He made it to midmorning before Mira found him.

  He'd been in the study, working through another stack of correspondence and building out the middle column of his journal — the things he didn't know, which kept growing in both length and urgency — when the knock at the door happened. He knew it was Mira before he opened it because there were exactly two people in this building whose knocks sounded like they were making a structural decision about the door. Rael's were loud and careless. Mira's were precise.

  He opened it. She was in full armor, which at this hour meant she'd been in the yard since before he'd woken up, and she was holding two practice swords, which meant this was not a social call.

  There it is. The training yard situation. I knew this was coming. I've been dreading this since I woke up. Vael trains — apparently this is a thing that happens regularly — and Mira Solenne is the one who trains with him, and she's standing in my doorway with practice swords and an expression like a closed door and I cannot tell her no without it being strange and I cannot tell her yes without having to physically demonstrate abilities I have no idea how to access deliberately.

  "You skipped the morning session," she said.

  "I had things to handle."

  "You have things to handle every morning." She held out one of the practice swords. It was wooden, weighted, clearly used. "An hour."

  An hour. One hour of sparring with the Covenant's battle commander who reinforces her own body with Iron Force magic and hits hard enough to shatter stone. Against me, a twenty-year-old from Seoul whose most physically demanding activity in the last year was carrying a convenience store bag up four flights of stairs because his building's elevator was broken. This is going to go badly.

  He took the sword.

  The yard was at the eastern side of the Keep — a wide stone square open to the sky, morning light hitting it at a low angle that made the shadows long and the air cold. A few other Covenant members were using the space, spaced out enough for privacy, doing individual drills or sparring in pairs. They noticed Junho arrive. The noticing was subtle — no one stopped what they were doing — but the awareness shifted through the yard the way it shifted through every room he'd walked into since he got here.

  Everyone always knows he's there. Vael walks into a space and the space adjusts around him. I'm still not used to this. In my actual life I could walk into a room and no one would look up. I am now apparently constitutionally incapable of going unnoticed and I genuinely don't know how to feel about it.

  Mira positioned herself across from him on the marked training ground, settled into a stance that communicated a complete absence of wasted movement, and looked at him with those flat grey eyes.

  "Ready," she said. Not a question.

  No. Absolutely not. I am the least ready I have ever been for anything in my life.

  "Go," he said.

  She came at him fast — not her actual speed, he could tell even now, some restraint in it, the way someone moved when they were used to calibrating for a sparring partner rather than an enemy. The strike was toward his left side, clean and hard, and Junho's body moved before he did.

  That was the only way to describe it. His body moved and he was along for the ride.

  The practice sword came up and deflected the strike at an angle that redirected the force rather than absorbing it. His feet shifted. His weight redistributed. And then somehow he was inside her guard — not because he'd thought it through, not because he knew what he was doing, but because Vael's body had been doing this for years and the muscle memory was stored somewhere below conscious thought, operating on a completely different track from the panicked Korean twenty-year-old running the commentary.

  What the — okay. Okay, the body knows how to do this. The body has been doing this for years. The body just blocked Mira Solenne and moved inside her guard without me making a single decision about it. This is. I don't know whether this is the best news I've received since I got here or the most unsettling.

  Mira reset, and there was something in her posture that was new — a fractional increase in attention, the kind that came from being surprised in a way she hadn't expected and was reassessing around.

  They went again.

  Junho stopped trying to think about it after the third exchange. Every time he tried to consciously direct what his body was doing, it stuttered — too slow, too deliberate, missing the rhythm that the body had built up over years. When he just let go and stopped trying to drive, it worked. The blocks happened. The footwork happened. The counterstrikes happened. He was not doing any of it on purpose and it was working far better than anything he'd attempted consciously since arriving.

  So the way this functions is: if I panic and try to control it, it breaks. If I relax and let the body run on instinct, it operates. That's — actually that's a perfect metaphor for everything about this situation. The moment I start overthinking I'm done. The moment I let the muscle memory or the plot knowledge or the borrowed competence just work without me second-guessing it, it holds together.

  That's either a useful insight or a very thin excuse to stop trying to understand what I'm doing. Probably both.

