"Speak, Bringer. What realm is this? Where are the gods?"
The voice still echoed like it was carved into the stone itself, heavy and cold, like it didn't come from Fenrir's mouth but from somewhere far older. Seojin didn't answer right away. He was still sitting on the cold floor, hands braced behind him, legs numb, chest tight. The wolf's eyes were pinned to him. Not glowing anymore, not pulsing with malice — just waiting.
"I don't know anything about gods," Seojin said, breath finally evening out. "But you're not on whatever battlefield you remember."
He pulled himself up, his legs shaky but working. The air still carried a faint sting of smoke and something older. Stone dust. Age. The scent of something too large to exist under the earth.
"Around thirty years ago," he said, wiping dirt off his palms, "the first rift appeared. Just opened out of nowhere, in the middle of the sky over Seoul. No warning. No reason."
Fenrir's head tilted, listening.
"It wasn't just monsters. Whole pieces of other worlds started showing up. Ruins. Forests. Places with rules that didn't belong here. It broke everything. Systems, maps, reality."
Seojin exhaled through his nose, slowly.
"Then the monsters came out. Some people got killed. Some… bonded with them instead. Like soul-links. The world changed fast. Now every country trains monster tamers. Beast contractors. Whatever you want to call it. That's how we fight. That's how we survive."
He didn't embellish. Didn't bother trying to explain the rankings or the celebrity hunters or the cities that rose from the ruins. It all sounded too much like a brochure when he said it out loud anyway.
Fenrir listened in complete silence, his breath low and steady.
"So they spread," he finally said, voice like gravel ground beneath a grinding stone. "Of course they did. Their filth always does."
Seojin didn't ask what he meant. It felt like the kind of sentence that wasn't meant to be unpacked. Whatever history Fenrir carried, it was layered and stained. Something he wasn't ready to speak out loud.
Instead, the silence held between them. For once, it didn't feel uncomfortable. Just wide.
"You are small," Fenrir said eventually, rising to his full height. "But our blood bond is real, and you even have the power to hold me back which is rather impressive."
His eyes narrowed, and the cold that had once hovered around his voice faded slightly.
"Climb on. We leave this place."
Seojin blinked. "Wait, what?"
Fenrir didn't answer. He simply crouched lower, shoulders rolling like a mountain preparing to rise.
Seojin hesitated. Everything in his body wanted to scream that this was stupid. Riding a monster he'd only just met — one that had tried to kill him a few minutes ago — felt like the fastest way to get eaten.
But something in his chest pulled forward. A weight, a draw, like the BestiaCore itself was leaning into it.
He stepped forward.
When his fingers touched Fenrir's fur, it felt nothing like he expected.
It was cold at first, smooth like ice-polished stone, but beneath that was something deeper. Heat. Pulse. Life. He swung himself up, shaky, gripping the scruff of Fenrir's neck like reins.
The beast shifted under him with effortless grace.
Seojin settled, legs clamped tight, heart thudding.
Before they could move, the system pinged.
[Quest Update]
[Dungeon Objective Unlocked: Defeat the Boss of the Rift]
[Completion Required for Exit]
The text hovered, pale and still.
Fenrir growled, low and slow, a grin curling into his voice.
"So they would trap us here. Let them regret it."
The next second was chaos.
Fenrir leapt — no warning, no tension — just a straight vertical explosion of movement that smashed them straight into the ceiling. Stone cracked. Dust billowed. Light shot through the fracture as the hidden chamber above collapsed inward.
They didn't stop.
Fenrir burst upward, claws digging into crumbling walls, then kicked off the side and launched into the next level.
Seojin gritted his teeth, holding on tight as the world blurred past.
They tore through the next subfloor like it was made of paper.
The first monster didn't even get a chance to react — it was some kind of horned beast with bark-skin armor and too many eyes, but Fenrir was on it before it had drawn breath. His jaws clamped around its throat and it vanished in a spray of ash and light.
A second monster tried to intercept — a winged serpent screeched and lunged from above.
Fenrir twisted mid-air, tail whipping it across the wall hard enough to leave a dent.
They landed for just a moment — just enough to gather momentum.
Seojin's fingers dug into the fur, knuckles white.
Every time Fenrir moved, something happened in Seojin's body. A rush of heat. A sudden alertness. His limbs felt lighter. His spine buzzed. His heart should've been panicking, but instead, it felt like he'd stepped into the center of a storm and found peace.
Another floor.
Another leap.
More monsters — malformed constructs with stone limbs and glowing cores — lunged out from shattered alcoves.
Fenrir's claws caught the first. He didn't dodge or parry — he shattered it. A front paw smashed through its core, sending glowing fragments across the walls.
A second construct launched spears of light from its palms.
Seojin ducked instinctively, but Fenrir didn't flinch. The spears pinged off a ripple of force that arced along his fur like a storm caught in motion.
He was slowing. Not drastically. But enough to notice.
His breathing grew deeper. Legs just a fraction slower to respond. Movements not clumsy, just… heavier.
He was still killing everything in his path. But the toll was rising.
Seojin felt it. Not as fear, but as weight in his chest.
They weren't connected. Not like normal tamers and beasts. This wasn't a soul link. This was something older. Wilder.
The next jump brought them up two floors at once. The space above was lit in flickering blue torches, with spiked platforms hanging from rusted chains and beasts lurking between shadows.
Fenrir didn't stop.
