Jayden stared at the floating holographic notification in absolute awe. He didn’t quite understand the prompt. Beast Companionship? Soul Bonding? What did any of them mean?

Before he could even ask Luna, her voice echoed urgently in his mind.

[Jayden, accept it immediately] she urged.

Jayden raised a brow. "Why do you say that?" he asked, his eyes drifting from the holographic window to the beast sitting patiently before him.

[Because this is probably the best thing that you could ever receive. Beast Companionship is exactly what it sounds like] Luna explained, her tone laced with excitement. [It is the innate ability to form a mutual, unspoken understanding with beasts. You’ve already been utilizing the passive aspects of this... when you instinctively understood beasts and when they could understand you too, or when the Winter Wolf came to save you from the Chthonix as retaliation for sparing her life. It was all tied to this dormant trait. But now, it’s officially unlocked]

Jayden nodded slowly. "And the Soul Bond?"

[That is the best part] Luna said. [Soul Bonding is when you form a literal pact with a beast. They become your ally, but unlike tamed beasts, Soul-Bound beasts retain full autonomy. You cannot command them like mindless soldiers. They have free will. They can choose to refuse an order]

Jayden raised an eyebrow behind his mask. "How is that better than taming them?"

[Because this is a true partnership] Luna insisted. [It’s a mutual relationship based on respect, not a master-slave dynamic. They choose to fight for you and protect you, but only if you do the same for them. They can even break the pact if they feel you are no longer worthy of their allegiance. Most beasts refuse to form pacts because they value their freedom. You are incredibly lucky that a Legendary beast—of all things, wants to form a pact with you]

Jayden reflected on this. He didn’t have to dominate her mind. It was a voluntary, mutual alliance. It was exactly what he had been hoping for when he wondered how he could ever make the Sapphire Sonic his ally.

He looked back at the prompt and mentally selected Yes.

The system chimed immediately.

[Initiating Soul Bond...]

[Cost: 200 EP. Proceed? (Yes / No)]

Jayden selected Yes again.

[-200 Ep]

[Soul Bonding in progress...]

The effect was instantaneous and overwhelming. A blinding, ethereal gold light ignited in the center of Jayden’s chest, mirroring a brilliant light that erupted from the Sapphire Sonic’s core.

Suddenly, the ruined mall vanished.

Jayden’s physical senses were violently overridden. The smell of ozone and burnt marble was replaced by the thick, damp scent of wet stone and moss. The ambient hum of failing neon lights was replaced by the echoing drip of water. He had been pulled into a whirlwind of blurred sights, sounds, and emotions. It felt like a dream.

Then his vision cleared, but he wasn’t looking through his own eyes anymore. The perspective was low to the ground.

He could see a massive, majestic Sapphire Sonic... it was larger and more battle-scarred than the one he knew. She was gently nudging a tiny, clumsy cub with a wet nose. Jayden felt a phantom warmth wash over him. He saw the mother teaching the cub how to run, how to hunt. The scene shifted rapidly. The cub was slightly older now—the exact size of the beast he was currently soul-bonding with. This was her. These were her memories. She was with her mother in a dark, damp cave that felt like home.

Then, the warmth shattered.

Deafening explosions rocked the cave. Men clad in heavy, high-tech black tactical armor swarmed the entrance, their energy rifles illuminating the dark with lethal crimson flashes. They didn’t hesitate; they aimed directly at the cub and fired.

But the mother moved with a speed that defied physics. She threw her massive body into the trajectory of the plasma bolts. And she was struck in the chest. Blood, hot and metallic, splashed across the stone.

Jayden felt a paralyzing, suffocating terror. The cub scrambled toward her fallen mother, letting out a desperate, mewling cry. The mother forced her head up. With her bloodied snout, she aggressively shoved the cub backward, motioning for her to run away.

Then more soldiers poured in.

The mother didn’t stay down. She forced herself up, even with the wound, her spots blazing with blinding blue light, and vanished into a streak of pure kinetic energy, tearing into the soldiers to buy time for her cub to escape.

She paused for a fraction of a second, looking back at her cub, who still hadn’t moved, and unleashed a deafening, desperate roar that reverberated in Jayden’s very bones.

GO!

Jayden felt the cub’s heart-wrenching grief as she finally turned and bolted deeper into the cave, squeezing through a narrow fissure to escape.

