Chapter 15: The Field Trip
When in doubt, adapt.
Uriel officially scrapped his plan to maintain emotional distance on the third day of the semester.
The reason was simple enough. The dormitory assigned them together — two beds separated by a single nightstand, roughly five feet of open air between them. He had taken that layout to mean each person had their own territory. What he had failed to account for was that to Galatina, the only practical function of those five feet was to give her room to cross without waking him when she got up at night to fix his blanket.
Mornings: he would be somewhere in the fog between sleep and waking, and he'd hear the faint rustle from the other bed. Then soft footsteps — soundless, the way a cat moves when it's pretending not to be watching you. The footsteps would stop at his bedside. He didn't need to open his eyes. He already knew what she was checking.
By the time he was actually awake, breakfast would be waiting on the small table beside him — still warm, a folded note tucked underneath it: Little Uri, you kept turning over last night. Bad dream?
He sat there holding the note for a couple of seconds, staring at nothing.
You could just ask me directly, you know. What's with the note system.
Evenings: he'd be reading at his desk, and a cup of hot tea or warm milk would materialise silently at the corner. No sound of approach. Anyone else would have found it unsettling. Uriel had gotten to the point where he was simply cataloguing it — he thought, with a strange sense of distance, that this would work well in a story, and tucked the feeling away.
Then the weather turned. He opened the wardrobe and found two new coats folded inside, both cut to his measurements, no note attached. He didn't need one. He recognised the stitching.
He stood there looking at them for a moment.
This was it. This was how it happened. He was never going to grow up. He was going to become completely dependent, and that was just who he was now.
...She had been sewing her own clothes for the whole family since she picked it up. We haven't bought anything from a shop since.
He took one of the coats out, shook it open, and pulled it on. The sleeves landed exactly where they were supposed to.
Without turning around, he said, "Thanks, Mom."
"You're welcome, little Uri. I'm glad you like it, really."
He stood there a moment longer, aware of something complicated moving through him, and aware that it felt very much like being a child.
He did like it.
That part didn't need saying.
---
Two months in, Uriel had a reasonably complete picture of how things worked at Kachin Academy.
The central fact was this: Tina was a singular presence on campus, and everything else followed from that.
Her academic standing had already made itself known — the Special Scholarship designation handled most of the explanation, and the faculty had settled into a particular register with her, one that might be described as I'm happy to answer any questions you might have, while privately uncertain whether I can. They came to her. She didn't go to them.
Beyond that, she had the quality — there was no cleaner word for it — of drawing attention simply by existing in a space. It didn't matter where she was or what she was doing. People noticed.
In gym class, someone would ask if she wanted to team up. During breaks, someone would materialise beside her on the pretext of borrowing notes and end up staying longer than necessary. In the lunch queue, people would start talking to her from both sides at once—about coursework, the weather, whether she had done something different with her hair, and everything in between.
Tina's response to all of this was the same: a gentle smile, never a rejection, never any real openness. She held a consistent distance that was impossible to measure precisely enough to call out. You couldn't say she was being cold. You couldn't say she was genuinely engaged. She existed in the space between the two, and people kept coming back anyway.
Uriel watched all of this from the sidelines and found it largely unsurprising. He had the sensation of a parent half-listening while the kids worked out their own social dynamics.
Then came the first practical combat simulation class.
One of the more popular boys in the year — the type who had figured out early how to make himself well-liked — gathered his courage and crossed the room to where Tina was sitting. He produced a confident smile.
"Tina, there's a really interesting array puzzle over there — we're putting a group together, would you want to join—"
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she turned to look at Uriel, who was sitting beside her doing absolutely nothing of consequence.
"Uriel," she said, with complete sincerity, "do you want to go try the puzzle?"
The boy's smile stopped moving. His gaze tracked slowly to Uriel.
Uriel looked at the boy. The boy looked at Uriel. A particular atmospheric pressure settled over the three of them — the specific heaviness of oh no, did I just walk into something, and, from the other direction, I knew this kid was going to be a problem.
