The wine didn't just warm me; it unlocked me.
The seizing tightness in my Alloy Flesh vanished, replaced by a fluidity that I hadn't felt for a while. The mana in the alcohol flooded my veins, acting as a high-octane lubricant for the heavy machinery of my body. For the first time in weeks, I didn't feel like a construct of lead and wire. I felt like a person.
I stood outside the supply tent, holding the fourth bottle by the neck.
Across the muddy yard, the Officer's Pavilion glowed. To the recruits shivering in their tents, it was a forbidden zone. To me, viewing it through the my sight, it was a kaleidoscope.
The canvas walls couldn't hide the auras inside. I saw swirls of lazy Yellow and vibrant Orange light mixing with the rhythmic pulses of music. It looked warm. It looked alive.
I shouldn't, the week old soldier in my head warned. I should go back to Jace. I should hide.
Boring, the drunk whispered. The mule carried the load. The mule deserves to hear the music.
I took a swig from the bottle. The purple mana hit my brain like a soft pillow. The soldier's voice faded.
I walked across the yard. I didn't sneak. I walked with the loose, rolling gait of a man who owned the ground he stepped on.
The Pavilion was a different world.
The moment I pushed through the flap, the smell enveloped me-roasted pork, rosemary, and the sharp, metallic tang of expensive silverware. The air was heated by smokeless braziers, keeping the temperature at a perfect, balmy constant.
I leaned against a support pole, taking it all in.
The room was filled with officers. Captains and Lieutenants lounged in plush chairs, their armor unbuckled. Their auras were relaxed, expanding into the room like gas.
In the center of the room, at the largest table, was Valerian.
It made sense he was here. Logistics had the best food, and Valerian-the Golden Boy- would naturally gravitate to the best table regardless of his division.
He was holding court. His Orange Core pulsed with a jagged, energetic rhythm-Lightning. He was animated, using a knife to demonstrate a parry to a circle of younger officers and cadets.
"Power is useless without trajectory," Valerian was saying, his voice carrying the easy confidence of someone who has never been hit for real. "The instructor wanted me to use an Earth stance. I told him, 'Why brace for impact when I can be the impact?'"
The table chuckled appreciatively.
I watched him. I expected to feel the bitter resentment from the training ground, but the wine had washed it away. Now, I just found him... amusing. He was a puppy barking at thunder.
I drifted toward the table.
"You're dropping your shoulder," I said.
The chatter died. Heads turned.
Valerian stopped mid-gesture. He looked at me-a muddy, small recruit clutching a bottle of wine that cost more than himself. His eyes narrowed, trying to place me.
"The Mule," he recognized. "The heavy one."
"That's me," I said grinning. I took a sip from the bottle. "In your story. You dropped your shoulder. If you don't brace, the recoil tears you rotator cuff. Your body doesn't care how rich you are."
A Lieutenant stood up, reaching for his sword. "You little-"
Valerian waved him down. He looked at me with a strange mix of arrogance and curiosity. He remembered the lightning bolt fizzing on my shoulder. He respected durability, even if it came wrapped in mud.
"And I suppose a Logistics grunt knows more about swordplay than a Magic Swordsman?" Valerian asked, raising an eyebrow.
"I know that if you hit a wall without bracing, the wall wins," I said cheerfully. I offered him the bottle. "Drink? It helps with the bruising."
Valerian looked at the bottle, then at my dirt-caked hand. He didn't take it, but he didn't order me killed. He just snorted, a sound of dismissal.
"Keep your poison, Mule. And your advice. Go haul something."
He turned back to his friends, cutting me out of his reality.
I shrugged. "Suit yourself. More for me."
I turned away, bored with the Golden Boy. I scanned the room for something more interesting.
In the corner, separated from the revelry by a wall of silence, sat a girl.
Rhea.
She wasn't eating. She wasn't drinking. She was bent over a table covered in ledgers, a quill moving rapidly across the pages.
Her aura was mesmerizing. While the rest of the room was a messy soup of relaxed colors, hers was a rigid, trembling Grid. Every line of white light around her was pulled taut. It was the aura of someone holding up a collapsing ceiling with sheer willpower.
She's going to snap, I thought, watching the tension vibrate in her shoulders.
In my wine-soaked mind, the context blurred. She wasn't a terrifying auditor. She was just a kid working too hard in a room of people who didn't appreciate the effort.
Tragedy, I decided. A smart girl shouldn't be that tense. She needs to breathe.
I walked over to her table.
I placed the bottle down on the ledger, right on top of the column of numbers she was adding.
Rhea stopped writing. She looked at the bottle. Then she looked up at me.
Her eyes were sharp, intelligent, and currently filled with ice.
"Recruit," she said, her voice quiet but deadly. "You are interfering with an audit."
"you're interfering with a party," I countered, leaning my heap against the table. "Look at you. You're wound tighter than a bowstring."
I squinted, my 'Understanding' focusing on her aura.
It was a rigid, trembling Grid of white light. But as I looked closer I saw something.
Near the base of her neck, the geometric line weren't straight. They were knotted. A cluster of her mana was backing up, creating a high-pressure blockage in her meridian flow.
"Your grid is crooked," I mumbled, pointing a dirty finger at her throat.
Rhea blinked, taken aback. "Excuse me?"
