was now long gone.

Speaking of the relic…

His hands clenched at his sides as he focused on the boyish figure in the distance that he felt was somehow related to all of this.

Then—

Whoosh.

Something streaked upward from below, cutting through the air with a sharp whistle before coming to a sudden stop beside him.

A hand.

A severed hand. That, rather than looking pale and dead as one would expect, was tan and healthy looking.

Indeed, this was the 9-star tamer’s avatar that had been accompanying Kain since the relic, but when Aurem had been summoned by Kain, it had made itself scarce upon sensing the golden dragon’s aura.

The 9-star tamer did not react outwardly—but his eyes narrowed, “Not going to continue hiding?”

The hand wiggled its fingers in what might have been interpreted as a sheepish greeting.

It leaned close and whispered something.

From a distance, Kain could see the movement but heard nothing. He stood tens of meters away beneath a fractured wall, watching with growing tension as the strange avatar—the same nagging hand that had followed him relentlessly through the relic—hovered beside the fort’s highest authority.

Kain had not forgotten the man’s earlier words inside the relic.

His proclamation that he planned to ‘question’ (i.e. interrogate) Kain.

That threat had not vanished just because of all that had happened in the fortress.

‘That was also part of the reason that annoying hand had been practically up my ass this entire time—’

Screech

The thought just finished forming before Kain recoiled internally to the sound of a record scratching.

“Ahem…No. Following closely,” he corrected himself at once, forcefully ejecting the horrific mental image that the previous statement had evoked.

He’d realized early on that the hand wasn’t following him just to protect him—it was surveillance.

A tether.

A promise that he would not be allowed to disappear.

The hand whispered again.

The 9-star tamer stiffened slightly.

His gaze shifted—not toward Kain, but past him.

Toward the distant golden figure still suspended above the battlefield.

Aurem.

Kain realized that the hand, who had been next to him when Kain had summoned the dragon using the Chronicles of Primordial Echoes book, had revealed Aurem’s relation to him.

It seemed like the promised questioning was still coming.

But instead, it would not be about the relic or his origins, it would be about his ‘disobedient son’.