Sunlight poured in through the blinds to finally rouse Cormac from his slumber, eliciting the smallest groan as consciousness flooded back into his head. After rubbing the sleep from his eyes and blinked away the rest, he found that Ixia was perched cross legged at the foot of his bed wearing only a large smile. Cormac remained otherwise motionless as his eyes surveyed the room, only to find nothing out of the ordinary.

For as little as such a term meant nowadays.

“I assume it’s good news this morning?” Cormac asked, still groggy.

Ixia nodded, her smile remaining. “I have decided that there is something very important I must show you how to do today!”

Given that he was not at full lucidity yet, Cormac fought off certain immediate thoughts about a certain naked tree woman sitting on his bed as he considered biting his tongue off. After a moment, he instead settled on another option. “Um, how to care for plants?”

“No!” Ixia gave a gentle laugh. “How to kill!”

There was a stretch of time, a little too long, where Cormac forgot a few basic yet vital things. Like how to not stare, how to blink, and how to breathe. As those thoughts flooded back in with a return to full lucidity, he took a deep breath. “What prompted this?”

“I don’t want you to die.” Her smile remained sweet, but there was the tiniest glint of sadness there at the edges of her eyes and lips. “And we are on a perilous journey.”

Cormac nodded in understanding from his place in bed. “I can’t really argue with that...I’ve been wanting to do more anyway.

“Then we can do more together.” The dryad said, and the human had absolutely no idea if she was doing this on purpose as he felt himself growing red.

“Well, I should probably get dressed first.” Cormac replied, looking off to not have those lilac eyes staring through him.

Ixia shrugged and hopped down off the bed. “If you wish. Join me in the kitchen for breakfast when you are ready.”

The dryad exited to the living room, Cormac watching her leave with a craned neck before he shook his head and swore that it was just to make sure he had some privacy now. Crawling out of bed, he debated if taking a shower now would serve any purpose if he was about to train to fight. Ixia’s door to her forest glade remained open, cool air wafting into Cormac’s bedroom to cause a slight shiver as he stood there in his underclothes and decided on dressing now and showering after fight training.

Opting for a workout shirt to throw on with some jeans, Cormac lamented that he had only a few days left to this vacation that had been anything but. Not that it had been bad. And perhaps good wasn’t entirely correct either, but it did feel more accurate he thought to himself as he poked his head through the portal door to glance around and make sure there was nothing lurking there.

Finding nothing but a grove of magic trees and other plants, he snatched his phone from his nightstand and entered his living room to find that it had already been slightly rearranged and now had a cage of roots surrounding the T.V.

“I didn’t want anything damaging it.” Ixia called from the kitchen table as she ate a bowl of granola, having set out one of the strange indigo fruits across from her.

“Good idea.” Cormac nodded, sitting down and biting into the fruit as he set his phone on the table. “Just so I can mentally prepare myself though, will I be bumping into those roots or thrown into them?”

“I am not going to be throwing you!” Ixia protested as she balled her hands into fists of indignation.

The human chuckled as he ate the strange superfruit that was so effective at providing incredible energy. “You say that now but I haven’t gone over all the details of the mysterious caller last night.”

Fists of indignation relaxed, laying flat on the table as Ixia steadied herself and looked at where Cormac’s phone sat on the table. “I assume it was not a pressing matter at least?”

“It maaaay have been more pressing if I didn’t believe so much in your whole warding of this place.” Cormac spent a second thinking over just how potentially perilous this may be. “Which I’ll be honest, involved using myself as bait in the experiment to ensure that yes your warding worked. But hey good news is that all of the supernatural things keep going for me first as an easy kill! A *distraction* Guardian still counts!”

Cormac’s toothy smile and triumphant fist pump into the air held for five whole seconds of Ixia’s intensely concerned eyes and wincing frown before his mind caught up with how pathetic that sounded and he slumped over onto his palm as he bit into the strange fruit in defeat.

“Working on better methods but until then it works.” Cormac mumbled into the fruit.

Ixia sighed and shook her head. “And what was the mysterious caller after?”

“Trying to tempt me into something probably nefarious by feeding off my feelings of not being a good enough Guardian.” The words flowed a bit too easy from his thin lips, but he knew he was a terrible liar and put no effort into pretending otherwise.

The dryad’s own much fuller lips curved down into a frown. “So it is another entity that prefers to remain hidden and know too much.”

Cormac shrugged, staring down at his several year old cell phone with a cracked case he should really replace already. “It’s about on the level of us needing that obsidian blade when it comes to secrets. Which had me thinking it might be our mystery man finally contacting us.”

Ixia’s eyes fixed on the human’s phone, still a thing of wonder she didn’t fully understand. Still a thing that if she had been born much more recently she felt she would know too little of, and yet this new mystery entity seemed to be familiar enough with it in defiance of what could be expected of things Veiled. “And what did you say to...him?”

