Olaf moved like a predator.
A massive one. The blond-haired, blue-eyed giant stood just over six feet tall and carried nearly three hundred pounds of dense, conditioned muscle on a frame built for exactly the kind of work it had been doing. Despite the size — or perhaps because of the specific way that size had been developed and maintained across decades of serious training — he moved with the balanced grace of a man who had spent a very long time learning to hurt other large men efficiently, the controlled aggression of someone for whom the management of force was simply the primary language of physical existence.
Shane Albright had faced large men before. He had built houses with them and beside them. Had worked with men who moved material that would have broken someone who hadn't been doing it long enough. Had been in situations where the size of the person in front of him was the most immediately relevant fact about that person.
But Olaf was something else entirely, and that was before accounting for the celestial component. Even setting that aside completely, the man was the reigning MMA heavyweight champion of the most popular fighting promotion in the world, which meant he had been tested against the best available opposition at the highest available level and had not lost. That was not an abstract credential. That was a specific and verifiable fact about what happened when Olaf decided to solve a problem physically.
And right now he was stalking Shane across the octagon with the patient, unhurried focus of a man who was not in a hurry because he did not need to be.
Shane backed toward the cage wall, moving in the careful lateral arc that Bjorn had drilled into him over weeks of preparation — not retreating, circling, keeping the geometry of the space between them in constant motion so that Olaf could not simply walk him into a corner and convert the size advantage into something structural.
At six-foot-five and two hundred forty-five pounds, Shane was not a small man by any reasonable standard. His recent leveling had reorganized his body into something that read more as professional athlete than construction worker — the same raw material, rebuilt to a cleaner design. His movements were sharp and efficient and considerably faster than they had been a month ago, and the foresight that ran quietly at the edge of his awareness gave him fractions of seconds of advance information about where Olaf's weight was going before Olaf's body completed the intention.
But Olaf still had fifty pounds on him. And a lifetime — several lifetimes, by any accurate accounting — of fighting experience.
Olaf stepped in. His weight shifted forward in the specific way that preceded a clinch attempt, the particular telegraph of a very large man who intended to get his hands on something and had learned that once he did, the conversation was usually brief. Shane read it through foresight a half-second before the movement completed.
He braced.
And vanished.
For the briefest instant the space where Shane had been simply emptied — not the blur of super speed, not the visual disruption of something moving very fast through visible space, but a clean and complete absence. There, and then not there, with no transition between the two states.
Olaf blinked. His hands closed on air. His instincts, sharpened across an almost incomprehensible span of experience, screamed before his conscious mind had finished registering what had happened.
He spun.
Shane had reappeared behind him, arm already sliding into position across Olaf's throat, the rear naked choke configured with the geometric precision that Bjorn had required him to achieve through repetition until it was automatic. The hold was good. It was the same hold that had put Krell on the canvas, and Krell had been carrying borrowed celestial power.
Olaf was something considerably older than Krell.
"Good," Olaf grunted, and the word came out with the specific quality of a man acknowledging competence at the same moment he decided to end the demonstration.
He exploded backward with brute force that had nothing to do with the normal relationship between muscle mass and output, driving Shane into the cage wall with enough momentum to rattle the structure in its anchors. The hold broke immediately, the leverage simply insufficient against that kind of committed counter. They separated and reset, both of them breathing hard, the space between them filling back in with the particular tension of two people who have been testing each other and have gathered useful information.
They circled. Two men at the outer edge of what human physical development could plausibly contain, moving around each other with the cautious respect of predators who recognized each other as such. They exchanged strikes and grappling attempts across several more minutes — Olaf pressing forward with his size advantage, Shane using the foresight and the precise geometry of his footwork to stay in the conversation rather than be closed out of it — before Olaf finally stepped back and raised one hand.
"Break."
Both men leaned against opposite sides of the cage. Sweat dripped from Shane's hair onto the mat in a steady rhythm. Olaf pressed a towel against his forehead and studied Shane across the octagon with the clear, interested attention of a man doing an assessment rather than simply recovering.
"That," Olaf said slowly, "was not super speed."
