## : THE DINNER TABLE
The Muller border fortress was smaller than he'd expected.
Not in the way of disappointing things — in the way of things built by people who understood that function outlasts aesthetics. Thick walls, narrow windows, a gatehouse that had been repaired in three distinct architectural styles across what the guards' borrowed memories dated as roughly two hundred years. It had survived floods, border skirmishes, two successions, and one siege. That was its argument for itself, and it made the argument plainly, in stone and mortar and the particular solidity of something that has never needed to be beautiful.
Shinji looked at it from the ridge and adjusted Julius's left cuff.
*Home,* he thought, turning the word over the way you turn a coin — examining it, not feeling it.
"NEKROMANTEION" spoke in its current register: binary, clipped, the voice of a system reporting rather than communicating.
*[Arrival proximity: 400 meters. Courtyard occupants: 15. Composition: 9 guards, 3 household staff, 1 steward, 2 unknown. Recommend activation of [Mental Clarity] and [Focused Record] prior to gate entry. Muller household database: cross-reference initiating.]*
"Thank you," Shinji said, quietly.
The rider to his left gave him a sideways look. He didn't explain. Julius wouldn't have needed to talk to himself.
He'd spent the two-hour ride cataloguing. The search party were seventeen genuine Muller men — loyal, relieved, already constructing the story they'd tell their grandchildren. *The young master, alive. We found him at the cave mouth, wounded but standing.* He filed this without particular sentiment: *survival mythology, self-generating. Useful.*
What occupied the deeper portion of his attention was the man three horses back.
His name was Aldric. Household steward — which explained his access to patrol schedules, his presence on the search party, and his current project of not looking at Julius with the focused discipline of someone actively suppressing the urge to stare. "Omniscient Analysis" had confirmed the name by cross-referencing his boot stitching against Captain Vane's archived memory of a Falmuth courier who'd visited the fortress twice in the past year. The Falmuth boots were still there — he'd changed his outer coat but not his footwear. A detail. The kind of detail that told Shinji everything he needed to know about the quality of the man he was dealing with.
*He thinks you're going to die from the wound before morning,* Shinji assessed. *He's also trying to determine whether you know anything.*
He didn't look at Aldric. He looked at the fortress.
*I know everything,* he thought pleasantly. *But there's no urgency. Let him sweat.*
The gate opened at the first signal from the lead rider, and Shinji rode Julius's horse through the arch of two hundred years of Muller history, and into whatever came next.
---
Earl Raymond von Muller was exactly what thirty-two years of Captain Vane's memory had assembled: a man who had at some point in his fifties concluded that severity and strength were the same thing, and had committed to this position with the thoroughness of someone who does not revisit decisions.
He stood in the courtyard. Not pacing — standing, the way men who have commanded things for a long time stand, weight distributed, arms at his sides, face set in the expression of a man who had prepared himself for two outcomes. Julius's horse came through the gate, and Raymond von Muller performed two seconds of silent recalibration, and then his face settled into something that was not quite relief and not quite what Shinji had expected.
*[Focused Record: Active. Tracking — eye movement: left-dominant scanning pattern, assessing for injury. Jaw: tight. Hands: clasped at lower back, self-controlled. Pulse at temple: elevated 12% from baseline. Classification: Controlled emotional suppression. He is relieved. He will not show it.]*
"Julius."
Not a greeting. An assessment confirmed.
"Father." Julius's voice — Shinji had spent three hours in a dark cave calibrating it, had run it through the guards' archived memories of how the boy spoke to the Earl until the specific weight of the formal drawl was automatic. He dismounted without assistance. His chest pulled sharply at the movement, the wound eighty percent healed but making its remaining twenty percent loudly known, and he let none of it cross Julius's face.
*A man who has tasted blood,* he remembered. *That was the order. Let's deliver.*
He crossed the courtyard and stopped at the correct distance — not intimate, not guilty, the precise conversational register Julius's memories had always placed between himself and his father, which was to say: formal, with the particular tension of someone who has never been entirely sure of their welcome.
Raymond studied him. Ran the checklist.
"You're wounded."
"I was."
"The guards."
"Dead." He held the Earl's gaze without blinking. "All twenty."
