The fourth floor had ten guards.
Not six. Not eight.
Ten armored soldiers standing in a straight line outside a single door, their expressions giving away nothing. Leo had walked past plenty of important rooms in Moonhaven Hall, but this kind of security, this deep in a city building, was something different.
Consul Elric Frostvane produced a key from inside his coat and unlocked the door.
The Stone brothers stopped breathing for a second.
The room had no furniture. No shelves, no decorations, no chairs pushed against walls. Just rows of wide wooden tables arranged in a clean grid — and on those tables, laid out with careful spacing like a museum display that someone had put real thought into, was gear.
Armor sets. Weapons. Boots. Gauntlets. Every piece catching the lamp light in a slightly different way.
Darius Stone stepped forward without thinking, then caught himself and went still.
Caden didn’t catch himself. He made a sound that had no proper words.
Mira glanced at the room, glanced at Liora, and they shared the mildly polite expression of two people who had grown up around nice things and had learned to be gracious about it.
Leo walked slowly to the nearest table.
He picked up a gauntlet, turned it over, set it back down. His father’s voice came to him the way it always did — unhurried, a little dry: *Equipment is just one piece of what you are. The only gear worth having is gear you earned.* He’d said that on a cold morning in Eldrin Town, three years ago, when Leo had been half this height and twice as confused.
He still believed it.
That didn’t mean he was going to walk out of this room empty-handed.
Consul Frostvane moved to stand at the head of the room. "These aren’t the highest-tier pieces available in the Alliance. But they’re well above what’s on the open market." He swept a hand across the tables. "We selected amplification types — the goal is to strengthen what you already know, not change how you fight. One piece per body part. Choose thoughtfully."
He paused and looked at Liora. Then at Mira.
Both of them shook their heads at the same moment.
"I already have my own equipment," Liora said, simply.
Mira shrugged. "Same."
No one was surprised. The consul’s daughter came from a family with a magical equipment shop. Mira’s family had money and connections that went back two generations. The room had always been for three people, really — Leo and the Stone brothers.
Hall Master Harven caught Darius’s eye and gave a small nod.
That was enough.
---
Darius moved the way Leo imagined he fought: steady, certain, no wasted motion. He went straight to the heaviest armor on the first table — full-body coverage, reinforced plates, defense-enhancement runes etched in tight rows across every surface — and checked the fit at his shoulders and elbows with practiced efficiency. He added a tower shield that was nearly as wide as Leo’s arm span, its face layered with fortification patterns that pulsed faintly when he touched them.
For a weapon, he chose a long blade with a speed-amplification rune. Simple. Practical. The whole set told a single story: *I don’t need to move fast. I just need to not fall down.*
Caden’s picks said the opposite of everything his brother had chosen.
Light armor, fire attribute, built for someone who needed to move and move and keep moving. Two long blades, both fire enchanted, their edges already warm to the touch even without any spiritual energy pushing through them. He held them at his sides and grinned at his brother.
"If I push these with a full burst," he said cheerfully, "I basically become a walking fire hazard."
"Wonderful," Darius said. "Walk somewhere else."
Leo moved to the back of the room where the light-attribute pieces were.
There weren’t many. Light-attribute enchantments were harder to produce than fire or wind — the materials were rarer, the process more demanding, the finished pieces fewer. He understood why the collection was thin before he’d even started looking.
What he found was a set of light alloy armor — refined iron and heavy-iron blend, hammered thin without losing structural strength. It covered his upper torso, his elbows, his knee joints. Silver in color, unflashy, but the moment he held it up, the faint holy aura around it was unmistakable. Warm and clear, like morning light through clean glass.
No helmet. There wasn’t a matching piece in the room.
He was fine with that.
Then he found the swords.
Two greatswords, standard knight pattern — wide blades, balanced weight, the kind of thing built to be used hard and last. The first had light-attribute enhancement lines running the full length of the blade, with a fourth-rank beast core crystal set into the fuller. The second had a fire-attribute enchantment, the same crystal, the same weight. Both somewhere between twenty and twenty-five kilograms.
He picked them both up. One in each hand.
At two hundred spiritual energy — his current external level — they were essentially weightless.
"Leo." Consul Frostvane’s voice came from behind him, curious and direct. "You’re a Guardian Knight. Why two swords?"
Leo turned, and there was a flicker of something almost sheepish in his expression. "I already have a shield, sir. I thought a second offensive tool would be more useful than a second defensive one."
Frostvane blinked. Then smiled — genuinely, without any of the careful political composure from dinner. "That’s a fair point."
Mira, from across the room, did not say anything.
But she was smiling too, the kind of smile that meant she’d heard every word and filed it away for future use.
What Leo didn’t say out loud — and had no reason to — was that two-weapon fighting had been part of his daily training long enough that it no longer felt like a choice. Both hands moved independently. Both could attack. Both could redirect. Two swords meant twice the angles, twice the pressure, twice the number of things an opponent had to account for in the first second of contact.
Kessel had called it wasteful, once, early on.
He’d stopped commenting on it six months later.
Leo set the swords aside and began properly fitting the armor to his frame.
The holy aura around it settled quietly when he put it on, like it recognized what it was touching.