.".....".
Jones didn't push further, but he clearly wanted answers. Ares could tell even from his exhaustion as a deliberate, steady silence that took its place. He sat on the edge of his bed, gazed at Ares for a while with his dark, scrutinizing eyes, then stood up and went to get water.
Not long after, he came back with a full bottle, set it on the table beside Ares's bed without comment, and then sat back down and waited.
Ares drank satisfactorily. The water was room temperature and tasted faintly of the facility's filtration system. Frankly saying, it was the best thing he'd experienced in weeks.
"You're not going to ask?" Ares said finally.
"You'll tell me when you want to", he replied.
Ares stared at the ceiling as his chest ached quietly, like something had changed drastically and was still settling. Moving felt unfamiliar, as if his arms belonged to someone bigger — a strange, disorienting sense of space where there had been restraint.
"I did something", he said.
"Yeah, I noticed", Jones scoffed while looking head to toe, his scrutinizing gaze still present.
"The fragment. Its energy. There's a technique—" He stopped. Tried again. "My mana pathways were too narrow to handle the Mana Force at higher volumes. It was like trying to run a river through pipes built for irrigation." He paused. "The Echo showed me how to widen them. From the inside."
Jones fell silent for a moment, trying to process what he just heard using his brain at full capacity. "Define....from the inside".
"Exactly how it sounds", Ares immediately answered. "So.....you let some dead god thing rebuild your insides."
"More or less."
Jones started to get a headache as he processed this tough information without showing any emotion (don't ask me how). His brow furrowed, then smoothed out.
"Did it work?" he asked, not wanting to say what he was thinking. "Integration jumped from seventeen to thirty-one percent..." A low exhale. "That's... significant."
"Yes."
Jones paused before continuing. "How are you feeling?"
"....."
Ares thought about the question carefully — It called for a sincere response. "It's as if someone used a crowbar on my insides, then put everything back together, but a bit larger. Still connected. Just... rearranged."
The muscle-man nodded slowly, like a man filing a report. Then: "Was it worth it?"
A long pause, "Ask me when I can stand up straight."
"Pfftt!"
Jones's face slightly cracked. A sound escaped him that was almost a laugh. He pressed his fist to his mouth to suppress it, which made it worse, and for a few seconds sat there with his shoulders shaking silently.
"It's not funny," he said.
"I know....but....Pffftt." Jones managed but utterly lost. Ares watched this with annoyance but with something else. something that felt, distantly, like warmth. He didn't dwell on it for long as Jones laughter came back once again, causing him even more annoyance.
"Okay. Now I know it's not." He exhaled, composing himself. Then looked at him steadily. "You could have told me."
"I know."
"I would have—"
"What?" Ares cut off.
"Talked me out of it?
Watched?
Held my hand? Jones."
He met his eyes. "There was nothing to do but go through it. And you can't go through something like that with company."
Jones was quiet for a moment. He didn't feel hurt or sad...he just felt like he wanted to help and understood too clearly why.
"Next time there's nothing you can do..." he said finally. "Tell me anyway, so I'm not sitting here, having noticed something was wrong at 2 AM and doing absolutely nothing."
Ares looked at him for a brief moment. Something stirred up, it had been the first time in years anyone had actually been that concerned for him. Though Linda and Celeste, he felt it as more like pity. With Ricko even felt more like a Landlord and Tenant relationship.
Even before his downgrade, He'd spent so long around people who either needed things from him or wanted nothing to do with him. The concept of someone simply wanting to know—To be present even when presence changed nothing, felt strange. Maybe its because he has grown accustomed to the murmurs.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Alright."
Jones nodded, satisfied, then stood up. "I'll get food. Don't try to get up until I'm back."
Ares frowned at his statement, "Food?" Jones turned to him, "What?". They both stared at each other for a while. "You're gonna die."
"What! What does that mean?" He then realised what he meant. "Oh, I forgot to tell you. We've got a refrigerator filled with some food hidden in the walls of our room".
"Oh", Ares said weakly. His fatigue started acting up and his craving for sleep is knocking on him like a house raid.
"Yeah, so wait here," Jones pointed at him with two fingers, already moving towards a side of the wall and pressing on a mysterious button Ares couldn't catch.
.....
...
The morning passed slowly and quietly, which was its own small mercy.
Sylvie returned from the first training session of the day, a group drill exercise Ares had been conspicuously absent from, and stopped in the dormitory doorway with an expression that was trying to be disapproving but landing closer to worry.
