The sll hit Noah first.
He was halfway down the stairs, still groggy from a night of restless sleep punctuated by dreams of black bones and parasitic shadows, when his senses registered sothing... off.
Not quite burnt, not quite raw, but occupying so unfortunate middle ground that suggested culinary experintation had gone horribly wrong.
Kelvin was already in the kitchen, standing near the counter with the kind of frozen expression that suggested he’d been offered sothing and was currently calculating the least offensive way to decline. Diana sat at the table, staring at her plate with the intensity of soone trying to solve a complex puzzle. Sophie had her diplomat face on, the one she used when negotiating contracts with difficult clients.
And Seraleth stood at the stove, looking radiantly proud of herself.
"Good morning, Noah!" she called out cheerfully. "I have prepared breakfast for everyone. Please, sit. You must be hungry after yesterday’s exertions."
Noah approached his designated seat with the caution usually reserved for disarming explosives. The plate before him contained what might have been eggs at so point in their existence. They were an interesting shade of gray-brown, with the texture of rubber that had been left in the sun too long.
Beside them sat what looked like toast, except it was simultaneously burnt on the outside and sohow still doughy in the middle. And there was... sothing. A at product, perhaps. It glistened ominously.
"This looks..." Noah searched for words that wouldn’t be a complete lie. "Different."
"I used traditional elven cooking techniques," Seraleth explained, beaming. "We prefer to let ingredients reach their full potential through extended heat application and minimal seasoning. The pure essence of the food itself should shine through."
Kelvin made a small noise that might have been agreent or might have been suppressed panic.
Diana, to her credit, had already taken a bite. Her face went through several interesting transformations before settling on sothing approximating neutrality. She chewed. And chewed. And kept chewing.
"Sera," Diana said finally, her voice carefully gentle. "This is... well, it’s certainly food."
The elf’s smile faltered slightly. "You do not enjoy it?"
"I think," Diana continued, setting down her fork with deliberate care, "that maybe elven cooking techniques don’t translate perfectly to human palates. Or human ingredients. Or possibly cooking in general."
Seraleth’s face fell. The transformation was imdiate and devastating, like watching soone realize they’d failed at sothing they’d been genuinely excited about. "I wanted to contribute. To be useful to the team in ways beyond combat. Everyone else has skills that benefit our daily lives, and I thought perhaps—"
"Hey," Sophie interrupted, standing up and moving to Seraleth’s side. "I was a terrible cook when I first started living on my own. Like, genuinely awful. I once made pasta that sohow ended up crunchy on the inside and mushy on the outside simultaneously. It defied physics."
"Really?" Seraleth looked hopeful.
"Really. It took years of practice to get competent. And even now, I wouldn’t call myself great. Just functional." Sophie gestured at Noah and Diana. "Besides, those two can’t cook at all. Noah once tried to make instant ran at my old place and sohow set off the fire alarm."
"It was one ti," Noah protested.
"It was instant ran," Diana deadpanned. "Literally the simplest food known to humanity. You just add hot water."
"The instructions were unclear."
"They’re printed on the package in fourteen-point font."
Seraleth was smiling again, so of the hurt fading from her expression. "So you are saying I simply need practice?"
"Lots of practice," Sophie confird. "And maybe so cooking classes. There’s a culinary school downtown that offers weekend workshops. We could go together soti."
"I would like that." Seraleth looked at her breakfast creation with new eyes. "Perhaps I should prepare sothing simpler in the anti. Do you have... bread? That does not require cooking?"
"Cereal," Kelvin suggested quickly. "Cereal is good. Very hard to ss up cereal."
They ended up ordering delivery from a breakfast place three blocks over, sitting around the table while they waited and discussing the previous day’s mission in more casual terms. The recruits’ performance, the unexpected twin category fives, the rising reputation of Eclipse Faction. Normal conversation, the kind that teams had when they weren’t actively fighting for their lives.
The food arrived twenty minutes later. Actual eggs, actual toast, actual bacon that didn’t require hazmat protocols. They ate quickly, everyone except Seraleth having burned more calories yesterday than they’d realized.
By the ti they finished, it was pushing nine in the morning. Ti to head to the office and face whatever the new day had waiting for them.
---
Noah rode with Kelvin in his new custom van, the back filled with equipnt and half-finished projects that clinked and rattled with every turn. Diana and Sophie took Sophie’s car, while Seraleth opted to walk, claiming she wanted to familiarize herself with the neighborhood. It was long walk but she could pull it off.
"So," Kelvin said as they pulled onto the main road, "you’ve been quiet. More than usual, I an. Sothing on your mind beyond the obvious category five insanity from yesterday?"
Noah hesitated. The dragon bone was currently stored in his void inventory, safely removed from normal space, but the weight of what it represented hadn’t left his thoughts since last night.
"Rember King Aurelius’s dragon?" Noah asked finally. "The one I’m supposed to find?"
"The ancient missing dragon that may or may not be relevant to any thing? Yeah, I rember."
