Harem of Villainesses: I Awakened SSS-Rank Skills After Killing a God Chapter 47 - Forth Seven. Montage

There was no mont where Lucius announced it or called a vote or laid out the logic for everyone to examine.

It just beca apparent over the course of the afternoon that they weren’t leaving today, and then that they weren’t leaving tomorrow, and by the ti Marta found them in the early evening to discuss housing the decision had already made itself without anyone saying so directly.

"There’s a cottage on the eastern edge," Marta said. She was sitting across from them in the village’s communal hall, a long low building that slled of old timber and cooking and the particular warmth of a space that had gotten to years of people using it.

"Belongs to a family that left two winters ago. They moved south when the lightning storms got worse." She set her hands flat on the table. "It needs work, but it’s standing. You’re welco to it as long as you need it."

"We won’t be staying permanently," Lucius said.

"I didn’t say permanently. I said as long as you need it." She looked at him with those steady eyes. "There’s a difference."

He nodded. "Then we’ll take it."

Marta looked at each of them in turn, Lucius, Seraphine, Valeria, with the assessing patience of soone who had been managing people and situations for long enough that she trusted her own read of both. Whatever she arrived at, she kept to herself.

"I’ll have soone open it up and check the roof," she said and stood and left.

****

The cottage was small and cold and slled of disuse.

Two rooms, a main space with a hearth and a table and two chairs that didn’t match each other, and a back room with a single wooden-frad bed and a storage chest that turned out to be empty.

The roof had one soft section in the corner of the main room where weather had gotten in at so point, the timber discoloured and slightly bowed, but the rest of it was sound.

The hearth drew well once Lucius cleared the accumulated debris from the flue, and within an hour of arrival the cold had retreated to the corners and the place had taken on the beginning of sothing livable.

Valeria assessed the structural issues in the first ten minutes, said nothing about them, and by the next morning had repaired the soft section of the roof with timber from the village’s maintenance stores and sealed the gap that had let the weather through. She didn’t announce she was doing it. She just did it before anyone else was fully awake.

Seraphine arranged the interior with the quiet efficiency of soone who had learned to make a space functional under worse conditions.

The mismatched chairs went on either side of the hearth. The table beca the work surface for Cophey’s journal and the stolen divine texts and the ritual components, organized by category and cross-referenced with the thodology notes Seraphine had been building since Hancock.

She added Mira to this system on the second day, bringing her to the cottage in the afternoon and sitting her down at the table and going through the basics of divination theory before they touched anything practical.

Mira arrived with three of her own books under her arm, which Seraphine examined with genuine interest before adding them to the working arrangent on the table.

Lucius watched this happen from the doorway and said nothing and went back to the hearth.

Mira ca every afternoon.

She arrived at the sa ti each day, knocked twice even though the door was generally open, and sat at the table with the focused seriousness of soone who had been waiting for this specific opportunity their entire life and was not going to waste it by being casual about it.

Seraphine was precise in her instruction. She didn’t talk down to Mira, didn’t simplify things unnecessarily, treated her as soone capable of handling the real material rather than a beginner’s version of it.

Mira responded to this by working harder than anyone told her to, reading ahead in the texts, coming back the next day with questions about things they hadn’t covered yet.

The ability was there. That was clear from the first session in Mira’s own cottage. The work was teaching her to find it deliberately, to hold it once she had it, to go looking for sothing specific rather than receiving fragnts at the ability’s own timing and convenience.

It was a slow, careful work. The kind that didn’t produce visible results every day and required both of them to trust the process on the days it seed like nothing was moving.

On the third day, Mira held a vision for fifteen seconds without losing it. She described a building she’d never been in with enough detail that Seraphine cross-referenced it against the pre-Church texts and found a partial match.

It didn’t an anything actionable yet, but it ant the training was working, which was what the third day needed to an.

Seraphine told her it was good work.

