Chương 89: Chapter 88 – Appraisal Rank Up

The courier found them at the rail, still breathing hard from the walk up from the registration tents, and asked twice for "Oath of Defiance" before Ant realized that meant him.

"Got a package for you." The man was already fishing it out of the satchel at his hip, not waiting for Ant to ask.

"Came sealed courier, paid through all the way to Bramholt — whoever sent it wasn't interested in it taking the slow road." He pushed it into Ant's hands like he was glad to be rid of the weight of it.

"Sign here, and it's yours to worry about." Ant scrawled a signature that barely counted as one, and the man was gone before he'd even finished the last letter, already moving toward whatever was next on his list. It was heavier than it looked, wrapped tight in oilcloth and tied off in the same neat, doubled knots Ant had learned to recognize from exactly one person in the clan. He worked the knot loose while Kalsar leaned in over his shoulder, unashamed about it, and Duncan didn't even pretend not to be curious.

Inside: a slim wooden case, and folded on top of it, a single sheet in Maren's cramped, fast handwriting. They came in yesterday. Four is all we could afford right now. We'll try to get more when there's coin to spare. Andy asked for these specifically weeks ago, said they'd matter more than people would guess. I trust his judgment on this more than I trust my own instinct to save the coin. Use them well. — M. Ant opened the case.

Four lenses sat cushioned in dark cloth, thin enough to worry about breaking just looking at them.

"She actually found them." Andy came up beside him, and for once the words came out fast, a half-step ahead of his usual unhurried pace — the first time Ant had heard him sound anything but perfectly settled about an outcome he'd asked for.

"You knew about this?"

"Asked her for them the week we signed on with the tournament. Didn't think she'd manage it this fast." Andy picked one up, turned it in the light the way a man might turn over a coin to check it wasn't counterfeit.

"I read auras. That's mine, nobody else's. But an aura only tells you how strong something might turn out to be — not a level, not a skill list, not what a Kithren's actually built to do in a fight before it does it. Whatever it is you do — and I'm not asking you to explain it, that's yours to keep — it's the same problem. One read, one target, at a time. Neither of us scales past that without help." He looked around at the rest of them — Kalsar, Ray, Duncan, the two who'd be carrying these.

"Tournament's only going to get harder from here. I wanted more than one set of eyes that could actually read what's coming before it lands. Figured it was worth the coin even before we had it to spend."

"That's the longest sentence I've ever heard out of you," Duncan said, grinning.

"Don't get used to it." Kalsar had already taken his lens out of the case, holding it up to the light with open interest, none of the caution Ant might have expected from him around anything untested.

"How's it meant to feel?"

"Like nothing, they tell me," Andy said.

"Give it a minute."

"Reckon I'll manage that." Kalsar was already working it into place, unbothered, the way he approached most new equipment — trusting it to earn distrust rather than assuming it upfront. Ray had his in a heartbeat later, muttering half under his breath about finally getting a look at what everyone else had been on about, and Duncan took his with the eager carelessness of a boy handed something breakable and told to be careful, entirely too pleased with himself to actually manage it.

"Rebekah?" Ant asked, holding the last one out toward her.

"I've got Lem." She didn't reach for it, easy about the refusal, one hand already resting on the fox's head where he sat pressed against her leg.

"He tells me more than a lens ever could. Save it for someone who needs it." Ant took the last one for himself, then, since nobody else was reaching for it and there wasn't much point in it going unused. It sat colder than he expected, and for a moment nothing happened at all — the world simply resolving a little sharper at the edges, the way any new lens might. Then the chime arrived, from somewhere behind his own eyes, exactly where every other notification the system had ever handed him came from.

External optical device detected. Integrate with existing system architecture? Y/N He went still.

"Ant?" Rowan was already watching him closely, quicker than anyone else to catch it.