Shane rolled his shoulders, working the tension out of the muscles along his upper back, and shook out his arms. "No," he admitted. "Teleportation."
Olaf raised an eyebrow. The expression was subtle on his face but readable — genuine interest, the particular quality of a man who has seen a great many things and has just encountered something he hadn't quite anticipated.
Shane chuckled slightly, the laugh carrying the specific warmth of someone sharing something that still struck him as faintly absurd. "Trust me, I was just as surprised when the system gave it to me." He leaned against the cage and settled into the explanation. "I wanted to test it in a controlled space where I could understand the mechanics without consequence. Teleportation works better than super speed in here because the octagon is small — there's not enough distance to build real velocity, so speed becomes less of an advantage than instant repositioning."
Olaf nodded slowly, turning the information over with the focused thoughtfulness he brought to tactical problems. "That makes sense."
"Since the last level jump," Shane continued, "the system started tracking strain thresholds more carefully. Super speed burns through its limit fast. I get one real burst per day before the system locks it down — one moment where it actually functions at the level that matters. After that it's reduced significantly." He gestured around the cage with one hand. "But teleportation gives me three uses per day. And it's instant. No buildup, no visible transit, no trail."
Olaf rubbed his chin slowly, his expression carrying the particular focus of someone turning over something that didn't quite fit the pattern he expected.
"I did not sense a celestial energy trail when you moved."
Shane blinked. "You can normally sense that?"
"Yes." Olaf said it simply, as established fact. "During the El Toro fight I felt the interference immediately. Whoever was operating in that cage left a clear signature — the specific residue of power being channeled through a vessel rather than originating from one."
Shane stared at him. "You knew someone was interfering in that fight?"
"Yes."
"And you didn't say anything?"
Olaf shrugged slightly. "I did not yet know who was responsible or what their purpose was." He paused. "But you left no such trail just now. Nothing I could read."
Shane absorbed that. "Is that unusual?"
Olaf looked at him steadily. "For someone operating with given power? Yes. Very."
Neither of them said anything further about it. But the observation settled into the space between them with the quiet weight of something that meant more than either of them currently had the framework to explain.
He leaned forward, resting his forearms along the top of the cage wall in the easy posture of a man settling into a different kind of conversation. "Speaking of El Toro."
Olaf looked at him steadily.
"AN had him arrested after the loss," Shane said. "Immigration violation. Apparently they've been holding it over him for years — the threat of deportation has been the mechanism keeping him compliant and isolated."
Olaf's expression hardened in the specific way that a large and controlled face hardened when the person behind it had decided something was unacceptable. "Arrested. For losing a fight."
"Punishment for failure," Shane said. "And a way to keep him contained. A man facing deportation doesn't make noise, doesn't reach out, doesn't talk to people he's not supposed to talk to."
Olaf paced a few measured steps, thinking. "Do you think we should help him?"
Shane didn't answer immediately. He let the question sit while he worked through the actual shape of it, because the surface of the question and the substance of it were meaningfully different things.
Helping El Toro carried risk. Significant risk. AN would notice the interference — would recognize immediately that someone with the capability and the inclination to navigate immigration law on behalf of one of his discarded assets had entered that space deliberately. It would communicate more about the network Shane was building than he was necessarily ready to communicate. It would draw attention to capabilities and connections that were currently still partially below AN's full visibility.
But El Toro had already been used. Had been inside AN's operation at a level that meant he knew things — specific things, operational things, the kind of information that a man abandoned by the entity that had controlled him might be willing to share with the people who had just demonstrated both the ability and the willingness to help him. A man left to face deportation by the side he had served was a man with reasons to reconsider his loyalties.
Shane nodded slowly. "It might give us an ally. Someone with inside knowledge of how AN's operation works at the operational level." He held the other side of it in the air between them. "But it will definitely draw AN's attention. He'll know we have the capability and the network to move on something like this, and he'll adjust accordingly."
Olaf gave a single decisive nod, the nod of a man for whom the calculus had resolved cleanly. "Then we do it. A man abandoned deserves better than that ending."
Shane grinned. "Alright." He pulled out his phone. "Let me get my team moving."
