It took half an hour before Hawk was settled, and the kitchen had already delivered a special order of monster meat for him to eat during the second dose by the time that the pain in Karl’s body faded.
“Just keep your eyes closed. The food bowl is beside your hand, just move it into the space for Hawk. Your body has stabilized along with his, but there is one more dose of that to go.” Colonel Valerie insisted.
[You ready to be a giant Hawk?] Karl laughed, while the bird trilled happily at the influx of Ascended Monster meat the kitchen had brought him. Not all of it was his preferred flavours, but at the moment Hawk didn’t care what animals it had come from, as long as there was a lot of it, and it was all energy rich to make up for the energy that he was lacking.
It only took a few more minutes for the bird to demolish the food shipment and decide that he was ready for another round of the special treatments.
Karl nodded to signal that he was prepared to continue, and the pain spread through his body from the left side this time, overwhelming his mind, but the effect on Hawk wasn’t as extreme. He didn’t grow any more, but his body filled out with powerful muscle. Now he looked like a proper Hawk again, but larger.
He finished the meat bowl and flew up around the space in joy, then cried in despair as he realized that his nest was too small for his new body.
Karl worked to change the shape as quickly as he could under the circumstances, while Hawk made sure not to lose his precious new stone before he settled down into the tree. Satisfaction flowed from his mind as power flowed in from the stone in the nest, and then the space itself seemed to change.
It was growing, but it reached a plateau where Karl had expected the quality to improve. Only that wasn’t what happened. The space seemed to split, and the growth went to a second space, separate and barren, the way that Hawk’s had been when he first bonded with Karl.
[Do you think that spot is made for someone else? Like, we have improved the size of your resting spot enough that it’s time to improve a home for a new friend?] Karl asked his feathered partner.
[I think so. I can’t go into it, so it’s not a separate bedroom for me.] Hawk replied, annoyed that not all the growth was going to his space. There was still room to fly, but he was much bigger now, so shouldn’t the room to fly have expanded proportionately?
“What happened?” The warrior asked after a few minutes of Karl trying to stabilize both his mind and the new beast space.
“The mental space seems to have reached a plateau. The injection increased the size along with Hawk, but then it stopped, and split into a small second space. The quality didn’t improve, I will have to do that myself with meditation, or more of the first set of pills, but this is a whole other space. I think that I might actually have the ability to add a second pet now.” Karl explained.
Karl opened his eyes and noticed the smiles on the faces of the three Bureau of Elite Development workers. Their gamble had paid off, and if Karl could now add a second beast, his effective power would multiply.
The second thing that he noticed was that the table was empty, with two used multiple injectors and two empty shot glasses on it. He had assumed that he was two out of twelve injections into the process, but they had injected them six at a time, and the second shot was the second dose of everything.
“No wonder that hurt. It was like my body was on fire, but the second time faded much faster, and Hawk didn’t have an explosive growth spurt, instead he filled out to proper Windspeed Hawk proportions, but over a metre tall, and with a wingspan that looks like a little over three metres.” Karl explained.
Colonel Valerie gestured impatiently, and Karl called Hawk out to stand on the empty table behind him.
The mage whistled in appreciation, and Hawk preened, accidentally puncturing the steel desk with his claws.
“Well, the claws haven’t gone translucent, so he’s likely not at Ascended Rank yet, but he is a huge pretty boy.” She cooed, then stood up to go pet Hawk’s head.
“It’s definitely a mutation again, like when he learned Shred, but this time it was physical growth. There is no record of this happening to a Windspeed Hawk before, but then I doubt that anyone would have been crazy enough to give a wild one that same sort of treatment just to see what happened.” The warrior noted.
“Interesting. Hawk, could you please claw at this barrier for me?” The mage asked.
“Wait, the room is too small for him to fly around and attack the barrier, and it won’t hold up to an Awakened Rank Rend attack if he succeeds.” The warrior stopped her.
“Right, sorry. We can do actual improvement testing tomorrow after the regular classes. I’m not sure if you noticed, since time passes differently when you’re absorbing that much energy or in pain, but it’s been over two hours already, and it is almost dinner time.” The mage agreed.
“Just enough time to finish up as planned.” Colonel Valerie agreed with a gesture for the food on the tray.
Hawk delicately sniffed at them and then shook his head.
[There is no meat, I’m going to rest.] He announced, then vanished back into the Beast Space.
“He says there is no meat, so he’s not interested.” Karl explained as he examined the various dense squares and puddings.
“Each of them should help with the understanding of a skill. The rest of the squares were passed out to the relevant classes today with promising results, so go ahead and try them one at a time and let us know if anything happens.” The Colonel agreed, looking a bit less severe for a moment.
The results really must have been good if the head of the Elite Development Department had a soft spot when they were mentioned.
Karl bit into the first one, which tasted a bit like burning rubber smelled, then waited before shaking his head. If anything happened, he couldn’t tell.
One after another, he went through them until he got to the one that smelled like freshly welded steel. As soon as he bit into it, he could feel the energy, but then the flavour became familiar and a glimpse of insight on how [Slash] was an introductory and inferior version of [Rend] filled his mind, giving him ideas on how to use lower power attacks with more energy efficiency.
“That one is Slash. I see it as an inferior Rend, but I think that I could use it, or something like it, using Rend as the base skill and then stripping away most of the benefits to use a more energy-efficient attack.” Karl explained.
The warrior looked vaguely offended, while his partner chuckled.
“Well, that’s one way to look at it, I suppose. If you use Rend as the basis and strip away the bleeding effect to have just the sword light, it would create something like slash.” He eventually agreed.
“Now, let’s see what else you can get out of this pile.”
A few more were eaten with no real changes, but the last one tasted like stone dust, and Karl sensed the familiar feeling of a Golem, but the energy was so foreign to him that his body immediately rejected it.
“I think that should have given me insight into the Golem spell, but my body just rejected it straight away. The taste was familiar, like the magic of the spell activating, but my body isn’t compatible with that.” Karl explained.
“Interesting. All of these should taste like regular food, but none of them seem to have tasted like that to you. Perhaps it’s a result of your bond with Hawk, who is more sensitive to all sorts of magical abilities and threats? I will put it in the report with a note to investigate.” The mage informed them.
“That concludes the day’s special programming. We will bring you a fresh uniform, then you can return to your room.”