"Your flow," I explained, tracing a line in the air. "You're pushing mana up, but valve at the junction there is stuck. You're wasting... maybe fifteen units of energy just fighting your own headache."
I tapped the table. "Drop your shoulder. Rotate the flow to the left. It'll clear."
Rhea froze. Her hand instictively went to her neck. She rubbed the exact spot I had pointed to-the source of a migraine she had probably been ignoring.
She looked at me with a sudden, piercing intensity. The ice in her eyes cracked, replaced by confusion.
"How could you possibly know about that?" She whispered. "You're just a Rank 1 with melted channels."
"I see everything," I said, grinning stupidly. "Except an empty glass."
For a split second, she wasn't looking at a drunk recruit. She was looking at a puzzle. The hostility in her aura wavered, replaced by a flicker of genuine curiosity.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"I'm the guy offering you a drink," I said.
"I don't drink while I work," she said, though her voice was less sharp than before. "And I don't fraternize with thieves."
"It's not theft," I said, leaning closer. "It's redistribution of morale."
"Guards," she called out, though she hesitated for a second.
She turned away from me to signal the door.
It was the dismissal that triggered it. The turning of the back. The refusal to engage.
Don't turn away, the happy drunk thought. We're having a conversation. Just relax.
I reached out.
In my head, it was a playful gesture. A way to say, "Hey, lighten up." A relic of a life where I was an adult joking with a peer.
I slapped her on the backside.
Smack.
It wasn't hard. It was barely a tap. But the sound cut through the pavilion like a thunderclap.
The music stopped. The laughter at Valerian's table died instantly.
Rhea froze. The rigid grid of her aura shattered, exploding into a chaotic spike of pure, white-hot shock.
She turned around slowly. Her face was pale.
"You..." she whispered. "You touched me?!"
I blinked, the haze clearing just enough for me to realize that the room was staring at me.
"Just trying to help you relax," I mumbled, the grin slipping from my face.
"FILTH!"
The roar came from the door.
A massive shape blurred across the room. It was the Sorting Sergeant-the one who wanted me in Vanguard.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't ask questions. He saw a dirty recruit assaulting the General's daughter.
He grabbed me by the throat and lifted me off the ground.
"That is Lady Rhea!" he screamed, spit flying into my face. "General Aura's blood!"
Ah, I thought, dangling in the air. General. That explains the quality of the wine.
"Die!" the Sergeant roared.
He pulled back a fist the size of a ham. His strength condensed into a solid block of Peak Rank 3 force. Steel Viscera. He didn't hold back. He put his entire body weight into the punch.
He aimed for my face.
I couldn't dodge. I couldn't block.
I just clenched my jaw and flooded my facial muscles with density.
CRACK-THUD.
The punch connected.
It felt like being hit by a falling tree. My head snapped back. A molar shattered in the back of my mouth. Blood sprayed across the Sergeant's uniform.
But my neck didn't break. My skull didn't cave in.
My Alloy Flesh-super dense, mana saturated, and currently running hot on vintage wine- absorbed the kinetic energy. The force traveled through my jaw, down my spine, and grounded out through my boots.
CRACK.
The floorboards beneath my feet splintered from the transferred impact.
I hung in there in his grip, dazed, bleeding, but conscious.
The Sergeant froze. He stared at his hand. His knuckles were bruised, swelling rapidly.
I spat a mouthful of blood and a tooth on his boot. I looked at him in the eye and grinned a bloody, red-stained grin.
"is that all you got, big man?" I rasped. "I've had hangovers that hit harder."
The room gasped.
Valerian stood up, his chair scraping loudly. He looked at me not with anger, but with a shocked, curious repulsion.
"Put it down, Sergeant," Valerian said coldly. "No one can touch Rhea."
The Sergeant reached for his sword.
"Wait."
Rhea stepped forward. Her face was still pale, but her aura snapped back into a terrifyingly rigid grid of logic. She looked at me. She looked at the Sergeant's damaged hand. She looked at the cracked floorboards."
"He took a punch from the Sergeant," she said softly. "And he's still talking."
"He insulted you, Lady Rhea!" the Sergeant growled.
"He insulted the General," she corrected coldly. She rubbed her arm, composing herself. "But my father needs quotas. And dead recruits don't clear mines."
She looked at me. There was no mercy in her eyes. Only calculus.
"He's durable," she said. "Don't waste him. We are short on meat for the Vanguard."
She pointed to the west.
"Transfer him to the 7th Battalion. Let General Draven use him. Let the Hibernians kill him."
The Sergeant hesitated, then grinned. A cruel, nasty grin.
"The Suicide Squad," he said. "Fitting."
"Get him out of my sight," Rhea ordered, turning back to her ledger.
Two guards grabbed my arms. They dragged backward, out of warmth, out of the lavender scent.
I saw the glow of Valerian watching me go, sipping his wine. I saw the Sergeant rubbing his knuckles.
Then I was outside.
They dragged me through the mud, past the Logistics tents, past the warmth, and across the main road.
The air grew colder. The mana grew jagged and fearful.
They threw me into a mud pit beneath a pole.
I rolled onto my back, staring up at the night sky.
The 7th Batallion.
I lay in the filth, closing my eyes as the freezing rain began to fall.
Well, I thought, spitting blood into the mud. At least the wine was good.