Chapter 8: The Quest
The yard was empty. The sun hadn’t come up yet.
I dropped into the same drill I’d started four weeks ago and finished it without the ground finding me halfway through. That was new.
I didn’t stop to make anything of it. Rolled my shoulders, picked up the pace, kept going until my own breathing was the loudest thing in the yard.
I told Sebastian not to follow me past the wall that morning.
"Of course, Young Master," he said, in the tone he used for things he had no intention of actually doing, and didn’t move from the doorway until I was most of the way down the path.
I didn’t look back to check. I’d tried that a few times already and gotten nothing for it except the distinct sense that whatever he was, he was better at this than I’d ever be at catching him.
Once, near the end of the second week, a hedge rustled on a morning with no wind. I stopped, waited, got nothing.
When I mentioned it that evening, he said, "Foxes, this time of year," and refilled my water without looking up from the tray.
There aren’t foxes this far south. I know, because I checked the primer.
I let it go. Mostly because I didn’t have a use for the information yet.
My sister was still in the capital, her birthday three weeks out, already being planned by people who weren’t going to invite me to help.
There wasn’t anything I could do about Aria yet.
So I kept training.
***.
The cave was an accident, a wrong turn during the second week.
Nothing lived near it. No birdsong, no rustling, nothing crossing the last stretch of ground before the entrance.
I could never find the path back in daylight. Tried twice, gave up, stopped trying. At night it was just there, same as always.
I didn’t ask Luna about it. Some answers felt like they’d cost more than I currently had to spend.
The first few nights got me nowhere. Sit. Breathe. Reach for the same flicker that had built the mana heart. Fall asleep sitting up. Luna found that much funnier than I did.
I kept using Wind Blade to strip bark off the same tree, and every successful cast left my mana heart aching so badly I couldn’t stand for nearly an hour.
Fireball never got past a single ember, guttering out on the second exhale, every time, like it had decided I hadn’t earned more than that.
By the last week the breathing had stopped being work and turned into habit. The mana heart still sat at bronze. Nothing about it had visibly changed. It just didn’t take as long to reach anymore.
White caught the corner of my eye before I heard anything. Luna, same as always, no warning beyond that.
"One month, Itsuki. Thirty-one days." No preamble this time. "And the only thing that’s actually moved is a number nobody’s grading you on."
"I’m aware."
"Are you. Because from where I’m standing, you’ve spent a month getting marginally less terrible at things a knight twice your age can already do in his sleep, and exactly zero time on the task that actually matters."
I didn’t have a good answer for that, so I didn’t give one.
She crouched anyway, bringing herself down to my eye level. For a moment something in her expression slipped out of place before settling again.
If I had to guess, she didn’t enjoy this part as much as the rest of her routine. I wasn’t going to ask and risk being wrong out loud.
"Shall I remind you what happens if it fails."
"No."
"Good answer."
Then she nodded at my hands. "Those didn’t used to be like that."
I looked down. My palms had gone rough sometime in the last month without my registering exactly when calluses hardened at the heel of each hand.
"Training," I said.
"I know what training looks like." She said it like there was more to the sentence, and decided against finishing it.
"Since the main quest isn’t moving," she said instead, already half turned away, "you’ve been given something to do about it. Check your status."
And then she wasn’t there. No flourish. She simply wasn’t there anymore.
I sat back against the cave wall and pulled up the panel.
Name: Itsuki Amagi
Title: The Wasted Heir
Mana Heart: Bronze Grade
Strength → F+
Agility → E-
Endurance → E
Aether Affinity → F+
Active Abilities: Wind Blade (Unstable)
Passive Abilities: Infinity Mana Breathing
Title Effect: [Wasted Heir → Aether circulation reduced by eighty percent.]
[SIDE QUEST 01 UNLOCKED] Make your existence known. Attend Iris Amagi’s eighteenth birthday celebration at the main estate. You were invited. You were expected to decline. Don’t. Reward: 300 Ink.
Iris had needed about four seconds to notice something was wrong with me, the morning after I woke up in this body, back when I was still relearning how doors worked.
A room full of strangers wasn’t going to be the hard part of that party.
She was.
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