The Storm King

[Well…] Xaphan started hesitantly.

Leon staggered to his feet. He was still in the artificial mountains in the western third of the training grounds. His body was filled to the brim with magic power, but the wonderful and energetic feeling that brought was dampened from Xaphan seeming refusal to speak with him during the storm.

[‘Well’, what?] asked a livid Leon when Xaphan paused. [Wasn’t part of the contract that you would provide me with your counsel in exchange for residing in my soul realm? Wher—]

Leon suddenly stopped and took a deep breath.

[What just happened to me?] he asked with a much calmer tone.

[That was a side-effect of possessing the Thunderbird’s power. Keep that in mind; whenever a storm gathers, you will probably enter a similar state,] answered Xaphan.

[There any reason you couldn’t tell me this as it was happening?]

[I haven’t been able to speak with you all day. I noticed lightning gathering in your soul realm hours before the storm began in earnest, and it seemed to prevent mental communication.]

Leon took another deep breath. He tried to remain calm, but the sheer amount of energy that came with his current overabundance of magic power was making it difficult. After a few moments, he did feel his anger fade, though he still felt like crushing a few boulders to let off some steam.

[Listen, Leon, there are some other things we should discuss. I know what happened to you not because it was something I already knew, but because I was just told.]

[Told? By who?!] asked Leon as his face slightly contorted in shock.

[While you were out of it, the Thunderbird showed up to watch.]

[WHAT?! And it spoke to you?!]

[It did.]

[Why… It’s never even spoken to me before…]

Xaphan rolled his eyes at that. [And why should it speak to you? You are only a third-tier human, not even two decades old!]

[I’m still its descendant!]

Despite Leon’s attitude, Xaphan didn’t actually think he was wrong, especially with what the Thunderbird had told him. It said that Leon was its last descendant, so why hadn’t it spoken to him? Sure, it had sounded crushed and hopeless, but it had also attempted to protect Leon from him before it knew he was no threat to the young mage.

[Well… perhaps that’s something to keep in mind for when you make it to the sixth-tier. You’ll have created your magic body by that point and will be able to access your soul realm. I’m sure you’ll get the opportunity to speak with your ancestor then…]

[Yeah, maybe… did it say anything else other than explain what happened to me?]

[… Not really. It did attack me, though, before it learned we had made a contract.] Xaphan decided not to tell Leon the rest for now. There was no need to tell him about Amon, and certainly no need to tell him what the Thunderbird thinks about his odds of survival in the long run.

[Huh. That’s a shame, but not really a surprise. Especially about him attacking you.]

[What?]

[I’m just saying, I would be suspicious as hell if a shady character like you showed up where you weren’t expected.]

[And with that, I will leave you to your own devices. Good day.]

[Oh, come on, demon! Don’t be so sensitive!] Leon chuckled a little. Xaphan seemed to enjoy poking fun at him, so he decided to do likewise.

Xaphan didn’t respond, though Leon didn’t think he was particularly angry. Whatever the case, he still started descending from the mountains and heading back to the Snow Lion’s tower.

---

Gaius stared at the three nobles who had been ambushed by the Snow Lions. They were in quite the sorry state, with bruises, cuts, and slightly swollen eyes or lips. None of their injuries were particularly serious, as they had been mostly inflicted by first-tier mages armed only with training weapons, and they had been taken care of with healing spells for the most part. They’d return to normal in another day or two, but that didn’t dampen their anger in the slightest.

“We need to get them back for this act of barbarism!” shouted one of the nobles, his face red with indignation.

“They fucking dare to attack us only a day after we punished them for their arrogance?!” shouted another one of them.

Gaius raised his hand just as the last noble was about to share his opinion. Based on his enraged expression, Gaius was perfectly aware of what it would be, so he didn’t need to hear it. The noble immediately shut his mouth and waited for Gaius to speak his piece.

“Let’s not get carried away, now. This was a matter of honor, you all knew this was probably going to happen when I asked you to do what you did for me. Don’t go getting all bent out of shape just because the savage did what any of us would’ve done. I understand that you’re angry right now, but keep in mind that classes resume tomorrow, so focus on those. I’ll speak with Linus and Actaeon and we’ll determine the correct course of action. Our honor will be preserved, don’t worry about that, but we’re not in our family’s lands anymore, so we have to act with a little more circumspection.” Gaius spoke with a calm and poised demeanor, but inside he was absolutely ecstatic.

He controlled himself as much as he was able on his way back to the top floor of the Deathbringers’ tower, just barely holding his smile back until he left the second floor behind, the second-tier nobles mollified at least for the time being thanks to his platitudes.

