The cultist hit the tunnel floor before he finished his last breath.
Sabrina straightened, cleaned the blade against his robe, and glanced around.
The inquisition team was dead. All of them were scattered across the tunnel in a particular stillness of people who had no warning before the end. Hans lay nearest to the entrance, his hand still wrapped around the hilt of a weapon he hadn't managed to draw.
Her brow furrowed. "I'm too late."
She had saved the other seven teams, but the one that had had their leader in it, she could not arrive in time for.
Fighting cultists had always been a gamble. You never knew what abilities the madmen might wield, and ability aside, they didn't care for collateral. They would burn through their own ranks to reach a target. They would harm themselves if it served the goal. Not all of them operated that way, but this singular hideout had harbored that kind of fanatic, and the proof was scattered around her feet.
Lucia had come to her with a bad feeling about this group, even as the evidence suggested the inquisition team could handle it. Sabrina had followed after them.
"I suppose she was right."
She buried the team's dead where they lay, then gathered the cultists into a pile and set them alight with a simple spell. When that was done, she cast Clean, and her uniform returned to its usual spotless white.
She watched the fire for a while.
The irritation building in her chest surprised her somewhat. She was upset about losing men; that was reasonable. But when she looked more carefully at the feeling, what she found underneath it was something more specific. She didn't want to see a disappointed look on his face when he came back.
Her master.
That gave her pause.
It had started simply enough. She had appreciated Ashen Hart from a distance the way one appreciates a man who suits their idea of what a person should be; someone capable and the kind of person whose presence soothed her weary spirit. She had been content to serve her mistress and observe him from afar.
Then he saved The Sin Lord, and overwhelming gratitude was added to the mix. And that appreciation became something she no longer had a clean word for.
Even so, when she was ordered to take him as a temporary master, she had never expected to slip into the role so naturally. That part still didn't quite make sense to her.
Sabrina had been a war orphan. Both of her parents were lost to the Bloodwall campaign. She had woken one morning to find her grandmother gone in the night, taken by nothing more dramatic than age, and had spent the rest of that day wandering Ashbastion with a child's faith that someone would know how to fix it. No one had. When night fell, and the cold came in, she had been ready to follow her family into it.
That was when she appeared.
Wild red hair. A confident stride. And a warmth that pushed the cold back like it didn't exist in the first place.
Cornelia hadn't saved her grandmother. But she had saved Sabrina from the cold, from starvation, and eventually from the kind of aimless grief that consumes children who have no one. She taught her to survive, then to be stronger than survival required. Eventually, she even became a new family to her. In return, Sabrina had chosen the Servitude Thema without hesitation and given everything she had to the role.
That was why she couldn't quite explain what was happening now. Gratitude and fondness, she understood. But she had felt both of those for Cornelia for years, and they had never produced this particular brand of restless irritation at the thought of a disappointed expression.
She recalled what her lord said sometimes, between his teasing smiles, about her having a servitude kink and only reaching her "true potential" under a man.
Sabrina's cheeks went faintly pink, then she clicked her tongue. "What nonsense."
She dispersed the thought and looked up toward the mansion that was now in full view.
"I hope his lovers don't take this too badly." But even as she said it, she knew they would. Even she was already irritated on his behalf, and she hadn't even found the words to explain the failure to him yet, when he returned.
⛧
⛧
⛧
Forty years of uninterrupted stillness granted a particular gift: the space to finally think without noise.
With the concept of Inertia settled into him, the struggle had quieted. The desperation behind each attempt had dissolved, and what remained was a mind that could actually sit with a problem long enough to turn it over properly.
The first problem he brought to that quiet was the one that had been sitting unanswered for a while.
Unmoving C+. Across every physical stat…
His initial assumption had been that his body had simply reached its natural ceiling and would require an ascension to push further. That wasn't wrong, but it turned out to be incomplete.
The body, it seemed, operated the same way his skills did. Raw training could bring a stat to its current ceiling, but breaking through that ceiling required something additional; a suitable concept integrated into the relevant physical aspect. Grasp the concept of strength, and the strength stat could pierce through to B rank, provided the body's potential allowed for it.
Ashen was confident his body could carry up to B-. The requirement to reach C rank had been absolute mastery over one's own physicality; a complete, intuitive understanding of the body's capabilities and limits. Somatic Autonomy had compressed what would otherwise have taken years of grueling training into a much shorter process, but the underlying requirement had still been met.
Which meant that he knew that his body was ready. He simply hadn't known what to give it.
Now he did.
He turned his attention inward, toward the billions of threads still woven through every inch of him, and considered what concept to reach for.
He had two for now, aside from Sloth. The question was which aspect of it to give the body.