“We’ve missed you,” said Lianshi, reaching out to touch his arm. “Grieved for you. But I didn’t believe you were dead.”
“Obstinate, she is,” said Leonis reluctantly. “Kept trying to find ways to launch a rescue mission. Bothered everyone she could find with her questions, even led me on reconnaissance missions to find a way past the guards.”
Scorio looked from one to the other, then laughed. “I can’t believe we’re here. Sitting like this.”
“Nor can I,” said Leonis. “So you’d better start talking before I wake up.”
“Right.” Scorio tried to gather his thoughts. “The Final Door. They threw me through it, right enough. On the other side was a dark warren of tunnels. A closed system, to which fiends were drawn by some lure. Someone set it up ages ago as a trap, a way to clear the underground of the monsters that infest the tunnels…”
He told them everything. Meeting Hestia and Havert, Sal’s hidden base, Nissa and the Bronze Door. Their escape, his wanderings through the dark, how he’d fallen into the same trap that had claimed Radert, and how the Great Soul’s treasures had enabled his own eventual escape.
At that point the proprietor and three other servers began bringing in the food, so Scorio stopped talking, sipped from his cup of water, and watched as platter after platter was placed on the table.
The food didn’t stop coming. Plates of steaming rice, bowls of vegetables, noodles with slivers of meat, deep-fried pastries, pink mollusks swimming in a clear red broth, hearty bowls of soup, pungent nuggets of meat on beds of more vegetables—by the time they were done, Scorio couldn’t see the table’s surface anywhere.
“Will that be all, masters?” asked the proprietor, brow gleaming, smile nearly splitting his face in half.
“Yes, thank you,” said Lianshi, smiling politely.
To which the man bowed, then ushered his servers out frantically and closed the door again.
“Who’s joining us?” asked Scorio, taking in the heaping quantities of food.
“Me, myself, and I,” said Leonis, taking up his plate and beginning to shovel food onto it. “Training has me perpetually starving.”
“Good thing he trains,” said Lianshi, “or he’d be twice as wide as he is tall by now.”
“Eat, eat,” said Leonis. “Don’t let the food get cold.”
Scorio hesitated, then gingerly started filling his plate. The smell was intoxicating, rich and savory, sweet and spicy. His mouth flooded with spit, and then despite his intentions, he set to devouring everything as quickly as possible.
“Not fair,” said Leonis around a mouthful of pickled tubers. “You can’t leave us hanging. So you used these three treasures to reach the surface?”
“Yes,” said Scorio, swallowing a mouthful of sticky rice and washing it down with a cup of water. “I wouldn’t have made it without them. At the Academy, I mean, do you get access to things like them?”
“To minor artifacts?” Leonis grimaced. “No. We’ve no need of them, to be honest. But they’re not common.”
“They were, once,” said Lianshi. “I read about it in my journal. But over the centuries they’ve grown less so as they’re broken and used up.”
Scorio stared at her. “Nobody knows how to replace them?”
“Doesn’t seem like it,” said Lianshi, shrugging one shoulder. “Or at least, not minor artifacts like the ones you found. They’d be really valuable if they didn’t become unnecessary past a certain power point. Dread Vaults and above don’t really need things like that anymore. This Radert must have been a Flame Vault, or perhaps even lower-ranked.”
Scorio nodded slowly. For some reason, the thought of his stick of chalk never being replaced, of being a unique item that would disappear forever once he finished it, filled him with a pang of sorrow.
Leonis pointed a serving spoon at him. “So. You reached the surface. Then what?”
“Let him eat,” said Lianshi, slurping noodles into her mouth. “You said yourself he looks half-starved.”
Scorio set to serving himself again, having cleaned his plate even quicker than Leonis. “No, I can eat and talk. I’m surprisingly talented, I’ll have you know.”
“More impressive than him, then,” said Lianshi, nodding toward Leonis, who was pouring a mass of noodles onto his plate, not bothering with the serving utensils.
“No argument there,” said the massive man.
So Scorio picked up his tale. The ruins, Helena and Feiyan. Dola, his strike on the skycrane yard, his retreat, and eventual run-in with Naomi.
The other two ate slower and slower and eventually stopped eating altogether, expressions avid, halfway between disbelief and amazement.
“So I trapped her in the hallway with the chalk. She tried to get at me, but I threatened to cut her in half if she didn’t concede defeat. Which she eventually did, and the next day she started teaching me what she knew.” Scorio paused. “What?”
Leonis exchanged a glance with Lianshi and set his fork down. “You did all this… in the past couple of months?”
“I’ve been busy,” said Scorio, sitting back with a smile. “I can only imagine how fast you guys have been progressing. I’ve had to work hard to keep up.”
“She teach you how to ignite your Heart?” asked Lianshi.
Scorio nodded. “Yes. Mostly. With a lot of caveats. Only having Coal mana around made it a hard proposition. I had to take some extreme measures to do it in a manner that satisfied me. You two?”
“Sure,” said Leonis. “Almost everyone ignited within days of awakening.”
Within days. Scorio tried not to let his smile slip. That meant that while he was fleeing through the Bronze Door, his friends had already taken that momentous step.
“Have you guys passed your first trial yet?”
“No,” said Lianshi, sitting back and crossing her arms. “That’s a lot more challenging.”
“Even with all the high-quality treasures they’re feeding us each morning,” said Leonis, picking at his food. “How much training have you received? You learned yet about the role motivation plays in all this?”
“Ambition, Naomi called it. Hunger, yes.”
“It’s a base quality,” continued Leonis. “How much you have determines everything. It’s like the true enemy of a Great Soul is happiness.”
“Not so,” sighed Lianshi, and Scorio guessed that this was an old argument. “There has to be a way to accommodate your motivations while still living a rewarding life. We can’t all be Jova Spike.”
“Jova Spike,” murmured Scorio. “She still at the head of the pack?”
Leonis snorted and finally set his fork down. “Miles ahead. Was the first to pass her trial and make Emberling. Developed this crackling black aura that only grows as she’s wounded, imparting an ever stronger resistance to being hurt.”
Scorio tried to imagine it. “That’s… completely unlike Naomi’s nightmare form.”
“Not really,” said Lianshi, tone growing clinical. “Your first trial determines whether you develop long-range combat abilities or personal, hand-to-hand abilities. Both Naomi and Jova developed powers that augment their ability to fight in close.”
Leonis sighed, raised his cup. “One of our instructors manifests a whip that’s completely under her control and can cut through rock. A second has spikes that erupt from his joints, like his knees and elbows, and he grows taller and leaner and becomes nearly impossible to hurt. All, apparently, the same.”
“Whereas Hera—another instructor of ours—collects light and focuses it into a beam with which she can hit people at a distance. Creates this weird side effect where everything goes dark around her, too, until she unleashes the attack.”
“This first trial,” said Scorio. “They tell you anything about it?”
Leonis scowled. “That information’s offered up, sure. But only to the Great Souls who’ve accepted House sponsorship.”