Fox freezes mid-step.
"...Oh yeah."
The Saintess blinks. "What."
"I gotta go see Pig and Cat first," he says like he's talking about the weather. "Promised I'd help them loot a tower."
Silence.
The wind hums between broken stones. Far below, the undercity breathes—steam vents, mana runoff, the distant clang of life scraping by under a floating kingdom that pretends it isn't crushing anyone.
"You're joking," she says flatly.
Fox looks genuinely offended. "I don't joke about Pig and Cat."
She stares at him. "...Those are not real names."
"They are where I'm from."
She pinches the bridge of her nose. "You are in possession of a classified artifact. You are under Saintess supervision. You do not get to detour to—" she gestures vaguely, "—animals."
"They're people," Fox corrects. "Pig's just built like a brick wall and Cat lands on her feet. Plus Cat owes me. Plus—" he taps his temple "—tower's gonna destabilize tonight."
That makes her pause.
"...Explain," she says carefully.
Fox shrugs. "Mana pressure's wrong. Ever since Fisscasia rerouted its lower flow, the old spires started compensatin'. That tower's already humming. It'll pop by dawn. Figured we loot it before it kills half the block."
She looks at him sharply. "You can sense that?"
"Yeah," he says. "Can't rely on magic like you. Gotta be good at somethin'."
Her eyes narrow, reassessing. Fox watches her calculate—weighing his utility against his inconvenience, probably. He's used to that math. Most people come out thinking he's more trouble than he's worth.
Most people don't carry divine cannons.
"...Even if I allowed this," she says, "we would still need to reach Alexandria quickly afterward. I have a return crystal."
Fox winces. "Ah. About that."
She produces it anyway—a clean, faceted shard of pale blue light, humming with authority. The thing radiates expensive, the kind of magic item that costs more than Fox's entire district makes in a year. "Once we're done here, I tune it and we—"
"Hold up," Fox says, holding up a hand. "Not tuned for my Arc."
She scoffs. "Do you even know your Arc?"
"No," he shakes his head. "Which is exactly why that's a problem."
She frowns. "Explain."
Fox squats, picks up a pebble, tosses it through a weak mana current visible only to him—one of the threads leaking from the spire above. It bends—not teleports, not burns—just... slides wrong. Moves three inches to the left of where physics says it should land.
"Return crystals lock onto Arc resonance," he says, watching her face. "Yours is keyed to your output profile. If I grab on and my Arc don't match—"
"...You'd be displaced," she says slowly.
"Atomized," he corrects. "Or worse. Stuck between positions. Like a thought that never finished bein' had."
She goes very still. The crystal's light dims slightly in her palm, as if sensing her suddenly uncertain grip.
"And you knew this," she says quietly.
"Yeah."
"And you didn't tell me."
"You were already mad," he says reasonably. "Didn't wanna stack."
She stares at the crystal in her palm, then closes her fingers around it. For a moment Fox thinks she might crush it just to prove a point—but no, those things are expensive. She tucks it away instead, and he pretends not to notice how carefully she does it.
"...So teleportation is impossible," she says.
"For both of us? Yeah. Big no."
A long, heavy silence. Somewhere in the undercity, a whistle screams—shift change at the manufactory. Fox counts the beats. Three long, two short. Third shift's starting early. Something's wrong down there, but that's not his problem right now.
Then she exhales—slow, controlled, irritated.
"...So," she says, eyes cutting to him, "you're saying we must travel by road."
Fox grins. "Old-fashioned voyage."
"Through contested territories."
"Yep."
"Bandits. Towers. Spirits. Monsters."
"Uh-huh."
"Multiple weeks."
Fox shrugs. "All the way to Alexandria."
She closes her eyes.
For exactly three seconds.
Fox watches her jaw work, watches her fingers flex around the cannon's grip. He's suddenly aware of how close they're standing—close enough that if she fires, there won't be enough of him left to identify. Close enough that he can see the fine silver threading in her robes, the kind that repels dirt and blood and probably doesn't come in his size.
