Chapter 77: Give This To Ouroboros

We rinsed the pot out with the last of the water, swirling it around until the metal ran clear again, steam still curled faintly off the sides from the last batch, and Sera dropped the rest of the Calfeeth meat inside without much ceremony, already thinking about the next leg of the journey more than the meal.

"We’ll need a way to keep this fresh," she said, mostly to herself. "Or cook it all now and carry it."

"Could freeze it," Theodore offered, glancing over at me. "Edmund, use your ice affinity to freeze it solid. Should keep for a while, right?"

My heart went cold in a way that had nothing to do with ice.

I didn’t answer right away. I just looked at him, then at the rest of them, feeling the weight of a conversation I had been quietly avoiding since the moment it became relevant settle over the fire.

"I... my affinity actually underwent a change," I said finally, "after I advanced to Bronze Core."

Theodore frowned. "What do you mean?"

"After I turned Bronze," I said, "my affinity changed. To Theif."

For a second, nobody said anything.

Then Arthur’s hand froze halfway to his mouth. "It what?"

Theodore actually leaned forward, staring at me like I had grown a second head. "You had an ice affinity and it just... changed?"

Mary’s expression didn’t move much, but her eyes sharpened, the same look she got whenever a puzzle piece finally slotted into a place she hadn’t expected.

Sera, notably, wasn’t reacting at all. She just nodded, slow and thoughtful, like I had told her the weather had shifted.

"Actually," she said, "that’s real. I read about it in Words of Saint Matthew Abraham. It’s called Alternative Change. When a spirit isn’t compatible with a given affinity, sometimes it changes to another one instead." She tilted her head at me. "Though I do have to ask. Why didn’t you tell any of us?"

Honestly, I didn’t have a great answer for that.

"I didn’t fully understand it myself," I admitted. "I thought something random that happened and I would have have to live with, not something with an actual name in a book somewhere."

"Well, it does," Sera said. "Congratulations. You’re apparently rare enough to warrant a paragraph in a very old text."

"Thrilling."

Arthur set his food down entirely now, curiosity winning out over hunger. "So what can you actually do with it? Theft affinity. That sounds like it could mean a hundred different things."

I took a breath, trying to organize the mess of half-formed understanding I had built up over the last month into something that actually made sense out loud.

"I can steal thoughts," I said. "Abilities. Attributes. And I have got faster hands than a normal person, along with a stronger spiritual intuition than I used to have."

"Steal abilities," Theodore repeated slowly. "Like, take someone’s power and use it?"

"Temporarily. I can use it for six seconds, if I manage to steal from someone but if its a relatively stronger opponent then I can only do it if their guard is down when it happens. After that, it snaps back to the original owner."

"And if they’re not above your rank?"

"Longer, but I haven’t tested the exact limits yet. Tonight was the second real fight I’ve used it in."

Mary studied me carefully. "You used it on puppeteer when it was an Unorthadox creature?"

"I did."

"That’s a Beast Lord," she said. "Well above your rank."

"I noticed."

Arthur leaned in again. "What about the thoughts part? You said you can steal those too."

"well yes I can," I said. "It happens on its own whenever I use the ability itself, not something I trigger separately. When I use the ability I get into the opponent’s Domain of Mind and stir up their Sea of Consciousness enough, I catch whatever they were thinking in the last three or four seconds, right around whenever their guard actually drops. Though all of this happens in micro seconds."

"And attributes?" Sera asked.

"Hardest of the three. Five seconds of borrowed use, and it costs more of me to pull off than the other two combined." I shrugged, a little helplessly. "I’m assuming all of this gets better as I get advance. It’s only been a few months."

They all sat with that for a moment, processing it the way you process finding out a friend’s been quietly carrying something heavy without telling you.

Finally, Arthur just nodded. "Well. Good to know, I guess. Would’ve been nice information to have before tonight, but I understand not exactly having time to explain it mid-fight."

"Sorry."

"Don’t be. Just don’t die keeping the next thing a secret."

"No promises."

Sera stretched, glancing toward the darkened treeline beyond our little fire. "Well. Let’s not waste any more time sitting around. We’ve got ground to cover."

We were halfway to our feet, gathering up what was left of the meal, when Mary suddenly went still, staring past the fire toward the corpse of the serpent still sprawled where it had fallen.

Five small shapes hovered above it, glowing faintly blue, edged with thin traces of green, pulsing gently in the dark like something breathing.

"Characteristics," Sera said, straightening. "Five of them. And strong ones, by the look of that glow."

I walked over and knelt beside the corpse, reaching out to gather them into my palm one at a time. The moment my fingers closed around the last one, something flared behind my sternum, sharp and insistent, my spiritual intuition screaming a single, clear directive loud enough that I actually flinched.

Give this to Ouroboros.

I straightened slowly, turning the glowing characteristics over in my hand, and looked back at the others.

"My intuition’s telling me something," I said. "It wants me to give these to the tree. The one we came from."

Nobody laughed. Nobody questioned it either, not after everything else tonight had already asked us to accept without explanation, without so much as a proper warning first.

They just looked at each other, then back at me, weighing it in the quiet, patient way people do when they’ve already learned tonight that questioning things too hard rarely gets you a satisfying answer.

One by one, they nodded.