The food was warm and it tasted like home.Dante ate at the table while Gianna sat across from him and Lucia took the chair beside her mother, both of them wearing the specific expression of people with questions they were deciding how to order.Lucia went first."Tell us everything."Dante took a bite. "It was mostly sightseeing."Her eyes narrowed. "You were in the Celestial Domain for a week and that's the summary.""There was a tournament. I entered it, won it. The rewards took time to collect.""That's it?""That's most of it."Gianna was watching him with the still, measuring look she used when she'd already decided something wasn't the full story and was choosing whether to pursue it. She let it go. She'd always known when to let things go, which was one of the things he respected most about her."Which empire?" Lucia asked."The Eltonaro."Lucia sat up straight. Her whole face changed, the boredom of the last week evaporating instantly. "You went to the Eltonaro Empire? The on

showed his card to the desk, and took the stairs to Augusto's floor.The office door was open.A young man was just walking out of it.Dante clocked him before they made eye contact, the automatic read he'd been doing since the Colosseum and couldn't fully turn off anymore. Tall, composed, the kind of composed that came from being around authority long enough to learn how not to show things. The face was familiar in the specific way of a face that shared structural features with another face he knew.Aron's face. Older, more controlled, but the same jaw line, the same set of the eyes.Dante kept his breathing even and moved to the side of the corridor to let him pass. The young man's eyes moved across him briefly and registered nothing, no recognition, and he walked past and took the stairs down.Dante stood still for two seconds after he'd gone.Then he exhaled and walked into Augusto's office.Augusto was at his desk with a pen in his hand and the expression of someone who had been

close the physical gap. The Black Swamp was supposed to be the answer, the brutal efficient shortcut that rebuilt the body from the inside in ways that normal training couldn't reach. He'd planned around it. He'd accepted that the ratio of people who came back with their minds intact was uncomfortable and decided the upside was worth the risk.None of that mattered. The ceiling wasn't about the method. The Black Swamp, the River of Dragon's Tears, mana essence absorbed through the skin in a spy-proof room underground, all of it hit the same wall.Rank. The system's fundamental structure, which didn't care about workarounds.He sat with the frustration for thirty seconds and then set it aside in the specific way he had learned to set things aside, not suppressing it, just putting it in the correct location where it could wait without taking up working space.Options.The Tower's second floor required two keys. He had one. The first floor's boss had dropped a single key and his subseque

He failed differently.He adjusted again.About an hour in, Vorak's head came up from his forepaws."He's doing it," Vorak said.Pride unfolded his arms.Azark opened his eyes.Dante was floating. One meter off the floor, both feet clear, his body holding a reasonable approximation of vertical with the skin-flow running in the continuous circuit Pride had described. The distribution wasn't perfect, a slight excess at the left shoulder, a thin spot at the right hip, but the overall system was holding and he wasn't falling.He stayed up.He moved.Not far, not fast, not with any confidence about what he was doing or where he was going, but he crossed three meters of the training room floor without touching it, and then another two, and then he tried to turn left and the turn destroyed the hip distribution and he came down again.Clean landing this time. He'd learned what was coming.He went back up.An hour after that he could move in a straight line at walking pace, hold altitude withi

She's training under one of their top Awakened. A swordswoman.""So she's moving to the capital.""We're all moving to the capital," Dante said. "After the academy term ends. Mom agreed."Something moved across Marco's face. Not surprise exactly, more the particular expression of a man receiving news that rearranges something he'd been thinking about."I'm heading back to the capital soon myself," he said. "Couple more weeks of things to tie up here and then I'm gone." He looked at the fountain. "It would be good to have you two in the same city.""Two-man dynamic," Dante said."Exactly." Marco smiled. "We were always better with even numbers."The park was quiet for a moment, a breeze moving through the oak's crooked branch, the gravel settling under pigeons near the fence."Giacomo," Dante said.Marco's expression changed. Not dramatically, just a shift in the set of his jaw, the particular tightening of someone hearing a name that carries recent history."What about him.""Linor to