When she opens them, something has shifted—not softer, not warmer, but decided.
"Fine," she says. "We go see Pig and Cat. We loot your tower."
Fox pumps a fist. "Knew you were reasonable."
"But," she continues coldly, stepping closer until the cannon is inches from his chest, "if this is a trick—if you waste my time—I will not warn you next time."
Fox looks down at the cannon, then back up at her face. Up close, her eyes aren't just gold—they're layered, like someone poured molten metal into glass. Pretty, in a dangerous sort of way. The kind of pretty that gets you killed if you're dumb enough to keep staring.
"Fair," he says. "Just so you know—Pig's gonna try to hug you."
"...He will not."
"He will," Fox says. "Real friendly."
She sighs, and for the first time since she pointed that cannon at him, she sounds tired. "...Lead the way, Scavenger."
Fox turns, already walking, voice light. His feet know these paths—broken stone, twisted rebar, the places where the mana pooling will burn your boots if you step wrong.
"Name's Fox," he says over his shoulder. "And hey—don't worry."
She follows, reluctantly. He hears her footsteps—too light, too perfect. She's using magic to walk, probably doesn't even realize she's doing it. The undercity's gonna eat her alive if she doesn't learn to feel the ground.
"The road to Alexandria's long," Fox adds, grin audible in his voice, "but it's way more fun with company."
She doesn't answer.
But she doesn't stop following either.
The market district crouches in the shadow of Fisscasia's lowest tier like a tumor that learned to thrive. Fox leads them through passages that shouldn't exist—gaps between condemned buildings, routes through mana-scorched courtyards where the stone remembers screaming.
The Saintess follows without comment, but he catches her looking up more than once, tracking the impossible geometry of the floating city above. Fisscasia gleams in the afternoon light, all golden spires and crystalline domes, beautiful and unreachable. From down here, it looks like someone pinned heaven to the sky and forgot about everything underneath.
"First time in the undercity?" he asks.
"No," she says. Then, after a pause, "First time this deep."
"Shows."
"How."
Fox points at her feet. "You're not stepping right. Magic's doing the work for you. Down here, that's expensive."
She glances down, frowning. "I'm conserving mana."
"You're bleeding it," he corrects. "Micro-adjustments, balance corrections, probably air-filtering too if I'm guessing right. Little stuff adds up. By the time we hit the tower you'll be running at eighty percent and wondering why you're tired."
She's quiet for a moment. Then, deliberately, she settles her weight into her next step. Fox hears the difference immediately—leather on stone instead of that whisper-soft magical glide.
"Better," he says.
"Don't patronize me."
"Wasn't. You're learning."
They round a corner and the noise hits them—the heart of the market in full swing. Vendors hawking salvage, children running messages between stalls, the smell of food that's more hope than nutrition. This late in the day most of the legitimate trade is winding down, but the black market's just getting started.
The Saintess stays close, one hand on her cannon, scanning the shadows like she expects an ambush.
She's not wrong to.
"Your friends," she says. "How do you know them?"
Fox considers lying, then shrugs. "Pig pulled me out of a collapsed tunnel three years back. Cat taught me which mana flows you can touch without dying. They're good people."
They keep walking.
A kid darts past—couldn't be more than eight, carrying something wrapped in oil-stained cloth. Fox recognizes him. Sparrow's youngest. Running copper wire to the Blue sector, probably. The kid doesn't acknowledge Fox, but his path shifts slightly—giving them space, showing respect.
The Saintess notices. "They know you."
"I live here," Fox says simply.
"No. I mean—" She gestures vaguely at the market around them. "They defer to you. Even the children."
Fox shrugs, uncomfortable. "I help when I can. They remember."
"Help how?"
