Chương 20: Chapter 19 - Traits

The screen arrived before he'd finished catching his breath. [Mahkir has defeated a Level 5 Kithren — Hawk. Experience gained: 200.] [Ant — Experience gained: 200.] [Mahkir has defeated a Level 5 Kithren — Starling. Experience gained: 180.] [Ant — Experience gained: 180.] [Congratulations — you are now Level 4.] [Congratulations — your Kithren is now Level 3.] Ant blinked at the numbers, the ringing in his ears finally fading into something quieter, and pulled the full screen up almost before he'd finished reading them. [User: Anthony Byrren] [Kithren: Mahkir] [User Level: 4] [Evolution Stage: 1] [Str: 9] [End: 6] [Magic: 5] [Agi: 12] [HP: 40/40] [Mana: 25/25] He ran the numbers against what he remembered from the cave. Endurance had climbed from four to six. Agility from eleven to twelve.

HP and mana had both jumped by ten apiece, a full level's growth landing in a single afternoon on top of a body that had spent five years barely scraping by on whatever it was given. He felt it more than he could point to it — steadier on his feet than he had any right to feel after everything the last hour had put him through, his balance sitting a half-inch lower than it used to, harder to knock over than he remembered being that morning.

The ache from the fight was still there, real enough, but underneath it sat something new: a sense that he had considerably further to go before it caught up with him. He checked the equipment tab, curious whether Soul Render had drawn on anything of its own during the fire the way it seemed to draw on his mana whenever he channeled through it. [Equipment — Soul Render equipped.] [Str +1, Agi +1, Magic +5.] No new figure logged beneath it. Nothing pulled from his own fifteen-point pool.

Whatever had fed that fire, it hadn't come from him at all — the sword had simply sat there humming, taking credit for a blaze it had no actual hand in.

"You didn't even use it," he said, mostly to himself.

"The sword. That fire was all you." Obviously. Mahkir sounded faintly offended by the implication he'd needed the help. It just likes standing near me. Can't blame it. Then, below the attributes, a line he hadn't seen before. [Your bond with your Kithren has deepened. You have learned a new User Skill — Emotional Control.] He went cold at the timing of it before he'd even opened the description.

He thought of himself on his knees minutes earlier, the tears hot and humiliating and entirely outside his own say-so, and wondered, with a flicker of something close to resentment, whether the system had been watching that too — whether it had looked at the worst moment of his week and decided the fix was a tool for switching it off. He pulled the description up before the thought could settle any further. [Emotional Control — The Kithren can read the emotional state of the User. In times of significant need, User and Kithren may share attributes to increase mutual potential. Low chance of success.] He read it twice. Not suppression. Not the system telling him his own reactions were a problem to be managed. Mahkir, some deepened thread of whatever ran between them, sensing what he felt and — in moments desperate enough — doing something about it. He thought about the tears again, and about what had happened less than a minute after them. Mahkir stepping between him and the ground.

The fight that followed.

"Did that trigger it?" he asked.

"Just now. Me, on my knees." Maybe. Mahkir didn't sound especially bothered by the question. Or it was always coming and you happened to be crying when it landed. Ask the system. I just work here.

"Helpful." I try.

"Can you make it happen again? On purpose, I mean. Not — not the crying part. The sharing part." Low chance of success. It said so itself. I'm not going to hand you my strength every time you stub a toe. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"I wasn't asking for every time." Good. Because the answer's still no. It works when it needs to. That's the whole point of it working at all.

"That's a very convenient rule for you to be the one enforcing." Somebody has to. You'd give it away for free if I let you. He let it go, unresolved, and moved on because the next line demanded more attention than the last one had given him room for. [Your Kithren has learned a new Trait.] A trait. He turned the word over and came up with nothing — no fragment of conversation overheard in the district, no half-remembered scrap from a world that had never once paid him any real attention.

He pulled up the Kithren tab and found the layout had changed slightly, a new box sitting below the skill slots, smaller, set apart from the rest. Trait [New Trait — When facing two or more enemies simultaneously, User and Kithren receive a 5% boost to all stats.] It made a certain sense once he sat with it. Two against one, both boys working real coordination, and Mahkir had spent the whole exchange doing considerably more than surviving.

"Two hundred for the hawk. A hundred and eighty for the starling." He said it out loud, turning the discrepancy over.

"They looked about even to me." The hawk hit harder. Mahkir didn't open his eyes to say it. Barely. Enough for the system to notice, apparently, even if you didn't.

"I noticed plenty." You noticed it from the ground, mostly. He didn't have a comeback for that one.

