Kalsar led them back through the village without a word, past the same weathered houses and indifferent neighbours, and into the yard behind his own home, the same scattered training equipment still standing where Ant remembered it. He dropped the salvaged equipment onto the low wooden bench near the fence and gestured for the rest of them to sit wherever they could find space among the posts and coiled rope.
"Now," he said, lowering himself onto an overturned crate slowly, joints clearly protesting after everything the fight had put him through. "Properly, this time. Start from the beginning."
Ant told them what he could. The moment of the bond itself, the screen appearing before anything should have had time to exist, the way it had simply been there ever since: stats, prompts, warnings, all of it arriving without explanation or preamble.
Maren leaned forward from where she'd settled against the fence rail, her earlier caution giving way to open fascination, though she kept it carefully reined in. "You never had a chip inserted," she said slowly, working it through out loud as she went, "and I'd have known if you had, I was there when you first came to us, there was no procedure, no reader, nothing at all!"
"There wasn't," Ant confirmed. "I bonded with him, and it was just... there, no chip, no process, it just started working."
"That's not how it works, though, that's the thing, it's not just some step that got skipped!" She wasn't accusing him of anything, just saying the fact out loud like that might help her find somewhere to put it. "The chip's not incidental, it's the entire mechanism, it reads the DNA, maps the bond, builds everything the system actually shows you, and without one there's nothing there to even generate a screen in the first place. None of this should be possible for you to have, not any of it!"
"I know," Ant said. "I don't have an explanation. It just was."
Kalsar hadn't spoken yet, watching the exchange from his crate with the same flat focus he'd worn back in the vortex chamber. When he finally did, his voice was measured, deliberate, clearly building toward something specific rather than just asking out of curiosity.
"What else does it show you," he said. "Besides items and stats."
"Warnings, sometimes, level-ups, skill unlocks for both of us." Ant hesitated, then added the rest of it, since there seemed little point holding anything back now. "When I use Appraisal on a Wraithkin it doesn't actually give me any real information, it just says Anomaly and nothing else, no stats, no details, nothing to work with. Every single one I've come across so far, weak or strong, gives me back that same word."
"Anomaly," Kalsar repeated. His eyes narrowed slightly, tracking on something he didn't say out loud.
"Every single time, it doesn't matter what kind."
Maren's fascination sharpened, her focus narrowing. "That's not a strength reading, then. That's a category the system refuses to fill in: for an entire species, not just the strong ones." She glanced at Kalsar. He didn't explain, and she didn't ask him to, whatever they were both thinking staying between them. "That's strange enough coming from a properly calibrated chip system. Coming from whatever you're actually running on, I have no idea what it even means."
"It might," Ant offered, though he doubted it would clarify much. "It reads him differently too." He nodded toward Mahkir. "Not Anomaly. It doesn't give me a species at all when I use it on him. Just his name. Nothing else."
"Tell me what it says," Maren said, some of her scholarly curiosity breaking free of the caution she'd been holding onto since the fight.
Ant hesitated, glancing at Mahkir, who returned the look with an expression that gave nothing away one way or the other.
Your choice, Mahkir said. It's your screen, not mine to hide.
Ant let out a slow breath and recited it aloud instead, since there was no way to actually show them what only he could see. "Level six. Strength sixteen, endurance fourteen, magic thirty-two, agility twenty-eight. Skills, Flame Breath, Enhanced Vision, and something called Attribute Sharing that only unlocked during the fight. There's a trait too, something passive. It doesn't have a name, just an effect. A boost when he's fighting more than one thing at once."
"Traits don't get names?" Maren asked, latching onto the detail immediately.
"Not that I've seen, skills do, but traits just... happen, no announcement, no description beyond what it actually does."
"And the equipment," Kalsar said, nodding toward the salvage still sitting on the bench. "You said it stays counted even after it's set down. Explain that part again."
"It's not about holding it," Ant said. "The system tracks it as equipped the moment I decide it's mine to use: armor, boots, the sword, all of it. Soul Render's been counted that way since the first time I picked it up. I could drop it in the dirt right now and the bonus wouldn't disappear. I'd have to actually lose it, have it taken, walk far enough away, something, before the system stopped counting it as mine."
Maren had stopped moving entirely, eyes fixed on him. "Thirty-two magic at level six," she said slowly, still catching up to the first thing he'd told her, the equipment detail apparently one revelation too many to process at the same time. "That's not a growth curve I recognize. Not for any registered species, and I've read most of the published material on Kithren stat progression."
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"It's not registered as anything real to begin with," Kalsar said. "That was always going to make the numbers strange along with everything else."
"Could it be Mahkir?" Ant asked, before he'd fully decided to ask it, "something about him, I mean, not the system itself, but whatever caused all this to happen the way it did."
Silence settled over the yard for a moment, nothing but the faint creak of the swinging beams swaying slightly in the evening wind.
"I don't know," Kalsar said eventually, and there was an honesty in his voice that didn't usually surface, sitting differently than his usual bluntness. "I've trained a great many bonded pairs. I've never seen anything remotely like this. Not a system with no chip behind it, not a Kithren whose own user's Appraisal can't return a species at all, just his name, and nothing else." He looked at Mahkir for a long moment, and Mahkir looked steadily back, offering nothing.
