Those Damn Corvids

Eric was your dime a dozen orphan nothing unusual or outstanding about his background, merely someone that grew up on the streets until he was picked by an old hunter and taught the basics of how to hunt, unfortunately, the old man died a few years later leaving him almost where he started but still better off as now he could at least make a decent living for himself.

For two years after the old man's death, he got nothing but practice and time to hunt, preferring to stay in his small hunting shack outside of the small city he grew up in.

If anyone had to describe Eric it would normally come down to one of two answers, being quiet or just not having much of a presence with just average looks and medium-length dark brown hair and having a lean, tall build, with the only thing standing out being his grey-blue eyes that seemed to see through everything he never really stood out.

On one soon-to-be unforgettable day, Eric woke up and got ready only to check the date, July 12th, his 16th birthday, the year he would be considered an adult and allowed to make a contract with a beast.

The beasts first appeared around five hundred years ago pushing humanity nearly to the brink of extinction with humans only pushing them back around 300 years ago with the emergence of beast tamers, with this newfound power humanity pushed back the beasts only to discover that the earth they once knew was gone with it becoming much bigger and with all new lands and new unknown dangers.

No one knew how or why this happen and questioned how it was even possible.

With these lands came new creatures that had a core in them that collected energy but not only that but the animals that were native to earth also mutated and changed to match these new creatures albeit much weaker but still would be a large threat to the average human, but to a tamer that had just signed their first contract they would be nothing more than a bug before them.

No one knew how the contracts work but that with one you can draw part of your partner's power even special traits or abilities if one got powerful enough, eventually it came to be known as realms and stages with contract signing being the weakest and integration being the strongest, but that isn't all there is to it as what also matters is the tier of the creature ranging from untiered to mythical.

Each beast tier was shown when making a contract as a color that the contracted circle had ranging from no color at all to red, with untiered being animals from old earth with some getting up to common tier with the weakest of the new creatures being common tier to the slightly stronger uncommon tier to rare then to hero tier then epic with the last two being legendary and mythical tiers each following the color pattern of the common rainbow.

The more powerful the creature, the lighter the color.

While that was the grading for beasts the humans stages progressed in the following being contract signing, bonding, understanding, imitation, fusion, soul fusing, aspect, then finally integration, from the human side of things one would have to get closer to their partner and understand both them and their traits and abilities to grow more powerful.

Those who didn't put effort or treat their contracted creature right never could get far in this new world an odd justice, but not a gate that kept many out, as every creature had its preferences and personality.

Returning to the back to the small clearing that house his shack, Eric quickly gets down to readying dinner alongside the routine prepping of his new catches of the day to be stored.

He caught two untiered rabbits today overall, a rather fruitful day.

Upon the near completion of his dinner, he was greeted with the two calls of the birds that has been mooching off him for the last couple of months; he greeted them and poured each a small bit of the stew he made and placed them down. Each bird landed and took a couple of quick hops over to their respective bowls and ate.

With a rather unique pair of a snow-white crow and a midnight black raven, both seemed to be blind in one eye each, as the crow was blind in the right and the raven in the left. At this point in the evening, all Eric had to was his basic and daily cleaning and maintenance of his knife and bow, after finishing their meals both of their meals the birds hopped over with the white crow taking a rather keen interest in Eric's knife, the crow from what Eric has seen of it will stop at nothing to grab and take any object it seems shiny enough as it has already stolen enough of his arrowheads.

While trying to shoo the rather motivated crow off his wrist and away from his very shiny hunting knife Eric ended up cutting the upper part of his wrist on the other arm, immediately after the blood started flowing out both birds seemed to be instantly attracted to is they both poked the wound with their beak than plucked and snapped a feather breaking the blood vessel within and covered both their beaks and Eric's wound with it.

Immediately a bright circle opened up under them but the odd thing about it was it didn't seem to stay one color but was more like someone was using a disco ball in the middle of the clearing, after the light died down the first then that Eric could process was a load voice in his head screaming.

"YOU WILL YIELD THAT SHINY YET SHARP THING TO YOUR MASTER THIS INSTANT"