“What were the guards doing?! They shouldn’t have let this happen to you!” Alyson said, angry at the city guards after recovering from her initial shock.

I raised my hands to stop her and shook my head, “It’s not their fault, really, and I was not the only one who suffered!”

Which was true, I was just the only one whose limbs were blown off or torn off, my heart pierced by a dagger.

“That’s even worse!” Alyson said, taking the mirror she lent me back.

“I’m going to get ready,” Nataly excused herself, her face unusually white.

The sight of my wounds and the blood obviously didn’t do her any good. Maybe the smell, too. I couldn’t blame her for that, as I didn’t like it either. 

After she left, Alyson looked at me,her anger gone, “Korra, take a bath first. I can’t have you here looking like this.”

She didn’t say it, but I realized she thought I would drive away her customers. For a moment, I wanted to argue that no one would see me in the laundry room, but then I rejected the idea. Now that I knew what I looked like, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

There was one problem, though.

“This is the only clothes I have...?” I didn’t dare ask, just to indicate if she lent me any clothes.

Alyson sighed, “I have some old pants and a shirt. But I will want them returned or paid!”

It was a little humiliating to be considered poor; I wasn’t rich on Earth, but I was able to pay for everything I needed. Now I could do nothing but accept her offer unless I wanted to return from the public bath only in my underwear. While it would probably be a good way to gain some experience in [Master’s Lover], it wasn’t the attention I wanted. 

Alyson wisely wrapped them in a piece of cloth so I wouldn’t touch them before I wash.

Although I had a space ring, the storage in it was too small to store clothes in. That was also the reason why I had a soap and towel in my backpack and the reason why, even though I didn’t want to go there in my condition, I had to visit Broken Mug.

...

“What will it be?” Byron asked me as soon as he noticed me, keeping his eyes on the beer he was tapping.

I cleared my throat, “Um, mr. Byron, are my things still in my room?”

“Korra?!” he asked, not believing his eyes when he looked at me. “Who did this to you?”

“You should see the other guy!” I replied with a smirk, pleased with myself.

I always wanted to use this line, but I never had the opportunity and the courage to do so.

“Is he dead too?” The innkeeper asked me. “Because you look like a ghost!”

Well, his guess was pretty accurate and surprised me, but I had to disagree.

“It’s still me, alive. I just need a bath, though. My stuff?” I asked.

“One bath? More like two or three,” Byron grinned, pointing to the back door. “Your things are still in the room. You have the key, right?”

It was still in my ring, so I picked up my things and visited the public bathrooms, regretting not asking about the bath in the barracks. Byron was right, and one bath of water wasn’t enough. With gnashing teeth, I was forced to pay for another. In my case, a shower would be much more suitable, but they didn’t have one in the public bathrooms. Whether this applied to the rest of Eleaden, I had to find out later.

I returned to the inn, looking clean and feeling fresh.

“That’s what I call a transformation!” Byron exclaimed as he looked at me.

His sudden cry caught the attention of guests at the inn. Curious why the innkeeper raised his voice, they looked at me. I didn’t like this attention, but I tried to ignore them.

I smiled at the innkeeper, “I feel like new.”

“Well, you definitely look better than before, and I’d like to know why you looked like that, but not now. It’s lunchtime. I’m a little busy.” He told me, focusing on my borrowed clothes.

Due to different figures, I had to roll up my pants and sleeves. The shirt was quite loose around my chest too.

“These are familiar,” muttered Byron, trying to remember where he had seen them.

Well, the shirts and pants were decorated with embroidery, but I saw nothing special about it.

He looked at me with a strange smile on his face, “Did Alyson give them to you? I remember taking them off her.”

To my displeasure, I imagined it, and immediately a shiver ran down my spine.

“...several times!” Byron added, remembering his experiences with Alyson.

I crossed my arms over my chest in defense and wrapped my tail around my waist to feel safer. At that moment, if I could, I would take the clothes off, but running in my underwear was an even worse option.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what the clothes I was wearing right now had experienced. Alyson was a companion. It was more than certain Byron was not her only client. So I was sure that these clothes saw more bed action than I did.

Her offer that I could buy them was out of the question.

During my shift at Broken Heart, I washed my clothes with the brothel laundry and let them dry with it, hoping it would be dry in the morning. Despite following the advice I got from Alyson and the girls, I couldn’t get rid of the bloodstains completely.

To do that, I would probably need a better potion, skill, magic, or some expensive magic tool. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any of it, so I had to accept that my clothes would be two-tone now or buy a new one.

Despite how small my hoard was, I considered it. I didn’t want to be a pessimist, but I was sure I would get hurt in the labyrinth. That meant damaged clothing and blood.

