The Taste of Sudden Silence
He finished. Waited. Her reaction:
“You hit me!” Tivi shouted, voice cracking.
“Yes,” Fate said, flat. “I did.”
“You hit me!” she yelled again, louder, face flushing red.
“Seriously, did you hear anything I just said?”
“You hit me!” Her teeth were gritted now, fists clenched.
Something in him snapped — irritation boiling over into something else entirely. He grabbed her, pulled her in close, and kissed her, deep, with tongue, her protest swallowed whole. When he finally released her, he was breathing hard.
“Now you can change it to ‘you kissed me,’” he said. “If people heard the first version out of context, I could get into real trouble.”
Tivi stumbled back a step, eyes blown wide with shock. Her sword was in her hand in a flash of steel, drawn on reflex. Fate’s own hand went to his hilt, ready to draw — but the next instant she spun on her heel and bolted into the dark with impossible speed, faster than he’d ever seen her move.
Now what was that about, he thought, watching the space where she’d been.
“Really, Fate. You’ll never land a girl acting like that.”
Pan stepped out of the shadow pooled at Fate’s feet, already laughing.
“You were supposed to be spying on Kate,” Fate said. “Not me.”
“I like spying as much as the next guy, but it’s getting repetitive,” Pan said, stretching. “If we don’t go hunting soon, I’m going to die of boredom.” He smirked. “Small mercy — Kate’s got a nice body, showers at least twice a day. If not for that, I’d have quit this assignment days ago.”
“Stop dodging and report,” Fate said.
“Nothing much. Kate came by and mentioned your ki’s grown fast — dramatically, in her words. Both her and the higher-ups are baffled how you’re advancing this quickly while spending all your free time butchering animals in the Kitchen. They liked the idea enough to send two students out to try the same thing, testing their ki on livestock.”
Fate laughed, the tension of the night finally breaking. “Good. Kitchen chef could use the extra workers . Let’s go pick up some water stones.”
A few hundred miles deep into the woods, a lone rider on a black horse broke from the tree line, moving fast through the dark. In the mine tunnel behind the old palisade wall, he found a stash of water stones scattered near three dead skeletons — their bones cracked, the mana-charged stones knocked loose around the wreckage.
Fate gathered the stones, drained what remained of the life force still clinging to the shattered skeletons, and set the remaining nine to work clearing the tunnel. Then he knelt before the Body of an orc shaman he’d kept preserved for weeks, carved a wide incantation circle into the stone floor, fed it with magic, and revived the Body into a lich.
He couldn’t have managed it before — even now, he barely scraped together enough mana to finish the ritual. Life force alone couldn’t force a jump in summon quality overnight; the matrix simply demanded more than that. Still, Fate felt a flicker of real satisfaction. This wasn’t a fresh summon — he’d revived the orc mage, keeping its intelligence and most of its spellwork intact, rather than raising a mindless shell from scratch.
The lich had always been one of his favorite summons for exactly that reason. Its matrix was brutally complex, demanding roughly a thousand times more life energy than a basic skeleton required. He’d been saving toward this for a long time. Worth every wasted hour.
He gave the lich its first orders. Immediately it began raising its own skeletons from the mine floor, nine hundred separate portions of the lich’s own stored life force bleeding into fresh matrices, fresh bone.
“Small goblin tribe to the north,” Fate told it, watching the skeletons rise one by one, dust sifting from their joints. “Another tribe further east. Fight them if it comes to that. Hunt what you can in the woods between. I’ll come back for the life force later, once you’ve built up a reserve.”
He left the lich with its growing skeleton ranks and rode back toward the academy under a sky just beginning to lighten at the edges.
After a proper night’s sleep, Fate went to sell off the water stones.
“Quite a haul this time,” Lara said, turning one of the stones over in the lamplight of her shop, its surface glinting faint blue. “Sixty-five gold. Fair deal.”
“Want me to just ask for a receipt instead?” Fate said, leaning against the counter.
“Fine — seventy-five. But I can’t go any higher than that.”
“They’re worth at least eighty-six with silver to spare,” Fate said. “Give me eighty and write whatever you like in your books.”
Lara’s face went sharp with offense. “I can’t do that. It’s too much.”
“Fine, seventy-five then,” Fate said, “but I want my receipt.”
She stared at him a long moment, jaw tight, then sighed and counted out eighty gold coins onto the counter anyway, sliding them across without a word.
Fate smiled. “So — about my date?”
Lara looked him up and down, lips pressed into a thin line. “How old are you? Thirteen? Maybe fourteen. No thanks. Come back in a year.”
He shrugged, feigning wounded pride. “Since when do you care about age like that? You’re what, fifteen yourself? But hey — if you really don’t want to—”
He turned to go, disappointment written across his face — and grinned the second his back was to her.
“Wait.” Her voice cut through the shop. “You’re really giving up that fast?”
His grin widened, though he kept facing away. “Giving up? I just don’t want to force myself on a girl who’s not interested.”
Long pause behind him.
“And who says I’m not interested?” Lara said. “You know where Bullhorn Inn is? Eight o’clock. Meet me there.”
Fate turned back around, expression serious now. “You sure? I don’t want to push you into anything. I want you to actually want to come.”
“Will you be there or not?” she snapped, a flush of irritation coloring her cheeks.
“Eight PM, then,” he said. “See you soon.”
Once outside, Pan fell into step beside him. “You really have a terrible character when it comes to women.”
“Why? I just wanted her to work for it a little.”
“That’s exactly why you never get a clean breakup,” Pan said, shaking his head. “Believe me, you’ll screw this one up too.”
Fate laughed under his breath. “Come on. You know exactly what’s going on. Stop playing dumb.”
Tivi hadn’t shown for morning training — no explanation given — so Fate was paired against another student instead. He’d quietly built a limiter into his own ki matrix beforehand, capping his speed and strength down near his opponent’s level. Even handicapped like that, he still walked away with nineteen wins against only four losses by the time class ended.
Afterward, for the first time in weeks, he actually sat through history. Most of the basic coursework felt like a waste of breath to him, but thirty minutes into the lecture, the teacher finally reached something worth hearing.
“Because of the Great Plunder in the Grand Forest,” the teacher explained, chalk tapping against a worn map, “the Beastman Alliance formed to push back against human incursion. Ever since, any human army foolish enough to invade the Grand Forest has been annihilated without mercy. And I mean annihilated — plenty of kingdoms have tried over the centuries. Even empires. Few return alive. We’re talking armies numbering in the tens of thousands, swallowed whole by that forest. The last expedition was seventy years ago. Ended in total disaster. That’s the real reason beastman slaves are so rare and so expensive — nobody’s eager to go get more.”
Fate thought to himself that in his time The beastmen themselves were far from unified, — splintered first by species, then further fractured into individual tribes. At least ninety-seven fox tribes alone, thirty-eight wolfman tribes on top of that. If they ever managed to combine forces under one banner, humanity would be lucky to hold even a sliver of the continent.
After class, Fate walked into town and spent a good portion of his new gold on clothes — nothing flashy, no noble finery dripping with gemstones, but a high-grade defensive coat cut with real elegance, dark fabric that moved like water. He picked up a black jacket to go with it, seventy gold coins well spent — a low-grade magic item that could shrug off weak blows and shed rain and water alike. Understated. Useful. Exactly his style.
He got a haircut after that, cleaned himself up properly, and reached the inn by six in the evening, easing into the crowd gathered there. At some point he asked to borrow a lute from the musician working the corner stage — half out of curiosity, half on a whim. The man let him play, more out of amusement than expectation.
No one in that room forgot the night that followed.
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