I slept badly.
It was too many new things pressing into my skull at once. The mine. The walkers. The blue shield that had erupted from my hand without asking. And the warm feelings that already left no trace.
It was cold here at dawn. Grey light seeped through the shutters. I lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling, running through the events. Mine. Walkers. Ken. Renn knows. Terro knows. Pol knows. Veyra — doesn't know yet.
Footsteps. The door banged open.
"Rise and suffer," Renn announced, fully dressed, twin swords on his back, a piece of bread in his teeth. He kicked the foot of my cot. "Training yard. Twenty minutes."
"Training?"
"You signed up yesterday. Contractor means you work. Working means you fight. Fighting means you train. Logic. Even Terro would approve." He bit off a chunk of bread. "Also, I want to see if that hit you landed on the practice dummy yesterday was skill or luck."
"I didn't hit a practice dummy yesterday."
"That was the goblin ambush. You hit a goblin. Same energy. Get dressed."
He left the door open behind him. Cold air flooded in. I swung my legs off the cot, pulled on my boots, and followed.
The compound was waking up. Mercenaries shuffled between the barracks and the mess hall, armor clanking, voices rough with sleep. Somewhere, a cook was screaming at a delivery boy about the quality of flour. A dog — whose dog? did the compound have a dog? — was barking at a cart wheel.
I walked through it, and for the first time, tried something different. Instead of just passing through the noise like a stone through water, I tried to be in it. I nodded at a man carrying firewood. He nodded back. No flinch, no alarm. Progress.
At the mess hall window, I grabbed bread and a cup of bitter tea. The cook — a wide woman named Berta, who ran the kitchen and had opinions about everyone — shoved the cup at me.
"You. New one."
"Yes."
"Eat more. You look like a scarecrow someone dressed in a shirt." She ladled something grey and chunky onto a plate. "Porridge. Don't make faces, it's nutritious."
"Thank you," I said. Deliberately warmer than yesterday's attempts. Berta squinted at me like I'd spoken a foreign language, then shrugged and turned to yell at the delivery boy again.
* * *
The training yard was a flat rectangle of packed earth, ringed by weapon racks and battered wooden dummies. Renn was already there, spinning a practice sword in slow circles, warming up his wrists.
"Grab a stick," he said, nodding at the rack. "We're starting with basics. Stance. Guard. How not to die in the first three seconds of a fight."
I picked up a practice sword — blunted oak, the weight of a real sword but designed to leave bruises, not corpses. Renn faced me, raised his, and grinned.
"Rule one: watch the shoulders. The hand lies, the shoulder doesn't. Ready?"
He swung. I blocked — barely. The impact rattled up my arm.
"Too stiff. You're fighting the sword, not holding a door shut."
Again. This time I angled the block, let the force slide past. Better.
"Good. Again."
We drilled for twenty minutes. Basic strikes, basic parries, footwork patterns. My body did its usual trick — occasional flashes of something deep and precise, movements that didn't come from Renn's teaching but from somewhere older — interrupted by stretches of raw clumsiness. Renn noticed every time.
"There," he said, after I'd executed a perfect counter-riposte that neither of us expected. "What was that?"
"I don't know."
"You keep saying that. Eventually I'm going to stop believing you."
"Fair enough."
Terro sat on a barrel near the armory, bow across his knees, watching us. He wasn't counting today — or at least, he wasn't announcing the count. Which somehow felt worse.
"Well, well."
The voice came from the far side of the yard. I'd heard it before — smooth, polished, carrying the particular confidence of someone who'd never had to earn their right to be heard.
Greyve walked toward us with the unhurried stride of a man who owned the ground he walked on. His armor was immaculate — oiled leather, polished buckles, the family crest on his shoulder piece gleaming like it had been buffed that morning. Because it probably had been. Behind him, two figures: a tall woman with cropped hair, and a stocky young man with a short axe on his belt. His usual entourage.
"Morning drills?" Greyve smiled. It was the kind of smile that had teeth but no warmth. "How touching. The Fourth is teaching its stray to fetch."
Renn's grip tightened on his practice sword. "Morning, Greyve. Shouldn't you be somewhere polishing your daddy's crest?"
"It's my crest, actually. Earned it at sixteen. Guild certification, field combat rating, the whole process." He stopped five paces away and looked at me. "You, though. No crest. No rank. No certification." His eyes moved to the practice sword in my hand. "And now you're learning which end of the sword goes forward. Inspiring."
"Did you need something?" I asked.
He chuckled.
"I heard about your little expedition to the Greyvein Mine," he said, circling slowly. "Ten walkers. Quite the mess. And rumor has it, one of Veyra's people pulled out some magic in the tunnels. Blue light, some kind of barrier." He stopped and faced me. "That was you, wasn't it?"
