"What a beautiful village."

The words left his mouth quietly.

Not sarcastically. Not with the theatrical appreciation of a man performing wonder. With the flat genuineness of someone who has seen a great deal and finds small things occasionally interesting.

The village of Edenveil was empty.

Or appeared empty. Every door was shut; every shutter was latched. The chickens had gone somewhere that chickens go when something in the air tells them to stop being visible. The well rope swayed faintly in a wind that seemed afraid to make too much noise.

Every person in Edenveil had gone inside.

Every person except two.

They stood in the main path between the shuttered buildings—the wide dirt road that served as Edenveil’s spine—and they stood with the particular configuration of women who have arranged themselves into a problem on purpose.

The front one was old.

Or: the front one was the age that stopped being old the moment you actually looked at her. The white hair was real. The deep lines at the corners of her eyes were real. The scar tracing her jaw was real and old and had healed well, which said something about whoever had treated it and considerably more about whoever had survived receiving it.

Everything else about her rejected the word "old" with quiet violence. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Her shoulders filled the space around her the way a wall fills a doorway—not through excessive width, but through the density of a structure built for load-bearing. The muscles of her forearms were visible from twenty feet away, defined and layered; the kind that came from decades of repeated movement rather than training. Her garment was fitted enough to show the outline of her chest—heavy, taut, the tightness of a woman whose musculature had organized itself around her mass rather than softening it.

The great sword’s handle rested between both her palms.

She was not holding it defensively. She was resting her hands on it the way a man rests his hands on the back of a chair he owns, the blade’s tip on the earth, her weight settled into the stance with the complete comfort of someone who has stood exactly like this in front of worse things than this and is still here.

Her eyes were fixed on him.

Not on his women. Not on the width of his group. On him only—and her gaze had the quality of a measuring instrument that had taken his full read in the first half-second and was now simply recording.

She was not afraid.

She was "aware."

There was a distinction.

Raven found it immediately, and the corner of his mouth lifted.

"There she is," he thought. "The strongest thing in this town."

The second woman was behind her.

Thick. Warm. The mature softness of a village woman who had eaten well and worked steadily and never had reason to become anything other than what she was. Her hips were wide—genuinely wide, the kind that stretched fabric to its functional limits, her skirt pulled tight enough across both cheeks that the line between them was visible through the cloth. Her blouse was full at the chest. Her face was warm-toned and full-lipped and carried the expression of a woman who had been brought along to perform a function and was now questioning the decision.

Raven looked at them both.

He let his power leak.

Not all of it. A precise amount—like opening a furnace door by two inches to feel the heat without seeing the fire. Enough for anyone sensitive to feel the temperature of what they were standing in front of. Enough to evacuate a village.

The old woman’s eyes didn’t change.

Her jaw tightened by one degree.

That was all.

"She can feel it and she’s still standing there."

He smiled.

The old woman spoke first.

"What great deity," she said, her voice carrying the flat steadiness of someone who has learned that the voice is a tool and panic is a waste of it, "is doing in this small town—appearing like a human?"

The words arranged themselves with deliberate phrasing. Not an insult. An acknowledgment. She was telling him what she had already concluded without being asked.

Raven’s eyes had already moved elsewhere.

They had moved inward—to the system window that opened behind his gaze like a second layer of vision, overlaid on the world in front of him, presenting him with the information he had not asked for yet but already wanted.

He read.

[TARGET ANALYSIS]

[Edda — Designation: Dragon Slayer]

Level: 30

Class: Veteran Vanguard / Dragon Slayer (Title)

Primary Ability: Dragon-Sense — mana recognition calibrated to draconic power signatures

Secondary Ability: Iron Physique — enhanced structural density, accelerated wound processing

Status: [WOUNDED — legacy damage, thoracic cavity, incomplete regeneration]

Notable: Title acquired under disputed circumstances. Dragon kill confirmed. Team confirmed deceased. Psychological designation: survivor’s burden.