Mira pushed her glasses up and looked at the table and said nothing, but sothing in her posture changed slightly, the set of her shoulders releasing a tension that had apparently been there so long she’d stopped noticing it.

***

Valeria started training Lucius before sunrise.

Not a schedule agreed upon. She was simply outside the cottage when he woke on the second morning, standing in the flat ground between the cottage and the village’s eastern fence with her arms loose at her sides, waiting.

He got his boots on and went out.

The training had changed since the road. On the road it had been opportunistic, drilling footwork while they walked, sparring when the terrain allowed, correcting in real ti during the ambushes.

Here there was ti and space and no imdiate threat to manage around, which ant Valeria could build structure around what had previously been reactive.

She started with the body.

Foundation first, starting with the way weight moved through his fra, the way force generated from the ground up rather than from the arms outward, the inefficiencies she’d identified in his movent that technique was being built on top of rather than replacing.

She was specific about what she was fixing and why, and she expected him to understand the reason rather than just follow the instruction.

"If you understand why it works you’ll fix it under pressure," she said, on the second morning. "If you just copy what I show you, pressure breaks it and you’re back to the bad habit."

She was harder on him here than she’d been on the road. The road had been about survival minimums, enough improvent to keep him functional against the next threat.

This was different.

She was building sothing with a longer tiline in mind, working with the patience of soone who understood that real change in a body took repetition past the point of thinking about it.

He ca back to the cottage every morning with new damage to manage. Nothing serious, the specific soreness of muscle being worked past its current capacity and rebuilt slightly larger, the bruising of soone learning to receive impact correctly rather than avoiding it.

He ate more, and slept harder. His body was doing its own accounting in the overnight hours and presenting the results each morning in the form of slightly better movent than the day before.

He didn’t always feel it day to day.

Valeria apparently did. She adjusted the sessions increntally, adding difficulty at the exact rate his capacity increased, keeping the challenge at a level that required everything he had without exceeding what his body could process.

It was precise calibration and she did it without appearing to think about it, the way she did most things.

On the fifth morning she had him spar at full intensity for the first ti since the road.

He landed two strikes.

She acknowledged both of them with the sa brief nod she gave everything, the minimum recognition required to confirm it had registered, and then ca back at him and demonstrated exactly how both opportunities had been created by mistakes she’d let through deliberately.

He didn’t mind. Two was more than none.

The village settled around them gradually.

Ashvale was a frontier settlent that had learned caution through necessity, and three strangers moving into the edge cottage and training in the pre-dawn dark and bringing an unknown girl to their table every afternoon wasn’t sothing the village processed quickly.

But the wolf pack was gone, the alpha was gone. The eastern periter was being repaired with timber the three strangers had helped carry from the stores without being asked.

The girl with the visions that nobody had believed was coming ho each evening with the specific focused expression of soone whose life had recently acquired a direction it hadn’t had before.

Marta watched all of it with her steady eyes and said nothing and occasionally left food outside the cottage door without knocking.

Tam found Lucius on the fourth day.

He was nine years old, missing a front tooth, and completely unbothered by the fact that Lucius was in the middle of a training session when he walked up and stood at the edge of the cleared ground and watched with open interest.

Valeria glanced at him once, assessed him as non-threatening, and returned to what she was doing.

Tam watched for twenty minutes. Then asked: "Why do you keep making him do it again if he’s doing it right?"

Valeria didn’t look at him. "Because doing it right once doesn’t an anything. Doing it right a thousand tis ans sothing."

Tam considered this, then asked another question. "How many tis has he done it?"

"Not a thousand yet."

Tam nodded seriously and sat down in the grass to watch the rest of the session.

He ca back the next morning.

**

By the end of the first week, the cottage had stopped feeling temporary in the way it had on the first night.

Lucius wasn’t confused about what they were doing here and how long the here part of it would last.

A base, properly established, with work happening inside it that ant sothing.

The Stormbreak storm ran its lightning through the clouds above the mountains every day, the sa as always.

The work continued.