The Extra's Rise - Chapter 801

801: Two Years (2) 801: Two Years (2) Time passed differently now.

I felt its shape in my bones-not as seconds stacking into minutes, but as years compressed into a single held breath.

The kind of time that only makes sense after you’ve spent too much of it, or lost too much of yourself inside it.

Two years.

Seven hundred and thirty days.

Stella had counted them through tears the night I left, as if tallying each could keep it from slipping away.

Numbers proved a poor ruler for what lived between departure and return.

On Xerion Prime, time moved like honey through crystal-slow, viscous, purposeful.

Hours were priced in technique, days in aches that wouldn’t leave, weeks in facts I could no longer unknow.

Now the imperial cruiser hummed beneath us while Avalon City gathered in the mana-fused glass-ward towers a touch taller, barrier arcs a shade brighter, the whole city breathing carefully.

Across from me, Empress Adeline looked as public memory required: composed, unreadable, silver eyes that had taught ministers to respect silence.

Beside her, Emperor Quinn Slatemark held the immovable quiet of a man who had outlasted a century and refused to romanticize it.

He wore power as a mountain wears weather.

I remembered them both too well.

The first time I’d returned to Avalon after training, I’d still been a boy with a sword and an argument.

Adeline peeled away charm like gauze from a wound.

Quinn’s low Radiant presence turned techniques I considered masterpieces into parlor tricks simply by standing nearby.

But the distance had narrowed into something almost elegant.

Not parity-I hadn’t reached Radiant-but a point where comparison stopped being useful.

The cabin could have hosted a council.

It held an empress, an emperor, and me.

The air vibrated with unspoken assessments.

I let mine be obvious.

I wasn’t here to preen.

I was here because the clock I learned to hear off-world was ticking here as well.

Quinn turned.

Crimson pupils met mine, and his senses-filed sharp by decades-tested my aura with a jeweler’s restraint.

He didn’t pry.

He paid attention, and truth rose on its own.

“I can’t believe my eyes,” he said at last, and Quinn Slatemark didn’t waste disbelief.

“Unless I’m mistaken… you haven’t reached Radiant yet?” “I haven’t,” I said, and let him feel the edges: no flare, no threat, the accurate outline of what I had become.

His eyebrows lifted by a fraction-an emperor’s gasp.

“And still… this strength…” Language failed on the approach.

“I became strong enough,” I said simply.

There was no better metric.

Xerion Prime corrected my definition of power.

I learned to end things not designed to end, and to measure worth by what remained afterward.

The fulcrum moved.

Quinn watched a ward-line breathe beyond the glass.

Adeline didn’t speak.

Her attention felt like a ledger totaling itself.

We fell toward the palace.

Crystal spires cut the afternoon while defense screens whispered beneath sight.

The reception terrace opened like a palm.

My senses reached out of habit-and found the clean chord of arrangement.

They were waiting.

Not as a surprised crowd, but as a line set with care.

Faces resolved with the clarity deprivation gives.

Rachel stood centered in quiet poise; Saintess composure at public distance, unmistakable joy at her mouth.

Cecilia wore her crown’s gravity with ease, strain betrayed only in her shoulders.

Rose and Seraphina set themselves for mutual anchor-planner’s readiness beside elven stillness.

Reika waited a step apart, intensity kept on a short leash.

And at the front-small, chin lifted, precision disguised as poise-Stella.

Not nine anymore.

Eleven, with seriousness layered over a heart that still loved unreasonably.

Hair arranged with care she would deny.

Hands clasped behind her back the way soldiers stand when they haven’t yet learned to fidget invisibly.

Something in my chest softened back into human shape.

“Your family requested permission to attend your return,” Adeline said, the formality gentled by warmth.

“It seemed… appropriate.” The cruiser kissed the cradle with craftsman certainty.

Hydraulics sighed.

Wards parted.

I barely noticed.

The room beyond narrowed to a single axis: faces-five women who could have left and did not; parents who consented to a son becoming something they couldn’t name; a daughter who took a promise made on the way to fight demons and believed it as if belief were an engine.

The door folded open.

Autumn met me-damp stone, leaf, a taste of rain.

Then Stella’s voice, balanced between control and relief, numbers deployed as tools and shields.

“Seven hundred and thirty-one days,” she said, clear as glass.

“You’re one day late, Daddy.” I have taken hits that cracked plate and bone.

None compressed the chest the way those words did.

She didn’t run.

She walked-determined, spine straight-closing the distance with dignity she’d practiced.

I went to one knee because it fit and put us eye to eye.

Up close I saw the tremor she tried to hide by locking her fingers behind her back, the shine she refused to let fall here.

“I know,” I said.

“I’m sorry I was late.” “Did you become strong enough?” Not accusation-assessment.

The test she wrote years ago, needing its final mark.