"You weren't at training," she said.
"Good morning to you too," Ares replied.
She looked at him with critical precision. The sweated-through shirt he'd changed out of, now on the floor, the slight hunch in his posture, the way his arms lay just a fraction too carefully at his sides.
"What happened?"
"I'm fine."
"You said that to Jones too. He told me." He paused, "The same words, in the same tone."
Ares looked at the ceiling. "I'm developing a catchphrase."
"Ares."
Something in the way she said his name — not soft exactly, but deliberate, stripped of its usual sharp edges — made him glance at her.
She was still standing in the doorway. It occurred to him that Sylvie's difficulty wasn't coldness but shyness... in some sort. To him, it looked like she was constantly recalculating the correct distance to stand from people, and the calculation rarely felt right to her.
"I did something to accelerate my integration," he said. Her eyes widened before returning to her usual cool-headed
"It worked
I'm paying for it physically
It will pass.... I hope."
She processed that but clearly she wanted answers but she knows she wouldn't get it from him in this state. Her jaw did the thing it did when she was deciding how much skepticism to deploy. Then, without a word, she crossed the room, deposited something on the table beside his bed, and left.
He looked at it.
A bread roll. Still slightly warm from the cafeteria.
He looked at the door she'd just walked through.
Huh.
Across the facility, in the larger communal training area, Henry Heckerson moved through the crowd of participants with the quiet assurance of a man who had never been uncertain about his own worth.
He stopped beside Subject 77 — a lean, dark-haired woman with a sniper's patience in her posture — and spoke low enough that the nearest participants couldn't hear. His expression was pleasant. Attentive. He had the particular gift of making the person he was talking to feel like the most important individual in the room.
"Valerius kept Subject 148 back after the conduit session yesterday," he said, conversationally. "Private discussion."
Subject 77's eyes moved slightly. "You think they're giving him special treatment?"
Henry tilted his head, a cunning smile plastered on his face. "I think patterns are worth noting. A D-rank with an anomalous conduit reading. Private sessions with the senior instructor." A small pause, perfectly timed. "And the conduit he touched — you noticed the color?"
She had noticed. Everyone had noticed.
"Black," she said.
"Yes..Black," Henry agreed. He let the word sit between them for a moment. "Every other participant produced blues, golds, and reds. Colors consistent with elevated Mana Force output. Black isn't power." He looked across the room. "It's instability."
Subject 77 was quiet for a moment. Her eyes observed Henry for a moment, "You think he's a liability."
Henry didn't answer directly. He simply moved on to his next conversation, leaving the thought planted, his cunning smile still plastered. In his experience, it was always better to let other people complete the sentences you started.
That night, Ares lay still in the dark and did a careful inventory of himself.
His mana pathways still ached — a bone-deep, ambient soreness that wasn't alarming, just present. Like the day after serious physical training, except the training had been conducted entirely on the inside of his own body.
He ran a slow, tentative circulation of Mana Force through the restructured channels. Not much. Barely a thread. Just to feel the difference.
The difference was significant.
What had previously felt like forcing water through rusted pipes now felt like... not easy, exactly, but clear. The Mana Force moved through him without the constant feedback of resistance. It was still foreign, still dense and wild in the way Vhala's energy always was, but it moved.
His interface updated quietly in the back of his vision:
[Mana Pathways: Restructuring — 74% complete]
[Estimated full adaptation: 3–5 days]
He closed the interface.
At some point — he wasn't sure exactly when, because sleep had begun to make its case more persuasively than usual — he became aware of something on his bedside table that hadn't been there when he'd lain down.
A small ceramic cup, still faintly warm.
Tea.
He looked around the dark room. Jones: asleep, breathing deep and even. Sylvie: still, controlled. Nia's bed: technically empty, as usual.
He picked up the cup. Drank it slowly in the dark.
It tasted like something from a memory he couldn't quite locate — something warm and domestic from a life that felt very far away. Ginger and something else. Something unfamiliar.
He set the empty cup down.
In the corner of the room, so still she might have been furniture, Nia sat with her knees drawn to her chest, watching him with an expression he'd never seen on her before. No mischief or predatory amusement.
She just quietly watched him, as if her mind was on something else. When she realized he had noticed, she turned her head to the side and said nothing.
"Weird," Ares thought. This was the first time he had seen her like that but he didn't really care. Probably some mental traits in her or something
After a moment, she unfolded from the corner, crossed to her own bed in complete silence, and lay down, telling Ares it's time to sleep.