"...Oh, right, I — I forgot my wand. Maybe next time!"
The boy exited the situation at a pace that was technically not running.
Uriel sat where he was and watched the whole sequence conclude, and felt the specific unease of a man who can see exactly where a pattern is going.
Great. In the eyes of every boy in this year, I am now the unhinged little brother with territorial attachment issues. I am the final boss of her dating simulator.
The same thing happened four more times.
After the fifth, nobody asked anymore. Tina had achieved a kind of unreachable status — a mountain peak with a permanent overcast, perfectly beautiful and completely inaccessible. And Uriel, through no campaign of his own, had achieved something adjacent to social exclusion. Not hostile. Just systematic.
The girls kept a courteous arm's-length distance, with a look in their eyes that communicated understood, maintaining clearance. The boys were more direct about it. He'd seen that particular look before, in both of his lives.
He assembled the two categories of stares, triangulated the angle, and reconstructed what the situation must look like from the outside.
Good thing I'm not actually eleven. If I were really this age and getting treated like this, it would probably sting.
He carried his lunch tray over, sat down across from her, slid one of the dishes toward her side—a small, habitual thing—and lowered his voice.
"Hey, sis. When they ask you to group up with them, you don't have to drag me along every time."
Tina looked up.
"But I want to be in little Uri's group," she said.
"..."
"Besides," she added, "I'd worry about you wandering around all by yourself. What if you didn't eat properly?"
Uriel took a bite of his food and said nothing.
Worry about what, exactly.
Your son was a functioning adult in a previous life.
...Okay. Fine. In this life I'll probably always be eleven to you. That's just the situation.
The field trip announcement went up midway through the first semester.
Uriel stood at the notice board and scanned it once.
Destination: the hills and woodlands north of town. One day. Structured activities in the morning, free time in the afternoon, reassemble before sundown. Standard format.
He glanced to the side. Tina was reading it too.
"Looks fun," she said.
"Yeah," Uriel said. "Should be fine."
---
On the morning of the trip, the group-forming ritual played out exactly as expected. Four or five different people approached Tina in sequence, all of them genuine, all of them cheerful.
She asked the same question each time.
"Can Uriel come too?"
Stone silence, every time.
By the end of it, Uriel and Tina were standing side by side, and it was just the two of them.
The column of students moved out from the assembly point and started up the mountain trail. Uriel and Tina fell to the rear, letting a comfortable gap open between themselves and the rest.
He'd calculated this deliberately. Too close and people would overhear things; overhearing led to comments; comments accumulated into incidents. Better to hang back and keep the buffer.
Tina matched his pace without comment, steady and unhurried.
The trees thickened on both sides as they climbed. Morning light came through the canopy in fragments, pale and scattered.
"During free time," Uriel said, after a while, "let's find somewhere off the path and just sit. No need to follow the main group."
"Okay," Tina said. "I brought things."
"Brought what?"
She patted the oversized pack at her side — he hadn't even registered where it had come from — and her voice carried a note of quiet satisfaction. "Food. And a tent."
Uriel stopped walking.
"A tent," he said. "We're on a day trip. We're back before dinner. Why do we need a tent? Are we surviving in the wilderness for three months?"
"It gets cold when you’re sitting still out here," she said, with the calm certainty of someone who had already solved the problem. "A tent is warm. You can sit in it or lie down, and the wind won't get to your food."
He looked at her face — the expression of a person who has prepared thoroughly and doesn't see what the issue is — and felt the energy required to push back simply leave him.
He kept walking.
The free period scattered most of their classmates in twos and threes into the woods, noisy and happy. Uriel and Tina found a gentle slope sheltered from the wind, far enough from the main group that their voices didn't carry, and stopped.
The tent went up quickly. Tina worked fast and clean; Uriel lent a hand without being asked, and the whole thing was done before it should have been.
Then the food.
He sat inside and took what she handed him and bit into it — she'd made it herself, obviously — and it was significantly better than anything the academy kitchen had managed.
