Chapter 19: First Contract

Chapter 19: Chapter 19: First Contract

The meeting point was a gravel lot behind an abandoned warehouse, which struck Jason as either extremely practical or extremely suspicious, and possibly both at once.

Three people were waiting. A broad-shouldered man in scarred plate armor, arms crossed, doing quiet math on whether the new guy was going to get them all killed.

A woman off to the side testing the string of a compact recurve bow, faint green mana coiled tight along the fletching. A third figure, smaller, a staff resting against her shoulder, radiating the specific nervous energy of someone who healed people for a living and had personally seen how badly that could go.

’Tank, archer, support. Missing exactly one melee body to round out the formation. That’s me. No pressure.’

"You’re the fill-in," the armored one said. Not a question.

"Jason."

"Reeve." His eyes dropped to the spear, then back up. "First Level, dual affinity, app said."

"Accurate so far."

"Cultivated how long?"

’Sixteen years, give or take, if we’re counting the part where I wasn’t allowed to.’

"Long enough," Jason said, which had the benefit of being technically true and answering nothing at all.

Reeve’s jaw worked, unsatisfied, but a party lead desperate enough to accept an application in under a minute wasn’t in a position to be picky.

"Fine. Stick close, do what I say, don’t freelance." He nodded at the others. "Skyler’s ranged. Wen holds the backline with her, keeps everyone patched up and puts her own spells out when she gets the chance. You’re melee with me. E-Rank Gate, wolf-type ecology per the scouting report."

"How many are we looking at?"

"No idea. Scouts read the ecology, not the headcount. Numbers shift gate to gate, sometimes wildly. Could be six. Could be sixty."

’Reassuring. Truly.’

They walked the rest of the way, fifteen quiet minutes across the district, and Jason spent it doing what he did best.

’Reeve favors his left leg slightly. Old injury. Skyler keeps checking the wind before she’s even nocked anything, good instinct. Wen hasn’t said a word since I showed up. Either shy, or she’s already watched a last minute fill-in get someone killed and isn’t optimistic about my odds.’

’Fair. I’m not wildly optimistic either.’

The Gate sat in a fenced lot, a shimmering vertical seam of pale blue light hovering over cracked pavement.

"Wolves inside," Reeve said, giving him a longer look than the others got. "Dealt with the type before?"

’Once. It broke into my bedroom and tried to eat my wife. I introduced its claw to its own eye socket.’

"Once. Went well enough I guess, I mean I’m still here."

"Good enough." Reeve stepped through first.

Stepping through felt like walking through a curtain of static, brief and tingling and gone before his brain finished registering it. Then he was standing in a dim clearing that smelled of pine and something colder underneath, ozone or frost, he couldn’t place which.

Reeve was already moving, shield up, scanning the treeline. Skyler nocked an arrow without being told. Wen fell in a step behind them both, staff in hand, the same faint blue glow along her palms that every water-attribute healer he’d ever heard of carried, nothing unusual in it, just competent and familiar.

Jason fell in beside Reeve, spear low, senses stretched as wide as he dared without making Veil’s absence look interesting to anyone watching.

The first wolf came out of the treeline fast and silent, right up until it wasn’t, lunging at Skyler’s flank half a second before Jason’s spear caught it mid-leap and drove it sideways into the dirt.

’Huh. That worked.’

It also felt wrong the second it landed, his grip too far up the shaft, his weight thrown forward with nothing behind it to recover if the strike had missed. He noted it and moved on, because the treeline had just stopped being empty.

Wolves poured out of the dark in a ragged, endless line. Ten. Twenty. Still coming.

"That’s a lot more than six," Skyler muttered, already drawing again, this one wrapped in a faint whistling gust that bent its arc mid-flight and put it through a wolf’s throat from an angle that shouldn’t have been possible.

’Wind. She’s not just shooting straight, she’s steering them.’

The clearing dissolved into motion. Reeve anchored the center, shield catching one wolf’s charge and turning it aside into a strike that opened its throat, the ground beneath his boots hardening and cracking upward in jagged plates each time he planted his stance, stone answering him like it recognized an old friend.

’Earth. Not just a wall behind a shield. He’s fighting with it.’

Behind them, a bolt of compressed water cracked past Jason’s shoulder and punched a wolf clean off its feet mid-charge, and he caught the tail end of Wen resetting her stance, staff already tracking the next target.

Jason had less time to admire any of it than he wanted, because two more wolves broke off toward him at once, and his spear, which had felt sharp and certain against a single target, suddenly felt like entirely the wrong length for two.

He overcorrected on the first thrust, spear buried too deep, and had to wrench it free with both hands while the second wolf came in low for his unguarded leg.

’Bad. That’s bad. That’s an opening a child could’ve seen.’

Lightning saved him before technique could, a short burst crackling down the shaft into the wolf’s flank, locking its muscles rigid just long enough for him to finish it before the tremor even faded from its legs.

