Chương 34: Chapter 33 - We Start Now

The room Kalsar had shown him to was small and plain, a single narrow bed against one wall and little else, the kind of space clearly kept for exactly this purpose rather than anything resembling a guest room. Ant sat on the edge of it with Mahkir laid carefully across a folded blanket beside him, watching the slow rise and fall of his small chest and trying not to let the waiting stretch into something worse.

He'd checked the wound twice already, the herbs Kalsar had provided already doing whatever they were supposed to do, though nothing about watching a Kithren breathe unconscious made the waiting feel any shorter. He kept replaying the fight in his head — the two clean deflections that had almost worked, the moment everything had gone wrong, the specific instant Mahkir had chosen fury over caution and paid for it in full. He'd been useless the entire time.

Shouting instructions that landed nowhere, watching something he was supposed to protect get thrown across a garden twice, and doing nothing more useful than catching him afterward. He checked the number too, somewhere in the middle of the waiting. Mahkir. HP: 15/30. Half, and climbing, and that was the only piece of the whole evening that felt like it was actually moving in the right direction.

He checked it again later, unable to leave it alone, and got 27/30 back — close enough to whole that some of the tightness in his own chest finally let go along with it. It felt like a very long time before Mahkir's eyes finally flickered open, slow and unfocused, the way someone surfaced from a daze rather than ordinary sleep.

"I—" Mahkir started.

"It's my fault," Ant said, before he could finish, the words already there and waiting, pressing to get out.

"I didn't think. I was so focused on getting through the round that I never treated it like an actual fight. I didn't even use Appraisal. Didn't check his level, his type, anything. I just told you to survive and left you to work out everything else on your own." He pressed his palms against his eyes for a moment, the exhaustion and the guilt tangled together into something he couldn't easily separate.

"That was completely stupid. I'm sorry." Mahkir looked at him for a long moment, something working behind the amber eyes that seemed, briefly, like it wanted to become words and then didn't.

"It seems," he said finally, "we both need to improve on that front." Ant let out a breath that was almost a laugh, though nothing about it felt funny.

"Maren said he was one of the best. Said the odds of him agreeing to train us were low to near impossible." He shook his head slightly.

"I still thought, when he actually saw you fight, he'd want to help anyway. I don't know why. Stupid, probably."

"Screw him," Ant said, with more heat than he expected to still have left in him.

"Since when have I ever relied on anyone else. I'll train with you, Mahkir. We'll work this out together, and we start now, if you've recovered enough to stand." He pushed himself upright, some of the exhaustion burning off under the sudden decisiveness.

"There's no reason to let all that equipment in the garden go to waste." Mahkir tested his legs before either of them moved for the door, planting all four paws slowly, deliberately, the way a man checks a bridge for weight before trusting it with his own. They held. His shoulders eased at that, though he straightened fast, covering it, settling into something closer to his usual bearing before Ant could say anything about it.

"You're still recovering," Ant said.

"We can wait until morning."

"I can walk to a garden," Mahkir said, already moving toward the door.

"I am not so fragile as that." They went out together, quiet, Ant carrying Soul Render loosely at his side, uncertain what any of it was actually for. He stood at the edge of the yard and looked at the scattered posts and frames and coiled rope with the specific helplessness of someone facing a puzzle with no instructions, the evening air cool against skin still damp from earlier exertion, the fight already sitting in his memory like something that had happened days ago rather than hours.

A row of practice dummies stood along the far fence, stuffed and battered, one missing an arm entirely. Beyond them, a target frame hung between two posts, its swinging beams motionless in the still evening air, waiting.

"I have absolutely no idea how any of this is supposed to work," he admitted. He walked the perimeter slowly, studying each piece the way he studied everything unfamiliar — carefully, methodically, looking for a shape that made sense. His eyes settled on a wooden structure strung with swaying beams suspended on long lengths of rope, arranged in a rough corridor.

"That looks like a gauntlet," he said, half to himself.

"Something to run through. Dodge the beams, keep moving." He pulled up his own status without quite thinking about it, checking his current agility against Mahkir's, turning the comparison over.

"We could use that. Build agility. Both of us."

"We," Mahkir repeated, something dry in the single word. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"Yes, we." Ant looked at him properly.

"You said it yourself, back in the lab. One half of the bond can't keep dragging the other down. If you're running drills, I'm running drills. Same as you." Mahkir didn't argue the point further, which Ant took as agreement. They spent the next four hours working through every piece of equipment in that yard, inventing rules for structures that had probably never been intended for the purposes they put them to.

The swinging beams turned into exactly the gauntlet Ant had guessed, and it took him the better part of twenty minutes just to get through it without a beam catching him somewhere painful, Mahkir weaving through the same structure at a fraction of the effort and looking faintly amused every time Ant stumbled.