He's not wrong to be careful, Mahkir said quietly, for Ant alone. Neither of us actually knows what I am. Better he asks the question than pretends it isn't there.
"You don't know what he is," Ant said aloud, half a question, half simply confirming it for himself.
"No," Kalsar said. "I know what he was classified as. I know what he's shown me since. Those two things have stopped matching, and I don't like operating on information I know is wrong." He exhaled slowly, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders as he squared them again, brisk and businesslike. "But wondering about it won't get either of you stronger. And that's still the more immediate problem."
Maren still looked like she wanted to keep asking, questions visibly stacking up behind her expression, but Kalsar's tone closed the subject for the evening at least. She sat back against the fence rail, arms folded, though her eyes kept drifting toward Mahkir every few moments, as though expecting him to suddenly volunteer an explanation of his own.
"So what changes," Ant asked.
"Everything," Kalsar said, and for the first time since they'd sat down, he sat up straighter, some of the tiredness gone from how he held himself. He rose from the crate and crossed to the swinging-beam gauntlet at the edge of the yard, resting one hand against the nearest post. "I told you, before we went down there, that I wanted to see what you were actually capable of before I wasted time teaching you equipment you might not even use the way I'd planned. Now I know. Now I teach it properly."
"What's the actual difference," Ant asked, "between this and what we were doing before."
Kalsar turned to face him properly, folding his arms. "Before, you were guessing at what each piece was for and building whatever strength that guesswork happened to produce. That's not nothing, but it's inefficient, and inefficient is a luxury neither of you can afford anymore." He nodded toward the gauntlet, the target frame, the coils of rope strung between posts. "Every piece of equipment in this yard does something specific. Trains one muscle group, sharpens one kind of reaction, builds toward one kind of use in a real fight. Taught properly, it compounds. Guessed at, most of the benefit goes to waste."
"And that raises our stats," Ant said, "directly, I mean."
"It does," Kalsar said. "Slowly, and within limits, but yes. Your body responds to what you put it through. Push it correctly and consistently, and it adapts: strength, endurance, whatever you're training toward. The same is true for him." He nodded toward Mahkir. "It's not magic. It's simply effort, applied properly instead of wasted."
"But it won't level us, though, will it," Maren said, working through it out loud the way she worked through everything, "training builds the body, sure, but it doesn't grant experience, those are two completely different things."
"No," Kalsar said. "That distinction matters more than most people realize, especially when they're new enough to hope otherwise. Experience only comes from battle: from actually testing what you've built against something that's trying to kill you. Training makes you stronger going in. It doesn't replace the fight itself." He looked between the two of them, making sure the point had actually landed. "Some trainers let their students believe otherwise, because it's an easier lie to sell. I'd rather you understand exactly what you're paying for."
Ant thought about that alongside everything else he'd learned that evening. It made a certain kind of sense he hadn't quite had words for before: why every level so far had come from something trying to kill him rather than the hours he'd already spent sweating through unfamiliar equipment.
"Starting tomorrow, none of this is guesswork anymore," Kalsar continued. "I'll show you what each piece is actually for, and we build from there. Stronger going into the next fight. That's the only promise I can make you."
The tightness in Ant's shoulders eased, not quite relief, but close to it. A plan, at least. A place to put everything that had just come out into the open.
"Good," he said. "Because I'd rather be ready for the next one."
Kalsar glanced back at him, and for a second his eyes weren't quite as flat as usual, before his usual composure settled back over them.
"We'll see," he said. "Get some rest tonight. You're going to need it."
He didn't sit back down. Instead he crossed to the small shed built into the corner of the yard, the one Ant had always assumed held nothing but spare tack and rope, and came back a moment later with something small enough to fit in one closed fist: dull metal, a single dark stone set into its face, worn smooth at the edges from years of handling.
"What's that," Ant asked.
"Communicator." Kalsar turned it over once, checking a marking on its face Ant couldn't see from where he sat. "Academy issue. Arena champions keep one too, if they're fool enough to still answer it." He said it without much weight to it, the way he said most things about his old life: present tense facts, no invitation to ask further. "Need to use it. Won't be long."
He was already walking toward the far end of the yard, putting distance between himself and the bench without making a show of it.
"Report what?" Maren asked.
"Every vortex requires a detailed report. Found or cleared, doesn't matter which." He didn't turn around. "Go on. Both of you. Get some rest."
Ant watched him go, the stone glinting once more before Kalsar rounded the corner of the shed and was gone from sight. Whatever he was saying into it, none of them were meant to hear.
Maren gathered the last of the salvaged equipment from the bench, still quiet, still working through a thought that hadn't fully settled in her expression. "I'm not finished asking questions," she said, mostly to herself, though loud enough for both of them to hear.
"None of us are," Ant said. "But at least we're finally asking them in the open."
He looked at Mahkir as he said it, and found Mahkir steady, looking back, the closest thing to relief either of them had managed to feel since the boss had first stepped out of the dark.