The next one wasn’t so cooperative. He caught it with the same trick and the paralysis barely held a heartbeat before the wolf shook it off entirely and kept coming, forcing him to scramble back a full step to avoid its jaws.

’Right. E-Rank. A jolt that’d flatten an F-Rank pest barely registers on something already sitting above my level.’

That was when the treeline shifted again, and something considerably bigger shouldered its way through the smaller bodies, easily twice the size of the rest of the pack, black furred, a low rumbling growl rolling out ahead of it like a warning nobody present needed explained.

"Alpha," Reeve called, already reading its trajectory. "It’s coming for me."

It was. It cut straight through two of its own pack to get to him, ignoring Skyler, ignoring Jason entirely, locked onto the biggest, most armored target in the clearing with the single minded focus of something that had learned exactly what killed a raiding party fastest.

Reeve didn’t retreat an inch.

"Good, come here then," he muttered, shield angling to meet it head on, and then, louder, to the others, "Focus fire, all of it, I’ll hold the front, you three put it down."

’He’s not just tanking it. He’s using himself as bait.’

The alpha slammed into Reeve’s shield with enough force to drive furrows into the stone plating rising beneath his boots, and Reeve held, jaw set, already absorbing the second strike before the first had finished ringing through his arms.

Skyler’s arrows came fast and wind-guided, aiming for the joints, the eyes, anywhere soft. Wen’s water lashed out in tight, controlled bolts, chipping away at its flank between healing pulses she kept sending Reeve’s way without breaking her own rhythm.

Jason drove in from the alpha’s blind side, spear and lightning together this time, not one covering for the other but both at once, arcing current down the shaft on impact and following through with everything his arms had left.

The alpha screamed, twisted, nearly took his head off with a wild swing he barely ducked under, and kept fighting even half stunned, dragging Reeve’s shield sideways with raw mass.

It took all four of them, sustained, ugly, unglamorous effort, before it finally went down, collapsing in a heap that shook the ground hard enough to rattle Jason’s teeth.

Silence, for exactly as long as it took Reeve’s legs to give out.

"Reeve!" Skyler was already moving.

"I’m fine," Reeve said, in the exact tone people used right before proving they weren’t, and then he was on one knee, then flat on his back, breathing hard around at least one cracked rib from the sound of it.

Wen dropped beside him instantly, staff planted, both hands glowing bright, and didn’t so much as glance at the wolves still circling the clearing’s edge, sensing the pack momentarily leaderless and testing whether that meant an opening.

"Cover us," she said, not a request.

Jason and Skyler fell back into position around them without needing to discuss it, spear and bow angled outward, holding the perimeter while Wen worked, the two of them trading off wolves that tested the line and retreated when they didn’t like what they found.

It took longer than Jason expected, Wen’s hands never quite steady, sweat tracking down her jaw, the glow at her palms flickering low more than once before she pushed through and kept going.

"Almost," she muttered, mostly to herself.

By the time Reeve got up, color mostly back, breathing less like a man who’d just had something inside him rearranged, the remaining wolves had thinned to a scattered handful, and the four of them finished the rest together, quick and efficient now that the thing actually leading the pack was gone.

The clearing went quiet for good this time.

-------------------

Jason hadn’t come through it clean either. A claw mark along his forearm, a shallower one across his ribs, both still leaking sluggishly by the time the last wolf dropped.

He caught himself checking them out of habit, not urgency. There was a familiar prickling itch already building beneath both wounds, deep and slow, the first sign the bloodline had noticed the damage and started working on it. It wasn’t fast. The gash on his arm was still visibly open 10 minutes later, the itch crawling steadily wider as it knit from the edges inward instead of closing all at once.

Reeve, sitting up now with one hand pressed to his side, caught the look on Jason’s face. "You’re bleeding."

"So are you. Yours looks worse."

"Mine’s being handled." Reeve nodded toward Wen, still catching her breath a few feet away. "Yours isn’t. Go sit down before you fall down."

Wen was already moving toward him before Reeve finished the sentence, staff tapping once against the ground, palms lighting again despite the visible exhaustion still sitting heavy in her shoulders.

"Let me look at that."

"I’ll be fine. I’m healing already." Jason said

"Slowly," Wen remarked, unimpressed, already reaching for his arm anyway. "I can make slowly considerably faster. Sit still."

He considered arguing, mostly out of reflex, and then didn’t. She’d just spent the better part of ten minutes holding Reeve together under fire without complaint. Turning down help out of stubborn pride seemed like a poor way to repay that.

He sat.

Her water essence settled over the wound cool and steady, and the itch that had been crawling at its own pace suddenly accelerated, the gash sealing shut in a few minutes instead of the better part of an hour it would’ve taken on its own.

"Better?" Wen asked, moving on to the shallower cut across his ribs without waiting for an answer.

"Better," he admitted. "Thanks."

She gave him a short nod, already turning back toward Reeve to check the rib properly now that the adrenaline had worn off enough to make the real damage visible, and Jason sat there a moment longer, flexing his healed arm.