Chương 15: Chapter 14 - What are you

The screen settled into focus, his own attributes laid out where the fight had left him kneeling. [Str: 8] [End: 4] [Magic: 0] [Agi: 10] [HP: 30/30] [Mana: 0/0] He read it once, then again, in case a second look changed the numbers. It didn't.

"Eight strength." He said it out loud mostly to hear how stupid it sounded.

"Four endurance." Five years hauling stolen sacks of flour through alleys too narrow to swing them properly, five years of nights on stone floors and mornings that started with nothing in his stomach, and this was what his body had to show for it. Not average. Not close to it, if the academy boys from this morning were anything to measure against — level five, barely out of their ceremony year, and he'd bet good coin neither of them carried an endurance stat this low. Agility, at least, hadn't embarrassed him.

Ten wasn't much, but it tracked. Moving fast and quiet was the one skill five years of scraping by had actually taught him. Magic sat at zero. He didn't linger on that one. A stat that didn't apply to him at all, filled in because the format demanded every field have a number in it. He pushed the screen toward Mahkir's name before the sourness in his chest could settle any deeper. [Str: 12] [End: 10] [Magic: 20] [Agi: 18] [HP: 30/30] [Mana: 22/50] He went still.

"That can't be right." Mahkir, still sitting on the shelf of rock where he'd hatched, didn't open his eyes. It's right.

"Your HP is the same as mine." Is that a complaint?

"You're the size of a housecat." A housecat that just ate something you couldn't have touched with a spear. He had nothing to say to that, which was, he was beginning to suspect, going to be a recurring problem. He read the numbers a third time anyway, the way you checked a locked door twice even after you already knew it was locked. Fifty mana at level two. Every account he'd ever studied put a Kithren that young somewhere near ten, maybe fifteen with a strong bond behind it.

Mahkir wasn't leaning toward one stat at the cost of the others either, which was the only way anything like this was supposed to happen. Everything sat high. Nothing had been paid for. He looked at Mahkir a while longer, turning the numbers over without finding a category they fit into, and decided they weren't going to explain themselves by being stared at.

"Right," he said, and stood, his knees protesting the stone they'd been braced against.

"If you can do that—" he tipped his head toward the scorched ring of ash still settling across the floor, "—what else can you do?" Mahkir's eyes opened. Now you're asking the right question.

"I've read about Kithren for five years. I've never had one to actually look at." He crossed toward the shelf, still favouring the arm the darkness had opened earlier.

"So. Humour me." Mahkir dropped from the ledge without any apparent effort, landing soundless on all four paws, and Ant caught himself cataloguing it anyway — the way the small body moved like weight was a suggestion rather than a rule. He crouched and held a hand out, not quite touching.

"Claws first," he said.

"Do they burn?" Try it and see.

"That's not an answer." It's a better answer than telling you. He reached toward the nearest chunk of the corroded blade lying half-buried in ash — safer than his own hand, if Mahkir decided to be difficult about it — and Mahkir obliged with a single unhurried swipe. Four thin lines opened in the rusted metal, clean and precise, and nothing about them so much as warmed the air around it. No heat. No smoke. Just steel, parted.

"So the fire only comes from your mouth." Obviously.

"Not obvious to me an hour ago." You've had an hour to catch up. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. He kept it in mind anyway — claws for cutting, breath for burning, two separate weapons rather than one creature that did everything the same way. It mattered. If they ever ran into something immune to fire, or something that needed handling quietly, that distinction was the difference between a plan and a guess.

Mahkir's nose pushed against his sleeve before he'd finished the thought, cold and insistent against the dried blood there, and Ant pulled his arm back on reflex.

"I'm fine." You're bleeding.

"It stopped bleeding an hour ago." Stopped bleeding isn't the same as fine. Mahkir pushed at the sleeve again anyway, until Ant gave up and let him look, tilting his arm so the cut along it caught what little light the chamber offered. It had scabbed cleanly, the edges dark but not angry, nothing swollen underneath. Shallow. You'll live.

"Very reassuring." I wasn't trying to reassure you. I was telling you the truth. He dropped back onto his haunches, tail curling once. You'll wrap it properly when we're somewhere that isn't a cave full of dead men. Until then, stop touching it.

"You could just say you were worried." I could. I won't.

"Enhanced Vision," he said next, and the world went red at the edges the moment the words left him, the way it had in the fight — except now there was nothing in the chamber trying to kill him, and he could actually look at what the skill did instead of just surviving through it. The bones at the far wall sharpened into individual pieces he hadn't registered before — a jaw here, a curled hand there — and gaps in the stone picked out where the ordinary light hadn't reached at all.

He turned in a slow circle, taking stock.

"How far does it go?" Further than you'll need it to, in here.

