The stream was about a hundred yards downhill from where Ethan had landed, tucked between two banks of mossy stone and running clear enough to see the gravel bottom. He found it by listening — the sound of moving water carrying through the forest like a thread he could follow — and by watching Moose, who had lifted his head, turned, and started walking in a specific direction with the quiet certainty of a dog who had already decided where they were going.

  Ethan followed him. Buster flanked left, nose down, scanning the underbrush in methodical sweeps. Pixie stayed close — unusually close, pressed against Ethan's calf, her ears swiveling at every sound the forest made. She hadn't stopped trembling, but she'd stopped shaking hard enough to feel through his jeans, which he was choosing to count as progress.

  The forest wasn't quiet. That was the thing that kept catching him off guard. Back home, "nature" meant the carefully landscaped strip of grass between houses, maybe the occasional park with paved trails and a duck pond. This was something else entirely. The trees were massive — trunks wider than cars, bark rough and dark, branches interleaving overhead into a canopy so thick that the violet sky only showed through in scattered patches. Birds called from somewhere high up, but the sounds were wrong — too musical, too structured, like someone had taken a songbird and taught it to harmonize with itself. Insects buzzed in frequencies he didn't recognize. The air carried layers of scent: wet earth, green growth, something floral and sharp that he couldn't identify.

  Every few steps, something moved in the underbrush. Rustling. Clicking. Once, a flash of iridescent blue that vanished before he could focus on it. Each time, Buster's head snapped toward the sound and held, assessing, before he decided it wasn't a threat and resumed scanning.

  Ethan's elbow had stopped bleeding, but the scrape stung when he moved his arm. He was wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, socks, and running shoes — what he'd been wearing at his desk. No jacket. No bag. No phone. No wallet. Nothing useful except the clothes on his back and a stainless steel coffee mug that he was still carrying because putting it down felt like admitting something he wasn't ready to admit.

  When they reached the stream, Moose walked to the water's edge, sniffed it carefully, and drank. He drank for a long time — measured, unhurried — and when he stepped back, Buster moved in and did the same. Pixie waited until both of them were done, then darted to the bank and lapped so fast that she got water up her nose and sneezed three times in rapid succession.

  Ethan knelt at the edge and cupped water in his hands. It was cold. Shockingly cold, the kind that made his teeth ache and his fingers go numb. He drank anyway, because his throat was raw and his head was pounding and dehydration would kill him faster than anything else in this forest.

  The water tasted clean. Cleaner than any water he'd ever had — no chlorine, no mineral aftertaste, nothing but cold and wet and something faintly sweet that might have been the moss on the stones. He drank until his stomach protested, then sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth.

  The system notification was still there. He could see it if he focused — a faint blue shimmer at the edge of his vision, like a browser tab he'd left open and forgotten about. He tried thinking at it, the way you'd think about clicking a button.

  The display expanded.

  [Status: Ethan Cross]

  [Level: 1]

  [Class: Arcane Tamer – Variant]

  [HP: 110/120]

  [MP: 1260/1260]

  The numbers hung in the air, clean and blue. HP he understood — his elbow, probably. The MP number made him pause. Twelve hundred and sixty. He had no frame of reference for whether that was a lot or a little, but the number felt heavy, the way a bank balance feels heavy when you know it's more than it should be.

  He tried to access more — stats, skills, anything — but the interface didn't respond to further prodding. Either he hadn't figured out the right mental command, or the system was giving him exactly as much information as it thought he deserved right now.

  "Helpful," he muttered.

  He closed the display — or tried to. It didn't close so much as recede, dimming to a faint presence at the edge of his awareness, like tinnitus you'd learned to ignore.

  Moose was watching him. The old dog had positioned himself on a flat rock at the edge of the stream, sitting upright with his front paws together, looking at Ethan with an expression that seemed to say: Are you done staring at nothing? Because there's work to do.

  Ethan looked around. The stream ran roughly north-south. The bank on their side was relatively flat — a strip of gravel and moss maybe ten feet wide before the trees started. On the far side, the bank rose steeply into dense brush. Upstream, the sound of the water changed, suggesting rocks or a small cascade. Downstream, the forest opened slightly, and he could see what might have been a clearing.

  Shelter. Water. Fire. Food. The survival pyramid he'd read about in a hundred Reddit threads and never once expected to need.

  "Okay," he said, standing up and brushing dirt off his jeans. "We're doing this."

  He found a spot about twenty feet from the stream, where two large trees grew close together and their roots created a natural depression in the earth — not quite a hollow, but close enough to block wind from one direction. He started gathering materials: fallen branches, strips of bark, handfuls of long grass. The forest provided abundantly. Whatever this place was, it grew things with enthusiasm.