Raymond's jaw tightened minutely. Not grief. "NEKROMANTEION" flagged the physiological signature with clinical precision: *[Galvanic response detected. Target: Raymond von Muller. Duration: 0.4 seconds. Classification: Calculation, not mourning. He is computing resource loss.]*
Not the response of a father. The response of a lord.
Shinji filed this, quietly, in the part of the Eternal Library that was building a profile on the household rather than just the conspiracy. The Earl had sent his son into a forest with twenty guards as a *bravery test.* He was now computing what twenty dead guards *cost.* The two facts lived next to each other, and he let them.
"What happened?" Raymond said.
"Greater Direwolf. Alpha female — she had established territory, and we entered during a feeding window." He paused, let the silence do the work. "The approach vector was deliberate. They hit us from three directions simultaneously. Wolves don't coordinate like that without guidance."
Something moved in Raymond's expression. Contained immediately, but "Omniscient Analysis" had already measured it: *[Micro-expression: alarm, 0.3 seconds. Not guilt. He didn't know. But he understands the implication.]*
"You're saying—"
"I'm saying Greater Direwolves don't plan ambushes," Shinji said, in Julius's voice, with a patience that bore no resemblance to nineteen. "Someone gave them a reason to be in that clearing at that time. Someone who knew our route."
The courtyard had gone quiet with the particular quality of people who are pretending very hard to be somewhere else. Three horses back, Aldric the steward had stopped moving.
Raymond von Muller looked at his son — looked at whatever had come back wearing his son's face and speaking with his son's voice and watching him with the steady grey depth of still water — and after a long moment said: "Come inside."
It was not an invitation. It was a decision being made about something he didn't yet have words for. Shinji catalogued it and followed.
---
The Countess found him in the corridor outside the great hall.
He heard her before he saw her — quick footsteps, the rhythm of someone walking fast and not wanting to run, and then the sound stopped and he turned and she was already crossing the remaining distance and pulling Julius's body into her arms before he'd made any decision about his hands.
He stood very still.
Not rigid — stillness and rigidity were different tools, and he'd learned in the cave hours what this specific stillness needed to look like. He put Julius's arms around her and catalogued through borrowed muscle memory the architecture of this particular embrace: she was shorter than Julius by just over half a head, she held tighter on the right because an old shoulder injury had left the left arm subtly weaker, and the way she pressed her face against Julius's shoulder was not the gesture of a woman performing maternal affection but of someone allowing themselves, for exactly this one moment, to not be composed.
*She hired the extra guards,* he remembered. *Without telling her husband. Twenty men she paid for privately because she loved her son enough to secretly undermine her husband's test.*
*Twenty men whose memories I now carry.*
He felt, distantly, something without a clean label. Not guilt, exactly. Not grief. Something that occupied the same address.
"You're cold," she said.
*[Alert: Surface temperature deviation registering. Countess Elara: physical contact, high sensitivity. Current simulation: 36.8°C. Insufficient. Adjusting peripheral circulation. +0.4°C. Implementing.]*
The adjustment was seamless. He had a moment to appreciate the skill's competence before returning his attention to the woman in Julius's arms.
"It was a cold night," he said. "I was in the forest for hours."
She pulled back and looked at his face. Elara von Muller had grey eyes, which Shinji noted abstractly — Julius's were blue, the Earl's coloring — and they held the quality of twenty-one years of watching a specific person's face across every version of it. Sick, sleeping, laughing, frightened, pretending not to be frightened. The full archive.
*This,* he recognized with clear-eyed accuracy, *is the performance that will break the cover if anything does.*
She raised her hand and touched Julius's jaw. The gesture of checking — the involuntary diagnostic of someone who needed their hands to confirm what their eyes were telling them.
"Julius," she said.
"Mother." He softened Julius's drawl specifically for her — the guards' memories had noted that Julius only dropped the formal register with the Countess, and that this was something he'd done since childhood, an unconscious signal of the one relationship in the household that didn't require performance.
Shinji used it deliberately.
"You're different," she said.
Not an accusation. Closer to recognition. The particular statement of someone who has been watching a person they love for a very long time and has just seen something shift beneath the surface.