The new Albright Roofing headquarters was in the particular state of a building that had been claimed for a purpose and was in the active process of becoming suited to it. Half construction zone, half functioning office — stacks of materials along the walls awaiting their proper homes, temporary desks assembled where permanent ones would eventually stand, blueprints covering the central table in overlapping layers that represented several simultaneous projects at various stages of planning. The building smelled of fresh lumber and coffee and the particular productive dust of work being done.
Gary, Ben, and Amanda were reviewing paperwork at the central table, moving through the documents with the practiced efficiency of people who had been doing this long enough to develop a shared rhythm for it.
Gary tapped one of the documents with two fingers. "So the orphanage roof gets replaced first." He said it as confirmation rather than question — he already knew the answer, but stating it aloud was part of how he organized his thinking about a job.
Amanda nodded. "That's what Shane wanted. Start with the reservation orphanage. The structure needs work before winter and the community sees it first."
Ben scratched his beard and looked at the project breakdown. "Free roof for the reservation orphanage." He said it in the tone of a man who found the arithmetic of generosity still slightly surprising even after months of working in an environment where it was standard operating procedure. "Seems like a good place to start."
Gary shrugged with the comfortable ease of someone who had stopped finding it surprising. "Kids first."
Amanda smiled slightly — a small, genuine expression that she didn't bother trying to make larger than it was. "Kids first."
Ben pushed back from the table and stretched his arms above his head. "Coffee before we start the supply run?"
Gary nodded without looking up from the document he was reviewing.
Ben wandered off toward the small kitchenette at the back of the space, leaving Gary and Amanda at the table with the blueprints and the quiet hum of the building around them.
They both noticed the quiet at the same moment.
Neither spoke immediately. Amanda leaned against the edge of the table, not looking at the paperwork. Gary set down the document he had been holding and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, a habit that surfaced when he was thinking about something he wasn't quite ready to put into words yet.
They had been dancing around this particular moment for months — not awkwardly, not with any of the painful self-consciousness that dancing around something usually implied, but with the careful patience of two people who had learned, through their respective difficult histories, not to reach for things before they were ready to hold them.
Gary finally said quietly, "You doing alright today?"
It was not a large question. It was the specific question he had learned to ask — not how are you, not everything good, but the particular formulation that acknowledged that some days were different from others and that the difference mattered and that he paid attention to it.
Amanda looked at him with the soft expression that she reserved for moments when she didn't feel the need to perform any particular version of herself. "Yeah," she said. "Today's a good one."
They looked at each other for a moment that was longer than the conversation required and shorter than either of them might have wanted.
Gary started to reach across the table toward her hand.
The room detonated with white light.
Both of them flinched hard and turned away from the flash, hands coming up instinctively. When they looked back, blinking the afterimage out of their vision —
Shane was standing in the middle of the office with the slightly self-conscious expression of a man who has just done something impressive and is not entirely sure how it was received.
From the kitchenette, the sound of shattering ceramic announced that Ben had dropped the coffee pot.
Gary stared. Amanda stared. The silence held for a moment in which nobody quite knew what category of response was appropriate.
Gary found his voice first. "Boy," he said slowly, "that skill is scary."
Shane grinned, and the grin carried the particular energy of someone who had been looking forward to testing this specific moment. "You should see it from my side."
Amanda's face had gone slightly pink in a way that had nothing to do with the flash of light and everything to do with the specific timing of the interruption, and she was very carefully not looking at Gary.
Ben appeared in the kitchenette doorway holding a fistful of paper towels and wearing the expression of a man who was adding this to a running mental ledger of things that had happened to him since joining Albright Roofing. "Shane."
"Yes?"
"You might want to warn people before teleporting into an occupied room."
Shane scratched the back of his neck. "Fair."
Ben pointed at the door with the paper towels. "What if someone outside the team had been here? A client. A delivery person. Someone who didn't know this was a thing that happens now?"
Shane nodded, accepting the point with the genuine openness of someone who had been thinking about logistics rather than social consequence. "Good point. I'll work on a protocol."
Gary and Amanda had both visibly relaxed in the way that people relaxed when a moment had passed and been replaced by something requiring a different kind of attention. Shane, absorbed in thinking through Ben's operational critique, hadn't noticed the specific quality of what he'd interrupted.
