Vera's ribs cost us the better part of two weeks, and two weeks of no contracts meant two weeks of no coin, so we did what broke adventurers have always done: we healed, and we trained, and we mended what we had.
It was, quietly, without any monster in it at all, the best stretch of my life in Valdoria.
Bruno drilled me every morning in the muddy yard behind the Lodge until I stopped fighting like a man who'd fallen out of a summoning circle in his pajamas and started fighting like someone who'd decided to be there. Footwork. Guard. How to fall without breaking. "You've got the instincts of prey," he told me, cheerfully knocking me flat for the ninth time. "We're going to make you a predator who remembers being prey. That's the most dangerous kind."
Lila taught me theory in the afternoons, cross-legged by the fire with her grubby notebook — how mana pooled and flowed, why my Demonic Aura burned a resource most classes didn't even possess, how skills drew on the well inside you and how that well could be deepened with use.
And in the evenings, far out past the palisade where the deep woods began and no trained eye would ever feel it, I practiced the one thing Vera had forbidden me in public: the Mantle.
Controlled, this time. Not rage. Not survival. Not the flood that had leveled a ravine. Just intent.
[Skill training: Mantle of a Hundred Claws.]New application unlocked: Precision — form single claws for utility, not destruction.]
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I learned to make one claw instead of a hundred. To lift a fallen log off a trap. To pluck a single Nightbloom stalk from thirty feet away, from behind, so it never got the chance to spit. To hold a delicate thing without crushing it. Lila watched me lift a teacup with a talon of living shadow and clapped like I'd invented fire.
"You're using an apocalypse skill," she wheezed, "to do chores. You are using the end of the world to fetch the tea. This is the greatest possible timeline and I never want to leave it."
"It's efficient," I said, with as much dignity as a man levitating a teacup by shadow-claw can muster.
Vera, ribs slowly knitting, watched from a stump most evenings and said little. But near the end of the two weeks she pushed a small pouch across to me — the silver we'd scraped together, nearly all of it — and said, "Buy a real coat. Frontier-cut, hooded, dark. And boots that fit. You still walk around looking like a runaway, and runaways are the thing people describe to bounty hunters."
I bought the coat off a Lodge trader. Dark oiled canvas, deep hood, the kind every third hunter in the Wildmarch wore. When I pulled the hood up, it threw my whole face into shadow, and Lila informed me with enormous satisfaction that I looked "extremely ominous, ten out of ten, would personally flee."
"Good," said Vera, and almost smiled. "An ominous hooded stranger, people forget by morning. A weird kid in another world's pajamas, people remember, and they remember out loud, to exactly the wrong people."
[Rank E: progress 33%.][Reputation (Thornwatch): Reliable Hunters.]
Reliable Hunters. I read that box in my new coat, by the fire, warm and fed and surrounded by three people I would die for — literally, the Pact insisted on it — and I let myself, just for one evening, be simply and completely happy.
Which was, of course, the precise moment the man who asks questions rode into Thornwatch.