"Well, now it’s not just his dragon I have to find. Apparently there’s another one." Noah kept his eyes on the road ahead. "Or sothing related to dragons, anyway. The details are complicated."
Kelvin was quiet for a mont, navigating around a delivery truck. "So you went from looking for one impossibly rare mythical creature to looking for two impossibly rare mythical creatures. That’s not ominous at all."
"That’s one way to put it."
"And this relates to yesterday’s parasitic nightmare beast how?"
"I have no idea. But the timing seems significant."
"The timing of mysterious bullshit happening around you is always significant," Kelvin observed. "It’s like you have a supernatural magnet for complicated problems that should probably be handled by people with more resources and less active death wishes."
"Thanks, Kelvin. Very reassuring."
"Hey, I’m just saying. Normal awakened hunters deal with category twos and threes. Maybe a four if they’re feeling ambitious. You casually punch category fives out of existence and get cryptic dragon-related quests as a reward. There’s normal, and then there’s whatever we’re doing."
Noah couldn’t really argue with that assessnt.
They pulled into the Eclipse Faction compound a few minutes later, finding the parking area already occupied by several vehicles. The recruits were here early, apparently eager to continue their training despite yesterday’s exhaustion.
Inside, they found all ten recruits in the training area, running through the drills Diana had started teaching them. Valencia, Marcus, and Chen were among the group, along with the seven others whose nas Noah was still learning. All of them looked up when Noah and Kelvin entered, sweaty and breathing hard but determined.
"Noah! Diana!" Chen called out, pausing mid-form. "Perfect timing. We could use so feedback on the techniques from yesterday."
Valencia wiped sweat from her forehead. "So of us are struggling with the ability integration exercises. It’s harder than it looks."
Diana entered just in ti to hear this, Sophie trailing behind her. "Good, you’re already ward up. That saves ti." She surveyed the recruits with an appraising eye. "Noah, continue with combat forms while I work on tactical coordination?"
"Works for ," Noah agreed.
Before they could start organizing the training session, Sam appeared from the main office, his tablet clutched in one hand and an expression that suggested he’d been up for hours dealing with administrative chaos.
"We need to talk," Sam announced. "All of you. Now, preferably."
They reconvened in the briefing room, the recruits included since whatever Sam had to say apparently affected everyone. Sam pulled up his tablet display on the main holographic projector, showing what looked like a contract database with far too many entries highlighted in green.
"Good news first," Sam started. "We have jobs. Lots of jobs. In the twenty-four hours since word spread about the Area 52 mission, Eclipse Faction has received forty-seven contract requests. Everything from category two pest control to category four threat elimination. Five of them are offering premium rates, and two specifically requested Noah by na."
"That’s good, right?" Sophie said.
"It’s excellent. It’s also way too much for one team to handle." Sam gestured at the display. "Even if we worked around the clock, we couldn’t accept all of these contracts without serious quality degradation. We’d burn out in a week."
Diana leaned back in her chair. "So we have too much work. That’s a good problem to have."
"It ans we’re legitimate," Sophie added. "A week ago, we were an unknown faction with zero reputation. Now we’re getting contract requests from settlents that previously wouldn’t have given us the ti of day."
Kelvin raised his hand. "I vote we accept everything and figure out logistics later."
"That’s a terrible plan," Sam said flatly.
"It’s an ambitious plan," Kelvin corrected. "But actually, I think we can make this work. We split into teams. Cover more ground. I was planning to head out into the field anyway—those armor pieces I’m working on won’t be ready for weeks, and I’m not sitting in the workshop while everyone else has adventures."
Noah considered the contracts displayed on the holographic interface. "We’d need to be strategic about it. Take jobs in the sa geographic region, maximize efficiency, make sure each team has balanced capabilities."
"I can coordinate that," Sophie said. "Sam, sort these by location and threat category. We’ll organize deploynt schedules that put the right people in the right places."
They were in the middle of analyzing the contract spread when Sam’s expression shifted, his attention drawn to sothing on his tablet. "Uh. We have a situation. Minor situation. Probably nothing."
"That phrasing suggests it’s not nothing," Diana observed.
"There’s a girl outside. She’s been hanging around the property since before you all arrived this morning. I already asked her to leave twice, but she keeps coming back. Security caras picked her up again about ten minutes ago."
Sophie frowned. "Did she say what she wanted?"
"Just that she needs to speak with Eclipse Faction leadership. Wouldn’t give her na or explain the situation." Sam pulled up the security feed on his tablet. "I can call security if you want, have them escort her off the premises."
"Let see," Diana said, standing up and moving to where Sam stood. She looked down at the tablet screen, at the security cara footage showing the front entrance area.
Her reaction was imdiate and visceral.
"Holy shit."
Noah looked up. "What?"
Diana’s face had gone pale. "It’s her."
"Her who?"
"Lila."
The pen Noah had been holding slipped from his fingers, clattering against the table with a sound that seed impossibly loud in the sudden silence.
Outside, visible through the security caras, a girl with blonde hair stood patiently by the gate, waiting for soone to let her in.
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