POV: RIO
"Master."
I jerked upright, my heart slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird in a cage. The sheets were damp with cold sweat, tangling around my legs as I scrambled backward, my spine colliding with the headboard with a dull thud. The sudden movement sent a flare of soreness through my muscles—a lingering souvenir from the fight with the wind mage—but the adrenaline currently coursing through my veins drowned it out.
The room was silent, save for the rhythmic, heavy ticking of the clock in the hallway. Outside, the moon was a silver scythe, casting long, skeletal shadows of the oak trees across the floorboards. Everything looked normal. Everything looked empty.
"Who's there?" I whispered, my voice cracking and thin.
"Master."
It wasn't a sound. It was a vibration behind my eyes, a resonance that felt like a pebble dropped into a perfectly still pool of deep water. It was bubbly, slightly melodic, and unmistakably close. It didn't travel through the air to reach my ears; it blossomed directly in the center of my consciousness.
I slowly lowered my gaze. There, peeking out from the darkness beneath the bed frame, two large, translucent eyes blinked at me. The slime wobbled out into a patch of moonlight, its blue body shimmering with a faint, bioluminescent inner light. It looked small, harmless, and utterly absurd given the gravity of the voice I was hearing.
"…Sui?"
[Yes, Master.]
I froze, the air catching in my throat. The confirmation was absolute. "You… you can talk? Wait. You guided me to Tess in the woods. When I was running, when I couldn't see the path… you were talking then, too, wasn't it?"
[I guided. You followed. The bond was fresh, the pathways unrefined. Now, they are open.]
The sheer impossibility of it made my head spin. Monsters didn't talk. They roared, they hissed, and they died. But this one—this little blue blob I'd saved from a cruel whim—was speaking directly into my soul. Before I could ask how a slime learned a language it shouldn't possess, the door burst open.
Tess stood there, her hair a chaotic mess and her eyes wide with a mix of exhaustion and lingering panic. She was still wearing her travel tunic, though it was wrinkled and dusty. Her hand clutched the doorframe so hard her knuckles were white, trembling slightly.
"Rio? I heard you shouting. Are you… is everything okay? Was it a nightmare?"
I looked at her, then back at Sui. "Tess, it talked. The slime just called me 'Master.'"
Tess blinked, her expression shifting from raw worry to a look of deadpan skepticism in record time. She walked over, leaning down to poke Sui with a finger. Sui let out a soft, wet squeak—the kind of sound a rubber duck makes when it's stepped on.
"Rio, it's making squeaky toy noises," Tess said, her brow furrowing as she looked back at me. "Are you sure your brain didn't get scrambled by that compressed air blade? You took a heavy hit."
"I'm serious! It's in my head! Only I can hear it, I think."
Tess's gaze sharpened, her posture losing its slump. She sat on the edge of the bed, her warmth a stark, grounding contrast to the chill of the room. She looked at the sigil on my hand—the silver lines etched deep into my palm, glowing with a faint, ethereal pulse. "Telepathy? If that's true… then what happened in the forest wasn't just a temporary taming for convenience. Rio, true contracts don't just fade when the mana runs low. They stay until both sides agree to break it… or until one of you dies."
The weight of her words settled in the room like lead. I looked at Sui, who was now pulsing rhythmically at my feet. She wasn't just a creature I'd saved; she was a part of me now, a literal extension of my own existence.
"Go back to sleep, Rio," Tess said softly, her hand briefly brushing my shoulder—a touch that lingered just a second too long—before she pulled away, her face flushing in the dim moonlight. "We'll talk about the mechanics in the morning. Just… try to stay alive until the sun comes up."
The sun hadn't even fully cleared the horizon when Tess returned. She didn't knock this time; she simply walked in with two cups of herbal tea and a look of intense focus that usually meant I was about to get a lecture. She sat on the chair by the window, the morning light catching the determination in her eyes.
"I spent the last few hours thinking," she began, bypassing any morning pleasantries. "Contracting isn't just a simple command-and-obey relationship; it's a complex science of the soul. In the magical world, the nature of a bond is dictated by the ratio of mana and will established during the formation, and these ratios determine exactly how power is shared between the parties. When a contract is a perfect fifty-fifty split, it's a true symbiosis where both the Dominant and the Weaker side can access each other's mana pools and unique abilities as if they were their own, though the risk is absolute—if one heart stops, both die instantly.
In more common cases, such as a seventy-thirty or sixty-forty bond, the relationship becomes more hierarchical; the Dominant side retains the authority to draw significantly more power or mana from the Weaker side at will, often using the creature's essence to bolster their own spells. Then, there is the rarer ninety-ten bond. In this scenario, the Dominant side possesses absolute control and authority over the Weaker side's actions, but in exchange for that loss of agency, the Weaker side receives the ability to 'Power Up.' This is a massive, rapid surge in physical strength, agility, and combat instinct—a biological failsafe designed to turn the Weaker side into a lethal shield to protect their contractor at any cost. Regardless of the ratio, however, the grim reality remains: if the Dominant side dies, the Weaker side's soul simply unravels. It is an inescapable tie."
The silence that followed her explanation was heavy. I looked down at Sui, who was currently flattened into a blue pancake on my lap. "Sui. What's our ratio?"
