The three silver coins and the beast's fangs seemed to weigh more than Brog's shield that had saved them.

  Malik didn't sleep that night. He sat on the cold floor of the tiny apartment, his rusty butcher's cleaver resting on his lap, his eyes fixed on the door. The coins were inside his worn boot. In the Roots of Orynth, letting it slip that a fifteen-year-old boy and a sick child had some spare change was akin to signing a suicide pact.

  But when the morning pushed a gray light through the resin-patched window, Malik didn't hesitate. Leaving Nasir huddled beneath the moth-eaten blanket, he ran to Copper Street. He threatened an apothecary who tried to charge double for the tiny vial, handed over the gold from Brog's contract as collateral, and returned before his brother woke from the first coughing fit of the day.

  "Drink," Malik ordered, kneeling beside the straw mattress. He held out a small, thick glass vial containing a dense, silvery liquid. *Moon-Thistle Extract*.

  Nasir sat up slowly. The potion's scent wasn't of field herbs, but something sharp, like ozone after an electrical storm mixed with bitter mint. He took the glass with trembling hands and, closing his eyes, downed the contents in one go.

  The effect was no gentle fairytale relief.

  Nasir's eyes widened instantly. He gagged, clutching his own throat, and fell sideways onto the mattress. The liquid felt like molten fire sliding down his esophagus. But his stomach wasn't the worst part; it was his chest.

  The potion's rudimentary magic expanded violently as it met his inflamed lungs. For anyone else, the plant's ethereal energy would heal the tissue and flow smoothly through their mana channels in seconds. But Nasir didn't have normal channels. His meridians were shattered, withered paths atrophied by his frail body's congenital flaws.

  The magical energy tried to circulate, crashed against the dead physical barriers, and pulled violently against the boy's own flesh. Nasir gasped, every muscle in his body contracting into a painful arch. He felt every millimeter of his magical flow being forced and blocked. It was a tearing agony, as if live barbed wire pulsed beneath his skin.

  But at the same time... it was lucid.

  In his mind, his physical perception of the moldy room lost its color for a fraction of a second. For the first time in his life, he didn't just imagine the diagrams from the books; he *saw* the exact cracks in his core. He felt the potion's flow battering against his physical limits, measuring the resistance, healing through brutal friction against the obstructed flesh. The pain was a beacon. His body's raw biology interacting with the Aether.

  "Nas!" Malik grabbed him by the shoulders, his voice failing in blind panic, ready to run out and drag the apothecary back to the room by the neck. "Breathe, kid, breathe!"

  The convulsion lasted ten endless seconds. And then, abruptly, it subsided.

  Nasir collapsed backward into the straw, soaked in a cold sweat that plastered his old shirt to his body. But his breathing... the sound of the wet, perpetual wheeze that had always haunted the room was gone. He drew in a breath. Deep. Oxygen filled his entire lungs, without the resistance of putrid inflammation.

  He stared at the cracked ceiling, regaining his visual focus through involuntary tears of pain. The memory of the agony in his meridians wasn't a warning to never approach magic again; it was a detailed map of his own limitation. He now understood, on a cellular level, why raw magic would kill him. He had felt the route the Aether had tried to take and failed. The ten-year-old boy smiled, a slight tug of pale, exhausted lips.

  "I warned you it would taste bad." Malik let out a sigh of relief so massive that his own knees gave out, hitting the wooden floor. He wiped a hand over his exhausted face, trembling slightly. "Never scare me like that again, brat."

  Nasir turned his head to the side. His brown eyes, incredibly focused for his age, locked onto his brother.

  "I'm breathing, Malik. I... I'm not coughing."

  Malik's relieved response was cut off before it even began.

  Three knocks sounded on the rotting wooden door. Heavy. Sharp. Thick shadows blocked the light from the jagged gap beneath the door.

  Malik drew his butcher's cleaver in a conditioned reflex of pure street nervousness. He positioned himself in front of the door.

  "Who is it?" he growled, forcing his voice into the deep harshness of the streets.

  "Open up, kid. This hallway reeks of rat piss and despair, and I hate getting my boots dirty without getting paid for it," a hoarse and guttural voice, impossible to mistake, vibrated through the damp wood. Brog.

  Malik hesitated. Had they come to collect for the dwarf's broken blade? Using his free hand to wipe the sweat from his brow, he removed the latch and opened the door a few inches, blocking the view into the room.

  The braided-bearded dwarf had to duck his head to enter as he pushed the door open with frightening ease. Without his full plate armor, Brog wore only a reinforced leather doublet with joints of dark steel. His eyes, small as stones, swept the impoverished room with blatant disdain.

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  Behind him, footsteps so light they seemed non-existent announced Miren. The taciturn healer exuded a faint scent of tobacco, antiseptic herbs, and a chill that seemed to cool the air around her. Gone was the long gray coat from the previous night; she wore a sturdy, dark fabric shirt, with a heavy belt carrying vials and a small surgical blade.

  Miren leaned against the doorframe and crossed her slender arms, her grayish eyes focusing directly on Nasir on the mattress.

  "I see the moon-thistle didn't poison the cripple," Miren noted. Her voice was dry, utterly devoid of any comforting warmth. "You got lucky. Most of the scum apothecaries in the Copper District cut the extract with sewer water."

  Malik didn't lower the knife, though it already looked like a child's toy next to the postures of the two veteran hunters.

  "How did you find us?"

