Before he dismissed them to their meditation, Edward paused beside Alice.
"One more thing. Your constructs." He said it plainly. "I won't pretend to know your craft better than you do. But I've seen enough fighters who relied on external tools to know this… the single biggest leap they ever made had nothing to do with technique. It was the day they got their hands on better materials."
Alice held his gaze. "Noted."
"Don't just note it. Act on it." He heard of rumors of Alice finding and selling a piece of mithril, and he didn't believe for a second that she would have sold all of it, especially knowing the nature of her job.
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
Now Seraphine and Alice sat beneath the wide shade of the oak at the garden's edge, cross-legged on the grass, eyes closed. From where Edward stood, they looked peaceful enough.
He turned back to Lucia.
She alone remained standing before him, arms loosely folded, expression not particularly enthusiastic.
"Unlike them," Edward said, "you have no memory-enhancing skill or an equivalent. Walking the caster's path would cost you more than ten times the effort for a fraction of the result, and you would never reach their casting speed regardless."
He paused. "But you're not particularly interested in walking that path anyway, are you? You were listening to gather the knowledge. The rest of it is someone else's road."
Lucia didn't bother looking surprised. "Correct. I know where my strengths are. I won't waste time somewhere they aren't."
"Pragmatic but also correct." Edward studied her for a moment. "...You've survived enough that your current way of seeing the world is essentially fixed. I won't try to change it. That's not why I'm here."
"What I can do," he continued, "is make that survival more likely." A brief pause. "...You already use words as weapons. You're good at it. But knowing how to put a blade through someone's heart has its own uses, and a survivor like you already understands that."
The corner of Lucia's mouth moved slightly. "...That is also correct."
Finally, her expression loosened into a perfect smile. "Then I'll be in your care, teacher."
Edward nodded. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose, an expression crossing his face that was almost plaintive.
He had trained soldiers, prodigies, and warlords. He had lectured to packed halls and to single students in empty fields. Never in recent memory had he needed to work this hard simply to get people to accept free training.
It was, he reflected, a little like persuading a picky child to eat.
"Alright, lass." He turned. "Let's find which weapon suits you, and we'll begin from there."
"Yes."
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
Oxygen meets fuel… heat breaks the molecular bonds… energy releases, escaping as light and heat—
Alice kept her eyes closed and her breathing even, moving through the steps in a low murmur.
Her Mind Repository had surfaced the memory cleanly: herself at fourteen with a chemistry textbook open across her knees, afternoon light coming through a window. On the page, the fire triangle. Fuel. Oxygen. Heat. The cycle of oxidation… molecules fragmenting, bonds breaking, energy releasing in a cascade that fed itself as long as the three conditions held.
...the released energy escapes as heat and light. What we see as flame.
She guided her mana through her circuits as she recited, coaxing it forward until a thin filament extended from the tip of her index finger. The innate skill that granted her her nine-tailed lineage made the mana cooperative and responsive in a way that most people spent years building toward. That immensely helped.
The mana pooled above her open palm when she reached the last step. It had gone faintly bluish at the edges, and a wave of dry heat pressed upward against her face.
'Imagination, then.'
She pictured a heart. Small, clean-edged, and burning.
The mana morphed. Slowly, as if being coaxed rather than commanded, it pulled itself into the shape she was holding in her mind, folding at the curves, steadying at the point until it matched.
She held it there.
'I did it…'
"Oh! Ally, that's such a cute heart!"
The shape dissolved as her focus scattered from the sudden voice. Alice opened her eyes.
Seraphine sat beside her with a hand pressed over her mouth and guilt written across her face. "...I'm sorry, I didn't mean to."
"It's fine." Alice looked at her properly and then registered what was rotating above Seraphine's head.
Seven fireballs. Steady and even-spaced, turning in a slow clockwise orbit as if they'd decided to live there.
Alice looked at them for a moment. "...When did you do that?"
"Hehe." Seraphine reached up and let one of them drift down to hover above her palm, rolling it back and forth like a coin. "Aren't I something?"
"You are." Alice said it without sarcasm, which made Seraphine blink. "Though I'm surprised. I would have expected the gap to be smaller."
"It's not that I'm more talented at this." Seraphine dismissed the orbiting fireballs with a wave and turned to face her. "It's just experience. Back in the tutorial, Ashen always got hurt on hunting missions. Most of it was covering for me." She didn't say it with guilt, exactly, but the acknowledgment sat in her voice regardless. "So when the teachers introduced us to the casting mechanics, I spent a lot of nights trying to build something useful."
