The Threat and the Notebook
Cassie shook her head.
“You clearly don’t understand how valuable a technique like this is. Your ki is nearly twice as pure as Kate’s—and she’s spent sixteen years refining hers. You did it in three days.” Her tone hardened. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Either way, I will find out how.”
Fate’s smile dropped.
“Is that a threat?”
Cassie let her full killing intent flood the room, aimed squarely at him. The air went thick, cold, pressing against his ribs like a physical weight.
“Do I need to spell it out more clearly?”
Fate’s reaction wasn’t what she expected. He started laughing—hard enough that he had to steady himself against her desk.
“What’s so funny?” Cassie snapped.
“Everything,” Fate said, still grinning. “You self-important academy types wrote me off as a loser for a year and a half—didn’t lift a finger to help me. Now I fix myself, on my own, without asking anyone for a damn thing, and you try to threaten it out of me. That’s hilarious.”
“You’re young,” Cassie said coldly. “You don’t understand how serious this is. Let me explain something to you, boy—”
Fate wasn’t in the mood to hear it. He slammed his palm down on her desk, meaning to shatter it—and the desk absorbed the blow without a scratch.
Cassie noticed. Her expression shifted, genuinely startled.
Yagrasil wood, Fate realized. She really is a show-off. People carve wands out of that. She made a desk.
He should have been embarrassed. Instead, he grinned, planted both hands flat on her ridiculous desk, and leaned in close, voice dropping to something bone-cold as he pushed his matrix to full output.
“Try me. I promise you—whatever cage you build for me, I’ll walk out of it. And when I do, I’ll burn this precious Academy of yours down to dust and corpses.”
Cassie went red with fury, but before she could get a word out, Fate’s hands lifted from the desk and the desk’s body dissolved into fine dust, drifting past both women.
When it settled, he was simply gone.
The two women stared at the papers and items scattered across the dust, shock plain on their faces.
“That desk was carved from Yagrasil,” Cassie said finally. “Found this piece years ago—too young to be useful for anything but this. Even I need real effort to cut through it with a blade.”
Kate stared at her.
“Forget the desk. Explain how he left a room with two master-rank knights in it without either of us seeing him move. The door never opened. I’d stake my life on that.”
Cassie sank back into her chair with a long exhale. Neither spoke for a while, the dust still settling in thin motes through the lamplight.
“We can’t move rashly,” Cassie finally said. “Killing him wouldn’t be hard. That’s not what we need. Get the network on him—I want eyes on his room, on him, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sleep with the boy if that’s what it takes. I want to know exactly how he did this.”
Kate sighed and left Cassie to stew.
Neither of them realized Fate had been in the room the whole time, tucked into a shadow beside Pan, listening to every word.
He nodded to Pan, and they slipped out through the shadows, back to his room to collect his gold, then vanished again, resurfacing in town twenty minutes later after a short search.
He found a magic shop. Fate had never liked the idea of people going through his things, so he spent ninety percent of his personal fortune on an adventurer’s pouch—a dimensional storage device holding two cubic metres of space. He tucked the rest of his money and a handful of leftover water stones inside.
He didn’t own much, but he still didn’t like the idea of anyone rifling through it.
He’d been a little irritated at first, but the irritation faded fast. From the Yagrasil sapling alone, Fate had absorbed ten times more life force than the entire orc village had given him.
Yagrasil went by many names, but one of them was Tree of Life, and it lived up to it. He funneled most of that force into his ki matrix, with the rest going toward slowly expanding his mana pool.
His flame refined life force far faster than his astral roots could process mana—it would still take days before the rest settled properly.
In the meantime, he went back to the kitchens and asked the head butcher for more work. He was still flush with life force for now, but the flame would need feeding again soon enough.
As for what anyone else thought of it—let them think what they liked.
“Did you find him?” Cassie asked, later, in her office.
“Yes,” Kate said. “He appeared out of nowhere and came straight back to the Academy.” She paused, clearly still processing it.
“What’s he doing right now? Training with someone?”
Kate gave a wry smile.
“No. He’s in the kitchens, helping the butcher. Been killing pigs and chickens for the last two hours.”
Cassie frowned.
“If I recall correctly, he’s from a minor noble house on the far side of the Gate Kingdom. Probably needs the coin.”
Kate shook her head.
“He hasn’t taken a single payment. Told the butcher it’s part of his training—uses his own sword to do the fine cuts, apparently. I think we can take that part at face value.”
Cassie’s frown deepened.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Six days. But he vanished for the last three days of Family Days, so I don’t think that’s connected to the change in his ki purity.”
Cassie nodded slowly.
“And his money?”
“Nothing in his room, but after a few hours of digging, my people found he sold off a fair amount of raw treasure yesterday, then spent a hundred and five gold today on an adventurer’s pouch. Still working out where the treasure came from.”
Cassie thought it over.
“Give him some room before we push further. But I want to know his every move.”
Kate bowed and turned to leave, but Cassie stopped her.
“Is there anyone in his class he’s close to?”
“Not that I’ve noticed. Though he seems to have some kind of connection with Tivi Fang.”
“Can we use her?”
Kate’s expression turned wary.
“I wouldn’t advise it. She’s General Fang’s granddaughter. Pushing her could cause real problems.”
“You’re right,” Cassie admitted. “Fang can be overprotective. Find someone else—men tend to let their guard down around women, though.”
Kate nodded and left.
Alone, Cassie muttered to herself, “We need him talking before anyone in the Heavy Ki sector catches wind of what he’s got and decides to just kill him for it. He keeps getting stronger, and they won’t like that at all. Damn it—first Sari, now this. Too many problem children on my head.”
She had no idea a pair of ears was listening from the shadows the entire time.
Once Cassie set her people on him, Fate—not wanting to just take without giving something back—sent Pan out to return the favor.
Over the next five days, Fate skipped every martial arts class and every other lesson, spending eighteen hours a day at the butcher’s block, while Pan gathered intelligence: half of the Light Ki sector’s information network, Cassie’s political alliances, her rivals, and a healthy list of things that could seriously damage her standing if it ever got out.
Fate didn’t need to lift a finger. He simply wrote it all down in a notebook, for later.
Once he’d exhausted what Pan could dig up on Cassie directly, he sent him after her allies among the other sector heads, then her enemies.
By the twentieth day of butchering, Fate had a working file on at least half the influential figures in the Academy.
When he finally felt ready, he walked back into his classes, notebook tucked away, and let her throw whatever she wanted at him.
I’m ready, he thought.
Leave a Reply