Fuuu.

The tree leaves rustled as a figure dropped from overhead, landing clean between a canopy of thick branches.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The moment the explosion happened Leon had already been moving.

He didn’t wait to see how the headmaster would react or how long it would take the school’s people to regroup. The immortal body didn’t need to be near him to keep functioning. The sliver of consciousness linking them stretched across distance without issue, so the moment the steel orb started drinking the mist he had already pulled his real body up from the floor of his house in Fire Village and started putting ground between himself and everything back there.

By the time the poison cloud cleared and the figure standing beside the mountain of bodies took one step and vanished, Leon was already well outside the five element school’s territory.

He landed in the forest and looked around.

"Hmm."

The smile came on its own.

He had gone into that dried pond as a body made of clay and blood, carrying nothing, and walked away with more than a reasonable person would expect from an afternoon.

Badur’s Gates was open again.

Over two hundred students of the five elements school had been relieved of everything valuable they were carrying, three transcendent elders included. That kind of resource didn’t show up in one place often. Tools and materials accumulated by people who had spent years climbing inside a world giant, all of it sitting in a pile now, all of it his.

Whatever was in that haul would shorten his road to the transcendent stage considerably.

"But first."

He raised his hand.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The gate appeared.

Badur’s Gates pushing into the visible world with the weight of something that had been sealed too long. The air around its edges felt different. Older.

For a moment nothing came through.

Then two figures rushed out at the same time and hit him with everything they had been holding onto.

"Ahh?"

Leon went stiff.

Both of them were holding on tight, arms locked, not saying anything, just there. The way people get when the thing they had been sitting with for too long finally stops being a possibility and becomes real again.

He stood there and let it happen.

They hadn’t seen him since he crossed the wall. They had watched everything from inside the gates. The swarm, the moments where the outcome could have gone the other way, the near losses that looked like final ones before they weren’t. All of it, without being able to do anything except keep watching.

And now he was here.

The grip tightened.

Past comfortable. Past normal. Leon’s ribs began to register a complaint he chose not to voice.

He didn’t say a word.

He just let them vent.

Their wait had been different from his. He had been the one moving, the one with something to do with his hands and his power and his mind. They had been the ones standing still, watching, unable to change anything.

That kind of waiting had its own weight to it.

He gave them the time.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Some time later.

They were sitting in an open grassland that stretched downhill from the tree line, the light easy, the air quiet.

Arian had her hand resting on Leon’s chest, her posture settled but her voice carrying the particular flatness of someone who had already made up their mind before speaking.

"I’m not going back into the gates." She said it calmly. "That was the last time."

Leon exhaled.

"Ahh. That’s something we will have to talk about later."

She didn’t move. Didn’t push back verbally. Just kept her hand where it was and looked at him in a way that communicated that later was not going to change anything.

He knew she was being too much about it.

The gates existed to protect them. To keep them out of situations that were above their current level while he handled what needed handling. That was the logic. That was the reason. But saying that out loud to her face while she was sitting like that was a different problem entirely.

He didn’t say it.

"I’m not going back either."

Ember’s voice came from his other side, and where Arian was flat, Ember was something closer to controlled heat. The crimson in her eyes had a faint glow to it that wasn’t entirely decorative.

"You brought us with you on the promise of strength and loyalty. If you had died we would have rotted in that place for god knows how long. You either fulfill that promise and let us stand with you, or you send us back to our fathers."

She meant it.

Every word of it, delivered without drama, without raised volume, which somehow made it land harder than shouting would have.

Ember’s relationship with Leon was complicated in ways that neither of them had put clean words to. Watching him move past her, watching him fight through things that would have ended her, watching him survive situations she could not have survived, all of that sat somewhere between pride and something that hurt more than pride had any right to.

Her feelings for him were tangled and real and she wasn’t interested in pretending otherwise.

Leon opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Arian, who was typically blunt in her own right, was staring at him from the other side with the look of someone who had more to say and was choosing not to say it yet, which was somehow more uncomfortable than if she had just said it.

Two of them. Both waiting.

Leon closed his eyes.

Held it for a moment.

Then exhaled.

"Okay." He said it slowly. "That’s fair."

Neither of them moved.

"However." He opened his eyes. "I have a condition."

The shift in them was immediate.

Both straightened slightly, the weight of the previous moment not gone but set aside, attention sharpening into something more focused. The question was clear on both their faces without either of them asking it out loud.

What is it?

Leon looked at them both once.

Then said it without pause.

"You must become a transcendent being or beat me in a battle."

The words landed in the open air of the grassland and sat there.

Not a request. Not a suggestion framed as one.

A condition. The same weight behind it that he put behind most things he actually meant. Clean and direct, the same way he had said immortality to the old ghost in the cave, like it was simply the next logical fact in a sequence that had already been decided.

Arian blinked once.

Ember’s eyes stayed on him, the crimson glow settling slightly, something turning over behind them.

Level five.

A Transcendent wasn’t a Rank people picked up quickly or easily. It sat well above where either of them currently stood, a gap that demanded real work, real time, real resources, and a specific kind of focused intent that couldn’t be faked or shortcut.

He was telling them that if they wanted to stand beside him going forward, that was the floor.

Not the ceiling.

The floor.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Then Arian looked down at the grassland stretching out below them.

Ember kept looking at Leon.

The silence stretched long enough to mean something.

Then Ember nodded once.

Short. Direct.

Arian followed a beat later without looking up.

Leon said nothing more about it.

He leaned back against the grass and looked up at the sky above the tree line, the open space of it wide and unhurried, and let the quiet sit between all three of them for a while.

There was a lot of ground to cover from here.

But that was tomorrow’s problem.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​