The Whispering Woods kept its old secrets: shafts of sunlight, a constant, low murmur of leaves, the lazy, comforting stink of loam. Klee danced through it like a bright bolt of mischief, a small comet with bells on her pack. She hummed to herself, shovel flashing as she pried at roots and soil with the unconcerned fervor of a child hunting treasure.
Kael lagged behind, rubbing the corner of his eye. He was tired in a way that promised a clean, focused exhaustion—reward for a week of small trades, small risks. Sleep in a real bed in Mondstadt felt like a promise he owed himself.
"Klee, hurry up," he said. Tiredness tinted the words the way a worn blade is tinted by long use. He kept his tone light. Children listened to light better than to lectures.
"Almost there, big brother!" Klee called back, then plunged her shovel again. With a few practiced tugs she exposed a small wooden crate, crusted in earth. She popped it free and turned it like a prize.
Kael's mouth twitched. The crate held rows of red bombs, each painted with a ridiculous smiling face. Somehow this was exactly what he had expected and still managed to unsettle him.
"Blast stash," Klee announced, hugging the box close as if she had recovered half the sun. "Klee hid them so she would not carry too many."
The child logic was appalling and efficient. She dumped the explosives into a backpack that refused to look crowded. It bulged with the kind of magical generosity that made his strategic brain ping with possibilities and warning lights. Albedo's handiwork, Kael thought. The alchemist fancied oddities. A pocket that swallowed objects without complaint and coughed them up on demand was a useful—and dangerous—gift.
"Tomorrow we go back to Starfell Lake and make dinner," Klee said, voice full of conspiratorial delight.
"Tomorrow," Kael agreed. He glanced at the sky. Afternoon light had a way of collapsing into evening too quickly when you miscounted your steps.
They walked out of the trees. The world opened to Cider Lake, wide and placid and utterly unprepared to be remade by a child's whim. The water shimmered like a blue sheet of forgiving glass, reeds nodding pale against a horizon of far hills.
Klee sprinted to the shore like nectar to a bee. She dug for one more bomb and, before Kael could stop her, flung it in a perfect arc out into the lake's center.
The explosion was not a sound so much as a verdict. Water erupted up in a monstrous column, a geyser of spray and displaced fish that threw lightning across the sky. The shockwave knifed through the air and knocked pebbles from the shore. Gulls rose and whirled as if the world had hiccupped.
Klee laughed, wild and delighted. "See? Boom big!"
Kael watched the plume with the kind of attention he usually reserved for moving tides of men and markets. The blast had the clean percussion of an engineered detonation. It was efficient in its destruction. It also carried a signature that made his spine tighten: a peculiar, hungry resonance that did not smell exactly like elemental fire. It was sharper, more absolute. It left the stones with tiny glassed hunger marks where blast pressure had rubbed at minerals.
Klee tossed another. The next strike looked measured by comparison, but the lake heaved like a living thing, and the shoreline filled with stunned fish and floating debris. Heat and steam rose. The reeds bent. The bridge on the far side vibrated and gave a low, complained groan.
"Klee, stop," Kael said, more force in his voice now. The joy in her face was a knife he wanted to sheath with a politeness that would not scar.
She froze, then slapped her forehead as if remembering a forgotten badness. "Oh—oh no. The city will hear this, right? They will—they will think a monster is attacking."
The horns began before she could finish. A deep, urgent sound that rolled up from the city walls and pushed through the valley. Alarms in Mondstadt were not a rumor; they were a summons that gathered people like rain gathers into gutters.
Across the water, from the city ramparts, shields rose. Toggles of light and dark unclenched as men and women hurried along battlements. Merchants stopped mid-argument. Someone screamed something about monsters. A single word loosened and ran down the line of voices: attack.
Kael watched the reaction ripple. The blast had not simply disturbed a lake. It had written a loud, undeniable event into public memory. The Knights would respond with cruelty and care. They would send scouts, ask questions, bring discipline. He had, for better or worse, placed a bright pin on the city's map.
Klee's face collapsed for a second, then threw itself into panic-laced cheer. "Big brother, we will say we were fishing!"
"That will not stop the knights from coming," Kael said. He had an economy of understatement and used it now. "They will want to know who made the explosions. They will ask, and they will expect answers."
A knot tightened in his chest that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with calculus. Every action had a counter. Every spectacle demanded an explanation. His small experiments with Path resonance were not private any longer. The system, the strange honkai-flavored engine that had gifted him destructive scaffolding, logged these things in cold pixels. It liked theatrical results. Men with authority liked clear threats. Tonight's bonfire would become tomorrow's audit.
Off to the east, the shout from the rampart turned into the clatter of armor and the thrum of urgent orders. Lanterns flared. A messenger dash set hoof and wing for the magistrate's house.
Klee hugged another bomb to her chest like a child with a found teddy and looked at him with wide, accusatory eyes. "Big brother, we only used them for fish. They make the fish come out to the top!"
"They also make the whole city wake up," Kael said. It was simple, stripped of lectures. Strategy could be stated cleanly.
They had to move. Exposure would be their enemy. The Knights, competent and dogged, would triangulate the source of these detonations. If Kael intended to keep experimenting with Path resonance, he needed a story that stood up under scrutiny. He needed plausible deniability and the right kind of friends.
He looked at Klee. The child's joy was a bright, dangerous thing that could be turned into leverage if handled properly. You could claim innocence. You could claim ignorance. You could claim a hundred different things. The city, his long-term plan, wanted someone it could trust or punish. Tonight he had given it a reason to look.
"Pack up," he said. "We leave now. No more booms. Not yet."
Klee's lower lip trembled. "But the fish—"
"Fish will carry over," Kael said. He allowed a small, dry amusement to velvet the order. "And next time we make sure the knights hear the story we want them to hear."
She nodded with the solemnity of someone training for mischief under instruction.
As they turned from the lake, horn and voice chased them through the trees, an approaching tide of official concern. Behind him, the water steamed and cooled and the reeds shivered back into place. The world would forget a good many things, but it kept a ledger of noise. His name would likely appear in that ledger soon enough.
He should have felt triumphant. Instead he felt a clean, professional regret, the kind a tactician feels when an experiment yields more data than safe margin. The Path resonance had worked. The bombs had obeyed. The sword he had once shattered had been a lesson, and tonight's fireworks had been a demonstration and a lesson wrapped in the same package.
Kael tightened his hand on the strap of Klee's bag. Bells chimed like punctuation. The city was moving. Knights would investigate. Questions would follow. He had stepped into a light that could warm him or burn him.
He already had a plan. It would have to be quick, neat, and socially palatable. It would have to make the knights see a harmless child doing something playful, not a new threat like a jagged, hungry rumor.
He let his mouth turn up in a little, controlled smile. "Beginner's luck," he said. It was equal parts thesis and promise.
Behind them, the horns kept calling.