This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

Chapter 731: Chapter 731: Mental Warfare

Inside the Slagbeast’s mind, Bea floated in silence. The terrain no longer shifted with each of her movements, no longer mimicked her emotions. It had learned to keep still. To lie in wait. And yet, she could feel the tremors beneath the stillness. It was adapting.

And worse—it was doing it by copying her.

She spotted it tucked away in a fleshy mental fold—a malformed structure clinging to the inside of the creature’s mind like a tumor. Her first thought was disgust. Her second was disbelief.

It looked like her.

Not physically. No, the malformed lump of flesh looked nothing like her elegant amoeboid form. But spiritually. Architecturally. She could sense that the jagged core of the mimic structure was laced with branching trails that mirrored her own mental framework. Fuzzy, misaligned copies of her memory relay paths. Primitive command-routing nodes trying to delegate tasks. It attempted to simulate how her splits operated independently.

“You ugly little thing,” she murmured aloud, not in fear. In curiosity.

It was crude. Unstable. Incomplete.

But it was trying to be her.

She circled the fake network slowly, analyzing its reach. It hadn’t grown to a level where it could be used. Not yet. But it was beginning to function like a mental relay hub—processing memory data from her split remnants, attempting to file and route them. This creature likely had a similar ability to herself—an ability to realize new skills based on ‘blood’ or creatures that it consumes. Similarly, Bea has an ability to realize new skills in rare circumstances when infecting a host.

This slagbeast was clearly in the process of realizing a new skill based on Bea.

But, currently, it was a failure. A miserable one. But the concept wasn’t without merit.

Bea paused. Her thought pulsed outward like a sonar ping.

“If it can steal from me… can’t I also steal from it?”

And more importantly:

“Could I improve it?”

———————

Outside, Aegis held the Blood Flame Hound pinned. Earth energy flowed from his arms in jagged arcs, forming binding chains around the beast’s legs and jaws. The crowd roared as the blue-grade creature struggled, fire leaking from the cracks in its fur, eyes glowing with feral rage.

But while Aegis was focused on the hound, other changes occurred on the field.

The Slagbeast had stopped its slow, lumbering movement. Its ribcage had begun to twist in erratic patterns, the blood constantly seeping from it, seemed to slow back in reverse. Something inside of it was changing—Bea, or what remained of her influence, was clearly causing damage.

Then Kain felt it—a flare from Bea. Not a scream for help. A marker.

Kain smiled, ever since he’d awoken as a beast-tamer, he’d trusted Bea, and now was no different. Even when he was cut off from her, he trusted her to find a solution: “Chewy. Boost the field.”

The spore chirped in acknowledgement and released a short, sharp burst of energy that spread across the Pale Thought Field. The field, disconnected from Bea and pretty much lying like an inert, useless blanket over the field, finally seemed to come to light It had no physical force, but the Slagbeast reared back slightly, its limbs twitching in agitation.

Then Nikolai moved.

He had been oddly still up until now, directing his contracts through subtle gestures and psychic commands. But now he pulled a thin dagger from his coat and stabbed it hilt deep into his own shoulder like a madman, causing many in the audience to gasp in shock. He’d clearly gotten impatient and wanted to activate his gift.

Kain’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t you get tired of using that same old trick?” Kain muttered while channelling some spiritual energy into the necklace provided by the College that was supposed to help offset the gift’s effects.

Aegis also moved for good measure, stopping his pummeling session on the Blood Flame Hound and intercepting the line of sight.

But for some reason…the gradually heating necklace Kain wore instantly cooled, and Aegis’ interception must have been too slow.

Kain looked down and saw a bloody mist curling around the necklace and isolating it from Kain. He looked to the right and saw the now partially recovered Wraith staring at him ravenously.

‘Shit!’ Just because it was the weakest opponent didn’t mean he should have overlooked it. The rookie mistake was now costing him.

Pain exploded in Kain’s shoulder—a sudden deep slice appearing exactly where Nikolai had cut himself.

His uniform jacket darkened from blood.

“Damn it,” he hissed, gripping the wound. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was deep. And now he was bleeding. And Aegis, enraged by Kain’s injury, sent a pillar of earth crashing down onto the Wraith while it was focused on Kain, before it could dodge. Now it was definitely completely out for the count.

Unfortunately, Kain couldn’t celebrate. Two sets of eerie eyes—the Slagbeast and the Blood Hound—were not staring at him like a starving man confronted with a Wagyu steak.

They smelled the blood in the air.

And Kain could already feel the soul-deep pain that would soon be coming his way from the injured Blood Flame Hound.

——————

Bea watched the mimic structure ripple. It had begun to mutate further, adapting more fragments of her instincts. Her early survival code. Her split duplication habits.

It was impressive in a way. Repulsive, but impressive.

She reached out with a thought and began to interfere. Not with brute force—but with curiosity, eager to learn. She fed it fake memories. Split-replication instructions that led nowhere. Dummy data that looped. Fed it some contaminated thought particles.

Then she added a special spice: Chewy logic.

But even as she corrupted it, she began to understand it. The relay model it used—a hub where multiple of the bootleg ‘splits’ resembling mice occasionally scampering around the slagbeast’s mind could operate independently without requiring direct, conscious control from the Slagbeast. It was like an external hard drive where all the feedback from the splits would go to, rather than going to the Slagbeast directly.

Bea, while not needing to control every fine movement of the split manually, when actually controlling and coordinating the splits that managed to seize control of another creature, she did have to begin using her own brain, since the thoughts of the splits were limited. Meaning that Bea was limited in the number of high-level minds she could coordinate on her own. She could probably control hundreds of weaker creatures at once. But creatures equal to her…maybe a dozen? Controlling a creature a grade higher? She’d have to focus completely on it and not be able to do anything else.

But what if she didn’t have to?

What if she created a true mind hub?

An external node, like a proxy. A sub-brain. A hive nerve center that her splits could report to and be rerouted from, freeing her to focus only when necessary.

The Slagbeast had tried to create it for her. She could take that idea. Refine it. Perfect it.

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