The Extra's Rise - Chapter 802

802: Two Years (3) 802: Two Years (3) The private reception hall felt smaller than I remembered, though nothing about its dimensions had changed.

Perhaps it was because I had grown used to the vast crystal caves of Xerion Prime, or maybe because the people filling it now carried themselves differently-taller, more confident, touched by power that hadn’t been there when I left.

The room itself had always been a study in precise luxury: veined white marble shot through with threads of blue mana, silk banners dyed the deep red of dawn, a chandelier whose facets held tiny ward-letters that hummed just below hearing.

The long table between us was imperial blackwood inlaid with a star map of the Empire; if you traced the silver filaments you could feel anchor runes respond like a cat leaning into a hand.

The air smelled faintly of bergamot, ink, and the metallic clean of fresh wards.

Beyond the thick mana-glass, autumn pried at the gardens with patient fingers.

Inside, breath and heartbeats and the soft tick of a null-ore clock measured a different kind of weather.

Stella solved seating with the determined efficiency of someone who had rehearsed it on a whiteboard.

She claimed my lap without asking-because asking introduced the possibility of refusal-and settled as if she were pinning down a theorem.

At eleven, she was almost too big for it; neither of us consulted dignity.

Her hands, small and cool, traced the new scars along my forearms with the methodical curiosity she usually saved for math proofs, pausing where tissue changed grain, testing edges with the gentleness of a scientist who respects what sharp things can do.

“You look different,” she announced, tone crisp as a lab report.

“Older.

And you have more scars than before.” “Two years fighting demons will do that,” I said, shifting to make room for both of us as the others drew in and the chairs squeaked their polite objections.

“But you look different too.

Taller.

And your hair is longer.” “I stopped cutting it,” she said seriously, chin lifting a millimeter.

“Rachel told me you might like it this way when you came back.” Across the low table, Rachel’s cheeks colored; her sapphire eyes never left my face.

She had chosen the chair with the cleanest sightline and clasped her hands together just tightly enough that the tremor had nowhere to go.

The Saintess composure was there-back straight, breath controlled-but something hungry burned beneath it, not crass or careless, simply direct.

Rachel had always loved with the same honesty she brought to prayer.

“I thought it would be nice,” she said.

Her voice slid across the surface of the room and left a warmth behind.

“I… I thought about you every day, Arthur.

Every single day.” That simple admission cracked the last ornamental crust of formality.

The careful, diplomatic spacing that had seemed appropriate in the courtyard dissolved into gravity, the human kind.

Chairs scraped.

Hands found places to land.

Cecilia reached me first.

She moved like hereditary authority made flesh, all clean lines and control, but her crimson eyes held a banked fire that hadn’t been there two years ago.

“Two years,” she said softly, fingertips finding my shoulder and lingering as if verifying the fact of me.

“Two years of not knowing if you were alive or dead.

Of wondering if you’d decided we weren’t worth returning to.” “Cecilia-” She pressed two fingers to my mouth and shook her head once.

“Don’t,” she said with quiet intensity.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t consider staying wherever you went.

Don’t tell me you didn’t think about how much simpler it would be without five complicated women and all the political mess that comes with us.” Honesty doesn’t bruise as badly when you let it land.

“I came back,” I said, catching her hand and holding it.

“I always intended to come back.” Rose slipped into the space at my other side, poise immaculate as ever, but with exhaustion braided through it like a second color in the thread.

“The guild kept detailed records,” she said, voice too even.

“Every day you were gone had a line.

We wrote reports to ourselves so we could pretend there was news.

I even considered expanding to other continents just to feel closer to wherever you might be.” Her brown eyes-usually full of angles and solutions-held a depth two years had carved.

Under her layered composure, power hummed at a pitch that had not been possible when I left; high Immortal-rank, clean and lethal.

Beneath that, the muscular patience of someone who carries burdens without insisting the world notice.

Seraphina approached last, not because she felt less, but because she refused to let feeling rush her.

Her ice-blue gaze audited me without apology: posture, breath, the way I held Stella, the set of healed muscle under old damage.

“I trained every day,” she said with characteristic economy.

“Forms until my hands split.

Heal.

Repeat.

If you came back wounded-if you needed a shield-I wanted to stand beside you instead of behind you.” Reika said nothing, at first.

She arrived as she always did: on silence and touch.

Two fingers rested against the inside of my wrist, where pulse proves presence.

A tiny tremor ran through them, the kind you can dismiss if you want to lie to yourself.

Her violet eyes met mine with an intensity too steady to be theatrical-devotion that didn’t need witnesses to be true.

“Tell us,” she said, the quiet carrying years.

“Where did you go?

What did we almost lose you to?” “Another world,” I said, feeling Stella’s attention snap into perfect concentration.

“A place called Xerion Prime.” Silence tightened.

Even my parents, who had supported my decision to leave, looked at me as if an old rumor had stepped into the room and asked for tea.

My mother’s hand hovered near a teacup as if the familiar weight might keep the world balanced.

My father’s jaw worked once, twice, calculating emotions the way he calculated a ledger.

“The same summoning network the Order used can be reversed,” I explained.

“But only by someone with enough power to spend, and only for a limited time.

It’s like swimming upstream through a storm.

You don’t get out unless you push harder than the river.” “What was it like?” Aria asked from beside my mother-seventeen and polite enough to attempt hiding it, curious enough to fail.

“Crystal trees that sing when the light changes,” I said.

“Two suns-one yellow, one red-so shadows keep each other honest.

Air that tastes like metal because magic saturates everything.” A breath.

“And demons.

Seventeen Marquis-level demons I had to hunt down one by one.” Rachel’s hands parted by a hair, the way they do when blessings are about to be born or withheld.

“Seventeen,” she breathed.

