Chương 46: Chapter 45 - Ok Lets Make A Clan

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Ant looked at Kalsar, turning the sentence over in his head, each individual word landing clearly enough while the whole of it refused to add up to anything he could actually believe. Maren's reaction was faster and louder, her mouth actually falling open slightly before she caught herself.

"You're joining a clan," she said, as though testing whether saying it out loud might make it sound less absurd.

"You. The man who moved out here specifically to get away from all of it."

"I did," Kalsar said, entirely unbothered by her tone.

"You told me once — years ago, when I was still a student — that you'd rather train stray dogs than deal with clan politics again. You said it more than once, actually."

"I did say that."

"So what changed?" Kalsar exhaled slowly, the sound of a man deciding how much of an explanation the moment actually deserved, and settled back against the fence post behind him.

"A few things," he said.

"I'll give you all of them, since you're clearly not going to let this go until I do." Maren folded her arms and waited, and Ant found himself doing much the same, some part of him still braced for this to turn out to be a joke that hadn't landed properly yet.

"First," Kalsar said, "the vortex. The one you two just cleared." He looked between them.

"Something was wrong with it. I've been keeping half an eye on that particular site for years — it's close enough to the village that we monitor it, loosely, not constantly, but enough to notice if something changed. It should have been manageable. Routine, even, for something that gets swept on a regular schedule the way that one's supposed to be. What came out of it instead was considerably stronger than anything a properly maintained vortex in that condition should have produced." He shook his head slightly.

"That doesn't happen by accident. Vortices don't get stronger on their own — they get stronger when nobody's doing the work of keeping them weak. Which tells me somebody, somewhere, isn't doing what they're supposed to be doing. And given how thoroughly clans control who gets sent where, and when, that's not an oversight I can just shrug off." Ant hadn't considered that angle at all, too consumed at the time with simply surviving the fight to wonder why it had been harder than it should have been.

Hearing it laid out now, plainly, put a different weight on the whole encounter — less an unlucky escalation and more a symptom of something larger sitting untended.

"Second," Kalsar continued, "and this one's less complicated. I hate the clan system. Not the idea of it — the idea's sound enough, people banding together, looking out for each other, sharing resources and strength so nobody has to face the world entirely alone. That's not what it actually is anymore, though, and hasn't been for longer than either of you have been alive. It's money. It's power.

It's who controls which territories, which contracts, which vortices get cleared and which get quietly left to fester because clearing them isn't profitable enough to bother with." His voice had hardened slightly, old frustration surfacing under careful control.

"Protection was supposed to be the whole point. Somewhere along the way that got buried under everything else, and nobody with the power to fix it has any interest in doing so, because the current arrangement suits them perfectly well." He paused, glancing toward Ant specifically before continuing.

"Third," he said, "the unclanned. There should never be a situation where someone wants to belong somewhere and simply can't, not because they lack ability but because the system decided long before they had any say in it that they didn't qualify. That's not how any of this should work. And I got to thinking — what better way to actually do something about that than to have someone who's lived it start a clan of their own?" He looked directly at Ant now.

"But here's the part that matters most to me. You'll be scorned for it. Other clans will look at an unclanned man building something from nothing and they will not be kind about it — not because you've done anything wrong, but because you're proof their whole justification for excluding people doesn't hold up. I've trained you for weeks now. I'm not about to let a student of mine walk into that particular fire without someone standing beside him who already knows exactly how ugly it can get."

Ant felt something tighten in his throat that he wasn't entirely prepared for, and it took him a moment to realise it wasn't discomfort. It was closer to the opposite. Before he could find the right thing to say, Maren spoke. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"I want to join too." Both Ant and Kalsar turned to look at her. She didn't waver under it, her earlier anger from the phone call apparently burned down into something steadier and more deliberate.

"I don't think staying in my clan helps me the way it used to," she said.

"Research is valuable. I still believe that, genuinely — I didn't spend two years in that lab because I hated it. But my knowledge has grown faster in the last three weeks than it did in the entire time before that, doing things instead of only theorising about them from behind a desk. My clan doesn't seem to have noticed that shift. Or if they have, they've decided it doesn't matter as much as having me exactly where they expect me to be."

She glanced toward the house, toward the phone still sitting wherever she'd left it, the argument still fresh enough to sharpen her voice slightly on the next words.

