Chương 18: Chapter 17 - Not Laughing

He turned around slowly, some small part of him hoping the voice belonged to someone else. It didn't. The stocky one stood at the center of the path with the starling already circling overhead, the lean one a step behind with the hawk settled on his forearm. Both grinning like they'd been waiting for exactly this. Dread came first, old and practiced, the muscle memory of every previous run-in with people exactly like this.

Under it, exhaustion — he'd walked out of the wasteland with a Kithren and a sword and a system that had rewritten everything he thought was possible, and here he was, not even a full day back, facing the same two idiots with the same grins, like none of it had counted for anything. He'd survived things out there that had killed people whose bones he'd stood among, and the world hadn't noticed, hadn't paused, had simply kept turning and delivered him straight back to this.

Then the anger came up under both, familiar and almost welcome. He'd rather be angry than afraid. Anger gave him somewhere to stand.

"Didn't you get enough last time?" he said.

"Enough?" The stocky one laughed, short and genuine.

"We didn't get anything last time. Your friend saw to that."

"What makes you think I'm without her now?" Ant said.

"You didn't see her coming last time either." That landed. The lean one's eyes cut sideways toward the treeline, scanning the shadows between the trunks with real unease — the last time this happened, the girl and the wolf had come from somewhere neither of them had been watching. The stocky one didn't share the worry.

"We've been behind you a while," he said, confidence intact.

"Watched some wild Kithren run off into the scrub before we even caught up to you. Must've felt us coming." Ant kept his face still, though the ground under that assumption tilted a little. He'd taken it for granted it had been Mahkir. The glimpse of red fur, the Phantom Bunny folding, the timing too clean to be anything else.

But if the boys had genuinely been closing in from behind the whole time — close enough to see it, close enough that their own approach could easily have been what the wild Kithren actually reacted to — the certainty didn't hold up quite so well. Two trained, bonded Kithren coming up from behind. A common creature with nothing to gain from a fight it would lose. It wasn't an unreasonable read. It might even be the right one. He didn't know.

He had no way to test it without handing over exactly what he was trying to keep hidden. Either way, they didn't know what he actually had. And for once in his life, not knowing belonged to him instead of them.

"What do you want," he said. Not really a question. Something to say while he worked out what came next.

"Last time got interrupted," the stocky one said, an edge of real irritation slipping under the performance.

"Word gets around when someone's Kithren gets chased off by an unkithered nobody's rescue party. Doesn't help our standing much." He rolled his shoulders.

"We're finishing what we started. Simple as that."

"Two of you," Ant said, "and a rescue party's still the version you want to tell people about." He kept his voice level, guarded, the old habit of giving strangers as little to work with as possible even while he was needling them.

"Must be a hell of a story once your friends hear it back." The stocky one's grin thinned out at the edges.

"You'll be telling a different story by the time we're done."

"I doubt it. I don't talk much when I'm unconscious."

"That can be arranged."

"You keep saying that like it's a threat and not just a plan you haven't managed yet." The lean one hadn't said anything since the treeline comment, watching the exchange with the flat stillness of someone waiting to see which way it broke. Somewhere off in the scrub a bird Ant couldn't name kept up a steady, unbothered call, and the whole path smelled of warm dust and crushed grass, the ordinary afternoon smell of a place that had no idea what it was about to host.

Both sets of reader lenses shimmered as the scan ran. Ant already knew what it would find — nothing, the same nothing it had found the first time, because no chip meant no data no matter how many levels he'd actually gained. Both boys settled into the same easy confirmation, the look of people whose assumptions had just been proven right by the only source they trusted. Unkithered. Still. As far as they could tell. A week ago that would've been the whole truth.

Now it was a lie their own equipment was telling them, and they had no way to know it. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. He thought about explaining. About just telling them plainly that whatever the lenses said, something had changed, and they might want to reconsider the next few minutes. He didn't bother. They wouldn't have believed him, and some tired, petty part of him wasn't in the mood to make it easy.

He unfastened the coat carefully and slid it off, feeling the small adjustment of Mahkir staying folded in the dark rather than spilling out into the open. He knelt and set it at the edge of the path with more care than the moment called for, buying himself a second to steady his breathing and keep the fabric closed around whatever was curled inside it. His hands weren't quite steady doing it, and he noticed, and let it go. He didn't call Mahkir out.

There wasn't much logic behind it once he actually looked at the decision — Mahkir hadn't fought the Phantom Bunny, hadn't so much as considered it, had made that extremely clear before retreating with as much dignity as the moment allowed. Nothing suggested this would go any differently. Whatever had made the wild Kithren run, it hadn't been an offer to fight. It had just been Mahkir existing in its awareness for a few seconds, and Ant had no idea if that repeated on command, or under proximity, or ever.

