The growl was low and menacing.
Dominic spun around, blood crusted to his temple, vision swimming from the exhaustion and hunger. His body moved slower than his thoughts, and his thoughts weren't moving at all.
The beast—something massive and muscular, with wet fur and gleaming tusks—locked eyes with him. It snarled, lips pulling back over jagged teeth.
Dominic braced for the charge.
But then…
It stopped.
Sniffed.
And gagged.
Actually gagged.
The beast blinked, face contorting into an expression that could only be described as deep personal offense. Then, with one final, shuddering snort, it turned around and ran.
Ran.
Ran away.
Dominic stood frozen, mouth slightly ajar. "...Huh?"
And then, like storm clouds parting, the memory returned—fragmented and dumb.
He'd been delirious. Stumbling through the marsh, desperate for cover and scent masking. He remembered smearing the beast gland he'd cut from a dead feral that he killed.
Then he'd spotted the Veilroot plant—gray veins, bulbous roots, and known for its scent-canceling properties.
Only… he hadn't canceled the scent.
He'd combined it.
Raw beast gland. Veilroot oil. Sweat. Swamp water. And whatever was oozing from that infected scrape on his shoulder.
The result?
An olfactory war crime.
After dusk, the third day since the day he woke, while he was trying to conceal his presence in the shrubs for a nice nap.
he heard another growl—
The growl behind him didn't belong to a pack—it was something bigger.
Dominic turned slowly, still crouched behind the log, vision swimming.
A massive silhouette stood just beyond the thicket, sniffing the air. Its nostrils flared once, then again—then it made a low keening noise. Like a child tasting vinegar for the first time. The beast's face twisted, its shoulders shuddered, and then…
It vomited.
Right there.
Dominic's eyes went wide. "Did… did I just make a Dire-class retch?"
The beast glared at him through narrowed, teary eyes, let out a threatening snarl—and promptly turned around, crashing back into the forest like it needed therapy.
Dominic didn't know whether to laugh or collapse.
He did both.
Lying there in a pile of wet leaves, breathing through his mouth, he muttered, "Okay. Okay. That's two beasts. Two. What the hell did I mix? Even after three day the stench only got worse?"
"Science," he said blankly. "I've weaponized hygiene."
The wind shifted, carrying the scent back into his own nose. Dominic gagged, rolled over, and nearly threw up himself.
"Okay, definitely a war crime."
By the time the sun began to rise, Dominic had nearly fallen into a crevice twice, hallucinated a singing squirrel, and had a one-sided conversation with a tree he swore looked disappointed in him.
He was halfway between dehydration, concussion, and olfactory suicide. But he was still moving. And still alive.
Dominic sniffed his arm. Immediately regretted it. "Dear stars… I smell like something that crawled out of a corpse and asked for a refund."
He tried to wash his hands in a puddle, but the water bubbled.
Bubbled.
Even the insects were avoiding him.
At first, he was horrified. Then… intrigued.
The beasts avoided him. Not out of fear. But pure, biological revulsion.
He was no longer prey. He was a one-man plague.
He staggered toward a stream—more to keep his limbs moving than to clean up—and that's when he heard them.
Voices. Human.
He peeked through the bushes and saw three cadets in uniform—bruised, weary, armed.
He opened his mouth to call out.
"GODS ABOVE—WHAT IS THAT SMELL?!" one of them screamed before he could say a word.
Another gagged. The third reached for their sidearm like they were under psychic attack.
Dominic stepped out, hands raised. "Friendly! Human! Please don't shoot!"
They looked at him like he'd emerged from the backend of a mutant cow.
"He's oozing," one whispered.
"I think his aura is crying."
"Is he rotting alive?!"
"I'm not infected!" Dominic barked, indignantly. "I'm innovating!"
They didn't move.
"Listen," he said, voice cracking with fatigue and pride, "I accidentally made the ultimate scent blocker-slash-biohazard using beast gland and veilroot. Mixed them while concussed. I may have transcended deodorant."
Silence.
Then one cadet—bless his soul—whispered: "I think he weaponized being gross."
Dominic smiled.
"Survival," he said, wiping goo from his arm, "isn't clean."
The cadets never stopped staring.
Even after they let Dominic pass—at twenty paces distance—their faces stayed twisted with expressions normally reserved for dissecting something rotten.
"You need a healer, man," one muttered as he gagged into his sleeve. "Or a priest."
Dominic didn't respond. He was too focused on walking.
Days passed the forest shifted as dawn broke. Shafts of gold pierced the canopy above, bathing the dirt path in a warmth that made him momentarily forget just how close to death he'd come. Or how foul he currently smelled.
His head still throbbed from the dizziness. Every now and then, the trees swayed a little too much, like they were waving at him. He waved back once, just in case.
"I should patent this," he mumbled to himself. "Dominic's Beast-Be-Gone. Guaranteed to offend even the hungriest predator. Side effects may include nausea, loss of friends, and spiritual detachment."
He snorted at his own joke, then stopped when the motion nearly made him retch.
He passed an old Federation waystone—moss-covered, cracked, and long-forgotten. Home wasn't far. A few more valleys, and the stronghold Karthun on the rim of the Dormant Realm would be in sight.
His stomach growled. Loudly.
Of course, food.
He looked down at the pouch on his hip. Just one dried ration pack left, crushed under the weight of a dozen battles. When he opened it, even that recoiled from him.
