In the middle of a strangely barren forest, a handsome young man with golden brown features slowly came to.
He at first looked around in confusion. This place looked familiar, but everything looked like it grew a few tens of meters.
'Strange' He thought, 'If I remember correctly then this should be my forest, but everything looks so…. Tall.'
He tried to stretch his trunk out to grab onto a tree to see just what was going on, but was shocked to see that he didn't have a trunk, nor his magestic tusks, his field of view wasn't even covered in his golden flames like before.
In horror he looked down to see the well shaped body of a young human male and almost fainted from shock.
AHHHHHH!
'Focus, you need to focus. This has to be some sort of nightmare.' He tried to recall what happened to him to lose his memory and transform into a human.
'I remember now, some ignorant bastard was trying to challenge me so I went to deal with it. And after… after.' He was completely lost as to everything that happened past leaving his nest that day. He tried to remember a few more times but every time he did he would get a headache that was progressively getting worse.
'Maybe I ate him and got into a food coma. Yeah, that's right. That bastard must have gotten eaten by me, which should be enough to push me into transformation.' He conveniently overlooked the fact that besides being almost barren, there was no sign of any combat in the forest.
There wasn't even any blood that should have been there, his mouth in his beast form wasn't big enough to completely devour his enemy based on his predictions at the time. If he truly ate whatever it was then there should have been evidence of some sort.
But that didn't matter to him, he was too busy trying to form some kind of explanation in his head. He had tried for hundreds of years to suppress himself in the peak of the saint tier because transformation would mean that he would be reset back to the practitioner tier.
With how oppressively he ruled over the forest, that kind of glaring weakness isn't something that he could afford. There were more than just a few beasts that while not the most intelligent, they were more than capable of keeping grudges.
What once was an attempt to gain control over the forest out of fear of being replaced and an even greater fear of actually leaving to see the wider world and continue to cultivate his strength, turned out to come back around and bite his ass when he transformed unprepared.
'No problem, those mindless beasts should have been scared away from my aura alone. And while that bastard hadn't broken through to the saint tier yet, his aura was unstable and should have scared them away even more.'
He got up and dusted off his naked body, looking around to orient himself. 'All I have to do is get to my nest before they notice that something is up, though that might be difficult with these two skinny legs.'
He started to walk over to where he nested, thinking to himself. 'Even if it was an intense battle, there should still be some plants alive. I would investigate further but I don't have the luxury of time.', before he was interrupted by a shuffling behind him.
He turned around slowly to see a wolf that, while smaller than he was in his beast form, was towering over him now.
Be broke out in a cold sweat and was practically stuck in place, he had never been in a situation like this before and didn't know how to deal with it. When he stumbled across this forest before making it his home, he was already at the saint tier from just growing up and was strong enough to easily overpower all of the beasts that he met.
Before that he somehow managed to not encounter any other beast that was stronger than him, not even on par with him, so he had no real experience standing face to face with the truly powerful.
To make it even worse he was a coward beyond belief, so his heart practically stopped and his brain switched off for a few seconds when his life was legitimately in danger for the first time in his long life.
But that was only for a short while. Even though he was a coward, he still had the internal desire of every living thing to survive.
He quickly turned around and bolted off in the other direction. While not as fast as one should be at his level on account of him not being familiar with his new body, he was still faster than a normal human even after the calamity and reached a whopping 100 mph, almost tripping over with every step.
But the giant wolf on the other hand was not only in a higher tier than him, it was also in the body it was born with so it could easily catch up even though it looked to be strolling around.
It could easily catch up and kill him in a second, but it clearly wanted him to suffer as much as possible before finally eating him. There was an evil look on its face as it sought vengeance on its lifelong oppressor.
He might have changed form but his life signature, aura and scent were the same if not a little weaker, so while the wolf wasn't sure exactly what was going on as to why the giant elephant was now so small and strange looking, it wasn't going to miss this chance.
It chased him for a few hours before he tripped over his own foot and fell over. Seeing this the wolf knew that the fun was up and made his move.
"Honestly I am impressed, I didn't think you would have lasted so long. I would have bet that you'd have fallen over the moment you got up."
The golden flame war elephant turned his head over to the side as he saw a flaming palm shoot over and land on this wolf's head, squashing it to bits and burning the rest.
He didn't know why but seeing this palm gave him a very unpleasant headache.
Jumping from a tree in the distance, a young black man easily covered the distance of over 100 meters and appeared in front of him.
His curly hair was long and messy, reaching his shoulders, and he was devilishly handsome. Even he, a straight male elephant in all ways except physical, couldn't help but blush and nervously look away.
He was dressed in nothing but a pair of severely ripped leather pants, leading to his entire upper body being exposed. If the war elephant in human form had a well built athletic body, then this man had the body of a bulky superhero chiseled from stone that somehow didn't look excessive.
This young mana was naturally Ray and he had just come back from clearing the center of the forest.
"Though I didn't think that you would be attacked so soon. I couldn't even sense that wolf when I was passing over so you are lucky that I was coming back now. Otherwise…"
While Ray had taken the initiative to force the golden flame war elephant into a contract because neither its heart blood nor flesh would be of any benefit to him, that didn't mean that he valued it.
It was a coward that basically crippled himself out of fear, that's not the type of people he wanted to have around.
He himself feared death but the only way to guarantee its hold over you is weakness.
Nevertheless it was a saint tier before he came along so there was knowledge that it had that he wanted. He could have always read his soul, but he didn't want to make a habit out of that, especially since it couldn't lie to him in any way.
His contract with it was a bit more authoritarian than the one he had with Laura and her kids. She was more or less his equal except in a few ways and her children on the level of his own children, if he had any, but the elephant was more of a slave than anything else.
'That being said I wonder how she is doing, I don't know much but I doubt that she is still feeding them. It's almost been an entire day. Guess I'll check up on her when I am done here.'
"Listen here elephant boy, I'm gonna ask you a few questions and you are gonna answer them. No if's and's or but's."