CHAPTER 1
The Edge of Ordinary
Aiden Raikos always assumed he would die quietly someday, somewhere, without anyone noticing. Maybe it would happen in his sleep, alone in his tiny apartment, or at his desk, hunched over a spreadsheet nobody wanted. He did not expect it to happen on a Tuesday morning on a subway platform, holding a cup of lukewarm coffee with stale cinnamon clinging to his tongue.
The station hummed with the exhausted rhythm of the city. Screens flickered with delay notices while a street musician outside the turnstiles strummed a guitar missing a string. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a pale glow as people pressed near the yellow line on instinct, as if standing closer might make the train arrive sooner.
Aiden stood a little farther back. There was always space around him, the kind that formed naturally when people glanced at someone and never looked twice. He did not mind it. Being overlooked meant fewer conversations and fewer reasons to engage.
He sipped his coffee, grimaced, and checked the time on his cracked phone. It read 7:41 a.m. If the train was on time, which it rarely was, he would slide into work with four minutes to spare. That would be enough to avoid being late and enough to pretend he had not stayed up gaming until two in the morning again.
Rubbing the heel of his palm against his tired eyes, he muttered that he should not have started a new save. It had been a survival RPG filled with crafting loops, monster hunting, and cooking buffs. He liked the repetition. Chopping wood, hunting beasts, cooking meat, enhancing gear. Numbers climbed in clean menus, and effort always turned into progress. In that world, outcomes made sense.
Real life did not offer the same satisfaction. Here, nothing really changed. The same job waited every morning. The same cramped apartment waited every night. The same monthly stress followed him everywhere. The blinking red message light on his answering machine never stopped, and he never checked it. Still, he had a roof over his head, reliable internet, and his games. That had always been enough.
A shrill laugh cut through his thoughts. A small boy stood too close to the edge of the platform, bouncing a battered soccer ball between his hands while humming off-key. His jacket looked too thin for the cold, his cheeks flushed red, and no parent stood nearby. Aiden frowned as he watched him, murmuring a quiet question about where the boy's parents were, though he did not expect an answer and received none.
Train lights bloomed in the tunnel, a white smear growing brighter by the second. The announcement chime crackled overhead and delivered the familiar warning to stand behind the line. The boy stepped closer instead. Aiden felt his chest tighten.
He set his coffee down near his foot, his attention fixed on the child. No one else seemed to notice. People were absorbed in their phones, their conversations, and their schedules. The world continued as if nothing were wrong.
Then the ball slipped.
The moment unraveled absurdly fast. One second the boy was smiling at his reflection in the metal rail. The next, his shoe slid on a dark patch of spilled drink, the ball bounced off the platform edge and clattered onto the tracks, and his arms flailed in a desperate attempt to recover before his body followed. Someone screamed. A woman dropped her coffee, the cup bursting across the floor. The approaching train's screech sharpened into a metallic howl.
Aiden was already moving, his body reacting before thought could intervene. Years of navigating crowded platforms and split-second decisions condensed into something older and faster than intention. He lunged past two commuters, knocking shoulders aside, his foot clipping his abandoned cup and sending it spinning without slowing him at all.
The boy's fingers scraped at the platform edge, eyes wide with terror. Aiden dove forward and grabbed the boy's wrist with both hands, telling him he had him, the words coming out steady even as momentum pulled them both toward the tracks. His knees slammed into the concrete lip, pain flaring up his legs as he pulled with everything he had. The child cleared the edge and flew upward, and a stranger behind Aiden gasped and grabbed the boy, hauling him fully to safety. The child collapsed into the stranger's arms, sobbing.
For a brief moment, Aiden felt weightless, suspended at the platform's edge with nothing beneath him but open air and screaming rails. He had no time to think or curse or feel afraid. He saw the boy's tear-streaked face staring back at him from the stranger's arms, and he gave him a small, quiet smile before gravity finished what momentum had started.
The train struck.
Sound dulled and then vanished. Pain never arrived. There was no drawn-out impact, only a flash of metal and light before everything went still.
