Chương 31: Chapter 30 - We Need To Level Up

He thought, briefly, of a middle path — find someone else with the ambition to build a clan and simply join what they made instead of carrying the burden of founding one himself. All the structure. None of the responsibility. He shook the thought off nearly as fast as it arrived.

Worrying about what might happen five, ten, twenty years out felt like an indulgence he had no business affording, sitting in a burned-out room with his shoulder throbbing and his skull still ringing faintly from a fight that had almost gone very differently. A great deal could happen between now and then. None of it was his problem yet.

"Whatever happens, or doesn't." Tired now, more than sharp, the frustration bleeding out of him along with whatever adrenaline had been keeping it up.

"Whether building a clan's ever the right move — none of that's the priority right now. What matters is levelling. Training. Both of us." He looked at her properly.

"Which reminds me. I have no idea what level you actually are." She didn't answer straight away. A flicker of embarrassment crossed her face first, gone before it settled.

"Nine." Ant blinked.

"Nine."

"I know how that sounds." Her voice had lost some of its polish, dropped quieter, less rehearsed. She glanced toward her Kithren, still waiting by the door.

"He hasn't evolved either. Five years and he's still first stage." Ant did the arithmetic without meaning to, and felt a flare of contempt rise before he could stop it — not quite, but close enough that he was almost ashamed of it. He'd have killed for that much time with a Kithren. Any Kithren. At any level. She'd had one the whole time and barely used it. He didn't say that. His face said some of it anyway.

"I spend most of my time in a lab." Defensive now, catching his expression shift.

"Research doesn't level you. And my parents—" She stopped. Started again.

"They've always been protective. Overprotective. Every time I wanted to actually go do drills, properly, there was always a reason it could wait, or someone else could do the field work while I analysed the results instead. So that's what happened. I got very good at understanding Kithren from a distance and never learned much about using one." The defensiveness caught him off guard, cracked a little of his own guard open with it.

He recognised the tone — someone explaining a failure they'd rehearsed defending long before anyone actually asked. He'd used it himself more times than he could count.

"That's not an accusation." Quieter.

"I wasn't judging you for it."

"You looked like you were."

"Maybe for a second." He didn't apologise, but he let the honesty sit there instead of smoothing it over.

"It passed." She studied him a moment, and her shoulders came down half an inch.

"So neither of us actually knows how to fight," she said, some of the lightness coming back into her voice.

"Broadly, no." A short, tired laugh escaped him, surprising them both.

"Bleak place to be starting from."

"I already have an idea."

"Go on."

"I had an old academy instructor. He retired about a year ago, just walked away from the whole thing. From what I heard he'd gotten thoroughly disillusioned with it — the academy, the clan politics underneath it, all of it. He cut ties completely. No clan attached to him anymore, no students."

"Does this instructor have a name."

"He does." Ant waited. She didn't offer it.

"You're not going to tell me."

"I'd rather you meet him without a name attached yet. People build an idea of someone off a name before they've earned the right to it, and I'd rather you saw him plainly." A small, almost apologetic shrug.

"Also, if I'm honest, he'll probably slam the door on us either way, and it feels a bit premature to introduce you to a man who might never let either of us past the porch." Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting tonight."

"And you think he'll agree to it."

"Absolutely not." No hesitation, plainly amused by her own bluntness.

"That's rather the point of retiring — getting away from exactly this kind of request. Two strangers turning up asking him to train them is probably his actual nightmare." Ant frowned.

"Then why are we going."

"Because we should try anyway." Her tone dropped, more serious now.

"He wasn't just theory. Before the academy he was an arena champion — the kind of name people still bring up when they talk about who used to be dangerous. Most instructors teach what they've read about. He taught what he'd actually done. If there's any chance of getting someone like that to help us, even briefly, it's worth the risk of the door slamming in our faces. The difference between training under him and training under anyone else isn't small."

