Chương 42: Chapter 41 - What Was Left Behind

The screen was still waiting when Ant finally let himself look at it properly, sitting through everything else — Axel's breathing steadying, Kalsar crouched over the first of the old remains — before he gave it the attention it had been asking for since the moment the boss came apart. User: Anthony Byrren User Level: 7 Str: 14 End: 12 Magic: 5 Agi: 16 HP: 60/60 Mana: 40/40 Two levels.

He hadn't even fully processed reaching six before seven had apparently arrived on top of it, the fight's intensity carrying him past a threshold he hadn't seen coming. He read through the changes carefully — Endurance climbing hardest of everything, three points at Level 6 and another three at Level 7, with Strength and Agility filling in the rest more evenly this time. Magic sat exactly where it always had, exactly where it always would without a piece of equipment doing the work his own body couldn't.

Thirteen points total, HP and Mana both climbing by twenty across the two levels combined. Seven levels now, and that one frozen number was still the quiet reminder that not everything about him had changed. He checked Mahkir's screen next. Kithren: Mahkir Level: 6 Evolution Stage: 1 Str: 16 End: 14 Magic: 32 Agi: 28 HP: 50/50 Mana: 90/90 Mahkir had picked up his own stat spread reaching Level 6, same as before, and Ant found himself turning the pattern over almost without meaning to.

Level two to three, a trait instead of stats. Level three to four, a full spread. Level four to five, nothing again — a skill in its place. Level five to six, stats had returned. It had held every single time so far, alternating back and forth with a consistency that felt too deliberate to be coincidence, though he still had no idea what actually governed it. If the pattern kept holding, Level seven would bring something other than numbers again. He filed the thought away to test later and looked up.

You're staring at numbers again, Mahkir said, stretching out along the chamber floor with his tail curling lazily despite the ash still settled in his fur. I could feel it happen, if that helps. Considerably less interesting than watching the numbers change.

"It helps a little," Ant said, and closed the screen before the small, stupid smile pulling at his mouth could turn into something he'd have to explain to anyone. Across the chamber, Kalsar was already elbow-deep in the wreckage, pulling free a corroded breastplate and turning it over with the practiced assessment of someone who'd salvaged more ruins than he'd probably admit to.

Maren had Axel sitting upright now, still groggy but breathing steady, and had clearly decided the best use of her own recovery time was cataloguing everything within reach.

"There's a lot here," she said, crouched over a half-collapsed pack, "and most of it's ruined. Fabric's gone, obviously. Metal's held up better." She lifted a fastening free, turning it in the light.

"This is Cerlan make. Old pattern — I've only seen it in archive illustrations."

"How old?" Ant asked, crossing over to look.

"Older than the vortex should be able to hide, honestly." She frowned at it, setting it aside carefully rather than tossing it onto the growing pile Kalsar was building.

"Whoever this belonged to came down here a very long time before we did." Kalsar grunted from a few feet away, not looking up from the sword he'd just pulled free of its owner's ribcage.

"Vortexes don't keep a calendar. Could be decades. Could be longer, if the residue's been building and clearing in cycles the whole time. No way to know without something that can actually date the metal."

"Later," Kalsar said, when Maren opened her mouth to suggest exactly that.

"Sort what's worth carrying first. We're not staying down here longer than we have to." Ant left them to it and drifted toward the far end of the chamber, where a collapsed shelf had spilled its contents across the stone in a wide, dust-caked scatter. He pulled a piece of leather free from beneath it and shook the worst of the grime away. Appraisal. Leather Armor (Reinforced) — Str +2, Agi +3, End +1. Good stitching. Close-fitting, built for someone who valued moving quietly over standing out.

He held it against himself and it settled close enough to fit under his coat without adding any real bulk. He set it aside to keep. A few feet further, half-buried under the same shelf, sat a pair of boots — the leather darker, the craftsmanship even more deliberate than the armor's. Appraisal. Traveler's Boots — Agi +4, End +2. Skill: Burst Step — A short, controlled burst of speed. Mana Cost: 15. An active skill, built into the boots themselves.

He turned that over with real interest, already picturing what a sudden burst of speed might mean mid-fight — closing a gap, breaking free of a grapple, buying himself the half-second he never seemed to have when it mattered — and pulled them on over his own worn pair without a second thought. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He worked through the rest of the debris nearby out of thoroughness more than expectation, but nothing else called to him the way the first two pieces had. By the time he made his way back toward the others, Kalsar and Maren had nearly finished sorting through the last of the remains, dividing everything into two rough piles — worth carrying, not worth the weight. Maren held something up to the light, turning it slowly.

"What've you got?" Ant asked, wandering over.

"Not sure," she said, still examining it — a ring, plain-looking, the metal dulled but intact.

"No obvious markings. Feels enchanted, maybe, but there's no way to test that without proper equipment." She held it out toward him, more out of habit than expectation.

"This looks nice, at least. Might be worth something even if we can't identify it." Ant glanced at it. Appraisal. Band of Minor Fortitude — End +3.

