“I apologize for bringing you out all this way,” Zeke said with a chuckle.
He was topless, his sword and shirt by his side. We stood at the peak of a steep stone mountain. It had taken an hour on horseback to get here from the capital.
It was midday and the skies were clear. There was no snow, but the winds were still cold enough to feel like blades. It was ridiculous for Zeke to be hanging out in these extreme conditions without a shirt on.
All the same, I was a busy man, and I didn’t like that he’d called me out to this remote place by owl post. The gusts were too strong for me to even smoke a cigarette.
“Idiot,” I snapped. “Learn to choose better meeting places. Are you insane?”
Zeke laughed off my insults. “Sorry. You’ve been here before, so I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“It was summer back then. We’re in the middle of winter right now.”
The wind was chilly back then, even, but nothing like this. On top of that, the air was so thin up here. It was the worst. Maybe it was a fantastic spot for intensive training, but one wrong move and your eyelids would be frozen shut. The tiny particles of ice that sparkled in the air around us were all formed from the moisture in our breath. I guessed it was about minus thirty degrees.
“It’s freezing here, damn it. My bangs turned into icicles.”
“For someone complaining so much, you’re dressed pretty light.”
Zeke had taken note of the fact that I was dressed no differently than usual. I didn’t own any hiking gear, and I’d come to the mountain peak as I was. My coat, woven with a black dragon’s myocardial fibers, helped ward off some of the chill.
“My grandpa made me tough,” I said. “It’s cold, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Same as me, then. Back when I was a kid, that old demon hag had me training in extreme conditions like this all the time. Thanks to her, environmental changes don’t faze me.”
“Old demon hag… Sharon Valentine, right?”
Sharon was a renowned elven woman, formerly the second-in-command of Supreme Dragon but now its number three. She’d seen something in Zeke when he was just a troublemaker in the countryside, and she’d put him through a grueling training regimen.
In other words, Sharon was Zeke’s teacher. He wasn’t her only student, though. She had picked up talented children from across the empire and developed a training system—a kind of elite Seeker education program. The results made her famous. She’d successfully trained a huge number of Seekers up to A-Rank, and she was instrumental in Supreme Dragon’s reputation as the empire’s strongest clan.
Though the general public put the spotlight on Supreme Dragon’s EX-Rankers—Victor and Zeke—the clan’s key player was, without a doubt, Sharon Valentine. That was how advanced and exceptional a teacher she was. Even my mentor, Overdeath, had used her writings as a textbook for teaching me modern Seeker theory.
“Though I may currently be the strongest Seeker of my generation, Sharon Valentine is easily the best trainer. When you decide you want to truly deepen your knowledge of Seekers, you would be wise to make her your next instructor. If I write a letter of introduction for you, she will not turn you away.”
In the end, I had instead chosen the path of strengthening myself through battle, so I had never gone to Sharon for training, but my grandfather had spoken the truth. Even now, as the clan master of Wild Tempest, I based the fundamentals of my strategies on her tactical manuals.
Even Leon, who had gone through the training academy system, and Hugo, who had learned Seeker techniques through self-study, had been strongly influenced by Sharon. Excluding rare cases such as the foreign-born Koga and Alma—who had been trained in seclusion in the mountains—there probably wasn’t a Seeker in the empire who hadn’t been impacted by Sharon Valentine in some way. Some even called her “Mother Seeker.”
“I’d love to sit down and talk about Seekers with her someday,” I said.
“It’d be in your best interest not to,” Zeke told me, tensing up a little. “She hates you. You’d have a gun pointed at your skull before you could even utter the word ‘discussion.’ Not even joking.”
“What a pity.”
I’d never met Sharon, but I figured she probably hated me. I was the type of guy to eliminate anyone as soon as I deemed them a problem, no matter who they were. As a leading Seeker, Sharon valued authority and character. We were anything but compatible. What I did at the regalia meeting was bound to make its way to her. It was no surprise to hear that she detested me.
“It’s your one weak spot.” Zeke smiled. “You are a tremendous Seeker. You have the kind of prodigious skills that only come ’round once in a lifetime. That’s how you’ve accomplished as much as you have at your age. But you’re so aggressive that you’ve made yourself a lot of enemies. And you can’t wallop them all into submission; some will rise right along with you.”
As I listened to Zeke, four people rose to mind: Lloyd, Tanya, Walter, and Chelsea.
“There’s a limit to how strong anyone can get on their own. We surpass our own limits by way of growing together—not unlike what you just said about wanting to talk about Seekers with Sharon. Because of the way you fight, those opportunities are like dust in the wind. That’s a fatal weakness for a person.”
He wasn’t wrong, but it was still advice to sneer at.