Chapter 364: New Update

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]

[REGENERATION PROCESSING... 75%]

[STRUCTURAL REPAIR... COMPLETE]

[RIB FRACTURE... RESOLVED]

[INTERNAL BRUISING... CLEARED]

[WAKING HOST...]

Liam opened his eyes.

The ceiling above him was the guest room ceiling at Elena’s mansion, the one he had learned to recognize from the specific way the light came through the curtains in the morning, the pale strip of it running across the plasterwork above the window.

’Cool have now developed some kind of healing factor’ Liam thought to himself as he was in the middle of excitement and sadness.

Not that he has this new skill he wasn’t sure it was enough to bring back from the died he was killed by his opponent.

He lay there for a moment and ran his own assessment separate from the system’s.

His side.

He pressed two fingers against the area that had cracked when he hit the ground and found nothing.

No sharp response, no deep ache, no the specific protest of damaged bone under pressure. He pressed harder.

Nothing.

He sat up.

Elena was in the chair beside the bed, her legs crossed, a document in her lap that she had apparently been reading before he moved, and she looked up when he sat up with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this moment and had prepared several things to say when it arrived.

"I’m sorry," she said.

He looked at her.

She looked back at him with the gold eyes carrying something that she had been sitting with for however long he had been unconscious, something that had settled into her expression and was not performing anything.

"I needed you to understand the weight of what you’re walking into," she said. "But I could have found another way to show you that." She set the document on the side table. "What happened out there went further than I intended."

"I know why you did it," he said.

"That doesn’t make it—"

"Elena," he said. "I know why you did it."

She looked at him for a moment.

"Okay," she said.

He moved to get off the bed.

"What are you doing," she said.

"I want to go back out," he said. "I need to beat his ass."

She looked at him with the expression of someone who had expected this sentence and had already assembled the response for it.

"That is not possible," she said. "You need to rest. What happened to your side alone—"

"I’m fine," he said.

"You are not fine," she said. "You hit the ground from a height with a crack that I heard from where I was standing and you lost consciousness and you have been in that bed for four hours."

"I feel fine," he said.

She looked at him.

He looked back at her.

She leaned forward slightly. "Let me see," she said.

He lifted his shirt.

She pressed her fingers against the area, the specific careful pressure of someone who knew what they were checking for, and he watched her face while she did it.

She pressed in different places, moving across the ribs, and her expression went through something that started as clinical and ended somewhere considerably more confused.

She pressed again.

"Where does it hurt," she said.

"It doesn’t," he said.

She looked at the area. Then at his face. Then at the area again.

"That is not possible," she said quietly. Not to him. To herself.

"I heal quickly," he said. Which was true. Which was not the whole truth. Which was the version of the truth available to him right now.

She looked at him for a long moment with her beautiful eyes doing what they did when she was reading something and the something was not giving her everything she was looking for.

"Rest," she said finally. "Even if the physical damage has resolved faster than it should have, your body needs time."

"I need to train," he said.

"Liam."

"Elena." He said it the same way she had said his name, the same register, and she recognized it and stopped. "I just watched what I’m walking into. I just felt what one strike from something like that does when it connects. And you want me to lie in this room."

She looked at the window.

The afternoon light was sitting at the angle it sat in the later part of the day, lower and warmer, the grounds outside quiet.

"Wrath is not available right now," she said. "He is handling something for the family."

"I don’t need Wrath," he said.

She looked at him.

"The cage is still open," he said. "The ground is there. I can work on my own."

She was quiet for a moment.

"What exactly are you planning to work on," she said, which was not agreement and was not refusal and was the specific question of someone deciding whether the answer moved them toward one or the other.

"The speed," he said. "His first movement. The way he crossed the distance. I need to understand what I’m looking at before I can do anything about it."

She looked at him.

"You already have Flash Step," she said.

