The notification sat in his field of vision, steady and unhurried the way system prompts always were, completely unbothered by the fact that his sleeve had just been on fire.

[Dragon’s Lust — Passive]

[A biological response unique to draconic beings and their derivatives. Manifests as elevated body temperature, chromatic shift in the eyes, and involuntary heat emission in the presence of strong attraction. Intensity scales with emotional proximity. Currently unregulated.]

[Additional changes associated with the Draconic Halfling class transition include but are not limited to: heightened sensory sensitivity, increased territorial instinct, periods of elevated core temperature, and further uncharted biological developments.]

[No additional data available.]

Noah read it twice.

Then he walked to his bed, lay down on his back, and stared at the ceiling.

He did not say anything for a long time.

’Unregulated,’ he thought. ’Great.’

He put one arm over his eyes and just lay there, letting the quiet of the room settle around him. The viewport showed dark water. The facility hummed at its usual frequency. Somewhere above him the faction was doing whatever the faction did at this hour.

His sleeve was still slightly warm.

’Okay,’ he thought. ’So the halfling thing. What do I actually know.’

He started from the beginning because that was the only honest place to start.

He had gone into the Harvest Gate following a quest reward. Fought through a castle. Lost to Ego. Woken up in a medieval timeline as someone named Burt with a mother and a sister and a job cleaning tables at a tavern. Spent months in that timeline fighting without his system, without his abilities, learning a technique from a knight order that nobody in 2077 had ever heard of. Tamed dragons. Completed a quest called Extinguish the Flames. Came back.

And somewhere in all of that, his body had crossed a line it was not going back over.

’But I still don’t know what I actually am,’ he thought. ’The system says Draconic Halfling. It says the origin is internal. Not bond-derived. But what does that mean practically? Where did the draconic part come from if not the bonds from these dragons?’

He turned that question over.

The Origin Point quest was still sitting open. Find the source. Understand the truth. His dragons are fragments separated from something greater. He had stepped through a gate onto a grassland with a wrong sky and empty castles and the quest had activated and then he had gotten pulled into the castle stages and the whole thing had derailed before he found anything.

’So the answer is probably there,’ he thought. ’Somewhere in whatever that place actually is.’

His mind drifted to Gigarose.

She had known him. In the medieval timeline, operating as Burt, completely stripped of his system identity, she had looked at him across a throne room and known exactly what she was looking at. Not Burt. Noah. She had locked his system on a road in the middle of a military confrontation and done it casually, the way you did something you had done before.

Arthur hadn’t known him. The dragon knights hadn’t known him. Egor had looked at him for months and seen a strange boy with unusual capabilities and never once connected him to anything larger.

But Gigarose had known immediately.

’She exists across time,’ he thought. ’Or something close to it. She was the nameless woman who blessed the medieval kingdom centuries before Arthur’s war. She was Arthur’s witch in the same timeline. She was in 2077 pulling strings through Elder Genes VR. Same being, different eras, completely continuous.’

’For a being that could reach into my system and lock it, that could create and unmake things, that had been operating across multiple timelines for what seemed like an indefinite period...’

He paused on the next thought because it felt significant.

’Would she know about dragons?’

He turned it around carefully.

She had recognized him despite the Burt identity. She had known what he was. She had interfered with his system specifically, not anyone else’s, not Arthur’s, not the dragon knights’. His. Which meant she had known about the system. Which meant she had known what kind of being carried a system like his.

’And she still smiled when I walked out,’ he thought. ’Told me it wasn’t over. Like she was looking forward to what came next.’

’Either she knows exactly what I’m becoming and finds it entertaining,’ he thought, ’or she knows exactly what I’m becoming and finds it useful.’

Neither option was particularly comfortable.

He closed his eyes.

The facility hummed. The water pressed against the glass. Somewhere in the domain his hatchlings were doing whatever hatchlings did at this hour, probably terrorising each other and finding it educational.

He fell asleep before he finished the next thought.

---

Something was watching him.

He knew before he opened his eyes because the quality of the air in the room had changed, the specific change that came from another person being present and very still and very close and trying very hard not to be the reason he woke up while simultaneously being extremely ready for him to wake up.

He opened his eyes.

Seraleth was approximately four inches from his face.

"Oh good," she said immediately, in a normal volume that suggested she had been waiting long enough that whispering no longer felt necessary. "You’re awake."

Noah looked at her. "How long have you been there."

"A while."

"How long is a while."

"Sophie told me about the hair last night," Seraleth said, which was not an answer to the question but was delivered with the confidence of someone who considered it a sufficient explanation. Her luminous eyes moved to his temple, then back to his face, then to his temple again with the attention of someone conducting a very serious examination. "Are you dying?"

