Chương 375: The Cost of Doing Business

"We're leaving," I said, putting my empty tea cup down on the log.

"Pack the tents. We're heading back to the Spire." Jared's jaw dropped.

"What? Eren, you can't be serious! That feathered parasite just threatened us! He's trying to extort ten million shards because of some 'Star-Wind' core nonsense!"

"I am entirely serious, Jared," I said, my voice flat.

"We came to Aetheria-Beta to sit by a lake and do some fun exploration, not to trigger a regional incident over a provincial noble. The moment we deploy a high-tier Domain here, the locals will flag our signatures. The Iron Cloak keeps us hidden, but a violent data spike in a neutral sector is a flare the High Courts can trace. We are packing up." Jared opened his mouth to argue, but Lucas gave him a firm, warnings-laden tap on the shoulder.

My student looked at Vesk, who was quietly wiping her daggers, then let out a sharp, frustrated breath.

"Fine."

"Good. I know you're frustrated, Jared, but these people just aren't worth it," I replied, standing up and dusting the pearl-sand from my trousers. I turned my attention to Talise. She was still huddled against Anna's side, her small shoulders shaking. She looked up at me, her opal eyes clouded with a deep, crushing dread. She had finally tasted freedom, only to have the leash jerked before she could even take a step.

"We are going back to our planet," I told her, crouching down so we were at eye level.

"It is a protected world. The sky-vanguard of the Sapphire Flock cannot reach you there. You can come with us, if you want. But the choice is yours. You'll also be able to leave whenever you want and we'll give you enough resources to make sure you thrive, wherever you end up going." Talise hesitated. Her scales flickered through a rapid, chaotic sequence of muted greens and anxious yellows. Through my [Void-Lattice Perception], I watched the threads of her aura.

There was a genuine, desperate yearning to escape — but beneath it lay a heavy, discordant note of guilt. A lie, woven tightly into her resonance.

"I... I will come," she whispered, her voice cracking.

"Thank you." She smiled, but the lie in her aura didn't dissolve. It only grew more pronounced, a knot of static in her spirit. I narrowed my eyes, observing the way her fingers tightly gripped the hem of her orange tunic, but before I could scry the coordinate of her deceit, Lucas stepped into my line of sight.

"Eren, a word," the shield-master said, holding a portable slate.

"Jeeves just sent a telemetry update. The automated scrubbers on Bir-Z had a minor pressure-valve failure. He wants to know if we should deploy an Echo to assist Leoric, or let the local Dweorg guilds handle the maintenance."

"Tell Jeeves to let the Dweorgs handle it," I said, my focus temporarily diverted.

"It's good practice for their apprentices. If they struggle to find a quick solution, he can deploy an echo then." By the time I finished a few more brief logistical discussions with Lucas, the camp was nearly packed. The tents had been collapsed into spatial storages, and Rexxar was lifting Eliza's "too fragile to store in the Void" cooling chest onto his massive shoulder with a grunt.

"Eren!" Jared's shout cut through the quiet camp. He was standing by the edge of the copper-wood forest, his hands cupped around his mouth.

"She's gone! Talise is gone!" I paused, my star-cores dropping into a slow, analytical rhythm.

"I sensed her leaving around an hour ago. I gave her a choice and she made her decision""You knew…? I went to grab her travel pack from the log, and she was just... gone…" Jared said, his face flushed with panic.

"Are we really going to leave her alone?"

"Perhaps she decided she didn't want to leave her home," I said.

"Or she didn't trust us. It is her choice, Jared. If she prefers to stay in Aetheria-Beta, we have no right to drag her to a foreign planet."

"No, that's not it," Vesk interrupted, sliding down from a high branch. Her yellow eyes were slit.

"When she was eating that bread earlier, she kept looking at the storage bags. Not with greed, Eren. With guilt. She was hiding three of the honey-loaves in her sleeves when she thought we weren't looking. She didn't run away because she wanted to stay. She ran because she didn't want to abandon someone." A sigh escaped my nose. I closed my eyes and reached into the local sub-layers of space, expanding my consciousness through [Void Emperor's Omnipresence].

The world of Aetheria-Beta unfolded in my mind like a schematic. I ignored the humming waterfalls, the drifting chlorophyll islands, and the distant, moving heat signatures of the local Glidewalker settlements. I focused entirely on the specific, silver-mote resonance of the crushed soul-oath I had destroyed an hour ago.

"Found her." She was thirty miles to the north, moving through a network of hollow, volcanic roots beneath the ridge. And she wasn't alone.

