Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 294: Chapter 289: Mission Mania

Location:Obsidian Academy + Mission Territories

Date/Time:Late Scorchwind, 9939 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

The Mission Hall board smelled of fresh jade lacquer and barely contained desperation.

Contracts hung in vertical rows — jade panels inscribed with mission parameters, reward amounts, and danger rankings, each one glowing faintly with the formation work that kept the ink from smudging. White-ranked contracts on the left wall: herb gathering, minor deliveries, city patrol routes. Green-ranked in the centre: beast subjugation, escort duty, resource extraction. Blue and Red on the right, locked behind a formation barrier that pulsed every time a student got too close without the appropriate clearance sigil.

Three months since enrollment. The lockout had lifted. The board was open.

Jayde stood in front of it with her hands behind her back, and Takara on her shoulder, and a feeling in her chest she recognised from another life.

Operational theatre. Asset deployment. Resource optimisation.

(Shopping.)

Both.

She pulled three contracts from the White wall and two from the Green before the registration clerk had finished his opening-day speech about safety protocols and mission parameters.

”Ashford. That’s—” The clerk counted the jade panels in her hands. ”That’s five missions. The recommended starting load is one.”

”One at a time, or one per week?”

”One at a time.”

”I’ll bring them back by Grindday.”

She was out of the hall before he finished saying ”that’s not how—”

***

Mission One. Spirit Herb collection — eastern ridge. White-ranked. Reward: fifteen merit.

The eastern ridge was an hour’s hike from the Academy’s lower gates, through forest that thickened with every step until the canopy blocked the sky and the undergrowth hummed with low-grade spiritual energy. The target: Moonpetal blossoms, a medicinal herb that grew near water sources and required careful extraction to preserve the roots.

Most students spent four hours on this mission. Walked the ridge path. Collected herbs one at a time. Walked back.

Jayde mapped the water sources from the ridge top in seven minutes — Fed tactical assessment overlaid with months of White’s terrain reading drills, the combat trainer’s voice in her memory: The land tells you everything. Read it. Six viable collection points, connected by a route that cut the distance by a third.

She had the Moonpetals bagged in ninety minutes. Thirty-two blossoms. The mission required twelve.

Takara rode her shoulder through the forest with the coiled alertness of a creature who considered himself personally responsible for quality control. He chirped once — sharp, specific — and her hand went to a blossom she’d been about to pull. Rot at the root base. Invisible from above. She left it.

”Good eye.”

He groomed his paw. Obviously.

[You’re treating herb collection like a military supply run.]

(Because it is one. Twelve blossoms at fifteen merit. Thirty-two blossoms at — well, twelve. The mission pays flat rate. But the extra twenty go into personal stock for Eden’s pill refining.)

[Efficient.]

(I learned from the best.) A beat. (Not you. Kazren.)

[Rude.]

***

Mission Two. Beast Core harvesting — Thornback Ravine. Green-ranked. Reward: forty merit.

Thornback boars. Sparkforged-tier beasts with plated spines and a bad attitude. The mission required three cores, extracted clean, delivered to the Beast Hall by sundown.

Jayde found the pack at the ravine’s southern entrance — seven boars, the largest the size of a small horse, rooting through the underbrush with the aggressive disregard of animals that had never met anything faster than themselves.

Seven targets. Three required. Take the three closest to the ravine mouth — they’re separated from the pack by twelve metres. Wind is north-to-south. Approach from the east. The terrain funnels them.

Kazren’s training sang through her movement. Not the Academy sword forms — the real work, the endless hours in the soul space where the ancient spirit had corrected her footwork with the precise disdain of a being who had trained swordmasters for forty thousand years and found her barely adequate. She moved through the underbrush without sound. Drew her blade with the controlled economy of motion that came from a thousand repetitions.

Three boars. Three clean strikes. The cores came out intact — glowing amber spheres the size of walnuts, warm with residual beast essence.

Takara had watched from a tree branch. He dropped to her shoulder as she bagged the cores, his small white body vibrating with what she’d learned to interpret as satisfaction. His blue-tipped ears tracked the remaining pack as they fled the ravine — not with fear, but with the evaluative attention of a predator assessing prey he’d chosen to spare.

(You know you weigh almost nothing, right? You could help.)

He yawned. On her shoulder. While she cleaned boar blood off her blade.

”Noted.”

***

Mission Three. Poison Sac extraction — Greenveil Marsh. Green-ranked. Reward: fifty merit.

Shadowfang toads. The size of dinner plates, toxic enough to corrode Sparkforged-tier defensive arrays, and possessed of the deeply unpleasant habit of launching themselves at anything that disturbed their nesting pools.

