Chapter 109: The Easy One

Healing Bond would not finish recharging until midmorning.

I had used it on Lena in a corridor the previous day, immediately after cultivation, and the skill measured twenty-four hours with the precision of something that had never once been late.

Which meant I spent the first part of the day waiting for a number to change.

[You have checked three times.]

’I’m monitoring a resource.’

[You are watching a number.]

’Those are the same activity.’

[One of them is dignified.]

One use when it arrived. Then another full day of nothing.

Lena had spent her hour producing three pages of notes, most of forty questions, and a proposal to repeat the process weekly under what she described as controlled conditions.

Six remaining.

Four of the ones that actually mattered lived in other buildings.

***

Zenith paired classes for practical work.

I discovered this the way I discovered most things about my own schedule, which is to say Penelope told me while I was still deciding whether the morning was a legitimate part of the day.

"Practical Attribute Work. Third bell. With Class Three."

I stopped walking.

"Three."

"Sophie’s class."

"I know whose class it is."

"You stopped walking."

"I was considering the implications."

"You were considering whether it would be loud."

She wasn’t wrong. According to Roland, who collected other people’s business the way some men collected debts, Class Three had spent their first evening planning three separate social events before anyone finished unpacking.

I had assumed this was an exaggeration.

Nothing I had heard since supported that assumption.

But there was a second consideration, and it was the one I could not explain to Penelope, or to anyone else in the building.

Start with the easy one.

The System did not offer advice often. When it did, it was usually correct, which was the most irritating thing about it.

***

The practical field was outdoors, which improved things slightly, and enormous, which did not.

Seventy-four students in one space. Class Five arrived in something resembling a formation. Class Three arrived the way water arrives, spreading outward until it filled everything available.

Sophie was in the middle of it, laughing at something, brown hair catching the light and green eyes crinkled at the corners in the way that suggested she had been laughing for some time and intended to continue.

She spotted me immediately and waved.

Enthusiastically.

With both hands.

"Alash!"

Several heads turned.

"She’s very awake," Roland observed.

"Yes."

"Is that normal?"

"For her, apparently."

Sophie crossed the distance between us at a speed that suggested walking was a compromise she had made with the world rather than a preference.

"You came."

"Attendance is mandatory."

"You still came."

"That’s what mandatory means."

She laughed, which was not the response I had been aiming for, and was becoming a pattern I did not know how to correct.

The instructor for the session was a thin man named Professor Ferran who introduced himself, checked that everyone had heard him, and then appeared to lose interest in whether anyone was listening after that.

"Attribute work," he said. "Not combat. Not theory. Application."

He gestured at the field behind him, which had been divided into stations. Targets. Weights. A long channel of standing water. Several things I could not identify and did not want to.

"Your attributes are tools. Most of you have spent five years learning what they do. Almost none of you have spent time learning what they do badly." A pause. "Today is about the second thing."

That was, unexpectedly, a good lesson.

"Pair with someone whose attributes are nothing like yours. Find out what they can do that you can’t. Then find out why."

Class Three began pairing immediately, loudly, with enormous enthusiasm.

Class Five looked toward me.

All thirty-six of them.

At once.

"...Pair with someone," I said.

They dispersed.

Leadership.

Sophie was still standing next to me when the field cleared.

"Well," she said.

"Yes."

"Nobody picked us."

"You didn’t move."

"Neither did you."

That was accurate, and I chose not to examine why.

***

Ice and Lightning against Healing and Barrier turned out to be an excellent demonstration of Ferran’s point, which was almost certainly why he glanced over once, nodded, and did not come back.

Sophie could freeze a section of the water channel solid in under two seconds.

I could not.

I could hold a barrier against the weighted impact drop for eleven consecutive strikes without it degrading.

She could not.

"That’s not fair," she said, on the fourth strike.

"It’s Barrier."

"Mine breaks."

"Because you’re making it out of ice."

"Ice is very hard."

"Ice is very hard and then it isn’t."

She frowned at the barrier, then at me, then at the barrier again.

"Show me."

"It’s not a technique. It’s the attribute."

"Then show me the attribute."

So I did, in the sense that I held a barrier and let her hit it, which was apparently educational for one of us and mildly tiring for the other.

She hit it with ice.

She hit it with lightning.

She hit it with what I can only describe as both at once, which produced a crack of sound loud enough that half the field turned around.

The barrier held.

Sophie stared at it.

"How."

"Practice."

"That’s not an answer."

She sounded, briefly, exactly like I had sounded at thirteen, arguing with a man who refused to explain things.

I understood Valerian slightly better in that moment, which was unwelcome.

"Barrier isn’t about being hard," I said. "It’s about deciding where force goes. Ice stops something. A barrier redirects it around you and spends the leftover on itself. That’s why yours shatters and mine degrades."

Sophie went quiet.

Which was, for Sophie, remarkable.

"That’s why you don’t have an offensive attribute," she said.

"I have four of them."

"You have four attributes at level three."

"...Yes."

"So you don’t have an offensive attribute."

"Correct."

"And you won."

"The exam wasn’t won with attributes."

"I know." She was still looking at the barrier. "That’s what I’ve been thinking about after the exam."

I had not expected the conversation to go there.

Around us, seventy-two people were making a considerable amount of noise about things that were freezing, burning, or falling over.