I said nothing.
"Oh come on. It's not a scandal. Half the Guild companies have a mage or two on retainer. The Seventh has three. It's practically a requirement for anything above rodent patrol." He waved his hand dismissively. "I'm not impressed. I'm curious. Because you're walking around with a hammer, doing grunt work, when you apparently can cast. That's either very humble or very stupid."
"Maybe both," Renn muttered.
Greyve ignored him. "Here's what bothers me, contractor." He said the word the way someone might say insect. "Unknown quantities are a liability. I don't care what tricks you can do — I care that nobody knows where you're from, or what you're hiding. And the Fourth is too soft to ask the hard questions."
"And you're volunteering?" Renn's voice was flat now.
"Someone has to." Greyve smiled again — sweet, poisonous. "Veyra collects broken things. It's endearing, really. But the Guild doesn't run on charity. It runs on standards." He looked at the practice sword in my hand. "Spar with me."
He walked to the rack and selected a practice bastard sword — the heaviest one. He held it like an extension of his arm. Natural. Effortless.
"Unless you'd rather not," he added, turning back with an expression of theatrical concern. "I wouldn't want to embarrass the Fourth's charity case."
"He's been training for twenty minutes," Renn started.
"I'll spar," I said.
* * *
Greyve was good. Genuinely good.
He didn't rush. His footwork was clean — balanced, measured, each step controlling distance. He opened with probing strikes, testing my guard, cataloging my responses before committing.
His first real attack came after thirty seconds — a feinted thrust to my left, collapsing into a sweeping cut at my forward knee. I jumped back. He closed the gap instantly and tagged my forearm with a sharp crack.
"One," called the stocky man from Greyve's group.
So they were keeping score.
I reset. Greyve circled. He hit me twice more in the next minute — a cut to the ribs I should have parried, and a clean thrust to the chest that got through a guard I'd set too high.
"Two. Three."
But on the fourth exchange, something fired. That buried reflex — the one I couldn't predict. My wrist rotated on its own. A half-step inside his reach, a strike angled at his exposed inner elbow. The movement was perfect — compact, fast, from another lifetime.
The practice sword cracked against Greyve's forearm. He grunted, surprised. Took a step back.
The yard went quiet for a moment.
Greyve looked at his arm, then at me. His surprise lasted exactly one second before a sharp, appreciative smile replaced it. "There it is," he said. "The ghost in the machine."
He came again — faster now. A three-hit combination that flowed like water. I blocked the first, ducked the second. The third caught me on the shoulder and spun me sideways.
He pressed the advantage. Hit, hit, hit — precise, technical, each one building pressure like a smith driving iron into shape. My flashes of competence surfaced and vanished — a perfect parry followed by a clumsy step, a riposte that my hands couldn't complete because my feet were wrong.
The final blow was clean. A low feint that pulled my guard down, followed by a snapping cut to my wrist. The practice sword flew from my hand and clattered on the dirt.
Greyve rested his blade against my collarbone. Close enough that I could hear him breathing — controlled, barely elevated. He'd barely broken a sweat.
"You have something," he said quietly. "You come alive for half a second at a time, and when you do, you're dangerous." He lowered the blade. "But half a second isn't a fight. It's a twitch. And twitches get people killed."
He stepped back and placed the practice sword on the rack with deliberate care. "Sort yourself out, contractor. The Guild doesn't need another mystery."
He turned and walked away, his two companions falling in step behind him.
Renn appeared at my side with a waterskin. "For the record," he said, "that hit to his forearm was clean. Beautiful, even."
"I lost."
"Losing to Greyve isn't news. The man's been trained since he could walk. Landing a clean hit on him is news." He paused. "Also, he's a massive ass, but he's not wrong. The twitchy-genius thing is going to be a problem until you stabilize it."
"Nineteen minutes of garbage, one second of brilliance," I said.
"Hey, that's more than most people get."
Three long blasts from a horn cut through the morning air.
Every body in the yard froze.
* * *
"That's the city horn," Terro said, already off his barrel, bow strung. "Not the compound horn. City emergency."
Movement everywhere. Doors slamming, boots on stone, armor being buckled mid-stride. A runner — a young man barely old enough to hold the sword on his belt — sprinted into the Fourth's compound, panting.
"Breach! Eastern market district! Tunnelers — at least four, maybe more — broke through the foundation of the old granary! Captain Veyra is being notified — all available units to the eastern quarter!"
"Tunnelers?" I asked Renn.
"Giant ants." He was already drawing his real swords — steel now, not oak. "Nasty bastards. Size of a large dog, mandibles that can cut through wood and soft stone. They burrow from the forest, come up inside buildings. If they establish a nest, you've got a hundred of them in a week." He checked his edge. "We kill them, and we collapse whatever tunnel they came through."
