Beast Gacha System: All Mine

The red haze of Arzhen’s own rage began to recede. In their absence, a different sense sharpened. His nostrils flared. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The air in the chamber was heavy with the scent of their distress. Elara’s cloying, fear-soured perfume, the acrid tang of his own sweat and fury, the clean, impersonal smell of the pine logs crackling in the hearth.

But beneath it all... threaded through the layers of present turmoil...

Faint.

So delicate it was almost a memory, not an aroma. A whisper against his senses where a shout had just been.

Nostalgic.

It tugged at a part of him that was not the furious heir, the betrayed son, or the failed assassin. It hooked into a deeper, older stratum of his being. A layer of instinct and possession he had convinced himself was buried, resolved, owned.

Familiar.

His blood seemed to still in his veins. His breath caught, suspended in his chest.

A scent—

No. Not the pervasive, environmental marking he had drenched her belongings in. This was different. The unique, elusive fragrance that had once been woven into the fabric of his days and nights for seven long years.

Her. Sunshine, stars and winter moon. The clean, ozone-kissed air before a storm. And underneath it all, the singular, vibrant essence of her. A scent he had hunted for in crowded halls, had woken to on empty pillows, and had, in the end, tried to drown out with his own.

Cecilia...?

Of course not.

It was impossible. A trick of the mind, perhaps. This was stress. This damned, freezing fortress truly seemed to warp reality itself.

And yet...

His gaze locked on his mother’s livid face. With her—

"The scent on you..."

Arzhen’s voice was low, guttural, stripped of all its previous fury, replaced by a hunting-feline’s intensity. His hands shot out to grasp his mother’s shoulders, his fingers digging into the fine silk of her gown. "Where did you get this scent?!"

Elara’s eyes, wide with residual hysteria, faltered. For a split second, confusion overrode her anger. Then, affronted by his grip, by the wild focus in his eyes, her rage surged back, hotter and more personal. "What are you doing?!"

She hissed, wrenching herself out of his grasp with a violent shrug. She leaned in, whispering sharply to cut through his apparent delirium. "Listen to me! I just met your uncle. That Dragon’s physician, she’s here, and she found out that your father was poisoned! Do you understand what that means?!"

Arzhen frowned, the words trying to penetrate the sensory fog engulfing him. "What do you mea—"

He inhaled again, deliberately this time, parsing the olfactory chaos clinging to his mother. His uncle’s scent was there, yes—overwhelmingly so. Potent. Territorial.

And woven through that dominant musk was another layer, sharp and unmistakable... the salty, musky, intimate aroma of sex. Recent. Passionate.

And tangled within that, like a single golden thread in a dark tapestry, was that faint scent.

Her.

"Tell me everything you did, Mother," Arzhen seethed.

Elara, bewildered and furious, didn’t understand. She was not a beast, her senses blunt and human. The complex symphony of pheromones and markers that screamed a story to Arzhen was, to her, mere background noise.

"I went to the inner garden near your uncle’s chambers," she spat out, clipped with impatience. "There, I saw your uncle fucking some woman—I thought she was a prostitute or some lowborn slut! She was foul-mouthed, vulgar, shameless! I’m sure they’d just finished rutting behind the bushes! But apparently—"

No.

No fucking way.

No fucking way she’s still ali—

"—apparently she’s the Dragon’s physician! The one who saved your father!"

The final piece of Elara’s sentence slammed into him.

...

"...what...?"

Something vital short-circuited behind his eyes. The logic center of his brain, the part that knew the weight of a still-beating heart in his palm, the final, fading warmth of her skin, sputtered and sparked against an impossible sensory input.

"That’s why, listen to me..." Elara seized his momentary paralysis, her voice still frantic, seething, pressing against his ear. "We have to make a move. Now. Before your father’s memory returns, before they find proof it was us, you better find a way to solve all of this. Permanently!"

Arzhen frowned deeper, confused. His nose... his nose couldn’t lie. It was his primal truth-teller. But as he tried to isolate the thread of the scent again, to chase it through the clutter of his uncle’s marking and sex, it seemed to... shift.

Not change, but reveal itself. It did smell like her, initially, because it shared the fundamental, hauntingly familiar base notes. Similar.

But now, breathing deeper, dissecting it with a beast’s precision, he detected the layers on top. The complicating factors. One... two other beasts, their essences braided into hers. One was clearly, aggressively, his uncle Arkai. The other... it tugged at a different memory, someone else familiar, a scent known from court or battlefield.

Scents were complex symphonies. More than one person could share similar base notes. Family members, people who lived in close quarters, shared food, air, life. It was rarer between the unrelated, but not impossible. Genetics, environment, diet, even hormonal states could create echoes, coincidences.

No.

Of course it wasn’t her.

He had met people before who carried echoes of her. He’d catch a whiff in a crowded market and his head would snap around, only to find a stranger. Now that he analyzed it, truly analyzed it, he realized, this scent and Cecilia’s were similar, yes. But they were not identical.

Something fundamental in the undertone was... different.

Of course.

It couldn’t be her.

It truly... couldn’t be her.

She was dead. By his hand. He had felt the bond sever, had held the still-warm, heavy proof of it in his grip. What was he doing, chasing phantoms?

Of course it wasn’t. Cecilia’s scent had always carried a subtle, perpetual undertone of cortisol. That sharp, green note of stress, of pressure, of a deep and unshakeable melancholy. It was the scent of a bird in a gilded cage, beating her wings against bars only she could see. Always.

This scent... this woman’s scent... it was different.

This scent was layered with something foreign, something that, in his darkest moments, he had ached to smell on her and never did.

This scent was full of... happiness.

"Arzhe—"

Rich, warm, contented. Satisfaction. Safety. Claimed, and claiming in return.

"Arzhen! Listen to me!"

Elara’s voice finally severed the sensory spiral. He snapped back to the present, to his mother’s livid, terrified face.

Her fingers clamped around his forearms, nails biting through the fabric of his sleeves. "You heard me, right?" she insisted. "Go. Go back to where you left her. Find that woman’s body, bring it here, and show it to your father."

"Show that you can’t do anything, that she left you and died somewhere unrelated to us. Make him take you back, somehow!"