Kane sat silently near the fire. After spending the rest of the day searching for Michael, they had finally returned to the temporary base they had set up to rest. Ostensibly, they were sleeping, but Kane knew no one would be getting much sleep tonight. Luke was likely the only one who wasn't rattled by the occurrence, and he generally got a lot less sleep than he should anyway.Eve was frustrated, and not only because the creatures had beat her.
Actually, she didn't seem frustrated at all that the thing had beat her. She seemed rather excited to have been beaten half to death in one blow, actually. That didn't exactly surprise Kane, but it was just more confirmation. No, she was much more upset about Michael's disappearance, and the zombie's failure to turn up again. Eve had enough explosive growth potential that she could, and sometimes had, defeated someone who had destroyed her badly on the very same day, often only minutes or hours later. And that wasn't even taking her full name, Evelyn, into account. That being the case, she hated people who didn't show up for a second match. She took it as a personal affront, which, to be fair, it technically was. They were basically saying that she wasn't worth the time to defeat again if they showed up for the second one. Her only satisfaction at that point was to call them a coward, loudly, publicly, and repeatedly.
When he had been helping to tutor her, on special request from a councilwoman, she had been brash enough that, although he hated doing it, he had had to agree with the others that she likely wouldn't go very well with a powerful charge.
Eve's family had had a long history of being mercenaries, and being the best. They were one of the few guardian families who had continuously output mercenaries, which were considered to be the least honorable guardians, out of all of the types, and they were the only family who lauded being a mercenary. Others had short historic records, but they buried them if they were a large family, or just presented the guardians who had made it to having a true charge first, if they were a small family. For some it was a great honor to be named a guardian and receive a charge instead of becoming a mercenary. Not the Lentions. They preferred doing the grunt work and holding up the associate families financially by training, equipping, and even sometimes breeding the greatest mercenaries, whether they were assassins or bodyguards. A Lention worked for pay, and although that had become a sort of disparagement, they were proud of it. By doing this, the Lentions had become one of the few among the associate families who had their name in the general directory.
Even more than those that were large or popular, families who were in the directory had a certain stability and credibility that was hard to find within the associate families. The name Lention, while it didn't carry as much weight as one such as Verteider, was recognized and respected, and could get you places.
Naturally, Eve's mother had disowned her as soon as she learned of her failure to become a mercenary. And while to some that may sound like a good thing at first glance, it was very much not.
You couldn't test out of being a mercenary. There was no threshold beyond which you had to be a personal guardian. There was a lower limit for personal guardians, but there wasn't an upper limit on mercenaries. As long as you said you wanted to be one, and Eve had, although she had done so reluctantly under her mother's concentrated pressure, you could be, assuming you weren't pathetically weak.
It was a terrible thing when a job broke a mercenary. Some returned with dead, soulless eyes. But it would be much worse if a mercenary broke a client. A breach like that could destroy the secrecy of the associate families, if investigated too closely.
Eve had been deemed too strange to be a mercenary. In the same way that some clients were unreasonable, some people who wanted to be mercenaries were unreasonable. Those people weren't allowed to become a part of the associate families' mercenary guild, but they could become a personal guardian if they were strong enough.
And Eve was easily strong enough.
So began the pain that he wished he hadn't seen coming. Eve's pain.