Word of the raider attack reached the garrison commander within the hour, and word of what a sickly exiled prince had apparently done to six armed men reached everyone else within the day. Khaemwaset spent that first night lying awake, listening to his own heartbeat, waiting for the knock that would mean someone official had come to ask questions he didn’t have safe answers for.
The knock didn’t come that night. It came four days later, and it wasn’t the commander who delivered it.
Meret burst into his room without knocking herself, which she never did, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with running.
"My prince. A rider from the capital. Not a messenger this time." She swallowed. "A general."
Khaemwaset sat up too fast, and for a second the room tilted the way it had the first day he’d woken up in this body, poisoned and half dying. It steadied. He made himself breathe.
"Which general?"
"Sethnakht. Commander of the Division of Set." Meret’s voice had gone thin. Everyone in this garrison, Khaemwaset’s borrowed memory reminded him, knew that name the way soldiers everywhere know the names that matter. Sethnakht didn’t get sent to investigate minor incidents. Sethnakht got sent when the crown wanted an answer it could actually trust.
Which meant someone in the capital already cared a great deal more about six dead-and-broken raiders on a desert road than a garrison-town skirmish should ever warrant.
He had maybe an hour before he’d be expected to present himself. He spent most of it doing the only thing that felt useful, which was staring at the status panel and trying to decide, with real precision this time, exactly how much of what he actually was he could afford to let a trained investigator see.
STATUS PANEL
Khaemwaset, Level 4
STR 6, AGI 10, VIT 6, INT 11, WIS 8, CHA 4, MAT 55
Skills: Double Tongue, Hunted Instinct, First Instinct, Desert-Born Reflexes
There was no hiding a body count. There was no hiding four broken men and a fifth choking on a crushed windpipe, all of it already reported, already rippling outward from a garrison town too small to keep a secret like this contained. The lie he’d been maintaining for weeks, the sick and forgettable prince, had a crack in it now the size of a battlefield.
What he could still control was how he explained the crack.
Sethnakht met him in the commander’s receiving room, standing rather than sitting, which Khaemwaset registered immediately as a choice. Standing meant the general controlled the room’s angles, could watch him enter from a height, could read every flicker of his posture before a single word was exchanged. It was the kind of small, deliberate positioning Khaemwaset recognized instantly, because it was exactly the sort of thing he used to notice in the body language of rival researchers fighting over dig rights, dressed up here in armor instead of academic credentials.
The general was younger than he’d expected. Not soft, nothing about the posture or the scarred forearms suggested soft, but younger than the legendary weight of the name had led him to picture. Dark eyes that didn’t move off him for even a second while he crossed the room and gave the correct, careful bow of an exiled prince greeting a superior officer.
"Prince Khaemwaset." Flat. Assessing. Not hostile yet, but not warm either. "I understand you had an eventful walk to the well."
New quest available. Under Investigation. A trained observer is assessing whether your combat performance was luck, training, or something else entirely. Every answer matters.
He almost smiled at the timing. Almost.
"I was fortunate, General," he said, and let the fortunate land with exactly the right note of shaken disbelief, a boy still not quite sure how he’d survived his own story. "I don’t remember most of it clearly. It happened very fast."
"Four men with broken bones and one with a crushed larynx don’t happen by accident to a boy your garrison commander describes as sickly." Sethnakht’s gaze didn’t waver. "Walk me through what you do remember."
This was the part he’d rehearsed in his head a dozen times in the hour before this meeting, and it still felt thin the moment he had to actually say it out loud in front of someone whose entire profession was catching people lying.
"I picked up a rock," Khaemwaset said. "I think. I remember being terrified, and I remember swinging something, and then they were running." A pause, calculated to look unplanned. "My servant would have seen more than I did. I was mostly trying not to die."
Passive skill triggered. Double Tongue. Statement registers as forty-one percent deceptive to observer.
Forty-one percent was better than he’d feared, but it wasn’t nothing, and the flicker in Sethnakht’s expression told him the general hadn’t needed a hidden stat readout to feel the same thing his skill had just quantified.
"A rock," Sethnakht repeated, in the tone of someone turning a suspicious artifact over in their hands, looking for the seam that would tell them it was a fake. "That put four trained raiders on the ground."
"I’ve heard fear does strange things to people, General." Khaemwaset kept his voice level, kept his eyes down in the correct, deferential angle a minor exiled prince owed a superior officer, and underneath all of it kept running the same calculation over and over. This wasn’t Bakenkhonsu, easily read and easily managed. This was someone dangerous in a completely different way, someone who had almost certainly seen a hundred liars try exactly this kind of frightened-boy performance and learned to see straight through it.
Sethnakht studied him for a long, silent moment. Long enough that Khaemwaset felt the old, familiar urge to fill the silence with more explanation, and forced himself, with real effort, not to.
"You’re not what your reputation described," the general finally said. Not an accusation. Something closer to a private note being filed away for later. "I was told to expect a boy too weak to be worth the ink in his own exile papers."
"People believe what’s convenient, General." It came out before he’d fully decided to say it, and he watched, too late to take it back, something shift very slightly behind Sethnakht’s dark eyes. Interest. Not suspicion exactly. Something colder and more careful than that.
"That’s an unusually sharp thing for a sickly, forgettable prince to say."
Quest updated. Under Investigation. Sethnakht’s assessment has shifted from routine to genuinely curious. Proceed with caution.
Khaemwaset let himself look, for just a second, exactly as tired and overwhelmed as a boy who’d nearly died twice in a month actually would look, and watched the general’s expression ease back, fractionally, toward something more neutral.
"I’ve had eight years to think about how quickly people decide what someone is worth, General," he said quietly. "It tends to make a person notice things."
It was true. It was also, he understood even as he said it, the most honest thing he’d told anyone since waking up in this world, and he had no idea, watching Sethnakht’s face carefully for any reaction at all, whether that honesty had just protected him or handed the most dangerous person he’d met so far exactly the thread they needed to eventually unravel him completely.
Sethnakht didn’t answer right away. Instead the general walked a slow half circle around the room, the kind of unhurried movement that Khaemwaset’s borrowed memory recognized as deliberate, a predator’s patience dressed up as idle thought.
"I’ll be staying in the garrison a few days," Sethnakht said finally. "To finish the investigation properly. I trust that won’t inconvenience you, Prince Khaemwaset."
It wasn’t a question, and they both knew it.
"Of course not, General," Khaemwaset said, and bowed again, and tried very hard not to let anything on his face suggest that a few days under the direct, watchful attention of the one person in the capital’s orbit sharp enough to actually see through him sounded like exactly the kind of inconvenience he could least afford right now.
As he left the room, he caught, just at the edge of his vision, Sethnakht watching him go with an expression he couldn’t quite read. Not suspicion. Not yet trust either. Something in between, patient and unhurried, the look of someone who had decided a puzzle was worth solving properly instead of rushing.
New skill unlocked. Read the Room. Passive. Improved ability to detect when an opponent, ally, or rival is deliberately concealing their true assessment of you.
He walked back to his own quarters slower than usual, turning the whole conversation over in his mind the way he used to turn over a fresh find before he’d decided what it actually was.
Four broken raiders had bought him a level and a handful of skills. They had also, apparently, bought him the undivided attention of the one person in this entire desert garrison capable of actually figuring out what he was before he was ready for anyone to know.
He wasn’t sure yet whether that made General Sethnakht his greatest danger, or the first person in this world he might actually be able to trust.