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

Guillaume was kicked out of the inn shortly after the threat was made, unceremoniously shown the door while hir gronfaine stomped uncomfortably in the snow.

The locals did not take kindly to those foreigners who disrupted the spirits. In legend, the berggeist were spirits who lived in the mountains whose tempers were mythological and whose rage could only be quelled by food, alcohol, or blood.

No one knew what would happen to the inn in the wake of this inhospitable treatment of the spirit, but they refused to harbor the insulting party, just in case the punishment would be worse.

In this small village, there were no secondary inns. No place for the beasthunter to sleep, save for sneaking into someone's barn and hoping for the best.

The fish hawk watched patiently as Guillaume trudged through the snow. Hir path stayed on the roads for some time, until ze stopped at a break in the trees.

A deer path, where brush and limbs were naturally parted so that beasts could cross the road and continue on their way.

The spot where, say, two kjerrborn and an akergryph would cross.

In the beastmaster's mind there was only one option. It was the same option that filled the beasthunter's mind.

Humans didn't grow hair that fast, from short if not a bit floppy, too long and wild. Humans didn't have claws. Humans couldn't gain bulk that fast, unnaturally changing their body type in only a month or two.

Humans couldn't sit in below freezing temperatures for hours, as the locals reported.

Humans didn't change shape. Humans didn't become flying beasts or massive kjerrborns.

A human would have stopped the chase immediately, explaining the situation to Guillaume. It would be a curse, some oddity that might have caused the change of shape.

A human would not have led the beasthunter back to Brigavalé, a place where berggeist were known. They didn't always have red hair, but many did.

And the description matched. It matched exactly.

To Guillaume, there was only one answer here.

This was a beast, a magical beast, a sentient beast not unlike unicorns and harpies and dragons.

A beast that somehow knew who Hallvar the Hero was, who may have killed the hero or stolen their memories. Or perhaps the hero never existed.

There was only one answer for a beasthunter.

These Brigavalé forests were terrible for hunting with their low-hanging limbs and careening mountains, but Guillaume maintained the same idea ze held from the first days of this hunt.

Find the cub; find the parent.

The cub was assuredly a kjerrborn, perhaps adopted by the berggeist, but not a shapeshifting creature. It had tracks that could be followed.

As for the spirit, Guillaume was prepared to change tactics. If the spirit could kill hir, it should have done so immediately.

Therefore, there were rules of this hunt now in place. The spirit only retaliated as a kjerrborn, though it seemed capable of taking flight. Even when injured, it remained a kjerrborn.

That implied that the kjerrborn was its combat form, and Guillaume knew how to fight those.

—

The beast waited until the hunter was far away from the road that smelled of human and mud, far enough away that the hunter could not call for help from other humans.

The sentience of Hallvar was reduced to a passing thought once they made their final decision, which occurred shortly after the hunter stepped into the trees.

They elected to follow Stella's guidance. Hallvar remembered the illustration of a large feline cloaked in shadows, the illustration from survivor's accounts suggesting a toothy maw and piercing eyes.

A qittakākom. A qitta.

To choose this was to sacrifice more of their time and sanity, but with their missing eye, they needed as many advantages as they could get.

They tried to commit to memory that the human and the gronfaine were enemies before choosing their new offensive form, mentally chanting about attacking the hunter, but their trepidation was misplaced.

The qitta knew exactly what it was supposed to do.

Though it was built to sneak along rocky cliffsides, barely balanced on steep, untraversable inclines, or ambush prey across desert sands, the qitta found Brigavalé an acceptable hunting ground.

It cautiously placed its fur-padded paws onto each tree branch, barely making a noise as it stalked the prey from a close distance.

The missing eye provided a challenge, hindering the qitta's ability to judge distance, but it simply meant that the beast had to check twice before transferring its weight to another tree.

It was locked onto the gronfaine.

All of the species memory of qittakākom was focused on three primary prey beasts:

The tiadhaq – a giant serpent that often came in armored varieties in the Qhai Republic, although its Eastern counterpart had another name and was notably soft-scaled.

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Mountain grazers – the various varieties of mountain ruminants that dotted the Staargraven and the rocky regions in lower elevations.

And the gronfaine.

With no sound, the qitta attacked.

It leapt down from above, landing on the gronfaine which hissed and grunted, incapable of crying out in distress as it lacked vocal cords.

The qitta's claws wrapped under armored segments as it rode the gronfaine's back, not unlike one would ride a bucking bull.

It was stabilized by its legs – six in total – which also allowed it to prevent the gronfaine from rolling into a sphere, pitting muscle against muscle.

As the qitta searched for a gap in the armor, the gronfaine bit uselessly at the rear leg of the beast.

While the injuries were irritating, the qitta was immune to most reptile-produced venom, given its love of giant serpents and reptilian pangolins as prey.

An arrow thwipped past the tangle of beasts, missing as the gronfaine thrashed.

The qitta ignored the hunter, which was low on its priority list, instead using its four-inch fangs and profound bite force to rip the armored scales off of the gronfaine's flesh.

If there wasn't a gap in the scales, the qittakākom could make one.

One exposed, it was easy work.

The qitta was thrown temporarily as the gronfaine bucked the long beast into a tree branch, but it was built for stealth and agility. The gronfaine had no time to escape the skittering paws of the qitta.

The fangs tore through the neck muscles and clamped onto a vertebra. Instinctively, the qitta chomped again and again until it felt the fangs slip between two bones.

It ripped its head back, throwing its full body weight into the gesture as it fell to the ground.