He ran across the platforms, claws sparking with each strike. Monsters lunged from both sides. Claws scraped. Teeth flashed.
Seojin caught a glimpse of something leaping toward him — a bug-eyed creature with split jaws and a metal spine — but Fenrir twisted, catching it in his teeth mid-air, then flung it into the abyss below.
The path narrowed.
The tower grew more unstable.
And Seojin realized something.
Fenrir wasn't just fighting.
He was enjoying this.
This wasn't a rampage.
This was freedom.
For the first time in however many centuries, the god-wolf of destruction was moving. Killing. Breathing. And not just surviving — but remembering what it felt like to overpower those weaker than itself.
Seojin didn't say anything.
He just held on tighter as the floor shattered beneath them again and they rose toward the final chamber.
The light above wasn't normal dungeon glow. It pulsed like a heartbeat. A dull red, hazy and thick, like blood smeared over a dying sun. The air crackled as they crashed through the final barrier.
Fenrir's paws hit the stone floor hard. Cracks spiderwebbed beneath them.
The boss room opened like a cathedral of violence — high ceiling, broken pillars, a circular arena wreathed in black flame. At its center stood the dungeon's master.
A creature of stone and war. Eight feet tall, maybe more. Its skin looked like it had been carved from mountain rock and then dipped in a dark substance. A twisted ogre with four arms, each holding a different weapon — hammer, glaive, whip, and a blade that looked fused to its flesh.
Its mouth was too wide. Its eyes glowed with ritual flame.
It stepped forward, dragging the weapons behind it. One of the walls glowed with runes. The door behind them sealed shut with a sound like thunder slamming steel.
Seojin tightened his grip.
Fenrir snarled.
The ogre stopped.
Then something flickered behind its eyes.
Recognition.
It didn't speak. But its entire body tensed, and the fire around its form sputtered once, like a heartbeat skipping.
It had seen this wolf before.
And it remembered.
Fenrir stood still for one long moment. Then lowered his front body, shoulders spreading, jaws opening slowly.
"You kneel," Fenrir said, voice low but ringing with something old. Something iron and final. "Or you die."
The ogre roared and charged.
It didn't kneel.
Stone cracked under its feet. It swung all four weapons at once — each aimed to slice, crush, dismember, kill.
Fenrir met it halfway.
The impact was like lightning made physical. The boss's glaive scraped past Fenrir's shoulder but didn't break the skin. The whip lashed around his hind leg — and Fenrir bit through it mid-spin, dragging the ogre forward with its own weapon.
Then Fenrir's front paw came down.
Not just a swipe. A blow.
The ground split.
Stone plates peeled back. The air warped from the force. The ogre stumbled, its balance wrecked.
Fenrir's body shimmered — for a second, his fur darkened and his eyes lit like moons in eclipse.
Then he opened his jaws again.
"Let the Nine Realms remember me."
The temperature dropped.
The torches died.
From the back of his throat came a deep thrum — not a growl, not a breath — something older.
And then he roared.
It wasn't sound. It was destruction wrapped in voice.
The ogre staggered back. Its weapons dropped. Its skin cracked, steam hissing from the breaks. Its feet dug into the ground but it was being pushed — not physically, but spiritually. The roar crushed something deeper than the body.
Seojin felt it in his teeth. In his bones.
Roar of the World Ender.
The fire died completely. The arena went dark.
Only Fenrir's glowing eyes and the broken shine of the ogre's armor reflected anything at all.
The ogre screamed.
It didn't lunge again.
It turned.
Ran.
Ran toward the barrier wall and lifted its hammer high, swinging with everything it had. Runes exploded. The dungeon trembled.
The ogre was trying to collapse the room.
Trying to trap them both.
Fenrir moved.
He didn't run.
He didn't leap.
He appeared behind the boss.
One breath.
One flash of light across his claws.
And he carved through the ogre's lower back, shredding muscle and stone alike.
The beast roared in pain — it spun, blind and desperate, swinging its fused blade in a wide arc.
Fenrir ducked low, then lunged.
His fangs caught the ogre by the neck.
He didn't bite down right away.
He looked it in the eye.
"You forgot who owns the end."
Then he ripped its head off.
The body fell a second later.
Seojin didn't breathe.
The room didn't move.
Then — slowly — everything began to unravel.
The fire returned, faint and blue now. The walls pulsed once with white light, and the torches reignited one by one, only to sputter out in silence.
The body of the boss crumbled to ash, scattered into the mist.
The system spoke.
[Dungeon Boss Defeated.]
[Exit Sequence Initiated.]
[Reward Calculated Based on Performance and Contract Status.]
[Quest Completed]
[Unlocked: Skill Tree]
[Unlocked: Enhanced Strength (Lv1), Enhanced Speed (Lv1), Increased Durability (Lv1)]
Fenrir let the ash drift past his snout. His breath steamed slightly. His body shuddered. Not out of weakness — more like someone catching their breath after running too long, too fast.
Seojin felt his Core pulse.
It wasn't glowing, but something in it had shifted.
His hands curled into fists. His heartbeat was calm now. Too calm.
Like something in his body had adjusted.
He looked down at Fenrir, who had lowered his head again, letting the silence settle.
"You good?" Seojin asked, voice quiet.
Fenrir didn't answer right away.
Then, finally, in that same deep voice, softer now:
"I am… just catching my breath."
Then he looked up, eyes bright.
"Hold on tight."
The room began to shake.
The collapse had started.