Ben disappeared back into the kitchenette to address the coffee situation. Shane pulled out his phone.
"I need Cory and Silas working on something," he said, and the shift in his tone communicated that the reason for the teleportation had been more than testing the skill in a new environment.
He reached through the system connection with the focused ease of someone who had been using this mode of communication long enough for it to feel natural.
"Cory, Silas — start the process to get El Toro released. Immigration lawyers. Use the network we have. Move carefully but move fast."
The acknowledgment came back immediately, the particular quality of a response from people who were already oriented toward action and simply needed a direction pointed.
Shane looked at Gary. "Olaf wants to help him. Thinks a man abandoned by the people who used him deserves better than deportation."
Gary nodded with the immediate and uncomplicated certainty of someone for whom this kind of decision didn't require extended deliberation. "Good call."
Shane scanned the room once, taking inventory of where everything was and where everyone was, the professional habit of a man who oriented himself physically in every space he entered. "Alright. I'm heading back."
Gary pointed at him. "Warning next time."
Shane raised one hand in acknowledgment, already focused on the coordinates. "Noted."
The white light filled the room again. Shane was gone.
Ben's voice came from the kitchenette. "Did he just —"
"Yes," Gary and Amanda said simultaneously.
Shane reappeared in the octagon. Olaf was in the corner working through a stretching sequence with the methodical focus of a man who maintained his body the way a craftsman maintained tools — not because he enjoyed the maintenance, but because the alternative was tools that failed when you needed them.
He looked up at Shane's arrival without breaking the stretch. "You gave warning this time."
"Trying to learn," Shane said. He explained the El Toro plan in brief — the lawyers, the network, the timeline they were working toward. Olaf listened with his full attention, nodding once when Shane finished.
"Good." He stood, rolling his shoulders. Then he leaned against the cage in the posture of someone shifting from one conversation to a different one. "I have another idea."
Shane waited.
Olaf smiled slightly — the specific smile of a man who has thought something through and likes the shape of it. "We host an outdoor MMA event. At the Capital. Invite youth from the community. Kids from high-risk areas across the region." He paused. "Show them discipline. Training. What the body can become when it is given direction and a reason to develop."
Shane nodded slowly, feeling the logic of it assemble itself in his mind. The community engagement angle. The visibility. The specific message that the presence of the heavyweight champion of the world communicating directly with reservation youth would send about who was worth the attention of serious people. "That could work. I can bankroll it and have Gary and Amanda make arrangements for their transportation."
Olaf shook his head. "No."
Shane raised an eyebrow.
"You sponsor me," Olaf said simply. "That is already your role. The event itself —" He gestured with one hand in a way that communicated the full scope of what he was about to say. "I am the heavyweight champion of the most popular MMA promotion in the world. I have connections that do not require your money to activate."
Shane laughed, the laugh acknowledging the accuracy of the point. "Fair enough. Gary and Amanda can still arrange the details for the reservation kids."
Olaf grinned. Then the grin shifted into something more deliberate, the expression of a man who has been building toward a specific thing and has decided the moment has arrived. "Actually."
Shane narrowed his eyes. He had learned to read the specific quality of Olaf's "actually." It consistently preceded something that was going to require a response he hadn't prepared. "Uh oh."
Olaf smiled with the comfortable ease of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. "Would you like a match?"
Shane processed that for a moment. "A match."
"Light heavyweight debut," Olaf said, with the tone of someone describing something entirely reasonable. "You have the physical profile. You have the training. You have capabilities that, used with appropriate restraint, make you a legitimate contender without exposing anything that requires explanation."
Shane had not finished processing the idea when his system entered the conversation with its characteristic disregard for the timing preferences of its host.
NEW QUEST: WIN DEBUT MMA BOUT. REWARD: +1 SKILL LEVEL.
Shane looked at the notification. Then at Olaf. Then back at the notification. He exhaled through his nose. "Well. Guess that answers that."
Olaf laughed — a full, genuine sound, the laugh of a man who was genuinely pleased. "You accept?"