  The lean-to took him an hour. It was ugly. The branches were uneven, the bark strips kept slipping, and his first attempt at a roof collapsed the moment he leaned a crossbeam against the tree. Ethan swore, rebuilt it, watched it sag sideways, braced it with a rock, and got something that was technically a structure in the same way that a napkin over a glass was technically architecture.

  Moose watched the entire process from his rock. He didn't help — he was a dog, and dogs didn't build shelters — but he watched with the focused attention of a project manager observing a particularly questionable deployment. Every time the lean-to sagged, Moose's ears twitched. Every time Ethan swore, Moose blinked slowly. When the roof finally held, Moose looked away, which Ethan chose to interpret as approval.

  Buster, meanwhile, had appointed himself perimeter patrol. He walked a slow circuit around the camp area, pausing at intervals to sniff the ground, the air, and specific trees with the methodical intensity of a building inspector checking load-bearing walls. When he finished his circuit, he circled back, lay down at the entrance of the lean-to, and put his head on his paws. The message was clear: This is the door. I am the door.

  Pixie had recovered enough to be curious. She investigated every pile of materials Ethan gathered, sniffing each branch and leaf with the intensity of a sommelier evaluating a wine list. She found a beetle, watched it for thirty seconds with her head cocked at an extreme angle, and then tried to eat it. The beetle escaped. Pixie looked personally offended.

  Fire was harder.

  Ethan had no lighter. No matches. No ferro rod. No magnifying glass. He had a coffee mug and the vague memory of a YouTube video about bow drills.

  He spent twenty minutes trying to make a bow drill from a shoelace and a curved stick. The shoelace snapped on the third rotation. He tried again with a strip of bark twisted into cordage. It held longer but produced nothing except friction burns on his palms and a growing sense of humiliation.

  "This is supposed to work," he said to the bark. "I've seen people do this."

  He'd seen people do this in edited videos with jump cuts and professional lighting, filmed by people who had practiced for years. He was a software developer from Dallas whose most rugged outdoor experience was grilling on his back patio.

  He tried a different approach — a hand drill, just spinning a stick between his palms against a flat piece of wood. His palms blistered. The wood smoked faintly but never caught. He tried a third time, using a notch cut with a sharp rock, packing the base with dry moss.

  Nothing.

  Ethan sat back, palms raw, and stared at the assemblage of sticks and failure in front of him. The forest was getting darker. Not dark — the violet sky was shifting toward a deeper purple, and the gold threads in it had dimmed to copper. Sunset, or whatever passed for it here.

  He needed fire. Not for warmth — the air was mild — but because fire meant control. It meant light. It meant cooking. It meant "I am alive and I am choosing to stay that way." Without fire, he was just a man sitting in the dirt.

  He picked up the hand drill one more time. His palms screamed. The wood protested. Smoke rose — thin, reluctant, barely visible — and Ethan leaned in and blew, gentle and steady, feeding the ember he couldn't see.

  And because the universe occasionally rewarded stubbornness over competence, and because Ethan Cross had spent his entire adult life grinding through problems that should have been someone else's job, the moss caught.

  A tiny orange glow. Then a curl of smoke. Then a flame — small, fragile, alive.

  Ethan cupped his hands around it and fed it twigs, one at a time, barely breathing, terrified that a stray exhale would kill the only good thing that had happened since the world ended. The flame grew. It caught the twigs. He added larger sticks. The fire crackled, popped, and settled into a steady burn that pushed back the gathering dusk.

  He sat back and watched it. His palms throbbed. His elbow ached. His back hurt from hunching over the lean-to. He was filthy, exhausted, hungry, and sitting on the ground in an alien forest with no tools, no supplies, and no idea what tomorrow looked like.

  The fire was warm. The stream was close. The lean-to would keep the dew off. And three dogs had arranged themselves around him in a loose semicircle — Moose at his right, solid and watchful, Buster at the entrance, guarding the perimeter, and Pixie curled against his thigh, finally still, her breathing slow and steady.

  Ethan looked at the fire. He looked at the dogs. He looked at the two moons rising above the canopy — two moons, one large and copper, one small and silver-white, hanging in a sky that had never been his sky and might never be again.

  He picked up the Yeti mug. Empty now. He'd drunk the last of the cold coffee an hour ago and hadn't been able to bring himself to wash it out. The inside smelled like stale brew and the ghost of his kitchen.

  He held it in both hands and let the metal warm from the fire.

  "I miss coffee," he said quietly. It wasn't a complaint. It was a prayer.

  Moose pressed his shoulder against Ethan's leg. The old dog didn't look up — just leaned in, steady and warm, the weight of him saying what a dog's weight always said: I'm here. You're not alone.

  Ethan scratched behind Moose's ear, feeling the short, rough fur and the warmth of the skin beneath. Moose's eyes half-closed, and a slow rumble built in his chest — not a growl, just contentment, the sound of a dog who had found his person and was satisfied with the arrangement.

