Chapter 98: The Parents Return
Chapter 98: The Parents Return
The transport landed at the east gate on a Tuesday afternoon, four days after the attack.
Ren was waiting. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to stand at the gate like a kid waiting for his parents to pick him up from school — and then he’d gone to the gate anyway, because some things are stronger than dignity. He leaned against the wall near the checkpoint where Alliance security was processing every arrival, reserves at eighty percent and body healed, and watched the sky.
The transport was a civilian model — a long-range shuttle from the inter-realm transit hub, scarred from the Jupiter relay’s energy wash. It settled on the landing pad with the heavy sigh of a vehicle that had crossed planets, and the doors opened, and his parents stepped out into the afternoon light.
Elena came first. She was scanning the gate before her feet touched the ground — eyes moving across the Alliance checkpoint, the security personnel, the rebuilt ward perimeter — and then she saw Ren and everything else stopped mattering.
She crossed the distance in three steps and wrapped her arms around him.
She was shorter than him now. That was the first thing Ren noticed. Three months ago, before Jupiter, before everything, he’d been about her height. Now she tucked under his chin, and her grip around his shoulders was tight and fierce and shaking slightly — the way that meant she’d been holding herself together for the entire transit and was only now allowing herself to stop.
"I’m okay," Ren said. His voice came out quieter than he’d intended.
"Shut up," Elena said into his shoulder. "Just — give me a minute."
He gave her a minute. Kaia pulsed warmly in his chest — a gentle, approving hum, the way she always responded to the people who loved him.
Adrian arrived behind Elena, carrying two expedition packs and wearing the practical field clothes of a man who had left a Secret Realm in a hurry. His face was tanned, his hair longer than it had been on the comm screen. His expression was the careful, measured look of someone cataloguing every detail of a situation before deciding how to feel about it.
He read Ren the way an Explorer Guild veteran reads terrain — shoulders, posture, frame, the physical changes stacked up one by one. Then he looked at Ren’s eyes.
"You’ve changed," Adrian said.
Not what Elena had said on the comm three weeks ago — You look different. That had been observation. This was recognition. Adrian Valis had spent twenty years walking into dangerous places and coming out the other side, and he knew what a person looked like after they’d done the same.
"Yeah," Ren said. "I have."
Adrian set down the packs. Then he stepped forward and put his hand on Ren’s shoulder — firm, solid, the way he’d always done when something mattered too much for words.
Ren’s throat tightened. He hadn’t expected that to be the thing that got to him.
— • —
They saw the campus on the walk to the temporary quarters Caelan had arranged.
The worst of the damage had been repaired. The diversionary blast sites cleaned, the scorch marks painted over, the cracked pavement replaced. But the signs were still there if you knew where to look. Alliance security at every intersection. The new ward system — heavier, denser, military-grade — humming at a frequency any experienced cultivator would recognize as combat-spec. The eastern wall of the training yard, rebuilt but still fresh, the mortar a slightly different shade than the original stone.
Elena walked between Ren and Adrian, her hand on his arm, and said nothing. She didn’t need to. Her eyes were doing what Ren’s had done in the hours after the attack — counting the indicators, adding them up, arriving at a total that was worse than anything the official notification had described.
"The comm message said a security incident," Adrian said mildly. "This looks like a combat zone."
"It was." Ren had decided on the walk to the gate that he would tell them the truth this time. Not all of it — never all of it — but enough to be honest in a way he hadn’t been on the comm call three weeks ago when he’d told them everything was fine.
"An organization called the Crimson Serpent Sect attacked the campus four days ago. Five operatives breached the eastern ward and targeted our group during a training exercise. One of them was significantly stronger than the others — a Tier 2 cultivator. Our instructor engaged the Tier 2. The group fought the others. The Alliance guards returned and the attackers retreated."
He paused. "Cassian was injured. He’s in the medical ward. He’s going to be fine, but it was serious."
Elena’s grip on his arm tightened.
"And you?" Adrian asked. Calm voice. Eyes that were not.
"I fought," Ren said. "I’m not hurt."
He left out the part about engaging the Tier 2 directly. He left out the dual-law fusion, the Death-law corrosion, the two minutes of unsustainable combat that had drained him to critical reserves and put his name on a plane-tier organization’s priority target list. He left out the parts that would make his parents lie awake at night for the rest of their lives.