"Sense mana flows. Find safe paths through the ruins. Sometimes I can tell when a building's about to collapse, or when runoff's gonna spike. Stuff like that." He kicks a loose stone. "Can't do magic like you, but I can keep people from dying to it. That counts for somethin' down here."
She's quiet for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice has lost some of its edge.
"The tower tonight," she says. "How many people live near it?"
"Tower Seventeen? Maybe two, three thousand. Depends on the day."
"And if it destabilizes?"
Fox doesn't sugarcoat it. "Half of 'em dead in the initial blast. Rest die slow from mana poisoning. The ones that survive wish they hadn't."
Her grip tightens on the cannon. "And your plan is to loot it."
"My plan is to stabilize it while we loot it," Fox corrects. "The mana's gonna crystallize anyway. Might as well harvest what we can and vent the rest safely. Otherwise it's just waste and corpses."
"You can do that? Stabilize it?"
"Yeah," Fox says. "With your help."
She stops again. "Explain."
Fox pulls them into an alley—more private, away from listening ears. The shadows are deeper here, the mana runoff creating patterns of light on the walls like oil on water.
"The focusing lens you want?" Fox says quietly. "It's not just for seeing. It's a Solomon-era mana director. Point it at compressed mana, it creates a release channel. Controlled. Directional."
The Saintess's eyes widen. "That's—those are theoretical. I've only read about them in historical texts."
"Well, this one's real. And it works." Fox meets her gaze. "But I can't use it alone. Need someone who can crack the crystal sphere without detonating it. Someone with precision. Someone with a cannon that fires compressed Arc energy."
Understanding dawns on her face.
"You're asking me to help you," she says slowly.
"Yeah."
"Using the artifact I'm supposed to confiscate."
"Yeah."
"To conduct an unauthorized operation in a condemned structure."
"Pretty much."
She stares at him. Fox can see her working through it—the protocol violations, the risks, the implications. Everything she's been trained to avoid.
"Why should I?" she asks finally.
Fox considers his answer carefully. "Because you shifted your aim," he says quietly. "When you coulda killed me on that strut, you didn't. You wanted me scared, not dead. That tells me you're the kind of Saintess who thinks about who gets hurt."
"That's not—"
"And because," Fox continues, "three thousand people are gonna die tonight if we don't do somethin'. They're not in Alexandria's census. They don't show up in any official records. But they're still people. Still worth savin'."
The Saintess is silent.
Above them, Fisscasia gleams, uncaring.
Around them, the undercity breathes.
"If I do this," she says finally, "and Alexandria finds out—"
"Then you tell 'em you field-tested a classified artifact and saved three hundred lives while retrieving it," Fox says. "Sounds like a successful mission to me."
She laughs—short, bitter. "You don't know how the Concordat works."
"No," Fox admits. "But I know how people work. And I think you're better than your orders."
She looks at him then—really looks at him. Not as a target, not as an inconvenience, but as someone who just said something that mattered.
"You're very annoying," she says quietly.
"I get that a lot."
"And manipulative."
"Also yes."
"And you're asking me to violate multiple protocols on the word of a scavenger I met an hour ago."
Fox grins. "When you put it like that, it sounds bad."
"It is bad."
"Yeah," he agrees. "But it's also right."
The Saintess closes her eyes. Fox watches her jaw work, watches her make the calculation. When she opens them again, something has changed—not softer, exactly, but decided.
"If this goes wrong," she says, "I'm blaming you entirely."
"Fair."
"And you're giving me the artifact afterward. No arguments."
"Deal."
"And—" she steps closer, voice dropping to something dangerous, "—if you're lying to me about any of this, I will hunt you across every territory between here and Alexandria and make sure you regret it."
Fox meets her eyes and doesn't blink. "I'm not lying."
They stand there for a moment, the weight of the decision settling between them.
Then the Saintess nods once, sharp and final.
"Show me where this tower is," she says.
Fox's grin returns. "Follow me."