We moved. Out of the compound gates, through the main street, east. Other groups were converging from different directions — the Guild had multiple companies stationed around Ashford, and a city emergency pulled them all.
The eastern market district was chaos.
Market stalls had been overturned. Civilians ran in every direction, clutching children, dragging carts off. A woman stood on a barrel screaming directions that nobody was following. Somewhere, a goat had gotten loose and was adding its own panicked commentary.
And there, in the open square in front of the old granary, was the problem.
The ground had collapsed inward, a jagged hole the size of a cart gaping in the cobblestones. Dirt and broken stone spilled outward. From the hole, two tunnelers had already emerged — and Renn's description was accurate but insufficient. They were the size of large dogs, yes. But dogs don't have armored carapaces the color of dried blood, six segmented legs that moved with horrible coordination, and mandibles the length of my forearm that opened and closed with a sound like shears cutting metal.
A third was pulling itself out of the hole as we arrived. A fourth was visible below, its dark body shifting in the tunnel mouth.
"Two more in the tunnel!" someone shouted from the rooftop.
Other teams were already engaging. The closest was a mixed group I didn't recognize — five fighters and, at the back, a mage.
The mage was a young man in a grey robe, no older than twenty-five, with the focused expression of someone trying very hard not to panic. He raised his staff, shouted a word I couldn't quite catch, and a bolt of crackling white lightning arced from the tip and struck the nearest tunneler square in the carapace. The impact blew a fist-sized hole in its armor. The creature shrieked — a high, vibrating sound — and collapsed, legs curling inward.
"Nice shot, Idris!" yelled a massive, dark-skinned woman next to him — she carried a two-handed axe like other people carried brooms and was grinning like this was the best morning she'd had in weeks. She charged the second tunneler with a war cry that rattled the market stalls. The axe came down on a joint between carapace plates. Chitin cracked. The tunneler's front section separated from its back.
"That's Kael," Renn told me as we ran. "Seventh Company. Absolute lunatic. Loves this stuff."
"And the mage?"
"Idris. Guild-certified. Third Circle, whatever that means. Good at lightning, terrible at conversation."
Our team hit the eastern side of the square — Renn, Terro, Pol, and me. Other Fourth Company members were converging too. Across the square, I saw Greyve's group approaching from the south, moving in formation.
The third tunneler was fully out now, mandibles clacking, its segmented body low to the ground. It turned toward a cluster of overturned market stalls where a woman was struggling to pull a child out from under collapsed canvas.
"Terro!" Renn shouted.
Terro was already drawn. The arrow hit the tunneler's head — the junction between the compound eyes. The creature jerked, stumbled, but didn't drop. The carapace was too thick at the front.
"Weak point is the belly and the joints," Terro called. "Flip it or hit it from underneath."
Pol moved. Tower shield forward, he advanced on the wounded tunneler and slammed the shield into its side. The impact knocked the creature onto its back, legs flailing. Renn was there instantly — both swords driven downward into the exposed underbelly. The tunneler convulsed and went still.
The fourth tunneler erupted from the hole. Bigger than the others — a soldier variant, nearly twice the size, its mandibles dripping with something that hissed when it hit stone.
"Oh, wonderful," Renn said. "A big one."
Across the square, Idris hit it with another lightning bolt. The impact scorched a strip of carapace but the soldier barely flinched. Too much armor. The dark-skinned axe-woman — Kael — let out a whoop and charged, but the soldier's mandible swept sideways and she had to dive, rolling behind a broken cart.
"Ha! Good reflexes, ugly!" she shouted at the tunneler, already back on her feet. "Come on, try that again!"
The soldier turned toward her. Its body coiled — preparing to charge.
And behind it, from the tunnel, two more emerged. Regular-sized, but flanking wide, heading toward the side streets where the civilians hadn't fully evacuated.
"We've got flankers!" someone shouted. Multiple groups shifted to intercept.
Greyve's team was already moving. He commanded cleanly: "Nessa, west side. Block the alley. Bruck, with me." His movements were efficient — no wasted steps, no hesitation. He intercepted the left flanker, his real sword flashing in precise cuts that targeted the leg joints. Two strikes. The tunneler stumbled. A third — deep, angled — cracked through the joint entirely. The creature collapsed, one side dragging.
The man wasn't just show. He fought like he'd been doing this his whole life. Because he had.
The soldier was the problem. Idris hit it with another bolt — this time a sustained arc, not a single shot. The lightning crawled across the carapace, searching for a gap. The tunneler shrieked and swung its massive head sideways, mandibles snapping. Kael darted in from behind and buried her axe in a rear leg joint. Chitin exploded. The leg buckled.
