Chapter 242: A Day and a Half Gone

"Huaaah."

Ravian yawned as he finally woke in his tent. He lay still for a moment, looking at the familiar roof while the last traces of sleep loosened their hold on him.

The tent they had built for him before he left the camp had remained exactly as it was throughout his absence. Malrik had told him yesterday that Claria was the reason no one had taken it down.

...

"Your tent? Of course we left it alone. Some of the soldiers who haven’t Awakened tried to turn it into a storeroom, but Claria drove them out without mercy and told them not to come back."

That had been Malrik’s answer when Ravian asked whether they had removed it. Claria being the first to object had surprised him, though on reflection, it suited the instinct to protect those around her that he had noticed more than once. She had defended a place he might never have returned to without even knowing whether he was alive. He had not asked her to do that, and he doubted she would welcome a lengthy expression of gratitude, but waking here made it difficult to forget.

...

Now Ravian sat in that very tent with his usually lustrous white hair tousled by sleep and his eyes slightly puffy. He raised both arms and stretched, working the stiffness from his back and neck. The movement did nothing his new body needed, but he had done it since childhood, and even a near-perfect physique could not rid him of an old habit.

Yesterday, he had spent hours studying and deciphering Prohibian until exhaustion overtook him and he fell asleep without meaning to. Understanding the language was not the same as mastering everything written in it; each passage concerning his cultivation technique demanded attention, and he had kept returning to parts he thought he understood only to find another detail worth examining. He remembered intending to rest his eyes for a moment before continuing. Evidently, that moment had lasted longer than he intended.

After some sluggish resistance, Ravian got out of bed and exchanged his civilian clothes for his military attire: a white cloth shirt and trousers beneath brown leather armor.

’...Man, this looks awful.’

He examined himself in the tent’s mirror. The armor itself was expensive, but the clothes beneath it were average at best, and the contrast did them no favors.

’I mean... have you seen Lysandra? Or Frank? Even Darius? They all wear fine clothes under their armor. It gives them a distinctive look.’

It was irritating that Darius had made the list. Ravian could overlook someone like Lysandra dressing well, but if that damned bear could put together a better outfit than he could, something had to change.

’Should I buy some clothes with the advance I received from House Viola?’

That seemed reasonable enough. He could go down to the city market and buy a few things, or ask Darius or Malrik to come with him and show him where they bought their clothes. Malrik would probably tell him to choose something practical and be done with it; Darius would be far more entertaining, though Ravian was not certain he wanted to give the man another opportunity to comment on his appearance. Either way, he could think about it after he had properly woken up.

Ravian looked toward the daylight filtering through the tent’s fabric as the haze of sleep finally began to lift.

It was still noon.

’Huh? How is that possible?’ He put a hand to his forehead, mildly confused. ’The sun had already set when I fell asleep... Did I sleep all the way until noon? That would be more than twenty-two hours!’

Even that estimate left him uncertain how many hours he had lost. He could remember night falling, and now the light outside was far too bright for early morning, but nothing in the tent told him which day it was. It was already longer than any uninterrupted sleep he had managed since coming to this world. As he wondered just how exhausted he must have been to sleep so deeply, a voice called from outside.

"Ravian!" It sounded half cheerful and half worn out.

He recognized it as a woman’s voice, and a familiar one, though he had not expected its owner to come looking for him at this hour. The others had been busy when he last saw them. If someone had taken time to check on him, perhaps his absence from breakfast had been noticed after all.

"Come in!" he called.

A pale hand with a luminous, jade-like sheen drew back the tent flap. A flowing black robe followed, trailing after its wearer like a faithful attendant. Despite its color, it looked neither gloomy nor weighed down with equipment; it was a loose, feminine garment with a quiet elegance to it.

Then the woman herself stepped inside.

Her hair was a deep black that seemed to swallow light like a black hole. Beneath it was a beautiful, slender figure, with fullness only where it lent her femininity without exaggeration. Her face had a mysterious beauty unlike Lysandra’s cold, proud appearance. Looking at her, one might struggle to tell whether she was happy or sad, whether she admired you or pitied you.

That was the woman who entered while Ravian stood near a barrel of water, preparing to wash his face. Her green eyes, touched with azure and shaped like those of an innocent ash-gray gazelle, settled on him at once.

"Ravian! You’re finally awake? They sent me to wake you since the men aren’t here, and Lysandra refused to come for some reason. What happened to you that you needed to sleep for almost a day and a half?"

She sounded half angry and half mocking. This was Evelyne, the Death Squad’s wind mage, whose father was obscenely wealthy. Ravian had barely spoken to her after returning yesterday; between Karius, Claria’s examination, and Malrik’s questions, there had hardly been time. He could understand her sounding a little put out by that, but there was something else in her voice that he had missed at first.

’Ah, I barely had a chance to talk to her yesterday. Is that why she seems a little angry—’

His thoughts stopped as a particular part of her question registered.

"Wait! Did you just say a day and a half?!"

Ravian could hardly believe his ears. He had been asleep for more than a day and a half? How had that happened in the first place?

"Yes, man. We were starting to worry because you kept sleeping, so I came to check on you. Are you actually all right?"

"I’m fine." Ravian looked toward the daylight again, as though the light might contradict her. "You mean I slept through all of yesterday?"

"You were asleep whenever anyone checked. That’s why I’m here." Evelyne’s expression remained halfway between amusement and concern. "If you hadn’t answered me just now, I’d have had no idea whether you were merely exhausted or something was wrong."

Ravian opened his mouth, then thought better of telling her he had exhausted himself reading a book he could not show her. The training with Karius had been grueling enough to explain why he needed rest, but it did not account for sleeping through so much of it. He settled for moving his arms to show that he could, at least, stand without assistance.

"I feel fine now. I didn’t expect to be out for that long."

"You certainly looked like you needed it." Evelyne’s gaze went to his disheveled hair, then returned to his face. "And you don’t look entirely awake yet."

"Yeah, I still feel a little tired, even after sleeping for so long."

"Sleeping that much can leave anyone groggy," Evelyne said. "You’d better shake it off before Darius gets back and decides to wake you up in whatever idiotic way he comes up with."

Ravian gave her a flat look. She had come to make sure he was well, and he knew it, but she appeared determined to enjoy the opportunity to mock him while she was here. Being the youngest member of the squad was not doing him any favors.

He drew a breath and began thinking through everything he had intended to do after waking, only to realize that the missing time had turned a loose plan into a much less comfortable schedule.

’Ah... fuck my miserable life, man.’

He did not have a day and a half to spare on sleep. His arrangement with House Viola had no such convenient pause. The people in the capital had no reason to know that training with Karius and hours spent deciphering Prohibian had left him asleep in a frontier tent, and he could hardly offer either as an excuse if the delay became a problem. The remaining steps of the project were still waiting for him. He had to return to House Viola soon, using the same ability, and give them those steps before he lost any more time.