Chapter 99: Dark Room

Chapter 99: Chapter 99: Dark Room

The Training Matrix on the second floor had a new setting.

Garrick had spent two days building it from Damian’s plans. When Donald turned it on, the lights in the room went out completely. The gravity rose to three times normal. Then, one by one, seven glowing gray rings appeared in the air across the length of the floor, each one a copy of a Council ward from the Crown Archive.

"They won’t hurt you," Garrick said from the control booth. "But if anything with an aura touches one, it’ll scream loud enough to wake the dead. Same as the real ones."

Sylvia stood at the start line in her tactical suit. Helena stood beside her in borrowed training clothes, black leggings and a fitted gray top. She had tied her hair back tight and taken off her glasses.

"Ready?" Sylvia asked.

"No," Helena said. "Go."

Sylvia took her hand. The shadow under them opened, and they sank into it.

Donald watched through the booth window with [Lesser Mana Perception]. Inside the dark, Sylvia’s signature moved fast and low across the floor, the way it always did. Helena’s signature was next to it.

It was bright. Very bright.

They reached the first ring. The moment they passed under it, the ring turned red and let out a long, high shriek.

The lights came back on. Sylvia and Helena rose out of the floor ten feet short of the second ring. Helena was on her hands and knees, breathing hard.

"Your core is too loud," Sylvia said. She wasn’t angry. "My shadow hides what’s inside it. But you’re glowing. It’s like carrying a lamp through a closet."

"I’m an Arch-Mage," Helena said between breaths. "My core is supposed to be loud."

"Then make it quiet."

They tried again. This time Helena pulled her aura in until Donald could barely feel it. They passed the first ring and the second. At the third, the effort slipped. The ring turned red and screamed.

Helena sat down on the floor, red in the face.

"I’ve spent thirty years learning to push my mana out," she said. "Nobody teaches you how to hold it in."

"Assassins do," Sylvia said. She sat down across from her, cross-legged. "Don’t push it down. Push it in. Small. Think of it as a coin in your fist, not a fire you’re trying to put out."

Helena closed her eyes. Donald watched her aura shrink, slowly, until it was a small, steady point in the middle of her chest.

"Like that," Sylvia said. "Hold it there."

The third try took eleven minutes. They passed all seven rings without a sound. When they rose out of the floor at the far end, Helena laughed out loud, surprised at herself.

"Again," Sylvia said.

They ran it nine more times. By the last run, they crossed the room in four minutes.

Helena went downstairs to sleep. Garrick shut the Matrix down and went to bed. The lights came up halfway and stayed there.

Sylvia was still sitting on the floor at the end of the course.

Donald walked out onto the training floor. "You should go to bed."

"I can’t stand up," Sylvia said simply. "Carrying her through the shadow under three gravity is like carrying a piano up a staircase. Ten times."

[Valuation Eye]

[Target: Sylvia]

[Stamina: 6%.]

[Mana: 11%.]

[Status: Muscle strain, both legs. Mild mana fatigue.]

Donald knelt beside her and put his hand on her shoulder.

[Purifying Touch]

White light went through her. Sylvia let out a slow breath and her shoulders dropped. The color came back into her face.

[Stamina: 6% → 58%.]

[Status: Strain cleared.]

"Better?" he asked.

"Much," she said. But she didn’t move away, and he didn’t take his hand back.

For a while they sat like that in the half-dark of the empty room.

"Can I ask you something?" Sylvia said.

"Sure."

"Why me?" She looked at the floor. "When you broke my contract in Malcor’s vault, you’d just met me. I’d tried to cut your throat that same morning. You could have let Evelyn kill me. Or just walked away. Why did you pay for me?"

Donald thought about how to answer it honestly without saying anything about the System.

"Because I was you once," he said. "Not an assassin. But owned. I spent four years in Sector 4 scrubbing other people’s armor, doing whatever I was told because I had nothing else. When I looked at you in that vault, you looked like somebody who’d been told her whole life what she was worth. And they were wrong about it."

Sylvia turned her head to look at him. Her violet eyes were very close.

"And Evelyn?" she said quietly.

He didn’t pretend not to understand. "Evie and I are together. She knows how I look at people I care about. She told me once that I pick up strays."

"I’m a stray?"

"You were," Donald said. "Now you’re family."

Sylvia was quiet. Then she pulled down her black half-mask.

He had seen her face before, but not often, and never this close. She had a narrow face, a small, firm mouth and a thin pale scar along her left jaw. She looked younger without the mask, and less certain.

"I don’t want to be family, Donald," she said.

She leaned in and kissed him.

It was careful at first, as if she expected him to pull back. When he didn’t, she put her hand on the back of his neck and kissed him harder. Her lips were cool. Her fingers were shaking a little.

When she pulled back, her cheeks were red.

"Evelyn knows," Sylvia said quickly, before he could speak. "I asked her yesterday. I told her I didn’t want to do anything behind her back." She looked away. "She laughed at me. Then she said if I hurt you she would throw me off the roof, and if you hurt me she would throw you off after me."

Donald laughed in spite of himself.

"That sounds like her," he said.

A golden window opened in the corner of his vision.

[Primary Asset ’Sylvia’: Affection Level — Maximum.]

[Milestone Reached: Bond of Trust (Emotional Merging, Stage 1).]

[Calculating Returns...]

[Reward: +4 Speed.]

[Reward: Skill Acquired — Shade Step (C-Rank).]

[Shade Step: Step from one shadow to another within 10 meters. Cooldown: 20 seconds.]

He closed it before it could distract him.

Sylvia was watching his face. "You’re doing that thing," she said. "Where you look at nothing."

"Thinking," Donald said.

"About what?"

"About how you’re going to carry a scholar through seven Council wards in eight days."

"Seven days," Sylvia corrected. She stood up. Her legs held now. She pulled her mask back up over her face, but her eyes were still soft above it. "And I’ll carry her. I’ll carry you too, if I have to."

She held out a hand. He took it, and she pulled him to his feet.

"When we come back from Aldmere," she said, very low, "I’m not stopping at a kiss."

Then she stepped back into the shadow and was gone.

---

Aris was waiting for him in the War Room the next morning with good news.

"I sold the Crimson Lotus tower," she said, before he’d even sat down.

"To who?"

"Ashford Holdings." She smiled. "It gives them a reason to meet you that nobody in Aldmere will question, and it gives you working capital. They paid four point two million for a ninety-nine-year lease. The money cleared at dawn."

[Current Balance: 4,860,000 System Credits.]

Donald let out a long breath. Enough to buy two or three A-Rank spells out of the air. Not enough for an S-Rank one. But enough to give him options in Aldmere.

"Good work," he said.

"I know." Aris tapped her tablet and the reactor readout came up on the table.

[Dimensional Core Resonance: 64.8%]

[Days to Ceremony of Seals: 7.]

Donald looked at it for a long moment.

Then he went downstairs to watch Sylvia and Helena run the course again.