"Perhaps," he grumbled. It was almost comical, seeing him dangling from her arm like a leaf fluttering in the high wind. "I hope you will accept the sentiment regardless. Without your intervention, I do not think my path would have opened. I owe you a debt."
"It is nothing," Ling Qi replied absently, burned and ruined farms flashed by beneath them, and ahead the walls of the village seemed terribly small. "I was only performing my duty."
"All the same, my words remain," he replied stubbornly. She glanced down, really looking at him for the first time. He was an average sort, handsome as most cultivators of the third realm were, but little about him stood out to her. Still, she had just been forcibly reminded that even first realms could be relevant on the field of battle. It seemed foolish to dismiss his gratitude.
"I will accept them then," she had an odd sense of deja vu, as if she had engaged in a similar exchange before, but she shook it off. It was difficult to think about politics though, surrounded by devastation.