There was an admirable stubbornness in that — walking toward a near-certain no just to be sure. He wasn't sure he had that particular kind of courage in him. He'd spent years avoiding exactly this sort of exposure, the vulnerability of asking for something and being told no to your face. He didn't say that either. Not important enough to give more attention right now. He hadn't said yes to any of this.

He hadn't said no to any single piece of it either, and somewhere in the accumulation of not-saying-no, the whole arrangement had quietly settled into something that felt, disconcertingly, close to real. You'll need training, Mahkir said, rousing from where he'd been dozing through most of the conversation, amber eyes opening halfway. I've already proven myself. There isn't much a retired human has to teach someone at my level.

Ant almost laughed, the sound catching somewhere between exhaustion and genuine amusement.

"You think this is just for me?" Isn't it? Tail flicking once, more curious than dismissive. I defeated a level-ten opponent today.

"Humility, apparently," Ant said out loud, keeping the actual thought to himself, too tired to argue it properly. Still — if there was combat on offer, Mahkir would show up for it regardless of what he claimed he needed. That much, at least, Ant had learned to count on.

"You might learn something anyway." Unlikely. But I won't object to watching you attempt it.

"Fine." He meant it this time, the fight gone out of the argument along with most of his remaining energy.

"Let's go find your teacher."

"Not today." Maren looked around at the ruined room, the scale of it visibly catching up with her for the first time since the fire went out.

"I need to deal with this. And you need to sleep. Wasteland, a fight, a chip insertion, and watching your Kithren set half my house on fire — all in one day." He hadn't let himself add it up like that until she said it. His body agreed before his mind finished the thought — the shoulder sharper now with nothing to distract from it, the dried blood along his forearm, a tiredness that had gone past the physical into something closer to the bone.

"Where." He didn't dress that one up either.

"I don't exactly have anywhere waiting for me."

"There are guest rooms — take whichever one you want, nobody's used most of them in years." Quick, like she'd been waiting for the excuse to offer it.

"Don't worry about tomorrow. I know roughly where he settled, close enough to narrow it down fast, and I'll pull supplies together tonight while you rest — no wasted morning on logistics." She caught herself, slowed, a thin thread of hope breaking through the efficiency.

"I just mean — I want this to actually happen. So I'll make sure it does. Assuming you're staying."

"Assuming."

"You haven't said yes."

"I haven't said no either. You told me yourself what that means, apparently." That got the first real laugh out of her all evening — short, surprised out of her before she could stop it.

"Careful. I'll start expecting you to remember everything I say."

"I generally do." Not a boast. Just true, and tired enough that he didn't have the energy to soften it into one. Ant looked down at Mahkir, already halfway to sleep, entirely indifferent to the question hanging in the room. He didn't answer her directly. Just nodded, once, and let the exhaustion carry him the rest of the way. He scooped Mahkir up, tucked him back into the coat where he'd apparently decided he lived now. No objection — just a small, familiar shift of weight settling against his ribs.

The guest room, when Maren found it for him, still smelled faintly of dust and old wood polish under the clean-linen smell of sheets that had been kept folded in cedar. Bigger than any space he could remember sleeping in, ever. A bed with a proper frame, wide enough he could've slept diagonally without his feet finding the edge. A desk. A wardrobe, empty but present, as if the house assumed every guest arrived with more than the clothes on their back.

"Sleep well," she said, lingering a beat longer than the words needed. He sat on the edge of the bed once she'd gone, elbows on his knees, and let the day finally catch up to him. Mahkir climbed onto the pillow and claimed it without asking, curling into a tight red circle, eyes already closed. Old clan or this, Ant thought, not sure if he meant it for Mahkir or just for himself. Neither one ever asked me what I wanted. This one's just better at pretending.

He lay back anyway, careful not to disturb him, and stared at a ceiling higher and cleaner than any he'd fallen asleep under in longer than he cared to count. Whatever tomorrow brought — the instructor, the training, a war three hundred years of one clan's certainty still couldn't actually prove was coming — none of it felt as urgent as it probably should have. Sleep found him before he'd finished deciding whether that was a problem.