‘They did it!’ he thought ecstatically, an unabashed, unapologetic smile blooming on his handsome face despite his people having been assaulted earlier in the day. ‘These people are so damn predictable!’

He thought about his fellow third-tier nobles in the upper lounge. His unit, the Deathbringers, was the only other male-only unit to have only three third-tier members—the other seven all had four. Linus and Actaeon, Gaius’ two fellows, had been reluctant to sign off on any ‘official’ attacks on the Snow Lions, but with this attack by the barbarian on their own people, then they had to get on board!

Now, Gaius had nothing to be ashamed about in attacking the Snow Lions. He, on the surface at least, would no longer be getting personal vengeance on someone who’d wronged him, but instead he would be preserving the honor of his unit. In organizing future attacks on the Snow Lions, he’d be defending his fellow Deathbringers from their completely unprovoked aggression.

Gaius paused at the top of the stairs to wipe the unseemly smile from his face. It was one thing to act like this in private, but when meeting with his peers, he had to present himself with the august serenity that his nobility demanded. Not always an easy thing to maintain, but Gaius did his best.

As he pushed open the door to the third-tier lounge, he was already planning the next steps. With all the Deathbringers on his side, he’d easily be able to salvage his wounded pride.

---

Dinner that evening was tense, to say the least. Every trainee had heard about the Snow Lion’s ambush by then, and even if they hadn’t, the Snow Lions who laughed and jeered at the Deathbringers made it perfectly clear what had happened.

But the laughing and jeering wasn’t particularly intense and was done mostly by the more oblivious of the Snow Lions. For the most part, the Snow Lions and Deathbringers sat in stony silence, either glaring at each other or pointedly not looking in the other’s direction.

This atmosphere damped basically the entire dining hall, preventing anyone, even the most unaffiliated of the trainees in the entire cycle, from enjoying their meal.

Everyone could see the writing on the wall. The Snow Lions and the Deathbringers were enemies, now, and they were going to come to blows again sooner rather than later. The question now was what form that retaliation was going to take, and when it would happen. Only the Snow Lions and the Deathbringers might, but they were in no hurry to lay out any plans they may have had.

For his part, Leon ignored this as best as he could. The tension in the dining hall was uncomfortable, to be sure, but he ate with gusto and little reservation. By the time the Snow Lions returned to their tower, he was as relaxed as he could reasonably be expected to be, and in a good enough mood to show Charles, Alain, and Henry a few more basic sword moves.

As he was leading them in their training, a few more first-tier Snow Lions came forward asking to join, and then a few more. Soon enough, Leon was supervising almost twenty Snow Lions, nearly everyone who had accompanied him on the punitive mission, in their supplemental training.

It wasn’t nearly as nerve-wracking as it initially seemed to him, but all the same, Leon was glad when everyone started to head off to bed. After everything that had happened during the day, he was ready to get some rest.

---

Classes began again the next morning. The Senior Instructor took the Snow Lions to the training field and separated them again into the usual groups. The trainees of the first two tiers began warming up for their morning training, while the Senior Instructor escorted Leon, Alphonsus, and Castor to the third-tiers dueling area.

Thing were a little tense on the first day, but the Deathbringers stayed on the opposite of the group from the Snow Lions, and otherwise largely pretended the other group wasn’t there. It led to a relatively peaceful first day back to the third-tiers ‘combat training’, and one that managed to deflate all of that tension considerably as the days continued on.

Leon and Valeria continued to frustrate everyone else who wanted to spar with them by only sparring with each other, but just about everyone ‘won’ anyway, because the two fought spectacularly. Leon won twice, Valeria won twice, and they fought to a draw on that Friday, leaving their record as tied as it was at the end of the previous week, frustrating them both.

One strange thing that Leon noted, however, was that Valeria seemed to have some trouble looking him in the eye. It was a weakness that he exploited during both of his wins, but she came back faster and more aggressive for her two wins. Still, Leon wondered just what in the hells seemed to be on her mind that she was having such a hard time even looking at him, at least in the early part of the week.

For a brief moment, Leon wondered if she had been the person who’d almost walked in on him while he was at the large cliff bath that he’d found, but he wasn’t able to work up the nerve to ask her. In the end, he supposed it didn’t really matter who saw him, or why she acted kind of strange, for she had seemingly returned to normal, for whatever ‘normal’ meant for them, but the end of the week.

During the afternoon classes, Valeria continued to sit next to Leon, though she deliberately avoided looking at him as much as possible. With the strangely tense air between them, Leon felt some amount of embarrassment at her presence, but he was never quite able to talk to her about anything more than just a few words here and there about the lessons of the day.

