Chapter 142: Teaching

Logan looked up at the window.

Rishin met his eyes across the garden and lifted two fingers from the sill. Then he stepped back out of sight, and soon after the kitchen door opened and he came out onto the grass with Vina attached to his hand.

"You are all standing in one place," he said. "That will not happen often down there. We start now."

Isolde frowned at him. "Senior, you ate a crystal that took everything you had. Sit down first."

"I can sit on the rim." Rishin pointed at the open stretch of lawn in front of the herb beds. "Helen. Daniel. Stand there."

---

Helen and Daniel traded a look before they moved.

Logan knew that look. It was the one they used to pass across the kitchen table in the old apartment whenever an envelope arrived that neither of them had been expecting.

They went and stood where he pointed.

"Isolde taught you to breathe into it," Rishin said. "Now there is something to breathe into. Show me what comes out."

Helen closed her eyes first. Her shoulders rose and fell in the slow count Isolde had drilled into both of them, and on the fourth breath her palms lit with a pale green-blue glow.

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[ Mending Spring (Lv1) ]

[ Restore HP to one target over ten seconds. ]

```

She opened her eyes and stared at her hands. Then she looked around the garden, and there was not a scratch on anyone in it.

"There is nothing to heal," she said.

"There is now." Rishin held his left hand out toward Solveig. "Your blade, please."

Solveig glanced at Logan. When Logan nodded, he handed it over hilt first.

Rishin drew the edge across his palm. A thin line opened, and blood welled up and ran into the creases of his hand.

"Senior!" Helen took a step toward him.

"I am Level 1. That will not close by itself anytime soon." Rishin held the bleeding hand out to her. "Heal it."

---

Helen took his hand in both of hers. Her fingers were shaking, and the glow flickered twice before it held.

The cut closed from one end to the other like a seam being pulled shut. It took the full ten seconds.

’The last time she held a hand like that, it was mine,’ Logan thought.

He could still picture the cheap tape she used to wind around his split knuckles after he practiced in the yard behind their building. She used to apologize because tape was all they had.

Rishin turned his palm over and studied the pink line where the cut had been.

"Slow," he said. "Down there, slow gets people killed. You will make it faster."

"I will," Helen said. Her voice shook, but she kept hold of his hand until the glow faded.

Rishin handed the blade back to Solveig.

---

Daniel’s turn came next.

"Set your feet," Rishin told him. "Whatever I do, stay where you are."

Daniel planted himself on the lawn. Logan watched his class answer. Thin brown lines crept down from Daniel’s ankles and threaded into the soil, and the grass around his boots pressed flat as if a heavy weight had settled there.

Rishin walked up to him and put one finger against his chest. Then he pushed.

Daniel did not move. Rishin pushed harder, and Daniel still did not move.

’Whatever he used to be, he is Level 1 now,’ Logan thought. ’He cannot just push through Dad anymore.’

Rishin stepped half a pace to the left. He tapped the back of Daniel’s knee with the side of his foot and pressed two fingers into the soft point under his collarbone.

Daniel sat down on the grass.

---

Billy made a noise that was trying very hard not to be a laugh, and failing.

Daniel looked up at Rishin from the lawn with his mouth open. Then he started laughing too, a real laugh from low in his chest, and he did not bother trying to stop it.

Rishin held a hand down to him. Daniel took it and got pulled to his feet, and Logan saw his father notice the exchange had just run backwards.

"Your roots held," Rishin said. "You did not. You watched my finger, and you should have watched my feet."

"Next time," Daniel said.

"Next time."

Alice had gone to stand beside Logan while it happened. She kept her voice low.

"He has nothing left," she said. "No stats and no levels. And he just put your dad in the grass with two fingers."

’Everything he knows is still in his hands,’ she thought. ’The crystal only took what the Tower gave him.’

---

"What about me?"

Vina had worked her way to the front again. She stood in front of Rishin with her chin up, and Logan could see her bracing to be told she was too young.

Rishin lowered himself onto one knee, slowly.

"You," he said, "are the most important student in this garden."

Vina blinked. "I am?"

"Everyone else here can fight. You cannot, and so you have the hardest job of all."

He held up one finger. "You will learn one word. When anybody you trust says it, you drop flat on the ground with your arms over your head. You do not look first and you do not ask why. You drop."

"What word?"

"Down."

Vina hit the grass so fast that she bounced.

Rishin’s mouth twitched. "Good. Get up."

---

He made a game of it.

He said the word while she was talking. He said it halfway through her step, and once while she was laughing at Sonic trying to hover upside down. Every time, she dropped a little faster.

By the fifth time, Solveig had stopped waiting to be asked. The moment Vina went down, Solveig was standing over her with his blade drawn and his back to the girl.

"Good," Rishin told Solveig. "Every time."

Solveig inclined his head.

"Keep going with her," Rishin said. "Use the word when she least expects it. That is the only way it becomes hers."

He left Solveig and Vina to it and walked over to where Logan and Alice were standing. He moved slower than he had on the mountain, and he favored his right knee.

---

"You two I will not teach today," he said. "You already know how to fight."

"Then what do we need to learn?" Logan asked.

"How to walk." Rishin watched Vina drop again across the garden.

"You fight like people who have always been told when to move. Waves came and timers ran out, and every match ended whether you were ready or not."

"The Abyss is different," Alice said.

"Down there, you decide when to take each step. Nobody makes you take the next one." Rishin looked at the two of them in turn.

"That is exactly what makes it so dangerous. The ones who rush die early, and the ones who wait too long never leave."

Logan turned that over.

’No waves and no match timer,’ he thought. ’Only a year on every unit we bring, and the next step down whenever we are brave enough to take it.’

"How will we know which is which?" he asked.

"You won’t," Rishin said. "That is why I am coming."

---

At the far end of the lawn, Vina had started getting clever. She was trying to guess when the word would come, dropping early to catch Solveig out, and Solveig was having none of it.

Vina gave up and sat in the grass with her knees pulled to her chest. She looked across the lawn at Rishin.

"Grandpa Rishin," she called. "Did you teach this to somebody before?"

Rishin’s hand stopped halfway to his knee.

"Once," he said.

Alice felt Logan’s fingers find hers. She did not look at him. She was watching Rishin, whose face stayed perfectly calm while his hand closed into a fist against his leg.

’Once,’ Alice thought. ’And he did not say whether it worked.’

Rishin turned back toward the girl in the grass.

"Again," he said. "Down."

Vina dropped, laughing, and Solveig was already standing over her.