Leor sat with a grumpy look on his face as he watched the five Beasts make themselves comfortable around the fire. His mouth and lips were scorched from the burns inflicted on them by the overheated meat, and the worst thing was that he was still hungry. That damn delicious morsel of meat was far too small to fill his stomach, but when he finally swallowed it, all the rest of the Beast had long finished eating. There was nothing left!
There was one silver lining though, even with his stomach and lips aching, he had been able to gain some additional information about his captives. The Beasts had finally let down their hoods to eat, so Leor was able to get a good look at them for the first time. The tall female was a wild canine of some kind, Her face was long and sharp, somewhere between beast and woman, with pointed ears and eyes that glimmered faintly in the gloom. There was no softness in her—only the wiry strength of a predator built for speed and survival. She almost looked like a fur covered dark elf, except for the prominent canine ears at the top of her head.
The remainder of the group consisted of a lion, a bear, a wolf, and a bull. They all wore crude leather clothing beneath their cloaks. It was odd, the quality of the cloaks was high, but the quality of the leather clothing was quite poor. Thinking about it for a moment, Leor realized that the group had probably looted the cloaks from the abandoned elven city, or an outpost of it at least. There was no way they had made the items themselves. Especially considering that the moment the Beasts removed the cloaks, Leor was able to immediately sense their presence. The dark hooded cloaks were not just for show, he realized. Now it made more sense why they refused to even lower their hoods out in the forest, and why they had wrapped Leor in a cloak of his own the moment they had captured him.
It appeared that none of the other Beasts within the group was capable of human speech, so they must have all been at the Feral or Dire tiers. That still didn't explain how they all had managed to learn the exceedingly rare talent of humanoid transformation, but it was good to know that at least all of them weren't monstrously powerful Highbloods like the leader.
By now the sun had begun to set, Leor could see the dim red glow of dusk peaking in the narrow gap of the boulder at the mouth of the cave. It seemed that they would be spending the night here, he doubted that his captors would be brave enough to travel through the forest in the dark.
So with nothing else to do but wait, Leor began to meditate and work on building his willpower. Closing his eyes, he visualized the flaming torch of light. The great symbol of the realm of light always brought a sense of security and peace to the young man's heart whenever he saw it. As he visualized the sacred symbol, he tried his best to form his willpower into a similar image. Not its visual image, but its nature itself. He was trying to emulate the sacred quality of the symbol. This was a very difficult task. The torch of light was a powerful divine symbol of the will of light, it carried a sacred aura that was powerful beyond words.
What Leor was trying to do was not actually replicate such a thing, that would be impossible for a mortal. What he could do, however, was use the sacred symbol like a guidepost. It was a lighthouse leading his way forward through the fog, helping him understand what direction he needed to go. There were multiple aspects of willpower that needed to be trained in order to grow in power. The first was the overall amount of willpower that an individual possessed, the second was the potency of the willpower itself, and the third was the nature of the willpower.
Leor could increase the amount of willpower inside of him by defeating defiled creatures, but in order to increase the potency and nature of his willpower, he needed to train. The sacred torch was one of the best symbols for training willpower because it both increased the potency of the users willpower and bestowed the willpower with the nature of the sacred light. This was the only reason that Leor had been able to use his willpower to temporarily cleanse the defilement from the Twisted one he faced. It could be said that it was the will of the light itself that had saved Leor from certain death during that fight.
Time passed swiftly as he focused on his meditation, and soon it was dark. The Beasts carefully snuffed out the flame and settled in for the night, all except the thin female who seemed to be standing first watch. A few more hours passed and it was well into the night by the time Leor finished his training, and his eyelids had begun to grow heavy on his face. He was just about to fall asleep when the female Beast suddenly rose to her feet, a vigilant expression on her face as she turned to face the cave entrance.
Leor sat up as he noticed that something was wrong, and turned to follow her gaze toward the large boulder that blocked the only entrance to the small cave. A few heartbeats passed in silence, then the massive stone began to slowly roll away. The darkness and misty corruption of the moonlit night poured into the small cave as the stone door rolled open, exposing the Beasts and single human inside to the melodious chirp of defiled insects filling the forest.
Leor held his breath as he waited for the visitor to show themselves. He did his best to feel for any fluctuations of corrupted will coming from outside, but try as he might, he could feel no hint of foreign will.
Then, quick as a flash, the large muscled body of the Beast leader had entered the cave and was already straining to pull the large boulder back in front of the door. A wide smile fell across the face of the thin female Beast at the sight of him, she was clearly quite relieved to see her leader back in one piece. But as he pulled the boulder into place and stepped away, Leor saw that two large bloody handprints had been left upon the boulder where he touched it.
As the Highblood Beast stepped towards them, he pulled the large cloak from his shoulders, exposing a body riddled with terrible wounds from head to toe. Leor's eyes went wide, and his breath caught in his throat as he witnessed the shocking extent of the damage on the leader's body. It looked as if something had tried eating the powerful Beast alive.
Large sections of flesh and muscle had been ripped away, exposing bone and sinew and even internal organs. The left eye of the Beast's ape-like face had been sliced to ribbons, and his previously strong jaw appeared to have been broken, as it dangled awkwardly to the side
When the female saw the extent of the leader's injuries, her face seemed to go pale. She hastily rushed around and woke the others, pointing to the leader and motioning for each one of them to do something, Leor couldn't quite understand the simple hand gestures she was using, but the Beast's all seemed to get the message.
Then, one by one, Leor watched as each one of the Beasts tore chunks of flesh from their bodies. The female cut the largest strip of flesh of any of them, going from her left shoulder all the way to her wrist, before quickly wrapping the bloody wound in dirty leather clothing. Then, she collected the pieces of flesh from each of the Beasts one by one, and delivered it to the Leader.
Leor realized at that moment what was going on. Beasts grew stronger by consuming the fleshy bodies of other Beasts. So they were offering the leader some of their strength to help him recover. It might just work. Given how powerful the bodies of Beasts could be, especially a Highblood Beast like the leader, it was not impossible for him to survive his terrible wounds given proper support.
The only problem was, the great beast's jaw had been broken, there was no way for him to chew the meat. Apparently such a thing was not beyond the experience of the Beasts though, because the female stepped up almost immediately and began to chew the flesh before carefully placing it inside the torn lips of the leader.
Leor couldn't watch any further at that point, he had no desire to watch the female Beast chew her own flesh and feed it to the injured leader. Closing his eyes, Leor listened to the noise of heavy chewing fill the small cave for what felt like a long, long time. At some point he finally faded off to sleep to the gruesome lullaby.