Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 37: Chop Chop

Dorian Delanivis arrived at the base of Mount Saede with his white wolf army. Quite a sight, really, tides of pale fur and polished steel washing over the scarred land.

The journey should’ve been a tense, cautious skirting of a rival’s volatile border. But now, it was a triumphant march. Leading the blanket of white west was no longer a concern.

For a full hundred years, his people had lived in the long, cold shadow cast by the Black Wolf King. Arkai Dawnoro’s rise had carved a kingdom from the tundra that the Delanivis could only look upon with hungry eyes. The man was... more of an institution, a force of nature as immutable as the mountains themselves.

Undefeated, unassailable.

But last night, a message changed everything. His son’s voice was full of excitement, "Father, he’s dead. March west! Take over, this is our chance."

He couldn’t believe it at first. That terrifying, magnificent bastard was dead by a mountain?

A sudden incredulous laugh had escaped him. Yes, of course. That arrogant prick. Challenging a volcano? For what? For a few buried commoners? It was the perfectly absurd, heroically stupid end he would have expected from the man.

Arkai had always been like that, so righteous, so noble.

Now, the north was masterless. With Arkai’s only heir being that boy, the son of his dead sister, an illegitimate pup he’d adopted into the Dawnoro name, the power vacuum was an invitation. The pack would be fractured, grieving. It would be easier to take it all.

His plan was simple. First, announce the king’s death to the northern holds, ensuring a psychological blow to shatter their spirit and send that bastard’s adopted whelp into a panic. Then, retrieve the body. Or whatever charred, noble proof remained of it.

He had to move faster than the Vasiliev house, his son’s warning said, "Don’t let them take over."

So, after delivering the devastating news and watching the predictable chaos begin to bloom, he led his army to the foot of the mountain himself. He would show the world that the Delanivis were the worthy successors.

They were the family who had the sense to survive, to seize opportunity, to replace the legend.

They were the family who replaced the Black Wolf King.

But as they crested the final ridge...

The air should have been thick with the silence of the grave. It should have been a monochrome tomb.

It was not.

The scene that stretched before him was of organized reclamation.

The acrid scent of ash was undercut by the smell of roasting meat from makeshift kitchens. The constant, low din of work filled the air. The scrape of shovels, the crack of shifting timber, the determined shouts of rescuers coordinating over the body of the victims.

His eyes scanned the valley. There were his rivals, the sleek Arctic Foxes, directing survivors to healers. And there, the hulking Polar Bears, using their immense strength to clear pathways through the rubble. All alongside the wolves of Dawnoro’s pack.

And the mountain... his gaze traveled up the slope. The prophecy, the vision of the Saintess, had been explicit. "A second eruption, a pyroclastic flow that had scoured the land and buried the first wave of rescuers."

But the evidence before his eyes told a different story. The new, searing path of destruction was there, yes, quite a vast, blackened scar of cooled lava and ash, but it carved a path eastward, away from the town, funneled into a desolate ice field where it could harm no one.

It was as if the mountain’s fury had been... redirected. Tamed.

How?

Wait.

The Saintess’s vision... she said it was a total devastation. She said the second wave had buried them all.

So why was the town still standing? Why were there survivors?

The scene before him was not that of a failed last stand.

It was more like... the aftermath of a victory.

But that wasn’t all.

The final nail in the coffin of Dorian Delanivis’s ambition entered his sight. A lone figure, detaching itself from the bustling activity below and beginning the slow climb up the ash-covered ridge toward his army. The very man whose very existence was a contradiction to the divine prophecy he had staked his future on.

Dorian’s knees began to tremble uncontrollably.

He was climbing the hill alone.

Alone.

Against a thousand of the Arctic Wolf Tribe’s finest warriors—

"Long time no see, Delanivis."

The voice was the same. That calm baritone with a casual dominance that had haunted Dorian since their youth. It had always been like this. Arkai Dawnoro was the standard to which every northern lord was held and found wanting.

And now, according to the impossible evidence before him, the man had not just braved a volcano, he had apparently wrestled with it and won. The deflected lava flow... the people below...

"You’re alive," Dorian whispered.

Arkai’s lips curled into a scoff. "What’s wrong? Now that I see you, you actually look like you’re seeing a ghost. I’m fine, see?" He spread his arms slightly. "Who told you I was dead, huh? Cursing me?"

This... this casual dismissal of his own supposed demise! What, as if Dorian had just misheard a piece of trivial gossip?

Dorian was flabbergasted. And so were the White Werewolves army around him. Yes, his soldiers were formidable in their own right, but they were barely standing on two legs.

The man before them, however...

Arkai Dawnoro stood in his full humanoid form. Only the majestic black wolf ears atop his head and the large, tail behind him betrayed his true nature. He was so powerful that his most relaxed state was this near-perfect human visage, a form that required immense discipline to maintain so effortlessly.

Again, he should be a charred corpse.

"I know, you’re all just joking with my son, right? I get you. We old men like to scare children," Arkai sneered, seemingly entertained by their pathetic power grab.

Then came the coup de grâce.

"Now that you’re here with these fine mutts," he said, with a dismissive wave at the thousand-strong army, "come along and help us with the body retrieval. Still lots of work."

He turned, already expecting them to fall in line.

"Chop chop."