Novel Full Chapter 182: Gradually Building Trust
Chapter 182: Gradually Building Trust
[Minor Quest Complete: Identify Active Skarn Trail]
[Reward: Tracking Proficiency Increased]
[Hunt Contribution: 18%]
[Death Essence Absorbed]
[Minor Quest Complete: Assist Storm-Silver Harvest]
[Reward: Veyrhold Standing +2]
[Condition Gained: Mild Static Burn]
[Condition Removed: Mild Static Burn]
[Beast Slain: Hollow Hare]
[Death Essence Absorbed]
[Rank Progress Increased]
The hollow hare notification had offended him.
Not because he killed it. The thing had attacked first, leaping out of an ash drift with too many teeth and a scream that nearly made him drop his spear.
But because the energy it gave was so small that the Great System seemed almost embarrassed to mention it.
Rohan still accepted it.
Pride was less useful than progress.
His Molten Attribute also changed through use.
At first, Molten Assimilation had been clumsy. A survival reaction at best in Rohan’s opinion. He pulled ash to his skin, thickened it, used it to smother heat or scrape against skarn bodies, but he had not understood the limits. In Veyrhold, under supervision and with several people ready to shout if he did something stupid, he began testing it carefully.
Wild ash outside the walls responded differently depending on its source.
Normal grey drift clung easily but gave weak protection.
Skarn-tainted ash reacted aggressively, carrying heat and ember traces that made his skin itch if he absorbed too much.
Cinderback ash held warmth well, useful against cold nights but dangerous near sparks.
Storm-silver dust was strictly forbidden after one attempt caused every hair on his arms to rise and made a nearby lens hum until Maerin threatened to tie him to a chair.
He learned to coat his hands without covering his whole arms.
He learned to harden ash over his forearms like crude bracers, which gave him a heck of a lot more defence than he had previously. Though he had less flexibility as a whole due to the hardness and sturdiness of the bracers.
He learned to release short bursts of ash into a skarn’s ember-mouth without nearly igniting himself, which was a big thing, of course.
’Don’t want to die before I can even find my way back home...’
He learned, most importantly, when not to use it.
That lesson took longer.
The first time he overreached, he nearly collapsed from energy exhaustion.
It happened during a hunt for a nest of young skarn that had begun stalking the southern marker line. The creatures were smaller than the ones that had attacked Liora’s cart, but faster. Rohan tried to spread his influence through too much ash at once, hoping to disrupt their movement the way he had near the ridge.
For three seconds, it worked beautifully.
The ash clumped beneath their claws. Two stumbled. Liora shot one through the head. Maerin hamstrung another. Rohan felt brilliant.
Then his vision went white at the edges.
His legs weakened. The ash coating his arms cracked apart. The world tilted.
A skarn lunged.
Jorren’s shield intercepted it with a sound like a door closing on a nightmare.
After the fight, Maerin stood over Rohan while he sat in the ash, breathing like an idiot.
"You tried to grip the field."
"I noticed."
"You cannot."
"I also noticed."
"Do it again and I will remove you from hunts."
Rohan looked up at her.
"That seems counterproductive to my growth."
"So is dying."
"That argument keeps being annoyingly strong."
Jorren made the sound.
Rohan did not have enough energy to glare at him properly.
By the end of the second month, he had a place in Veyrhold’s rhythm.
Not a home.
Not yet.
But a place.
He slept in a small room attached to the ash-house, officially because the healers wanted to monitor his strange ash reactions, unofficially because Maerin preferred knowing where he was. He ate most meals in the watch hall, where suspicion slowly gave way to practical familiarity. People still asked too many questions. Children stared openly. Older residents touched their line plates when he passed, a habit that might have been protective, superstitious, or rude.
But the hostility faded.
Mostly.
The first real shift came after the west drain cracked during an ash tide.
It happened at night. The bells rang three times in a pattern Rohan had learned meant structural breach, inner wall, non-fire. He stumbled out of bed with his spear in one hand and one boot half-fastened, expecting skarn.
Instead, he found half the ash-house district choking in a cloud of grey drift pouring up from a drainage channel.
The filters had jammed. The channel shutters had failed. Ash from outside the wall was being forced through an old crack beneath the western service path, filling the lower homes faster than people could sweep it back.
No monsters.
Just Cael Athis trying to kill everyone through maintenance failure.
Rohan joined the bucket line without being asked.
Then the crack widened.
A section of paving dropped.
Pell, who had been carrying a shutter brace, slipped.
Rohan moved before thinking.
He grabbed the boy’s collar with one hand and slammed his other palm into the ash pouring from the crack. Molten Assimilation surged through him. Not outward across a field this time. Focused.
Narrow. He pulled the loose ash into a dense plug, compacting it with every scrap of control he had learned until the flow slowed.
It hurt.
The ash was freezing cold at first, then suddenly hot as friction and pressure built. Grit tore at his palm. His bandaged bite wound reopened. But the flow slowed enough for Jorren and two workers to drag a metal shutter over the crack and hammer it into place.
Pell coughed, shaking and covered in grey dust.
His mother arrived thirty seconds later and nearly knocked Rohan over hugging the boy.
She did not hug Rohan.
But the next morning, there was a second bowl of stew waiting beside his usual seat.
No one said who put it there.
Rohan ate it without asking.
[Minor Quest Complete: Prevent Drain Breach Casualty]
[Reward: Veyrhold Standing +5]
[Standing: Useful Guest -> Trusted Helper]
Rohan stared at the panel.
Trusted Helper.
Still not shipblood, but that would never happen, as he was neither blood related to any of these people, nor did he have any plans on sticking around permanently.