TWO

Kon stalked the silent halls with quiet ease, his eyes roamed the shining steel halls, his blurred reflection his only companion. There were no signs on where to go, no easy path to Diur. Instead as he walked across the halls, he focused on trying to sense excess energy. Alice and Diur had been able to do it, but he had never picked up the trick.

Now off world, where there was no rampant rift energy to consume and obscure his duller senses, he could feel it. A thin tendril of pressure against his senses, all Kon had to do was follow it to its source. It was far from accurate, worse than following a scent, but he could do it easily enough.

Thiery didn't keep any staff around aside from his invisible stewards who only appeared when they wanted too. Kon didn't think that they were unaware of him leaving his room, but no one had come out to confront him about it yet. So he followed his feeling until he got to a bank of lifts. She was somewhere above him and the simple instructions on the mechanical panel were easy enough to use.

With every floor he reached he took a moment to see if Diur's presence felt like it was closer, but she always felt above him. When he reached the final level of the lift he left, following his senses until he came upon a metal hatch.

It was three times the size of his own small door and the console next to it only had a single button to press that sent a familiar chime sounding. Diur opened it before the chime even had time to finish sounding. The Ulmna woman stood there in a fresh set of robes, similar to the ones she had been wearing when they had found her.

She was clean for once, not covered in dirt and gore, her pale blue skin looked healthy, the opal octagonal markings seemed to glow faintly as she looked at him with wide emerald eyes. A faint nervous smile tugged at the corners of her lips as stepped away from the hatch, inviting him in.

Kon followed her in, noticing that her blood red hair had recently been cut with what appeared to be a ruler, falling in a perfect line across the top of her shoulders. He didn't remark on the strange haircut as he looked over the room she had been put up in.

It was much larger than his own, about ten times the size of his own with a large bed in the center of the room, a thick red blanket covering it with a heap of slick pillows the same color as her hair.

A bolted in bookshelf covered the entire length of one wall, a protective layer of glass over it. Hundreds of thick books filled it, wide covers with golden letters down them. Kon froze at the sight of wealth sitting there.

"When was the last time we printed books?" Kon found himself drifting over to look at the books, his eyes glancing over titles he didn't recognize.

"Jason said these are from the old world. Replicas anyway. The originals are on the World Ships in stasis storage. Still quite rare, he assured me," Diur said as she came to stand near him. Their elbows nearly brushed as they looked over the long bookshelf.

"How come you got the suite and I'm stuck in the closet?" Kon asked, only half jokingly.

"Did you miss the part where my ancestor ascended into the B-Grade causing a continent-spanning storm?"

"That's enough to get the suite?" Kon asked only half jokingly.

"Yes. No one wishes to insult a cultivator at that level of power. No medicine or science in the world can replicate the extended life of a cultivator, nor their power. Who wishes to anger a semi-immortal being with the power to crush continents under their heel?" Diur said with a sly smile.

"The young master treatment?" Kon asked, remembering the phrase Alice had thrown around.

"Yes. It can be nice at times," Diur said as she drifted away from him and toward her bed. She bent down and reached under the bed, pulling out a drawer and the duffel bag he had seen her carrying around during the final fight atop of the cannon tower at Camp Alpha.

She pulled it open and ruffled inside of it for a moment as Kon looked at her, curiosity starting to rise. There were clothes there, filled to the brim, holopads, laser rifle batteries, and other odds and ends. She pulled a second zipper and reached inside of a second pocket and pulled out a familiar holopad. Kon felt his mouth dry up as he looked at her.

"Here," Diur said, tossing the pad at him with a flick of her wrist. Kon caught it, grabbing it and instantly unlocking it and scrambling through the menus to find the videos of the rune covered door.

Stolen novel; please report.

"I made a brief stop at the locker before I made it back to you. My ancestor's presence kept your Inquisitors from being too invasive. At least while we were in orbit of the planet she's on."

"Thank you," Kon managed to croak out as he turned off the screen, intent to look at it later.

"It's yours. I also didn't want to have this hanging over us when you came to ask me the questions I'm sure are burning in your heart," Diur continued as she sat on the edge of her bed, interlacing her fingers and putting them in her lap. Kon looked at her and realized how small she looked, contrite. The small smiles weren't of mirth or humor, but had an edge of sadness in them.

