The morning sun stabbed through the inn windows like it had a personal grudge against Roland's eyelids.
He sat hunched over a wooden bowl of watery porridge, turning the runic fragment over in his fingers. The carved lines caught the light.
This wasn't some village hedge wizard's work.
"Sloppy code," he muttered, squinting at the pattern.
"But expensive sloppy code."
Across the table, Elena leaned forward, her breakfast untouched.
"What does it mean?" she asked quietly.
Roland pocketed the fragment with a grunt.
"Means someone's got deep pockets and bad priorities. Also means we need to get out of this buggy area before more patches show up."
"Patches?"
"Problems. People with swords who want to stab your dad."
Reinhardt appeared at their table, already dressed for travel.
His face looked carved from stone, but Roland caught the tension in his shoulders.
The man had spent the night planning, not sleeping.
"We leave within the hour," Reinhardt said.
"The roads to my estate should be safer. Local lords there know better than to bite the hand that feeds them."
Roland drained his ale mug and stood with a groan.
"Finally. Time to get out of this mess before the next raid encounter spawns."
Elena blinked.
"Spawns?"
"Shows up. Whatever. Let's go home."
The Reinhardt manor sat on a hill overlooking rolling farmland, surrounded by a low stone wall that looked more for decorative than defensive. It wasn't some massive castle from a storybook, just a large, practical house with good bones and better maintenance.
Roland squinted up at it from the carriage.
"Huh. Looks almost normal."
"What did you expect?" Elena asked, bouncing slightly in her seat as they rolled through the front gates.
"Towers. Banners. Maybe a moat. You know, typical noble DLC content."
"Dee-el-what?"
"Never mind."
The carriage stopped in front of the main entrance, where a small crowd of servants waited. They looked genuinely happy to see Elena, not just doing the polite noble thing. A few waved. One older woman actually smiled.
"Elena!" A plump woman in her fifties bustled forward, gray hair escaping from her cap. "Look at you, all grown up and proper! Was the journey terrible? You look thin. Are you eating enough?"
Elena laughed, hugging the woman.
"I'm fine, Martha. Ummmm... This is Roland, my... tutor."
Martha turned her sharp eyes on Roland, taking in his rumpled coat, stubbled chin, and general air of a man who'd been dragged somewhere against his will.
"Tutor?" she said, hands on her hips.
"You look half-starved. When's the last time you had a proper meal?"
Roland opened his mouth to answer, but Martha was already steering him toward the door.
"Never mind. Kitchen. Now. Can't have Elena's teacher fainting from hunger."
"I don't faint," Roland protested weakly.
"Everyone faints if they're hungry enough. Come on."
Roland shot Elena a look of pure betrayal as Martha hauled him inside. Elena just grinned.
An hour later, Roland sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of actual beef stew in front of him. Real meat, real vegetables, real bread.
He took another spoonful and made a sound that might have been approval.
"See?" Martha said, arms crossed with satisfaction. "Proper food fixes most problems."
"Finally," Roland muttered around a mouthful of bread. "Someone who makes decent soup."
Martha beamed like he'd just declared her the greatest cook in the kingdom.
Elena appeared in the doorway.
"Ready for the tour?"
Roland looked longingly at his half-finished stew.
"The food will still be here later," Martha said. "Go on."
Roland sighed and followed Elena out.
The manor was bigger inside than it looked from outside. Not fancy-big, just practical-big. Lots of rooms that actually got used, hallways that made sense, windows that let in real light.
"Library," Elena said, pushing open a door. Shelves lined the walls, filled with books that looked read instead of decorative.
"Father's study." Another room, this one with a desk covered in papers and ledgers.
"Guest wing." A hallway with several doors.
"And this," she said, stopping at the end of a corridor, "is the old practice room."
She opened the door to reveal a disaster.
The room was maybe twenty feet square, with dusty stone floors and a few grimy windows. Shelves lined one wall, covered in jars of mysterious substances and tools that hadn't been touched in years. A single wooden table sat in the center, scarred from decades of magical accidents.
Roland stepped inside, looked around, and made a face like he'd bitten something sour.
"Who designed this mess?" he muttered. "No wonder your spells kept crashing."
Elena frowned.
"What's wrong with it?"
"Everything." Roland pointed at the windows. "Light's all wrong. Half the room's in shadow, half's too bright. And this table, it's right in the middle. Can't move around properly."
He kicked at a jar on the floor.
"Storage is chaos. Probably can't find anything when you need it."
He walked to the far wall, running his fingers along the stone.
