B2 Chapter 191: Ignition

The ghosts of Kaius’s fingers spasmed.

Grunting at the discomfort, he scratched at the stump of his limb. It was a smooth nubbin, muscles and skin slowly distending as his flesh morphed and grew. Disgusting, in all honesty. Though, no matter how much his skin crawled at the sight of his morphing flesh, he knew it would bring back his hand—and his missing fingers with it.

What disturbed him more was the unblemished skin that came with the regrowth. His glyph was gone.

That galled. It also heightened his nerves, a tight little ball that had been building in his stomach. Rieker would have had no way of knowing, but he had never inscribed one of the Vesryn glyphs by himself.

They were convoluted, three dimensional, and ruinously complex. The prospect of weaving one around his mana flows without the system’s assistance was terrifying—made him feel the icy breath of dread on the back of his neck.

Still, he knew it was for the best. The strong delvers? The kinds who rose to the peak of what people knew to be possible? They lost limbs. Not often, but it happened. Especially in those who held down the front line like he did.

Usually it wasn’t too much of a problem. Even if they didn’t have a healer capable of some form of regeneration on their team, they would have the wealth and connections to see one of the rare few healers who plied such a skill publicly.

To learn to weave a new glyph now, meant that he wouldn’t have to experiment if it happened in the field.

It still sucked. Losing his hand sucked. Losing sucked—more than he thought it would.

Sighing, Kaius leaned his head back against the hard wood of his headrest, staring at the vaulted ceiling far above.

After Rieker had dressed them down, he’d ushered them back to the table, before leaving once more to fetch what he called ‘the good stuff’. Said he’d be back soon.

No doubt he was just giving them space to decompress after he’d smeared them across the floor in a minute flat. Thank the hells that Rieker had, because only the gods knew that he needed it.

With his mind drifting to their ‘spar’, Kaius was unable to stop himself from ruminating. Not even the sharp spiking pain of his tooth goring the inside of his cheek was enough to snap him out of it, not with his pain resistance and healing.

As much as it burned for them to get destroyed, to have his flaws so systematically revealed, it was worse that he knew that the guildmaster was right.

He’d been reckless. That might get them killed, and there was little he could do about it at this point.

Picking the spider as their first mission? Stupid. He could see it now—though he felt like punching the wall until his other hand was a smeared mess that it had taken it being rubbed in his face to realise.

They should have taken it slow—or at the very least planned a cover story and more circuitous route back.

Porkchop and Ianmus, they might have agreed with him, but it was his duty to be the voice of reason. He’d taken the mantle of party leader, and failed to respect it.

He’d failed his team.

Too drunk on freedom and the allure of power. The oldest sin—the one that killed more delvers than anything else. He’d thought himself immune, untouchable thanks to his strength.

Stupid.

Relative strength meant nothing when you were still helpless to those with power and experience both. The strongest chick in the henhouse was still helpless to the weakest fox.

His gaze turning back to the stump of his hand, Kaius watched the rhythm pulse in time with his heart—growing just a little bit more with each undulation. Supposedly it would take a few weeks, not that it made it any less miraculous.

It was a strange thing, to be beaten and broken. It made you realise things. Revealed truths.

Clawing his way up the mountain, step by bloody step? Advancing on all obstacles and beating on them with shattered fists? That wasn’t his truth.

It was a truth. But it wasn’t his.

Too incomplete, too…juvenile. There was something more there—he knew it, even as his aspect lay silent and still within him.

If victory at all costs had been his pillar, this experience would have shattered it. It was the truth of the fool, the deluded, and the egoistic. It was the dream of a boy.

He had too many responsibilities to be a boy.

Even if he would never let go of the thrill of the fight, or stop taking risks—for those things were as much immutable truths about himself as his stubbornness—he needed more. Enough tribulation had washed through his life that he was more.

That fight? Rieker’s total annihilation? It had been necessary—brutal and eye opening.

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Kaius sighed, letting his eyes feel closed as he felt the weight of consequence settle on his chest. They had a long way to go, and he’d just had to go and give them a deadline.

Hurling them at the closest deadly challenge and hoping for the best? Hoping they could use the pressure of the experience to grow? It would kill him and Porkchop eventually, and Ianmus would undoubtedly die far far sooner. All it would take is a single slip up for a beast or a man to get past them, and the mage would be dead.

He couldn’t allow that. Ianmus had made his choice, and they had made theirs, but that didn’t mean he needed to be stupid about it.

But if his truth wasn’t that of mindless determination, what was it?

What did he want? Truly want?