The marsh stank. Not the clean organic smell of rotting vegetation — the acrid chemical sourness of concentrated beast toxin leaching into stagnant water. Jayde’s boots sank into mud that sucked at her ankles, and every step released bubbles that carried a smell she was fairly certain violated several of the conventions governing acceptable substances.

Takara had relocated from her shoulder to the top of her head. His claws were anchored in her hair with the absolute conviction of a creature who would not be touching the mud. His tail hung down the side of her face like a furry pendulum.

”Comfortable?”

Silence. Royal silence. The silence of a being who would not dignify the question.

The first toad hit her barrier formation before she saw it — a grey-green blur that connected with her defensive array and sizzled. The toxin ate through the outer layer of the formation before she reinforced it. Fast. Aggressive. Not intelligent, but persistent — the toad recovered, circled, and launched again with the single-minded determination of something that had evolved to defend territory through sheer chemical hostility.

From her soul space, Kazren observed: Your Federation would have classified this ecosystem as a biological weapons testing ground. It is, in a sense. Nature simply got there first.

She extracted seven sacs. The mission required four. The extras went to Eden, who turned them into purification compounds worth three times the original mission reward and split the profit without being asked.

That girl is running a pharmaceutical operation out of a student dormitory.

(Takes one to know one.)

***

By the end of the first week, the Mission Hall clerk had stopped trying to enforce the recommended mission load. By the middle of the second week, Jayde had completed twelve contracts — a mix of White and Green that covered herb collection, beast cores, escort runs, and one memorable investigation assignment that turned out to be a lost merchant’s cart stuck in a creek bed, which she’d resolved in twenty minutes by using a formation array to lever the wheels free.

The clerk had started leaving her contracts pre-sorted on a separate desk. He didn’t look happy about it.

”Ashford.” Ryo’s voice. Economical as always — one word that served as greeting, observation, and opening move simultaneously.

He was standing at the Green board, jade panel in hand. Tawny amber eyes tracking her stack of completed mission tokens with the neutral expression of a man who was absolutely keeping count.

”Ryo.”

”Twelve?”

”Twelve.”

A nod. He pulled two more Green contracts from the board. His movements were fluid, unhurried — the trained economy of a noble who’d learned that looking like you weren’t competing was more devastating than admitting you were.

”I’m at nine,” he said. And walked out.

Kiran, leaning against the hall’s doorframe with his arms crossed and his sea-green eyes sharp, watched Ryo leave. ”He’s going to try to beat you.”

”I know.”

”You’re going to let him think he can?”

”For about a week.”

The corner of Kiran’s mouth twitched. Not a smile — Kiran didn’t smile easily — but the closest equivalent: a crack in the defensive wall that said he was amused and didn’t hate that he was.

”Eden’s at seven,” he said. ”All medical. She comes back with full herb bags and sells processed compounds the same evening. Made more merit last week than I’ve made all month.”

Of course she has.

***

Week three. The rhythm was a machine.

Dawn: Pavilion training — White’s blade drills, conditioning circuits, the wyrmlings providing distraction training by launching themselves at her knees during sword forms. Takara watched from the roof of the equipment shed, his three ribbons catching the first light. Occasionally, he’d drop a small object — a pebble, a seed pod, something that clinked — onto the ground near her feet at the worst possible moment. She’d asked him to stop. He’d blinked. He had not stopped.

Morning: Classes. Formation theory. Runology. Combat Hall — where she hid her real ability behind the Academy-standard forms Heizan had taught her to use as cover. Kazren’s opinion of the disguised technique was unprintable.

Afternoon: Missions. Three per day, sometimes four if the routes overlapped. She’d mapped the mission territories so thoroughly that she could plan optimal paths connecting multiple objectives — beast cores from Thornback Ravine, herbs from the eastern ridge, and a delivery drop in the frontier village of Ashwick, all in a single circuit that took five hours and earned a hundred and ten merit.

The combat was getting easier. Not because the beasts were weaker — because she was faster. Kazren’s training and White’s conditioning had rewired her footwork from the ground up, replacing the broad, efficient strikes of her early months with something sharper, more economical, a blade language that spoke in single syllables where she used to speak in paragraphs. The boars fell in one strike now, not three. The toads couldn’t touch her barrier. The shadowcats that lurked in the deep forest — the ones the mission board classified as ”avoid” — watched her pass from their perches and chose not to attack, which was a kind of respect she hadn’t earned a month ago.