Despite this lack of familiarity and friendly interaction between the two of them, to say that Gaius was less than enthused about the situation would be to put it mildly, but he managed to keep himself under control. Leon felt the nobleman’s eyes on him many times during that week, always with just a tiny hint of killing intent that reminded him of large cats back in the Forest of Black and White, the kind that would always wait hours or days while they stalked their prey just waiting for the one perfect moment of vulnerability that would present the best time to strike.

He found Gaius’ behavior unnerving even though Gaius was largely leaving him alone. In Leon’s mind, it was almost like lying on the headsman’s block just waiting for the ax to fall. He didn’t have any legitimate reason to go after Gaius, so he kept to himself, but his instincts were screaming at him that Gaius was planning something, and that he was some kind of threat.

Leon, hoping that the tense peace that had settled over their two units would last, did his level best to ignore Gaius and focus on his training. So far, everything had been pretty basic and he hadn’t learned much, but he supposed that was to be expected. With Artorias as his teacher, he’d already gotten a good hold over the basics of knighthood and his chosen creative hobby of enchanting, even if anything past ‘basic’ was still fairly unknown to him.

As for the enchanting classes themselves, the instructor had finally gotten around to starting the lectures after having every trainee write out each of the seven basic elemental runes to prove they could do it in a reasonable time. He started with introducing the sixty other runes in the runic alphabet and giving a brief summary of basic glyph structure.

Essentially, one or more runic circles form the core of the glyph, which was where the power source of the enchantment was usually located—for most conventional enchantments, the mages using the enchantment provided the power themselves from their own reserves of magic power. Additional runes were then added in a myriad of other patterns around the core, modifying it as needed. The Art of Enchantment was often described among enchanters as the ‘Language of Magic’. From that perspective, a glyph was a sentence or paragraph made of runic letters, and the core of the enchantment, the part that would house most of the elemental runes, was the basic idea of that sentence or paragraph, with the rest of the runes modifying and expanding upon that idea.

The entire week was spent memorizing the dozens of additional runes, with lecture time dedicated to basic glyph structure. It was a mentally taxing class, but Leon loved every second and soaked up every trace of new information or enchanting technique that was presented before him.

Still, even throwing himself into his studies or his spars with Valeria couldn’t erase the omnipresent tension that he felt among the rest of the trainees that something was going to happen between the Snow Lions and the Deathbringers. It was a sentiment that he shared, but there was little he could do about it other than striking first. Given how few people had gone with him to get revenge, he doubted he’d be able to get together a force large enough to make a meaningful first strike, and even then, he wasn’t sure what that would accomplish. Another ambush on the road? Humiliating for the Deathbringers, maybe, but would accomplish nothing.

Leon supposed he could always try and make a play for their banner, but he had his doubts about whether that was a proper strike or not.

For the time being, he decided to wait and see what the Deathbringers would do. The ball was in their court, he would let them make the next move.

---

“Oh, man! I’m exhausted!” uttered Charles as he collapsed onto a couch in the first-tier common room. “This week really dragged!”

“Really? You’re exhausted?” asked Henry incredulously. It was Friday and the usual group was training in the corner.

“And why can’t I be exhausted?” Charles shot back.

“No reason you can’t be, I guess. I’ve never painted before, so it’s not like I know how draining it can be…” Henry responded sarcastically with a mocking smile.

Alain decided to get in on the mocking and said with excessive sarcasm, “Hey! Painting is real hard work, alright?! All that lifting of the paintbrush and running it along the paper—Charles, are you sure you’ve made it through this week’s classes without any permanent damage?”

“Oh, don’t start with this again…” said Charles in a tone that matched his exhaustion.

“What’s this about painting?” inquired Leon with a curious look.

“… Charles has been spending some of his free time painting…” answered Alain after a moment of faint confusion.

“You didn’t know that?” asked Henry incredulously. Leon didn’t respond verbally but shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. “How did you not know?! We’ve been giving him shit about it for the past week!”

“Must’ve been while I was meditating or something…” said Leon with a little embarrassment. “But why are you giving him shit for anyway? Nothing wrong with painting.”

“Indeed, painting is a pursuit worthy of the time spent on it,” added Charles, his tone both proud and defensive.

“No, nothing’s wrong with painting itself. It’s just that he chose painting over learning something more practical, like horse riding or military history,” replied Alain.

“I guess…” Henry conceded.

“Although… I am a tad curious as to why you picked that particular hobby, Charles, you don’t really seem the sort that would be into painting…” Leon wondered aloud.

“Well thanks for that. Really appreciate the implication,” Charles responded with sarcasm. “Anyway, the late Michael of Vesontio was born in a village less than fifteen miles away from the mining town I grew up in.”