  Fifteen minutes in, Mira called a stop.

  She wasn't breathing hard. He wasn't either — another feature of a body that was significantly more physically capable than the one he'd had yesterday — but she was looking at him with the expression that had been developing since the council meeting, the one that said she was collecting data and processing it into a conclusion she wasn't ready to state yet.

  "Your weight distribution is different," she said.

  "Is it."

  "You're not fighting from the front foot the way you usually do. You're letting the form carry it." A pause that had edges. "It's cleaner."

  She's complimenting me again. Mira Solenne, who communicates in observations rather than opinions, is noting that I'm fighting better than Vael did. Because I'm not fighting — I'm just not interfering with the fighting. I'm a passenger in a very well-trained body and apparently abdicating control produces better results than actually trying. This is a sentence I never expected to think.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "I've been thinking about efficiency," Junho said. It was vague enough to mean nothing and specific enough to sound deliberate, which was becoming his native language.

  Mira considered this. "Again," she said.

  They went for the full hour.

  By the end, the yard had mostly cleared out — the other Covenant members filtering away to whatever the rest of their morning looked like — and the sun had climbed high enough that the shadows had shortened and the stone was warming under the light. Junho's arms had the mild, distant ache of muscles that had worked but not strained, and the clarity that came after physical exertion that he'd been missing since arriving in this body was doing useful things to his brain.

  Okay. Things I now know. The body runs on instinct in physical situations and the instinct is good. If I don't interfere it functions. I should not try to throw a punch with conscious intention, I should just not stop the punch from happening. This applies probably to the magic too — the Crimson Gaze happened when I was stressed and not trying, which means the blood affinity activates in the same way. The danger is if it activates when I don't want it to, or if someone asks me to demonstrate something specific that requires deliberate control I don't have.

  I need to not be in a situation that requires deliberate magic use until I figure out if there's a way to access it on purpose. Which means I need to avoid direct confrontations for as long as possible. Which means I need the hero to stay in his early chapters. I have — weeks, probably. Maybe a month. I need to use that time better than I used yesterday.

  Mira sheathed the practice swords under her arm and looked at him with that grey, evaluating gaze.

  "You were distracted for the first three exchanges," she said. "Then you stopped."

  "I know."

  "Whatever you were thinking about — stop thinking about it during sparring."

  "Noted."

  She nodded once. Turned to go. Then — doorframe effect, except there was no doorframe in a training yard, just the archway back into the Keep, and Mira apparently carried the doorframe energy with her:

  "Rael said something about Ashthorn," she said. Without inflection. Without turning around.

  I told Rael not to say anything until the council meeting and he held out for approximately two hours, which is probably a personal record for him.

  "Council," Junho said. "Two days."

  "Understood." She walked away, and the quality of her walk had changed — a slight increase in purpose, the way a person moved when they'd just been handed a piece of information that rearranged other information they already had. She disappeared through the archway without looking back.

  She's going to spend the next two days preparing. Whatever she prepares is going to be thorough and probably alarming. That's fine. Mira Solenne being prepared for the hero is one of the things that keeps the Covenant alive long enough for me to figure out how to get out of volume seven. It's supposed to happen. It's in the story.

  I just have to make sure the story goes the way it's supposed to. Or close enough that I survive it.

  ?

  Lyss found him before lunch.

  He was back in the study — back in the chair that had failed him as a bed, with the correspondence and the journal and the increasingly organized list of things he needed to know — when she knocked, came in without waiting for an answer the way she always seemed to, and set the stone on the desk in front of him.

  She sat down. Opened the small notebook she'd carried in with her. Looked at him.

  "The mark," she said, "is older than the Covenant. Older than the current kingdom structure. The root form places it at the Interregnum period — approximately four hundred years ago, during the collapse of the old empire."

  Four hundred years. That's. Okay. So whatever this is predates Vael, predates the Covenant, predates everything I know from the webcomic by several hundred years. The story's oldest established history goes back maybe one fifty, two hundred years. This is outside the frame entirely.

  "What does it say," Junho said.

  "The primary inscription translates roughly to: held until the blood returns." She looked at him steadily over the tops of her glasses. "The secondary marks are a location. They describe a place within the Keep — the original foundations, below the current vault level. There's a sub-level."

