The Curse of Arcadia

They found Yami exactly where they always did — atop the south gate tower, staring out toward the Death Mountains with the particular stillness of a man who never seemed to actually be resting, even when nothing was happening.

He didn't turn around as they climbed the last of the steps. "Heard you brought back three ogre cores worth of trouble instead of two."

"News travels fast," Kaelid said.

"Guild reports travel faster than you'd like." Yami finally turned, arms crossed, gaze sweeping over both of them — Kaelid still moving a little stiff, Tatsuya carrying himself with his usual deceptive ease. "Let me see it."

Kaelid didn't need to ask what. He pulled his shirt up enough to show the fading, still-yellowed bruising along his ribs. Yami studied it in silence for a long moment.

"You almost died."

"I'm aware."

"I'm not asking if you're aware. I'm telling you what happened, so we're both looking at the same thing." Yami's voice didn't rise, didn't sharpen — if anything it went flatter, more clinical, which was somehow worse. "Three Fractured-rank ogres. You should not have survived that fight in the state you did. You survived because your healer emptied herself keeping you alive, and because your tank and your archer got back in time to matter. That's not skill. That's luck wearing skill's clothes."

Neither of them said anything.

"You're both still weak," Yami continued. "Weak enough that a fight like that should never have been close. I'm not saying this to insult you — I'm saying it because apparently nobody else in your life is willing to."

"We handled it," Tatsuya said, quiet but not backing down.

"You survived it. There's a difference, and if you don't understand that difference yet, you're not ready for what's actually out there." Yami finally let his arms drop, some of the sharpness fading into something closer to tired. "I've watched a lot of promising kids die assuming surviving and handling something were the same thing."

Kaelid felt that land somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

"So what," he said, "you're benching us?"

"I'm telling you to get stronger before you go looking for another fight like that one." Yami turned back toward the mountains, done with the conversation as far as he was concerned. "Take your week. Rest, whatever your healer needs from you, sort out your house. But when you're back here, I expect both of you to actually be trying to close the gap between 'survived' and 'handled it.' Because next time, I promise you, luck won't be as generous."

Neither of them argued on the way back down the tower stairs.

Ana sat alone on the mansion's rooftop garden long after the others had drifted off to their own version of rest — Eric asleep before he'd even finished complaining about his arm, Aria and Tatsuya somewhere downstairs arguing over nothing in particular, Kaelid presumably passed out in his room the way he'd been most nights since they got back.

She'd told herself she came up here for the quiet. That was true, technically. It just wasn't the whole reason.

He said "in a heartbeat."

The thought arrived uninvited, the way it kept doing lately, and she let it sit there instead of chasing it off like she probably should have.

No hesitation. He didn't even think about it.

She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms loosely around them, staring out at Avalon's rooftops without really seeing any of them. It would've been easy to dismiss — Kaelid said things without thinking half the time, blurted whatever was closest to true in the moment without weighing it first. That was just how he was. It didn't have to mean anything more than exactly what it sounded like: gratitude, loyalty, the plain honest kind two people who'd nearly watched each other die owed one another.

So why can't I stop thinking about it.

She thought about the garden — his easy "I'm staring, sue me," the way he'd said it without an ounce of the usual deflection he used for literally everything else in his life. Thought about waking up against his shoulder, that first disoriented second before she remembered where she was, and how instead of feeling embarrassed the way she should have, some small stupid part of her had just felt warm.

This is inconvenient.

She almost laughed at herself for that thought — inconvenient, like it was a scheduling conflict and not whatever this actually was. But that was easier to sit with than the alternative. Inconvenient she could manage. Inconvenient had solutions. The other thing didn't, not without changing something about the shape of their whole group, their whole rhythm, the thing they'd all built together out of nothing over the last few months.

He almost died. I healed him. That's it. That's all it has to be.

