Kael nodded into his stew. "I'm fine with stone. The alpha rollers were good fights. I want to learn the spine-roller pattern better. I had to improvise a lot yesterday. Today I want to be ready for it."
"Good. Then stone it is."
The decision was made simply, between the three of them, in the way decisions had begun to be made: someone proposed, someone evaluated, the others confirmed or pushed back, and they moved on. There was no friction in it anymore. The party dynamic had settled.
Bruce appreciated this in the way an older man appreciates almost anything that works without effort. He had spent decades in his physical-realm career working with teams that had to be carefully managed at every turn. The fact that this team simply worked, that Kael and Theron and he had fallen into a working rhythm by the third day, was not nothing. It was, in fact, rare.
He filed that gratitude too.
The walk to the stone portal felt different today.