Darkness swallowed the station, the screams, and the lingering smell of coffee and oil. Aiden drifted without sensation, unable to feel limbs, breath, or heartbeat. For a moment he wondered if this was shock, if this was simply what dying felt like. Then he realized there was no body left to feel anything with.
A low, resonant hum rolled through the void, deep and distant like thunder beneath the ground. It vibrated through his awareness, ancient and unhurried, and then a translucent screen flickered into existence before him, its pale blue text hovering in the darkness without warmth or ceremony.
[BEASTBINDER SYSTEM]
[Subject: Detected]
[Status: Terminated]
[Soul: Intact]
The screen held for a moment, cold and still, before it shifted. Aiden stared at the words. They resembled system notifications from a game, except there was no monitor and no interface beyond the floating screen itself. He whispered the words back into the dark, subject, terminated, his voice swallowed by the void before the echo could form.
The screen flickered, and a new line appeared as the hum deepened.
[Soul Analysis: In Progress]
[Processing...]
Then it dissolved, taking the light with it.
The sensation that followed was not physical or emotional but precise and clinical, as though something unseen examined him from every possible angle. His memories surfaced under that scrutiny. Late nights spent gaming. Silent mornings. Forgotten birthdays. Long stretches of repetition. Quiet wishes that life might become something more. Then came the boy. The fall. The grip on his wrist. The moment fear stopped mattering.
A new screen appeared before him.
[BEASTBINDER SYSTEM]
[Soul Classification: Unremarkable Human]
[Primary Values: Low Ambition. High Empathy.]
[Notation: Anomaly Detected. Re-evaluating.]
The screen lingered on the last line longer than the others, as if something behind it considered what it had found. Then it faded. Aiden would have laughed if he still had a throat, muttering that it sounded about right.
A voice emerged, layered and calm, neither human nor mechanical. It said that he had died for a life that was not his own, that most souls clung to their final breath filled with regret or anger, and that he had not. Aiden replied that he had simply not wanted the boy to die. Silence followed, heavy and deliberate, before the voice asked whether he truly was ordinary, given that most souls were.
He had spent his entire life feeling like a background character, easily overlooked and easily replaced. He answered that if he were ordinary, the boy would be dead.
A screen dissolved and reformed before him, faster this time, symbols and images flashing too quickly to follow. Beast shapes, fractured worlds, glowing eyes, and threads of lightning collapsed together and then narrowed into a single result.
[BEASTBINDER SYSTEM]
[Compatibility Assessment: Complete]
[Result: 97%]
[Designation: Beastbinder]
The screen held just long enough for the word to settle into something real, and then it was gone. Aiden asked what he was compatible with, and recognition struck like a familiar echo of menus and progression paths. The voice said that he understood systems. He replied that he played games, that it was not the same thing. The voice answered that it was sufficient.
A screen returned, quieter this time, its text appearing line by line as if each word were being committed to rather than simply displayed.
[BEASTBINDER SYSTEM]
[Prior Candidates Reviewed: 2,847]
[Successful Bonds Formed: 0]
[New Candidate: Identified]
[Reason: Acted without hesitation. Expected no reward.]
[Status: Approved to Proceed]
The screen dissolved. Aiden asked what he would be proceeding to, and the voice gave him a single word in return. What followed.
The system screen condensed into a single point of light and began rebinding his soul core, energy surging through the void and pulling at his existence, reshaping it at a level he had no language for. He demanded to know where he was being sent. The voice told him that one question remained. A final screen appeared before him, smaller than the others, its text simple and unadorned.
[Do you wish to continue?]
[Yes / No]
The light intensified around it.
Aiden thought of the boy's face, the terror in it and then the relief, and he knew he was not ready to disappear into whatever the dark wanted to make of him. He answered yes.
[Response Accepted.]
[Initializing Beastbinder System.]
[Binding Soul Core.]
[Transferring...]
The screen shattered into light and was gone, and white swallowed everything.
Beastbinder Book 1 is fully complete and releases on Amazon (ebook + paperback) on May 30th.
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> Thank you for reading more chapters are coming during the pre‑release countdown.