She tilted her head. "Soothing Touch came out of that. It's sitting at Skilled+ now."
Alice looked at her.
"I know." Seraphine laughed, a little self-conscious. "Healing mechanics are more complicated than fire. So in comparison, this spell felt almost easy." She pointed at the space where Alice's heart had been. "You'll get there. You've always been the brainy one between us, don't forget that." She winked.
"And you've always been the most emotionally sensitive one between us," Alice said it in the same mild tone, and then, with perfect timing, winked back.
Seraphine stared at her for a moment.
Then she burst out laughing and pulled Alice into a sideways hug that nearly knocked her over.
"Okay! Okay, that's fair." She kept one arm around her and tilted her head toward the field, where Edward and Lucia had apparently begun their own training. "Mister Edward is going to be busy for a while. Want me to help? I'll show you what I did with the emotional side of it."
Alice recognized immediately what this was. Seraphine had spent most of their friendship being the one who quietly deferred to Alice's explanations, her logic, and her systematic approach to everything. Now she had a corner of expertise, and she wanted to use it.
Alice rolled her eyes. "Fine. Show me what I'm missing, O great master."
Seraphine sat up straight, expression going deliberately solemn. Then the grin broke through.
"Hmm~ leave it to me!"
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
The territory's growth was the most reliable clock Ashen had.
Survey reports arrived twice a week. Records, population movement, the slow expansion of the outer fortifications… he could track the weeks by the numbers in the margins of those documents better than by any sun or calendar. Time had otherwise stopped meaning much. There was training. There was sleep. There was the spear in his hands.
And now there was gravity.
It had been Edward's most recent addition, offered without ceremony. Ashen had felt it the moment his teacher's hand lowered, a pressing weight settling over his entire body, familiar but relentless, like the world had decided he personally needed to be reminded it existed.
Half-dead by midday had become a fixed condition, as reliable as the sunrise.
The mischievous spear found his wrist.
He redirected, reset his stance, and kept going.
What made the weeks distinguishable now, more than any report, was the noise.
It started around a week ago… a distant boom from somewhere beyond the hill at the mansion's back. He'd paused at the first one. By the third day, he'd stopped noticing unless the size changed, which it did, incrementally, each time edging up.
They were learning fast…
⛧
⛧
⛧
thud—
The grass met him, and he allowed it.
By this point, the body knew the process: hit the ground, stay down, wait for the signal from his limbs that they were prepared to discuss the possibility of movement at some future date. Edward had called it a day. That was enough for now.
"Ash…" Soft footsteps. "Teacher says you can rest."
"Is… that… so."
Seraphine knelt and guided his head onto her lap without asking, settling it into place like she'd done it a thousand times. Her fingers moved through his hair in a slow and unhurried manner.
"Don't talk. Just relax."
He didn't argue.
A glow built in her hands gradually, mana gathering at her palms until the light seeped in warmth against the edge of his vision. Then her voice dropped into that particular register she used when she chanted. It was quieter than her speaking voice, each phrase deliberate, calibrated with small pauses:
"A healing and mercy has come from your Lord.When I am ill,
He is the One who heals me.From what He created comes a remedy for people,
and in His words…
is healing for what lies within the hearts of the believers."
The fatigue didn't leave just yet, but it became bearable enough not to suffocate him. His breathing slowed on its own.
Seraphine lowered her hands. "This won't undo the exhaustion, but it will boost your natural healing instead of replacing it. You'll still feel the sore muscles until tomorrow." She smiled a guilty smile befitting of a Saintess who failed her duty. "I'm sorry for that part."
"Don't be." His voice had mostly come back, if not much of his volume. "This is perfect. Thank you, love."
She smiled, and it was the small private kind, not the bright public one she used most of the time. "Don't thank me. Healing you is my duty and my pleasure... in exactly that order."
"My personal little nurse." He exhaled slowly. "How could I forget?"
"Yep." The word came out soft as a memory surfaced without permission... the tutorial phase, his sick bed, the very creative excuses she'd invented to justify climbing into it. She'd been shameless about it, really.
'Doing that now would have entirely different consequences,' she thought, watching his eyes drift closed. 'Which might be exactly the problem.'
"Sera."
"Mm?"
"Stay like this a little longer."
She resumed her slow pass through his hair. Outside the training field, the last of the dusk had gone purple, and somewhere behind the hill, silence had finally replaced the day's explosions.
"Sure~"
Haah. She looked down at his face. The exhaustion smoothed away from it now, making him sport an expression almost peaceful in its place.
'For how long am I going to be able to hold myself back from you...'