SSS-Class Profession: The Path to Mastery-Chapter 197: A Hurtful Conversation

Our conversation took place in the living room which started smelling like lavender and scorched leather.

Mostly because I hadn’t showered yet, the stains still present on my body, and because Sienna, in her infinite wisdom, insisted on burning calming candles whenever there was a "crisis."

I sat slumped on the edge of the oversized suede couch, stripped down to a blood-streaked undershirt and torn pants, trying my best not to bleed all over the furniture. It was a losing battle. A small but growing stain was already seeping into the pristine suede. At this point, I couldn’t even tell what injury I was bleeding from. Hell, I couldn’t even tell if I was bleeding out or it was just blood that hadn’t fully dried up and was still leaking a bit.

Alexis hovered over me like an executioner preparing her tools.

"You’re an idiot," she said calmly, yanking open a medical kit that looked suspiciously military-grade. There were scalpels, adhesives, syringes, and enough disinfectants to drown an army.

I gave her a relatively flat look. "Glad to see my heroic rescue effort is being properly appreciated."

She didn’t even dignify that with a response. Her hands moved with the cold efficiency of a surgeon as she snapped on black gloves, laid out gauze, stitching needles, antiseptics, all in a neat, terrifying little line.

"Heroic?" Camille drawled from her perch on the arm of a nearby chair, perfectly poised as if this was some lazy Sunday debate instead of an intervention. "You call sprinting into a full-blown revolution with half your guts hanging out heroic? Or maybe fighting a bear in the forest is what you call heroic? Or what about going live to hundreds of thousands of people while bleeding and refusing to take the advice of your partners?"

Sienna, bless her, sat cross-legged on the other couch, her small hands wrapped tightly around a cup of steaming tea. Her eyes shimmered, too bright, betraying the tears she was desperately trying not to let fall.

"You could’ve died," she whispered, her voice a threadbare thing barely holding together.

That hit harder than any of the punches I’d taken.

I dropped my gaze, shame curling deep in my chest.

"I didn’t die," I muttered defensively, feeling like a scolded child.

Alexis grabbed my chin sharply, turning my head to better inspect the nasty gash along my jawline.

"Yet," she said, voice so sweet it could corrode metal. "If you so much as flinch, Reynard, I will knock you out and stitch you unconscious. You chose to keep going with half your body broken, so you’re gonna sit there and live with it while I fix you properly. Am I clear?"

"Crystal," I muttered.

Across the room, Evelyn sat stiffly at the dining table, sipping her tea like it was the only thing anchoring her. She hadn’t removed the sack from her head until earlier, and even now, her gaze stayed fixed downward, her posture so careful, so rigid, like she was terrified of herself.

I didn’t blame her.

None of us wanted to risk triggering something before we found a way to undo what had been done to her. freewebnøvel.coɱ

"You do realize," Alexis continued, dragging a soaked cloth across my ribs with brutal efficiency, "that running yourself half to death, getting clawed by a bear, stabbed by rogue agents, fighting Cain Protocol subjects, and getting body-slammed by a brainwashed Evelyn does not qualify as a normal Tuesday for sane people?"

"I prefer ’resourceful’ to ’insane,’" I grunted, wincing as she poured something that smelled suspiciously like napalm onto the wound.

"You’re lucky," Camille said, flipping her hair with a flick of her wrist. "If you weren’t Reynard Vale, if you were literally anybody else, but the urban legend of the Masked Syndicate, the government would’ve already dropped everything they had on you whether it was exposing you or killing you."

"Urban legend?" I wheezed through the pain. "I’ll take it. Better than minor celebrity."

Sienna set her tea down, trembling just slightly. "Rey," she whispered, voice cracking, "please... don’t joke about this."

I froze.

Something about how Sienna said my nickname brought me back to reality for a moment.

"I..." I exhaled slowly. "I had to. I couldn’t leave her behind. Plus, in the end everything ended well did it not? I lived, Evelyn got saved, Anthony is well and Elliot and Anika are going to some rural home where they wanted to go. I would say everything went relatively smoothly."

"We know," Sienna said, her voice barely more than a breath. "But still..."

