Chương 45: Chapter 44 - I Don't Have A Choice

"That's not the same as being alone," Kalsar started, some real heat entering his voice for the first time since they'd begun.

"You keep confusing—" The shouting reached them before he could finish. It came muffled through the wall at first, indistinct, and then clearer as Maren's voice rose past whatever restraint she'd been holding onto.

"I have gained more in the last three weeks than I did in two years stuck in that lab!" Ant and Kalsar both went quiet at the same moment, the argument between them forgotten entirely, neither one making any pretense of not listening. Kalsar's eyes flicked toward the house once, something unreadable crossing his face before he settled back into stillness, arms folding across his chest as though bracing for whatever came next.

A pause, something low and indistinct answering her from the other end of the line, too quiet to make out through the wall.

"I don't care," Maren's voice cut back in, sharper now.

"You're always so overprotective — I can take care of myself now. I don't need to be babysat." Another pause, longer this time. Ant found himself watching the doorway to the house without meaning to, as though he might be able to see the conversation through solid wood if he just looked hard enough.

He could picture it easily enough anyway — Maren standing rigid by the counter, the phone pressed too hard against her ear, the particular stubborn set of her jaw he'd already learned to recognise over the past few weeks.

"You know what," Maren said, and something in her tone had shifted, gone past anger into something colder and more final, "fine. If that's what being part of the clan is, then I want no part of it. I enjoy experiencing this. I enjoy actually learning by action, instead of just theorising about it from a room I never leave." The phone slammed down hard enough that they heard it clearly even through the wall — a sharp crack of plastic against its cradle, followed by silence.

Maren came out a moment later, crossing the yard with quick, tight strides, and dropped back into the chair she'd left barely ten minutes earlier, arms folded, jaw set, staring at nothing in particular with the specific fury of someone who hadn't finished being angry and had simply run out of anyone to direct it at. Neither Ant nor Kalsar said anything for a moment. The yard held its quiet around the three of them, the swinging beams creaking faintly in the breeze, everything else deliberately still.

Ant let the silence sit a moment longer before breaking it.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Maren said, too quickly, the words coming out clipped in a way that suggested otherwise. She straightened slightly, visibly pushing the last of it down, some of the composure she usually carried settling awkwardly back into place like clothing put on in a hurry.

"What were you talking about?" Kalsar looked at her for a moment before answering, something careful in the way he chose to let the subject move on without pressing it.

"I was explaining to Ant why going unclanned is unwise," he said.

"Especially if the plan is to actually grow stronger, rather than simply survive." He nodded toward Ant as he spoke, though the explanation was clearly meant for both of them now.

"He needs vortices. He needs a proper team around him — people he can actually rely on in a fight, not just whoever happens to be standing nearby. He needs access to stronger Kithren to test himself against, which means structured opportunities to find them." He shook his head slightly.

"Unclanned, he can join arenas. That much is open to anyone with coin for the entry fee. But he won't get missions. He won't get bounties on vortices — those go through clan channels, always have, and no amount of raw talent changes who gets first refusal on a contract like that. His growth would be limited, capped by whatever he can scrape together on his own, in a world where everyone stronger than him is operating with resources he'd have no access to at all."

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. He looked at Ant directly.

"My advice to him is to start a clan." Maren let out something that wasn't quite a laugh.

"Ha. That's exactly what I told him." Kalsar didn't acknowledge the point, his attention still fixed on Ant.

"I have one other reason," he said, "probably the most important one, and I want you to actually sit with this before you dismiss it the way you've been dismissing everything else today." He paused, choosing the next part carefully.

"Mahkir." Ant felt something in his chest go still.

"I've only known the two of you a few weeks," Kalsar continued, "but I can already tell he's something rare. Stronger than he has any business being, for a start — I've trained enough bonded pairs to know what a level six Kithren is supposed to look like, and he isn't it. But it's not just that." His eyes held Ant's, steady and unblinking.

