As darkness settled, moonlight spilled across the mountain path, and candlelight flickered dimly through the window of the wooden house. A thin curl of smoke rose from the doorway, where a white-haired old man stood bent over the stove, busy at work.
Noe followed Cold Cry at an easy pace, the mountain breeze doing nothing to settle the mix of excitement and nerves in her chest. This was her first time actually living up in the mountains.
Fujikasane Mountain didn't count, obviously. That hadn't been living. That had been survival.
She glanced back toward the valley below, already lit up with scattered lights strung together like a string of torches in the dark.
"Grandpa, let me help." She hurried to the stove and reached for the ladle in his hand.
"Noe, you're back." Roubee gently waved her off. "No need, no need. There's just this last pot. I've got it. Go wash up first. Dinner's almost ready."
"But Grandpa, didn't you say I'd be doing the cooking?" She lingered by the stove, a little shy about it.
"Not on your very first day. Plenty of time for that later."
He gave her shoulder an affectionate pat, nudging her off toward the wash basin, then turned, spotted Cold Cry passing behind him, and his expression soured instantly. "Look how thoughtful our Noe is, unlike some people who've lived here two, three months now and still haven't figured out how to look after an old man."
"I've been chopping your wood and hauling your water the whole time. Two grown men in a house did you really need a girl underfoot too?"
"The only one underfoot around here is you."
Cold Cry gave up on the argument and pulled three sets of bowls and chopsticks from the cupboard instead, laying them out on the table by the door.
What had always been just enough food for two suddenly filled the table like it was meant for four or five, now that Noe was here.
At dinner, Roubee kept piling food onto her plate, and she kept thanking him for it. The table, usually quiet, felt almost lively for once. Cold Cry sat off to the side, eating with his head down, looking every bit like he didn't belong in the scene.
After the meal, cleanup naturally fell to Noe.
Cold Cry, following Roubee's instructions, heated water for the bathtub and settled into his nightly medicinal soak.
His body looked recovered enough from the outside, but plenty of damage still lingered underneath, damage that, left untreated, could cost him dearly later, in his training and possibly in his life.
Once evening lessons wrapped up, the question of where Noe would actually sleep came up again.
The wooden house had only three rooms. Roubee slept in the bedroom. Cold Cry slept on a makeshift bed on the living room floor. The third room was a storeroom out back.
The storeroom was so packed with junk that there was no room even to step inside, and there was no realistic way to clear it out in one night. It would probably take longer than that to make it properly livable at all.
That left exactly two options: Cold Cry could share the bedroom with Roubee and let Noe have the living room, or Roubee could take the living room, and Noe could have the bedroom.
But no matter how hard he knocked on Roubee's door, the old man wouldn't wake up. Normally the two of them turned in around the same hour, but tonight, apparently, Roubee had gone to bed unusually early. Cold Cry started to suspect he'd been set up.
As the saying goes, you can't wake someone who's only pretending to sleep.
He knew, right then, that tonight was a lost cause.
With no other option left, he handed his own bedding over to Noe and settled down to share the living room floor with her.
The two of them lay stiffly against opposite walls, east and west, and got through the night that way.
The next morning, after his run and breakfast, Cold Cry skipped his usual training in the woods. Instead, he and Noe spent the day clearing out the storeroom. Over the next few days, they scavenged wood from the mountainside and put together a simple bed frame.
Through all of it, Cold Cry kept noticing the odd looks Roubee kept throwing Noe's way, flashing his yellowed teeth in a grin that looked a little too pleased with itself.
Noe, for her part, was acting strange too head down, shy, timid in a way that didn't suit her.
Caught in the middle of all that strangeness, Cold Cry could barely eat or sleep, needled by how awkward the two of them had suddenly become around each other.
*They've both clearly lost it,* he thought.
A week later, Noe finally moved into the finished storeroom, settling properly into life on the mountain.
From then on, alongside cooking, laundry, and cleaning, she trained daily on a program Roubee had built specifically for her.
Unlike Cold Cry, who had to grind for every gain in his physical conditioning, Noe had been born with an unusual constitution. Her muscle density would naturally climb to six times normal as she matured, and hold there once it did.
She already had strength and durability well beyond an ordinary person's reach. What she lacked was combat sense and experience, so Roubee built her training around closing exactly that gap.
Cold Cry still hauled his weights up and down the mountain every morning. By the time he got back, Noe would have breakfast ready. After eating, the two of them worked through a trap-filled stretch of forest together, sharpening their coordination and awareness.
In the afternoons, Cold Cry would strap iron weights to his wrists and ankles and sink to the bottom of the lake to run through Breathing Technique forms and sword drills. Noe joined him down there occasionally, though she couldn't hold her breath long enough yet to stay under for long.
His left wrist still hadn't fully healed, so for now he trained one-handed, relying on his right.
About three months had passed since the Final Selection ended.
Normally, recruits got their uniform and blade within about two weeks of passing, followed by their first assignment within a month.
The Corps had been slowly assigning Cold Cry a mission, likely on account of his wrist. Why Noe hadn't been given one either was anyone's guess; probably something only the Corps itself could answer.
One day, after finishing their morning training, the two of them made their way back up to the house together.
From a distance, two figures sat in the shade of the tree out front. One was Roubee. The other wore a strange mask that hid his face entirely, though from the full head of silver hair and the voice carrying across the clearing, he looked to be roughly Roubee's age.
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