He wasn't going to test the theory with two academy boys watching. He stood back up. They watched him with matching expressions of mild curiosity, the kind you'd give anything interesting but not remotely threatening. Neither of them moved. The screech came before he'd fully straightened.

He turned into it on instinct, Soul Render already free in his hand, and the flat of the blade caught the strike at an angle that felt more like luck than skill — a starling's wing skidding off curved steel instead of opening his face. The impact jarred up through his wrist into his shoulder. He'd deflected it. A week ago his body wouldn't have known how. For half a second something close to hope moved through him.

"I like that sword," the stocky one said, tilting his head.

"Tell you what. Hand it over now and we'll call it even." Ant didn't believe him for a second. He settled into a stance that felt right and would have looked, to anyone who actually knew how to fight, close to what it was — a man with maybe an hour of Mahkir's blunt coaching behind him, none of it tested against anything that hit back. Mahkir's voice from the chamber surfaced anyway, unhelpful and unbidden: your feet are wrong.

He adjusted them out of pure reflex, weight settling lower than it wanted to, and it didn't fix nearly enough. His grip was still too tight. His elbow still sat wrong under pressure the way it hadn't in an empty room with nothing shooting at him. He kept the blade up anyway, eyes moving between both boys, trying to track two threats the hard way — the way you learned to when a housecat's opinion on your footwork was the only training you'd ever gotten.

Under the coat, folded and still, he felt Mahkir go tense against his side. Not moving. Just present, coiled, watching through whatever sense let him track a fight he wasn't in. Ant didn't call him out. He held the sword instead and made himself the only target worth aiming at. The hawk came first, a diving arc he half-tracked and half-guessed at, and he pivoted a second too late — talons catching his forearm instead of his throat, opening a line of fresh pain right alongside the older wound that had barely closed.

It wasn't a knockout hit, but it wasn't nothing either; he felt a real chunk peel off whatever he had left, enough to notice, not enough to slow him down yet. He staggered but kept the sword, breathing hard through his teeth against the sting of it. Then the starling tore into two birds where a moment ago there'd been one — Splitrun, a name he remembered from years of reading about skills he'd never expected to face — closing the pincer he'd half-braced for.

He turned to meet it and missed the boy coming in from the side entirely. A hand closed around his wrist and wrenched, hard, the bond-enhanced grip crushing until his fingers opened whether he willed it or not. Soul Render left his hand and hit the dirt several feet away, spinning once before it settled. He lunged for it, off balance, already knowing it was the wrong move and doing it anyway.

The punch caught him on the side of the head before he'd finished turning — a solid connection that sent white light across his vision and his balance sideways — and he went down onto one knee, ears ringing, the taste of copper somewhere in his mouth. [HP: 19/30.] It sat there for a second, flat and useless, a number with nothing to say about how to make the ringing stop. The laughter started above him.

He pushed himself back up slowly, one hand flat on the cold ground, his vision swimming back into focus by degrees. The boys were laughing — real, unbothered laughter, the kind that came from finding this genuinely funny rather than just satisfying — and it cracked something open in his chest that had nothing to do with the punch. The tears came before he could stop them. Not from the pain, though the pain was real enough. From how familiar it was. On his knees. Being laughed at.

After the wasteland, after the dark, after everything that should have meant this couldn't happen to him anymore — and here he was on the ground anyway, exactly where the world had always seemed to think he belonged. Five years of this. He'd thought a sword and a level and a Kithren had changed the math. It hadn't. Not enough. Not yet.

He wiped his face with the back of his hand, angrier at himself for the tears than at anything the boys had done, and forced his head up instead of staying bent over the dirt where it would've been easier to stay. His knees still hurt. He made himself look anyway. The laughter had stopped. He followed their eyes and found the reason — standing between him and the two Kithren circling above, small and red and completely still, was Mahkir. The amber had gone from his eyes.

What was left burned dark red at the edges, a thin curl of smoke rising off his fur where it had gone stiff with heat, fixed on the starling and the hawk with something that had no patience left in it at all. Both birds faltered mid-motion. The starling's split collapsed back into one bird, frozen. The hawk began backing away in the air, wingbeats gone careful in a way they hadn't been a second earlier.

Even the stocky one, who'd stood his ground through everything so far, took a half-step back without seeming to notice he'd done it. Neither boy said anything. Nobody was laughing anymore. The path had gone quiet — just the treetops moving overhead and the ragged edge of Ant's own breathing — and for the first time since he'd turned around and seen them standing there, something other than dread or anger settled into the space where those feelings had been. It felt, distantly, almost like relief.

He stayed on one knee a moment longer than he needed to, just breathing, letting the quiet hold.