  Brog snorted, pulling the only three-legged wooden stool in the place toward him. The wood groaned dangerously beneath the dwarf's dense weight.

  "Listen here, 'bait'. We kill abominations in the sewers and skin alchemical beasts that would drink you for breakfast. Do you think tracking two acid-smelling beggars in a slum would be an intellectual challenge? Besides, you flashed gold around earlier today. You painted a giant target right on your back in the slums."

  "Did you come to get a piece back?" Malik raised his chin, stupid but determined.

  "We didn't come to teach you survival, nor steal your pocket change," Nasir spoke from the bed, cutting through his own brother's bluff. He crossed his legs on the rustic mattress and pulled Malik's overly large jacket tightly around his shoulders. His childlike presence contrasted terrifyingly with the cold rationality of his tone. "If you wanted to strangle us for the money, you would have kicked the door down while we slept. You came for me."

  Miren uncrossed her arms and walked slowly through the cramped room. She dragged her finger along the edge of the stained little table, inspecting the dust, until she stopped before Nasir's pile of books and scrap pages. She leafed through the crude charcoal notes in the margins of a binding on corrupted anatomy.

  "The sick biology you read about that Matriarch saved my shield from being twisted and my legs from being chewed off," Brog grumbled, crossing his thick arms. There was an enormous reluctance shaping the dwarf's face. He looked like he'd rather be in any dirty hole than admitting it right there, but he was brutally practical. "We've been grinding for five years, Miren and I. I'm the iron wall, she patches the bloody cracks when the beast hits me back. But we're blind arms in the trench."

  Miren tossed the notebook back onto the table unceremoniously and turned her eyes to Malik.

  "We lack a mind that understands the plagues infesting the alchemical docks without charging us the fortune those damned Academy Scholars demand for three lines of advice." Miren inhaled her own air, her expression serious. "Thirty gold for that monstrosity was a heavy haul, yes, we owe that to your little pet's intellect. But the raw slaughter market pays poorly to blind hunters. The real money is in the planned extermination of rare pests. Hard targets. Targets where knowing the mutant anatomy offsets the chance of dying."

  Malik stared at the veterans, slightly lowering his guard as his brain processed the sudden brutality of that dry proposal.

  "You are high-ranking Veteran Hunters. You're asking to carry two kids on your backs? One doesn't have a core strong enough to spit a spark, and the other hasn't even reached the putrefaction of Iron Rank yet."

  "Don't confuse professional interest with charity, kid," Miren cut back. "You're weak, but you aren't afraid. You run like a bastard and you don't freeze when danger hits. And the little pest there..." Miren pointed at Nasir with her chin. "He has a scholar's brain in a beggar's body. He's the floor plan we've never had."

  Silence flooded the moldy room again, too heavy, suffocating the dripping leaks outside. No one was offering false illusions, street-bard heroism, or an instant adopted family. Brog thought it was risky and a pain, and Miren was calculating the cost-benefit ratio of investing future contract profits into a brilliant mind bottled up in the body of a decrepit boy. They were cold, callous, and self-serving in a grim world that chewed up emotional bonds just like the beasts of the rotting Swamp did.

  To Nasir and Malik, however, that cutting coldness sounded like the only honest truth ever exchanged beneath the murky waters of Orynth. For the first time in their miserable lives, they weren't a handout. The duo was worth the risk. They were vital, rustic commodities.

  Nasir, who for the first time in his life held steady breath in his thin chest, cast a meaningful glance at Malik. Holding his protective brother's astonished gaze, he signaled a subtle 'yes', cold and methodical, with a nod of his neck.

  "His name is Nasir. And I'm Malik," Malik declared, straightening the broad back of the jacket. He dropped the knife into the improvised holster wrapped by the frayed cloth sheath. "The Fangs of Orynth. What's the deal?"

  "Eighty percent is ours," Brog stood up, the wood of the stool cracking in relief beneath his massive weight. "Twenty is yours. We step into the beating; you step in with the map and the bait. And if you falter when push comes to shove, I don't threaten. I break. Understand?"

  Nasir nodded solemnly from the bed. Malik confirmed dryly.

  Miren pulled a thin clove cigarette from her pocket, lighting it with a silent snap of magical fingers from her free hand. She lowered her grayish eyes.

  "Clean off the dirt and get out of this misery tomorrow, at first sunlight. We'll test you in the inner courtyard of the Eastern Ruins," Miren instructed, turning her back. "And make sure you find a knife a little less useless than that one, boy."

  Brog didn't look back as he stepped through the door last, disappearing into the fetid darkness of the dead stone street.

  When the door creaked and hit the frame, Malik let out the breath he didn't even know he'd been holding. He looked at Nasir, who was still sitting on the mattress, his eyes focused on some random spot of rotting wood. The older brother walked over to the damp windowsill, picked up the last half slice of stale bread resting there from the previous night's handout, and chewed it, the dry, tasteless flavor scratching his throat.

  "We joined the pack," Malik muttered with his back to the window, facing the bed, a little dazed by his own statement.

  Nasir gently pressed his right hand against the tip of his own diaphragm at the base of his bruised chest. His eyes moved to Malik's as a tiny cough scraped clean through his throat. The wheeze of fear and death that used to fill their mornings did not greet his fragile ribs this time.

  "Now we just don't die," he replied.

  Malik laughed, a dry, exhausted sound, without humor or malice, just heavy air hitting the walls. He turned to the cracked window, letting the gray trickle of light bathe his fatigue.

  "Yeah. Now we just don't die."