When Fabrisse caught up, Anabeth and the armored stranger were already halfway to the far archway, moving fast but not hurried, like they didn't expect anyone sane to follow.

He cut across the lawn and called out, "Von Silberthal!"

Anabeth whirled around, eyes wide, finger to her lips as she spotted him. "Keep your voice down, will you? It's midnight!" She sounded like someone trying to scold a cat for knocking over a vase.

Fabrisse opened his mouth to answer, but then the armored figure turned.

A single glance over his silver-rimmed shoulder sent Fabrisse into silence. It felt as though gravity had doubled from a glance alone. The sound of the fountain faded, the wind flattened, and something deep in his spine screamed don't move. His eyes wanted to lift, to properly see the person's face, but they wouldn't. His neck stiffened, his body obeying some older, deeper instinct that screamed once more: don't look.

What's this? This . . . intimidating aura from him . . . can't be magic, right?

[Passive Skill Detected: Intimidating Aura, Tier III, Rank VIII (Concordance Skill)]

The words flashed before his eyes.

His thoughts blanked. Then came the shock, sharp and cold.

A Rank VIII Concordance Skill?

That wasn't possible. Concordance Skills were supposed to be unique, right? Concordance was supposed to be a hidden element.

"Oh! Have you met my companion?" she said with all the effortless grace, as if she were announcing a guest at a ballroom rather than standing in the moonlit courtyard. "Sir Henry of Mostenstein! A real knight, mind you! Hero of the Greyfen Pass, slayer of the Seven-Horned Bogmaw, and vanquisher of at least three bandit kings! He once held a bridge against fifty men, you know. Or was it fifteen? Either way; terribly brave!"

The armored figure said nothing.

[SIDEQUEST COMPLETED: Unidentified Variable (1)]

Objective: Learn the name of the armored stranger

Reward: +125 EXP

Fabrisse just stared, frozen somewhere between awe and sheer, bodily panic. Every instinct in him was howling to keep perfectly still, to breathe shallowly, to not draw attention. Yet Anabeth was out here grinning.

Fabrisse finally managed to force air into his lungs and asked, "What—what are you doing out here this late?"

Anabeth turned to glance up at the knight with an expression that was both expectant and reverent. The knight did not move. The moonlight rolled down the plates of his cuirass like water off polished stone, pooling briefly on the rim of his pauldrons before sinking into shadow.

They seemed to have exchanged something in that moment of silence, for Anabeth's eyes grew bigger than Fabrisse thought they could possibly grow. When she spoke again, her tone had changed: lighter, but oddly solemn. "Do you see that quartz on Sir Henry's left gauntlet?"

"No, I—" He hadn't had a chance to look. The knight lifted his left hand for Fabrisse to see, and there, inset along the ridged knuckle guard, was a chunk of raw quartz. Up close, it was almost empty, like a core of absolute clarity, like someone had bored a clean eye through the middle of it, but inside that clarity, something moved: a suggestion of current, as if a thin storm were trapped and pacing in a glass room. Veins ran through it in hairline forks, not mineral streaks but something that looked carved from light itself, branching sharp like frozen lightning.

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His mind flipped through every catalogue entry he'd ever memorized and every alchemical notation from Kann's and Hajin's notes. This must be the Stormglass Aetherquartz.

He was almost sure of it. This was a crystal rumored to form only at the convergence of stormfront and leyline. where air and aether collided so violently that light itself had to fold to survive. It was a material that could store a weather pattern inside it.

But that couldn't be right. Stormglass Aetherquartz was volatile and murky. The ones in the Archives were all fractured, clouded, their cores webbed with impurities like frostbite. None of them ever looked like this.

This one was immaculate. Could it really be Stormglass—

"It's Stormglass Aetherquartz!" Anabeth declared.

Every part of him screamed to confirm it, to scan it, to prove beyond doubt what he was seeing.

His thumb twitched unconsciously, the familiar mental gesture to activate Grain Analysis, but the knight stared at him, and the idea immediately died inside his mind.

"But what does it have to do with what you're doing?" Fabrisse asked Anabeth.

Anabeth clapped her hands together as if unveiling a grand thesis. "We're looking for a quartz that reacts to the Stormglass! Imagine—two resonant cores in sympathetic vibration! The feedback could amplify the knight's channeling efficiency by a factor of ten. Maybe more! It could help Sir Henry here achieve his god-like potential!"

What god-like potential? He thought back to her earlier words: slayer of the Seven-Horned Bogmaw, hero of the Greyfen Pass, bridge against fifty men. Those weren't current wars. There hadn't been a proper battle near Greyfen in decades. If Sir Henry had really achieved three of them, that would make him a localized folk hero, not a divine aspirant. So what did he fight? And why does someone like that need to get stronger?

But the more important question was . . .

"Stormglass Aetherquartz is an epic-grade quartz. To resonate with it, you need another epic-grade quartz," he said.

"Correct," Anabeth said.

"How are we going to find it in the Synod?" He asked.

"You know about the Synod valley?" She asked back.

"Yes."

"You know about the cave there?"

"Yes." In fact, he'd been there countless times. There was definitely no epic-grade quartz in there.

"You know about the secret tunnel underneath the cave?"

"No."

"Great! Not even Exemplar Kann knows about it."

"Then why would you tell me?"

"Sir Henry has determined you are worthy and capable of holding a secret. Or else he'll just exterminate you. Also, we need someone with actual stratal knowledge who isn't from my family line."

"Okay . . ."

How would he know that? And how would SHE know he knows that? He hasn't even said a word . . .

Unless—

There were ways for thaumaturges to share information nonverbally. Telepathic communication was possible, but it was very unlikely a Magus-Student had access to that. Or did these two form some sort of high-level Emotional Synchronization? More possible, but still pretty impossible. It took Liene and him almost all their FP to push a tiny petal.

Between two people, that would mean a level of emotional harmony bordering on—

"So?" Anabeth grinned. "Are you following? We shall leave you here to your own devices in five seconds if you don't decide."

Fabrisse glanced at the scale-looking contraption on Anabeth's hand. "Can I borrow the scale if I do?"

She followed his gaze, then back at him. "Sure!"

So it is a scale.

[SIDEQUEST RECEIVED: Unidentified Variable (2)]

Objective: You or your party successfully find an Epic-grade quartz inside the Synod Valley cave

Reward: +15% Progress for Sedimentary Recall (Rank I)

+15% Progress for Aetheric Grain Analysis (Rank I)

Oh. That's good. I can . . .

[SYSTEM WARNING: PRAXIS NODE has detected a conflicting System signature in proximity.]

What?

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