It didn't feel like all it had to be. It hadn't for a while now, if she was being honest with herself — and up here, alone, with nobody to perform composure for, being honest with herself was about the only thing she had energy left to do.

She thought, unbidden, of her mother. Of Asia, retired and quiet in Eclipse, who'd once told her — years ago, half-joking, the way she said most true things — that her family line tended to fall hard and fall once. We're not built for halfway, Ana. When it happens, it happens completely.

Great. Thanks, Mom. Very helpful.

Below her, faintly, she heard a door open and close — someone finally heading to bed. She sat there a while longer anyway, watching the last of Avalon's lights flicker out one by one, no closer to deciding what to do with any of it than she'd been an hour ago.

One week, she told herself, standing at last, brushing off whatever dignity she still had left before heading back down. Figure it out during the one week nothing's trying to kill us. Shouldn't be that hard.

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She had a feeling, even as she thought it, that it would be exactly that hard.

The week that followed didn't look like much on the surface — no monsters, no near-death anything, nothing that would have made it into a guild report. But it was, in its own quiet way, exactly what all five of them needed.

Eric spent most of it exactly where Ana put him, submitting to daily sessions that left his arm steadily less useless with each passing day, grumbling the whole time about how boring recovery was compared to actually doing something. Ana ignored the complaints with practiced ease, more concerned with results than his opinion of the process.

Tatsuya, unsurprisingly, treated "rest" as a suggestion rather than an instruction. He spent his mornings sparring lightly with Kaelid — nothing like their usual sessions under Yami, just enough to keep sharp without undoing whatever healing was still settling — and his afternoons maintaining Moonlight with the kind of devotion most people reserved for something alive.

Aria used the week to properly rest for the first time in longer than she probably wanted to admit. She'd been running on fumes since well before the ogre fight, if she was honest with herself, and it took a few full days of doing nothing before the tension she'd been carrying in her shoulders finally started to ease. She and Eric fell into an easy, comfortable orbit around each other most days — nothing declared, nothing named, just proximity that neither of them seemed inclined to correct.

Kaelid split his time between light training, sitting in on Ana's sessions with Eric mostly to keep him company, and slowly, quietly getting used to having actual money in his pocket, however little of it there currently was. He caught himself, more than once, doing absolutely nothing and simply enjoying it — a strange, foreign feeling for someone who'd spent most of his life either working or fighting to survive.

Ana kept busy the way she always did, splitting her attention between Eric's arm, the mansion's upkeep, and whatever quiet processing she was still doing about things she hadn't said out loud to anyone. If anyone noticed she was a little more distracted than usual, nobody mentioned it.

By the time the week ended, the bruises had faded, the debts were settled, and something in the house had shifted — subtle, but real. They weren't just five people who happened to fight monsters together anymore. Somewhere in the last few months, without any of them quite deciding to, they'd become something closer to family.

One week down, Kaelid thought, standing on the mansion's front steps that final morning, gear already checked twice out of habit. Back to work tomorrow. Guess it was nice while it lasted.

Morning came sharp and clear, the kind of cold that meant winter wasn't finished with Avalon yet, no matter how much everyone wanted to pretend otherwise. Kaelid stood on the front steps a while longer than necessary, watching his breath fog in the early light, before the rest of the house started stirring behind him.

Tatsuya emerged first, Moonlight already at his hip, looking more awake than anyone had a right to be this early. "Back to Yami today?"

"Back to Yami today," Kaelid confirmed, already dreading it a little. A week off hadn't made the old man any less brutal, and if anything, Yami's parting words from before the break meant today was probably going to hurt more than usual. "He's not gonna let us ease back in, is he."

"No," Tatsuya said, entirely too cheerful about it. "He really isn't."

Eric came out next, testing his arm with a few careful rotations, satisfaction plain on his face at how far it had actually come. "Feels almost normal. Whatever you did," he said to Ana, who'd followed him out, "worth every bit of complaining I did about it."