"His was different from mine," Liam said. "Mine is a commitment. I decide to use it, I use it, there’s a window on either side of it where I’m coming out of it or going into it. His had no window. He was in one place and then he was in another place and there was no in-between." He looked at his hands. "I need to figure out what that gap is."

Elena stood up from the chair.

She went to the window and looked out at the grounds, her back to him, her arms loosely crossed.

"What you saw out there," she said, "is someone who has been doing what he does for a very long time. Long enough that the gap you’re describing stopped existing for him organically. It is not a skill he learned. It is a skill that became part of how he exists." She turned back. "You have been doing this for months as well."

"I know," he said.

"He just cut you of guide that’s all" She said "I feel like next time it won’t happen again now that you know he can do it."

"I know that too," he said. "But if he could do it. then, I’m very much lacking. And we can’t have that if I’m going to fight that guy."

She looked at him.

He looked back at her.

The room was quiet around them, the afternoon light doing what afternoon light did, the house settled and unhurried outside the door.

"Eat something first," she said.

He looked at her.

"Before you go out," she said, with the specific tone of someone offering terms. "You eat something first. Properly. Then we go out together and you show me what you’re working on and I tell you if what you’re doing is going to get you killed or not."

"Together," he said.

"I am not going to sit in that room and watch you go back out to the ground where I just watched you hit the floor two hours ago," she said. "So yes. Together."

He looked at her for a moment.

’This woman,’ he thought, ’has decided she is coming to the ground with me and has presented it as a condition attached to food, which means she thought about how to say it before she said it, and I did not see it coming until it was already said.’

"Alright," he said.

Something in her expression settled.

She moved to the door.

"Odessa will bring something up," she said. "Give it twenty minutes."

She went out.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands again. At the knuckles and the specific hands that had blocked the kick and had been attached to the wrist that the web had caught and had been connected to the arm that had helped deliver him into the ground from a height.

He flexed his fingers.

Nothing.

’Four hours,’ he thought. ’Rib fracture resolved in four hours. Whatever that system is doing it is getting faster. Or the damage was less than it sounded when it happened.’ He looked at the area on his side that had cracked. ’It did not sound like less.’

He stood up and went to the window.

The grounds were quiet in the late afternoon, the cage still open from this morning, the front wall still lowered, the dark interior of it visible from here. The grass where he had landed was ordinary grass, no particular evidence of what had happened on it.

He looked at the tree that had been growing at the boundary of the property since before anyone currently walking this ground had been born.

He thought about the man’s movement.

About the specific quality of it, the absence of the thing that Flash Step still had, the tell that came before and the recovery that came after. The man had neither. Origin to destination, nothing between.

He thought about what Elena had said. A skill that became part of how he exists.

’So it started as a skill,’ he thought. ’It was learned before it became automatic. Which means there was a version of it that looked like mine. Which means there is a path between what mine is now and what his is.’ He looked at the cage. ’I just need to find the path.’

Odessa arrived twenty minutes later with a tray and set it on the side table and looked at Liam standing at the window with the expression she wore when she had noted something and had decided it did not require comment from her.

He ate.

Elena came back when the tray was nearly finished and looked at what was left on it with the satisfied expression of someone whose condition had been met.

"Ready?" she said.

"Ready," he said.

They went downstairs and through the house and out through the back doors onto Ashford Ground.

The afternoon had cooled by a degree, the light lower now, the shadows from the boundary wall reaching further across the grass.

The cage sat where it had sat all day, open, the interior dark.

Elena stopped at a distance from it and looked at Liam.

He stood in front of the open cage and looks at the man inside, still unconscious on the ground where Wrath put him, and he stays there for a long time just looking.

Not training. Not moving. Just standing there and looking at what he has to fight.

Wrath showed up about twenty minutes later and stood beside him without saying anything for a while.

Then Wrath says something about the man that changes how Liam understands what he saw. Not a full explanation.

Just one specific piece of information that reframes the threat in a way that makes it more manageable without making it smaller.

Liam asks one question.

Wrath answers it.

And then Elena just stood there watching the both of them standing there.