3. Bear Hugs and Other Greetings (Patreon)

A roar deafened me. The grip tightened. My feet left the ground, and the air rushed out of my stomach. Stunned, I flailed, smashing blindly at my attacker.

“Kit!” Grim shouted, beautiful hazel eyes big and scared.

“He’s gone mad!” a stranger behind me shouted.

Short on air, the world bleeding black, I closed my eyes and drew on the mana in my system. The core in my chest began to burn.

Not again, I thought, tired.

--

A quick history lesson for the girls and boys in my audience! Sit tight now everyone, criss-cross applesauce, and save your questions for the end! Don’t worry, I’ll get back to dying in just a moment, but first, shall we?

A long time ago, humans discovered magic. Specifically mana, the physical form of magic. Harnessing it allowed them to create fire, to craft unimaginable weapons and control the fundamental powers of the universe, and it also poisoned them. Horribly, irreversibly, every sorcerer went mad and died.

At some point, humans realized that beasts also used magic, and didn’t die of horrible poisoning in the process. No, instead, they lived for hundreds, even thousands of years. The difference? Simple. Beasts had cores. Glowing, stone-like organs inside their bodies that held and condensed mana and allowed them to instinctively harness magic.

Thus began the core age. Humans built cores into their magic circles and used cores to harness magic, harvesting hundreds of thousands of beasts in the process.

It didn’t take long for them to realize a fundamental problem. Every spell required a core. Humans cast hundreds of spells in a year. It took magical beasts dozens, hundreds of years to condense a core, and all of ten seconds for humans to use that core. Not counting the truly powerful old cores, the thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand year cores. All those years to create, gone in the blink of an eye.

Solution? Embed cores in gear and in people. With a living body to maintain them, or with a steady supply of blood and mana to the gear, the cores could survive independent of their beastly creators. Transfer them from one host to another fast enough, or keep the gear supplied steadily enough, and the cores could survive indefinitely, while granting their mystical powers to the bearer all along.

Problem. Mana remained horribly corrosive and poisonous. It ruined gear and drove people mad. Slower in a core than harvesting it directly, but ultimately, still drove them mad.

One day, some genius discovered embedding the beast cores in beast materials allowed people to survive much longer and saved the gear from corroding so quickly. The beast materials guided the mana to the core and then processed the mana between the core and the human body, leaving humans to shape less harmful magic rather than raw mana.

Thus began the Chimera Age, as people began surviving ordinary, even enhanced, lifespans with cores in their bodies, effectively creating a new, magically-enabled kind of human. As chi-tech gear—that is, gear made with beast materials and cores, or even beast materials alone—exploded, it seemed our world had entered an age of untold plenty and magic expansion. Of course, the occasional chimera still went mad, and the occasional piece of chi-tech exploded horribly, but was humanity to halt Progress for a measly death or five thousand?

And then came the Great War.

--

Paws tightened around my already-small waist. The last air left me in a huff. My arms twisted, reforming under my duster. I tensed.

A determined look in his eyes, Grim raised his harmonica to his lips. His shirt fell open to the side, revealing the sheen of scales over his right shoulder. A pleasing tune filled the air, one that beckoned the listener to stop and wait a while.

The bear-hugger froze, arms slackening. I jabbed mine between his and my sides and threw my arms up, breaking his grip. He growled and reached again, but before he could grab me again, I spun and reached up. Hands blackened, arms shimmering with golden fur, I caught his massive bear paws. The weight of the blow made me grunt, and I drooped slightly, bending a knee to catch the force.

A huge bear-monster loomed over me, a scar over its eye, saliva dripping from its maw. The ragged remains of clothes hung to the shaggy body, but little else of his human form remained. A few patches of pale flesh. A foot with toes instead of claws. A twisted face, half human, half bear, coated in shaggy fur. He tugged at my grip and roared again, spraying saliva in my face.

Fully chi-mad. No choice.

Resisting the urge to release his paws and wipe my face, I scanned the bear. No lump, no shining stone poking out of his flesh. I scowled. “Couldn’t make it easy on me, huh?”

The bug-chimera he’d been arm-wrestling with scythed at the back of his head with praying mantis-like blades. The bear staggered and fell toward me. I released his arms and stepped back, and he thumped to the ground.

“There! Lower back!” Grim shouted.

I followed his pointer and found it. A silvery stone poked out of a lump in the bear’s back. His core. Silver. A hundred years? Not bad, nowadays.

Before I could make a move, a half-dozen other chimera jumped on him. The bear struggled, but he had as much chance as a chicken leg in a piranha tank. Fur flew. Blood splattered over the floor.

I backed away, no interest in that fight. Someone might go for my pouch in the melee, and then I’d be the one looking a fool. Quietly, I pushed the magic out of my body, and my arms returned to normal.

“I got it! It’s mine! Finders keepers!” the praying mantis chimera shouted, holding the silver stone aloft.

Immediately, the brawlers jumped on him. He shouted and fought back. Invisible blades of wind cut gashes in the rear wall. A fire burst out, quickly killed by a blast of dust that also took a handful of scales off someone’s reptilian foot.

“Hey! The body. Clear the damn body!” Tanya shouted. The chaos swallowed her voice. She rapped a glass on the bar, to no avail.

A scrawny woman with a patch of spotted hyena fur on her forearm smiled at Tanya and grabbed the body, slowly dragging it toward the rear door. A half-dozen other scrawny types waited there, licking their lips, shiny silver scalpels ready to go.

Chimera bodies made for lucrative trade. Though sub-par to actual beasts, chimera materials could still be used to build gear, if the chimera lived long enough for magic to fully infuse their body. Barring that, the original beastflesh could still be harvested and sometimes reused, though more often it became gear instead of the foundation for a new chimera’s core.

“Filthy scavengers,” I muttered, though there was no bite in it. Everyone had to do what they had to survive. The man had gone chi-mad on his own. He had felt the mana poisoning crawling through his veins. He knew the consequences, and he’d still used magic.

One way or another, chimera never left beautiful bodies.

Pulling his collar back up, Grim sighed and put the harmonica away a second time. “Ugh. Let’s get out of here.”

“Prettyboy can’t stomach it?” I teased, hooking Cher’s strap over my shoulder.

“Never was one for the butcher’s,” he replied, lips twisting, a faint greenish sheen around his cheeks.

“But you’re a hunter.”

He shrugged. “It’s different when I’m doing it.”

I cut a look at him and raised my eyebrows suggestively.

A smile broke through the disgust. He nodded to the door. “Shall we?”