  Below the vault level. Below the basement I already went into. There's another level under that and it's been sealed for four hundred years and apparently the condition for opening it is the blood returning, which is either a metaphor for something or — oh. Oh, that's not a metaphor.

  Blood magic. Vael's affinity. The body's affinity. Four hundred years ago someone sealed something in the foundations of what is now Ashenveil Keep and the condition to open it was the return of whoever — whatever bloodline — carried blood magic. And Vael built the Covenant here. Built it specifically here, in this location, which means either Vael knew, which would mean the original sealed thing was always part of his plan, or Vael didn't know and it's a coincidence, and I don't believe in coincidences that tidy.

  "The blood," he said. "What bloodline."

  Lyss looked at him for a long moment. The look had weight to it — not accusatory, but deliberate, like she was placing something carefully.

  "Yours," she said. "Or rather — the bloodline you carry. Blood and Curse affinity at the Forbidden rank isn't common. Four hundred years ago there was only one recorded family that produced it consistently." A pause. "The Duskmoore line."

  The Duskmoore line. Vael's family. The body's family. Whatever is sealed in the foundations was put there by someone from Vael's bloodline four hundred years ago, to be opened by someone from that same bloodline when they came back, and Vael — whether he knew it or not — built his entire operation directly on top of it.

  And now I'm here, in Vael's body, with Vael's blood, and the stone has bonded to me, and it's pointing down.

  I need to go down there. I absolutely do not want to go down there. But whatever is sealed under this Keep is something someone four hundred years ago thought was important enough to lock away until the right bloodline came back for it, and if I don't find out what it is before someone else does, or before the story reaches a point where it becomes relevant in a way I can't control, it's going to become a problem I can't manage.

  "Can you locate the entrance," he said.

  "I already have," Lyss said. She turned the notebook around. There was a map — precise, careful, drawn from what must have been the Keep's architectural records. A passage marked in her neat handwriting: behind the south wall of the lowest vault. Hidden. Sealed.

  "I'll need Cass," Junho said. A medic. If something had been sealed for four hundred years and the condition for opening it was a specific bloodline, the precaution wasn't paranoia, it was reasonable risk assessment.

  Something in Lyss's expression shifted — a small approval, almost imperceptible, the reaction of someone who had been waiting to see if he'd think of the obvious thing and was quietly satisfied that he had.

  "Tonight," Junho said. "The three of us. No one else."

  "Understood." She stood, pocketed the notebook. At the door — and yes, apparently the architectural doorframe thing applied to her too — she stopped. "One more thing."

  "Go ahead."

  "The Messenger." She glanced toward the wall that separated the study from the storage room. "It isn't going to leave. Pale Messengers stay with their delivery recipient until the sealed thing is opened. After that, they go." A pause. "They're also sensitive to magic. Specifically blood magic. If you use the affinity near it, it responds."

  Responds how. She said that and then paused like the response was something worth noting separately. Responds how, Lyss. Complete your sentences.

  "Responds how," he said.

  "It amplifies," she said. "Moderately. Think of it as a resonance." She considered this for a second. "Don't activate the affinity near it unless you intend to."

  She left.

  Junho sat very still for a moment. Then he looked at the wall between him and the storage room.

  There is a creature in the next room that makes my forbidden blood magic stronger just by being nearby. I have been existing in close proximity to this creature since approximately midnight. I have been in the same building as it all morning. The Crimson Gaze — the thing my eyes do when I'm stressed — happened last night in the council chamber well before I knew the creature existed, so that wasn't it, but.

  But I'm going to have to be more careful. I'm going to have to not be stressed in the vicinity of a magic amplifier, which is a great note to receive on day two of trying to convincingly run a villain organization while secretly being a twenty-year-old from Seoul who doesn't know how to do magic on purpose.

  Cool. Great. This is fine. Tonight I'm going into a sealed four-hundred-year-old sub-basement with a blood magic amplifier following me around and two of the Covenant's most observant people watching everything I do.

  Completely fine.

  He pulled the journal out of the drawer and added three things to the middle column.