"I'm aware," Ana said, not looking up from where she was securing her hair back into its usual style. "You told me. Repeatedly."

Aria trailed out last, moving with an ease that hadn't been there a week ago — whatever exhaustion had been sitting on her finally, fully gone. "I actually feel like a person again," she said, stretching. "Didn't realize how bad it'd gotten until it wasn't there anymore."

"We noticed," Eric said, earning a light shove for it.

They gathered their gear in the kind of comfortable, practiced silence that came from doing this enough times now that nobody needed instructions — Kaelid and Tatsuya breaking off toward the south gate and Yami's tower, Ana, Eric, and Aria heading for the guild to check the job board and see what the week had left waiting for them.

"Try not to die today," Ana called after Kaelid, only half joking.

"No promises," he called back, and caught her small, exasperated smile before he turned the corner — already bracing himself for whatever Yami had planned to make up for a week of missed training.

Yami didn't ease them back in. If anything, the week off seemed to have annoyed him into being harsher than usual.

"Run the wall first," he said, nodding toward the inner fortification that ringed the tower's base. "Ten laps. Full gear."

Kaelid glanced at Tatsuya, who was already stripping off his outer robe down to something more practical without complaint. Ten laps in Cocytus Plate. Great. Wonderful. Missed this.

They ran. Yami watched from the tower's edge without a word, arms crossed, expression unreadable in the way that always made Kaelid feel like he was being graded on something nobody had explained the rules for. By lap six his lungs were burning despite [Lightweight] doing its job on the armor's actual weight — the plate might as well not exist in terms of mass, but it still trapped heat, and Yami never let them remove the helmet for this part.

They finished. Yami didn't offer water, or a break.

"Spar," he said instead. "Both of you, together, against me."

Kaelid blinked. "At once?"

"You survived three ogres together. Let's see if you can survive one Apostle swordsman together." Yami drew his blade — nothing fancy, a plain longsword he'd used for as long as Kaelid had known him — and settled into a stance that looked almost lazy. "Begin whenever you're ready. I won't wait."

He didn't. The first strike came before either of them had fully squared up, a blunted arc aimed at Tatsuya's ribs that he barely managed to deflect, the force of it still enough to send him skidding back a full step.

Kaelid moved to flank, found Yami already turning to meet him, blade catching Mercy's edge with a shock that ran straight up his arm. He's not even trying yet.

"Talk to each other," Yami said, almost bored, parrying Tatsuya's follow-up without looking at him directly. "You fight side by side constantly and you still move like strangers who happen to be swinging swords in the same general direction."

"Little busy," Kaelid managed, ducking under a strike that would've taken his head off if he'd hesitated half a second longer.

"Make time. A real enemy won't wait for you to find your rhythm."

They adjusted, slow and clumsy at first — Tatsuya calling short warnings, Kaelid answering with position instead of words, the two of them gradually finding something closer to coordination instead of two separate fights happening to share the same patch of dirt. It still wasn't enough. Yami read the shift in maybe four exchanges and simply adapted, stepping into the gap between their rhythms like it had never been there at all.

By the time he finally called it, both of them were on the ground, breathing hard, thoroughly beaten without a single real wound between them — which Kaelid understood, dimly, through the exhaustion, was probably the entire point.

"Sharper," Yami said, sheathing his sword. "Not better. Sharper."

"Feels like the same thing you said before we left," Tatsuya muttered from the dirt.

"It's not. Before, you weren't trying to fight together at all. Now you're trying and failing. That's progress, even if it doesn't feel like it from down there." Yami looked between them, something almost approving flickering behind the usual flatness. "Same time tomorrow. Bring whatever's left of your dignity."

He turned back toward the tower without waiting for a response, already done with them for the day.

Kaelid lay in the dirt a moment longer, staring up at the pale winter sky, every muscle in his body filing a complaint at once.

Sharper. Not better. Guess I'll take it.