"Then let's go."
Kael smiled once, small and almost practical. "Thanks, Klee."
"Not a problem!" she chirped, looping her hand through his. Her bells chimed like a bright punctuation. "Klee is Spark Knight of the Favonius. Klee help!"
He let her drag him along. Children made routes into the woods like maps drawn in bone memory. Klee's map led them by deer trails and hidden hollows, by places where lampgrass gathered in quartets and where cobwebs marked the slow paths of small animals. The low sunlight filtered through the leaves, dust motes turning the air into a slow, indifferent galaxy.
They reached the first clearing without fuss. Five lampgrass nodded like tiny lanterns, blue and patient. Kael knelt to take them, fingers cool against the delicate petals. The texture was clean and fine. It felt like a small, honest reward the world had given for attention.
"You found them!" Klee beamed. "Klee knew they were growing."
He smiled and harvested with efficient hands. Half the task done. The map had been worth its weight in Mora and time.
By midday they had collected fourteen lampgrass between three spots. Kael checked the tally, tired in a way that made him pleasantly alert. The guild would be pleased. He had fulfilled the contract and gained a useful piece of local intelligence, all without risking public exposure. Small wins stacked into something that looked like progress.
Klee's stomach interrupted his thoughts. She patted it dramatically. "Klee hungry!" she announced.
"Then starfall lake it is," she added, bright as a bell. "Big fish, big fry. Klee make best fried fish!"
Kael paused. Fish frying with an explosives enthusiast. The hazard calculus made a neat, private grin bloom on his lips.
At Starfall Lake the water lay like a sheet of glass, reflecting the sky so perfectly it was hard to tell where lake ended and sky began. The shore smelled of wet reed and old sun. Klee dug in her pack and produced a bomb the size of her fist, painted with a smiling face that looked ridiculous and terrible all at once.
"Klee's bombs are excellent," she declared with the absolute confidence of a child who believed in miracles and had a cache of them.
She tossed one as demonstration and it popped the water like a ceremonial drum. Fish floated stunned, easy pickings. Klee harvested several with delighted efficiency. The process made him think about resource cycles, about how a little force concentrated in the right way could produce food, leverage, or fear.
Klee pressed a second bomb into his hand. "Try, big brother."
He felt the memory of the system move against his skin like a foreign wind. The I Also Want to Help skill sat in him like a new instrument, a way to thread destructive Path resonance into ordinary things. After the sword debacle he had learned caution. He would not let the Path devour his equipment again.
He centered his intent. Not flamboyance. Not a one-off spectacle. Stability and restraint. The skill accepted, a cold, clean note threading into the bomb. A slow sheen crept over its red surface, a black-red wash that made the painted smile seem suddenly insolent.
He tossed it gently toward the lake center. The arc was neat. The device hit water and then the world changed.
The explosion was not a pop. It was a sentence. A column of water launched skyward like a sculpture, carrying spray and light in an instant that felt like surgery. Trees bent to the shock wave. A flock of waterbirds lifted, silent and stunned. The lake boiled with displaced force. The shoreline trembled and pebbles jumped.
Klee's mouth formed a perfect O. Her eyes shone with a shock that looked, for a moment, like awe at something holy. She had known small explosions, the kind that made fishermen laugh. This was a different order entirely. The bomb had become a clean instrument of overwhelming effect.
Kael held his breath, measuring the aftertaste. The air smelled of ozone and hot metal. The water fog rose in slow, ghostly veils. The lampgrass at the lake edge bowed but did not burn. That told him two things. One: the resonance was powerful. Two: his control had prevented indiscriminate destruction.
Klee bounded up to the spray, hands sticky with lakewater and victory. "Big brother! Did you see? It went boom—big boom!"
She looked to him, as if the world might suddenly confirm a truth that friends sometimes keep secret. He raised a single brow, letting the dry humor sit in his voice.
"Effective," he said. "But don't treat it like a party trick."
She pouted in the endearing way of small people who had already decided they would be rebellious charms. "Klee only does safe booms."
It was the sort of lie he would allow from a child. She had bravery in her stitches and a reckless thrift that would both save and endanger her. He had decided, for now, to tilt toward protection.
He also catalogued the results in the part of his mind that kept lists. The bomb's shock had been far greater than an ordinary device could muster. The Path resonance had amplified the core energy cleanly. The sword had failed because of structural mismatch. A bomb's purpose, to shatter, meant it could better contain a transient surge of destructive Path force. Tools designed to cleave and hold were not designed for this sort of raw additive. Projectiles and explosives might be more forgiving. A lesson folded into experience.
Klee hugged him, small arms silly and proud. Nearby, a heron shook its feathers and flew off, bewildered and intact.
The blue panel pulsed once, polite and bureaucratic.
[Skill use recorded. Effect observed: Destructive Path resonance scales with item tolerance. Explosive delivery systems show high compatibility. Caution: item overstress may cause unexpected self-destruction.]
Kael let the warning sit like an annotation he would act on. He had broken a sword once. He had now detonated a lake. The margin of safety narrowed into a map he intended to learn by experiment, not by accident.
The exploit had a social ripple. Walk into town covered in lake spray and smoke and someone remembered your name. He watched Klee's face for signs of hurt or thrill. She glowed with both.
"You should be mindful," he told her, softer. "Bombs are useful. They are not toys."
Klee slapped his arm with a tiny hand. "Klee know. Klee big brother!"
He let the comfort of that stick for a second and then returned to his ledger thinking. Bombs would be his reach weapon. He could carry several into a fight, trigger them remotely, and remove himself from direct clash. He could also imbue traps with Path resonance and collapse armored doors or disable constructs. The political logic unfurled like a map with new roads.
He pocketed the residue of the experience, mental accounting already in motion. The system would offer more choices. It always did. He would take the ones that increased options, not the ones that burned bridges.
As they walked back toward the town, Klee chattered about the fish she would fry and how many coins she would spend on fireworks. Bells chimed. The sun moved. The world felt ordinary again, but the ordinary had shifted beneath his feet. Power that could eat steel might become a tenet of his trade. It might become his leverage.
For now it was enough to have a wallet of experience, a small child who trusted him, and the knowledge that the Path could be threaded into things that were meant to break. That knowledge had teeth.
He kept the smile small and practical. "Beginner's luck," he said, and the phrase was both joke and thesis. He would temper luck with planning.
Behind them, the lake sighed and the bells kept time.