Admiration startled into her eyes; behind it, a darker fascination that would trouble anyone who hadn’t watched her stand between a crowd and a monster without blinking.

“You killed seventeen Immortal-rank demons by yourself.” “The first few nearly killed me,” I admitted.

“They don’t run on mana.

They push miasma through the grain of the world.

If you think wrong, you become the wrong thing.

So I learned to anchor thought before I moved muscle.

I learned to breathe with the part of me miasma can’t touch.

I started counting backward primes when reality bent, tying each number to an image I refused to surrender.

I learned to break their fields without letting their fields break me.” “But you survived,” Cecilia said, and the possessive fear in her tone alchemized into fierce pride.

“And then?” Rose asked, soft but relentless, already inventorying the next necessary problem.

“Then I looked for a way home,” I said.

“Something was coiled around the corridor I needed-an Astral Leviathan called Void-Singer Maethis.

Older than mountain ranges.

Its shadow could shade an ocean.

It had been guarding Xerion Prime for centuries as if the planet were an altar and it the song.” “What did you do?” Stella asked, and in her voice science and love shook hands.

“I killed it.” The sentence landed and the room did what it needed to: stopped.

Even Quinn, quiet near the window with his hand against the glass as if feeling the ward’s breath, became entirely still.

“You killed an Astral Leviathan,” Seraphina repeated, not in disbelief, but to test whether the words made sense in the air.

“It sang in a register that rattled atoms,” I said.

“Its tendrils threw enough static to light cities.

It tried to write my name into its song and make me a note it could hold.

I answered with something it couldn’t measure-counter-harmonics I built out of what Xerion taught me.

The fight lasted three days.

At the end, the corridor was clear.” Rachel’s breathing went shallow, then disciplined itself into a slow, precise rhythm.

“Three days,” she whispered.

“The techniques you must have forged-the things you had to become…” “Arthur,” Reika said softly, devastation braided with certainty, “you could have died.

Really died.

No message.

No body.

No goodbye.” I let that land.

I let it hurt.

I let my senses move across the five of them and felt what they had become-high Immortal, all of them now, their power a second circulation under skin.

It shouldn’t have been possible in two years.

They had made it possible.

Beneath the strength, I felt the cost: the nights training until hands bled, the mornings waking with fear and telling it to wait, the way love had been converted into fuel and burned clean.

“I know,” I said, pulling Reika closer without loosening my hold on Stella.

“I know what I asked of you.

I left because I wanted to return with enough strength to make what matters safe.” “We refused to sit and practice waiting for bad news,” Cecilia said.

“We broke ourselves to be ready to stand.” “I can sense it,” I said, meeting each of their eyes.

“All of you-high Immortal-rank.

That’s remarkable progress.” “We had motivation,” Rose said-dry, and not.

“Knowing someone we love is fighting for his life on another world tends to accelerate development.

Also, good teachers.” She tipped her head toward Quinn and Adeline.

“The Empire did not let us drown.” Adeline’s silver gaze held mine for a beat; something like approval warmed a degree most people would miss.

Quinn’s mouth tightened at one corner-his version of a smile.

It said: We did what was necessary.

It also said: Next.

“Love,” I repeated quietly, and the word felt both familiar and newly cut to fit the shape of the last two years.

I had rationed it like oxygen, convinced that spending too much of it would burn me out where help could not reach.

“Did you doubt it?” Rachel asked.

There was no blade in her tone, only the clean edge of a needed answer.

“Did you think two years would change how we feel?” “Sometimes,” I said.

The honesty made the room very, very still.

“When it was worst-when I hadn’t slept and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, when I couldn’t tell if the miasma in my lungs was mine or theirs-I wondered if you’d move on.

Find someone who could give you ordinary.” “Don’t imagine it again,” Cecilia said.

It wasn’t a threat.

It was a law.

“We don’t choose ordinary over you.” “Ever,” Reika added, and there was iron in the single word.

“I missed you,” I said, and speech shrank under the weight of it.

“Every day.

Every battle.

You were the reason the next day had to exist.” “We missed you too,” Stella said with eleven-year-old simplicity that cut through decoration.

“But you’re here now.

That’s what matters.” My parents had watched everything with the expressions of people whose son had come home and who understood coming home did not end a story so much as begin a harder chapter.

My mother’s thumb worried the rim of her cup until she seemed to remind it, gently, to stop.

My father cleared his throat in the careful way a man does when he is moving from gratitude to business.

“Arthur,” he said, precise even when his voice threatened to fray, “while we’re all grateful you’ve returned, there are… developments that require immediate attention.” The warmth in the room cooled into alertness.

Shoulders straightened.

Backs found familiar postures.

Breath shortened and then steadied.

“What kind of developments?” I asked, though their faces had already told me not to expect a small answer.

Cecilia looked at each of the others in turn.

Agreement moved through their eyes like a current.

When she spoke again, her crown found her voice-the slight pressure that makes the air itself sit up straighter.

“The kind that suggest your training was more necessary than even we feared,” she said.

“Arthur, things have been building while you were gone.

Threats that even our new power might not be enough to handle.” “How serious?” I asked, feeling responsibility settle across my shoulders with the uncanny ease of something that had never truly left.

Rose’s composure didn’t crack; it tightened.

“Serious enough that killing an Astral Leviathan may turn out to have been rehearsal,” she said.

Neutral words, alarm humming beneath.

Stella shifted in my lap just enough to signal understanding without asking permission to speak.

The room pivoted toward a single point, the way a compass settles on north.

Cecilia drew a breath you could almost hear.

The chandeliers’ quiet ward-hum seemed to step aside for her words.

“Arthur,” she said, every syllable steady, every eye on her, “it’s time we told you about the Second Calamity.

And why we think it might be starting.”