The longer I thought about it, the clearer it was that I needed at least two pairs of clothes—one to the labyrinth, one to the city.

Of course, Alyson wanted to know exactly what happened to me, and omitting a few details, I told her. Later in the shift, I retold it to Zoe, who found out and was curious. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say it a third time, as Byron simply didn’t have time.

As it turned out, regeneration was more expensive than I expected. In the evening, I was so hungry that I had to have two servings of dinner. Which meant I got nothing for my work in the kitchen, and instead I had to pay a few coppers.

Annoyed by this, I retreated to my room, checking the notifications.

(ding) Inner Perception reaches lvl 4

(ding) Inner Perception reaches lvl 5

…

(ding) Painless Agony reaches lvl 6

…

(ding) Never-Dying reaches lvl 26

…

(ding) Tireless Machine reaches lvl 9

…

(ding) Swift as a Whip reaches lvl 6

 

I got levels on more skills than I anticipated, but I was not surprised. Except for [Never-Dying], these were low-level skills.

I was just a little disappointed by one level rise at [Painless Agony]. However, the truth was that I had not felt any back pain for a few hours, and without pain, I could not have gained any experience in this skill.

The two levels at [Inner Perception] weren’t surprising, I checked my injuries all day. 

There was no longer a sign of injury on my lower back, and instead I had a strange protuberance ten centimeters long there. My new left wing. The right one was also growing and was a bit longer than in the morning.

If all goes well, I was confident that tomorrow I would get the second tier at [Tireless Machine].

If I forced myself to work out instead of lying on the bed, I was sure I would get the skill to the next level, considering how tired I was. I didn’t have the will, though. The little time I had, I wanted to use to improve my control on [Beast]. Swordmaster advised me to learn to control the skill as soon as possible, and since I did not want to turn into a beast unexpectedly, learning to control this skill had priority over others.

When I took off Alyson’s clothes, it was liberating. I could finally stop thinking about what she was doing in it, which also allowed me to focus on training. To do that, I lay down on the bed, turned on my back, which with my wings in a state they were, felt a little strange, and held out my hand in front of me.

“Now, how do I turn into a beast?” I asked myself.

So far, I have only tried to reverse the change, not to incite it. But it was easier than I expected. Just the thought of Roe Blackthorn and how I felt when the swordmaster told me he hadn’t caught her, did the trick. It was a mixture of fear and anger.

Watching claws grow on my hands was nerve-wracking, even though I’ve seen it before. The thought that this was not a permanent change, was the only thing that kept me from panicking.

I fiddled with them in front of my face, checked them with both [Inner Perception] and [Space Domain], and concluded that they were real claws. It wasn’t an illusion, or a magically created construct on my fingers, my nails were gone, and no mana was consumed to maintain them.

The fangs were just as real.

Reversing the change was easier than ever before, though it was not because of experience but because I was relaxed. No one held me by the throat, no one attacked me, the question was whether I could do the same under such conditions.

Such training might seem useless if I looked at it this way. But I did not stop even when I received the system notification.

(ding) Beast reaches lvl 6

Get angry, get calm. Beast on, beast off. While I was training like that, I realized that I was thinking wrong about [Beast]. So far, I have considered it a skill focusing purely on the strength and the constitution, which were the bonuses it was giving me. I thought of it as a better version of [Lover of Work], that hard work was a way to get the levels. That was also one of the reasons I chose it.

Just yesterday, if I knew I would change even more than I was, that it was a skill about accepting the beast inside me, I wouldn’t give it a second thought and chose some different skill.

Now I didn’t even flinch when my claws appeared on my hands and disappeared again.

(ding) Beast reaches lvl 7

I even wondered if I should try to deepen the transformation, as I managed under the barracks wall on my first attempt to suppress the transformation, but for now I have rejected the idea. I was worried about what might happen, scared of how I could change, how I would behave, and this was not a place where I wanted to destroy even though there wasn’t much in the room.

When I was returning from my last visit to the outhouses in the inn's backyard before sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about Roe Blackthorn. I searched in my area for signs of the assassin with [Space Domain]. I checked every nook around me, annoyed by the limited range. It was hard to listen to the surrounding sounds because all I heard was the inn and the brothel’s noise. From the very beginning, I tried to push these sounds out of my head, not to focus on them.

I didn’t find anyone, but to calm my mind, I checked the room too.

Basically, I hugged the walls to get my domain as far as possible.

My worries gradually disappeared, but then I came across a woman on the other side of the wall. My heart skipped a beat, and I stopped breathing for a moment. I stood there motionless, pressed against the wall, afraid to move while the woman on the other side did the same.

I panicked, wondering what to do when I registered someone else in my domain, a man standing behind a woman. There were two.