"A few weeks ago, an idea like this would have been impossible for me to even consider. Leaving. Starting something from nothing, with no guarantee any of it works." She looked back at Ant.

"Now it feels less like a risk and more like the only thing that actually makes sense." Ant looked between the two of them — Kalsar, arms still folded, watching him with the particular patience of someone who already knew what answer was coming and was simply waiting for Ant to arrive at it himself; Maren, steadier than he'd seen her since the phone call, something settled in her expression that hadn't been there even an hour ago.

He thought about the version of this conversation he'd walked into expecting — a clan of one, no money, no name worth anything, nothing to actually build with. That version had felt impossible in exactly the way that made refusing it easy. This version didn't feel impossible anymore. It felt, for the first time since he'd stood in that ruined lab trying to name a creature he barely understood, like something that might actually hold together.

"You're both serious about this," he said, less a question than confirmation he was still trying to fully believe.

"Entirely," Kalsar said. Maren simply nodded, arms still folded, but something had eased in her posture that hadn't been there a minute ago — the look of someone who'd just said something out loud that had been sitting unspoken for longer than she'd probably admit. Ant looked down at Mahkir, curled loosely at his feet, watching the exchange with the same unbothered calm he brought to nearly everything. Well, Mahkir said, catching the shift in him easily. That's one problem solved.

"Only one of several," Ant muttered, but he found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was almost smiling. Ant let the moment settle for a second before the practical side of him caught up with the rest.

"There's a couple of things we need to actually talk through before any of this feels real," he said.

"First — your clan. Are they going to just let you leave? My situation's different. They threw me out, I didn't walk away from them, so there was never really a question of them holding a claim over me once that happened. You're not in that position. You're still theirs, technically, whatever you said to your parents on that phone a few minutes ago." He looked at her carefully.

"Doesn't a clan have some kind of claim over you? Legally, formally, whatever the actual mechanism is. I don't know how that works from the inside, but I doubt it's as simple as deciding you're done and walking out the door." Maren's jaw tightened slightly, but she didn't look away from the question the way he half expected her to.

"And your parents," Ant continued, before she could answer.

"Have you actually thought about this from their side? Not the clan — them, specifically. You said yourself you left a note, that you didn't know if they were even back yet. That's a very different conversation than the one where you tell them you're leaving the clan entirely to join something that doesn't exist yet, built by an unkithered man they've never met, backed by a retired trainer and whatever coin he's willing to put into it."

He wasn't trying to be unkind about it, but the words came out plain regardless, the way things tended to when he was working through a problem rather than performing tact.

"I just want to make sure you've actually sat with that, not just the part where it feels like the right decision in the moment." Maren opened her mouth, then closed it again, something working behind her expression that suggested the question had landed somewhere she hadn't fully explored yet either.

"Second issue," Ant said, before the silence stretched too long, "and this one's mine, not yours. I have no idea how you actually start a clan. Practically, I mean. I'm assuming it's not as simple as standing in the yard and announcing it — 'hi, I'm a clan now' — and that's just the end of it." He glanced at Kalsar.

"There has to be a process. Paperwork, registration, someone official who has to sign off on it. I don't know what any of that looks like, and I'm guessing neither of us has ever had to find out." Kalsar's expression shifted slightly, something almost amused settling into it.

"I know how," he said.

"We take a trip to the main clan hall." Ant looked at him blankly.

"The main clan hall."

"It's where clan leaders and representatives go for bounties, missions, contracts — anywhere real coin changes hands over vortex work. It's also where most of them go to stand around gloating about how successful and powerful they've all become, which is frankly the part I could do without." Kalsar pushed off from the fence post, rolling one shoulder as though already bracing for the walk.

"But for us, it's simpler than that. It's where we register a clan. Fill out the paperwork, pay whatever the fee currently is, get a name entered into the official record. That's genuinely all it takes, mechanically speaking. The hard part isn't the registering. It's everything that comes after." Ant let that settle for a moment, the sheer practicality of it landing somewhere he hadn't expected — he'd half imagined some elaborate ritual, a ceremony, something with more weight to it than a desk and a form.

"Which brings up the obvious question," Kalsar added, looking at him directly now.

"Have you actually considered what you want to call it?"