Three weeks.

  It didn't feel like three weeks. It felt like something longer and shorter simultaneously — longer in the body, which carried every training session and arena match as accumuted weight, and shorter in the mind, which measured time by progress rather than days and found the distance between where he had started and where he needed to be still vast.

  He was walking back from the arena when the children found him again. He heard them before he saw them — the specific cadence of voices trying to sound casual and not quite managing it.

  "Brother Ashen…" The tone was softer this time. Less accusatory than the first time. Something closer to tired. "Aren't you going to py with us today either?"

  Another voice, quieter: "Do you not want to spend time with us anymore?"

  He slowed. Turned. Crouched down to their level the way he always did.

  "It's not like that," he said. "I've just been busy."

  They exchanged gnces — the silent communication of children who have known each other long enough to have a nguage of looks. "Busy with what?" one asked. "Everyone has things to do. But what keeps you so busy?"

  "Something I can't tell you right now."

  Their frowns were immediate and identical. "Don't tell me it's something bad." The voice was firm."You haven't forgotten what you always told us, right? About not getting involved in bad things?"

  Something moved in Ashen's chest. Small and complicated.

  "It's nothing like that," he said, keeping his voice steady, light. "I promise. Nothing serious."

  The relief that moved through them was visible — shoulders dropping, the particur exhale of children who had been holding tension they weren't entirely sure how to name. "That's good," one murmured. Then, smaller: "We just don't like that you've been so distant."

  Ashen reached out and ruffled the nearest head of hair gently. "It's not that I've forgotten you. I haven't. Try to understand, okay?"

  He stood and turned to go.

  "Ashen, wait—"

  He kept walking. He had to. If he stopped again he wasn't sure if he could afford it.

  Their voices followed him down the street until the distance swallowed them.

  A few days ter, he sat on the hard bed and ate a proper meal for the first time after returning.

  It was a simple thing. Nothing extravagant — just food that was fresh and warm and enough, the kind of meal that only feels significant when you've gone long enough without it. He ate slowly, tasting each bite, letting himself have this one uncomplicated thing.

  His winnings from a recent string of victories sat counted in his mind. Enough. Finally, tentatively, enough — not for comfort, not for anything resembling security, but enough to take the next step.

  "Time to become a mercenary," he said to the empty room.

  The words settled into the silence and stayed there. He turned them over, checking them from different angles, looking for the fw in the reasoning. There wasn't one. He had recovered enough strength to survive in the field. He had enough coins for the registration fee. And the arena had given him what it could — the next level of growth required real missions, real stakes, the kind of opposition that fighting rings couldn't provide.

  More importantly, he needed to start building something. Strength alone was a foundation, not a structure. He needed information, connections, resources — the slow accumution of everything required to move against an organization that controlled the world from behind the face of its own heroism.

  That began with the mercenary guild.

  The morning was sharp and clear as he left the slums behind.

  The city opened up around him as he walked — wider streets, cleaner air, the gradual shift in architecture that marked the boundary between where people lived because they had no choice and where people lived because they did. He moved through it with his hood drawn low and his eyes forward, the way he had learned to move through spaces where he didn't quite belong.

  People noticed him anyway.

  He was used to that too. The wrinkled noses. The quick steps sideways to avoid proximity. The looks that traveled from his face to his clothes and back again, arriving at a conclusion before he'd taken another step. In the worn fabric of his clothes, in the particur way poverty marks a person's bearing whether they intend it to or not.

  He ignored it. He kept walking.

  The mercenary guild rose ahead of him — solid and permanent in the way that institutions which have survived long enough to seem inevitable tend to look.A worn sign. The accumuted weight of a pce where people came to sell what they were capable of and find out if it was worth anything.

  Ashen stood before it for a moment.

  This was the next step. Just the next stone in a path that stretched further than he could currently see. But it was forward. And forward was the only direction that mattered.

  He pushed open the gate and walked inside.