"Class Three had the maps," Sophie said. "We had the routes and the scouting and every piece of information anyone needed, and I kept thinking, if we’d just moved faster, if I’d just made people decide instead of letting them argue..."

"You’d have arrived earlier with the same information."

"Maybe."

"You’d have arrived earlier with the same information," I repeated, "and Class Five would still have been in an infirmary, and the answer would still have been in the infirmary, and none of it would have mattered."

Sophie looked at me.

"That’s supposed to make me feel better?"

"It’s supposed to be accurate."

"Those are different things."

"Frequently."

She laughed again, and this time it was smaller and more real than the enormous one she’d greeted me with.

The barrier dissolved between us.

And I realized, with the specific irritation of a man who has been putting something off, that I had been standing next to her for forty minutes without once attempting the only thing I had actually come here to do.

***

’System.’

[Yes.]

’How close.’

[Closer than a room.]

’That’s the same answer you gave me last time.’

[It remains equally true.]

Sophie was approximately one arm’s length away, describing something about how lightning behaved differently in cold air, with gestures.

There was no version of this where I asked permission without explaining, and no version where I explained without lying.

So I did the third thing.

"Sophie."

"Mm?"

"I have a new skill. Healing type. It increases someone’s natural recovery for an hour. It doesn’t heal anything, it just makes your body do what it was already doing, faster."

She stopped gesturing.

"You got a skill?"

"Healing reached ten."

"Alash, that’s..." She paused, visibly recalculating something. "That’s three attributes at ten. Healing, Barrier, Apothecary."

"Yes."

"Nobody has three at ten."

"I sleep less than people assume."

That was, technically, the least true sentence I had spoken all week.

"Can I see it?"

"That’s what I was going to ask you."

"Then yes."

"You haven’t heard the conditions."

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"Then yes."

I looked at her for a moment.

"You should ask more questions before agreeing to things."

"Probably." She held out her hand anyway. "But you’re the person who spent an entire exam refusing to gamble with anyone’s life, so I’m going to guess you’re not about to start with mine."

That landed somewhere I had not prepared a defense for.

I did not take her hand.

’Activate.’

Green mana gathered, thin and quiet, and did not travel through my fingers because it did not need to. It crossed the space between us directly, the way water finds a channel it already knows, and vanished into her without a sound.

Sophie’s eyes widened.

"Oh."

"What."

"You didn’t touch me."

"No."

"You said contact required. I heard you say contact required."

I had, in fact, said contact required.

Which meant either I had been wrong, or the skill was wrong, or the rule had an exception that applied to exactly four people in this building and I had just demonstrated it in front of one of them.

"It’s new," I said. "It’s inconsistent."

Sophie accepted this immediately, which was both a relief and, I suspected, a habit of hers that was going to get her in trouble someday.

"It’s warm," she said.

"Lena said that too."

"Lena’s right." She flexed her hand, watching it. "It’s like... you know when you’ve been cold for so long you stopped noticing, and then you go inside?"

"That’s remarkably close to what she said."

"Then Lena and I are both correct and you should write it down."

『 Sub Quest 3 : Healing Path 1

➤ Objective: Successfully bond with 7 individuals through Healing Bond (2 / 7) 』

Two.

One vessel.

’That was the easy one.’

[Yes.]

’The next one won’t be.’

[No.]

Sophie was still examining her own hand with an expression of undiluted delight, as though someone had handed her a small pleasant mystery and told her she could keep it.

"Does it do anything else?"

"Not that I know of."

"Will you tell me if it does?"

I thought about the four fragments, the golden lines at the Guardian Seals, and a System that had gone silent at exactly the moment I needed it not to.

"Yes," I said.

It was not entirely a lie.

It was not entirely anything else, either.

***

The strange part wasn’t the warmth.

Sophie had been warm before. She was an Ice attribute user with a Lightning secondary, which meant her own body ran hot as a side effect of everything she did, and she had spent five years being told this was normal by instructors who had clearly never experienced it.

The strange part was that it felt familiar.

She turned it over during the walk back to Brightvale, half-listening to two of her classmates argue about whether Emergency Dessert Night should have a formal schedule.

Familiar how?

She had never felt this before. Alash had said it himself. New skill. Two days old, maybe three. There was no possible way she had encountered it previously.

And yet.

There was a particular sensation buried inside the warmth, underneath the settling, that her body seemed to recognize the way you recognize a room in the dark.

She stopped walking.

The Citadel.

The Guardian Seals.

All five of them stepping into position at once, and that single instant where everything had gone strange and bright and enormous, and she had assumed it was the formation activating, because what else would it have been?

"Sophie?"

She blinked.

Nadia was not here. This was Class Three. Someone else had said her name.

"Sorry. Thinking."

"You stopped in the middle of the path."

"I did."

She started walking again.

It was probably nothing. Magic felt like magic. Two warm sensations feeling similar did not mean anything, and she had a residence full of people who wanted a decision about whether dessert required a committee.

Still.

She glanced back once, toward the practical field, where Class Five was dispersing in thirty-six different directions around a boy with a pillow under one arm who had spent forty minutes explaining barriers to her without once mentioning that he was one of only five students in the year who had reached D-Black.

He hadn’t brought it up.

Elizabeth would have brought it up.

James would definitely have brought it up.

Sophie smiled, filed the whole thing under things to think about later, and went to go argue about cake.