But the soldier whipped around faster than something that size should move. Its tail — I hadn't even noticed the tail, a thick, segmented appendage tipped with a bony point — swept low and caught Kael across the thigh. She went down hard, cursing creatively in at least two languages.
"Idris! Again!" she yelled from the ground.
Idris raised his staff. His face was pale, sweat running down his temples. The lightning came — but weaker this time. A thin arc that fizzled against the carapace. He was running out. "I need a minute!" he shouted.
The soldier oriented on the fallen Kael. Mandibles open. Charging.
Pol stepped into its path. Shield planted, mace ready. The impact was tremendous — the shield rang like a bell, and Pol's boots scraped back a full foot on the cobblestones. But he held. The soldier's mandibles closed on the shield edge and squeezed. The metal groaned.
Renn attacked from the right, aiming for a gap between carapace plates. One sword bit in. The soldier released the shield and swung toward him.
I was standing ten paces back, hammer in my hand, watching the geometry of the fight. The soldier's underside, exposed for a moment as it reared up at Renn. The crack in its carapace where Kael's axe had damaged the rear. The angle Pol had created by forcing it to turn.
My hand came up. Not the hammer hand — the left.
Fingers folded. Two extended, thumb bracing.
Ven.
The compressed burst of air hit the soldier's cracked rear section — the exact spot Kael had weakened. The carapace plate blew inward. The creature's back legs gave out. It crashed sideways onto the cobblestones, belly partially exposed.
Renn didn't wait. Both swords — down, hard, into the gap. Pol's mace came from the other side. Between them, they cored the thing like an apple.
The soldier shuddered. Its legs folded. Still.
Silence in the square, broken by distant shouts as the last flanker was dealt with somewhere in the side streets.
Kael sat up from the ground, bleeding from the thigh, staring at the dead soldier.
"Oi! Who blew the shell open?" she yelled. "Was that Idris?"
"Wasn't me," Idris said, leaning on his staff, completely spent. "I'm out."
Kael's eyes found me. My hand was still raised, fingers still folded. I lowered it.
"You!" She pointed. "Skinny one with the hammer! Was that wind magic?"
"Yes," I said.
Her face broke into a massive, delighted grin. "Ha! Brilliant shot! Come work for the Seventh, we need another caster! Idris burns out after three bolts, the useless—"
"I do not burn out," Idris protested, his voice quiet and precise. "I conserve energy based on threat assessment. The fourth bolt was, in my judgment—"
"Was limp, that's what it was! Couldn't have stunned a rabbit!"
"I stunned the primary target for six seconds on the second bolt. Six seconds is—"
"Not enough, Idris! It's never enough with you!" But she was laughing, blood running down her leg, and when a medic came over she swatted at him: "It's a scratch. Fix Pol's shield, it looks like someone chewed on it."
"Someone did chew on it," Pol said.
* * *
Clean-up took most of the morning. The tunnel entrance was collapsed with controlled demolition — a team of engineers packed the hole with rubble and sealed it with quickite. Four dead tunnelers in the square, two more in the side streets. No civilian casualties. One broken leg, Kael's thigh cut, assorted bruises.
We sat in the shade of a half-collapsed market stall afterward — me, Renn, Terro, Pol. The usual configuration. The quiet after violence.
Renn spoke first. "Twice in two days."
I knew what he meant.
"Shield in the mine. Wind on the ant." He leaned forward, elbows on knees. "And both times, you targeted the exact weak point. Not random — precise. You saw the opening."
"Yes."
"So it's not just reflexes. You think tactically."
I said nothing because there was nothing to argue with.
Terro: "The question remains. You wait. You hold back. You watch while others fight. You only act when someone is about to get hurt or the fight is about to be lost."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's a pattern. And patterns have reasons."
Pol spoke. Third time total. "Use what you have." Same words as before. He stood, adjusted his dented shield, and walked toward the armory.
Three words. Again. Pol didn't need more.
Renn watched him go. "He says that to everyone. But he only says it twice to people he thinks are worth it." He turned to me. "Look — you've got magic. Everyone saw it today. Half the square saw it. That Kael woman wants to recruit you. Idris is pretending not to be intrigued but I guarantee he's going to find you later and ask seventeen technical questions about air magic."
"What's your point?"
"My point is: you're not hiding anymore. So stop acting like you are." He stood. "Greyve is smart. He's already going to frame this. He'll go to the Guild leadership and raise concerns — proper channels, polite language, 'for the safety of the company.' He'll say you're an unregistered mage with no background, no training documentation, and no accountability. And he'll be technically right."
"So what do I do?"
"Be useful. Be so useful that when Greyve files his little report, Veyra can drop a stack of results on the table and tell him to sit down."
He offered me a hand. I took it. He pulled me to my feet.
"Tomorrow. Same time. Training yard." He grinned. "And this time, bring everything. Not just the hammer."