Some lies are kindness. Some truths are weapons. Ren was starting to understand the difference.
— • —
The quarters were in the annex — a guest suite on the second floor that Caelan had opened for visiting families. Small, clean, heavily warded. Elena unpacked with the automatic efficiency of a woman who had lived out of expedition bags for twenty years, turning a bare room into something that felt like home in under ten minutes. Adrian set up the portable stove they’d brought from Jupiter and started making tea.
They sat together — the three of them, around a small table, drinking tea from mismatched expedition cups. It felt like the apartment back home. The labeled containers in the fridge. The quiet evenings. The love that had been waiting for him when he arrived in this body.
"Tell me about your group," Elena said. She was doing the mother thing — starting with the safe questions, working her way toward the hard ones. Giving him room to share on his own terms.
Ren told them. About Cassian — the frontier kid who’d become his closest friend. About Lyra and her energy control. About Iris and her tactical mind. About Kaelen, who he kept deliberately vague, because the Voss-Valis history was a conversation he wasn’t ready to open. About Yuelan’s ferocity and Yueying’s composure and Vesper’s void-cat and Eira’s quiet support.
Elena listened. Adrian listened. They asked small questions — where is Cassian from, what does Lyra specialize in, is Iris really a Blackthorn — and the conversation felt normal in a way that made Ren’s chest ache.
"You care about them," Elena said. Not a question.
"Yeah," Ren said. "I do."
She smiled. The warm, certain smile of a mother who had worried about her quiet, loner son finding his place in the world and was now seeing evidence that he had.
— • —
Adrian brought up the sealed record after dinner.
They were sitting in the quiet of the guest suite, the expedition stove turned off, the tea long finished. Elena was reviewing a plant sample she’d brought from Jupiter — a crystalline root fragment sealed in a preservation case. Adrian had his data pad out, scrolling through something with the distracted focus of a man who’d been turning a problem over for weeks.
"I mentioned the sealed Valis record on the comm," he said. "The one we found in the deep sections of the Jupiter Realm."
Ren nodded. He’d thought about that record more than once since the call.
"I filed a formal request with the Explorer Guild to unseal it before we left Jupiter. Denied. Alliance classification — clearance level I don’t have." Adrian looked up from the pad. "I’ve been in the Guild for twenty years, Ren. I have access to classified material up to Tier 3 operational. Whatever that record contains is sealed above Tier 3. That’s military. That’s Alliance command-level."
He let that sit.
"Our family isn’t important enough to have Alliance command-level secrets attached to our name," he said quietly. "Except it seems we are."
Aldric. The same word Ren had thought on the comm call. The great-grandfather who had vanished generations ago and left behind a family that didn’t know he’d become the most important cultivator in their bloodline. What did you do that’s still classified?
"I’m going to talk to the principal tomorrow," Adrian said. "Caelan Veyr. He’s Alliance-connected — if anyone at this school can help me understand why the Valis name is sitting in a classified file on Jupiter, it’s him."
Ren’s pulse jumped. Caelan knew the Aldric truth. Caelan had been managing Ren’s anomaly status with that knowledge for months. If Adrian walked into Caelan’s office and started pulling on the Valis family’s sealed history, the conversation could go in directions that neither of his parents were prepared for.
"I’ll come with you," Ren said.
Adrian looked at him. The careful expression came back — the one that said he was reading his son and seeing something he couldn’t fully identify. Not suspicion. Not doubt. The quiet awareness of a father who knew his child was carrying more than he was sharing, and was deciding whether to push or to wait.
He waited.
"Okay," Adrian said. "Together, then."
— • —
That night, after his parents had gone to sleep and the annex had settled into its quiet lockdown rhythm, Ren stood at the window and looked out at the campus.
His parents were home. In the next room, breathing the same air, sleeping under the same wards. The thing he’d tried to prevent on the comm call three weeks ago — bringing them into the danger zone — had happened anyway. The universe didn’t care about his careful plans.
But they were here. And despite the fear, despite the secrets, despite every complicated layer between what he knew and what he could say — having them here felt like the ground had come back under his feet.
Kaia pulsed. Warm and steady, the way she always was when the people Ren loved were close.
Tomorrow I walk my father into a meeting with the one person who knows our family’s real history, Ren thought. This is either going to answer questions or create new ones.
He turned from the window and went to bed. For the first time since the attack, the room didn’t feel empty.