"Do you want to come with me?" Kon said. All the other thoughts and questions he had fell away instantly as he looked at her.

"Yes. Do you have any other questions for me?" Diur asked, this time her smile did have humor.

"I did. But I don't anymore. You made your choice. Then you made another one. You showed me who you were, all of it. I can live with that," Kon said slowly, each word coming with a painful tearing in his chest. He had been nursing that anger, that sense of betrayal since he'd arrived on the ship and every word he said broke it apart. The days on the ship in confinement had made him think about that ball of anger, and no matter how badly he wanted to nurture it, he realized it wasn't only her he had been mad at.

Diur pursed her lips, looking at him for a moment before closing her eyes and nodding her head solemnly. She sighed deeply, keeping her head down as the silence between them stretched out. Kon waited patiently.

"I owe you," Diur began but Kon cut her off.

"You don't owe me anything. We will save each other's lives and we're not going to keep count. You have helped me with my training and you came back. Alice trained us both," Kon said the final sentence quietly.

"She did. I wish to see her mission completed. With your cultivation," Diur said and Kon felt a hungry burst of ambition in his chest. He had the holopad with the data and his friend next to him, someone who would continue to help him grow. A sense of hope started to fill him that hadn't been there since Alice's death.

"Well, we're going to need more information on body cultivation. And runes," Kon said as he sat down on the bed, leaving an arm's length between them. The bed sank under his weight. A flash of jealousy shot through him as he ran his fingers across the thick, comfortable bedding.

"I can try to do that. Jason is quite willing to let me send a message back to my clan. I haven't taken him up on it yet. I could arrange to have a shipment of materials reach us, if you're interested?" Diur asked. Kon was stuck on her using the man's first name. Or his interest in letting her communicate with her clan.

"Your clan will be willing to do that?" Kon asked.

"My ancestor is allowing me to aboard this ship and leave the system. That's an implicit seal of approval as far as anyone will care," Diur said.

"That will be more than enough to have them send basic body cultivation techniques in a data packet to a rendezvous point. I will have to ask Jason the exact coordinates, but it can be arranged."

"Then all I need is a rune instructor. Someone we can trust," Kon said.

"Alice's brother-in-arms, Leo?" Diur guessed.

"If we can. I don't think I will have much say in this honestly. My contract doesn't really leave me with a whole lot of rights, not until I finish my training and become a Knight," Kon said.

"That could become problematic. We will have to see if we can nudge fate in the proper direction," Diur said.

"What about your training?" Kon asked. Diur groaned and flopped into her bed. The flop didn't cause the bed to move at all, the energy absorbed by the bed. Kon felt another pang of jealousy over the bed.

"I'm in E-Grade. Most of my training is fairly simple. Absorb more energy. I have a cultivation technique and several martial techniques that I need to hone. More fighting and clearing rifts, absorbing energy. It is boring for the most part, a repetitive cycle of gradual growth and shoring up one's foundation. Once I push out of E-Grade I will need to find an instructor to show me the path through, but for now I am fine," Diur explained.

"That sounds nowhere near as horrific as what I'm doing," Kon said. Diur laughed and shook her head in amusement.

"Body cultivators can become quite powerful physically, rarely are they able to use projection techniques in a suitable manner, but I don't think you need to worry about that with your runes," Diur said.

"Projection techniques?" Kon asked.

"Shaping of the aura you see and projecting it away from yourself. Currently I am learning to use my technique to extend my sword's blade. Eventually I will be able to free the energy projection and launch it out in a ranged attack," Diur explained.

"Still, why don't you have to dredge up sludge out of your body?" Kon complained.

"I did. When I first balanced out my body and began to cultivate rift energy. When I was six," Diur responded, her laugh filling the room again. The two of them relaxed and chatted and Kon felt good not having the weight of that anger in his chest any longer.

It wasn't completely expunged, there were traces of it still there, but the heart of the knot or rage had broken apart. Diur was with him, the only remnants of his time on the planet left. Aside from his family, on some distant humanitarian ship, she was all he had.

So they sat in her room and talked quietly, about their childhoods, favorite foods, and all the other small bits of trivia that formed the beginning of a friendship. It felt weird to Kon to make these connections so long after they had known each other, but aside from the small snippets they'd shared on Crucible, this was the first time they took the time to get to know each other.

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