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“…Okay, I’ll bite, what’s going on?”

Since he considered them among his friends he did them the courtesy of not immediately reading their minds for answers when they both looked the way they did. Worry, concern, guilt, and a bit of excitement from one of them in particular were all mixed together as they shuffled about, with Sachel being the one to answer him.

“Um, would it be okay if we came in to talk?”

“Alright, sure, make yourselves comfortable.”

He stood to the side to let them in before grabbing the two some seats while he himself leaned against the counter, waiting for an answer.

“So?”

“Ah, well first, the bracelets you made us worked like a charm and as far as we could see they didn’t get in the way of our growth rates at all. The bit of pain Ralia was under from hers also disappeared in just a couple days too.”

“Okay, good to know. Since it’s not a normal buff it looks like it doesn’t have the same drawbacks.” He could only imagine that was because the way it was working meant the user was taking advantage of both it and their own souls at the same time without using one to empower the others which was by all accounts an excellent result, even if that wasn’t what he wanted to know at that moment. “Now on to what I’m actually curious about. Delair, as lovely as it is as always to see you, why do I get the feeling this isn’t some casual visit?”

The young girl took a minute, gathering her courage before looking him in the eye and speaking up. “I want to be your apprentice.”

His immediate reaction was to tell her he’d already accepted that but he could tell that she wasn’t talking about some uncertain future, she was talking about immediately. Delair wanted to train under him and had come all the way to Stonewall to do just that.

Before he could say anything, Sachel was already speaking, trying to make a case for it. “She’ll be staying with me and Ralia, there’s nothing you need to worry about as far as where she’ll live or what sort of expenses she’ll have and it’s not like she’ll need to be there with you all of the time. I know you have a lot you do and a busy life in general, it’s really only when you’d be able to and-”

She stopped her rambling as he held up a hand while pinching his brow with his other, many of his minds boosting to their maximum to think it over the second after the girl had asked.

He wasn’t going to ask Delair about leaving her home during the invasion, there was no doubt that topic had been discussed to death with Sachel and Fontesh, probably even Hentath too. If she was there then that meant she’d gotten all of their approval and her being in Stonewall was probably even for the best. The dryads now had a few awakened plant mages in their village which should have meant it would be safe but Stonewall would still be safer overall for having himself, Thera, and Sachel in it, not to mention all of the spirits who seemed to have moved to the area thanks to Thera’s presence.

So that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that he had so much to do and the time he had to do it all was only ever shrinking. He needed more power and he was already slowing himself down because of the gods and he needed to do what felt like the impossible by forcing two third-tier awakenings in less than a year. He needed to keep making things for the war effort, be they his mana bracelets or his materializers or his new buff bracelets that Sachel had just given him the results of testing and those weren’t even his big projects. Inux still needed a new body and while progress was being made on the summoning spell, large segments of it still needed to be decoded before he could start to really try to hone in on the aspects they’d actually need and then improve them from there, and-

And I still need to live.

The sole thought that was keeping him from outright telling them he didn’t have time to do something like that. The world was ending but that had basically been true since he’d arrived on the planet and no matter how productive he would try to be and how much more he already did than any average person, he wasn’t a machine. Even if the gods and the people in his life disagreed, he’d take breaks and he’d make time for the people he cared about. Hell, just making sure he still returned home each day to prepare most meals for Thera and Sonya was an act of not devoting everything he was to completing the goals he held and when there was a very real chance he’d be dead by the end of the third wave, if he put off training Delair he might never get a chance to.

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But while she might not get the chance to train under him more than the few days he’d already given her, if rejecting her now meant the odds of him winning in the future would go up, wouldn’t that be worth it? Even if he died, she would live on, able to find someone new to learn under in a significantly safer world.

He pulled his hand away from his face but before he could say anything he looked after her, scared and worried and hopeful all at once as mind after mind in his head flashed to his brother Mark. Only nine when Ben had died on Earth, he had to be well on his way to the middle of his teenage years by that point, plenty of time to mourn him and move on with his life but nothing to Ben himself. Someone he’d loved dearly and been ripped from without the chance to say so much as a goodbye and now here he was, standing in front of another child he’d grown close to who only wanted a bit of his time with whatever she thought she had left.

Delair was young but she wasn’t naive, she no doubt understood that their odds were terrible overall and she still wanted to spend the time she had left learning from him, making a choice for how she’d spend the rest of her days and asking him to accept it.