“Yes.” I let conviction carry.

“Strong enough to keep my promises.” I drew her into an embrace that lasted exactly as long as it needed to.

Long enough for the body to believe what the mind had feared to trust; short enough the hall didn’t have to reinvent etiquette around us.

“Arthur,” Rachel said, warmth tucked into a voice trained for blessings.

She and the others approached with the coordination you only spend on moments that matter.

Each kept ceremonial distance; their faces made ceremony a liar.

“Welcome back,” Rose murmured, eyes checking me the way a captain inspects a keel after weather-no visible breaks, still verifying.

Seraphina’s gaze softened by a calibrated degree.

For her, it was thunder.

“You kept your word,” she said.

Reika dipped her chin.

“Alive,” she said.

Cecilia let a breath escape that might have been a laugh if she permitted it another second.

“The Empire applauds punctuality,” she said, then allowed herself a smile.

“We’ll forgive a day.” My parents reached me last.

My father’s first touch was inventory more than embrace-counting bones, judging weight the way he’d judged ledgers all his life-then his arms remembered how to be a father’s.

“Welcome home, son,” he said, voice rough from refusing to break.

My mother’s fingers brushed my cheek with reverence and immediately scolded my hair.

“You said you’d be back,” she whispered.

“I said I’d be back,” I agreed.

Quinn and Adeline stood close enough to bless, far enough not to crowd what wasn’t theirs.

“Perhaps we should move somewhere private,” Cecilia suggested when breath returned to the room.

“There are developments you should hear before the briefing.” My senses had already tasted worry in the stone-fresh sigils along the east transept, a new lattice above the south garden, oath-magic still cooling.

Something had happened.

Some part of me flexed to run toward it.

Another part-older, steadier-understood that this moment was why the running mattered.

“In a few minutes,” I said.

She inclined her head.

We let ceremony breathe.

Rachel stepped half a pace nearer and took my hand for exactly the blink that wouldn’t be noticed.

Seraphina exhaled tension she’d held for two years.

Rose’s shoulders eased by a fraction that meant a contingency had become a plan.

Reika looked to Stella and offered a small, solemn nod that would weigh more than speeches.

“Seven hundred and thirty-one,” Stella repeated, softer now, recalculating with new data.

“We’ll round down to on time.” “Fairness has always been your weakness,” I said.

“Accuracy is my strength,” she countered, then tilted her head.

“Your hair is longer.” “Barbers don’t keep hours in demon country,” I said.

It stole a laugh from Rachel.

It pulled an unguarded sound from my father he’d call a cough.

It coaxed a fractional smile from Seraphina most would miss.

Quinn came to stand at my shoulder, not ahead or behind.

“There’s work,” he said, quiet as tide.

“I know.” I kept my eyes on the faces that turned obligation into meaning.

“That’s why I returned.” He nodded once.

“You will have what you need.” Adeline’s gaze flicked to Stella and back.

“And you will keep what you require,” she said.

We stood and let togetherness do what speeches rarely accomplish.

Outside, the city carried its afternoon-wards breathing, banners talking to wind.

The Empire prepared for the next necessary thing.

I drew a long breath and let the last thin air of Xerion Prime leave my lungs.

Stars gave way to faces; the hum along the edge of reality faded into home’s ordinary sound.

In the friction between then and now, meaning settled.

The demons I hunted.

The techniques carved into bone.

The way a Void-Singer had tried to turn my name into a dirge and I answered with a promise.

All of it had been momentum toward this: a courtyard, autumn in stone, a daughter with the right to call me late and the right to expect me anyway.

Cecilia lifted a hand: a room stood ready and the path cleared.

Quinn glanced once toward the wards and back.

Adeline shifted her weight with the dancer’s patience that precedes movement.

Rose raised a brow that asked if I was ready to argue maps.

Seraphina’s fingers loosened.

Reika had already memorized exits because that is her love language.

My parents stepped back.

Stella wiped her eyes with the brisk swipe of someone who prefers equations to tears.

“Maps?” I asked.

“Too many,” Rose said.

“Bring opinions.” “Tea?” I asked.

“Already on the table,” Cecilia said.

“Good,” I answered, and felt the word anchor.

I looked one last time at the people who made survival worth the trouble-Rachel, Cecilia, Rose, Seraphina, Reika; my parents; Stella.

The detachment I’d worn like armor didn’t shatter; it slid away in quiet pieces, like snow leaving a roof when spring becomes fact.

What remained felt heavier and lighter at once.

I had left to become strong enough.

I had returned to use it.

Standing in the Imperial Palace courtyard, autumn curling cool across familiar stone, surrounded by the faces that made strength meaningful, I smiled-not the polite line for cameras or the strained curve meant to keep others from worrying.

The real kind, starting behind the heart and arriving because it had nowhere else to go.

It had all been worth it.