  On his other side, Pixie twitched in her sleep. Her paws moved in small, jerky motions — chasing something in a dream, maybe, or reliving the fall through worlds. Ethan rested his hand on her side and felt her heart beating fast, the way a small dog's heart always beats, too fast for the size of the body it lived in.

  Buster lay with his head on his paws, eyes open, watching the darkness beyond the firelight. Every few minutes, his ears would rotate toward a sound — a rustle, a distant call, the creek of a branch — and then settle back. He wasn't sleeping. He was standing watch, which was something Buster had never done at home, because at home, there had been nothing to watch for.

  The fire popped. Sparks drifted up into the purple dark and vanished. The two moons climbed higher, their light filtering through the canopy in silver and copper threads.

  Ethan didn't sleep for a long time. He sat with his back against the tree and his dogs around him and the fire between him and whatever else lived in this forest, and he listened to the world breathe.

  It breathed differently than Earth. The rhythm was slower, deeper. The wind moved through the canopy in long, rolling waves instead of gusts. The insects pulsed in synchronized patterns that rose and fell like tides. Even the stream seemed to have a cadence — not random splashing but something almost musical, as if the water was running over stones that had been placed on purpose.

  He thought about his house. The laptop still open on his desk. The broken repo nobody would fix tomorrow because nobody would notice he was gone until at least Wednesday. His sister's unanswered text about a girl named Jenn who volunteered at an animal shelter and didn't hate dogs.

  He thought about whether "didn't hate dogs" was the bar he'd set for human connection, and whether that said more about him or about Amelia's previous attempts at matchmaking.

  He thought about the system notification still pulsing faintly at the edge of his awareness: Arcane Tamer – Variant. Pack Bond Achieved. Mirror Link – Dormant.

  He didn't know what any of it meant. He didn't know if he'd ever know what it meant. He didn't know if there was a way home, or if home still existed, or if anyone would remember to feed the fish he didn't have.

  But the fire was warm. And the dogs were here. And the water was clean.

  Ethan Cross closed his eyes and let the numbness go, because numbness was a luxury he could no longer afford.

  When sleep finally came, it came heavy and dreamless, and the last thing he was aware of was Moose shifting his weight, pressing closer, and the old dog's slow breathing settling into rhythm with his own.

  Ethan woke to Buster growling.

  Not the low, conversational rumble that meant someone had stepped on his tail or taken the last piece of chicken. This was the real thing — deep, wet, and continuous, vibrating in his chest like an engine running hot. Ethan's eyes snapped open and found the forest still half-dark, the fire burned down to a heap of red coals, and Buster was on his feet at the edge of the camp, every muscle rigid, teeth bared at the treeline.

  Moose was already up. The big dog stood between Ethan and whatever Buster was looking at, his body low and braced, head down, ears flat. He wasn't growling. He was doing something worse — he was silent, which meant he'd already decided this was serious.

  Pixie was pressed against Ethan's side, awake and trembling, but this time it was different. She wasn't afraid. She was coiled, every line of her small body taut, her eyes locked on the same spot in the brush that had both of the bigger dogs on edge.

  Ethan sat up slowly. The forest around them was doing the wrong kind of quiet — the birds had stopped, the insects had gone silent, and the only sound was the stream behind them and the low, constant thunder of Buster's growl.

  Something moved in the underbrush. Heavy. Deliberate. The crack of a branch, followed by another, each one closer. Whatever it was, it wasn't trying to be quiet. It was pushing through the brush with the confidence of something that had never needed to sneak.

  Ethan's hand found a stick — the thickest one in reach, a fallen branch about three feet long, still damp from the morning dew. It wasn't a weapon. It was a piece of wood. But his hand didn't care about the distinction.

  The thing came through the treeline.

  It was a boar. Or something that had once been related to boars in the same way that a motorcycle is related to a bicycle. The body was massive — easily four hundred pounds, built low to the ground with thick, dark bristles that looked more like wire than hair. Its shoulders hunched forward in twin ridges of muscle, and its hooves left gouges in the dirt as it stepped into the clearing. The tusks were wrong. Not ivory — bone, pale and ridged, curving up from the jaw like weapons that had grown with intent. They were cracked at the tips and stained dark, and Ethan did not want to think about what had stained them.

  The boar's eyes were small, red-rimmed, and utterly devoid of the wariness that normal animals carried. It looked at Ethan the way a machine looks at a task: without emotion, without hesitation, with the singular focus of something that had identified what it wanted and was now deciding the most efficient path to getting it.

  Blue text flickered at the edge of Ethan's vision.

  [Wild Forest Boar – Level 3]

  Level three. He was level one. The math on that was simple enough that even panic couldn't obscure it.

  The boar charged.