“Him.” Cormac nodded. “And he put it in the form of a question, whether I thought I was doing enough for you. I told him no and hung up. At which point he started sending texts, which I ignored until I managed to disgust him into leaving me alone.”

The dryad’s brow raised as she looked at Cormac, and he wordlessly opened his phone to the text history and slid it across the table to her. She stared down at the phone, read the short history and snickered while trying and failing to suppress further laughter. “I wonder how he feels about proving himself wrong.”

Cormac’s pleased looking grin from making Ixia laugh remained as he tilted his head in the slightest confusion.

“My guardian repelled a foe without lifting a finger.” She said with a pleased looking smile, eliciting a blush from Cormac as he cleared his throat and looked away.

“Not true at all.” Cormac clarified, her lilac eyes only catching his green eyes through his peripheral vision. “I lifted several fingers to type that out.”

“So you are quite good with your fingers then?” She said as she propped up her head on her palm, keeping a pleased grin.

Cormac took a final massive bite of the indigo fruit, tossing its seeds down on the table as he stood and spoke through a full mouth as Ixia’s eyes burned holes through him to the core and caused him to overheat. “Who’s ready for that murder training? I sure am now that we’ve established I probably only made this guy mad!”

“Yes yes.” She rolled her eyes as she stood, grin going nowhere. “You still won.”

The human continued avoiding her gaze, though he felt it still. “Mmmhmm, a winning streak that ends now that I’m not dealing with some easily deterred mysterious entity….do you think we’re being watched right now?”

After having walked into his cleared out living room, he came to a sudden stop as he glanced around. Less from expecting to find some obvious answer to his question but more in contemplation.

“It should not be possible.” Ixia commented as she joined him in glancing about, and eventually her eyes landed upon his phone. “Then again...if messages can get in through that device could they be leaving as well? Without your knowledge?”

Cormac followed her gaze, sighing as he stared at his phone. He walked back into the kitchen nook to pick it up and put a finger to his lips as he motioned for Ixia to follow. The dryad nodded as he walked into his bedroom while powering down his phone and searching for...something. Taking a few towels he wrapped it up, stowed it in a shoe box, and stashed it under a pile of old clothes pushed towards the back corner. He motioned again to follow and once they were clear of his room he finally spoke.

“There’s a...microphone. An ear, let’s say, that I suppose in theory might allow for some tech savvy supernatural thing to listen in.” He winced at himself for not having thought of this sooner. “Now luckily my laptop and everything else in here is too cheap to have microphones, so that should hopefully keep things private while we’re at home? I kinda need that while we’re out and about most of the time.”

Ixia listened carefully, face once again serious. “It might count as a willing exchange, and thus get around many a ward. Or we may have a mysterious watcher whenever we are outside of this place.”

“Or more than one.” Cormac noted with a grimace and a shake of his head as though he didn’t want to fully acknowledge that idea. “That sounds like our luck.”

The dryad shivered at that thought. “I wouldn’t blame yourself too much. This should not have been a quest that required such great secrecy, nor one that should have so many opposed to it.”

“Well…” Cormac stood in the center of his living room once more, looking around and not sure what to expect from this. He pulled out a hair tie from his pocket and set about tying his red mane back in preparation for this training. “Teach me your ways, so that hopefully I don’t need to use them that much.”

Ixia nodded with an affirmative grin as she watched him fix his hair and pulled the dulled wooden knife from her arm to hand to Cormac. “A wise choice, but you must always be ready for a foe that will not stop until you have forced them to do so.”

Cormac took the long wooden blade, inspecting it and turning it over in his hand a few times as he got used to the weight and balance of it. It felt as though it had been weighed to simulate an actual knife as opposed to a mere piece of wood, perhaps closer to the feel of an obsidian blade?

“You remember how we defeated the ash hound?” Ixia asked as the human inspected the blade.

“Made it run face first into a tree at top speed and cut out its heart, yeah.” Cormac answered as he gripped the knife, not liking where this was going already.

The dryad nodded, but her smile betrayed that the answer wasn’t so simple. “The heart removal can only be done after sufficient damage to incapacitate. You’ll find the hearts of most Veiled to be quite resistant to damage.”

“Alright, don’t go for the heart...what do I go for?”

“The eyes.” She said pointing to her own.

“An even smaller target than the heart.” Cormac sighed. “Good.”

Ixia took a step back and into a readied stance. “Now, to start I want to see what we’re working with. Try to stab me in the eyes!”

The human’s red brows pressed together so hard that he started getting a headache, with a frown to match. “....no?”

“Don’t worry, I made sure the knife I gave you won’t be able to actually hurt me.” She beckoned him forward with a hand, and through another deep sigh Cormac readied himself for what he was certain was about to go very poorly.