[One hundred to zero.]
My heart skipped a beat. I looked at Tess, my voice barely a whisper. "She says it's a hundred to zero."
Tess dropped her cup. The tea spilled across the floorboards, but she didn't even flinch. "One hundred to zero?! Rio, that's… that's not a taming. That's absolute subordination. It means she has placed her entire existence—every spark of her life and every drop of her mana—entirely in your hands. She has no authority over you at all, but because the ratio is so skewed, her potential to Power Up is theoretically limitless. She has turned herself into a weapon with only one trigger: you."
"Why?" I asked, looking down at the slime. "Why would you give up everything?"
[Because you saved me when the world would have crushed me. Because I chose this. I will be your shield, Master.]
Tess reached out, tentatively touching Sui's head. To my surprise, Sui didn't pull away; she leaned into the touch, molding herself to Tess's fingers. "We have to hide this, Rio. There are only about a thousand Beast Tamers in the whole world. If the Guild or the nobility finds out you have a hundred-zero bond with a telepathic monster… it won't just be a scandal. It'll be a hunt. For now, she's just a 'rare pet.' Nothing more."
The air in the forest was thick with the smell of damp earth and the subtle, cloying scent of rot. This was our first official guild quest: Subjugate six goblins harassing the southern trade route. It sounded simple in the guild hall, but standing under the canopy of ancient trees, it felt much more real.
"Stay behind my barriers if they swarm," Tess warned. She adjusted her grip on her staff. Unlike the fluid, airy magic I'd seen before, Tess was an Earth and Healing specialist. Her mana felt heavy, grounded, and immovable.
We found them near a ravine, huddled around a small, guttering fire. Six of them—ugly, green-skinned creatures with jagged daggers and eyes filled with a cruel, primitive intelligence.
The lead goblin shrieked, a sound like grinding stones, and the battle began.
Four goblins charged me at once. I didn't wait for them to reach me. I met them head-on, my blade humming as I coated the steel in fire mana. The heat was intense, singeing the hair on my arms, but it gave the blade a lethal edge. I swiveled, a clean horizontal strike taking the first two down before they could even scream.
The third goblin lunged low, aiming for my knee with a rusted bone knife. I reinforced my stance with earth mana, my legs feeling like stone pillars. I parried the blow, the vibration rattling my teeth, and drove my blade through its chest.
[Master, above!] Sui's warning echoed in my mind.
I ducked instinctively as a crude wooden arrow whistled over my head. I looked toward the trees—a fifth goblin was perched on a branch, reloading.
"Earth Grasp!" Tess's voice was a sharp command. She slammed the butt of her staff into the dirt. The ground beneath the archer's tree turned to liquid mud, dragging the roots down and causing the entire tree to tilt. The goblin fell, shrieking, and was instantly pinned by a jagged stone spire Tess summoned from the floor.
But the remaining two goblins had circled around. They were smart; they realized Tess was the anchor and support. They ignored me and rushed her.
"Tess, get back!"
She tried to raise an Earth Wall, but the goblins were fast, skittering on all fours. They were inches away from her when Sui launched.
Because of our 100-0 ratio, Sui's Power Up was terrifying to behold. She didn't just jump; she became a blur of high-velocity blue mass. She hit the first goblin with the force of a falling boulder, her body hardening into a dense, rubbery projectile that sent the creature flying twenty feet back.
The final goblin lunged for Tess's legs. I channeled water mana, freezing the moisture in the air around its ankles. It tripped, its momentum carrying it face-first into the dirt. I closed the distance in three strides, my fire-lit blade ending the threat in a single, heavy strike.
Tess finished the stunned one with a precise stone spike from the ground, her face set in a mask of grim determination.
The clearing went silent. The only sound was the crackling of the goblins' small fire and our own ragged breathing. Six bodies lay scattered across the moss. The metallic tang of blood was thick enough to taste.
"We have to… we have to take the ears," Tess whispered. Her face was pale, nearly translucent in the dappled sunlight. She looked at her hands, then quickly hid them behind her back. "The guild won't pay us without them."
"I know."
I knelt by the first goblin. It wasn't glorious. It wasn't heroic. I pulled out my hunting knife, the steel cold in my shaking hand. The sound of the blade against leathery skin—the wet, tearing noise of the collection—made my stomach do a slow, sick somersault.
One ear. Two.
By the time I reached the sixth, my hands were stained a dark, sticky green-black. Tess had turned away completely, her shoulders shaking slightly as she leaned against a tree. She was a healer by nature; this went against every instinct she had. I hated it too. But as I looked at the leather pouch now filled with the grim trophies, I realized the threshold had been crossed.
Yesterday, I was a boy running for his life. Today, I was an adventurer.
"It's done," I said, my voice sounding older than it had this morning. I wiped my knife on a patch of moss and stood up.
Tess turned around slowly. She didn't say anything, but she stepped forward and gripped the sleeve of my tunic, her head resting against my shoulder for just a heartbeat—a silent acknowledgment of the weight we now shared.
"Let's go get our money, Rio," she said, her voice regaining its strength.
"Yeah. Let's go home."
As we walked out of the forest, Sui rested quietly on my head, her cool, damp body a steadying weight. We had a secret that could change the world—and a bond that went deeper than blood.