  It moved faster than something that size had any right to — a burst of raw acceleration that shook the ground, tusks lowered, hooves tearing through the forest floor. It didn't aim for Ethan. It aimed for the gap between Moose and Buster, the narrow corridor of open ground between the two dogs, heading straight for the lean-to and the fire pit behind it.

  Moose intercepted.

  The old dog threw himself into the boar's path with a commitment that made Ethan's stomach drop. He didn’t hesitate or calculate. He slammed shoulder-first into the boar's flank. The impact was brutal. Moose hit hard enough to knock the boar sideways, redirecting its charge by maybe fifteen degrees, and then the boar's tusks caught him across the ribs.

  Moose yelped — a sharp, pained sound that cut through the clearing — and was flung sideways, rolling twice before finding his feet. Blood appeared on his left side, a bright line cutting through the gray-brown fur. He stood, shaking, and faced the boar again.

  The boar skidded, tore up a line of dirt, and wheeled around for another pass. It was angry now. The small, red eyes locked on Moose, and the bristles along its spine rose like hackles, making it look even larger.

  Buster hit it from the right.

  No bark. No warning. Buster came in at a dead run, low and fast, and slammed into the boar's hindquarters with every pound he had. The impact staggered the boar — its back legs buckled, and for half a second, its rear end dipped toward the ground. Buster bit down on the boar's haunch, clamped his jaw, and pulled, trying to drag the animal off balance.

  The boar shrieked — a sound Ethan had never heard before, high and furious and wrong, like metal scraping stone — and kicked backward with both hind legs. The blow caught Buster in the chest and launched him backward into a tree trunk. He hit hard, slid to the ground, and lay still for a heartbeat that lasted a year.

  Then he was up. Slower, favoring his left side, but up. He bared his teeth and circled.

  Pixie was already moving.

  The small dog had launched from Ethan's side the moment the boar charged, and now she was everywhere — darting in and out of the boar's peripheral vision, yipping, snapping, dodging, never staying in one place long enough for the animal to track her. She wasn't doing damage. She was too small to do damage. What she was doing was driving the boar insane.

  Every time the boar focused on Moose, Pixie nipped at its ankles. Every time it wheeled toward Pixie, Buster lunged at its flank. Every time it turned to face Buster, Moose was there, braced and blocking, absorbing the impact with his body.

  They were fighting as a unit. Three dogs who had never been trained for combat, who had spent their lives on couches and dog beds and house floors, operating in a rotating pattern of distraction, redirection, and force that looked almost coordinated. Almost intelligent.

  Ethan stood rooted, the stick in his hand, his mind racing through options and finding nothing useful. He couldn't stab through that hide with a wet branch. He couldn't outrun it. He couldn't help his dogs by standing here.

  The boar caught Moose again — a glancing blow from the flat of a tusk that sent the big dog stumbling sideways. Blood was running freely down Moose's ribs now, and his breathing was heavy, labored. Buster was limping. Even Pixie was slowing, her yips losing their frantic edge.

  They were losing.

  Ethan looked at the fire pit. The coals were still red. The biggest piece of wood — a branch he'd been saving to feed the fire through the night — was half-charred, its tip glowing orange.

  He dropped the stick, grabbed the burning branch with both hands, and charged.

  The boar was mid-turn, tusks coming around toward Moose, when Ethan swung the burning branch into the side of its head. The impact jarred his arms to the shoulders. The glowing end hit the boar's snout, just below the eye, and the bristles caught — a brief flare of orange heat and the stink of burning hair. The boar flinched. It was the first time it had flinched.

  Ethan swung again. The branch was awkward, heavy, and losing its ember with each impact, but the heat was doing what force alone couldn't — making the boar hesitate. It jerked its head back, tusks slashing air, and Ethan pressed forward with a stupid, desperate courage that had nothing to do with bravery and everything to do with watching his dogs bleed.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  The boar lunged. Ethan threw himself sideways, felt the wind of a tusk passing inches from his hip, and rolled. His hand found the Yeti mug — he'd set it by the fire pit last night, and now his fingers closed around it reflexively, muscle memory from ten thousand mornings.

  He swung the mug.

  The heavy stainless steel connected with the boar's tusk with a sound like a church bell being struck by a hammer. The impact rang up Ethan's arm and reverberated through the clearing. The tusk cracked. Not broke — cracked, a hairline fracture running from the point of impact toward the jaw. The boar screamed and shook its head, pain and fury driving it backward.

  Moose saw the opening. The old dog surged forward, ignoring the blood on his side, and slammed into the boar's front legs. The boar stumbled. Buster came in from behind and bit down on the opposite haunch, pulling with everything he had. The boar's front legs folded.

  It was still thrashing, still dangerous, still trying to find its footing — when it staggered sideways and impaled itself on a broken sapling.

