The 5th Hero is a Beast [Queer LitRPG Isekai]

It took a few days before Hallvar could string proper thoughts together, but it was blessedly Hallvar who did so.

The understanding of the kjerrborn began to merge with the human-mind, so although instincts and habits remained, Hallvar was not solely a witness of every decision, but the actor.

The unicorns were careful to heal the beast while they slept, trying not to disturb the kjerrborn more than necessary. The injury was close to their brain; fever and illness clung to the kjerrborn despite repeated healing and treatment.

This was common for injuries that failed to be healed within the first hour. Wounds left to heal naturally tended to scar, and deep wounds caused consistent and chronic pain. It was the burden of surviving such intense injuries.

Hallvar didn't quite understand what these weird deer were about, but they did recognize that their mind was clearer and there was significantly less pressure and pain from their face.

It was a matter of not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

With more capacity to process system information, Hallvar glanced at the countdown in their periphery. The attunement clock listed thirty-nine more days remaining.

That was a horrifying understanding to reach. There was a hunter on their trail. Not just a hunter, a good hunter, one that knew how to kill kjerrborns.

It took less than a third of the time Hallvar was locked into kjerrborn form for Guillaume to partially blind the beastmaster. Permanently, not an affliction or a curse that could be undone.

There was only one option if Hallvar couldn't stomach killing the beasthunter.

Stall.

After eating the food the weird deer generously provided each day – a large pile of greens and roots, occasionally nuts – the kjerrborn urged the cub to leave the glade.

There was no way to be thankful to the odd deer, especially since Hallvar wasn't convinced this was just a fever dream.

Deer, gathering food to feed a polar bear sized beast? A veritable daycare system where the cub frolicked amicably with fawns?

Hallvar was sure that they witnessed one of the deer playing with the akergryph by teaching her to pounce where it tapped its hoof.

Gift horse. No questions until the hunter situation was solved.

They didn't ask why the hunter hadn't found them in the glade, why the deer were so content even though the kjerrborn arrived with a human's spear in their eye.

It didn't matter.

Hallvar left immediately after eating, gathering the cub and Pipkin to venture northwest.

Their plan was simply to run.

Pipkin caught on fast, and she began sleeping heavily while the kjerrborn travelled from food source to food source.

While Hallvar ate or rested, the akergryph retraced their steps by wing, flitting immediately back to her beastmaster once the hunter was spotted trudging across the landscape.

The trio was gone before they were in the sights of the hunter, with Hallvar picking up the pace as Pipkin and the cub rode on the kjerrborn's back.

Now filled with more sentience than instinct, Hallvar was able to measure their progress compared to the beasthunter.

Every day spent fishing and gathering nullified the prior travel, suggesting that Guillaume was stopping to rest just as infrequently as the beastmaster.

Ze must have a high endurance, given hir lack of a mount, which meant ze was a direct challenge to the kjerrborn's high stamina. Maybe there were skills involved too, that would make sense.

So, Hallvar tested the beasthunter's limits, pushing for days without rest or food, while timing hir reappearance when the beasts stopped.

When vetta trees were available, Hallvar would let the cub eat as much as she could stomach, grabbing the remaining roots in their mouth as travel snacks. The same was said for the streams and Pipkin, with Hallvar carrying a long-dead salmon or trout so that the akergryph could perch on their tusks and feast.

The beasthunter's perseverance was admirable, honestly. Commendable. Whatever the word was.

Guillaume always caught up. Hallvar couldn't account for the state of the hunter, nor the state of hir gronfaine companion, but it couldn't be great, right?

They left almost petty signifiers near their resting spots. Half eaten fish, claw carved marks in tree trunks, scent markings in the shape of massive kjerrborn shits.

Over a few weeks, the landscape passed by in beautiful detail, though Hallvar could only guess at the features in the distance from logical reasoning.

The evergreen forests transitioned to sparsely vegetated grassland, a cold desert whose temperatures stayed near freezing year round. These were the high elevation lands of the Qhai Republic.

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As the elevation approached sea-level over the vast expanse of the nation, the temperatures rose drastically.

From the kjerrborn's position, they could see oases dotting the hot desert, strips of scrubland breaking up the sands, preventing the prevailing winds from simply decimating the dunes.

The cub began to gain fur, formally announcing her shift into teenager as her dark, spotted coat began to show the grey of the typical kjerrborn coloring.

At one point in the Qhai Republic crossing, the keen-eyed akergryph sounded out an alarm. She could see what the two kjerrborn could not – in the far distance atop another rocky ridge, the beasthunter was visible with the gronfaine.

Simply watching, far out of reach of the hunter's arrows.

The kjerrborn stood and bellowed out a taunt before returning to their quest to shake the hunter's pursuit.

Hallvar decided that the cub who was no longer a cub required a name. She would need one when they returned to human form, and although Hallvar couldn't vocalize the words, they could still grow attached to her.

She was growing into such a strong beast. She no longer cried when the hunter's scent drifted on the wind, instead growling and grunting out her disapproval.

As her coat grew in, a little ring of grey fur sprouted awkwardly on the crown of her head. She looked like she was wearing a fluffy tiara or a coronet.

Princess felt a bit demeaning for a beast that would grow into at minimum 1600 pounds and 5 feet at the shoulder, but… Queenie? It suited her. She would be a kjerrborn queen, eventually.