"What?"

"The hair." She reached out and touched the white streak at his temple with two fingers, lightly, the way you touched something you weren’t sure about. "On my world, when elders reach the end of their years their hair changes color. It begins at the temples." She looked at him very seriously. "Are you at the end of your years, Noah?"

"I’m twenty one."

"That doesn’t answer my question."

"Sera. I’m not dying."

She considered this for a moment. "You’re certain."

"Yes."

"Because it is quite white," she said. "Well." She tilted her head. "Not entirely white. It is more like..." she studied it with the expression she wore when she was searching for the right word in a language that was not her first, "it is like when snow sits on dark stone. You can see both."

"That’s actually a good description," Noah said.

"I know." She sat back slightly, giving him actual breathing room for the first time since he opened his eyes. "Sophie said something changed. That things are different now." Her eyes moved across his face with the unhurried attention she gave everything. "You are taller."

"Little bit."

"Your shoulders are wider."

"Okay."

"And your eyes last night, Sophie said they went red. She was quite alarmed. She described it to Lila and I using several words that I don’t think translate well but the general impression was that it was significant."

"It’s a new development," Noah said, sitting up. "Part of the same thing causing the hair."

"Your system?"

"Class change. The body is adjusting."

Seraleth nodded slowly, filing this information away in whatever internal system she used to process the world. Then she said, with the casual delivery she reserved for things she considered minor logistics, "Oh. Sam has people setting up some training posts outside. He wanted me to tell you when you woke up." She paused. "I have been waiting to tell you that for approximately two hours."

Noah looked at her.

She looked back, completely unbothered.

’Two years,’ he thought, looking at her face. ’She spent two years on this planet, in this facility, in a world that still confused her in a hundred small ways, without the person she had actually come here for.’

She had come using a ship from Raiju Prime and decided, with the directness that was just how she operated, that she was staying. Because of him. And then he had vanished into a gate for what felt like months to him and turned out to be two years to everyone else.

And she was sitting here having waited two hours to tell him about training posts, looking at his hair with genuine scientific curiosity, not a trace of resentment anywhere in her expression.

None of them had held it against him. Sophie had cried when he came back but had spent two years holding everything together without complaint. Lila had said nothing about the absence, just grabbed him. Seraleth was asking if he was dying with the same energy she asked about everything.

’Angel, on the other hand,’ he thought, ’had looked like she wanted to cause me physical harm. Which was fair.’

He got up, grabbed a fresh shirt, and went to find Sam.

---

Outside the facility the morning was clear, the harbor surface catching light in the way it did when the weather was being cooperative, which in the Eastern Cardinal was not guaranteed. The training area occupied a flat section of the dock adjacent to the facility’s main entrance, and Sam had done exactly what Sam always did, which was take a request and execute it so completely that the result exceeded what the request had described. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Six reinforced posts stood in a line, spacing precise, composite construction that Noah could see from twenty feet away had been built properly. Around them, faction members moved through their morning routines, and the quality of attention that followed Noah whenever he moved through the faction was present, the glances held a beat too long, the conversations that paused when he passed and resumed when he was far enough away.

He had spent months being nobody. Being Burt, specifically, which was about as far from SSS rank faction leader as a person could get. Coming back to this was an adjustment he was still making.

"Good work," he said to Sam, who was standing at the edge of the setup with his notepad.

Sam nodded. "Replaced the composite core with the reinforced variant you asked for. Should hold up."

"They won’t," Noah said. "But that’s the point. Get the OGs together for me?"

---

They assembled with the energy of people who had been summoned without context and were managing their curiosity at varying levels of success. Sophie, Lila, Seraleth, Lucas, Kelvin, Diana, Reyna, Marcus. Standing in a loose group near the posts, the morning light catching them all differently.

Noah looked at them.

"I was gone for two years your time," he said. "Where I was, it was longer in some ways. I want to explain some of what happened." He paused. "I went back in time. Medieval timeline. And I experienced war," He paused to look at everyone, "Real war, real politics, real people dying over things that mattered to them." He watched their faces.

"I fought through a gate quest that sent me there as a penalty for losing a boss fight. Spent months operating without my system, without my abilities, just my body and whatever I could figure out." He kept his voice level. "The war involved a man named Arthur who all of you have encountered. And a being named Gigarose who I’ve told some of you about." He looked at Kelvin specifically. "She exists across time. She was in that timeline the same way she’s in this one. She recognized me despite everything. Arthur didn’t. Nobody else did." He let that sit for a second. "Make of that what you want."