  The splintered trunk punched through the boar's chest behind the shoulder, driven deeper by its own momentum and weight. The boar's legs buckled. It thrashed once, twice, tusks gouging the dirt, and then its movements slowed to tremors and stopped.

  The clearing went quiet except for the sound of heavy breathing — Ethan's, Moose's, Buster's. Pixie stood a few feet away, panting, her sides heaving, covered in mud and boar bristle and possibly her own drool.

  Ethan sat down hard. His hands were shaking. The Yeti mug had a dent in it — a deep, satisfying dent that he'd keep for the rest of his life, he decided right then.

  Blue text exploded across his vision.

  [COMBAT VICTORY!]

  [Defeated: Wild Forest Boar (Level 3)]

  [Bonus XP: Defeating enemy above your level]

  [Bonus XP: Pack coordination – first engagement]

  [Level Up! Level 1 → Level 2]

  [+1 Stat Point Available]

  [New Feature Unlocked: Mirror Link – Active]

  The last line pulsed, brighter than the rest, and Ethan felt something shift inside him — not pain, not pressure, but a deep, structural change, like a wall coming down between rooms that had always been separate. The sensation spread outward from his chest, branching along invisible lines that he could suddenly feel the way you feel your own heartbeat: always there, usually ignored, impossible to unfeel once noticed.

  Three lines. Three connections. Each one distinct, each one alive, and each one terminating in a dog.

  The nearest line — thick, warm, steady as bedrock — connected to Moose. Through it, Ethan felt weight. Solidity. A deep, patient awareness that scanned the clearing in methodical sweeps, cataloging danger and finding none. There was pain along the left side, a bright line of fire across the ribs, but beneath the pain was something immovable: the absolute refusal to go down while the others were still standing.

  The second line — hot, rough, and crackling with a kind of belligerent energy — ran to Buster. Through it, Ethan felt frustration. Anger at the pain in his chest. Anger at the boar. Anger at the dirt and the blood and the fact that this situation existed at all. But beneath the anger, holding it up like scaffolding, was loyalty so fierce it had teeth.

  The third line — electric, buzzing, vibrating at a frequency that made Ethan's own thoughts feel slow — reached Pixie. Through it, Ethan felt everything at once: fear and excitement and relief and hunger and the urgent, burning need to check on everyone right now immediately this second and also possibly to bark at the dead boar just to make sure it stayed dead.

  And then, through each line, he felt something change.

  It came from him — from his side of the connection, flowing outward along the bonds like water finding a grade. His intelligence. His pattern recognition. His capacity for abstract thought and language and reasoning. The system called it INT, and it poured through the Mirror Link and into each of them, and in return, their highest attributes — CON and WIS from Moose, STR from Buster, AGI from Pixie — flowed back.

  Ethan gasped. His body felt different. Stronger, faster, more aware — not dramatically, not like a movie transformation, but like switching from a standard monitor to high-definition. Everything was sharper. His peripheral vision widened. His balance improved. He could hear things he hadn't heard before — the individual notes in the stream, the slight change in wind direction, Pixie's heartbeat.

  The dogs went quiet.

  All three of them had frozen in place, eyes wide, bodies still. Moose's head was up, ears forward, staring at nothing. Buster had stopped panting, his mouth closed, a deep furrow forming between his brows that hadn't been there before. Pixie was sitting perfectly still for possibly the first time in her entire life, her eyes enormous, her tail motionless.

  Ethan felt it through the bonds. The surge of intelligence hitting them all at once — not just awareness, but understanding. The world around them suddenly had names and categories and implications. The trees weren't just obstacles or landmarks — they were shelter, resources, strategic positions. The stream wasn't just water — it was a supply line. The dead boar wasn't just a threat that had ended — it was food and materials and evidence.

  And Ethan wasn't just their person anymore. He was their person, and they could finally tell him so.

  The system pulsed again at the edge of his vision, insistent.

  [Mirror Link – Active]

  [Stat Sync Enabled]

  [Ethan Cross receives: Highest stat from each bonded companion]

  [Bonded companions receive: Ethan Cross – INT (full)]

  [Cross-bonuses between companions: +15% of each other's highest stat]

  This time, the “more text” didn’t stay vague.

  The display expanded again, clean and structured, like the system had decided he’d earned the full readout.

  [Status – Ethan Cross]

  Class: Arcane Tamer – Variant

  Level: 2

  HP: 173 / 175

  MP: 1260 / 1260

  Stat Points Available: 1

  Attributes:

  STR – 8 → 18 (Mirrored from Buster)

  DEX – 10

  AGI – 9 → 18 (Mirrored from Pixie)

  CON – 10 → 16 (Mirrored from Moose)

  INT – 22 (Mirrored to Companions)

  WIS – 11

  CHA – 11

  LUK – 19

  Skills:

  – Pack Bond (Passive)

  – Mirror Link (Active)

  – Basic Directive (Active)

  – Command Surge (Active)

  – Pack Awareness (Passive)

  – Translation (Passive)

  Bonded Companions:

  – Moose (Level 2)

  – Buster (Level 2)

  – Pixie (Level 2)

  Ethan stared at the numbers until they started to mean something.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m pulling your best stats. STR from Buster. AGI from Pixie. CON from Moose.”