"But you could’ve listened to us for once," Alexis snapped, slapping a roll of gauze onto the table beside her. "You think you’re invincible. You think carrying the weight alone protects us."

"Instead, it just rips us apart watching you destroy yourself," Sienna said, her voice tightening.

Camille, uncharacteristically serious, tilted her head at me. "Do you get it yet? You are not alone, Rey. You never were."

Alexis wrapped my arm in tight, almost aggressive motions, her jaw clenched the whole time.

"It doesn’t..."

I looked up, and what I saw there, the tightness in their stances, the lines around their eyes, wasn’t just anger.

It was fear.

I knew she was getting anxious due to my system starting to harm me, but seeing it in person now made me feel so much worse.

"You scared the hell out of us," Camille said, voice low, serious. "When the riots started, when the news started breaking... We thought you were dead. We thought we were going to lose you without even a goodbye."

I opened my mouth to argue, to say I’m fine, but the words stuck somewhere in my throat.

Because they were right.

"I didn’t want to drag you into it," I said, quieter, guilt threading through every syllable.

"You already dragged us into it the moment you called us family, the moment that we decided to join you," Alexis said, finishing the wrap with a brutal tug that made me grunt. "You don’t get to choose when we stop caring about you."

There was a beat of thick silence.

Evelyn, quietly sipping her tea, finally spoke.

Her voice was soft, but laced with dry amusement.

"You know," she said, lifting her cup slightly, "for someone who’s supposedly brilliant enough to outsmart half the world’s governments, you’re... remarkably bad at following simple advice."

I blinked at her.

She sipped her tea again, her lips twitching faintly upward.

"You did save me," she added after a moment. "That’s undeniable. But you’re still the biggest of all idiots."

Alexis snorted.

Sienna half-laughed, half-sobbed into her sleeve.

Camille leaned back with a smug, satisfied smile. "See? Even the hostage agrees."

"Ex-hostage," Evelyn corrected primly, though she was still holding the tea like a shield.

"And here I thought we’d have to brainwash you ourselves just to get you to admit he’s an idiot," Alexis muttered, shaking her head as she peeled off her gloves with a sharp snap.

"There," she said briskly, pressing a final bandage onto my side. "You’re stitched together. Again. Congratulations. You’re officially the prettiest Frankenstein’s monster I’ve ever seen."

"Hotter, though," Camille added with a wink.

Alexis grabbed a roll of gauze and lobbed it at her. Camille caught it mid-air without breaking her smirk.

I slumped back into the couch, exhaustion finally catching up. But underneath the bruises and the burns, there was something lighter. Something steadier.

They were furious.

But they were still here.

I closed my eyes briefly, letting it sink into the battered marrow of my bones.

Until—

"You might want to turn on the news," Evelyn said again, her voice slicing through the quiet like a scalpel as she was staring at her phone.

I cracked an eye open.

Evelyn still hadn’t looked up from her tea. Her voice was flat, detached, clinical, like she was announcing rain.

Sienna, frowning, grabbed the remote and flicked on the giant TV.

The room exploded into a chorus of anchors shouting over each other:

"...breaking news—" "...massive unrest across multiple sectors—" "...government leaks tie uprising to an underground figure known as—"

The screen flickered.

And there it was.

My face.

Clear as day.

An old archive photo, public but long-forgotten. A perfect, clean shot.

Beneath it, bold, screaming headlines:

REYNARD VALE — THE MASKED SYNDICATE LEADER EXPOSED

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

I sat up so fast that pain flared through my ribs, my hands fisting into the couch cushions.

The girls stared at the screen.

Then they turned.

Slowly.

Together.

Their expressions were blank.

Too blank.

Which was infinitely more terrifying than yelling.

"Rey," Alexis said sweetly, the kind of sweetness reserved for death threats, "is there something you forgot to mention?"

Sienna’s eyes were wide, shock flashing like lightning.

Camille just gave me the slowest, most distraught face I’d ever seen.

I swallowed thickly.

"Uh," I managed, voice cracking slightly, "I’ll be honest—"

They leaned in.

A synchronized, silent demand.

"I wasn’t expecting it to happen this soon."

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