Chapter 128: Vacation
The group found an exit node right as they left this inheritance ground, and everyone was satisfied with their journey in the Tomb.
Aidan distributed some of the drops, but not much. He did most of the work, so he kept some things. However, he also had a way to get things because of the Omni-Slot Machine tickets, so he made sure that everyone was satisfied with what they got.
"Digicard sync and the leaderboard exam can wait," Aidan said. "I’ve got somewhere to be first."
Jovan raised an eyebrow. "Somewhere being Earth."
"Somewhere being Earth." Aidan rolled his shoulders, feeling the last of the trial’s aches finally fade under proper healing, though the tightness sitting under his ribs had nothing to do with any of that. "Power Bond’s got a requirement for the SSS evolution. Something I have to actually face, not just grind through."
"Face," Jovan repeated, quiet enough that it barely counted as a question.
Aidan didn’t answer that directly. "It’s old business. Personal. I’ve been putting it off a lot longer than I should have."
Something in Jovan’s expression shifted, understanding arriving without needing the specifics spelled out for him. "Then go handle it properly. I have my own matters to attend to here regardless."
Beatrix also felt she knew what Aidan was talking, more clearly than Jovan. ’Is it about that lass?’
Aidan managed something close to a grin, though it didn’t quite make it all the way to his eyes. "Wish me luck."
"You don’t need luck." Jovan inclined his head. "You need to actually go through with it, whatever it is."
"...Fair."
...
Earth smelled like rain and traffic and absolutely nothing trying to kill him, and Aidan decided within about four seconds of stepping off the transport that he’d missed it more than he wanted to admit.
He hit the market district in H City before he’d even dropped his bags off, Tom riding his shoulder in full grump, Arthur trotting along in disguise form as a small winged cat drawing exactly the kind of attention Aidan had been hoping for.
"Absolutely not sharing," Aidan told a vendor, already three skewers deep into a bag that was supposed to last the week. "These are mine."
[Arthur: Those smell like they should be shared.]
"They should not."
Tom didn’t open his eyes. "You’re both embarrassing."
Aidan chuckled and distributed the food. "Here, take it."
The market rolled on in the pleasant, aimless way markets did when nobody in them was trying to kill you. Stalls of fruit and cured meat and things that hissed faintly with stored Spirit Energy lined every alley.
Vendors called out prices over the noise of kids chasing each other between the legs of adults who’d long since stopped noticing.
Aidan bought more than he needed, because that was the entire point of shopping without a war on. A whole roasted bird from a stall that made Arthur’s disguise-form ears go flat with longing.
A jar of pickled something that smelled sharp enough to make Tom sneeze from three feet away. Dumplings, too, because a vendor two streets over pressed a free bag into his hands before he could even ask, waving off his attempt to pay.
"You’ve got an honest face," she said, shrugging when he tried to argue. "Consider it a good omen for my next batch."
He didn’t argue further. He just thanked her and moved on, but secretly slipped a Tier-10 Spirit Stone under her stall.
By the time he’d circled back toward the transport pad, his bags had multiplied into something Arthur eyed with open, undisguised hope.
[Arthur: Some of that is definitely for me.]
"Some of that is definitely for everyone." Aidan ruffled the cat-shaped head. "Including you, you menace."
...
He’d been sitting on the location for a month, a listing his estate agent had flagged as "if you ever want somewhere nobody has ever heard of," and today felt like exactly the right day to finally use it.
The mountain rose out of untouched wilderness two hours north by aircar, forested slopes wrapped in low cloud, and the natural hot spring at its heart sat exactly as advertised, a wide stone basin fed by mineral water that steamed gently even in the warm afternoon air.
A small wooden lodge sat tucked into the treeline nearby, simple and sturdy, exactly enough shelter for a group that mostly intended to live outdoors anyway.
"This is disgustingly nice," Beatrix said, dropping her bag the second they arrived, already pulling her boots off.
"That’s the idea." Aidan spread his arms at the whole valley. "No neighbors, no signal, no Terrors. Just us."
Solenne stood at the basin’s edge, quiet for a moment, taking in the steam curling up into the mountain air. "I don’t think I’ve been somewhere this quiet since before the guild took me."
"Good." Aidan dropped his own bag with a satisfied thud. "That was the point."
Cameron manifested last, shrinking obligingly down from mountain-scale to something closer to a large boulder, and immediately looked around the valley with an expression that managed to be both content and faintly wistful at once.
[Cameron: This is a lovely mountain. I once knew a mountain very much like this.]
"Please don’t propose to the scenery, buddy."
[Cameron: I make no promises.]
Finn shot past everyone the instant the water came into view, orbiting the basin twice before diving straight in with a splash that soaked half the group.
[Finn: HOT WATER. This is the best water. This is officially my favorite water.]
[Tom: You said that about the last three bodies of water.]
[Finn: They were ALL my favorite. I contain multitudes too.]
"He stole that from me," Aidan said, delighted.
...
The hot spring absorbed all of them eventually, one by one, steam rising thick enough to blur the edges of the valley into something soft and private.
Tom refused to get in for a solid ten minutes, perched on a warm rock at the water’s edge with his tail curled tight, unimpressed by the entire concept.
[Tom: I am a cat. Cats do not do water.]
"You’re a Vaelith Threadseer."
[Tom: I am a cat-shaped Vaelith Threadseer with strong personal opinions about water.]