"Lucas, I'll be dealing with this, just stay here and stay put," I commanded.

"Jared, Vesk, Rexxar. With me." I grabbed Jared's shoulder, Vesk's collar, and Rexxar's massive arm. With a single, silent translation of spatial coordinates, the lakeside camp vanished, replaced by the damp, moss-covered walls of a subterranean root-tunnel. The smell of rotting vegetation and stagnant water was heavy here. A few yards ahead, huddled in the dim, bioluminescent glow of the root-moss, was Talise.

She was kneeling on the wet dirt, tears streaming down her face as she broke one of Eliza's honey-loaves into small, manageable pieces. She was feeding them to a tiny Glidewalker boy, who looked no older than six. The boy's skin was translucent to the point of being skeletal, his breathing shallow and rattled. Talise froze when our spatial arrival rippled the air. She threw herself over the boy, shielding him with her small body, her scales turning a terrified, pitch-black color.

"Please!" she shrieked, her voice echoing off the wet stone.

"Please, don't hurt him! I'll go back! I'll tell Lord Volarus I ran away on my own! Just let him keep the food! He's my brother... he can't glide yet... he would have starved without me!" Jared's breath hitched in his throat. He took a step forward, his hands shaking, but he stopped himself, looking back at me with a silent, pleading desperation. I walked slowly into the light of the moss. The little boy peeked out from under Talise's arm, his eyes wide, watery opals of pure confusion.

He didn't understand the concepts tiers or the empires; he just knew he was hungry. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"You should have told us," I said, my voice quiet in the hollow cave.

"I... I'm sorry… I was afraid," Talise wept, her head pressed against her brother's shoulder.

"The Lord, Volarus... if he ever found out about Toby, he would use him too... I kept the debt... I took the whipping... just so they wouldn't look for him." I knelt in the dirt, ignoring the damp moss staining my trousers. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small, warm vial of Leoric's low-tier cellular-restoration broth — something designed for human children, but pure enough for any humanoid species. I slid it across the wet ground toward her.

"Give him this," I said.

"It will clear the rattle in his lungs." Talise stared at the vial, then looked up at me, her chest heaving.

"You... you are not going to drag me back?"

"You are already one of us," I said, a dry, faint smile touching my face.

"I'm not about to abandon you just because you happened to have a second passenger. There is plenty of room in Bastion. We have schools, gardens, and houses that don't smell like rotting roots. Both of you are invited." Talise stared at me, her defensive black scales slowly softening into a tremulous, grateful orange. She snatched the vial and began feeding the broth to her brother, who drank it with a sudden, desperate energy.

"I know it must be really hard for you, but you can trust us," Jared whispered, crouching next to them, his gravity sparks dimming to a warm, ambient glow.

"We don't leave our people behind."

"How touching," a wet, mocking voice echoed from the mouth of the root-cave. I didn't turn around. I already saw his approach; his attempts at Veiling were a weak imitation of a Tier 6's stealth. Lord Volarus stepped into the cavern, flanked by twelve of his elite sky-vanguard. They were wreathed in shimmering blue wind-armor, their hands resting on the hilts of curved, starlight-steel cutlasses. Volarus was no longer carrying the polite, greasy smile of a merchant.

His face was twisted in a predatory, vindictive sneer.

"A search party," Volarus laughed, his wind platform humming in the narrow space.

"And look what we found. The 'dead' rat Toby is still breathing. I must commend you, girl. You managed to hide him in my own backyard for three cycles." Talise let out a sharp, choked whimper, pulling Toby closer to her. Volarus looked at me, his eyes gleaming with a manic, untouchable arrogance.

"Well, traveler? The bill has just gone up. A star-wind core in the sister, and a clean, un-anchored soul in the brother. They will make fine additions to the sky-docks. I will take the boy now... unless you have another twenty million shards sitting in that pocket of yours?" I slowly stood up, my boots producing a heavy, solid thud on the cavern floor.

"And if I refuse?" I asked, my voice carrying no emotion at all.

"Then we will take them by force," Volarus sneered, his wind platform vibrating with aggressive mana.

"And we will take your life as interest. After all, a pair of foreign rats with no regional pedigree make excellent toys when they are properly broken. I wonder how many times the boy can fall from the high cliffs before his bones stop knitting?" The cavern went absolutely, deathly silent. The air instantly turned cold, losing its pressure. I looked at Jared. My student was staring at Volarus, his amber eyes completely devoid of their usual teenage warmth.