  His eyes snagged on INT.

  Mirrored to Companions.

  “And you’re getting my INT,” he said, voice flat with disbelief. “All of it.”

  That explained the sudden vocabulary problem currently vibrating in the bond.

  He pushed the display aside and focused on the companion list. The system obligingly unfolded the first panel.

  [Status – Moose]

  Class: Bonded Companion – Guardian

  Level: 2

  HP: 148 / 192

  MP: 391 / 391

  Attributes:

  STR – 14 → 15 (+15% from Buster)

  DEX – 11

  AGI – 10 → 12 (+15% from Pixie)

  CON – 16

  INT – 4 → 22 (Mirrored from Ethan)

  WIS – 16

  CHA – 12

  LUK – 12

  Skills:

  – Pack Bond (Passive)

  – Mirror Link (Passive)

  – Defensive Stance (Passive)

  – Guard Shift (Active)

  – Tactical Insight (Passive)

  Then Buster.

  [Status – Buster]

  Class: Bonded Companion – Bruiser

  Level: 2

  HP: 157 / 166

  MP: 353 / 353

  Attributes:

  STR – 19

  DEX – 9

  AGI – 10 → 12 (+15% from Pixie)

  CON – 14 → 15 (+15% from Moose)

  INT – 5 → 22 (Mirrored from Ethan)

  WIS – 10 → 11 (+15% from Moose)

  CHA – 13

  LUK – 11

  Skills:

  – Pack Bond (Passive)

  – Mirror Link (Passive)

  – Body Check (Active)

  – Endurance (Passive)

  – Loyal Heart (Passive)

  Then Pixie.

  [Status – Pixie]

  Class: Bonded Companion – Scout

  Level: 2

  HP: 107 / 107

  MP: 368 / 368

  Attributes:

  STR – 10 → 12 (+15% from Buster)

  DEX – 16

  AGI – 19

  CON – 9 → 11 (+15% from Moose)

  INT – 3 → 22 (Mirrored from Ethan)

  WIS – 11 → 12 (+15% from Moose)

  CHA – 14

  LUK – 17

  Skills:

  – Pack Bond (Passive)

  – Mirror Link (Passive)

  – Quick Strike (Active)

  – Evasion (Passive)

  – Heightened Senses (Passive)

  Ethan’s brain latched onto the pattern and wouldn’t let go.

  They got his INT in full.

  He got each of their best stats in full.

  And each of them got a percentage of the other two’s best stats.

  That wasn’t a one-way buff. That was a feedback loop.

  His own display pulsed again.

  Stat Points Available: 1

  He didn’t hesitate. He nudged INT up by one.

  INT – 22 → 23

  The pulse hit him a second time—harder. Not pain. Pressure. A wave that ran outward through the bonds.

  Pixie flinched and let out a noise that sounded like a hiccuped yip, then froze.

  Buster’s head snapped up.

  Moose inhaled sharply and held it.

  The panels updated.

  INT on each dog rose with his.

  The link didn’t just share. It echoed.

  Then Ethan felt a second pulse, distinct from the first. It didn’t originate in him.

  It came from Moose.

  WIS – 16 → 17

  Ethan’s panel updated a heartbeat later.

  WIS – 11 → 17 (Mirrored from Moose)

  Ethan went still.

  “…Your Wisdom is tied with your Constitution,” he said slowly, eyes flicking back to Moose’s panel. CON 16. WIS 17, now the top line.

  Moose’s answer came through the bond, steady and sure.

  “It felt right,” Moose said within the bond.

  Ethan looked between the panels again, doing the math the way he couldn’t stop himself from doing.

  “One point from me,” he murmured. “One point from each of you.”

  He swallowed.

  “That’s four stat points per level.”

  His gaze flicked back to the Mirror Link rules, then to the numbers, then to the cross-bonus percentages.

  “This might actually be broken,” he said, and the words came out with the flat certainty of someone who had just found a duplication exploit in a game that wasn’t supposed to have exploits.

  The first voice came through the bond like a radio tuning to a frequency it had always been searching for.

  Pixie. The voice carried the exact texture of her personality — breathless, startled, and immediately, irrepressibly curious. It wasn’t out loud. It landed in his head fully formed, packed with emotion and momentum.