"It's the system. Whatever you're both running on. If that ever becomes known — properly known, outside the four of us in this yard — you won't just be interesting to people. You'll be wanted. Not only for what he can do in a fight, but studied. Taken apart, piece by piece, by people who'll want to understand exactly how something like that works." He let that sit for a moment before finishing.

"Clans will want you," he said.

"And if you refuse them — which you would, and rightly so — some of them won't ask twice. They'll simply take you. By force, if it comes to that. And right now, today, you have no way of stopping them." Ant sat with that for a moment, turning it over the way he turned over everything — carefully, looking for the flaw, the way out, the piece that would let him dismiss it and go back to the simpler version of the future he'd already decided on. He didn't find one. That was the part that settled hardest.

He'd spent five years learning to spot exactly this kind of argument — the ones people used to get something out of him, dressed up as concern, angled to sound reasonable right up until you noticed what it actually cost you to agree. This one didn't feel like that. It felt like someone laying out a map of a danger Ant hadn't let himself look at directly, not once, not since the moment the lab had first gone quiet around the numbers on Mahkir's screen. He found himself thinking about Mahkir instead.

About the small, unbothered creature who'd chosen him for reasons neither of them fully understood — who'd thrown himself, without hesitation, at something three times his size in Kalsar's own yard rather than let Ant take a hit meant for him, and who still, most nights, curled up small enough to fit against his ribs like none of that had cost him anything at all. He had no particular interest in protecting himself.

Five years of surviving on nothing had worn that instinct down to something almost theoretical — he kept moving because stopping wasn't an option, not because he especially cared what happened to him if he stopped. But the thought of someone taking Mahkir — studying him, dissecting whatever made him what he was, treating him like a specimen rather than the thing he actually was — settled into Ant's chest with a heat that felt entirely unfamiliar in its size. He tried, briefly, to picture it properly.

Some Cerlan facility, maybe, or somewhere worse, instruments and restraints and people speaking about Mahkir in the same clinical tone Maren had once used to explain how a chip read muscle density. Mahkir strapped to something. Mahkir with no say in any of it. The image didn't want to finish forming, and Ant found he didn't particularly want it to. He'd be damned if he let that happen. As if I would let them, Mahkir said, dry and immediate, answering before Ant had even finished thinking it.

Ant almost smiled at that. He knew exactly how much confidence sat behind those words, and knew, too, exactly how little it would matter against the kind of force a determined clan could bring to bear. He'd seen what Mahkir could do. He'd also seen, in the vortex, what it looked like when something stronger simply refused to go down — Kalsar's own Kithren wearing itself out swing by swing, the runes dimming, strength alone not enough to close a gap that size.

The only real answer, the only one that actually held up under pressure, was strength enough that the question never got asked in the first place.

"Let's say for a moment I agree," Ant said slowly.

"It still doesn't solve any of the problems I already mentioned. The main one being it costs money to register a clan. Money I don't have." He glanced sideways at Maren.

"Unless — you fancy giving me a loan?" Maren looked at him for a long moment, something flickering behind her expression that hadn't been there a second ago.

"I don't have money either," she said.

"Not anymore. What I had access to was my clan's money. And after the call I just had—" She stopped, jaw tightening briefly before she pushed through it.

"I no longer have access to any of it. I'm as broke as you are now." Something in her voice cracked slightly on the last few words, the anger from a few minutes earlier finally giving way to something quieter underneath it — the actual weight of what she'd just done to herself over the phone, sitting in properly now that the shouting had stopped. Kalsar was quiet for a moment, watching the two of them work through it, something settling behind his weathered face that hadn't been there a minute ago.

"I can lend you the money to start a clan," he said.

"Only, it won't really be a loan. Not the way you're thinking." He let that sit for a minute, watching Ant's expression shift as the words caught up with him.

"Because I'll be joining you. As your first member."