Though the gronfaine continued to move, the qitta turned its attention to the hunter.

The other beast was merely convulsing, its spinal cord severed as it bled out. The nameless gronfaine would die in due time.

The hunter looked to be preparing an attack, hir weapon glowing ominously.

The qitta did not care to confront the human head-on; it darted into the dark, cold forest without another sound.

It was not aware that the hunter's skill outlined recent trail marks, highlighted in the trees. Perhaps the hunter could not see the qitta directly, but ze could see traces – scratches on tree branches as they were made, footprints in the fallen snow.

Ze couldn't hold the arrow forever, grip fatiguing as the hunter was forced to loose the bolt.

It bit into the qitta's hide, aimed well-enough to injure but not enough to slow the beast's progress.

The bleed counter was ignored in favor of immediately attacking while the hunter's weapon was not armed.

It had been easy to land on the gronfaine as it was a very large beast, but aiming for a smaller human while half blind was of a higher difficulty.

Their depth perception was poor and the qitta had not existed long enough to adapt by triangulating distance with hearing yet.

The qitta didn't miss as much as its attack scraped the side of the hunter, not the main body mass.

They adjusted quickly to swipe at the human; rear legs thudding heavily into the ground before they angled to pounce at such a short range.

In all this, the combat was quiet, broken up by only human noises, thuds of strikes, and the crunch of snow underfoot.

The hunter swore, abandoning hir bow for a dagger since the spear was far too long to combat a beast so close. Any blood drawn was unseen as it blended with the rust-red fur.

The human had little chance once the qitta was on top of hir.

Claws that were intended to rip chunks of flesh-rooted armor off of monstrous beasts made easy work of leather straps.

Slaps from heavy paws were like percussive slams of fur-lined hammers, denting plate metal and jarring the human inside.

And those four-inch fangs easily broke through the chainmail gorget covering the hunter's neck.

Though the qitta had no sense of system notifications, it had a little under half-health left, the various bleed effects affecting the beast intensely in comparison to the sturdiness of the kjerrborn.

It licked its wounds as it regarded its two prey options.

The qittakākom was not averse to eating humans, though it was hardly within the top ten or twenty options for prey. The beast preferred to avoid humankind entirely.

However, the gronfaine...

After eating its innards and stomach, the qitta looked only slightly different than before.

The blood failed to color the red fur of the qitta's head and torso any darker, only making it sticky and wet.

Its white paws and legs were darkened red like the surrounding snow, equally stained by mud and frozen slush.

The gronfaine muscle was greasy and stringy; the thinner scales near the stomach crunched under the qitta's jaws.

Regrettably the remaining gronfaine carcass was too big to carry back to the qitta's young, but not for lack of trying. It was still instinctively attached to the juvenile kjerrborn and the akergryph regardless of species.

After rolling in some fresh snow to clean off its face and front paws, the qitta shook off and reoriented itself, using its internal guide toward Hallvar's beast companions to find its way back.

—

Once cognizant, a few things were made very clear to Hallvar about the qittakākom.

They used [scholar skill: rote reading] to scan previously read beast books for information on the qitta.

They were surprised to see that every source insisted that the qitta were feline – large, elongated, described as smoke-like in nature, rare, elusive, dangerous, ambush predators.

Having been one for nearly a week, Hallvar could readily assert that this was not a feline, but some form of mustelid. More akin to a very large marten than anything cat-like.

In fact, this slip back into Hallvar's own personality was so seamless and easy that they didn't notice the regained control until days later. The qitta's nature was elusive and human-shy, yes, but also energetic and curious and playful.

The first clue was that the qitta was not an obligate carnivore.

It readily ate seaweed from the shore of the northern sea when the beast trio arrived as they tried to dodge the coldest part of the country near the Staargraven.

It instinctively had preferred prey, but its hunting was opportunistic. Fish, rabbits, deer, scavenged carcasses, winter berries – anything was food if the qitta looked hard enough, just like with the kjerrborn.

The second clue was the qitta's energy.

Whereas big cats often preferred to conserve energy, lazing around and acting only when necessary, the qitta didn't stop moving.

The lack of an eye didn't slow the beast down from climbing all over trees and rocks, leaping from spot to spot, or tackling the kjerrborn juvenile in impromptu playfights in the snow.

In fact, the move to a slightly warmer climate was practically a demand from the akergryph, who grew tired of being tossed loose out of the nice warm fur nest during a playfight.

They were easily able to provide for their little beast family between hunting deer or rabbits to foraging for winter greens. It took more time to hunt with their depth perception wrecked, but the qitta was compensating more and more with each passing day.

The experience of being a qitta was so enjoyable that the system had to remind Hallvar of the end of the attunement countdown, the 10 days passing rapidly compared to the trial of being a hunted kjerrborn.

Well, now they had a choice to make. Without the hunter on their tail, Hallvar felt a sense of freedom that was long since denied.

Their status as hero made it hard to relax while the King-Consort was in power, then this whole adventure...

As the beastmaster climbed the massive fjord – leaving Q safely below – they gazed out over the beautiful landscape of Brigavalé.

It was icy and cold but gorgeous, a massive inlet carved between two fjords decorated with snow and rock.

Hallvar truly missed the clarity of good eyesight as the kjerrborn, despite the one-sidedness of it now.

From their perch, they could see a… a castle in the far distance. It was literally a storybook castle, with pointy towers and a million windows, all built on another fjord.

They could begin the long trek home; their system map indicated that they were on the complete opposite side of the Staargraven.

Or… they could find a place to send a letter to Stella and find a nice, comfy bed for a while.