Chương 125: Chapter 124 – A Reasonable Sort of Man

The intake door opened for them a little past noon, a woman filling the frame with a clipboard tucked under one arm and the flat, worn-down tiredness of someone who'd already said the same six sentences to four different pairs of strangers that morning.

"Ethan and Beth, of Ashholt?" she asked, not looking up from the board.

"That's us," Rebekah said, already on her feet, dragging Ant up by momentum more than intention. The woman led them through a narrow hall that smelled of old paper and boiled leather, past two doors standing open on rooms Ant didn't get a good look at, and out the back into a fenced yard where a handful of recruits stood scattered in various states of waiting. She stopped at a low table with a stack of forms on it and didn't sit.

"Name, prior clan, level, and bond type have all been confirmed already at the gate, so we can skip that part," she said.

"What I actually need is a look at what you can do, because a chip tells me a number and nothing about how a person fights, and I've had level tens who couldn't hold a line and level fours who'd take my arm off if I let them close." She finally glanced up, taking them both in with the flat, practiced assessment of someone who did this daily and had stopped finding it interesting years ago.

"Going by that chip, one of you fights and one of you doesn't, so let's find out which is which the easy way."

"That'd be him," Rebekah said, hooking a thumb at Ant.

"I keep the books. He hits things."

"Well, that settles who's fighting who," the woman said, not quite a joke, already turning to lead them without checking whether they'd follow. The training yard sat past a second fence, wider than the first, packed dirt scarred with the marks of a hundred prior sparring matches. A man was already waiting there, built thick and solid, the kind of frame earned over years rather than a single growth spurt, a boar-type Kithren at his side with tusks filed blunt at the tips and a hide the color of old rust.

"His name is Corlan," the woman said, by way of introduction, and didn't offer anything more before she stepped back to the fence line to watch. Corlan looked Ant over once, unhurried, the flat once-over of a man checking a horse for something the seller might have dressed up to hide.

"Level six," he said, "and you don't hold yourself like one."

"I get that a lot," Ant said, the line worn smooth from repeating it twice already today.

"Uh huh." Corlan didn't sound convinced, but he also didn't sound like he cared enough to push it past the shrug he gave.

"Doesn't matter to me either way, the point's the same either time. Hit my Kithren till one of you can't, or I call it before that happens, nothing fatal, nobody's trying to hurt anybody today." Finally, Mahkir said, already moving toward the boar with the loose, easy stride of a creature that had never once doubted the outcome of a fight before it started. No skills. Mahkir stopped mid-stride. Excuse me. No claws-through-fire, no anything that isn't just hitting him.

Ethan is Common tier, level six, and this fight needs to look like something a level six could actually pull off. You're asking me to fight with one paw behind my back against something that isn't worth the other one either. I'm asking you to lose a little if it comes to it, or win slow, whichever works.

The look Mahkir gave him then had no words attached to it at all, which was somehow worse than anything he could have said, and then he turned back to the boar and dropped into a stance that was, by his own considerable standards, almost apologetic. The fight that followed was, by design, nothing worth remembering.

Mahkir moved first, a clean low strike that should have ended things in one exchange and instead pulled up short of full force, catching the boar's flank hard enough to matter but not hard enough to end it. The boar answered with a low charge that connected because Mahkir let it connect, a glancing hit that would have barely registered on a real fighter and took a thin skim off Mahkir's HP instead, a drop he made a visible show of shaking off.

They traded like that for a full minute, testing and answering, Mahkir's every strike calibrated somewhere just under what it actually needed to be, and Ant stood at the edge of the yard with his jaw tight, watching a creature who could have ended this in four seconds spend a full minute pretending he couldn't. Corlan's boar finally landed something real, a proper hit across Mahkir's flank that dropped a real chunk of HP this time, no performance in the wince that followed. [Mahkir HP: 68/80.] That one I didn't let happen, Mahkir said, low, only for Ant. For the record. Noted. Finish it. He did, a clean takedown that put the boar on its back and held it there with one paw across its throat, not enough pressure to do any real damage, just enough to make the point. The boar stopped struggling, accepting it, and Corlan called the fight with a short whistle that cut through the yard.

A few of the other recruits along the fence had drifted closer without seeming to mean to, the way people always did around a fight that wasn't their own, and one of them, a lanky kid who couldn't have been more than sixteen, let out a low whistle of his own at the takedown before catching himself and looking around to see who'd noticed. Rebekah noticed.

She didn't say anything, but the look she shot Ant afterward carried more weight than a compliment would have, the kind that said she'd seen exactly how much Mahkir had left in reserve even if nobody else in that yard had the eye for it. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"Good enough," Corlan said, crossing over to check his Kithren, running a hand along the boar's ribs before nodding, satisfied. He didn't look up right away, still weighing whatever had caught his attention.

"Technique's real, better than a level six ought to have, though that's not the part bothering me." He straightened, looking at Ant properly now, nothing hostile in it, just plain and direct.

"Your cat pulled every hit past the first one. I don't know why, and I'm not going to pretend I do, but he's stronger than he's letting on out there. Some instinct, maybe, holding back on a stranger's Kithren till he trusts the fight's not going to turn real. Happens. Doesn't mean I didn't clock it."

