"Unclean food like snake," Kael continued, his tone carrying the composed certainty of someone reading from a list they had already finalized, "pigs, wolves — these are things I'll never eat."
Noah chuckled.
It came out fuller than his usual quiet sounds, genuine enough to push past the brief containment he normally applied to reactions.
The word unclean sitting next to pig and wolf and snake, delivered with that particular Kael gravity, was more than his composure wanted to manage silently.
"Unclean food?" he said, the laughter still present at the edges of his voice. "Haha."
The pig was the detail that made it specific.
The beast before the snake had been exactly that — a mana beast in the rough shape of a pig, massively proportioned, its hide thick and its charge genuinely dangerous, earth element with the dense body that element tended to produce in its hosts.
