Chương 32: Chapter 31 - Instructor Kalsar

"You should make him walk, you know." Maren said it without looking away from the road ahead, though her eyes cut sideways toward the lump in Ant's coat with the particular pointedness of someone repeating themselves on purpose. It was the second time since they'd set off that morning she'd broached the subject, apparently convinced Mahkir was missing some valuable training opportunity by refusing to use his own legs for anything longer than a fight.

Mahkir opened one eye long enough to look at her with something that managed to convey both contempt and genuine pity, then buried himself deeper into the fabric, tail curling tight, as if wishing the pair of them luck with whatever foolishness they intended to get up to without him watching.

"He's not going to walk," Ant said.

"He's decided the coat is his now. I stopped fighting it around the time he set your lab on fire."

"He could build endurance."

"He could," Ant agreed.

"He won't." Maren made a small, frustrated sound and let it drop, for now, though Ant suspected it would resurface again before the day was finished. She'd been that way most of the morning — persistent in small, specific ways, circling back to ideas she'd already raised as though repetition alone might eventually change the outcome. Nothing was ever fully settled with her until she'd tried it from at least three different angles.

They'd left before proper daylight, Maren moving through her own house with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd clearly stayed up most of the night sorting supplies rather than sleeping. A pack for each of them. Food that would keep. Water, and a change of clothes for Ant that fit close enough not to be a problem.

She'd tracked down an approximate location for her old instructor through channels she hadn't fully explained — contacts within the clan's records that could apparently trace someone even after he'd gone to considerable effort to disappear.

"He's not hiding, exactly," she'd said, over breakfast eaten standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down felt like it would take too long.

"But he's made it clear he doesn't want to be found casually. Whatever address he's settled on, it's not registered anywhere obvious." The trail led them here — to a village that didn't appear on any map worth consulting, seven miles beyond the edge of the town Maren called home.

The road grew progressively less maintained the further they walked, and by the time the first buildings came into view it had degraded into something closer to a suggestion than an actual path, rutted and uneven, clearly used by very few people who had very little reason to hurry. The village itself made the district Ant had grown up in look almost welcoming by comparison.

Buildings leaned into each other in the particular way of structures that had given up on maintenance decades ago, the wood grey and weathered, the only visible signs of habitation a handful of chimneys and washing strung between houses that looked otherwise abandoned. Nobody came out to greet them. Nobody, as far as Ant could tell, was even watching them arrive — though he had the distinct impression that had less to do with nobody noticing and more to do with nobody caring enough to make it obvious.

Maren slowed as they entered, something uncertain crossing her face for the first time since they'd left the house.

"This is considerably less welcoming than I expected," she said quietly, as though raising her voice might attract attention she didn't want. Ant felt something unexpected settle into place instead — not comfort exactly, but a kind of recognition. He'd spent five years in places exactly like this. Nobody asking questions because nobody wanted questions asked back. Nobody offering help because help implied a debt nobody here could afford to owe. It wasn't friendly.

It was, in its own way, honest, and something in his chest loosened slightly at the familiarity of it, the way muscles loosen when they finally recognise a movement they've made a thousand times.

"You get used to it," he said.

"Is that meant to be reassuring?"

"Not particularly." An old man passed them on the narrow street without so much as a glance in their direction, moving with the unhurried indifference of someone who'd seen a thousand strangers pass through and expected a thousand more, none of them worth remembering. Further down, a woman pulled her door shut the moment she caught them looking her way, the message clear without a single word needing to be spoken. Keep your nose out of my business.

It seemed to be the village's universal greeting, understood by everyone without ever needing to be said aloud.

"So where is he," Ant said, keeping his voice low, scanning a row of identical grey buildings without much hope of finding anything useful in any of them.

"I don't know." Maren's admission came out flatter than he expected, none of her usual confidence behind it.

"It all looks the same to me. I don't have anything to go on beyond the general area." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Ant felt his patience thin, frustration surfacing before he could stop it.

"So we walked seven miles on a hunch with no actual plan for what happens once we got here."

"I didn't say that."

"You said you don't know where he is."

"I said I don't know yet." Enough edge came through that he decided, wisely, not to push it further — though the muttering continued anyway, mostly under his breath, something about bringing a research expert along only to watch her fail at the first real test. He kept looking anyway. There wasn't another option.

They moved slowly through the streets for the better part of ten minutes, Maren studying each house with a focused attention he recognised from the lab — not aimless searching, but a specific, trained way of looking that filtered for details he wouldn't have known to check. He watched doors and windows for anything that suggested activity. She was watching something else entirely, and he couldn't have said what until she stopped abruptly outside a house no more remarkable than any of the others.

