Chapter 174 — What He Lacks

Chapter 174: Chapter 174 — What He Lacks

The climb back through seven floors took the better part of two days, and Arlen found himself, retracing ground that had once felt impossibly vast, moving through it now with the same easy, practiced rhythm he’d once reserved only for Floors One through Three.

Everything eventually becomes familiar, if you walk it enough times, he thought, passing the goblin colony’s quiet, half-rebuilt territory on Floor Three without breaking stride.

He surfaced late on the second evening, the checkpoint guard’s nod carrying its usual unbothered efficiency despite the state of his gear, and made his way straight to the guild’s expedition registry rather than the Foxglove, the Treant’s harvested wood still packed carefully alongside everything else the week had given him.

The clerk on duty took his report with brisk, professional attention — the Rotwood Treant’s confirmed kill, its displaced and aggressive behavior, and, delivered with rather more care, the sighting of something considerably larger sleeping deeper in the same territory.

"Deeproot Guardian, you’re fairly certain?" the clerk asked, making careful notes.

"Fairly certain. I didn’t get close enough to confirm beyond doubt, and I didn’t intend to."

"Wise." The clerk finished writing, and glanced up at him with genuine, professional respect. "This is useful, Arlen. Floor Seven’s survey data is older than I’d like to admit — routes shift down there constantly, tunnels collapse and reopen, and what one expedition maps rarely matches what the next one finds if they take a different path in. Something this size, previously unflagged, is exactly the kind of report that gets a proper follow-up scheduled."

"Glad it’s useful," Arlen said, and meant it.

He made his way to the Foxglove after that, exhausted in the particular, hollowed-out way that followed genuine danger properly survived, and found Rilla behind the counter, her usual quiet appraisal softening into something closer to relief at the sight of him upright.

"You’re still in one piece," she said. "Barely, from the look of it."

"Barely’s become something of a theme," Arlen admitted, settling into his usual seat.

Yveth found him not long after, and rather than her usual sharp opening volley, she simply studied him a long moment before speaking — the exhaustion in his posture, the fresh bruising still visible along one forearm, something in his expression she apparently read more clearly than he’d intended to show.

"That one cost you something," she said quietly, settling into the chair across from him without her usual preamble.

"Nearly cost me everything," Arlen admitted, surprising himself with the honesty of it. "Twice, actually. I don’t think I’ve been that close since before I ever left Greyhaven."

She didn’t press for details, and he found himself, for the first time, offering them without needing to be asked — the Treant’s desperate, cornered fury, the fire that slowed its regeneration but never stopped it, the water that finally, unexpectedly, proved the answer he hadn’t thought to look for until exhaustion had nearly cost him the chance to find it at all.

"You solved it, though," Yveth said, once he’d finished. "Whatever it actually was."

"Eventually. Too slowly. That’s what’s sitting with me now, honestly." He turned his cup between his hands, the admission settling into words for the first time since the fight itself. "I’ve spent weeks building something I thought was fairly complete. Turns out it’s mostly built for surviving things, not for actually ending them quickly. I had to improvise my way to an answer that should have come faster than it did."

Yveth studied him with genuine, evaluating interest. "What would have made it faster?"

Arlen considered the question seriously, turning it over the way he turned over every real problem now. "Something that hits harder. Properly harder — not fire that slows a thing down, or steel that opens a wound and hopes it matters before the wound closes again. Something built to end a fight, not just wear it down."

He thought, as he said it, of every ability he currently carried — the water command that had ultimately won him the fight, but only as a clever workaround rather than a direct answer; the resistance and endurance and stealth that had kept him alive through the encounter’s worst moments; Edgeline Strike and Ember Touch, his only two tools that actually existed to deal damage outright, neither of them scaling properly against something built to endure exactly what they offered.

Lightning, maybe. Or something in earth that doesn’t just sense the ground but actually uses it. Or water shaped into something that actually strikes, rather than simply redirecting what’s already there.

"You’ll find it," Yveth said, with a confidence that felt, coming from her, considerably more grounding than the same words might have carried from anyone else. "You’ve found everything else you’ve gone looking for so far."

"Haven’t gone looking for this one yet," Arlen admitted. "Didn’t know I needed it until something nearly ended me for not having it."

"That’s usually how the important lessons work, in my experience." She rose, gathering herself with her usual brisk efficiency, though something in her expression lingered warm a moment longer than strictly necessary. "Rest tonight. Whatever you’re planning to go looking for next, it’ll still be there once you’ve actually slept properly."

He took her advice, and slept deeply, exhaustion finally overtaking even the restless churn of everything the Treant fight had left unresolved in him.

He woke the following morning with a clarity he hadn’t expected, the accumulated weight of the past weeks settling, quietly and without ceremony, into something he could finally properly name.

He lay still a long moment, turning it over.

Every ability I’ve gained has come with more than just the raw power itself. Some understanding, bundled alongside it — why else would fusion even be possible, if I weren’t carrying some genuine grasp of what each ability actually is, not just what it does. That’s why I’ve moved faster than Corwin ever expected a Novice to move. Not because I trained harder. Because every single fight has been its own lesson, layered on top of the last, faster than any single technique could ever teach a person on its own.

He sat with that understanding, letting it settle properly, and felt something shift beneath it — not dramatic, not the sharp, immediate warmth of a new ability arriving, but something deeper and more foundational, the same patient, structural certainty he remembered from his very first breakthrough in a warded guild room weeks ago.

Early Novice. Not anymore.

He didn’t need Corwin’s crystalline device to confirm it. He felt it plainly, the same way he’d felt every genuine truth about himself since the moment a boar’s fire had first taught him what he actually was — a quiet, settled deepening, understanding catching up at last to everything the past weeks of relentless, varied combat had already taught his body and never quite finished teaching his conscious mind.

Middle Novice.

He lay there a while longer, turning the small, hard-won milestone over with genuine satisfaction, and found his thoughts, inevitably, returning to the gap the Treant fight had exposed so plainly.

Survival, control, endurance — I’ve got all of that in abundance now. What I don’t have is anything that actually ends a fight quickly, decisively, the way Osric’s lightning does, or the way Ilyana’s frost does. I need something like that. Something that strikes rather than simply holds.

He rose, dressed, and made his way down toward the common room with the particular, settled resolve of someone who had finally, properly named a problem worth solving — not urgently, not with any real fear attached to it, simply with the same patient, deliberate curiosity that had carried him through every genuine gap in his understanding so far.

I’ll find it, he thought, echoing Yveth’s quiet confidence from the night before. Next time I go looking, that’s exactly what I intend to bring back.