"Ventilation's terrible too. One little fire spell goes wrong and everyone suffocates."
Elena watched him examine the room like he was debugging a broken machine.
"So... we can't use it?"
Roland cracked his knuckles.
"Didn't say that. Just needs some patches."
Over the next few hours, Roland turned into someone Elena had never seen before.
He moved the heavy wooden table to one corner, muttering about "workflow optimization." He dragged the shelves around until supplies were organized by type instead of randomly scattered. He even convinced a servant to help him clean the windows properly.
"Lighting's better now," he said, standing back to survey his work.
"Workspace is clear. Emergency exits are marked."
He pointed to the door and windows.
"And everything's where you can actually find it."
Elena looked around the transformed room. It felt... bigger somehow. More organized. Like a place where actual work could get done instead of just storing old junk.
"It's different," she said.
"It's functional," Roland corrected. "Now we can actually debug your magic without tripping over garbage."
He pulled a stool over to the cleared workspace and sat down heavily.
"Alright. Time for your next lesson."
Elena perked up, sitting across from him.
"Another spell?"
"Yep. But not a flashy one." He held up his index finger. "Fireball's good for combat. But what about daily life? Lighting candles, starting campfires, that kind of thing. You gonna throw a fireball at every candle in the house?"
She blinked. "...No?"
"Exactly. Wasteful. Like using a sledgehammer to crack nuts."
He concentrated for a moment. A small flame appeared at the tip of his finger, steady and controlled.
"This is [Flame Touch]. Simpler than fireball, but harder to control."
The flame danced on his fingertip like a tiny candle, giving off warmth without burning him.
Elena leaned forward.
"How's it harder if it's smaller?"
"Because small means precise. With fireball, you can be sloppy, just throw power at it until something explodes. But this?"
He moved his finger, and the flame stayed perfectly still relative to his skin.
"This needs exact control. Like holding a match that never burns out."
He extinguished the flame with a thought.
"Your turn."
Elena held up her finger, concentrating. She could feel the mana flowing, tried to keep it steady like she'd learned with the fireball...
A burst of flame shot from her fingertip, it's way too big and way too hot. She yelped and shook her hand.
"Ow!"
Roland snorted.
"Too much power, not enough control. Try again. Smaller."
She tried again. This time the flame appeared, flickered wildly, then went out.
"Better. Again."
The third attempt lasted almost five seconds before sputtering out.
"Getting there. The trick is treating it like breathing. Steady in, steady out. Don't force it."
Elena bit her lip, focusing harder. The flame appeared, smaller this time, dancing on her fingertip. It wavered but didn't die.
"I did it!" she said, then immediately the flame went out as her concentration broke.
Roland nodded approvingly.
"Not bad. You're learning faster this time."
She was. The systematic approach he'd taught her with fireball was carrying over. Instead of panicking when the spell didn't work perfectly, she could troubleshoot. Adjust the mana flow, steady her breathing, try again.
"Why this spell?" she asked, attempting it again.
"Because it's useful. Light candles, start fires, heat food. Also because if you can maintain a tiny controlled flame, bigger spells get easier. It's like..." He searched for words she'd understand. "Like learning to write neat letters before trying to write whole books."
The flame appeared on her finger again, steadier this time.
"Foundation work," she said.
"Exactly."
They practiced for another hour, Elena gradually getting the hang of maintaining the small flame for longer periods. By the end, she could keep it lit while walking around the room.
"Good enough for today," Roland said, stretching. His joints popped. "Don't overdo it. Practice a little each day, build up the muscle memory."
"Muscle memory?"
"Your body remembering how to do it without thinking too hard."
Elena looked at her fingertip, still feeling the echo of controlled heat.
"It's kind of amazing," she said quietly. "Magic that's actually... useful."
Roland raised an eyebrow. "What'd you think it was for?"
"Combat. Showing off. Proving I was worthy of..." She trailed off.
"Ah." Roland nodded. "Yeah, that's the academy's fault. They teach magic like it's all about impressing people. But most magic is just... daily life stuff. Lighting fires, cleaning water, fixing things that break."
He stood, dusting off his coat.
"Come on. I want to see what other broken systems this place is running."
As it turned out, the manor was running quite a few broken systems.
The kitchen's heating stones were temperamental, sometimes too hot, sometimes barely warm.
The lamps in the hallways flickered randomly.
The well's cooling rune made the water taste funny.
"This code is older than me and twice as cranky," Roland muttered, examining a particularly stubborn heating stone that refused to maintain consistent temperature.
