Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 31: Hope

They needed to return. Now.

The survivors. The catastrophe. The fact that we’re all standing around in various states of undress on an active volcanic slope. His thought process was a shambles.

He watched, his brain still struggling to catch up, as the woman, the Saintess, plunged her hand once more into the glowing repository in her chest and pulled out a perfectly folded set of men’s clothes. She began helping the Dragon Lord get dressed.

Then, she turned to Arkai.

A—

His hands flew down to cover his crotch, a hot flush of crimson blazing across his face so violently he was surprised the falling ash didn’t sizzle on contact.

A shy chuckle escaped her. "S-sorry, I wasn’t prepared for clothes... I just brought my mate’s..."

Of course you did, Arkai’s mind wailed. Why would you carry a spare set of garments for a random, naked Werewolf Alpha you just fished out of a volcanic incident? It’s a perfectly reasonable oversight!

"It’s... okay, my Lady..." he managed to choke out. Desperation offered a solution. The noble, imposing, and fully fur-covered form of his wolf. Yes. That would solve everything. He would become a monument of sleek, black fur and dignity.

Why had he ever shifted back to his human form in the first place?

Ah. Right. For the same reason.

Well screw it!

He reached for his mana... and grasped at... nothing.

Fuck.

Right. Whatever the thing she shoved down his throat had been effective at un-crushing his internal organs, but it hadn’t come with a complimentary mana recharge. He was running on empty.

This led to the second, more humiliating lesson of the evening. The paradox of supreme beastly control. The stronger a beast, the closer to a human form they could achieve, proving their mastery over their primal essence.

But mastery, it turned out, had a failsafe. In a state of catastrophic mana depletion, his body’s innate intelligence kicked in, forcing him into the form that required the absolute least energy to maintain.

Thanks to a lifetime of discipline, that form wasn’t a mindless beast, it was his most basic, efficient humanoid shape.

Which, at this precise moment, included a very human body, a set of very fluffy black ears twitching in mortification on top of his head, and a very fluffy black tail that had just poofed into existence and was currently trying to curl itself into a ball of shame behind him.

FAAAHHH!

In front of his two saviors, one, the legendary Dragon Lord, now fully and impeccably dressed, and the other, the gorgeous Saintess whose very existence had him questioning his entire sexuality, he was now standing there, pale, blushing, and accessorized.

WHY?! OH WHY?!

This was a cruelty far beyond the mountain’s wrath!

"I see, you don’t have much mana left...?" the Saintess asked, spot on.

Before he could formulate a lie, or perhaps just spontaneously combust, she stepped forward, took his palm in hers, and placed another vial of potion in his hand.

"Please drink this. This is a mana potion. It’ll restore your mana, so you’ll feel alright."

Fuck... come on...

She’s so pretty.

Her hand is so soft. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

And she smells so good, damn it...

BUT THAT’S THE SCENT OF HER MATE, THO!

"Thank you, my lady..." he mumbled, looking down, pale shock and hot blush warring on his face. He was, for all intents and purposes, blushed pale. He felt hot and cold all at once.

"We’ll see you down the mountain. Please return swiftly!" Cecilia said, already being swept back into Oathran’s arms. Immediately after, the two were airborne, leaving him alone on the scorched mountainside.

...

...

Silence.

"FUCK!" Arkai screamed, directing it at the stone beneath his feet. "Why is she so... uuuuuu..."

In a fit of pique, he uncorked the vial and downed the mana potion.

Ooh.

It was... good.

A river of cool power flooded his desiccated channels, restoring him to full peak strength in an instant.

...

He was now at his absolute full power. Completely healed. Mana brimming. And still standing buck naked on a mountain with fluffy ears and a tail, having just had a complete emotional breakdown.

"FUUUUUUCKK...!!!"

The second scream was even more filled with agony than the first. The restored strength in his limbs only made the urge to turn and fling himself directly into the volcano’s maw that much more tempting.

***

Oathran, soaring through the ashen skies with his precious cargo, had to close his eyes against a wave of secondhand embarrassment.

As a fellow male, a being who understood, on a fundamental level, the delicate architecture of pride, he recognized that his wife’s well-intentioned aid had just demolished something inside Arkai.

Leaving a proud Werewolf Alpha naked, eared, tailed, and blushing on a mountain was one thing.

Doing so after saving his life, revealing you’re his revered Saintess, and then handing him a potion with the soft, gentle hand that smelled of another man? It was a triple-layered humiliation cake, and she had served it with a smile.

And now, the woman responsible was innocently humming in his arms, vibrating with satisfaction, convinced she had performed a simple, wholesome good deed. What a hurricane of pure-hearted chaos leaving a trail of flustered, emotionally-scarred men in her wake...

Poor guy...

My wife doesn’t even register the absolute wreckage of dignity she has left behind.

To her, he was a successfully completed task. A checked box. A saved life...

His mournful reverie was interrupted by Cecilia, her mind already leaping to the next catastrophe.

"Your Majesty, how do we think we can find survivors under all these rubbles? It seems the werewolves couldn’t find them because the living survivors’ scent is covered under the ashes."

Her analysis was, as usual, brutally accurate. Werewolves relied heavily on scent after all. Here, the world had been boiled down to an overpowering note of scorched death. Their greatest tool was useless.

"Yes, we need to use a pure magic, searching spell. We can’t use just our five senses," Oathran nodded.

"How... do we do that?" Cecilia tilted her head.

"Your mana control is the most immaculate, even better than me. You should be able to do it," Oathran stated. "Spread your mana thin around the area, and find existing ripples of mana."

He proceeded to explain the theory that every living being, from the mightiest beast to the most magically-bereft human, carried a faint residue of mana within them. Perhaps it was a spark left by the food they ate, or the air they breathed.

"I see. It’s apparently quite simple," Cecilia nodded, her brow furrowed in concentration.

Oathran, had he been a lesser being, might have choked.

Simple? Actually, no. To stretch one’s mana into a gossamer-thin, living net over miles of devastation, sensitive enough to feel the faintest flicker of a dying ember of life... well, most seasoned mages would weep at the attempt.

Werewolves, for all their ferocity, were specialists. Their wind, scent, and sound magic were blunt instruments here. A dragon’s own affinity for fire, light, and mind magic was equally ill-suited for this kind of delicate, attribute-less detection.

It required a finesse that was, frankly, boring for most powerful beings. It was the magical equivalent of threading a needle during an earthquake.

"Alright, I’ll begin," Cecilia announced after a moment of internal calibration. She closed her eyes.

And then, she did it.

On her first try.

Her mana unfurled from her. It stretched over the desecrated settlement below, thinner than a butterfly’s wing. Oathran could feel it, a whisper of power so refined it was barely there at all.

Her eyes snapped open.

"One... two... five... eight... twenty... there’s a lot!" she turned to him, a brilliant, sun-breaking-through-the-ash smile spreading across her face. "There’s a lot of them, Oathran! Ahhh! Thank God! Thank you—!"

In her elation, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed his lips.

She... had not only succeeded on her first attempt... but she’d also quantified the survivors in a running tally without so much as a tremble. How many heartbeats had it taken her to master a high-level arcane technique? Five? Six?

Oathran melted into her kiss, his own heart swelling with relief. She had been crying from guilt, pleading for him to bring her here, and now, her hope had burst back into bloom.

"Cecilia..." he murmured against her lips, kissing her back.

His beautiful mate...

"My Saintess..."