Free Web NovelChapter 13: A Mentor
The city came in sounds first.
Traffic. Horns. The steady noise of a million people packed close together and making no effort to be quiet about it.
He recognized it before he understood it, and then the images assembled and he was standing on a street he knew, surrounded by buildings he knew, crowds moving past exactly the way they always had.
He was on Earth.
Something he hadn’t known he was carrying loosened in his chest all at once.
"I’m back," he said quietly. To no one in particular.
"...I see you’ve returned home. Shang."
He turned.
His step-mother stood on the sidewalk, watching him with a smile, that particular smile she’d always used when she wanted something. Same narrow eyes. Same so-called warmth that had always been a costume over something else. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
She was dead. He knew that for certain.
His throat tightened. "How are you—"
Movement behind her. One person, then several. Neighbors. Faces from his engineering program. His landlord from the apartment he’d lived in alone for three years. All watching him with expressions that were almost right. Close enough to recognize, wrong enough to feel immediately.
"Come back," one said.
"You belong here," said another.
"Come home, Shang. Come back. Come home."
"Stop... Stop it!" Aries pressed both hands to his ears. It didn’t help because the sound was already coming from inside.
The crowd split without anyone moving to split it.
A figure walked through the gap, and it didn’t have a face.
It reached behind its back. Pulled out a knife. Stepped forward towards Aries, aiming to kill him.
"NOOO—" He woke up.
When he looked around, he was in a carriage.
Eren had hit the roof on the way up. He sat upright with one hand pressed to the top of his head and the other flat against his chest, staring at Aries.
"You absolute lunatic!" He pressed harder against his chest. "I was asleep. Peacefully, completely asleep, and then you—" He exhaled hard. "My heart nearly left my body just now."
Aries looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"...Oops." freewebnovel.cσ๓
"Oops." Eren repeated it back with a look that said the word had personally wronged him. "You wake up like the world is ending and all you have is oops?"
Across the carriage, Cedric was mid-drink.
The sound he made trying not to laugh was the least composed Aries had ever seen from him.
"Don’t laugh!" Eren pointed immediately. "That was a demonic laugh."
Near the window, without turning his head, Nico said: "I wish I were a tree."
Valea had her chin resting in her hand, watching Eren with amusement she wasn’t hiding. Then almost as an afterthought: "You did look kind of cute while you were sleeping, though."
Aries’s brain stopped.
He looked at her. She looked back and offered him absolutely nothing useful.
’Is she flirting?’
"Unlike that ’cute’ you snore," Nico said, still facing the window. "I genuinely thought something was dying nearby."
"Just what’s your problem?" Valea turned toward him.
Aries looked between them. Something had been sitting at the back of his mind since the campfire, waiting for the right gap.
This seemed like the gap.
"...By the way," he said. "I heard you two are engaged."
The silence was immediate and total.
Valea and Nico went still.
"...Who," Valea said, "told you that."
Aries pointed at Eren.
Eren’s head turned toward him slowly, wearing the face of someone watching a door close they cannot stop. "...I may have spoken too much," he said quietly, but inside him ’You damn traitor Aries!’
The look Valea and Nico turned on him in perfect sync was the most united Aries had ever seen them.
Eren wilted.
The argument resumed at full volume, the carriage kept moving, and Aries turned back to the window.
The landscape had changed while he slept. Molgrith’s forests were somewhere behind them — different trees now, different light sitting at the horizon. He watched it pass.
Farther, he thought. Every hour, farther.
His family was back there. Three people who thought he was dead, in a kingdom getting smaller with every turn of the wheels beneath him.
Drelan, who had walked beside him down the ceremony steps without saying a single word. Althea, whose grip had tightened with every sound from outside the carriage. Mirielle, who had lain flat over a cliff’s edge with her whole arm shaking and her fingers three inches from his, and grabbed nothing.
He exhaled slowly against the glass.
’Better to be with people than wandering alone,’ he thought. ’Besides, this body doesn’t even remember which road leads home.’
That second part was truer than the first.
He almost smiled.
Kaelenor rose out of the landscape before the carriage reached it — high walls built to be seen from a distance, lanterns lining the main roads, architecture that clearly had opinions about itself.
The estate in the upper district was large and quiet.
Valea walked through the front door, spotted the nearest bed, and fell onto it face-first without breaking stride.
"I’m dying," she announced into the mattress. "Good night."
Aries stepped out onto the balcony while the others sorted themselves.
The night air came in cool from above the rooftops. Below him, Kaelenor’s lanterns lit up the streets like something from a photograph he might have seen in another life, another world.
"Aries."
He turned.
Cedric stood in the doorway with his hands folded behind his back.
"Now that you’re traveling with us," he said, "I’d like to offer you something. I guide these three already. As a truly awakened, proper training will matter more for you than most." He looked at him directly. "Would you like to train under me?"
Aries thought about it for exactly as long as it took him to remember — Cedric crossing eight meters of open space between one blink and the next. A creature folding and falling before the sword had returned to its sheath.
His own palm with fire running through it for the first time, enormous and completely uncontrolled, like holding something that could just as easily have turned back on him.
Raw power with no idea what to do with it.
"Yes," Aries said. "I’d be honored."
One nod. "Good. We start tomorrow."
From inside, immediately:
"THAT’S MY SIDE—"
"I GOT HERE FIRST—"
Nico and Eren at matching volume, followed by the sound of two people solving a territorial disagreement physically.
Then a focused gust of wind crossed the room and both of them hit the floor.
"MINE," Valea said, face still in the mattress.
Cedric looked at his three students from the doorway for a moment.
"Training," he said quietly, "may not be the most difficult thing you’ll need to survive in this group."