The target frame became something else entirely once Ant worked out that Soul Render responded better to short controlled strikes than the wild swings he'd been attempting since the day he'd first picked it up — he ran drill after drill against the worn wood, adjusting his grip, adjusting his stance, correcting the same mistake a dozen times before something about it finally began to feel less like flailing and more like technique.

The frayed rope, once he understood what it was actually for, became a test of grip and endurance that left his forearms burning within minutes. Mahkir ran his own version of all of it in parallel — testing his speed against the swinging beams at increasing difficulty, forcing controlled bursts of Flame Breath at reduced power against the target frame to build precision rather than raw output, working through movement patterns Ant couldn't follow but that clearly meant something specific to him.

Neither of them had any real reference for correct. It didn't matter. Something about doing it together — both of them exhausted, both of them figuring it out by trial and increasingly sloppy error — made the absence of proper instruction feel less like a failure and more like a starting point, the first thing either of them had actually chosen to build rather than simply survive. By the end of it they'd both collapsed onto the packed dirt, soaked with sweat, breathing hard.

Ant checked his screen with what little focus he had left. User: Anthony Byrren User Level: 4 Str: 9 End: 5 Magic: 5 Agi: 12 HP: 30/30 Mana: 15/15 One point of agility, gained from the running and the dodging. One point of endurance, probably from the walking he'd already been doing over the last few days stacked on top of today's efforts. He stared at the numbers with a frustration that had nowhere useful to go. It felt small.

After four hours of genuinely trying, of pushing through exhaustion and inventing an entire training regimen from nothing, one point each felt like an insult to the effort. He checked Mahkir's screen next, some part of him half expecting to see the same modest gain reflected there. Kithren: Mahkir Level: 3 Evolution Stage: 1 Str: 12 End: 10 Magic: 20 Agi: 18 HP: 30/30 Mana: 50/50 Nothing had moved.

Not a single figure, despite four hours of drills that should have counted for something, despite Mahkir clearly working himself as hard as Ant had. He thought about Mahkir's numbers again, sitting there exactly as they'd sat before — figures that had arrived seemingly by accident, gifted rather than earned, apparently already so far beyond what training could add to that four hours of genuine effort hadn't moved them by a single point. It wasn't fair.

He knew that wasn't a useful thought, knew fairness had nothing to do with any of this, but it sat there anyway, heavy and unwelcome, refusing to be reasoned away just because he recognised it for what it was.

"You need to rest," Mahkir said, watching him with a concern he wasn't bothering to hide beneath the usual dry composure.

"It does neither of us any good if you empty yourself out completely. What if something finds us tonight and we need to fight. You need to preserve something." Ant was too tired to argue. He pushed himself upright and held his arms out, expecting Mahkir to climb into them the way he usually did. Mahkir shook his head instead, and walked. He fell into step beside Ant's legs, small and steady, making his own way back toward the house under his own power for the first time since Ant had known him.

There was nothing dramatic in it, no announcement, no acknowledgment that it meant anything at all — just Mahkir walking, deliberately, on legs that had been thrown across a garden twice that same afternoon, matching Ant's exhausted pace step for step rather than asking to be carried. Ant let him. He was too tired himself to question it properly, though he registered the choice as significant anyway, filed away for later consideration once his body wasn't quite so thoroughly wrung out.

The two of them crossed the yard together in the fading light, neither speaking, and for the first time all day the silence between them didn't feel like failure. It felt like the start of something they were actually building on purpose. As Ant reached for the door handle, it opened before his hand found it. Kalsar's enormous frame filled the doorway, arms folded, expression unreadable in the low evening light.

For a moment neither of them said anything, and Ant braced himself for another version of the rejection from earlier, some final confirmation that whatever they'd just spent four hours building had been for nothing.

"Get some rest," Kalsar said instead, curiosity threading through the gruffness of his voice that hadn't been there earlier, the flat finality from earlier gone out of it entirely.

"Training begins tomorrow. I'll show you how that equipment is actually supposed to be used." Ant blinked, too exhausted to properly process the change in him, certain for a moment he'd misheard. Kalsar didn't answer directly.

He simply stepped past them, moving toward the tree house at the back of the yard with the unhurried gait of a man who'd already made up his mind about something and saw no reason to explain himself to anyone, least of all two strangers who'd shown up uninvited and then had the nerve to keep training after he'd already said no.

"He was watching," Ant said quietly, mostly to Mahkir, still too exhausted to fully process the reversal. After everything Kalsar had said about arrogance, about it being something no amount of training could fix — this was the last thing Ant had expected to hear from him.

Ant stood in the doorway and watched Kalsar's retreating shape cross the yard, Mahkir settled quiet against his leg, and felt the tightness in his own chest finally loosen — the first real ease he'd felt since the fight had gone wrong, cautious and small but unmistakably there.