Shane shrugged with the expression of someone who has made peace with a thing even as he's being surprised by it. "Apparently."
Olaf slapped him on the back with enough force to shift his balance by a full step, the contact communicating affection in the specific language of very large men who had grown up in traditions where physical warmth and physical force occupied overlapping categories. "Welcome to MMA."
They rested for a few minutes, hydrating and letting the training session settle, and Shane found his mind returning to the thing that had been sitting at the back of his awareness since the new quest had arrived.
"The Frigg quest," he said.
Olaf nodded, setting down his water. "Yes. I have been thinking about it."
"Where would she be?" Shane asked. "What draws her? What would she have moved toward in this life without knowing why?"
Olaf thought for a moment with the careful, unhurried deliberation that characterized his approach to questions he took seriously. "Orphanages," he said. "Group homes. Any place where children exist without the protection they should have by right. That is where her nature would pull her, even without conscious understanding of why." He paused. "Hospitals, perhaps. Anywhere that the work is protecting the vulnerable and the work is thankless and the people doing it stay anyway."
Shane nodded. "We could run social media outreach. Messages framed around her characteristics — maternal, protective, strong in the ways that don't announce themselves. See if anything surfaces."
Olaf nodded slowly. "But that assumes she remembers herself. If she is deep in the reincarnation cycle, the messages may find the right person and mean nothing to her consciously."
Shane considered that. "So we look in the places the work would have drawn her regardless. And we build something visible enough that if she's awake, or waking, she finds us rather than the other way around."
Olaf agreed. Then, after a brief pause, he added: "There is also Freya."
Shane looked up from the mental architecture he had been building around the Frigg search. "The warrior goddess."
"Yes." Olaf straightened slightly, and the shift in his posture was small but readable — a different kind of attention, a topic that carried different weight. "We should search for her as well. She is not secondary to Frigg in terms of importance to what we are building. She is different."
Then his expression shifted into something more considered. "I may already know where she is."
Shane leaned forward. "Seriously?"
Olaf nodded slowly. "I believe she may be a movie star."
Shane blinked. "A movie star."
"Jessalyn Ingalls." Olaf said the name with the particular precision of someone who has been thinking about this for long enough to have arrived at confidence. "Extraordinary beauty — not merely attractive, but the specific quality of beauty that has always surrounded her, that drew attention in ways that went beyond the ordinary social mathematics of appearance. Roles that consistently emphasize strength and complexity. Famous for performances that carry genuine intensity, that communicate something about human nature that requires a specific kind of interior depth to access."
Shane pulled up the system screen. Images appeared in the overlay — press photos, promotional material, the visual record of someone who had been in the public eye long enough for that record to be extensive.
Shane stared for a moment. "Wow."
Olaf smirked. "Yes. That profile fits."
Shane looked at him carefully, picking his words. "Were you two — involved? Previously?"
Olaf burst out laughing with the full-body sincerity of someone who found the question genuinely funny rather than merely amusing. He wiped the corner of his eye with the back of his hand. "No."
He composed himself. "Frigg was my love. She has always been my love. That has not changed and will not change." His tone warmed slightly at the edges in a way that was visible only because he allowed it to be. Then the warmth settled back into explanation. "Freya was my counterpart. My equal in different domains. She taught me more than I have usually been willing to acknowledge publicly." He paused. "Half of the dead belong to her."
Shane tilted his head. "I'm sorry?"
"I rule Valhalla," Olaf said simply. "She rules Fólkvangr. Her domain is Sessrúmnir. When the slain were chosen after battle, she always chose first among them — her hall filled before mine." He delivered this with the equanimity of someone who had made peace with a hierarchical arrangement a very long time ago. "That was always the agreement."
Shane stared at him. "That is an extraordinarily competitive arrangement."
Olaf grinned. "Yes. She was extraordinarily competitive. It was one of her better qualities."
Then his tone shifted back toward the operational. "If she has reincarnated and is not fully awake, approaching her will be delicate. Freya in any form is not a person who accepts information about herself passively. She will need to arrive at recognition on her own terms, or she will reject it entirely."
Shane nodded. "Frigg first. Then Freya?"