For now, she was Queenie, or her goofy self was more aptly nicknamed Q.

Pipkin spent most of her time in the fur at the kjerrborn's collar, keeping her tiny body warm in the cold winds. She had better luck hunting than Hallvar did, as tiny insects and small mammals were readily available in the cold desert.

The transition into Staareaux was almost stark. The elevation dropped as the trio skirted the edge of the massive mountains, bringing in the pastoral biomes that the nation was known for.

Here, Hallvar hunted in the dusk, traveling at night under the guidance of the stars.

There were small deer or antelopes, and boar, both of which could be chased into exhaustion by the persistence predator. It took practice, but with the akergryph's assistance, Hallvar was able to feed themselves and their companions.

It wasn't the plentiful fishing in Amnasín's streams, but it would do. Meat was meat, and the red-blooded game was just as tasty as fatty fish flesh.

Halfway through Staareaux, Hallvar stumbled upon a problem.

Their path was blocked. Not by mountains or stones, but a … a strange monument built amongst the foothills of the Staargraven.

Hallvar didn't dare to go any closer, as the aura the building put off was terrifying. It felt like drowning in a desert or dehydrating in the ocean. Something was incredible wrong and all Hallvar had to do was one thing – avoid it – yet they couldn't.

After an hour of indecision, Hallvar lumbered farther up into the Staargraven, hard ground shifting into snow melts, then ultimately snow drifts.

The monument passed by underneath the beastmaster, in the far distance but tangibly unnerving from a mile away.

The kjerrborn instincts knew what the feeling meant. A dragon lived there. Something base and feral in the kjerrborn's brain understood that smell on the wind or the feeling of magic in the air.

The mile was not far enough away, but it was all the hero could reasonably allow without cutting into the distance from the beasthunter.

As the cold became icy, Pipkin moved; she found a fold of skin at the underside of the kjerrborn's throat to bury herself in, insulated from the air and surrounded by soft fur with only her little beak sticking out.

Q grew larger by the day and leaner as food disappeared. She could no longer ride the kjerrborn's back, but instead had to walk alongside her dad, though she tired more easily.

Hallvar conceded the need for a long rest, following their nose to a strange location on the edge of a rocky cliffside.

The kjerrborn's eyes could only make out so much in the dark, but it seemed to be a very tall building with a shed attached to the side.

Their nose insisted on two things: that the smell of the building was oddly familiar, and that there was food in that shed.

The lock on the door was easily broken with the kjerrborn's weight, allowing the beasts to enter and shelter from the cutting wind. Hallvar leaned against the doors, not entirely shutting them but closing them so that the snow stayed out.

The smell was so strangely familiar. Someone Hallvar knew.

But, that was a secondary curiosity. The rafters were lined with dried meats, fish and deer strips preserved by salt and the cold. A barrel with a simple lid contained half-frozen sour yogurt. In another, leather-wrapped rounds of butter were stacked, wrapped close by strips of cloth.

It was an absolute feast.

Despite the kjerrborn instinct insisting on devouring everything in sight, Hallvar knocked down only most of the meats. They fished out a half dozen butter rounds with their long claws and left that for Q to eat.

The half-frozen sour yogurt became a kjerrborn popsicle for Hallvar to consume, slamming their weight into the frozen bulk and chomping on the fragments of ice.

The trio passed out after stuffing their bellies, only to be awoken in the morning by the creak of the shed door.

Hallvar practically leapt to their feet, slowed slightly by the sloshing yogurt in their stomach.

The human silhouette in the doorway held a staff, not a spear, which only calmed the kjerrborn's nerves slightly. But, when Hallvar sniffed the air as they eyed the shape of the human, the familiar smell clicked into memory.

Oh! It was Tyrus!

With the glee of recognition, Hallvar lumbered forward, grunting and sniffing softly to communicate friendliness.

To the mage Tyrus, this was a trial in and of itself.

First, a notification from the system that one of his barriers was broken – a simple barrier on the door to the storage of his tower, his home. The mage was too busy to simply vanish at the moment, but once Tyrus was able to slip away from a guild quest, he did so.

There was one coded spell in his book – an ancient, entirely secret spell for transportation across great distances. It was several verses of linguistic traps and archaic rhyme schemas, but Tyrus was well-practiced in it by now.

He was certainly an important member of the Adventurer's Guild; however, he was an important member of several Adventurer's Guilds worldwide.

It was why he was known as the Wandering Mage, after all.

To be greeted by beasts in his larder was one thing.

To be greeted by two kjerrborn was another entirely, especially since the largest one – the rumored red kjerrborn of Amnasín – began to approach Tyrus way too quickly.

He yelped. Unbecoming but a reflex. The mage backed away from the doorway and sprinted toward his veritable wizard tower, chanting a barrier spell as he locked the door.

He heard sniffing through the cracks in the metal and wood structure, but it grew silent after some time.

Tyrus climbed to his kitchen on the first floor (not the entry floor) and stood with tea in hand as he peered through a slit window over the Staareaux landscape.

The dragon Ilyna's lair was visible from here across the rolling landscape, monumental in its construction, but Tyrus was far more interested in watching the backs of the two kjerrborn travelling farther north.

If anything, this would be an interesting anecdote for the system mages, tomorrow. A kjerrborn! In his storage shed! Eating his butter and yogurt!