He got in anyway once nobody was looking, and pretended for the rest of the afternoon that it had been Aidan’s idea.
Beatrix and Solenne settled into the water across from each other, and it took roughly ninety seconds for the peace to turn competitive.
"Bet I can hold a stance longer than you," Beatrix said, already planting both feet against the basin floor.
"That’s not a real contest," Solenne said, already doing exactly the same thing.
"Loser buys dinner."
"Deal."
They lasted eleven minutes before both of them gave up at the same moment, laughing too hard to keep any kind of stance at all, and Aidan watched from his own corner of the basin with the specific, warm amusement of a man who’d stopped being surprised by either of them a long time ago.
"You two are going to owe each other dinner forever," he said.
"That’s the plan," Beatrix said, entirely unbothered.
Anrita sat at the water’s edge rather than in it, watching the whole scene with the quiet, cataloguing attention she brought to everything, and after a while Aidan noticed something he hadn’t seen from her before.
She was smiling. Small, almost accidental, but real.
"You alright over there?" he asked.
"I am processing an unfamiliar input." Anrita considered the water for a moment longer. "This qualifies as pleasant. I am choosing not to suppress the observation."
Aidan grinned, and didn’t push it further than that. Some deals were better kept quiet than commented on.
...
Beatrix drifted closer once the splash war finally wound down, resting her arms along the basin’s warm stone edge beside him.
"You’ve been different since that necropolis," she said, quieter than her usual register. "Not bad different. Just different."
"Yeah." Aidan watched steam curl off the water’s surface, unhurried. "Learned a few things in there I’m still sitting with."
"You going to tell us what?"
"Eventually." He nudged her shoulder with his. "Not today, though. Today’s for soup and bad water contests."
Beatrix studied him a moment longer, the way she always did when she suspected there was more sitting under the surface than he was offering, and then let it go with the easy grace of someone who’d learned exactly how far to push and when to stop.
"Fair," she said, and settled back against the stone beside him.
On his other side, Solenne surfaced from a lazy underwater drift just long enough to flick water in both their directions.
"Stop being soft at each other," she said. "It’s throwing off the whole vibe."
"You’re one to talk," Beatrix shot back. "You cried at the dumplings."
"I did not."
"You absolutely did."
"They were very good dumplings."
...
Arthur, predictably, caused chaos.
He’d shifted out of disguise form not long after they’d settled in, and a dragon roughly the size of a small horse did not fit gracefully into a natural stone basin built for people, a fact he discovered by trying anyway and displacing enough water to soak Tom’s rock entirely.
[Tom: ARTHUR.]
[Arthur: Sorry! Sorry. I’m small! I’m being small!]
[Tom: You are the size of a horse.]
[Arthur: A SMALL horse.]
Cameron watched the resulting splash war with the calm, patient interest of someone who had genuinely never seen anything like it before, occasionally offering commentary that helped absolutely nobody.
[Cameron: I believe Arthur is losing.]
[Arthur: I am NOT losing.]
[Cameron: You are, statistically, losing.]
"Don’t you start too," Aidan said, laughing hard enough that he had to brace against the basin’s edge.
Food came out properly once the chaos settled, everything Aidan had bought at the market spread across a wide flat stone at the basin’s rim, and for a while nobody said much of anything at all, just the steam and the mountain quiet and the sound of people who trusted each other eating well.
"This is exactly what I wanted," Aidan said eventually, leaning back against warm stone, eyes closed, steam curling past his face. "No system notifications. No enemies. Just food and water and people I actually like."
"Careful," Beatrix said, nudging his shoulder with her foot. "That almost sounded sentimental."
"Don’t tell anyone." Aidan cracked one eye open and grinned. "I have a reputation to protect."
Solenne, floating on her back a few feet away, didn’t open her eyes either. "Your reputation is already ruined. We’ve all seen you cry over good soup."
"That soup earned it."
The mountain held the sound of their laughter a long moment before letting it fade into the steam, and somewhere above the valley the sky finally started turning gold with the first edge of evening, unbothered by anything at all.
...
The lodge went quiet a while after the sun finished setting, steam still curling faint off the basin outside, and Aidan lay in the dark of his room for exactly as long as it took to admit sleep wasn’t coming tonight.
He left without waking anyone, folding Wind around his own steps until they stopped making any sound at all, and let the mountain fall away behind him.
...
Divine Nexus’s tower rose out of the city skyline the way everything about the guild did, deliberately, impossibly tall, gold light bleeding from a thousand windows into a sky already fully dark.
Aidan stood at the edge of the plaza below it for a long moment, hands in his pockets, doing absolutely nothing at all.
’Funny.’ He almost laughed at himself. ’Faced down an Overlord a few days ago. This is somehow worse.’
He already knew the answer to the question he’d spent years refusing to ask himself properly. He’d known it since long before Hunter’s Shack Three, since before Garen, since before any of the masks he’d built specifically to avoid this exact moment.
Knowing wasn’t the same as saying it. Wasn’t the same as standing in front of her and letting the words actually exist outside his own head.
’One way to find out. When i see her in the flesh, i will know that i don’t have even a spec of feeling for her.’
His inner demon was actually the curiosity regarding her. Like, what would she feel and think when she sees that the boy who foolishly died for her was alive?
He crossed the plaza toward the entrance, and for the first time since this whole ridiculous journey started, Aidan Filcrow walked toward something without a single joke ready on his tongue.