"There," she said. He followed her gaze and found nothing obviously worth the word. A small yard, mostly dirt, nothing cared for the way the neat woodpile two streets back had been. Just a scattering of what looked like scrap — wooden posts sunk into the ground at odd angles, the remains of something that might once have been a target frame, coils of frayed rope looped over a low fence rail.

"What am I looking at."

"Training equipment." She was already moving toward the fence, urgency in her pace now.

"Old. Homemade, most of it — not anything you'd buy from a proper outfitter, but genuine. Posts set for striking drills. That frame's for reaction speed. The rope's grip conditioning." She gestured at the assembly like someone recognising a language most people couldn't read.

"Nobody sets this up unless they actually know what each piece does. Everyone uses duelling constructs and simulation software now — this is considered outdated. Unless you trained the old way, before any of that existed, and never saw a reason to change." It wasn't much. A handful of worn objects in an unremarkable yard, nothing that confirmed anything beyond the vague possibility that whoever lived here understood combat training in a specific, old-fashioned way.

But it was more than they'd had a minute ago, and Maren was already moving toward the door with the fixed determination of someone who'd decided this was the lead she was taking, thin as it was. Ant followed, glancing once at the silent street behind them, entirely unsuited to the kind of casual door-knocking that might work anywhere else. Whatever came next, there wasn't a version of this village where doing it quietly was an option. Maren knocked.

"Get lost," came the response — immediate, without hesitation, in a voice carrying the particular gravel of someone who'd spent decades shouting instructions across training grounds and never fully lost the habit. Whatever doubt Maren had been carrying evaporated on the spot. Something lit in her expression, sharp and delighted, entirely at odds with the words just thrown at them through a closed door.

"It's him," she said, turning to Ant with something close to triumph.

"I'd know that voice anywhere. Nobody else says get lost with that much conviction." She knocked again, more deliberately this time.

"Instructor Kalsar," she called through the door, "it's Maren. I — no. We need your help." The correction came out almost before she'd registered making it, the shift from I to we small but immediate. Ant noticed it land the way small things sometimes did, more clearly than she probably intended. Silence answered. A longer one than the first refusal had taken, as though the name itself had bought them something the knocking alone hadn't.

Then came the sound of movement — not quiet, not careful, more like something large deciding whatever furniture stood between it and the door was simply an obstacle to be dealt with rather than navigated around. A heavy thud, a scrape, another thud closer still, the floorboards themselves seeming to register each footstep before the door itself finally answered it.

Something clattered — a chair, maybe, knocked aside without apparent concern for whether it survived the encounter — and Ant found himself bracing without quite meaning to, the way you braced for weather rather than for a person. The door opened. Ant took a step back without deciding to. The man standing in the frame was, without exaggeration, the largest human being Ant had ever seen in his life.

He filled the doorway completely, shoulders wide enough that he'd likely had to turn sideways just to fit through it, forearms thick with the kind of muscle that came from decades of use rather than any deliberate effort to look imposing. His hands alone looked capable of ending an argument before it had properly started.

Ant was fairly certain that if this man ever stood in front of a crowd, he'd block out the sun for everyone behind him without even trying, and some old, deeply ingrained instinct in him — the one built by five years of learning exactly which strangers deserved caution — was already screaming that this was a person worth taking very seriously indeed. It took a moment for the sheer scale of him to settle enough that Ant could actually look at his face. He was old.

Properly old — deep lines carved into skin that had clearly spent a lifetime outdoors, a weathered quality no amount of size could disguise, grey hair cropped close to a skull that looked like it had absorbed more blows than it had any right to survive. A beard, more grey than dark, had clearly given up being anything other than functional decades ago. There was a scar along one side of his jaw, old and pale, the kind that only came from something that had genuinely tried to kill him and failed.

None of it softened the impression he gave. If anything the age sharpened it. This was a man who had earned every one of those years the hard way, and he carried an aura that suggested speaking without being invited to was an excellent way to find out how quickly your face could rearrange itself.

"I thought I got rid of kids like you when I left the academy," he said, in a voice as deep and gravelled as the one that had come through the door, aimed at Maren though his eyes stayed fixed pointedly on Ant the whole time.

"What do you want. And why have you interrupted my peaceful retirement." Beside him, Maren hadn't said anything yet. Ant glanced over and caught something raw crossing her face before she managed to smooth it back into something more composed — the specific, unguarded look of someone seeing a person they hadn't realised they'd missed until the missing was suddenly standing right in front of them. Whatever she'd been expecting from this reunion, it seemed the reality of it had caught her slightly off balance.