I emerged from my Nave feeling like someone had fed me through a meat grinder, reassembled the pieces wrong, and then asked me to run a marathon.

Every muscle in my body screamed. Not the dull ache of normal exercise — this was a full-bodied symphony of suffering, each fiber playing its own unique note of agony. My legs felt like they'd been replaced with columns of wet sand. My arms hung at my sides like dead weight, fingers tingling with the memory of marble floor dragged across inch by agonizing inch.

'Thirty-five years of training. That's what she said.'

If every session was like this, I wouldn't last thirty-five days.

The deck of the ship swam back into focus around me. The same organized chaos as before — workers carrying cargo, Derry shouting orders, the smell of tar and salt and timber. Except now everything seemed too bright, too loud, too much. My eyes watered against the afternoon sun like it had personally offended me.

Po materialized beside me with the kind of sudden appearance that made me wonder if feralis could teleport.

"Mr. Cade! You look terrible!"

"Thanks, Po. I appreciate that."

He beamed at me like I'd paid him a compliment. "Mr. Derry says you should sit down before you fall down! He says people who collapse on his deck get thrown overboard!"

'Charming policy.'

I found a barrel that looked sturdy enough to support my weight and lowered myself onto it with all the grace of a dying man. Which, to be fair, wasn't far from how I felt. The wood creaked beneath me, and for one horrible moment I thought it might give way — but it held, and I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

The sun had shifted position since I'd entered my Nave. It was harder to tell time in the spirit plane — sometimes minutes felt like hours, other times hours could feel like minutes, not that I'd spent that much time there anyway — but based on the light, I had to have been there for at least two or three hours.

Two or three hours of dragging myself across marble floor like a particularly ambitious slug.

I'd made it to Kassie eventually. Barely. By the time I reached her, I'd been shaking so hard I could barely stand, and she'd simply looked at me with those pale crimson eyes and said: "Tomorrow, you will do it faster."

Then I dismissed myself from the Nave without a second thought before trying my best to move to the deck to check how the situation was.

Still, beneath the exhaustion and the complaining, something else stirred. Something that felt almost like... satisfaction?

I'd done it. It had taken everything I had, had pushed me past limits I didn't know existed, but I'd done it. I'd reached her.

'One inch at a time. That's how this works.'

One inch at a time until I could stand beside my spirits instead of behind them. Until I could fight alongside Kassie and the Pyre Saint instead of watching from a distance while they did all the work. Until the next time someone came to kill me, I'd have something more to offer than clever words and desperate luck.

The pain was the price. And right now, sitting on this barrel with my muscles screaming, I was more willing to pay it than I'd ever been.

"Mr. Cade?"

I blinked. Po was still there, watching me with those vertical-pupil eyes. His tail swished behind him in what I was beginning to recognize as concern.

"You were staring at nothing for a long time. Mr. Derry says that's a sign of brain damage!"

"Tell Mr. Derry I said thanks for the diagnosis."

Po nodded seriously and scampered off, presumably to deliver my message verbatim. I watched him go, shaking my head slightly.

'Where does Levi find these people?'

The question had been rattling around my head since I'd arrived on this ship, but it kept getting more relevant. Po. Derry. The entire crew moving with practiced efficiency around me like I was just another piece of cargo. The ships themselves — plural, because I'd seen at least three others bearing similar markings when we'd climbed aboard.

This wasn't some ragtag rescue operation. This was infrastructure. Organization. Money.

The Black Snow Company... a massive organization of the worst people you can think of, according to what Nisha had explained. Criminals, killers, people who'd made themselves unwelcome in polite society.

'And somehow, they all dropped everything to extract one F-rank spirit summoner from Aetheris.'

Something wasn't adding up. But I was too tired to solve equations right now. My brain felt like it had been wrung out and hung to dry.

The afternoon wore on. I stayed on my barrel, occasionally accepting water from crew members who passed by, trying to convince my legs that they still existed. The harbor sounds washed over me — distant shouts, the creak of rigging, the calls of strange seabirds that looked nothing like any bird I'd known on Earth.

The ocean stretched beyond the harbor mouth, vast and gray and endless. Looking at it still made my head swim slightly, that strange vertigo I'd felt since arriving in this world. Something about large bodies of water just... didn't agree with me. Some leftover instinct from a life I barely remembered anymore.

I was contemplating whether drowning would be preferable to another training session when a commotion near the gangplank caught my attention.

Three figures were climbing aboard. Even from a distance, I recognized them.

Nisha came first, practically bounding up the ladder with the energy of someone who hadn't spent the last several hours being physically destroyed. Her brown skin gleamed with sweat, and there was a new tear in her shirt that definitely hadn't been there before, but she was grinning like she'd just won a prize.

Tristan followed, more measured in his ascent. His expression was harder to read — there was relief there, but something else too. Tension that hadn't fully released.

