Chapter 285: Morning Routine

"That will be Zarion."

I looked at her with interest. The man hadn’t introduced himself, so there was no way for me to tell if she was right or wrong.

But she went on to describe him further.

"Red hair, weathered face, dresses like some weird sage?"

I nodded quickly. All she needed to say was the red hair. I hadn’t met many people with red hair in this world, and that alone was confirmation enough.

"I see... that livestock..."

I took a few moments before I eventually asked.

"You speak of him like you know him... do you?"

Odelia said nothing immediately. Instead she looked at me with something like expectation, her gaze dropping pointedly to my hands.

I belatedly remembered the hammer. When I did, I lifted it and brought it down again, falling back into the rhythm of our work. Once we finished the section, she straightened up and stretched.

"Zarion is a lone wolf mercenary... he is also a struggling and desperate criminal."

I turned my head slightly.

"Are you... sure?"

Odelia nodded. "Why do you ask? You noticed anything different?"

I thought about it for a moment.

’How can a struggling person afford five hundred thousand gold crowns?’

Of course, the answer was simply that the Blood Mage had given him that obscene sum. But there was something else that bothered me. Zarion had chickened out early, which felt unexpected given how strong his summon actually was. I’d expected it to be at least a Hero tier summon based on that level of power.

And yet he bailed. Just like that.

’Only someone with no true sense of loyalty or duty bails in that manner.’

I shook my head. "I don’t... I’m just thinking. That means the Blood Mage sent a mercenary after us. Did he expect the mercenary to fail?"

Odelia sighed and nodded silently.

"It’s possible the whole encounter was only meant to check the situation of the company. You may have defeated Zarion, but he was certainly part of the plan, his defeat just as much as his victory."

"So... he’s going to come for us himself, no doubt?"

Odelia didn’t answer right away. She thought about it carefully, or rather, she was visibly turning it over, weighing something she wasn’t willing to share. Eventually she smiled.

"Anything that happens, we have it under control."

I looked at her. "Do we, though?"

I mean, I had Kassie, and there was Maggie. More than that, there was Kassie’s new mentee, Evangeline, who had been training brutally under Kassie to grow stronger and set out to find her sister. We weren’t helpless.

"The problem is that we don’t know how he’ll come at us. But as long as he does it physically, it’s nothing we can’t handle."

"I see."

***

The next few days passed without incident.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Odelia had the company running repairs on the damaged sections of the building, and Milo had been tracking Manhattan’s movements with the kind of quiet obsession that made me glad he was on our side. But as far as direct threats went, the Blood Mage didn’t follow up on Zarion’s failed visit. Which either meant he was regrouping, or planning something worse.

I chose not to think about which one it was.

Instead, I found myself gravitating toward the back courtyard every morning.

Because it had become a ritual of sorts, watching Kassie pummel the elf girl from a few months ago. Evangeline, who had decided she wasn’t leaving until Kassie had trained her to the bone.

It took a while, but Kassie had eventually taken the girl under her wing. In a way. The difference was that Kassie had trained me knowing I was her summoner, knowing that my growth somehow tied to hers. With Evangeline, there was no contract. No benefit. No obligation binding them together.

Which meant Kassie was doing it because she wanted to.

’Huh.’

I sat on the low wall bordering the courtyard with a cup of something that Ophelia had brewed and insisted was tea. It was not tea. It tasted like someone had boiled tree bark in rainwater and then apologized to the cup. But it was warm, and the mornings in Recimiras carried a chill that surprised me given how brutal the afternoons were.

Below me, in the wide stone clearing that Odelia had designated as a training ground, Kassie circled Evangeline like a predator evaluating wounded prey.

Evangeline was on her feet, which I respected. She’d hit the ground four times in the last ten minutes, and each time she got back up faster than the last. Her breathing was ragged, her clothes filthy, and there was a cut along her forearm that she hadn’t bothered to acknowledge.

Kassie noticed, though.

"Your left side drops every time you reset your stance." Kassie’s voice carried across the courtyard with flat certainty. "You’re compensating for the cut. Stop it."

"It’s not that deep," Evangeline said through gritted teeth.

"I didn’t say it was deep. I said you’re compensating for it. Pain is information. You process it and you move. You do not let your body make decisions your mind hasn’t approved."

Evangeline adjusted her stance. Wider this time, lower. Her jaw was set, and her eyes held a focus that I’d seen in people who had something to lose. Not the abstract kind that came from ambition or pride, but the concrete kind that came from knowing someone you loved was out there, waiting, possibly suffering.

She was thinking about her sister. She was always thinking about her sister.

Kassie moved.

It was almost unfair to watch. Even suppressed, even holding back what had to be ninety percent of her actual capability, Kassie’s movements carried a fluidity that thirty-five years of war had burned into her body. She closed the distance in two steps and threw a combination that would have flattened me during our early training sessions on the ship.

Evangeline blocked the first strike. Redirected the second. Ate the third on her shoulder and used the impact to spin into a counter that actually made Kassie shift her feet.

’Oh. That was new.’

Kassie’s expression didn’t change, but I caught the slight pause before she reset. She’d felt that.

Evangeline pressed forward, and for three seconds she was genuinely fighting instead of surviving. Her strikes came in a rhythm that wasn’t quite her own yet, something borrowed from Kassie’s style but filtered through a body that moved differently, thought differently. Then Kassie stepped inside her guard and put her on the ground again.

This time, Evangeline didn’t get up right away. She lay there, chest heaving, staring at the sky.

"You held the combination for three exchanges," Kassie said, standing over her. "Two days ago, you couldn’t hold it for one."

Evangeline blinked. Processed that. It wasn’t praise exactly, but coming from Kassie, it landed close enough to make Evangeline’s expression shift from frustrated to something cautiously less frustrated.

"My timing on the counter is still off."

"Your timing is fine. Your commitment is off. You pull the strike at the last moment because part of you doesn’t believe it’ll land. So it doesn’t."

Kassie extended a hand. Evangeline took it and was hauled to her feet.

"Again."

I took a sip of the not-tea and watched them reset.

There was something about watching Kassie teach that unsettled me in a way I couldn’t quite name. On the ship, when she’d trained me, there had been an edge to every session. A manic energy, like she was trying to compress decades of combat knowledge into my skull through sheer force of repetition. It had worked, mostly, but it had also felt transactional. I was her summoner. My strength was her investment.

With Evangeline, something was different. The intensity was still there, but the energy behind it had shifted. Kassie corrected Evangeline’s form with a patience I hadn’t known she possessed. She explained principles instead of just demonstrating them. She waited for understanding instead of demanding it.

’She actually cares about this girl.’

The thought settled in my chest like a small, uncomfortable stone.

I wasn’t jealous. That would be ridiculous. A grown man being jealous that his spirit summon was giving better training to someone else? Absurd. Childish. The kind of petty nonsense that didn’t deserve a second thought.

I took another sip of the not-tea.

’I’m not jealous.’