I asked Koo why he was here instead of with the others.

  He shifted his weight, one hand scratching at the back of his head in a way that made him look, briefly, exactly like a confused child despite everything he had just told me about himself. The gesture felt oddly out of place on someone who carried himself with such quiet confidence. “Uh… Greta asked me to check on you,” he said. “Make sure you could make it down. She said today would be harder for you than yesterday.”

  The words landed harder than I expected, and I understood what she had meant almost immediately. There was a delay between hearing them and feeling the truth of them, just long enough to make the realization worse when it finally arrived.

  The strength I had been borrowing ran out all at once. It did not fade or taper off. It vanished. My bones felt thin and brittle, not with pain but with exhaustion that sank deep and refused to move. My muscles sagged, heavy and unresponsive, like they had already decided they were finished for the day and were no longer interested in negotiation. I felt like a sack of beaten meat barely held together by stubbornness and habit, and even that stubbornness was running low.

  My legs were the worst of it. There was no tension left in them, no spring to brace against the floor, only weight dragging downward and joints that felt unreliable. Standing felt like a complicated calculation rather than a reflex.

  I tried to stand anyway. I misjudged the effort it would take, shifted my weight too quickly, and nearly fell.

  Koo moved without hesitation. He caught me under the arms, bracing himself and me at the same time. For a moment we wobbled together, the world tilting in a way that made my stomach drop, then we found our balance again.

  “Easy,” he said, calm and steady.

  “Thank you,” I managed, the words taking more effort than they should have.

  He helped me straighten, slow and careful, like he understood exactly how close I had been to the floor. With his free hand, he picked up my staff where it leaned against the bedpost and placed it back into my grip. The familiar weight grounded me more than it probably should have, anchoring me long enough for the room to stop spinning and the edges of my vision to settle.

  I stood there for a moment, breathing steadily and waiting for my body to catch up with the decision to remain upright. Each breath felt deliberate, measured, as if I had to remind myself how to do it properly.

  It was clear that there would be no training today. The realization settled in without argument or disappointment. There was no sense of failure attached to it, only assessment. Today was not for pushing forward. Today was for surviving the aftermath and letting the damage settle into something livable.

  It was a cheat day, in the most honest sense of the term, not as indulgence but as necessity.

  The God of Iron did not argue with that assessment. If anything, the sense I had of him settled into quiet approval, heavy and solid in the back of my mind. Recovery was part of the regimen. Ignoring that would have been stupidity rather than discipline, and he had never valued stupidity.

  Koo looked at me, assessing the situation the same way Greta would have, eyes flicking over posture, balance, grip. Then he nodded once, as if he had reached a conclusion and saw no reason to announce it.

  Before I could protest, he bent and lifted me up like I weighed nothing at all. One arm hooked under my knees, the other around my back. He kept my staff tucked securely against my side, holding it as naturally as if this were a practiced routine rather than a spontaneous decision.

  I was briefly offended by the ease of it. The feeling passed quickly, overtaken by relief and exhaustion.

  “Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “This is faster.”

  “It is,” I admitted, because arguing felt pointless.

  He carried me out and down the hall with steady, unhurried steps. The ceiling drifted past above me. Doors slid by at a pace that made my head swim less than walking would have. We headed toward where Greta would be waiting, and I found myself trusting that completely.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  My friend Koo carried me like the toddler I was, and this time, I let it happen without protest.

  When we reached the others, Greta took me from him without comment. The transfer was smooth, efficient, like something she had done before. She sat me down beside her with practiced ease, one arm steady at my back until I was settled and no longer listing to one side. Only then did she release me, though she stayed close enough that I could feel her presence like a brace I could lean against if I needed to.

  The mess hall had filled while I was gone. Movement threaded through the space constantly. Footsteps crossed behind us in a steady rhythm. Trays clinked against tables. Voices overlapped in low, constant conversation, rising and falling with laughter, complaints, and half-finished stories. Benches scraped as people shifted to make room. The room felt alive in a way that made it hard to remember how close I had come to the floor only moments earlier.