"Give me a second." Ant read the two words again, turning the choice over the way he turned over every choice the system handed him — carefully, half-suspicious of anything offered without being asked first. But there was nothing in the phrasing that read like a trap. Just a door, open, waiting on him to decide whether to walk through it. He thought yes. Integrating. Appraisal — Rank Up. Appraisal: Rank 2. Appraisal may now identify all items and Kithren simultaneously within the user's field of view.

System upgrade: 50%. He read it three times before he trusted it enough to say anything out loud.

"What," he said, to no one in particular.

"That bad?" Kalsar, already half-turned, hand drifting toward a sword he wasn't currently wearing.

"No. Good, I think." Ant let his eyes drift over the crowd near the rail without meaning to test it, and the test happened anyway — every Kithren in view, every piece of visible gear on every handler standing nearby, arriving all at once instead of one at a time the way it always had before. Levels. Grades. A blur of information too dense to hold onto individually, gone again almost as fast as it landed, like a hundred pages flipped past him in under a second.

"It used to be one thing at a time. Point it, focus, get the read. Now it's everything. All of it, all at once." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"That's an upgrade," Duncan said, entirely unbothered by the idea of his own eyes doing something new.

"Something like that." Ant let it stop there. The number sitting behind his own eyes wasn't anyone's business but his and Mahkir's — not standing in the middle of a crowd with Ray close enough to catch every word of it. Fifty percent, he said instead, once the others had started drifting back toward the schedule board and it was just the two of them again. Toward what, I don't know. But it already ranked up once. Doesn't seem unreasonable there's a third rank sitting somewhere past it.

Then we'll find out when we find out, Mahkir said, unbothered as ever. Worrying at a number won't move it any faster. The horn sounded before anyone could chase it further — three low notes, the arena's own signal that the first bout of the day was minutes out. Ferrowatch's boar came out of its gate like it already knew it had won. It was bigger than Xylock by half again, tusks the length of forearms, a hide that caught the morning light in a rust-colored sheen that didn't look like it would take a blade easily.

It didn't charge straightaway. It circled, unhurried, sizing. Kalsar wasn't beside them anymore — he'd taken the handler's strip at the edge of the sand the moment the draw was called, the same real distance from the rail that had kept Andy silent through Hexa's fight, and whatever he was telling Xylock now, none of them could hear it.

"Level's higher," Rowan said, watching from the rail.

"Has to be, moving like that. That's not nerves. That's a thing that's done this before." Xylock circled the other way, low and coiled, the new grade sitting strange on him still — a shape Ant hadn't fully gotten used to reading yet, longer than before the evolution, scaled in a way the old Xylock hadn't been. The boar broke first.

It came in low and fast, head down, tusks leading, and Xylock didn't try to meet it head-on — twisted sideways at the last possible moment, close enough that Ant heard Rebekah suck a breath in beside him, and came away with a line of red already welling along one flank where a tusk had caught him anyway. Duncan hissed through his teeth.

"That's going to leave a mark."

"He's still on his feet," Rebekah said.

"That's something, at least." The boar wheeled and came again almost before it had finished its turn, faster than something that size should have been able to manage, and this time Xylock didn't get all the way clear — took the shoulder of it, staggered, found his footing again half a second slower than the crowd's held breath wanted him to.

"He's losing ground," Ray said.

"He's finding the rhythm," Rowan said back, though nothing in his voice sounded fully convinced of it either. It went on longer than Hexa's fight had. Longer than anything Ant had watched from the rail so far — the boar pressing again and again, relentless in a way that read like it didn't know how to fight any other way, and Xylock giving ground each time but giving less of it, the retreats shortening, the recoveries coming faster, until on the fifth or sixth exchange he didn't retreat at all.

Met the charge low, took the tusk's line across scaled shoulder instead of soft flank, and wrapped. The boar screamed. It was a short fight after that — Xylock's coils working fast, methodical, nothing like the desperate scrambling of the exchanges before it, and inside another twenty seconds the boar had stopped moving beneath him entirely. Forfeit called. Round 1 — Oath of Defiance.

