This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange-Chapter 594: Alternate Realities

After Aegis evolved, Kain gave him the directive to attempt breaking through to blue-grade. After all, it was long overdue. And Kain had a feeling that, perhaps due to the relic being unable to assess his strength accurately, it will continue to give non-combat related trials to him.

As if to match Kain's expectations, the grey-stone waiting room dissolved around Kain like smoke, the walls bleeding away into a swirling void, separating him from his contracts. For a moment, there was nothing—no sound, no light, no weight to his body. Then, a voice echoed, neither male nor female, its tone flat and mechanical:

[Trial Initiated: Alternate Paths]

[Objective: Retain your sanity by the end of the trial]

[Warning: Memory suppression in effect. Trial details will fade upon entry.]

Kain barely had time to process the words before the world snapped into focus—and he forgot everything.

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"I think that one's waking up!" shouted a familiar yet unfamiliar voice, giving Kain the feeling of déjà vu.

Kain's eyes flew open. He was seated on a wooden chair, surrounded like a zoo animal under peering eyes.

Around him, the murmurs of hopeful students buzzed like distant static and a large brown-haired figure was barreling towards him.

A large pair of arms wrapped around him, almost crushing him to death. "Please tell me that you have an affinity, Kain. Please!"

Kain disorientedly patted the large figure—Bridge— on the back, trying to clear the fog from his mind. 'Affinity…that's right, I was taking the affinity ceremony'

Kain's mind was a complete blank, he couldn't remember anything that happened while his eyes were closed. Did he have an affinity or not?

Likely seeing his confusion, Mr. Evergreen, Kain's favourite teacher, stepped in, "Let's go get you tested," He said, as he led him towards the testing machine, Bridge following closely behind.

Something twisted in Kain's chest. Why did this feel so familiar but also… wrong?

But he stood, walking forward on autopilot. Another teacher in charge of the large machine directed, "Please place your hands here and channel your spiritual power into the machine."

As Kain reached forward as directed he was incredibly nervous.

Silence.

No surge of energy. No warmth. No golden light.

The machine remained dull.

The unfamiliar teacher's smile dimmed slightly, but didn't seem too surprised, after all, this was the result for most of the students. "No affinity detected."

A disinterested murmur rippled through the crowd as they went back to their own conversations. Since Kain had no affinity, he had nothing left to interest the crowd. Only Bridge and Mr. Evergreen's expressions fell on Kain's behalf. If anything, they appeared even more distraught than Kain himself.

'Strange…why don't I feel more upset?' Perhaps it hadn't sunk in yet? Kain reasoned. After all, one would expect him to be more devastated by the results, but something about them just felt disconnected from himself.

After the failed awakening ceremony, Kain threw himself into academics. Without an affinity, he couldn't be a beast-tamer like he dreamed—but he could still study them.

He graduated top of his class and went to Starfire College—the top college in the southern region. After studying and graduating, he buried himself in research, designing evolutionary paths for others while never bonding with a contract of his own.

Then, the Abyssals came.

The attacks started small—a village here, a town there. By the time the first city fell, Kain was locked in a research bunker, frantically scribbling notes as the walls shook.

He died under rubble, clutching a half-finished thesis on the use of Source Energy Extraction to Counteract Abyssal contamination, his last thought a bitter lament that no matter how intelligent, it was hard to survive in a chaotic world as an ordinary person.

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The world shifted.

Kain gasped, his hands braced against a stainless-steel lab table. A headache pounded behind his temples.

"Kain, my boy? You alright?"

He blinked. His supervisor—Dr. Blackwell—leaned over him, frowning.

"Yeah. Just… dizzy."

Blackwell chuckled. "Well, shake it off. We've got some more relics and texts to analyze from Brazil."

Brazil. The outbreak of an unidentified disease.

Kain's breath hitched, and his heart started pounding from fear at the thought of returning to that country. But why? Although it was ground zero for the outbreak, and there had been a brief scare where he'd thought he was infected, it was just a false alarm.

The fever never came. The cough never started. He'd boarded the plane, hiked into the rainforest, analyzed the samples—and watched, over the next year, as the disease they'd originally discovered only in a remote location of South America, spread beyond containment.

By the time the world realized it was airborne, incurable, and intelligent (shifting its symptoms to evade detection), it was too late.

In underground labs, he worked alongside what remained of the world's governments. When ethics became a luxury, he crossed lines.

Human trials. Live vectors. Gene editing.

He told himself it was necessary.

(The inhumane screams in the isolation wards said otherwise.)

But Kain reasoned that sometimes inhumane actions were needed to fight something non-human.

Something that, despite being a simple-celled disease seemed to possess intelligence and evolve at a rapid rate.

Whereas originally, those infected seemed to have a grotesque collection of symptoms from known diseases like the flu, leprosy, flesh-eating disease, and more—eventually, many of the reported symptoms seemed to take on an otherworldly quality.

Those infected began to attack others, making Kain and the others think that rabies-like symptoms could also be included. But then the victims began to turn a pitch black colour, as if dipped into crude oil, and the irises of their eyes all shifted to a bright red.

Even more off-putting, the infected seem to be physically stronger than before infection, and were able to wordlessly communicate and coordinate attacks on humanity.

It was an apocalypse. The closest to a zombie apocalypse that any of them could imagine, and the greatest hope, aside from their experiments, is to go through the ancient murals and texts found in the Brazilian tomb at Location Zero—where it all started.

They described the disease in those ancient texts, but they had a very strange name for it—Abyss.