Olaf considered for a moment. "Frigg first. Not because Freya matters less, but because Frigg is center. If we find Frigg, the path toward the others becomes something with direction rather than something we are navigating blind."
Shane was preparing to leave — running through the mental checklist of what needed to happen next and in what order — when Olaf stopped him with the particular tone that indicated something had occurred to him that he considered important.
"One more thing."
Shane paused.
"You play fantasy football."
Shane nodded, mildly uncertain where this was going.
"That counts as gambling under most professional athletic contracts," Olaf said. "If you debut in MMA as a signed fighter, a fantasy football league constitutes a contract violation. You would need to withdraw from any active leagues immediately."
Shane blinked, and the specific expression on his face was the expression of a man who has just discovered a consequence he genuinely hadn't anticipated.
Shane worked through it. "So I need to keep playing. I just can't be the one playing."
Olaf's expression communicated that this was precisely correct and that Shane had arrived at the solution without requiring it to be provided.
Shane pulled out his phone. "I'll find someone."
He found Ben in the kitchen, which was where Ben tended to be when he was not actively needed elsewhere, and pulled him aside with the particular directness of someone who has a specific thing to ask and is not planning to build up to it gradually.
"I need you to play fantasy football."
Ben looked at him with the expression of a man who had learned to expect unusual requests and was calibrating his response accordingly. "Fantasy football."
"Twenty-five dollars per week entry," Shane said. "I'll pick the players. You just need to be the name on the account."
Ben was quiet for a moment. "Why can't you do it yourself?"
Shane shrugged. "MMA contract issue. Just trust me."
Ben sighed the particular sigh of a man who had discovered, through repeated experience, that trusting Shane tended to lead to outcomes that were good in the aggregate even when the individual requests were confusing. "Fine."
Gary and Amanda left the headquarters building together just after sunset, falling into the easy companionable rhythm of two people who had been making this walk together long enough for it to have stopped requiring any navigation.
Work. Dinner. Meeting. Home. The routine itself was something both of them valued with a depth that was difficult to articulate to anyone who hadn't experienced its absence. A year ago, neither of them had possessed anything resembling this kind of regularity. The steadiness of the same sequence on the same evenings, the particular comfort of knowing what came next — these were not small things to people who had lived without them.
Their sobriety had held through everything. The pressure, the chaos, the specific gravitational pull of situations that in a different version of their lives would have provided obvious justification for sliding backward. The combined weight of their clean time was approaching something that felt like proof rather than just evidence.
Gary still occasionally found it briefly surreal — standing in the evening outside a building he helped run, walking toward dinner with a woman who understood the specific shape of his particular battle — that this was what his life had become. A year ago he had been a wreck. Not a dramatic one, not the kind of wreck that announced itself, but the slow and quiet kind that accumulates from too many compromises made in the wrong direction for too long.
Shane had given them both the chance to be something else. Neither of them had forgotten that, and neither of them felt the need to perform their gratitude about it. They showed up early and stayed late and took responsibility when the easier move would have been to redirect it. Shane never demanded loyalty. He simply created the conditions under which loyalty was the natural outcome, which was a considerably more effective approach.
Amanda glanced over as they walked into the restaurant. "You know," she said, "Shane has no idea how much good he's doing."
Gary chuckled, the sound carrying the warm familiarity of a man who has thought the same thing many times. "Yeah, well, if he slows down long enough to actually think about it, he'll probably decide to open three more branches before the weekend."
They found a booth near the back and settled into it with the comfortable ease of people who had sat across from each other enough times to have stopped needing to establish any kind of conversational posture.
The restaurant had the particular hum of a place where locals gathered regularly — the background layer of plates and conversation and a television murmuring somewhere above the bar, the ambient sound of a place that had been doing this long enough to have developed its own texture.
A waitress appeared.
She was small — petite in the specific way that some people were petite, five-foot-three at a generous estimate, slight in a way that made her movement through the busy restaurant feel efficient rather than fragile. She carried herself with a bright, warm confidence that communicated itself immediately, the kind of ease in one's own skin that made people relax without knowing why. Her smile was genuine in the way that distinguished genuine smiles from performed ones, and it landed on both of them with the specific quality of someone who was actually glad to see the people she was serving rather than simply going through the motions of gladness.