  “What happened?” Pixie said within the bond. “Why can I— Ethan, can you hear me? Can you hear me? I have so many things to say. I have always had things to say. Remember when I chewed the plastic thing off your shoelaces? That little plastic tip is called an aglet. How do I know that? This is crazy. Nobody ever listened except sometimes Buster and only when he was eating and couldn’t walk away—”

  “Calm down,” Moose said within the bond.

  His voice was exactly what it should have been — deep, measured, carrying the same patient gravity as his physical presence. Through the bond it felt like a hand placed on a shaking shoulder.

  “We’re different now,” Moose said within the bond. “All of us. Something changed.”

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Buster cut in within the bond, his voice as rough and grumbling as his physical demeanor suggested. “I just did math. On purpose. Do you understand how upsetting that is? I looked at the boar and my brain said ‘mass times velocity equals impact force,’ and I didn’t even ask it to do that.”

  Ethan sat in the dirt next to a dead boar, blood on his shirt, a dented coffee mug in his hand, and listened to his dogs talk in his head. His eyes were stinging, and it had nothing to do with smoke.

  “I can hear you,” Ethan said within the bond, and the effort of directing it felt like flexing a muscle he’d never used before. “I can hear all of you.”

  “Good,” Pixie said within the bond, the mental equivalent of a shout right next to his ear. “Because I have been trying to tell you for years that the red bowl is better than the blue bowl and—”

  “Not now,” Moose said within the bond.

  “It’s important,” Pixie said within the bond.

  “It’s not,” Moose said within the bond.

  “The red bowl has better structural integrity for kibble distribution and—”

  “Pixie,” Moose said within the bond, and the single word landed with enough weight to settle her mid-spiral. “We need to deal with this.”

  A pause.

  “Whatever this is,” Moose finished within the bond.

  Ethan took a breath and tried to steady himself. His dogs were talking to him. Through a magical bond. In a fantasy forest. Next to a boar he'd just killed with a coffee mug.

  He pressed his palms against his eyes and laughed — a short, ragged sound that was half-relief and half-hysteria.

  “Are you broken?” Buster asked within the bond.

  “No,” Ethan said out loud, then caught himself. “No,” he repeated within the bond. “I’m okay. This is just… a lot.”

  “He’s broken,” Buster said within the bond.

  “He’s processing,” Moose said within the bond. “Let him process.”

  Ethan lowered his hands and looked at his Pack. Moose was still bleeding — the cut along his ribs was ugly, a four-inch gash that needed attention. Buster was favoring his left side, the ribs bruised or cracked from the kick. Pixie looked uninjured but exhausted, her usual frantic energy dimmed to a flicker.

  He needed to focus. The marveling could wait. The questions could wait. His dogs were hurt.

  "Let me see," he said, moving toward Moose. The old dog held still as Ethan examined the wound — deep enough to show the red muscle beneath the skin, but not so deep that it had hit anything vital. It needed to be cleaned and packed, and Ethan had nothing to clean or pack it with except stream water and moss, which was going to have to be enough.

  He packed the wound with the cleanest moss he could find, tore a strip from the bottom of his flannel shirt, and bound it as tight as he dared. Moose endured the process with the stoic dignity of someone who considered complaining beneath him.

  “You should eat,” Moose said within the bond when Ethan finished. “The boar is food. We should use it before it draws scavengers.”

  Right. Food. He had a four-hundred-pound boar, no knife, and a dented coffee mug. This was going to be an adventure.

  Ethan found a sharp rock at the stream bank — flat, with a natural edge that wasn't quite a blade but was close enough to work with patience and profanity. He spent the next hour butchering the boar in the most inelegant manner possible, cutting strips of meat from the haunches while trying not to think too hard about what he was doing. The tusks, cracked and stained, he set aside. They felt important in a way he couldn't articulate — system-adjacent, maybe.

  Buster watched the butchering with intense focus, occasionally shifting his weight when a particularly good piece of meat was separated from the carcass. Through the bond, Ethan could feel the dog's hunger like a physical thing — sharp, immediate, and deeply offended by the delay.

  “That piece,” Buster said within the bond, eyeing a thick strip of haunch meat. “That one’s mine.”

  “We share,” Moose said within the bond.

  “I called it,” Buster said within the bond.

  “That’s not how sharing works,” Moose said within the bond.

  “It should be,” Buster replied within the bond.

  Pixie circled the carcass at a respectful distance, nose working furiously.

  “It smells like the biggest treat in the universe,” Pixie said within the bond. “I want to roll in it. Should I roll in it? I’m going to roll in it.”

  "Please do not roll in it," Ethan said aloud.

  Pixie stopped circling but did not look convinced.

  He rigged the meat strips on green sticks over the rebuilt fire. The cooking was imprecise — some pieces charred black while others stayed raw in the center — but when the first batch came off the fire, hot and dripping and smelling like the most primal thing Ethan had ever cooked, nobody complained.