The cub was outside the cave now, running through a terrain Jayden didn’t recognize... low scrubland, unfamiliar sky, the specific quality of light from a star that wasn’t the one over earth.

The memory blurred into a frantic, dizzying montage of survival. The scene shifted, and shifted again continuously.

Jayden could see the cub running, hiding, and starving. He could see the men in black actively hunting her, searching and pursuing her relentlessly about the planet.

It was a race of survival for the cub.

She was always on the run. Jayden could feel it in her... that constant, creeping paranoia of being hunted. She moved from place to place, hunted at night and consumed crystal after crystal until she was finally strong enough. Finally fast enough to escape from the planet and from her hunters.

But there was something that Jayden caught in those memories... etched onto the shoulders of her hunters black armor was a chillingly familiar insignia.

EVA.

Jayden’s fists clenched.

He knew that insignia. He’d known it since before the system, since before any of this. He’d known it the way you knew the face of something that had been in the room when your life changed. The face of the people that had come through the door.

And then he began thinking about his mother.

The memories of the Sapphire Sonic began to aggressively violently intertwine with his own. The damp cave walls morphed into the burning wallpaper of his childhood home. The metallic smell of the Sonic’s blood became the scent of his own mother’s blood pooling on the forest floor. He saw the EVA soldiers standing over her. He saw his sister, Jasmine, her bright smile replaced by a mask of sheer terror as the flames consumed their lives. He felt his younger self kneeling on the floor, his hands desperately pressing against his mother’s wound, begging her not to die.

The grief was absolute. It was a crushing, physical weight.

Jayden gasped, crashing back into his own body in the ruined mall. He stumbled backward, his hands clutching his chest. His breathing was ragged, shallow, and panicked. Tears streamed down his face uncontrollably.

He fell to his knees, his hands pressed against the floor. And the pain and grief began to turn into something else. Something violent.

Rage.

The anger arrived like something breaking open. It moved through him in a wave that had no useful direction.

[Heart Rate: 170 Bpm] 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Jayden’s heart rate spiked. His breathing became ragged, his hands pressing harder against the floor because the floor was the thing he could feel and he needed to feel something real.

[Heart Rate: 290 Bpm]

[Heart Rate: 310 Bpm]

[Warning! Host Heart Rate Spiking Critically]

[Warning! Neurological Instability Detected. Seizure Imminent]

The red warning screens violently flashed across his vision, but he couldn’t focus on them. The anger was mutating into a paralyzing sorrow. It was too much. The emotional feedback from the Soul Bond process had ripped open his deepest, most traumatic wounds.

[Jayden! Breathe! You have to calm down!] Luna’s voice cried out, but it sounded muffled, drowned out by the phantom sound of his mother’s ragged breathing.

Jayden squeezed his eyes shut, spiraling. But then, breaking through the cacophony of his panic, he heard it. A soft, melodic voice.

"Jayden. You have to breathe..."

Jayden gasped. He heard the voice the way you hear something through water... muffled, present, and reaching him at a distance he couldn’t measure.

"Jayden, please breathe..."

Jayden shuddered. He knew the voice. He had always known it... the specific register of it, the particular quality of warmth in it, the way it said his name like his name was something worth saying carefully.

It was a voice he’d known since he was just a baby.

It was his mother’s voice.

He visualized her face, peaceful and smiling, completely untainted by the fire and blood.

"Breathe," she said.

Jayden obeyed. And slowly, the vice grip on his lungs loosened. His heart rate began to decelerate. The world snapped back into focus. He came back into himself gradually, the way light returns after a power cut... not all at once, but in stages, the room assembling itself around him piece by piece.

He was on his knees. The Sapphire Sonic was hovering over him, her massive head pressed firmly against his chest, emitting a low, vibrating whine of pure distress. She could feel his pain just as deeply as he had felt hers.

Jayden let out a long, trembling exhale. He reached up, his fingers sinking into her thick, soft fur.

"We’re exactly alike, aren’t we?" he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "Separated from everything we knew. Forced to survive in the dark."

He looked into her deep, glowing eyes, a newfound, profound respect welling up inside him. "You’ve had to live completely on your own, always running. You’re an incredibly powerful creature to have survived all that. But why... why would you want to tie yourself to someone as broken as me?"

The golden light connecting their chests finally faded into a soft shimmer before disappearing entirely.

[Soul Bonding Complete]

[You have successfully established a pact with the Sapphire Sonic (Legendary)]