The Supreme Return Of Logan Kai

The herbs were spread across the flat stone like a man's entire life laid bare some worth keeping, some not worth a second look.

Kai crouched low over them, picking through each bundle with the kind of patience that only eight years of mountain silence could teach a person. His fingers moved without rush, turning each stem, each dried root, each pressed leaf between his fingers before he made his decision.

“No.”He set one aside.

“Yes.” That one stayed.

“No not good enough.”

He had been at it since morning. The air up here carried that familiar bite cool and sharp, heavy with pine and something older than pine, something that had no name in any city dictionary. The Supreme Forest did not care for names. It did not care for much of anything that came from down below.

That was why people stayed away.

Nobody climbed this mountain unless they were called to it or crazy enough to try. Stories had followed this place for generations strange lights moving between the trees at night, sounds that had no animal attached to them, men who wandered in and never found their way back out. The villagers at the base of the mountain would not even point in its direction after dark. They called it cursed. They called it haunted. They called it a hundred different things, and every single one of those things kept them far away.

Which was exactly how Master Liam preferred it.

Kai turned another bundle over in his palm. Blackwood thistle, at least three seasons old, the potency already breaking down at the stem. He set it with the others that were no good.

He was so focused on the work that he almost did not hear them coming.

The sound of feet on the stone path behind him was light  careful the kind of careful that was trying too hard to seem like it was not trying at all. He did not turn around. He already knew who it was before the first voice opened its mouth.

“Kai...”

He kept his eyes on the herbs.

Three of them had entered the clearing behind him. He could tell by the footsteps alone Mia walked heaviest on her left, Megan barely made a sound at all, and Malisa always dragged her right heel just slightly on stone, a habit Master Liam had tried to correct a hundred times.

“Kai Logan.”

This time it was Mia's voice, and there was something different wrapped inside it. Not urgency exactly. Something that was performing urgency.

He set down the bundle in his hand and waited.

“My back,” Mia said, and her voice dropped into something softer, something almost fragile. “Something is wrong with my back. It has been hurting since last night and I — I do not know what is happening to it.”

He stood up slowly, brushed his palms against each other, and turned around.

The three of them were standing at the edge of the stone clearing. Mia was in front, her hand pressed against her lower back, her face arranged into something pained. Megan and Malisa stood just behind her, watching him with that look he had come to know well over the past two years quiet, waiting, like they were holding their breath to see what he would do.

He walked closer to Mia, his eyes steady, already reading her posture out of habit. The way a person stood when their back truly hurt was a specific thing. The body leaned without meaning to. The shoulder on the painful side dropped. The breathing was careful. There was none of that in Mia right now. Her spine was straight and easy. Her breathing was fine.

But he said nothing yet. He stopped in front of her.

“Where exactly?” he asked.

“Here.” She reached behind herself and her fingers found the lace at the back of her garment. She began to loosen it, slow and deliberate, her eyes not leaving his face. “I will show you.”

“Mia.”

She did not stop.

“Mia, stop.”

At that moment she paused, her fingers still holding the lace, her eyes lifting to his with something searching in them, something looking for any small crack it could press into.

Kai looked at her evenly. 

“We are not doing this again.”

The silence that followed was the kind that fills a space after something honest has been said out loud. Immediately Mia's hand dropped from her garment. 

Then Malisa stepped forward.

“If she will not, then I will.” Her chin was lifted and her voice had an edge to it, something sharper than Mia's approach. She reached up toward her own collar.

“Malisa.”

“And me,” Megan said quietly from behind, already moving.

Immediately Kai held up one hand. A single, flat gesture. Not harsh. Not unkind. Just clear.

All three of them stopped.

Three of them were beautiful, and have good bodies most men will kill for, and they from from various sides of the country, North, West and East 

And they are the daughter's of the leader's from those regions, and they were sent her so Master Liam can train them for two year, but he ran away and left him to do all the job, however he was still curious why the South never sent anyone.

He looked at them really looked at them and for a moment the clearing was quiet except for the wind moving through the tops of the pines above. Their garments were already partially loosened. Mia's shoulder was bare on one side. The curves of their bodies were visible in ways that would make any ordinary young man look away or lean in, one or the other.

Kai did neither.

“Pull your garments back,” he said.

“Is it that we are not—” Megan started.

“Pull them back.”

The words were not loud. 

Megan closed her mouth. One by one, slowly, the three of them adjusted their garments back into place.

Then Mia's voice came again, and this time the performance was gone. What was underneath it was real — frustration, and underneath the frustration, something that actually hurt.

“All this time,” she said. 

“All this time, Kai. We have been here with you. Side by side, every single day. And you just you keep pushing us away like we are nothing. Like we mean nothing.” Her jaw was tight. “Is it that we are not good enough for you? Tell me. Just say it so I know.”

Megan folded her arms across her chest. “Three of us. All three of us. And you have never once—”

“It is not about good enough,” Kai said.

“Then what is it about?” Malisa asked, and her voice was the quietest of the three but somehow it carried the furthest. There was something genuinely soft in it not a performance, just a real question from a real person. 

“What is it, Kai? What are we missing?”

He opened his mouth to answer her.

And that was when the scroll arrived.