The group was quiet. Reyna and Marcus had the expressions of people receiving information that was reorganizing several other pieces of information they already had. Lucas was nodding slowly. Kelvin had his tablet out and had stopped pretending he wasn’t taking notes.

"The posts," Noah said, moving on. "Sophie. Come here."

Sophie raised an eyebrow but walked over to the nearest post.

"Hit it," Noah said.

"Okay?" She looked at the post, then at Noah, then shrugged and hit it.

The post shuddered. A clean impact, controlled, the strike of someone who had spent a year training under Master Anng and knew exactly what she was doing with her hands. A crack ran along the surface of the composite material.

"Give me everything," Noah said.

Sophie looked at him for a second. Then she hit it properly.

The post split. Not shattered, split, the composite separating at the impact point, the two halves separating slowly before toppling.

"Sera," Noah said.

Seraleth cracked her knuckles, stepped up, and hit the next post with the flat efficiency of someone who had been described as their tank for good reason. The post did not split. It disintegrated from the midpoint down, the lower half becoming composite dust that settled on the dock.

Lila went next without being asked, stepping up and driving her fist through the third post with the quiet focus she brought to everything, the impact producing a sound like a gunshot, the post coming apart completely.

Lucas picked up a piece of the debris from Seraleth’s post, looked at it, set it down, and hit the fourth post with a single controlled strike that drove the entire thing six inches into the dock surface before the composite gave way.

They all looked at Diana.

Diana looked at the remaining post.

Then she walked up and gave it a light tap, one knuckle, almost polite.

The post stood there, completely intact.

Everyone looked at her.

"Still recovering," she said simply, with the unbothered delivery of someone who had made peace with something. "Can’t push it yet."

"Then you don’t need to be here," Noah said.

"I want to be here." She looked at him. "Call it physical therapy."

He looked at her for a moment. "Fine."

He turned back to the group.

"You all failed," he said.

Various expressions greeted this.

"Sophie cracked it before she committed. Sera hit a surface instead of a point. Lila was clean but the force dispersed on contact. Lucas buried it instead of driving through it." He looked at each of them in turn. "You hit surfaces. All of you. Which means the force spreads across whatever you’re hitting and the structure absorbs it and distributes it and survives more than it should."

"That’s how striking works," Kelvin said.

"No," Noah said. "That’s how most people strike. There’s a difference." He looked at the last remaining post. "When you hit a surface, the force has nowhere specific to go. It radiates outward, the structure catches it, distributes it, and the damage is spread thin. But if you compress the entire force of a strike into a single point..." He paused. "The structure can’t distribute what it can’t catch. The point drives through before the material has time to respond."

"That’s not physically possible," Kelvin said, and he said it the way he said things he was genuinely uncertain about but had a framework that suggested otherwise. "The surface area of a human fist against a composite post of that density, the math doesn’t produce a needle effect. The material resistance alone—"

"Watch," Noah said.

He stepped up to the last post. Looked at it for a second.

He hit it.

Not hard. That was the thing that registered first for everyone watching. He did not wind up, did not commit his full body, did not do anything that looked like the strikes they had all just thrown. Just extended one knuckle and hit the post at a single point with something that looked almost casual.

The post had a hole through it. Clean, circular, the diameter of a single knuckle, running from the front face to the back face through four inches of reinforced composite material like the material had simply decided not to be there.

Everyone was quiet.

Kelvin walked up and put his finger through the hole. Looked at Noah. Looked at the hole. Looked at Noah again.

"Was this," he said slowly, "something you learned while you were back there?"

"Yes," Noah said.

"From who?"

"A knight order." Noah looked at the hole in the post. "They called themselves Dragon Knights."

The silence that followed had a different quality to it.

"Dragon Knights," Lucas said.

"Yes."

"And this technique," Sophie said carefully. "They used it for what exactly?"

Noah looked at them. At the faces he had known long enough to read without effort, the expressions cycling through the same sequence of understanding arriving in pieces.

"To put down dragons," he said.

The dock was very quiet.

Reyna’s mouth opened slightly. Marcus looked at the hole in the post. Seraleth’s expression did something complicated. Lucas went still in the way he went still when tactical information arrived that reorganized a situation entirely.

Kelvin said nothing, which was its own kind of significant.

Noah looked at all of them and let it settle properly, the full weight of what he had just said finding its resting place in each of them.

Then he smiled, just slightly, the kind of smile that came with a question already forming.

"But who says it only works on dragons?" he said.

He looked at them.

"What about Harbingers?"