Gary noticed Amanda watching her carefully. Not casually. Carefully.
When the waitress left with their drink order, Amanda leaned across the table with the expression of someone who has just completed an assessment and has arrived at a conclusion they want to share.
"Don't you think she and Shane would hit it off?"
Gary followed Amanda's gaze toward the waitress moving efficiently between tables and studied the situation with the genuine consideration of a man taking a question seriously. He tilted his head slightly.
Amanda punched his arm. "Hey."
Gary raised both hands. "I was just looking because you told me to look."
Amanda's mouth pressed together against a laugh. "What were you thinking?"
Gary considered it honestly for a moment. "Honestly? I was thinking she might be too short."
Amanda blinked. "That's your main concern."
Gary spread his hands in the gesture of a man presenting a reasonable position. "Shane is six-foot-five. He'd have to sit down to kiss her. That's a logistical issue."
Amanda burst out laughing — a genuine, unguarded sound that drew a glance from the next table. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and shook her head. "That is your primary concern. The kissing logistics."
Gary shrugged with complete equanimity. "It's practical."
Amanda wiped the corner of her eye. "Oh my god." She leaned back in the booth, still smiling. "What kind of girls does he actually like? Has he ever mentioned anyone?"
Gary thought about it. "His ex was taller. About five-eight. Athletic. Intense."
Amanda made a face — the specific face of someone who has just been given information that confirms an opinion they already held. "The intense one. You mentioned her before."
"That's the one."
Amanda tapped the table in the rhythm of someone organizing a thought. "That's exactly why."
Gary looked at her. "Exactly why what?"
Amanda tilted her head toward where the waitress was laughing with another table — a real laugh, quick and bright, the kind that was clearly a response to something actually funny rather than something she was required to find funny. "Shane needs someone who can lighten the mood. He carries a lot. He needs someone who makes the carrying feel lighter, not heavier."
Gary followed her gaze and watched the waitress for a moment with fresh eyes, reassessing with Amanda's frame rather than his own. Then he nodded slowly. "Height aside."
Amanda smiled. "Height aside."
When they finished their meal and stood to leave, Amanda caught the waitress's eye with the particular ease of someone who is comfortable initiating conversations with strangers.
"Hey," Amanda said, her tone carrying the friendly directness that was one of the things Gary most appreciated about her. "What's your name?"
The waitress tucked a strand of hair behind her ear — a small habitual gesture that somehow communicated something genuine about the person making it. "Erin."
Amanda introduced herself and Gary, and the three of them fell into the easy brief conversation of people who have been introduced by circumstance and have found the introduction comfortable. The restaurant hummed around them. Erin had the quality of someone who was genuinely present in conversations rather than managing them from a distance.
Then Amanda asked, with the delivery of someone who had been thinking about how to phrase this and had decided that direct was better than indirect, "Are you single?"
Erin laughed — a short, honest sound with a tired edge to it that communicated lived experience with the question and its usual outcomes. "Unfortunately yes."
Gary chuckled. "That didn't sound especially optimistic."
Erin shook her head with the expression of someone who is not complaining so much as accurately reporting. "I just don't have a lot of time to meet people. And honestly, the ones I do meet lately —" She paused. "There are a lot of crazies out there."
Amanda nodded with the sympathetic certainty of someone who knew exactly what that category contained. "Oh, we know."
Gary added, in his driest register, "You have no idea."
Amanda leaned forward slightly, and the shift communicated that they were moving from casual conversation into something with a specific purpose. "Can we get your number?"
Erin blinked. "For what?"
Amanda smiled with the confidence of someone who has made a decision and is comfortable with it. "Our boss is a great guy. He just works too much and doesn't get out enough. We thought maybe we could set something up. Double date, low pressure, just dinner somewhere."
Gary nodded. "He's a good man. Genuinely."
"Not crazy," Amanda added. "That's an important qualification."
Gary raised one finger. "Genuinely one of the most important qualifications available currently."