[TARGET ANALYSIS]

[Rika — Designation: Common Warrior]

Level: 7

Class: Scout / Village Guard

Primary Ability: Truth-Sight — involuntary verification of spoken claims, activates on direct statements

He stopped.

He read the second entry again.

"Truth-Sight."

His smile changed. Not wider. Different—the quality of a man who has just looked at a locked room and found the key taped to the door.

He looked at Rika.

She was standing behind Edda with her wide hips pressed together, her skirt stretched across both of them, her hands folded in front of her with the careful composure of a woman who had been told to follow and follow only and was trying very hard to do exactly that.

Her eyes, though.

Her eyes were fixed on him with a sharpness that was not trained. That was not martial. That was the involuntary sharpness of an ability that activated whether the person wanted it to or not.

She was reading him.

Or trying to.

He could feel it—the soft, probing quality of the Truth-Sight touching the edges of his anomaly field and sliding off them like water off sealed stone. She was getting something. Not everything. The anomaly Fatima had given him wasn’t immunity to truth-reading abilities, but it was a distortion—the ability’s return data on him would be incomplete, blurred at the edges, like trying to read text through frosted glass.

She would feel he was telling the truth.

She would not know what it was.

"Perfect."

He looked at Edda.

"I am collecting strong warriors," he said, "who can manifest the Dragon’s Heart."

He let the words settle for exactly one breath.

"Bestowing upon them the power of Pure Mana—" he looked at her steadily, his voice carrying no theater, only information, "—through mating."

The silence lasted less than a second.

Behind Edda, Rika’s eyes went wide.

Involuntary. Immediate. Her Truth-Sight had activated, had touched the statement, and had returned a result she had not been prepared to receive: "true."

She pressed two fingers together at her side—the small, private signal she had apparently developed for exactly this situation—and tapped.

Twice.

True. True.

Edda saw it.

The old woman’s composure did not shatter. It bent. Just slightly—a fraction of a degree in the set of her jaw, a brief, involuntary parting of her lips before they pressed together again.

"What?"

The word came out before she could reframe it. Not fury. Not disgust.

Shock.

Not because a dragon was demanding women.

Because of what the second half of the statement meant.

"Dragon’s Heart."

She knew what that was.

Every person who had spent real time in the Labyrinth’s deeper strata knew what that was—the artifact of a dragon’s genuine power transference, the thing that could elevate a person’s mana core past its biological ceiling, heal structural damage that conventional recovery could not touch, and rewrite the body’s fundamental capacity.

She had a wound.

She had carried the wound since the day her team died.

The day she had landed the final blow—or rather the day she had witnessed the final blow; the black dragon’s destruction coming from something else, something she had never been able to name.

She had claimed the kill because she was the last one standing and there was no one left to correct her.

She had the title.

She had the scar.

She had a thoracic wound that had never fully closed, that pulled with every breath when the cold set in, that occasionally woke her at three in the morning with a pressure behind her sternum that felt like a fist from the inside.

Her heart was thumping.

In that body. In those years. In that chest that held a wound she had stopped expecting to heal—her heart thumped like a woman who had just been shown a door she thought was sealed.

She stopped it.

She sealed it down. Pressed it flat. Returned her face to its practiced stillness.

"I see," she said.

Her voice was level. Impressive, given the circumstances.

Behind her, Rika had placed her hand over her own mouth.

Her wide eyes were moving between Edda’s back and the man standing twenty feet away, her Truth-Sight still running, still trying to read him, still returning the same blurred-but-clear result: "true, true, the core of it is true, I cannot see the edges of it but the core—"

She was overwhelmed.

Not in a sophisticated way.

In the way of a level-seven village scout standing in the presence of something that her ability could feel but could not measure, like a drop of water encountering the fact of the ocean and deciding this information was too large to file anywhere useful.

Her thighs pressed together.

She was not aware she had done this.

Raven was aware she had done this.

His eyes moved.

Down. Not predatorily—assessingly. The same way he had read the status window. The same way he read everything: with the flat, complete attention of someone for whom observation is a form of possession.

He looked at Edda’s garment.