It crumbled into paste. He ate it anyway. No pride left. Only purpose. But bad Idea.
The cadet party moved cautiously through the outer perimeter of the Dormant Realm, weapons at the ready. But the strangest thing wasn't the quiet… it was how unnaturally quiet everything was.
Not a single beast approached them.
Not one.
At one point, a Razorback boar the size of a truck burst from the brush—snorting and pawing the ground—only to freeze mid-charge. Its beady eyes locked on Dominic, nostrils flared...
Then it made a choked squeal and turned tail, disappearing so fast it left a trail of torn roots and shame behind.
"What the hell was that?" one cadet muttered, sword half-raised.
Another blinked. "Did that Predator-tier just… run?"
Dominic didn't answer. He just kept walking in the middle of the group like a cursed talisman nobody wanted to touch. His face was pale, sweat still clinging to him, and a faint green mist seemed to linger in his wake like a plague cloud.
A third cadet gagged. "Is this what death smells like?"
"I thought it was me," someone whispered.
One of the older escorts leaned close to the commander and whispered, "Sir, I recommend we torch his uniform. And possibly the topsoil he walks on."
Dominic blinked slowly. "I can hear you."
The commander gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder—but kept his gloves on. "Just hang in there, kid. Stronghold's got showers. Industrial ones."
Dominic mumbled, "I'll need a priest."
The group pressed on, the Stronghold just a few kilometers ahead, visible now as a dark silhouette beyond the ridge—steel towers catching the morning light like jagged teeth.
The path should've been crawling with Dire-tier beasts at least. Yet the forest parted for them like they were carrying plague. Birds didn't chirp. Insects avoided the airspace above Dominic's head. Even the trees somehow looked wilted in his presence.
At some point, a Predator-class Nightstalker peeked from a cliff ledge, hissed… and fell off in its panic to retreat.
"Sweet abyss," one of the cadets muttered, "he's a walking apocalypse."
Dominic didn't even bother responding anymore. His boots squelched with every step. The veilroot-beast gland mixture had soaked into his skin, reacting with his sweat and body heat like it was fermenting into war crimes.
"Can we at least put him in the back?" someone whispered.
"He is in the back. We rotated twice already. He loops."
One of the younger girls—Mira—gagged so hard she had to stop and lean against a tree. "I can taste it in my soul," she croaked, eyes watering.
"Stay strong," another cadet told her. "We're almost there."
Dominic tried to laugh—but it came out cracked. His throat felt dry, coated with whatever fumes were still leeching off him. He hadn't eaten anything normal, since the incident, and his stomach growled… though even it seemed unsure it wanted anything digestible inside.
One of the escorts, a tall bald man named Riggs, finally had enough.
"I don't care what the rules are," he snapped. "Next beast we see? We bait it with this kid and let him get washed by blood if it neutralizes the stench."
Dominic squinted at him. "If I survive this, I'm rubbing my boots on your pillow."
Riggs recoiled like he'd been slapped by a ghost. "Gods—don't you dare! That smell latches on!"
But the commander raised a hand. "Enough. No one's dying today, and no one's getting scent-marked. Eyes ahead."
Dominic chuckled softly to himself. Despite everything—the fear, the pain, the humiliating nausea he was causing—he felt something strange. A sense of... belonging. They were teasing him now, not ignoring him. Treating him like one of them.
That was a start.
Finally, they crested the last hill—and there it was.
The Stronghold.
Not outside the Dormant Realm—but deep within it. One of the rare few bastions scattered across the wilds. A functional wreck of reinforced alloy, brute-forged walls, and old-world architecture fused with low-tech survival ingenuity. Everything here ran on analog systems, hand-tuned mechanisms, and hope.
As the cadet party emerged from the underbrush—mud-caked, exhausted, and dragging their rank-scented comrade—the sentries at the barricades gagged almost immediately.
"Identify yourselves!" barked a guard, cloth mask already up.
"It's the boy," their commander called out. "Recovered near the Sector Seven sinkhole."
"Oh sweet void," someone choked. "He smells like a Feral's corpse mated with a latrine!"
Another shouted: "CONTAMINANT!"
Dominic groaned, raising both hands. "It's not a bio-weapon! It's beast gland, veilroot, sweat, and swamp juice! The scent cocktail of champions!"
The guards didn't look convinced. One was halfway through lighting a fire to 'purify the air.'
"Back! BACK I SAY!" a rookie cried, waving a burning torch like a ward.
Dominic took a step forward—and the wind betrayed him. A foul gust rolled through the gate like death itself had taken a breath. One guard collapsed. Another prayed.
A gruff female voice from the tower called out, calm and unimpressed.
"Dominic Solari?"
"Yes!"
"Did you intend to create this… aura?"
He paused. "No. But I think I've stumbled into beast-repellent 2.0."
"Open the scrub chambers," she sighed. "And get the industrial soap."
The gate creaked open—manually, of course—and Dominic staggered through while cadets behind him gave the guards pitying nods.
Inside the walls, the stronghold's interior was all crude but sturdy buildings, open fire pits, and analog panels. People cleared a path for him like he was a walking gas cloud. Someone tossed him a tarp.
He reached the decon shack and dropped to his knees. "Sweet, putrid home."
He collapsed, a faint smile on his face, reeking of accidental genius.
Beknowth to him there is a gathering in the forest that will come against against him—