Kalsar crossed back from the handler's strip fast enough that it wasn't quite a run, letting out a breath he'd clearly been holding since the second charge.

"Told you."

"You told us arithmetic," Rebekah said.

"That wasn't arithmetic. That was him nearly losing an arm."

"Wasn't his arm to lose." Kalsar's shoulders came down, the tension he'd carried since the second charge finally letting go.

"Level's just a number. Body remembers what it's built, even when the number says it shouldn't." Xylock came off the sand favoring one side, and Kalsar was already moving toward the gate before the official had finished the call. Redmoor's boar-cub looked, by comparison, like a stray pup that had wandered into the wrong ring by mistake. It was young. Ant could see that without needing Appraisal at all — the too-big paws, the tusks barely past nubs, a handler at the rail who looked more worried than the animal did.

Mahkir sat at the center of the sand already, tail moving in slow, patient sweeps, watching it the way a much larger dog might watch a puppy that hadn't yet worked out the world could hurt it. Finally, Mahkir said, and there was nothing in it that sounded like nerves. The cub charged.

Mahkir stepped aside slow enough to make a point of it, let it go past, and answered with a strike that didn't look like it was trying especially hard — a paw, claws sheathed, catching the cub's shoulder and turning it sideways into the sand. Redtusk (Common — Boar-cub) — attack landed. Mahkir: 49/50. Ant blinked at the number sitting behind his eyes. One point. He checked it again in case he'd misread it, but it held.

The cub scrambled up, charged again, caught nothing but air as Mahkir turned half a step out of its path, and answered with the same unhurried paw. It went down again. Got up again. Ant watched three more exchanges pass in almost exactly the same shape — charge, miss or graze, answer — before the fourth ended with the cub simply not getting back up, Mahkir's weight settled across its back just enough to make the point without needing to make anything worse of it. Forfeit called. Round 1 — Oath of Defiance.

The screen took its time arriving, hanging behind Ant's eyes a second or two after the fight had already ended. Common bout concluded. Experience gained: 40. He stared at the number the way he'd stared at the system prompt an hour earlier, except this time there wasn't any confusion in it, just a flat, small disappointment he hadn't expected to feel this sharply.

"Forty," he said, mostly to himself. Mahkir padded off the sand, unbothered, barely breathing hard. Told you it would be easy.

"Forty experience," Ant said again, like repeating it might make it into more than it was.

"You're this close to eight and it hands you forty." It was an easy fight. Mahkir said it plainly, without any defensiveness in it at all, settling down beside the rail with the same patient stillness he'd shown the whole bout. The system doesn't pay for effort you didn't spend. I barely moved.

"I know how it works. I'm still allowed to be annoyed about it." You can be as annoyed as you like. Won't change the number. A pause, and his tail thumped once against the sand, the closest thing he had to a laugh. Would you rather I'd let it hit me harder? Bled a bit, made it look better for the crowd?

"No," Ant said, too fast, and Mahkir's tail twitched in a way that made it clear he'd noticed exactly how fast. Behind them, Kalsar was helping Xylock into the shade of the handler's tent, checking the shoulder wound with the kind of careful, unhurried attention he gave anything that had actually cost something. Rebekah had already crossed half the distance toward Ant, her usual grin gone flat and quiet at the edges, close enough now that he could hear the low murmur she kept up toward Lem at her heel.

"Forty experience," she said, catching the tail end of it, "and you're standing there looking like someone told you Christmas was cancelled."

"It's not about the number." Ant heard how unconvincing that sounded even as he said it.

"It's entirely about the number." She was closer now than she needed to be for the conversation, close enough that he could smell woodsmoke still clinging to her from the morning fire.

"You wanted him to struggle. Just a little." He didn't answer that, mostly because she wasn't wrong, and admitting it out loud felt like admitting something else besides. Mahkir, from the sand, said nothing at all — just watched the two of them, tail moving in slow, unbothered sweeps, like a creature who'd already worked out exactly where this conversation was headed and saw no reason to hurry it along.