Takara had developed a mission routine. He rode her shoulder through the forest, transferring to her head during marsh work and to a nearby tree branch during active combat. He’d return the moment the fighting stopped — landing on her shoulder with the precision of a bird of prey and the entitlement of a house cat. During herb collection, he served as quality control: one chirp for good, silence for pass, a specific low sound she’d never heard any other animal make for ”something is wrong with that plant, and you should back away.” He’d saved her from a mimicry vine that way — a parasitic growth that looked exactly like Moonpetal and would have dissolved her fingers.

She’d started bringing him treats from the mess hall. Dried fish. He ate them with the deliberate slowness of a creature establishing that tributes were acceptable but not to be considered payment for services rendered.

Evening: Back to the Pavilion. Reiko’s commentary on the day’s missions provided through the bond with the editorial precision of a creature who had opinions about everything and the vocabulary to express them.

[The toads again? You smell like marsh rot and poor decisions.]

(Four poison sacs at fifty merit says those were excellent decisions.)

[You have toad slime on Takara’s ribbon. The pink one. He’s been glaring at you for twenty minutes.]

She looked down. Takara was sitting on the table, his pink ribbon distinctly discoloured, his large blue eyes fixed on her with the focused intensity of a creature composing a very detailed grievance.

”I’ll wash it.”

He turned his back. Punishment.

***

Mission Twenty. Beast patrol — Academy perimeter. White-ranked. Reward: ten merit.

A nothing mission. Routine sweep. The kind of contract she could finish in her sleep, and had taken specifically because it was her twentieth, and she wanted the number clean.

Except.

Movement at the tree line. Not beasts — she’d cleared the patrol route of anything larger than a squirrel three circuits ago. Human movement. Careful, deliberate, positioned at the same vantage point where she’d noticed the surveillance team during her first week of patrols.

Three observers. Different faces from last time, but the same posture — the studied casualness of people pretending to be travellers while watching a fixed point. Cold tea in their cups. Suppressed essences. Professional.

Different personnel. Same position. Whoever’s watching the Academy rotates their observers on a cycle. That’s institutional, not personal. Funded. Organised. Not going away.

She filed it. Added it to the growing collection of observations she kept — the surveillance teams, the funding shifts, the Temple’s expanding influence — and continued her patrol with the measured pace of a student who hadn’t noticed anything.

Takara’s ears tracked the tree line. His tail was low. Not frightened — focused. When they passed the observation point, he pressed closer to her neck, his small body warm against her collar, and the vibration that ran through him wasn’t purring.

It was a growl.

(I know. I see them too.)

She completed the circuit. Logged the mission. Twenty.

***

”Twenty-one,” Ryo said. He set his mission tokens on the Mission Hall counter with the precise arrangement of a man delivering a final argument.

”Twenty-three,” Jayde said.

His eyes narrowed. One fraction. The slightest contraction of otherwise perfect composure.

”When?”

”Tue—” She caught herself. ”Grindday. Three back-to-back Green contracts in the southern territories.”

”Back-to-back Greens.” Ryo processed this. His hand went to the signet ring hidden under his collar — the unconscious gesture of a man recalculating. ”You routed them.”

”Optimal path. Three objectives, one circuit.”

Silence. Ryo looked at her stack. Looked at his. Looked at the Mission Board, where a fresh batch of Green contracts had just been posted.

”Hammerday,” he said. ”I’ll have twenty-five.”

He left. Kiran, who’d been watching from the bench with the expression of someone enjoying a sport he didn’t fully understand, shook his head.

”You’ve broken him.”

”He’ll be fine.”

”He polished his boots twice this morning. He only does that when he’s strategising.”

Eden appeared from the Medicine Hall corridor, herb bag over one shoulder, blue eyes carrying the serene calm of a woman who’d made two hundred merit this week and hadn’t needed to fight a single boar. ”Are they still competing?”

”Ryo just declared Hammerday as his deadline for twenty-five,” Kiran said.

”I had twenty-five by Quenchday.” Eden adjusted her herb bag. ”But mine were all medical-grade. The merit-to-effort ratio is significantly better if you don’t insist on punching things.”

She’s not wrong.

(She’s never wrong. That’s the problem.)

Mission Maniac. That’s what the clerk had started calling her — not to her face, but to the students who asked why one person’s completed missions took up an entire desk. The name had spread the way names did in enclosed spaces: fast, distorted, and with the unstoppable momentum of a reputation that had stopped being a joke and started being a warning.

Twenty-three missions. Thirty days. Enough merit to cover next month’s expenses with a surplus that went straight into materials for the next Hearthstone prototype.

The forge was waiting. The missions were the fuel.