Orion was very tired…
He had been pretending otherwise.
The honest reason was that acknowledging it meant acknowledging that the old woman was costing him more than he had planned for.
Which was not, strictly speaking, his fault.
The plan had accounted for Victor as a hostage and nothing more. A tamer with a half-crystallized arm and days of captivity behind him had no business functioning as a meaningful shield. By any reasonable calculation, he shouldn't have any fight left in him or strength enough to matter.
But Victor's partially crystallized body had turned out to be 'denser' than Orion's estimate accounted for. It had absorbed impacts for far longer than it had any right to before Selphira finally pulled him back.
That miscalculation had cost him...
Not critically, but he could feel the cost in the ringing, in the slight delay between decision and response that hadn't been there at the start.