*[Note: Maternal intuition threshold: HIGH. Current suspicion classification: Unresolved. She does not believe you are a threat. She believes something she cannot name has changed.]*
He had already reached the same conclusion. And the Butler's instinct was correct: he could not simulate the warmth. He could simulate the temperature — 37.1°C, perfectly calibrated — but warmth was not a thermal property. It was the accumulated weight of nineteen years of being *known* by someone, and it was not in any archive he could access.
What he could do was be honest about the part that was true.
"I watched twenty men die," he said. He kept Julius's voice level, but he let the content carry real weight — because it was real, because he had in fact watched it, crouched in the canopy, tracking the thermal signatures of twenty soul-wavelengths as they went out one by one. "I couldn't — there wasn't anything I could do. I wasn't strong enough." The pause came from Julius's habit of trailing off when something was difficult, and Shinji deployed it accurately. "The Julius who left for that forest isn't the one who came back. I don't know how to explain it better than that."
Elara looked at him for a long time.
Then she pressed her forehead to Julius's temple — a gesture so private that it had not appeared in any guard's memory, because it was the kind of thing that only happened in empty corridors, between a mother and the son she loved too much to be measured about — and Shinji stood still and let her.
*She hired twenty men to protect him,* he thought. *She knew the test was wrong. She couldn't say so.*
*He never knew she did it.*
Something in that settled into the part of him that was still building the ledger. Debts and payments. The shape of what was owed.
"Go eat something," the Countess said, pulling back, composing herself back into her title with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had been doing it for thirty years. "Your father will be insufferable at dinner. You'll need your strength."
"Yes, Mother."
She started to turn, then stopped. Looked at him one more time — just a fraction of a second, the particular duration of a doubt being examined and then set aside for later.
Then she walked back the way she'd come, and Shinji watched her go, and the corridor was quiet.
*[Maternal suspicion: Unresolved. Probability she raises concern to Earl Raymond within 48 hours: 67%. Recommend sustained performance of Julius's behavioral baseline in proximity to Countess. Priority: HIGH.]*
*I know,* he told the skill. *She'll be the one who figures it out, if anyone does.*
He adjusted Julius's left cuff and went to find the training grounds.
---
Sir Hendor was already there.
He hadn't been sent for — he'd simply arrived, the way old soldiers arrive at things they consider their business, which was: everything within the walls of anything they'd sworn to protect. He was a short man, which Shinji noted with mild interest since the guards' memories had described him as intimidating, but the shortness was the compressed kind. Nothing about him was loose or wasted. Fifty years of purposeful reduction.
He was holding a blunted steel longsword.
"Young Master," he said. The title used as punctuation.
Shinji looked at the sword. Then at Hendor. Then back at the sword. "You want to spar. Now."
"Your father wants dinner in an hour." Hendor's eyes moved across Julius's body the way a craftsman inspects returning work — looking for damage, looking for what had changed. "This won't take long."
"It won't," Shinji agreed, and drew the Silvershard.
*[Hour 70 of 71. Core partition: stable. Recommend controlled deployment of [Blade of the Fallen] synthesis. Output parameters: consistent with advanced Aura Manipulation. Do not expose necromantic signature.]*
He took his guard.
Hendor attacked without preamble — which was, the training memories confirmed, the man's entire pedagogical philosophy. The crushing overhead came fast and heavy, blunted steel driving for the shoulder, designed to shatter guard and nerve in the same movement. Against the original Julius it had worked on both counts for the first seven years of training. Against the original Julius in the final two, it had worked on the guard but not the nerve, which was why Hendor had switched to other methods.
Against Shinji, it accomplished neither.
He slipped. Three centimeters to the right, weight transferred in the same instant, the overhead passing close enough to feel the displaced air, and the Silvershard was already moving — the needle thrust, Muller Family Fencing, stopping at precisely the correct distance from Hendor's throat. The precision was not artistry. It was calculation. Auto-Calculation, burning magicules to measure geometry in microseconds, mapping the space with an accuracy no nineteen-year-old had any business possessing.
Hendor checked his swing.
Then "The Alchemist" fired.