"Does the five percent hit me too, or just you?" Ask your own screen. I'm a Kithren, not a librarian. He pulled the trait description up again and read it a third time. It said User and Kithren both, plain enough once he actually looked instead of arguing with Mahkir about it, and he set the question aside with everything else he didn't fully understand yet — a list getting steadily longer with every week that passed — and became aware, gradually, of his own body.

The adrenaline was draining fast now, leaving an ache that seemed to be everywhere at once — his forearm where the hawk had opened it, the older wound running alongside it, his knuckles from an earlier fall, the side of his head where the punch had landed and was still making itself known in a low, steady throb. He pressed two fingers to his temple and winced. Small stuff, most of it, nothing that needed a number attached — a thin skim off whatever HP he had left, hardly worth stopping to check.

Nothing close to what the punch itself had taken out of him. He was still standing. That counted for something, even with the small ledger of damage adding up underneath his coat. He rolled his shoulder experimentally and regretted it, then looked back at the scorched ground one more time, half-convinced the smell of it — feathers and hot dust, catching low in his throat — would follow him the rest of the way home whether he wanted it to or not.

He was turning the trait over yet again, wondering whether the bonus reached him too or stopped at Mahkir, when he noticed someone approaching. He nearly called Mahkir back out on reflex — some instinct that said a red-furred housecat standing openly at his side would explain less than it complicated. He decided against it. Whoever this was had already seen the fire. The girl he'd seen earlier, the one with the ape Kithren, had stopped walking away and started walking toward him instead.

Her hands came up as she closed the distance, palms out, the small universal gesture of someone announcing they weren't a threat before they were close enough to be mistaken for one.

"I mean no harm," she called, still several paces off, pitching her voice to carry without shouting. Ant straightened as best his body allowed, one hand still loosely around Soul Render, and took stock of her as she came. His first thought, absurdly, was that she was walking too openly for someone approaching a stranger who'd just set two Kithren on fire — no hedging, no circling wide the way most people would. Early twenties, maybe.

Pale purple hair pulled back from her face in a way that looked practical rather than decorative. Simple white top under fitted brown leather armor, good quality without being showy, built for use. Whoever she was, money wasn't the constant question mark it had been over everyone he'd grown up around. Her Kithren padded alongside her on a loose lead — four arms, broad shoulders, dark fur, the lazy, rolling gait of something built more for carrying than for speed.

It watched Ant with an expression that read more curious than wary. The colors were what placed her. Deep blue worked through the trim of her armor, pale gold along the seams, understated rather than announced across her chest the way the academy boys wore theirs. Cerlan. The clan that had built the chip system — the readers, the calibration process, the entire manufactured backbone every bonded person in the city relied on to know their own numbers.

He'd read about them the way he'd read about everything, secondhand and years out of date, scraps picked up off market talk and the backs of pamphlets nobody else wanted. Nothing in any of it had told him what one of them looked like walking toward him on an empty path with her hands raised. Wealthy, then, in the way that mattered. Connected in ways that would matter more. Silverwing had run on rank and blood and old battlefield records — a clan you fought your way up through, generation after generation.

Cerlan, from everything he'd ever pieced together, ran on something closer to knowledge. Labs instead of arenas. Contracts and calibration instead of trophies. Two clans that couldn't have looked more different, and yet here she was, standing on the same ordinary stretch of path he'd been thrown onto, curious about him for reasons that had nothing to do with rank at all. She smells like ink, Mahkir offered, muffled and entirely unconcerned, from somewhere against his ribs. And something bitter. Metal, maybe.

"Helpful as always." I try. His stomach didn't drop so much as clench, the rest of the thought catching up a beat late. If this clan had built the chips, she'd know exactly what a normal system screen should and shouldn't do, exactly how wrong his would read the moment she got close enough to look. The ape Kithren's stride hitched, just barely, as the pair closed the last of the distance — one half-step of hesitation, its gaze cutting toward the coat rather than Ant's face.

It settled again almost immediately, falling back into its slow, careless pace beside her, but he'd seen it. Whatever the boys' birds had sensed in Mahkir, this one had caught a trace of it too, even through wool and buttoned fabric. It knows I'm here, Mahkir said, low and almost lazy about it. Smart animal. Tell it I'm not in the mood.

"I mean no harm," she'd said. He believed the words. He didn't believe they made him safe. He kept his guard up anyway, too tired to soften it. He didn't have much choice about talking to her — she was already here, already curious, and there wasn't a version of the next few minutes where he simply walked off in front of a Cerlan with a Kithren twice Mahkir's visible size.

She stopped a comfortable distance away, hands lowering now that she'd made her point, her eyes flicking once to the scorched ground before coming back to him.

"That was impressive," she said. Ant looked at her properly for the first time and said nothing, because he genuinely didn't know yet what she wanted, or how much she'd seen, or where any of this was about to go.