The cook, a thin man named Alfred, hovered nearby.
"Can you fix it, sir? It's been acting up for months."
Roland traced the rune carved into the stone's side.
"Just needs a minor adjustment. Someone tried to boost the output but didn't balance the flow properly."
He scratched a small mark with his fingernail, adjusting one line of the rune by a tiny amount.
The stone immediately began radiating steady, even heat.
Alfred's eyes widened.
"That's... that's it?"
"Yep. Just a small patch." Roland moved to the next stone. "Most problems are small problems that got ignored until they became big problems."
He spent the rest of the afternoon making similar small fixes throughout the manor. It's not flashy, just quality-of-life improvements. The lamps stopped flickering. The well water tasted clean again. The heating in the servants' quarters worked properly for the first time in years.
Word spread quickly through the manor. By dinner time, Roland had a small following of grateful servants who kept trying to thank him.
"It's nothing," he kept saying. "Just basic maintenance."
But to people who'd been putting up with broken systems for months, it felt like miracles.
Dinner was in the main hall, a long table set with actual silverware and cloth napkins. Roland felt out of place in his travel clothes, but no one seemed to care.
Reinhardt sat at the head of the table, looking more relaxed than he had in days. Home ground suited him.
"I hear you've been troubleshooting our household problems," he said, cutting into his roast.
Roland shrugged.
"Hm? Just small fixes. Nothing major."
"Alfred tells me the kitchen hasn't run this smoothly in years."
"The runes were just poorly maintained. Like any system, they need regular updates."
Elena, sitting across from him, held up her hand and lit her fingertip with a small, controlled flame.
"Look, father! I learned [Flame Touch] today."
Reinhardt smiled, the first genuine smile Roland had seen from him.
"Impressive. Very controlled."
Elena beamed, extinguishing the flame carefully.
"It's more useful than I thought magic could be," she said. "Not just for fighting or showing off, but for... normal things."
Reinhardt nodded approvingly.
"Magic should serve daily life first, and combat second. Too many mages forget that."
Roland took a sip of wine – actual good wine, not the tavern one – and felt something unexpected.
Contentment.
The food was good. The company wasn't terrible. He had a comfortable room, a proper workshop, and nobody was making unreasonable demands of him.
Elena was learning fast and actually seemed to enjoy the lessons instead of treating them like torture.
Maybe this wasn't so bad after all.
"The servants are quite taken with you," Reinhardt mentioned casually. "Martha's already planning to fatten you up properly."
"She makes decent soup," Roland admitted.
"High praise from you."
Elena laughed. "Yesterday you called her stew 'functional nutrition.' Now it's decent soup."
"Don't push it, kid."
But he was smiling when he said it.
***
Later that evening, Roland sat in his new workshop, examining the runic fragment by candlelight. The pattern still nagged at him, it's familiar but not quite placeable.
A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts.
"Come in."
Reinhardt entered, carrying two glasses and a bottle of brandy.
"Thought you might like some company," he said, setting the glasses down and pouring.
Roland accepted the drink gratefully.
"Thanks."
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, sipping brandy.
"She's learning faster than I expected," Reinhardt said eventually.
"She's smart. Just needed someone to explain things in a way that made sense to her."
"The academy's methods didn't suit her."
Roland snorted.
"The academy's methods don't suit anyone with half a brain. Too much theory, not enough practical application."
"You have strong opinions about education."
"I have strong opinions about systems that don't work." Roland held up the runic fragment. "Like whatever organization is funding these attacks."
Reinhardt's expression grew serious.
"Any progress on identifying them?"
"Some. The craftsmanship is professional grade. Military or court level. And the attack pattern..." Roland frowned. "It's too organized for random banditry. Someone's coordinating this."
"Local corruption?"
"Maybe. Or maybe something bigger." Roland pocketed the fragment again. "Either way, it's not going to stop with one raid."
Reinhardt nodded grimly.
"I've sent word to my allies. Quietly. If there's a larger conspiracy, we'll need information before we can act."
"Well, here's to information gathering. And to hoping we get some peace and quiet while we do it."
They clinked glasses and drank.
It seems peaceful. But Roland had learned not to trust peace and quiet. In his experience, it usually meant the next problem was just taking its time to load.
Still, he thought, settling back in his chair, this wasn't a terrible place to wait for the next crisis.
The brandy was good, the company was tolerable, and for the first time since leaving his village, he had a proper workspace.
Maybe he could get used to this domestic life.
Just for a while.