At that moment, I broke out in a cold sweat, I wanted to run away!

In my panic, I almost overlooked that the two were moving, that they were naked and unarmed.

Feeling stupid, I realized that on the other side of the wall was Broken Heart, that the woman must be a companion, a whore, and the man her customer.

With this realization, I stopped ignoring the noise coming from the brothel and truly listened for the first time. Their sighing, which I now heard loud and clear as if I were in a room with them, only confirmed what I saw. I turned my back to the wall and laughed at my stupidity, still watching the couple. Even though I felt like a voyeur doing something I shouldn’t have, it was arousing to watch them, and thanks to my domain, I saw and perceived almost everything. It was better than watching porn.

(ding) Space Domain reaches lvl 5

Even the system alerted me to my voyeurism, telling me that what I was doing was not right. 

But it also meant I used the skill correctly, I thought to myself.

“It’s been so long,” I breathed, thinking of the last time I touched myself.

Standing there only in his underwear, leaning against the wall on the other side of which the couple had sex, was a great opportunity to release accumulated frustration.

But as before, when I tried to touch myself, I couldn’t—still disgusted by my body, afraid to be satisfied, of what would happen, of what it would mean.

My knees buckled, and I cried.

Lamenting over what had happened to my body, I pressed my knees to my chest and wrapped my tail around my legs. I thought I started accepting my body as it is, with all the changes, but it wasn’t true. I was just lying to myself.

I wasn’t ready.

By the time I calmed down enough to move to my bed, the couple on the other side of the wall had long been out of reach of my perception. They didn’t finish, I could still hear them. They just moved elsewhere in the room.

It was harder to ignore their sighs and the sounds they made during sex again than before. I managed to fall asleep only by hugging my tail and the smell of his hair. Apples.

…

I felt embarrassed in the morning, my mood was down, but my hunger pulled me out of bed.

I was grateful to Byron for letting me eat in peace before he sat down with me to find out what happened to me yesterday, and even though I had to pay for the food, I didn’t regret it.

“...so they took me to the barracks, where the Imperial Agent was waiting for me.” I told Byron, a story I had told several times yesterday.

“Was his name Hal?” The waitress asked me, appearing in a chair beside me.

Her question startled me and made me wonder where she could hear about the agent, whether gossip was already circulating in the city.

I nodded, my eyes wide, “It was...where did you hear about him?”

She laughed and with her the innkeeper too.

“It’s either Hal or Sah. You’ll never know their real names,” Byron explained to me before I could ask what they were laughing at.

I thought Stanley Morton had simply taken the name of the agent he had killed, but in reality it was a code name common to the imperial agents. Like… like Johnson or Lynch. I laughed at my stupidity.

The waitress leaned over, “I’ve heard that the people who met them can’t remember their faces. Is it true?”

Taken aback by the question, I had to think about it, but Morton’s face came to mind. There could be more reasons why that was, though. He was not a genuine agent, but a mind mage, and he was dead. I did not know how the agents’ cover worked, whether people could remember their faces after their deaths, so not knowing what to say, I nodded. 

“Wow, I’d like to meet one!” The girl said in amazement.

“Tess, I don’t think it’s a good idea!” Byron said, and I had to agree.

Even though I now knew who Hal really was, I couldn’t shake the impression I had on the imperial agents he left on me.

The innkeeper looked at me, “Excuse my daughter. She’s young and doesn’t know what she’s talking about!”

I nodded thoughtlessly, shocked by what I had just heard. I couldn’t imagine how this young, slender girl half a head taller than him could be his daughter. I had nothing to compare her blond curly hair to on his head, but they had different eyes. His were dark green, while she has auburn eyes. Looking deeper, trying to ignore the fat on his face, I saw a few features they had in common, such as their scooped noses with turned-up tips.

Even so, I thought she must have been adopted.

“Yeah, I’d rather avoid another meeting, too,” I told the truth.

But I already knew that another meeting was waiting for me and that I could not avoid it.

Tess snorted, “I never said I wanted to be questioned by him! I just want to see one!”

I understood her curiosity, and like her, I wondered if those rumors were true. I had an urge to mention that I didn’t see his class, but I didn’t. Morton was a mind mage, and after his death, the system revealed his class to me.

Instead, I looked at the girl.

[Dancer: lvl 26]

I haven’t seen many people yet, but I felt it was a decent level for someone who looked so young. The fact that the system showed me her class meant that she had to be over sixteen, and her choice of class, that she was a normal girl who liked dancing. When I thought about it, she moved gracefully between the tables of the inn.

If I was born here and had the opportunity to choose my class, I wouldn’t even have to think about it, and I would choose a florist.

I loved that job.