The Capital celebrated the way it always did after a successful trial run.
It was loud, messy and completely sincere. People who had just survived something genuinely terrible drinking and laughing with the specific joy of those who hadn't expected to make it back. It was the kind of celebration that only existed in places where death was a realistic Tuesday outcome and Arie had always understood why people needed it even if he'd never quite felt it himself.
He sat with his group at a corner table and played the part.
He laughed when Rosh recounted the Guardian fight with approximately three times the drama it had actually involved. Listened while Demi broke down every tactical decision they'd made with the focused energy of someone who was already thinking about the next trial. Raised his cup when someone proposed a toast. Said the right things at the right moments and meant none of it and nobody knew the difference.
The laughter around him came easily.
He matched it without thinking.He had to play his part flawlessly after all. There were far more important things to do than to just sit and enjoy so an hour in he stood up.
"I think I need some air," he said to nobody in particular.
He felt Rosh's eyes on his back as he walked out.
The market district was quieter at night but never empty. Merchants who dealt in the kind of goods that moved better after dark, information brokers running their quiet networks, warriors spending their trial earnings on upgrades before the next run. The Capital didn't really sleep. It just got more honest after midnight.
Arie moved through it with his hands in his pockets and his eyes forward.
Arie knew where Divan would be. The man ran his operation out of a narrow building three streets off the main market with no sign outside, easy to miss if you didn't know to look. In Arie's first life he'd only heard about Divan secondhand. It was a name attached to rare resources, to information that shouldn't exist, to the kind of quiet influence that didn't show up on recruitment boards but shaped everything anyway. By the time Arie had understood how valuable that network was he'd been too deep into his first life's mistakes to do anything about it.
He turned down the third street and slowed his pace.
There were four men. He'd counted them in his first life too, heard the story from someone who'd been nearby when it happened. They had Divan against the wall of his own building, one of them holding a blade low where the street torches didn't reach, two others going through the satchel they'd already taken from him. The fourth was watching both ends of the street.
The fourth saw Arie first.
"Keep walking if you want to keep your life ," he said.
Arie looked at him. Then at the other three. Then at Divan. He was a compact man in his forties, dark eyes, completely still against the wall with the careful stillness of someone calculating rather than panicking.
Arie had always respected that about him.
He reached for his power and felt it settle into the ground beneath his feet the way it did now, finding the fault lines, reading the space. Four targets. He had it mapped before any of them registered that he hadn't kept walking.
It was over in forty seconds.
It wasn't exactly clean. Two of them were capable enough to make it interesting for a few seconds but efficient. He moved through them the way you move through a problem you've already solved, no wasted effort, no unnecessary force. The fourth one ran. Letting him go was more efficient.
When it was done he straightened up and looked at Divan.
Divan looked back at him with those dark calculating eyes, taking in Arie's age, his gear, the way he was standing, the specific lack of anything dramatic in his expression.
"You're quite young," Divan said. Like it was the most relevant observation available.
"People keep saying that." Arie smirked
Divan looked down at the two men on the ground, then at his recovered satchel, then back at Arie. "What do you want for this, young man?"
Arie picked up his jacket from where it had landed during the scuffle and shook the dust off it. "Nothing."
Silence.
"Nothing," Divan repeated.
"Nothing..yet" Arie looked at him. "I might want something later. I don't know yet."
Divan was quiet for a long moment. That calculating stillness working through whatever he was working through. Then something shifted in his expression, it was not warmth exactly, more like the specific recognition of one careful person identifying another.
"You know who I am," Divan said. Not a question.
"I've heard the name."
"And you know what an open debt from me is worth."
"I have some ideas." Arie shrugged.
Divan studied him for another moment. Then he picked up his satchel, straightened his coat, and looked at Arie with an expression that had moved past calculation into something closer to genuine interest.
"What's your name, lad?"
"Arie."
"Do you have a group?"
"Mm. I have one."
"Mm." Divan glanced at the street around them, empty now, the fourth man long gone. "You should come find me when you know what you want, Arie. My door is the one with no sign." He paused. "You already knew that though."
He walked inside without waiting for a response.
Arie stood in the empty street for a moment. Then he turned and walked back toward the celebration.
Rosh was in the same seat when he returned. Everyone else had shifted around, new conversations, the table slightly louder than when he'd left. Rosh looked up at him when he sat down and said nothing. Just looked at him the way he'd been doing since Ashfield. That quiet watchfulness that sat slightly wrong on a man who presented himself as straightforward.
"I assume you got your air?" he asked finally.
"Yeah."
Rosh held his gaze a second longer than necessary.
Then nodded and looked back at his cup.
Arie poured himself a drink and rejoined the conversation like he'd never left.
Across the table Demi was already sketching trial layouts on a scrap of paper, talking through the second trial's known variables with focused intensity. Her handwriting was small and precise. Her mind was already three steps ahead of where everyone else's was.
Arie watched her work and felt nothing and thought about an open debt sitting in a narrow building three streets off the main market with no sign outside.
It would keep.
Everything was keeping right now.
Six more trials.
Two domains.
He wouldn't need to spend anything yet.