Erin laughed — the real kind again, the kind that arrived before she'd decided to produce it. She looked at both of them for a moment with the assessing quality of someone who was reading the situation and finding it more promising than she'd expected. Then she reached for the small order pad at her apron and wrote down her number with the efficient handwriting of someone who does this motion many times per shift.
"Why not," she said, handing it to Amanda. "I'll give it a shot."
Amanda took it with the specific smile of someone who has just confirmed something they were already fairly sure about. "Perfect."
The drive to the sobriety meeting was quiet and comfortable, the particular silence of two people who had been in enough cars together to have stopped needing to fill the space between them.
Halfway there, Gary glanced over. "You really think Shane would like her?"
Amanda didn't hesitate. "Yes."
"You're sure."
Amanda smiled with the settled certainty of someone who trusts their own judgment on this particular category of question. "I have excellent instincts."
Gary was quiet for a moment. "We're going to get blamed if this goes badly."
Amanda considered that. "Then we'll survive it together." She said it with the ease of someone who has already decided this outcome is acceptable.
They got back to the rental house after the meeting to find Shane at the kitchen table in the specific posture of a man who had been working for a long time and was going to continue working for a while longer — tablet displaying schedules, paperwork arranged in the organized clusters of someone who knew what each pile was for, the quiet focus of a person whose mind had been occupied with the same set of problems all evening.
He looked up when they came in. "Just getting back?"
Gary nodded. "Meeting ran long."
Shane tapped the tablet. "I'm trying to figure out the weekend schedule. The training sessions with Olaf are taking more evenings than I planned for."
Amanda sat down across from him. "Any gaps?"
Shane considered. "Most evenings are Olaf and Bjorn right now, but I could probably take one night off. Saturday maybe."
Amanda and Gary exchanged the briefest possible glance — less than a second, the kind that communicated a complete thought between two people who had been paying attention to the same thing.
Amanda nodded. "Good."
Shane looked up. He had the particular instinct of a man who had spent months in situations requiring him to notice when something was happening just below the surface of what was being said. "What?"
Gary waved a hand in the specific way of someone whose facial expression is doing something his hand is claiming it isn't. "Nothing."
"We were just thinking," Amanda said, with the composed innocence of someone who had rehearsed nothing and was simply being pleasant, "that it would be good for everyone to go out this weekend. All of us. Something easy."
Shane frowned slightly — the small, specific frown of a man who is not suspicious of the suggestion but is aware that something about the framing is slightly more organized than it appears. "Why?"
"You work too much," Gary said.
Amanda nodded. "You need a break."
Shane looked at both of them for a moment, and the look was the kind that suggested he was running some version of his system's pattern recognition on the conversation and was not finding any specific flag to act on. He checked the schedule on the tablet. "Saturday works."
Amanda smiled. "Perfect."
They didn't mention Erin. The surprise, they had both decided without needing to discuss it, was part of the point.
Shane made his way to bed a while after the others had turned in. He paused in the hallway for a moment in the specific way that people paused in quiet hallways when they were alone with a long list of things their mind was sorting through.
Celestial confrontations. Apex Negativa applying pressure through mechanisms that were still not fully visible. Training sessions with the reincarnated king of the Norse pantheon who was also the current heavyweight MMA champion. Finding Frigg. Finding Freya. Debuting in professional mixed martial arts. Teleportation protocols. Time manipulation used correctly. The reservation expansion. El Toro's release. The fantasy football logistics.
All of it felt dangerous in the way that things felt dangerous when you understood them clearly enough to know the actual size of what you were inside. And all of it felt manageable in the same way — not small, but within the range of things that could be approached systematically, one piece at a time, with the right people and the right tools.
But something about the vague and underspecified prospect of going out with Gary and Amanda on Saturday felt different in a way he couldn't quite account for. He stood in the hallway and turned the feeling over for a moment, trying to locate what it actually was.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"I can fight gods," he muttered to himself, and the words arrived with the particular flat honesty of a statement that was simply true and required no emphasis. He shook his head slowly.
"But dating?"
He sighed, and the sigh carried the specific quality of a man who has just identified the one category of thing that his system, his training, his celestial allies, and his accumulating supernatural capabilities had not actually prepared him for.
"That might actually be the dangerous one."