He looked like a wolf that had just been given the scent of blood. Beside him, Vesk was already leaning low, her daggers held backward, her reptilian pupils slit to the point of being thin black needles. They were waiting.

"Eren?" Jared asked, his voice barely a whisper, a dark, feral grin slowly tugging at the corner of his mouth. I let out a short, quiet sigh.

"Keep it clean," I said.

"Try not to leave any data for their diviners or whatever else they have in their 'Flocks'." Jared didn't even yell. He simply pointed his finger at the lead vanguard guards. The physics of the cavern ceased to function. The twelve elite guards, who had been hovering gracefully on their wind-platforms, were suddenly subjected to a localized gravity spike that multiplied their physical mass by a factor of fifty. With a series of wet, heavy thuds, the vanguard elites were slammed into the cavern floor.

The stone beneath them shattered, their wind-armor collapsing inward with the sound of snapping crystal. They didn't even have time to scream; they were simply pinned to the earth, the pressure of Jared's gravity-wells cracking their breastplates and pinning their limbs to the stone.

"Huh?!" Volarus shouted, his wind-platform flickering as he tried to stabilize his own coordinate.

"What is this?! They are Tier 6 elites! How—" He didn't finish the sentence. Vesk vanished. She utilized the phase-sliding technique I had taught her — stepping into the quiet, non-Systemic sub-layers of the Lattice. She reappeared directly behind the three remaining guards who had managed to resist the gravity spike. Her daggers wreathed in a cold, frost-shadow affinity, she executed three precise, light-speed strikes.

The daggers bypassed their physical armor entirely, severing the mana-conduits inside their necks on a conceptual level. The three elites went rigid, their eyes rolling back as their star-gates suddenly lost their seals, before they collapsed into the moss like empty sacks of grain. Talise and Toby watched in absolute, paralyzed wonder. To them, the sky-vanguard of the Sapphire Flock were untouchable gods — monsters who had ruled their lives with whips and chains.

And yet, in the span of two heartbeats, these gods were being systematically dismantled by two teenagers who looked barely older than they were.

"M-Monsters…" Volarus stammered, his aristocratic poise completely gone. He scrambled backward on his wind-platform, desperately trying to channel his wind-authority to conjure a defensive gale.

"You are... you are illegal cultivators! The Flock will find you! The—""YOU TALK TOO MUCH, BIRD-MAN!" Rexxar stepped forward, drawing his Event Horizon. The claymore wreathed in the dense, planetary mass of a void-titan's spine, roared through the damp air of the cave. Rexxar swung the massive blade with a single hand, the kinetic displacement of the swing producing a localized vacuum that sucked the air directly out of Volarus' lungs. Volarus tried to raise a wind-shield.

The Event Horizon hit the shield like an anvil hitting a pane of glass. The wind-shield shattered into a thousand useless sparks of mana, and the flat of Rexxar's blade slammed directly into Volarus' chest. The Sapphire Lord was launched backward through the root-tunnel, his bones producing a wet, crunching symphony as he hit the volcanic stone wall. He slid down into the damp moss, his chest caved in, his expensive blue silk robes stained with his own arterial blood.

He was still breathing his last few breaths, his fingers twitching weakly as he stared at the golden lion looming over him. Rexxar moved quickly, reaching the Lord and grabbing his Soul core, shattering it in his palm before he could make another move.

"BOISTEROUS FEAT!" Rexxar laughed, slamming his claymore back into his shoulder harness.

"THE FEATHERED ONE HAS VERY SOFT RIBS, EREN!" I walked over to Talise and Toby. The little boy was staring at Jared with wide, starry eyes, his mouth open in a perfect circle of awe. Talise was shaking, but for the first time, her scales were a bright, glowing, healthy pink.

"Can... can I learn to do that?" Toby whispered, his voice thin but clear. Jared grinned, reaching down to pat the boy's head.

"If you eat your bread and finish your homework, kid, you'll learn how to make an entire mountain float."

"Let's go," I said, waving my hand to open a direct, purple crack in reality back to Bastion.

"The registry will probably be trying to scan this coordinate in about three minutes." We stepped through the violet archway, leaving the shattered ruins of the Sapphire Flock behind us in the dark. As the raspberry air of Aetheria-Beta was replaced by the rich, heavy starlight-sweetness of Bastion, I adjusted my collar, hearing the kids already bickering about who had the cleaner execution.

The vacation was cut short, but as I looked at the two pairs of innocent, wide eyes stepping onto the marble of our capital, I decided then that it was worth it.