"He doesn't warm up to strangers fast," Ant said, which had the benefit of being true even if the reason underneath it wasn't.

"Doesn't trust a fight's actually a fight until somebody's bled a little. Held nothing back once your boar landed something real. You saw that part too." Corlan considered that, and whatever he'd been weighing seemed to settle somewhere in Ant's favor, because the edge went out of his posture.

"Fair enough. Cautious Kithren's not the worst trait to walk in with." He nodded once, decision made.

"Reasonable, this yard's seen a lot better, but you won't embarrass a patrol unit." He turned toward the fence, calling out a short update to the woman with the clipboard, who made a mark and didn't look up. Ant let himself breathe out, slow, careful not to make it look like relief. That had been closer than it should have been on the first day, and he hadn't even noticed it happening until Corlan pointed straight at it. Noted for next time, Mahkir said, low, nothing playful left in it now. Hold back further.

Or hold back better. Same thing, from where I'm standing. She turned to Rebekah next, pen already poised.

"And you? Chip says unarmed, no combat class on record."

"I can hold a bow well enough to not shoot myself with it," Rebekah said, easy, "but that's not where I'm useful, numbers are: supply counts, patrol rosters, whatever paperwork this place drowns in same as every other clan I've ever seen. Put me somewhere with a ledger and I'll earn my keep twice over, but put me on a patrol line and I'm dead weight with better handwriting than most." The woman's mouth twitched, not quite a smile.

"Honest, at least."

"Honesty's cheaper than getting someone killed because I pretended otherwise."

"Show me the bow anyway," Corlan said, nodding toward the quiver at Rebekah's hip.

"Costs nothing to check, and I've had recruits undersell themselves worse than you're doing right now." Rebekah shrugged, unhooked the bow, and put an arrow into the fence post nearest the boar pen without any particular ceremony about it, close enough to the knot in the wood to make the point without showing off.

"Serviceable," she said, before he could offer his own verdict, "same as I told you. I can carry my own weight if it ever comes to that. Doesn't mean I want to make a habit of it." Corlan grunted, the closest thing to approval he'd given anyone all morning that wasn't aimed at his own Kithren.

"Fine, logistics primary, and patrol reserve if the numbers ever get thin enough to need it." He glanced between the two of them, real approval settling into his face for the first time since the yard.

"You'll do, both of you. Go back through intake and they'll sort quarters and duty rosters from here." [Sparring match concluded. Experience gained: 10.] [Mahkir: 14, 335/32, 000 to Level 9.] [Ant: 710/15, 800 to Level 13.] Ant caught the numbers out of the corner of his eye and said nothing, filing it away as one more small, strange proof that the System didn't care whose name was on the chip when it decided what counted as a fight.

Mahkir fell into step beside him as they crossed back toward the fence, tail low, mood souring visibly now that there was nobody left to perform for. Ten experience is an insult, he said, flat. Stepping on a loose stone has bruised my pride worse than that fight did. You wanted the applause and got a paycheck instead, and not every fight's the tournament. I am aware of that, and I did not need reminding of it by ten experience points and a boar with filed tusks. You held back, Ant said, quieter now, meaning it.

That wasn't easy for you, I know that. Mahkir didn't answer right away, and when he did, the sting had mostly gone out of it, leaving a duller, more grudging note behind. No. It wasn't. His tail flicked once. I expect better fights out of this eventually, or I'm renegotiating the terms of this entire arrangement. Deal. Rebekah caught up on Ant's other side, falling into an easy pace that put her shoulder near enough to his that anyone watching would read exactly what they were meant to read.

"Logistics," she said, sounding pleased with herself in a way she wasn't bothering to hide now that Corlan was well behind them, "desks and ledgers and absolutely nobody expecting me to swing anything sharper than a quill. I could kiss whoever built this clan's paperwork system."

"You're enjoying this too much."

"I'm enjoying not getting hit," she said.

"I intend to keep it that way for as long as this lasts." They passed back through the fence into the yard where the other recruits still waited their turns, benches fuller now than they'd been that morning, more faces added to the same tired queue. A pair of them, younger than either Ant or Rebekah, sat close together comparing chip readouts in low voices, the kind of nervous energy that hadn't yet learned to hide itself the way the older arrivals had.

The woman with the clipboard fell into step long enough to point them toward a low building on the far side of the compound, gray stone with smoke curling from a chimney at one end and washing strung between two posts out front, plain shirts and patched trousers drying in a breeze that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and boiled cabbage from somewhere behind it.

"Housing's through there," she said, "ask for Sela, she'll get you sorted with a room and a duty schedule, and patrol assignments post daily at the board outside the mess hall. Welcome to Marigolds." The words came out worn flat from overuse, and she turned back toward intake without waiting to see if either of them had anything to say back. Ant watched her go, then looked past her at the compound spread out in front of them, more of it visible now than it had been from the gate.

Smiths hammering somewhere out of sight, a cart being unloaded near what looked like a supply store, a training bell ringing faint from a yard he couldn't see. More people, more structure, more places for something to go wrong than he'd been able to count from outside the wall, and every single one of them a stranger who might, at any given moment, look at his face a half-second too long. We're in, Mahkir said, quiet now, all the earlier sting gone out of it entirely. We're in, Ant agreed.

Neither of them said the rest of it out loud. They didn't need to.