The synthesis was not loud. It never was. But the result arrived like a change in weather — the temperature between them dropping by several degrees, a specific and local cold that had nothing to do with the evening air, and then the spectral weight pressed forward: twenty dead guards, thirty-two years of sword practice among them, Captain Vane who had been genuinely gifted and trained three of the others himself, all of it condensed into the phantom echo of the rapier's arc. Not a strike. A *presence.* The collective intent of twenty men who had died in a clearing they'd walked into trusting their patrol route, carrying the last weight of everything they had known about defending something.
It pressed against Hendor's chest and he stumbled back one step with the involuntary reflexes of a body registering a threat before the mind had named it.
The old knight lowered his blunted sword.
He looked at the space between them — the space where something had been, that wasn't there anymore. Then he looked at Julius's face.
"Who are you," he said. Not a question. A man stating that he understood the answer was going to be complicated.
Shinji let the Silvershard drop to his side. He let the silence run — the specific duration of silence that communicates *I am choosing my words,* which was both accurate and useful.
"The Julius you knew died in that forest, Sir Hendor," he said. Julius's voice, but his own content — the honest version, because Hendor was the one person in this fortress who had just demonstrated he could handle it. "The one standing here is what crawled back over the bodies of his men."
Hendor hadn't moved his eyes from Julius's face.
"If you want the boy back," Shinji continued, "go dig up the Jura mud. If you want a Lord who can protect this house from the things circling it—" he held the old man's gaze, steady and level and cold the way deep water is cold— "then pick up your sword. There's work to do."
A long silence.
And then—
＜＜Confirmed. Hour 71 threshold reached.
Core partition: finalizing.
Ghost Core evolution initiating.
Vessel integration: locking.＞＞
It arrived not as sound but as *fact* — the Voice of the World inscribing itself directly into the architecture of his existence, bypassing ears, bypassing the body entirely, landing in the Ghost Core that was Shinji Satou the way a key lands in a lock it was made for.
He had thought it might be dramatic. A surge of energy, light behind the eyes, some theatrical announcement of transformation. What happened instead was quieter and more total: a *click,* the precise mechanical sound of two things releasing into their correct relationship, and then everything was different in the way that everything is different when you finally understand something you've been looking at wrong.
＜＜Confirmed. Race Evolution: Ghost → Spectre (Greater Ghost).
Intrinsic Skill: [Ethereal Phase] — acquired.
Intrinsic Skill: [Mental Interference] — acquired.
Dark Magic proficiency: registered.
Constraint noted: [Ethereal Phase] radius limited to 100 meters from Anchor vessel.＞＞
His Ghost Core expanded.
There was no other word for it. The processing capacity of his spiritual architecture scaled upward in the same way a room becomes larger when a wall is removed — not added to, but opened. New channels registering, new parameters populating, the world's magicule currents becoming visible in detail that had not been available before. He could feel the fortress now. The pulse of every soul within its walls, each wavelength distinct, the guards at their posts and the kitchen staff moving and the Countess sitting in her private parlour with the specific stillness of someone engaged in controlled worry.
And Hendor, in front of him, whose soul-wavelength was doing something interesting: a deep, slow frequency, the signal of a man who has been frightened by something and is choosing to stay anyway.
＜＜Confirmed. Vessel designation: Wight-Vessel (Living Dead Variant).
Biological systems: transitioned to Manual Override.
Intrinsic Skill: [Biological Stasis] — vessel registered.
Core Slot: Alpha — online. Status: EMPTY.
Physical Attack Nullification: retained.
Magic Resistance: enhanced.
Holy Magic Vulnerability: inherited. Noted.＞＞
The Julius body exhaled once — the last automatic breath — and stopped. Then Shinji redirected the function to manual, because a chest that didn't move was the kind of detail that got noticed, and he had a dinner to attend.
The cold settled into the body's surface. He corrected for it immediately — 37.1°C, as discussed.
Then "NEKROMANTEION" finished its own evolution, and what emerged was not the binary terminal that had been running since the Prologue.
The voice arrived like a key turning in a well-maintained lock — the sound of something that had been designed for exactly this moment and had been waiting with complete patience for it to arrive.
「Stabilization complete.」
Refined. Dry. The tone of someone who has been keeping your schedule while you were busy and has several