Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 38: Chapter 38 — Questions Arlen Can’t Answer

He woke a little past dawn to the low, steady murmur of a camp already stirring, his ribs a dull, persistent ache rather than the sharp agony of the night before, and found Aria checking on him again before he’d even fully surfaced from sleep.

”Better than I expected,” she said, pressing gently at his side and noting his lack of flinch with something like professional satisfaction. ”You’ll want to move carefully today regardless. Whatever’s speeding your recovery, it isn’t infinite.”

”How’s Ilvera?”

”Holding steady. Not out of danger, but no worse than last night, which counts as good news right now.” Aria studied him a moment. ”You should eat something. Properly, not just enough to be polite about it. Your body’s clearly working hard at whatever it’s doing.”

Arlen managed a small meal from the camp’s field rations, and found Reya waiting nearby once he’d finished, her usual sharp confidence dimmed by the same exhaustion Arlen suspected showed plainly on his own face.

”Heard you got a good look at it,” she said, settling beside him. ”Whole camp’s talking about it, honestly. Nobody’s ever described anything quite like what you’re describing.”

”I wish I had better answers than what I gave Lyra.”

”She mentioned that too.” Reya’s gaze sharpened slightly, though not unkindly. ”Also mentioned you walked away from a hit that should’ve killed you outright. People are going to ask about that, Arlen. Not just Lyra. Half the camp saw the state you were in last night.”

He’d known this conversation was coming, in some form, since Petra’s questions the night before, and he found himself grateful, at least, that it was Reya asking rather than someone with less patience for an incomplete answer.

”I don’t fully understand it myself,” he admitted, which was, if not the whole truth, at least an honest piece of it. ”I started noticing changes to my stamina and recovery a while back. Faster healing, more endurance than training alone should account for. Never made a formal claim about it because I wasn’t certain what it actually was.”

”And now?”

”Now I think it’s real. Aura-related, probably, given what it looks like in practice.” He kept his tone even, unremarkable, the same careful economy he’d used with Cobb weeks earlier, though it cost him considerably more effort this time to sound as casual about it as he had then. ”Might take a formal evaluation to say for certain. I haven’t exactly had the chance.”

Reya studied him a moment longer, something thoughtful behind her tired eyes. ”You know half the guild already assumes you’re some flavor of Dual-Affinity, right? Cobb’s mentioned it more than once, and it’s not exactly a secret conversation.”

”I’d heard,” Arlen said, careful to let the acknowledgment sit as simple fact rather than confirmation or denial.

”Doesn’t much matter to me either way,” Reya said, with a small, tired shrug. ”Rare talents happen. Doesn’t make you less of the person who got Ilvera out alive last night. That’s what people actually care about, whatever they’re speculating about the rest.”

He found some genuine comfort in that, though the underlying unease didn’t fully leave him — the awareness that whatever people chose to believe about him now, the gap between that belief and the truth was only growing wider, not narrower, the longer this went on.

Lyra found him again mid-morning, her manner brisker now, the crisis clearly demanding more of her attention than any single adventurer’s unusual talents, however curious they’d made her the night before.

”I won’t press you further today,” she said, without preamble. ”We’ve larger concerns right now than sorting out the exact nature of your abilities. But I want you to understand something plainly, Arlen.” Her gaze held his, steady and direct. ”Whatever you’re capable of, I’ll need it properly documented eventually, formally, through the guild’s evaluation process. Not because I doubt your account of last night. Because talents this unusual, left unexamined, have a way of becoming problems nobody saw coming.”

”I understand,” Arlen said, and found, beneath the careful surface calm he maintained, a genuine flicker of unease at how closely her words matched fears he’d carried privately since the very first night by the river.

”Good.” She studied him a moment longer, something almost gentler beneath her usual composed authority. ”For what it’s worth, whatever’s kept you alive twice now — the wasps, and last night both — I’m glad of it. The guild needs people who survive things they shouldn’t. We’ll sort out the details properly, once there’s time to do so.”

She left him with that, moving on to the next urgent matter demanding her attention, and Arlen sat alone for a while afterward, turning over the exchange with the same careful attention he gave most things, though exhaustion made the effort considerably harder than usual.

She’s not satisfied, he thought. She’s choosing to set it aside because there’s a bigger problem right now. That’s not the same as believing me.

He thought, too, of Reya’s easy acceptance, of Cobb’s genuine, uncomplicated respect weeks earlier, of how readily people seemed willing to fold his strangeness into a category the world already understood and accepted, simply because the alternative — actually questioning it properly — required effort most people weren’t inclined to spend on a friend they already liked.

That’s the real protection, I think, he wrote, later that day, once his journal had finally been retrieved along with the rest of his gear. Not the story itself. The fact that people want to believe the easy version, because the easy version doesn’t ask anything difficult of them. Lyra’s different. She’s the kind of person who’ll eventually ask the difficult question anyway, once she has time to spare for it.

I don’t know what I’ll say when that day comes. I only know it’s coming, and that whatever answer I give will need to be better than the one I managed to give tonight.

He closed the journal, glancing toward the tent where Ilvera still lay recovering, and toward the distant, forest-shrouded horizon where something ancient and unexplained still waited, unresolved, in the deepening dark beyond the camp’s careful perimeter.