"That's not a number." Numbers are your job. Results are mine. He let the skill drop, and the chamber snapped back to its ordinary grey, dimmer than it had felt a second ago, the red glow of Mahkir doing most of the work now. He glanced at the mana line sitting quiet at the edge of his awareness. Still zero. Whatever Enhanced Vision cost him, apparently it cost nothing at all, which either meant it drew from somewhere he couldn't see or meant the number attached to it really was as small as the screen had claimed.

"What about the nose," he said.

"Can you smell better than I can, or is that just a story people tell about anything with fur?" Mahkir's expression didn't change, but his head lifted, nostrils working once, twice, in a way that looked almost mechanical in its precision. There's iron under the ash. Old. Older than the fresher iron on your sleeve. A pause. And something rotten two chambers back, past where you haven't bothered looking yet.

"Rotten how?" The kind of rotten that used to have a heartbeat. I'd leave it. He decided he would, in fact, leave it. He crouched instead and picked a broken shard of the corroded blade off the floor, turning it once in his fingers before tossing it, underhand, toward the far side of the chamber — no warning, no count, just released it and watched.

Mahkir caught it out of the air before it had covered half the distance, jaws closing around the rusted metal with a precision that made the whole motion look slower than it had actually been, the way truly fast things sometimes did. He dropped it at Ant's feet a second later, unbothered, as if retrieving thrown scrap metal from midair was simply what afternoons looked like now.

"That's — " Ant looked at the shard, then at Mahkir, then back at the shard.

"I didn't even see you move." You blinked. It's not my fault your eyes are slow. The locked skills bothered him more. He called the Kithren tab back and looked at the two remaining slots, still marked with nothing but a pair of question marks apiece.

"What are these." Mahkir's tail moved once, unhurried. Ask them.

"I'm asking you." I don't know either. The words came out flatter than usual, like the admission cost him something to give. They're not open yet. I'd know if they were open.

"Level requirement?" Presumably.

"You don't sound certain." I'm never uncertain. I'm simply not telling you something I don't have. He almost laughed, the sound coming out closer to a cough the way it kept doing whenever he tried to sound light after a day like this one.

He crouched back down, elbows on his knees, and studied Mahkir properly for the first time since the panic of the fight had burned off — the diamond marks on the forehead, too even to have grown by accident, the tail that never stopped moving even when the rest of him went still as stone, the small pointed ears that hadn't so much as flicked at any of it.

"Try the fire again," he said.

"Let's see it properly this time." Mahkir's ears flattened, just slightly. Can't.

"Can't, or won't." Can't. The word came out flatter than his usual dry deflections, closer to genuine annoyance at having to say it at all. Thirty mana. Every time. There's no small version — it's not a tap I can turn partway. I don't have thirty left. [Mana: 22/50] I have twenty-two. Ask me again once I've slept. That landed harder than Ant expected.

He'd assumed, without ever quite deciding to, that whatever Mahkir had access to simply renewed itself as fast as it spent — that the creature who'd burned a Dark Elemental to nothing an hour ago was standing in front of him now exactly as armed as he'd been then. He wasn't. Whatever that column of fire had cost him, it hadn't come back yet, and wouldn't for a while.

"How long to fill back up?" Depends how hard I've worked. Slow, out here, sitting in a hole in the ground. Faster once I've eaten something that isn't ash.

"So if something else comes through that gap tonight—" Then I fight it the ordinary way. Claws. Speed. You stay behind me regardless. Mahkir's tone didn't change, but the flatness of it closed the subject before Ant could push further.

"How far away can you hear me?" he asked, because it was the next obvious thing and because some part of him wanted to keep going before his body remembered exactly how much the day had cost it.

"The talking. Not the vision. The—" he gestured vaguely between them, "—whatever this is." Mahkir looked almost offended by the question. Walk and find out. He did. Crossed to the far wall of the chamber, further than he'd have liked given the state of his legs, until the red glow behind him had shrunk to a coal-sized point against the dark. He turned.

"Can you hear me?" I could hear you complaining about your knees three steps ago. Yes.

"I wasn't complaining." You were thinking it loudly enough that it might as well have been out loud. That gave him pause — a small, cold flicker of a question about exactly how much of what happened in his own head Mahkir actually caught, and how much stayed his — but he tucked it away rather than chase it now, too tired to want the answer badly enough tonight.

He started back across the chamber instead, boots scuffing through drifts of old ash that gave off a faint mineral smell every time he disturbed them, sharp and dry at the back of his throat. He was three steps from the shelf when the ceiling groaned. Not loud. A low settling somewhere in the stone above the gap, the kind of sound a building made in winter, except there was no winter down here, no reason for anything to move at all unless something up there had put its weight onto a different foot.

Mahkir's ears swivelled toward it. The amber in his eyes didn't change — not yet — but every line of him went taut the same way it had right before the darkness first arrived.

"Later," Ant said, more to himself than to Mahkir, and started moving toward the far side of the chamber where the ash sat undisturbed and something pale glinted, half-buried, against the base of the wall.