"Yeah," he said, distracted, already moving past the thought toward whatever else might be worth checking.

"It's got decent stats. End plus three." Silence. He looked up, expecting nothing more than agreement, and found both of them staring at him instead — Maren with the ring still held out, forgotten in her hand, and Kalsar with whatever he'd been sorting dropped entirely back onto the pile.

"How can you tell?" Kalsar asked. His voice was even. Carefully even, in a way that made the question land heavier than the words alone accounted for. Ant's mind raced through every version of a lie he could offer — a lucky guess, a trick of the light, something about the craftsmanship that gave it away — and found all of them thin, transparent, the kind of thing that would only buy him a few more minutes before the question came back harder. Tell them, Mahkir said, quiet and certain in the space behind his ears.

Ant hesitated. You're sure? They've bled for you already. Both of them. Whatever this is between us, it isn't served by you flinching every time it almost shows. A pause, and something almost wry crept into the thought that followed. And it will save considerable time, going forward, if you stop having to invent excuses every time you know something you shouldn't.

Ant looked between them — Maren still holding the ring, her expression caught somewhere between curiosity and concern; Kalsar watching him with the same flat, unreadable focus he brought to everything, waiting. He let out a breath.

"I can see it," he said.

"The stats. What things do. I have — I don't know what to call it, exactly. Not a chip. Something else. It shows me things a normal system would, but it started the moment I bonded with Mahkir, not after." Maren's mouth opened slightly, the ring forgotten entirely now in her hand.

"That's not possible," she said, though the words came out less like a challenge and more like something she needed to say out loud before she could actually consider its opposite.

"Chips take days to calibrate. There's no bond alive that produces immediate—""I know," Ant said.

"I've had five years to read every scrap of theory I could find on why that shouldn't be possible. I still don't have an answer. It just is." Kalsar hadn't moved. His eyes had narrowed slightly, some calculation working behind them that Ant couldn't read.

"You've had this the entire time," he said.

"Since the vortex. Since before it."

"Yes."

"And you said nothing."

"I didn't know how," Ant said, and found, once the words were out, that they were simply true.

"I didn't know if telling anyone made it worse. Made me a target for a different reason than the one I already am." Something in Kalsar's expression shifted — not anger, not quite, but something adjacent to it that took a visible effort to set aside.

"That," he said slowly, "is a conversation we're going to have properly. Not down here." He glanced around the ruined chamber, the bones, the scattered salvage, then back at Ant with something that might have been the beginning of understanding rather than accusation.

"But I'd rather know what I'm actually training than keep guessing at it." They spent another stretch of time working through what remained of the chamber, but nothing else caught Ant's attention the way the boots and armor had. A few more scraps of rusted equipment went onto Kalsar's pile of things not worth carrying.

Maren catalogued what little else showed promise — the ring, a scattering of coin too corroded to spend but perhaps worth melting down, a handful of components she seemed to recognize from whatever research she'd been steeped in back home. Nothing else spoke to Ant the way the first two pieces had.

Once the armor was settled beneath his coat and the boots laced properly over his own worn pair — the ring added almost as an afterthought, slipped onto his finger without much ceremony — he pulled the screen up one final time, curious to see the full picture now that everything was actually equipped. User: Anthony Byrren User Level: 7 Str: 16 End: 18 Magic: 5 Agi: 23 HP: 60/60 Mana: 40/40 He stared at the numbers longer than he meant to.

Endurance in particular had climbed further than anything else — the armor, the boots, and the ring all quietly stacking on top of each other until the number sat well past anything his own body alone could claim credit for. A week ago he'd have laughed at any of these figures belonging to him in the first place, let alone boosted this far by a stray find in the bottom of a collapsed vortex chamber.

He couldn't have said exactly how much of it was equipment and how much was simply him anymore, and something about that not mattering felt like its own small victory. You look pleased with yourself, Mahkir observed, stretched out nearby with the specific boredom of someone who'd been waiting for the humans to finish sorting through garbage. A little, Ant admitted, and didn't bother pretending otherwise.

Kalsar called them together not long after, the last of the salvage divided and packed, the chamber finally stripped of everything worth carrying. The four of them made their way back through the passage the way they'd come, the violet residue long gone from the walls, nothing left of the vortex's presence but ordinary stone and the memory of what had filled it. Nobody spoke much on the walk out.

Ant found himself grateful for that, the quiet giving him space to sit with everything that had happened in the last few hours — the fight, the fear, the eventual argument, and underneath all of it, the conversation that was still waiting, unfinished, for whenever Kalsar decided the time was right to have it properly. He thought about what he'd actually have to explain, once they were somewhere that wasn't a collapsed cave full of bones.

Not just the mechanics of it — the screen, the timing, the way it had arrived without calibration or explanation. All of it tangled together with Mahkir himself, with everything neither of them fully understood about what he actually was. He had no idea where to even begin. The passage opened ahead of them, daylight bleeding in at the edges for the first time in what felt like days, and Ant walked toward it already dreading the conversation waiting on the other side of it.