And finally, Levi. Those heterochromatic eyes found me immediately, one green and one red, and something in them shifted with a small smile of satisfaction.

"Cade!"

Nisha crossed the deck in approximately three seconds and would have tackled me if I hadn't raised my hands in desperate surrender.

"Wait — don't — I'm injured—"

"You're always injured! That's your default state at this point!"

She settled for clapping me on the shoulder instead, which still sent a jolt of pain through my already-destroyed muscles. I winced but managed not to crumple entirely.

"Good to see you too, Nisha."

"Good to see me? Good to see me?" She put her hands on her hips, looking genuinely offended. "We've been running around this city for hours making sure nobody followed us, and all you can say is 'good to see you'?"

"What would you prefer? A parade? Should I compose a poem?"

"A poem would be nice!"

Tristan arrived, saving me from having to actually compose anything. He looked me over with that assessing gaze of his, the one that always felt like he was cataloging my injuries and calculating survival odds.

"You look like shit."

"That's the second time someone's told me that in the last few hours. I'm starting to think it might be true."

A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "I sure would like to hear how you managed to escape that guy."

"I gave him hell. Literally, by the way."

Levi had reached us now, hands in his pockets, that enigmatic half-smile playing at his lips. He looked entirely too composed for someone who'd apparently spent hours evading pursuit.

"Armed with the Blood Conqueror, there's no way you can really lose," he said. "All you have to do is summon her. You really are a lucky one, you know?"

'Lucky? Okay now.'

Lucky wasn't the word I would've used. But I was too tired to argue semantics with someone who seemed to know more about my spirits than I did.

"Are we clear?" Derry's voice cut through the reunion, the big man striding over with purpose. "Because if we're clear, I'd like to get this ship moving before the Church decides to do a thorough inspection of every vessel in harbor."

Levi nodded. "We're clear. No tails. They'll figure out we left by sea eventually, but by then we'll be beyond their reach."

Derry grunted, apparently satisfied. He turned and bellowed orders that made no sense to me but set the crew into immediate motion.

"Mr. Derry is very good at yelling!" Po appeared beside me again, beaming with what I could only interpret as pride. "He practiced for many years!"

"I can tell."

The ship began to move.

I don't know what I expected — maybe something gradual, a slow drift away from the dock. Instead, there was a deep groan from somewhere beneath the deck, a vibration that ran through the whole vessel and up through my already-aching bones, and then we were pulling away from the harbor with a speed that seemed impossible for something this size.

I gripped the barrel beneath me, suddenly aware of how unstable my perch was.

"Spirit-powered," Tristan said, noticing my expression. "The engine room has bound spirits that generate propulsion. Much faster than sails alone."

'Of course...'

The harbor began to shrink behind us. The massive ships we'd been docked between fell away, then the rows of smaller vessels, then the gargantuan beasts of burden with their patient golden eyes. The cliff face of Faeren Heights rose in the distance, growing smaller by the second.

Aetheris Kingdom. The place where Lira had lived. The place where she'd died.

I watched it recede, and something twisted in my chest. Not quite grief — that wound was still too raw to touch directly. Something older… colder.

'I'll be back.'

The thought came unbidden, hard and certain as stone.

'I'll be back, and when I am, I won't be running.'

Nisha settled onto a crate beside me, apparently content to watch the kingdom shrink into the distance alongside me. Her earlier energy had softened into something quieter.

"Strange feeling, isn't it?" she said. "Leaving a place."

"I've left places before."

"Not like this, though." She glanced at me sideways. "Not with a hundred thousand silver on your head and an Inquisitor probably already on your trail."

'Thanks for the reminder.'

"Where are we going?"

She grinned, and there was something almost predatory in it.

"Home. Black Snow Company headquarters." She stretched her arms above her head, casual as anything. "Fair warning — it's not exactly what you'd call civilized. But it's ours, and nobody there gives a shit about the Church's bounties."

Home. The word felt foreign. I hadn't had a home since arriving in this world. The Mercenary Guild had been close, maybe — close enough that losing it had torn something inside me.

Now I was sailing toward a criminal organization's headquarters with two calamity-tier spirits in my soul, a body that barely functioned, and absolutely no idea what came next.

'One inch at a time,' I reminded myself. 'That's how this works.'

The last sliver of Aetheris disappeared below the horizon.

And despite everything — the pain, the exhaustion, the grief still lodged like glass beneath my ribs — I felt something else too. Something that might have been anticipation.

The Church wanted me dead. They'd burned the Guild. They'd killed Lira. They'd chased me across this kingdom like a dog.

But I was still alive. Still moving forward. Still getting stronger, one agonizing inch at a time.

And someday — not today, not tomorrow, but someday — I was going to make them regret ever learning my name.

The ocean stretched ahead, gray and endless.

I watched it without flinching.

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