  Behind the serving line, Myrda moved through it all with the same unhurried efficiency she brought to everything else. She took breakfast orders without looking flustered, hands moving from bowl to ladle to plate in a practiced sequence. A bowl was set down. A ladle dipped. Someone muttered thanks. Someone else was told to wait their turn. The rhythm never broke.

  The room had divided itself without anyone saying a word.

  The untrained adventurers, the ones like us who had iron ranks only on paper, clustered closer to Greta. We took up the middle tables, close enough to the serving line to be convenient and far enough from the doors that we weren’t in the way. It felt instinctive, like everyone knew where they belonged without needing to be told or corrected.

  Off to the far corner, the mage class sat together, tight and contained. They kept their distance, voices quieter, shoulders drawn in. Every so often, one of them glanced our way, eyes sliding past Greta and lingering on the iron-ranked adventurers with something like caution. They stayed where they were, as if an invisible line had been drawn across the floor and crossing it would invite trouble.

  Between the two groups, there was space that people avoided without needing to be told to do so. People walked around it rather than through it, trays balanced carefully, eyes forward.

  Greta noticed all of it. I could tell by the way her posture never shifted, relaxed but unyielding, a quiet claim on the territory around us that did not need to be stated aloud.

  Winnie, Mika, Sean, and the others had all turned to look at me. Curiosity mixed with concern on their faces, the kind that came from not knowing whether to be impressed or worried. Someone asked the question that had clearly been waiting since I disappeared the day before.

  “So,” Winnie said, leaning forward just enough to make it clear she was serious. “What’s it like being a real tin adventurer, Runt?”

  I looked at them. I looked at Winnie, trying to read her expression. I looked at Greta, whose face was calm but attentive, waiting to see how I answered. Then I sighed.

  “It’s… I don’t know yet,” I said honestly. “Right now, I feel like I got run over by a herd of yaks. My bones feel like they’re made of jelly. My eyes hurt. Everything hurts. It’s not fun.”

  There were a few uneasy laughs at that, the kind people give when they are not sure whether they are allowed to laugh at all.

  “For a very short moment,” I continued, choosing my words carefully, “I could tell I was stronger than I was before. Just a little. Enough to notice. Right now, though, I feel weaker than I ever have.”

  That earned me a few surprised looks, and more than one person straightened as if recalibrating their expectations.

  “I had lynko fever when I was two,” I added. “You all know what that is.”

  I did not elaborate at first, because I did not need to. Lynko was common enough that nearly everyone had known someone who caught it. It was not a season on its own so much as a consequence of the hottest months, when flies came thick and unavoidable. Lynko flies were blood flies, so small that a fruit fly dwarfed them, small enough to slip through cracks, screens, and careless hands. Stopping them entirely was almost impossible.

  Their bites itched viciously. Most people said a mosquito bite was a pleasant scratch by comparison, something you could ignore. A lynko fly bite crawled under the skin and stayed there, demanding attention long after you wanted to forget it.

  It mostly affected children. Adults built an immunity quickly, their constitutions stronger and better able to fight it off. For kids, though, it could be brutal. Not usually deadly, but miserable in a way that lingered and made time stretch.

  The memory filled in the rest on its own.

  I remembered those days clearly, more clearly than I would have liked. The fever that burned and froze me at the same time. The coughing until my chest hurt. The sickness that came in waves, leaving me shaking and exhausted. I remembered my mother sitting with me through it all, cleaning me up, holding me when the pain made me cry, whispering reassurance when I did not have the strength to be brave.

  This was worse, even knowing all of that. Not because the pain was sharper, but because it was everywhere at once. It lived in my bones, in my muscles, in the spaces between breaths. The difference was that I was not as small as I had been then. I was not helpless in the same way.

  I was still here.

  Greta rested a hand briefly on my shoulder, a silent acknowledgment rather than comfort. I leaned into it just enough to steady myself, then straightened again.

  “I think it’s going to be worth it,” I said after a moment. “I just don’t think today is the day I prove that.”