  Ethan fed the dogs first. Each portion was placed on a clean patch of bark, and for the first time in his life, he watched his dogs eat with the awareness that they were choosing how to eat, not just eating. Moose took measured bites, chewing thoroughly, his new intelligence treating the meal as fuel rather than pleasure. Buster ate fast but with visible concentration, and Ethan could feel through the bond the dog's brain cataloging the calories, the protein, the approximate energy return per bite — and being annoyed at itself for doing so. Pixie inhaled her portion, looked up, and sent a thought so pure and simple that it carried no words at all — just the raw, unfiltered emotion of a small creature who had received exactly what she needed.

  Ethan ate his own share sitting by the fire, chewing slowly, tasting the wild, gamy meat and not minding the char. It was food. Real food, earned with blood and stupidity and a coffee mug.

  He wished, very specifically, that this world came with a tutorial. Or a recipe book. Or a button that summoned a cheeseburger.

  The Yeti mug sat beside him, dented and warm from the fire. He'd washed it in the stream. The dent was on the left side, just above the base — a permanent record of the moment he'd hit a monster in the face with a piece of drinkware.

  He was keeping the dent.

  As the fire settled into its rhythm and the two moons rose again — copper and silver, patient and strange — Ethan leaned back against the tree and let himself feel the bonds. Three lines of connection, each one humming with the quiet presence of a mind that was awake, aware, and unquestionably alive.

  Ethan leaned his head back and looked up through the trees.

  Two moons.

  One sharp and silver-white. The other a hazy gold that looked too big for the sky.

  “Definitely not in Kansas anymore,” he said.

  Pixie’s confusion hit through the bond first, then her voice followed, sharp and offended. “Wait… I thought we were from Texas!” Pixie said out loud, because she was Pixie and apparently volume was still a default setting.

  “It’s a reference,” Ethan said. “Old movie.”

  Pixie stared at him. “Is it about meat?” she asked out loud.

  “No. It’s about a girl who gets thrown into a magical land by a tornado, meets a bunch of weirdos, and tries to go home,” Ethan said.

  Pixie’s ears twitched. “That happens?” she asked.

  “Apparently. There are sparkly shoes. A scarecrow. A tin guy. A lion with anxiety,” Ethan said.

  Pixie blinked. “Why would you bring a lion?” she asked.

  “You don’t bring him. He just shows up,” Ethan said.

  Buster’s voice was flat. “This sounds poorly planned,” he said.

  “It was a different time,” Ethan said. “There’s also a dog named Toto.”

  Pixie’s eyes widened. “A dog?” she said.

  “Yeah. And flying monkeys,” Ethan said.

  Pixie stared harder. “Monkeys shouldn’t fly,” she said.

  “They shouldn’t,” Ethan agreed. “There’s a witch, too.”

  Pixie leaned forward like she was about to hear something important. “Do we fight the witch?” she asked.

  “She dies because someone throws a bucket of water on her,” Ethan said.

  Pixie processed that for a second, then looked genuinely betrayed. “That’s it?” she asked.

  “That’s it,” Ethan said.

  Buster snorted. “I hate your movies,” he said.

  “The dog was the best part,” Ethan said.

  Pixie nodded solemnly. “The dog is always the best part,” she declared.

  “You should sleep,” Moose said within the bond. The thought carried concern — steady and practical, the kind that tracked rest cycles the same way it tracked perimeter threats. “We’ll watch.”

  “I’ll take first,” Buster said within the bond. The grumble was still there, but underneath it was responsibility, chosen instead of assigned.

  “I’ll take all of them,” Pixie said within the bond immediately. “I am the most awake. I am always the most awake.”

  “You’ll take second,” Moose said within the bond. “After Buster.”

  “But—” Pixie started within the bond.

  “Second,” Moose said within the bond, calm and final.

  Pixie’s objection fizzled into reluctant acceptance that tasted, through the bond, exactly like being told she couldn’t have dessert.

  Ethan smiled. It was a small smile, and it hurt in places he didn't expect, but it was real.

  "Thank you," he said. Out loud, because some things deserved sound. "All of you."

  Moose pressed closer. Buster's ears twitched in acknowledgment. Pixie climbed into Ethan's lap, turned three circles, and collapsed with the absolute certainty of a being who had decided that this was where she would remain until the stars went out.

  Ethan put his hand on her back and felt her breathing slow.

  The forest breathed around them. The fire crackled. The stream ran on.

  Tomorrow, he'd figure out the stats. Tomorrow, he'd explore the system. Tomorrow, he'd try to understand what Arcane Tamer – Variant meant, and what a Mirror Link could do, and what kind of world had levels and classes and boars the size of motorcycles.

  Tonight, he had fire and food and three dogs who could finally talk, and the knowledge — fragile, tentative, and absolutely nonnegotiable — that he was not going to die alone in the dark.

  That was enough. For tonight, that was enough.