When the equipment room was done, they went back downstairs.
The reception hall looked exactly the same as before — same lamps burning low, same round table, same five city leaders watching five young fighters reassemble in front of them. But the mood had shifted. The comfortable dinner warmth was completely gone. Something heavier had settled in its place, the kind of weight that comes when important people stop being polite and start being honest.
Aldros Vale stood.
He didn’t clear his throat. He didn’t arrange his words. He just spoke, the way a man speaks when he has said a thing many times and means it every single time.
"The Alliance will assign a senior supervisor to your group for the qualifying period," he said. "Their job is to observe. Not to advise. Not to assist. Observe." He let that sit for a moment. "Whatever danger you walk into — no matter how bad it gets, no matter how close things come — the supervisor will not step in unless you ask them directly."
The table was very quiet.
"If you ask for help, you hand the mission back to them. You lose your eligibility for this entire cycle — not just this round. This cycle." He looked at each of them in turn, slow and deliberate. "That is the rule. It exists for a reason. The Demon Hunt Selection is not a training exercise. It has never been a training exercise."
Darius Stone sat completely still. Caden had stopped fidgeting for the first time all evening.
"Your lives matter more than your results," Aldros Vale said. "If you are in over your heads and you know it — ask for help. No one at this table will think less of you for coming home alive."
He sat back down.
Consul Elric Frostvane took over without pause, the handoff so smooth it was clearly rehearsed.
"Moonhaven City sits in the southeastern quarter of the Alliance," he said. "Approximately two hundred kilometers from the nearest demon territory border. A route has already been planned and handed to your supervisor — you won’t be navigating blind." He folded his hands on the table. "You’ll move quietly. No unnecessary engagements, no side detours, no heroics for their own sake. The goal is five confirmed kills per person to qualify. That’s it. In, done, out."
He paused.
"If a threat is beyond your ability to handle — fall back. Retreating is not failure. Retreating is the decision that keeps you alive to fight again." His voice stayed even, but something underneath it had an edge that hadn’t been there at dinner. "Getting killed because you were too proud to step back — that is the failure. The only one that actually matters."
Elric Frostvane was a diplomat by title and a careful man by nature, but in that moment he sounded like someone who had sent people into danger before and had learned the hard way what good advice looked like versus what people actually listened to.
Leo listened. He had the quiet, focused stillness of someone storing information rather than reacting to it.
Hall Master Harven glanced at the Stone brothers. A small look, nothing more, but the brothers both sat up slightly in response — an unconscious reflex of students who had trained under a man long enough to read every shade of his silences.
Hall Master Baric looked at Liora with something that was almost fatherly, though he would probably never use that word for it.
Hall Master Rowan Voss looked at Leo.
Leo met his gaze for a moment, then looked back at the table. Calm. Steady. The kind of calm that isn’t performed.
Rowan smiled to himself and said nothing.
Aldros Vale lifted his teacup.
The four leaders beside him rose with him — not hurried, not ceremonial, just five people who had worked together long enough to move like one thing when it mattered.
"You leave tomorrow morning," Aldros Vale said. "A city representative will travel ahead tonight to handle administrative matters at the Alliance staging ground. By the time you arrive, everything will already be arranged — registration, assignment, the works. Your only job when you get there is to be ready."
He raised his cup.
"You are Moonhaven Hall’s people and Moonhaven City’s representatives. We are proud of every one of you for being in this room tonight." A beat. "Come back. That’s the only result we actually care about."
Five cups rose across the table.
Five young fighters stood, bowed in unison, and drank.
The tea was warm. The room was quiet.
And then it was over.
---
The night air outside the Office Hall was sharp and clean, the kind of cold that wakes you up rather than bothers you. The streets of Moonhaven City had thinned out — just a few late walkers, a cart rumbling somewhere past the eastern quarter, lamplight throwing long gold shapes across the stone road.
Mira walked beside Leo at her usual pace, which was slightly faster than comfortable and showed no signs of slowing down. She was talking — she was almost always talking after events like this, processing out loud the way some people processed in silence — something about Darius Stone’s tower shield being almost comically large, something about whether Caden’s fire-blade combo would translate well against demon-type enemies specifically, something about the look on Elric Frostvane’s face when the supervisor rule was explained.
Leo half-listened.
His mind was already moving ahead — the route, the distance, the number. Two hundred kilometers. Five kills each. A supervisor who would watch them nearly die and keep their hands in their pockets unless asked.
He knew Kessel had cleared him for this. He trusted that. But knowing you’re ready and walking into demon territory for the first time were two different things, and he was honest enough with himself to hold both at once without pretending one cancelled the other.
He stopped at a stall near the east market.
Mira stopped two steps later and turned around.
"Two and a half kilograms of five-spice dried fish," Leo told the vendor.
The vendor didn’t blink. Paper rustled. A package appeared.
Mira stared at it. "You’re buying fish."
"I promised."
"You promised a two-headed lizard."
"Yes."
She opened her mouth, closed it, and then pointed at the package with the energy of someone who had given up arguing but wanted that noted for the record. "I just want it acknowledged that you remembered to buy dinner for your reptile before I had to remind you about literally anything else."
"She was waiting."
"She is always waiting. That’s all she does. She waits by the door and looks at you with four eyes and you immediately do whatever she wants." Mira fell back into step beside him. "It’s actually a little impressive. I’ve been trying to get you to listen to me for months."
Leo said nothing, but the corner of his mouth moved.
Mira caught it. "Don’t smile. That’s not a compliment."
They walked the rest of the way back in the easy, comfortable silence of two people who had spent enough time together that silence didn’t need to be filled.
---
Back in his room, Veyra was exactly where he expected her to be.
Both heads raised the instant his hand touched the door handle. By the time he stepped inside, she was already on her feet — red eyes bright and alert, golden eyes warmer, tail sweeping in slow arcs that had already knocked a small stack of books off the shelf by the window at some point during the evening.
Leo held up the paper package.
Both heads went completely still.
The red eyes locked onto the package. The golden eyes locked onto the package. For one full second, nothing moved.
Then both heads lunged forward at once, stopped themselves at the last moment with visible effort, and looked up at him with the most dignified expressions two heads on one lizard had ever managed.
Leo laughed. Genuinely, quietly, the laugh of someone who hadn’t expected to find something funny tonight and was glad for it.
He sat cross-legged on the floor and unwrapped the fish. Veyra settled beside him — all two meters of her, warm and solid — and ate carefully from his hands, one head at a time, trading off with an unspoken rhythm that still amazed him sometimes. Two separate minds. Two separate personalities. One creature who had chosen, very deliberately, to bind her life to his.
He scratched behind the left jaw. Then the right.
Both heads pressed into his hands.
The new armor was stacked neatly by the door. The two greatswords leaned against the wall, their enchantment lines faint in the low light. Rowan’s folded map sat on the table where Leo had placed it when he walked in.
Tomorrow. Two hundred kilometers. Demon territory.
Five kills to even get through the door.
He looked at Veyra — at four eyes half-closed with contentment, at the slow rhythm of her breathing, at the small purple-gold mark on her back that matched the one on his forehead — and felt something settle in his chest. Not confidence exactly. Something quieter than that. Something that didn’t need a name.
*Whatever’s out there,* he thought, *we go together.*
Outside his window, the last lamps of Moonhaven City burned against the dark.
Morning was close.
And somewhere past two hundred kilometers of road, demon territory was waiting — patient and cold and completely unaware of what was coming for it.