Chapter 494: Chapter 494- Cursed Heroes Sword

’He ordered this,’ she thought. ’A dragon ordered this. The godfather — if that word means anything — of the black dragon my team died fighting — ordered me to train these women.’

Her hand found the sword hilt out of reflex.

’I don’t know what they need. I don’t know their levels. I don’t know their bloodlines — wait, no, he said they failed to inherit the Dragon’s Heart. Which means he tested them. Which means they have some—’

She stopped that line of thought.

She looked at them more carefully.

They were watching her with composed, patient, exhausted faces. Not afraid. Not challenging. Not performing deference in the theatrical way of people who did not actually intend to defer.

They were genuinely waiting.

The one at the front — the compact Indian woman with the military-straight posture and the Iron Flesh density visible in her forearms — gave a small, precise inclination of her head.

The others followed. One by one. A light bow, synchronized without being rehearsed, the gesture of women who had been organized around someone and were now extending that organization toward the nearest available authority.

"Please guide us, Lady Edda," Preet said.

The words were clean. Quiet. No ornament.

Edda flinched.

’Lady Edda.’

From women who had been— from women that he had— from women that a dragon had chosen as his—

She looked at them.

She looked at the wall.

She looked at the weapon rack.

If these had been village girls, she would have snapped something sharp and sent them to the yard. If these had been adventurer recruits, she would have started with the physical assessment — push capacity, swing weight, footwork baseline.

These were neither.

She did not know what these were.

She opened her mouth.

The dark-titted woman at the back — the thick one with the enormous chest and the hairy edges visible at the dress hem — spoke before Edda found her words.

"We hope," Fatima said, softly, "you do not show mercy just because the master said so."

Edda went still.

She looked at Fatima.

The innocent dark eyes were not performing the statement. They were reporting it — the honest, tired request of women who had already understood that whatever softness existed in this training would not serve them.

Edda felt something in her chest loosen by one degree.

’They know what training means.’

’They are telling me they will accept injury.’

She exhaled through her nose.

"Fine," she said. "Then let’s go to the training room."

She nodded once.

They nodded back.

She turned toward the rear door of the hut — the one that led out to the yard where she had maintained the practice ground for years.

She took three steps.

"By the way, Lady Edda—"

She stopped.

It was a mature voice. Unhurried. Carrying the dry, measured quality of a woman who had delivered lectures and knew how to time a statement for maximum effect.

Edda turned her head.

Marla.

The thick professor stood with her glasses perfectly adjusted, her ink-stained fingers folded in front of her, her expression carrying the mild, academic pleasantness of someone making a completely reasonable offer.

"If you want," Marla said, "I can help you wear a skirt and even do your makeup."

The hut went very quiet.

Edda’s face.

The crimson arrived faster this time — not the gradual flush of before, but the immediate, comprehensive flooding of a woman who has been cornered by a single sentence in front of an audience. It reached her collarbone in three seconds. Her white hair seemed to sharpen against it.

Her eyes fixed on Marla.

Marla looked back with complete, professional composure.

Behind Marla, the other five women reacted.

Preet’s jaw did something involuntary and she pressed her lips together hard. Celia and Gia exchanged a sideways glance that communicated a complete paragraph. Nara’s head tilted by three degrees. Fatima pressed her enormous tits together with her arms in the gesture that meant she was suppressing something.

And then the silent arithmetic moved through all of them simultaneously.

’She mentioned the skirt.’

’He mentioned the skirt.’

’She connected to the thing he mentioned.’

’She scored a point.’

The collective internal response was quiet and immediate and distinctly unfair.

Preet’s eyes went to the floor, carrying an expression that was somewhere between impressed and deeply irritated. Celia pressed her lips together. Gia’s dark tits rose with a breath that was slightly more forceful than necessary. Nara looked at the ceiling.

Fatima looked at Marla with innocent eyes that were, for once, not entirely innocent.

None of them said anything.

Because saying it would require acknowledging that the thick professor with the ink-stained fingers had, in one sentence about a garment, achieved a conversational outcome that none of the rest of them had managed all morning.

Edda held Marla’s gaze for a long moment.

Then she looked away.

"I understand," she said.

Her voice was flat and carefully controlled.

She turned and walked toward the training room door.

"Follow," she said.

Far above.

The waterfall was a white column in a green valley, crashing into a basin that threw mist twenty feet in every direction. The forest around it was old-growth — thick trunks, deep canopy, the sound of the water filling the air so completely that nothing else had room to exist alongside it.

Raven floated above it all.

Invisible.

The anomaly field Fatima had given him bent the light around his body with the lazy efficiency of a system that had simply stopped accounting for his presence. He hung in the air with his arms at his sides, his violet wings folded, looking down at the waterfall below him with the expression of a man doing an inventory.

’First life,’ he thought. ’Hero’s sword. This waterfall. Behind the fall, behind the basin, in the rock shelf twenty feet under.’

He dropped.

Silently. Straight down through the mist, through the cold spray of the waterfall, through the white curtain of it. The water hit his skin and his mana field shed it without discussion, the droplets parting around him and falling elsewhere.

He found the rock shelf.

The skeleton was there.

It was old. Very old. The bones had the gray, compacted density of remains that had been here longer than the village above had been standing. The sword was in the skeleton’s grip — or had been, before the grip had become unreliable, and the sword had settled into the stone shelf beside the bones with the patient permanence of an object that had decided to wait.

It was a beautiful weapon.

The blade was dark — not black, but the deep, layered gray of folded steel worked by someone who had known exactly what they were doing. The edge was still clean. The crossguard carried two small gemstones that pulsed with a faint, cold light even here in the underwater dark.

Level 50.

In this town. In this base village at the Labyrinth’s outer ring where the average adventurer was scraping toward level ten.

’How did you get here,’ he thought, looking at the skeleton.

He reached for the sword. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

It reacted immediately.

The blade pulled upright — not moved by any visible force, just rising, the mana in it activating with the sudden, furious urgency of a weapon that had been sleeping for a long time and had woken up with opinions. The killing intent came off it in a wave — cold, clean, the focused hostility of an artifact that had been designed to decide who was worthy and currently had a strong feeling about the answer.

Raven looked at it.