The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 716

Grim's breathing evened out under the needles before noon even arrived. Alex kept his hand on the hound's flank a while longer anyway, feeding the last thread of inner force in slow, so the healing wouldn't jolt him awake into a fight he wasn't ready for yet.

Monica hadn't stopped shaking. "Please. You don't know what these people are."

"Don’t worry they don’t know me too." Alex stood, wiped his hands on his coat. "Get inside. Bar the door. Don't come out until I say."

She looked at him like she wanted to argue, then looked at Grim's bandaged side, and didn't.

They came at noon exactly. Twenty of them, spread loose across the torn-up lot like they'd done this walk a hundred times before — mismatched jackets, chains looped over shoulders instead of belts, the kind of confidence that came from never once having lost.

Behind them, on ropes and collars, came the beasts: a couple of mangy pit-dogs foaming at the leash, a scarred boar-thing with tusks filed to points, three jackal-shaped things moving in a pack rhythm that wasn't natural, all of it herded loosely around one animal at the back that nobody walked too close to — a mastiff built like a boulder, matted grey-black, one eye clouded white from an old fight it clearly hadn't been allowed to lose.

Their leader was a lean man with a shaved scalp and a voice that carried.

“Are you the owner?”

“As you see.”

"Guess nobody told you to run."

"Somebody did," Alex said. "I didn't feel like it."

"Cute." The man spread his hands. "Return this forest to us. We hate it when outsiders like you touch our stuff. That doesn't sit right with people here. And no one wants you here. Get out of this place."

"Who paid you?"

“Nobody hired us. We’re from here. Grew up on this dirt. We just hate outsiders, especially the ones who walk in and take our things. Even if those things were never really ours to begin with.”

"Well, if you don't like me, you need to move me." Alex smiled.

"Trying to be a tough guy, huh?" He grinned and snapped his fingers. "Get him."

The twenty came in together, with twenty beasts rushing to attack — which was their first mistake. Alex moved through them the way water moves through fingers — a wrist turned here, a knee folded there, a windpipe found and pressed just short of collapsing it.

None of them got close enough to land anything. In under five seconds the ones still standing had stopped bothering to stand.

“So weak,” Alex said, a flicker of genuine surprise in his voice. It was completely different from the arrogance they just flaunt.

Then the beasts came, and that part didn't go the way he expected.

The pit-dogs he barely noticed shrugging off. But the jackal-pack hit in a coordinated wedge that would have taken a normal man's leg off at the knee, and the boar-thing's charge cracked a fence post clean through on a miss.

Alex caught himself actually stepping back from that one — an honest, reflexive retreat, the first he'd needed all day.

He went still for half a second, reading them. He tried to measure the beasts' power and was shocked to find they were at least Foundation level, and some were at peak of it.

The twenty men didn't even reach Qi Foundation level. But the beasts had reached Foundation level, and some reached the peak.

This was really interesting. No wonder they called it dominion of the beast.

The beasts were more powerful than the humans.

The mastiff went for his throat, and he didn't kill it — caught the lunge on a flat palm to the chest and let it feel exactly how far it wasn't going to get, then bore it into the dirt hard enough to end the argument.

Its jaw was still snapping air when he pinned it, one hand flat between its shoulder blades, and in that instant, with the animal's rage still lit up and fresh.

Skill acquired: Bloodrend.

He didn't have time to think about that yet. The jackals broke off the moment their leader's dog went down, scattering the way pack animals do once the pack logic fails.

"We've done business."

The captain's mouth twitched, the closest thing to a smile she seemed willing to spend. "Then she'll take good care of it."

By evening the drones had the windows reset, the door rehung, the floorboards Grim had bled across pulled up and replaced board for board.

Gaia finished the report without being asked: cosmetic damage only, structural integrity unaffected, four hours' work compressed into forty minutes because there was so little of it this time.

Alex sat on the back step afterward with Grim's head heavy in his lap, the hound healed but not yet willing to sleep, ears up at every sound from the tree line.

Squall paced the new fence line without being let out, static crawling faint along his mane, working off something that hadn't been spent yet.

Neither of them had done anything today. That was the part that sat wrong with both of them, Alex could tell — Grim had watched from a bandaged doorway, Squall from behind a fence, and something in the set of both animals said the same thing without either of them able to say it: let us be the ones who don't need protecting next time.

Alex looked at the mastiff's reading again in his mind, turning it over. Foundation level, peak. Built by nothing but feeding, driving, and fighting a creature until it broke or didn't.

He was still turning that thought when Monica came out with two mugs and her face still pale from the afternoon.

"You're not hurt," she said, like she still didn't quite believe it.

"No."

She sat down across from him, wrapping both hands around her mug before she spoke again. "There's a place on the north edge of Willowmere. Officially beast master licensed, city-run — keepers bring animals in to test them against each other, under rules, with a judge watching so nobody gets torn apart over a bet gone wrong." She hesitated, glancing at Grim, then at Squall pacing the fence. "I wasn't going to bring it up. Not after today. But watching you look at that dog just now like you're already doing math…"

"What's it called?"

Monica took a slow breath, like she already regretted saying yes to whatever came next.

"I'll take you tomorrow," she said. "You'll see for yourself."