"Hey," he said, chewing, "what kind of things are you supposed to find out here? In these woods."
The question came out before he'd considered it. He sat with it for a moment after.
That's the kind of thing a kid asks. A kid being taken care of. Note to self.
Tina propped her chin in her hand and thought about it.
"Probably dwarves. Elves," she said. "Dragon-kin sometimes, in the mountains."
"Hm."
"From the Demon Realm side, you occasionally get demon wolves. Or other things. Hard to say."
Uriel stopped chewing.
"What does any of that have to do with fun?"
"For kids, it's exciting. It's new." She paused. "And usually not that dangerous."
"Usually not that dangerous," he repeated, spacing out each word. "That usually — is that in absolute terms, or..."
He let the sentence hang.
"...relative to you?"
Tina tilted her head. "...More or less?"
Uriel looked away and spent a few seconds turning more or less over in his mind with the focus of someone defusing a charge.
Then the light went out.
The hell? Is it gonna rain? Are we seriously doing the mysterious forest trope right now?
He looked out through the tent flap and confirmed it was not clouds. It was a shadow — something very large had crossed between them and the sun, blocking the light that had been coming down through the canopy.
A low sound travelled through the ground. More a pressure than a noise.
Uriel was six years old the first time he'd watched Galatina deal with a pest problem. He remembered the exact weight she'd put behind it. His memory served up that image with complete, unhelpful precision.
He looked at Tina.
She was already looking out.
He pushed out of the tent and looked up.
A dragon.
Red, entirely. The scales caught the daylight and threw it back in fractured pieces. The wingspan had taken out a substantial section of sky. It had settled on the ridge not far above them, head dipping low, thin wisps of heat curling from the gap between its jaws.
Large was an understatement. Large was what you said when you hadn't seen one yet.
Apex of the Ancient Forest. King of the Skies. There is not a creature in these woods that doesn't know what that silhouette means.
Uriel stood where he was, looked the dragon over from end to end, then tilted his head toward Tina without taking his eyes off it.
"So," he said. His voice was level. "Does this count?"
Tina came out and looked up too.
"This one's more dangerous than usual," she said, in the same tone she used for explaining weather. "You don't normally see them this close."
"More dangerous. Define more dangerous."
She considered. "The kind where, if you cross it, there's no running away."
"...Right. Okay."
He lowered his gaze.
The first scream came from somewhere down the trail. Then a second. Then the whole slope below them came alive with noise — panicked shouting, the sound of people scrambling over each other, and underneath it all the strained voices of teachers trying to maintain some kind of order.
Uriel turned his head toward Tina.
"Can you handle it?" he asked.
"Yes." She was already smoothing the grass off her skirt.
She moved to step forward and he caught her sleeve.
"Wait." His voice dropped, sharp and fast, the words pressed through his teeth. "Nobody can see it's you. Keep the noise down. And I want it to look—as much as possible—like it left on its own. It slipped. It remembered it left the stove on and flew away. I don't care. Just make sure no one connects it to you. Understood?"
Tina listened to all three of these requirements with full attention.
She nodded. "Okay. I understand."
She took two steps toward the ridge. Then she stopped and turned back.
"Eat your sandwich before the bread gets hard," she said. "Mommy'll be right back."
Then she was walking — light-footed, unhurried, her hair lifting slightly in the ridge wind — toward the dragon that had swallowed half the sky. She moved the way she moved when she was heading to the kitchen to check on something simmering.
Uriel stood and watched until her outline was small against the ridge.
Then he turned, ducked back into the tent, picked up where he'd left off with his food, and ate.
He had no idea how she was going to make a winged dragon "slip." He had stopped having the bandwidth to wonder. She had walked straight toward the kind of danger that made "no running away" the only honest description — and her hair had caught the breeze like she was out for a Sunday stroll.
He chewed a bite of sandwich and looked at the tent fabric.
You get used to it. And honestly? That's not the worst thing.