Outside the unassuming three-story building, a group of five individuals huddled together in the shadows of a nearby alleyway.
Their eyes were glued to the building's entrance, their expressions a mix of anxiety, impatience, and fear.
"I'm telling you, he's dead," muttered a wiry man with a scruffy beard and a perpetual scowl. "It's been an entire day and this whole thing reeked of a trap from the start. Some random beast-tamer offers him power? Yeah, right. They probably lured him in, chopped him up, and fed him to their contracts. Classic beast-tamer move."
Like Darius, this ragtag crew was made up of ordinary people who had spent years honing their skills and plotting revenge against the beast-tamers who had wronged them. Naturally, they all did not have the best impression of beast-tamers.
