Chapter Ninety-Nine: Interlude — The Weapon

A few days passed, and everything returned to normal. The Ostends did not come again—no visits, no messages, nothing—and the family let the whole affair sink quietly into the past where it belonged.

Three months slipped by after that.

When it became clear the trip would run far longer than anyone had planned, Oliver extended the lease on the breeding house without being asked, the way he handled most things—quietly, before they could become problems. And within two months the whole crew had grown so used to Silverstream that its shining canals and glacier views had stopped being scenery and started being home.

They fell into a rhythm. Oliver and Cassian worked, as they always worked. Damian, restless without a purpose, took a job as a healer in the district and was quietly excellent at it. Selena and Kyle went out to the outskirts to hunt demonic beasts and forge treasures from what they brought back, and often enough Iris or Seraphina or Rowan went along for the sport of it. The family lived in the guest rooms of Elias’s lab and ate with the guardians every single day, and somewhere in those months the last seams between the two groups dissolved entirely. They had stopped being a family and their guardians. They had simply become family.

The lake had come into its own, too.

The guppies had all grown to full size now—a proper hand’s length each, gleaming and healthy, their multicolored jade water shimmering like a slow aurora at every hour. Damian, delighted with them, had tried to let Amia swim among the new generation, thinking she might enjoy the company of her own kind.

Amia had declined. Emphatically. The old guppy took one look at the shoal of gleaming youngsters and turned up her nose—drifting in her sphere of water with an expression of such profound aristocratic disdain that the meaning was unmistakable: that Damian would even suggest she mingle with these infants was faintly insulting. She was a Commander Rank 10 elder of impeccable breeding. They were babies. The matter did not warrant discussion.

It was Iris who noticed the thing Elias had forgotten to mention.

She pointed out, one evening, that the new guppies were growing abnormally fast—not merely healthy, but climbing in rank at a rate the lake’s good conditions alone could not explain. And Elias slapped his forehead, because he had, in fact, never gotten around to telling any of them about his talent. They had all told him to, more than once. He simply kept forgetting it was a thing worth mentioning.

He decided, at last, to tell them—most of it, anyway.

He was careful about the setting. Angel rested at his collarbone as she always did, her quiet power wrapped around his mind, shielding his thoughts from probing; Seraphina’s Nightmare Sheep, though her set wasn’t complete, was more than enough to blunt any mental intrusion besides; and Cassian’s people were near. So he judged it safe. He did not lay out every detail—some things he kept even from family, out of caution—but he told them the shape of it: that he could pinpoint the exact evolution he wanted for a beast, that each evolution he completed rewarded him, and that among those rewards he’d gained two further gifts—a talent for insight, and the ability to accelerate the growth of rank and skill in any spirit beast he personally evolved.

They were, understandably, stunned.

But not one of them was hurt that he’d kept it close. If anything, several scolded him for telling them even this much—a talent like that was the sort of thing that got a person killed if the wrong ears caught wind of it, and they would rather he guarded it than trusted them with it. That, Elias thought, was rather the point. That was exactly why he’d decided to tell them.

Because Cassian was here, and his soldiers were near—the bodyguards Elias had still never once managed to spot, though Cassian assured him they were there, and Elias had come to believe it. Cassian could feel them: his own men, devoted to him, folded invisibly into the district under an Emperor’s perception. Surrounded by all of that, watched over from angles he couldn’t even see, Elias had simply decided he didn’t want to keep secrets from his family anymore.

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And then the storm broke—right on the schedule Oliver had set for it.

The method for breeding Sparkling Jade Guppies went public. Fully, deliberately public, released the way Elias released most of his work: into everyone’s hands at once. And the whole federation went into an uproar.

Of course it did. This was a rare life-attribute healing spirit beast with Lord-rank potential—and unlike the Lifebloom Bees, whose numbers were capped by the requirements of their evolution, this was something else entirely. There was no ceiling here. Given enough time and enough materials, anyone could produce them. As many as the world could want. A limitless supply of healing, where healing had always been scarce and precious and hoarded.

The people scrambled. Everywhere, at once, a frenzy broke loose to buy the materials, to buy the specific base guppies, to be first to the miracle.

But Oliver had been ready for this for months.

He had never once intended to simply drop the method and let the market tear itself apart. Long before the announcement, he had gone quietly to work—to the government, the military, the political powers, the Breeder Association, the Combat Beast Tamer Association, and more besides. By now they all knew exactly who Oliver was: the representative of the famous breeder Elias Arkwright, and a man whose word carried the weight of everything Elias had ever given the world. So when Oliver’s calls came, they were answered. Deals were struck. Materials and base guppies were bought up quietly, jointly, in enormous coordinated quantities, before the public ever heard a word.

So when the frenzied crowds rushed to buy, they found they couldn’t. The supply had already been gathered and channeled—handled by the larger corporations, the associations, the governments—and directed, deliberately, where Elias would have wanted it to go. To the destitute. To those who had given much and had little left. To the districts and clinics where healing was most desperately needed. To brilliant beast tamers too poor to have ever dreamed of affording a healing spirit beast of their own. Priority went not to the richest bidder, but to those who needed it most and those who had earned it.

Among all this, Silverstream’s ruling houses—the ones who had monopolized the Sparkling Jade Guppy for generations—were incandescent.

They had thought themselves the clever ones, handing the breeder their method for a fee, certain they were on the winning side of the bargain. Who could have guessed the man they’d dealt with was a monster of a different order—that he would take their guarded secret and, within months, render one of their most valuable assets obsolete? Their monopoly was worthless now. Their crown jewel was about to swim in every clinic pond in the federation.

For Oliver, managing them was almost too easy to bother with.

What, after all, was one district’s aristocracy against millions of life-attribute healing spirit beasts and the goodwill they bought? He did not threaten anyone. He did not need to. He simply began, quietly, to take things away.

The patriarch of the house that had complained loudest woke one morning to find a century-old government supply contract—the backbone of his family’s fortune—had not been renewed, awarded instead to a rival who had known when to stay silent. A prominent daughter’s carefully arranged engagement to a political family evaporated inside a week, her fiancé’s backers having discreetly reconsidered the wisdom of the match. And one old lord, who had made the mistake of putting his displeasure into a threat, announced his retirement for personal reasons not long after—a phrase everyone in the district understood to mean something far more final than rest.

Oliver arranged each of these the way another man might answer correspondence, and did not bat an eye at what had happened, or at what would happen to the next ones who tried. Politics, he had always understood, was every bit as cruel and ruthless as any battlefield—and he was very, very good at it.

He had the best skills. He had the sharpest instincts. And above all he had the finest and strangest weapon any operator in the federation could dream of: Elias Arkwright himself, a man who kept making miracles and handing them away for free, whose very generosity was a power no rival could match.

Oliver intended to make certain of one thing, whatever it cost, whatever he had to do in the shadows to see it done.

That weapon would never break. Not under this, not under any of it. Elias would go on being exactly what he was—and Oliver would quietly handle everything that came for him.