“Who’s that?” asked Leon.

“A famous painter…” answered Charles a little drily.

“He painted the portrait of King Julius Septimius, as well as directed the work decorating the new dome over the Assembly Hall. Most of his private works go for hundreds of thousands of silvers if you can find the right collector,” added Alain, drawing odd looks from the others. “What? You all look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

After a brief moment of moderately stunned silence, Charles continued. “Well, every year around Michael’s birthday, we’d get a ton of traffic going through our town from art students and aficionados traveling to see the old master’s home village that inspired most of his early work. I never actually learned to paint, but I spent plenty of time around painters and always kinda wanted to learn.”

“Now’s as good a time as any,” said Alain in support of Charles, who nodded back appreciatively.

“Moving on, anyone got any plans for tomorrow?” asked Henry.

“I’ve got nothing going on,” said Charles.

“I planned to go to the Heaven’s Eye Tower,” mentioned Leon, causing the other five to immediately go quiet and stare at him.

“Why…?” Charles asked. “I get that that place must be amazing, but you couldn’t pay me enough to go there consistently. All those damn stuck-up nobles thinking they’re better than me… I think I’d end up punching someone in their upturned nose.”

“Was hoping to find a good bow,” Leon replied, completely ignoring Charles’ rant.

“A bow? You could find a good bow in just about any forum in the city. If you wanted a really good bow you could go to the Blasted Furnace,” Henry stated, much to Leon’s irritation.

“I don’t just want a good bow,” Leon growled, his teeth starting to clench, “I want a bow that I can make my own. Any forum in this city could see me a bow, to be sure, but not one that’s conducive to my purposes. I want to be able to enchant mine exactly as I want it, and what those forum merchants will try to sell me won’t be able to take much in the way of enchanting, even if they’re of otherwise decent quality.”

“I guess…” Henry grumbled, his mouth quickly shutting when he realized that he was starting to piss Leon off.

After they finished their training and made plans for what to do the next day, they all made for bed. Before they all parted ways, though, Leon did remind them to always stick together just in case the Deathbringers tried something similar to what they had done the previous weekend. While Leon had decided to take a wait-and-see approach with the Deathbringers given how little the rest of his unit seemed to want to participate in a pre-emptive strike, he still wanted his friends to stay safe. The Deathbringers were going to retaliate at some point, he could feel it in his bones.

[So, out of curiosity, why’re you really going to the Heaven’s Eye Tower?] asked Xaphan as Leon closed the door to his room behind him.

[I didn’t take my bow when I left my home back in the north. I’ve come to regret that decision; I greatly miss shooting and hunting and want to get back into practice. Plus, I wanted to grab some good spell paper to practice writing runes,] replied Leon.

[That all? That Elise girl has nothing to do with it?]

[… No.] Leon’s voice trembled a little, something which didn’t go unnoticed.

[You don’t sound very convincing.]

[Don’t start with me, demon,] warned Leon.

[Alright, alright, fine. You’re not going there to see Elise. Why would you need to go and see her when you’re already spending so much time with… Valeria, was it?]

[Her name is Valeria, yes. And she has no bearing on this.]

[Mmmhmmm,] teased Xaphan.

Leon went silent, which Xaphan kept for a few seconds before continuing.

[You seem to be getting close to that silver-haired girl, at least. You looking to start something with her? Or maybe that red-head? They both look about as attractive as a lumpy rock to me, so I question your taste in women, but I suppose a boy like you will take whatever crumbs are offered…]

Leon, ignoring most of what Xaphan had just said for the sake of his sanity and blood pressure, replied, [‘Getting close’ would imply that we’ve actually spoken with each other, which we really haven’t. The occasional polite word and sitting together in silence does not a relationship make.]

[Right. Well, regardless, you’d better make a move, or at least do something other than stammer and blush when talking to a pretty girl, damnit. I’m bored out of my gourd in here!] the demon complained.

[That sounds like a ‘you’ problem to me. And I don’t blush!] Leon said, perhaps a little too insistently.

[Did your face go red and heat up?] asked Xaphan despite that fact that he already knew the answer.

Leon went silent again.

[It did, and we both know it. That means you blushed!] taunted Xaphan in a teasing tone.

[Whatever… I just need a bow… no other reason…] muttered Leon.

[Don’t say that! If you like a girl then make a damned move! Don’t just… You know what? You just do your own thing. I’m going to stay out of it. Of course, ‘your own thing’ won’t get you very far, but it’s your own life. Waste it as you see fit. Honestly, if your Clan is truly as reliant upon you as it seems, then it might as well already be dead.]

[Hey, screw you too, demon!]

[Prove me wrong, kid. Prove me wrong.]