The forest was one of the few things that did not imdiately require scheming around.
No Entropy, no folks trying to get involved with them, no politics, just trees, cold air, and the sound of birds arguing about sothing in the canopy forty ters up.
The sunlight ca through the leaves in moving fragnts, the kind that shift and resettle with every breath of wind. The path we were on was not really a path either, just moss and occasional shallow puddles that caught the light.
[The calm here is almost anus-unclenching in its serenity...] The thought surfaced as I stepped over a shallow puddle.
Nom-Nom was walking beside and had said nothing for nearly an hour now.
And that was just as notable as the calm of the forest.
Nom-Nom on a walk through sowhere new typically produced: humming, pointing at interesting rocks, asking whether various plants were edible, and at least one request to investigate a strange sll coming from sowhere she should not investigate.
What she was doing instead was staring at the small gold speck floating beside my right shoulder.
She... well, we all knew what it entailed, beyond just the mid-bogging amounts of mana.
The speck looked harmless. Tiny, warm-glowing, rotating in its slow orbit. Almost pretty.
[She’s been staring at that thing like it personally insulted her bloodline...] I thought. [Which it might actually have.]
Brushing a low branch aside, Peko broke the silence that had been stretching for nearly an hour now.
"I have been aning to ask you sothing."
I glanced over.
She was looking ahead through the trees, and I could tell, whatever it was, she really had been aning to ask it for a while now.
"Go ahead."
"Where do you think it all ends?"
"Preferably sowhere with enough room for Nom to commit environntal damage comfortably."
"You know that is not what I ant," Peko said, giving the look.
I did know.
I chuckled, and that chuckle wound down into sothing quieter as I looked up at the sky through the gaps in the canopy, at the blue coming through in irregular shapes between the rustling leaves.
"It ends with going back ho to my family..."
That made both of them go still.
Peko’s eyes widened first, then Nom-Nom’s followed a second later, and the two of them looked at like I had just announced sothing taboo.
I kept walking while I talked, because if I stopped moving, then the words would start sounding too much like a speech, and I did not want that.
"You already know I spent most of my life with a disease I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy..." I said, keeping my eyes on the path ahead while the forest kept its quiet breathing around us, "The treatnt... forget treatnt, just keeping alive was expensive as hell. I haven’t forgotten the days when my mother, after working two jobs, would co to the hospital to sit with , often sleeping on plastic chairs because I was scared that I was going to die... co morning, she would go straight back to work."
I paused to step over a root.
"And my little brother basically raised himself through most of it, because mom was always either at work or at the hospital, and I was always at the hospital, so he was just... around, doing what needed doing, without anyone asking him to."
The forest humd around us. A bird called sowhere high up, and another answered it from further away.
"Look, the point is, the point is that both of them gave up far too much just to keep alive for eight long years..." I said, turning to look at both of them. "If I were actually dead, that would’ve been the end of it... But I’m not. I’m right here, and I owe it to them to get back, tell them I’m okay, finally okay... and make sure they spend the rest of their days like royalty."
"I see," Peko said softly, in a way that made it clear she understood more than she was saying out loud.
Nom-Nom looked like she wanted to ask sothing but had decided against it, which for her was basically a full-on philosophical restraint exercise, and I appreciated it enough to keep going before the silence got too heavy.
"These dungeons, and the Night of the Red Moon, and the weird dinsional nonsense hiding underneath all of it..." I said, glancing down at the path while we walked, "Well, they’re proof that inter-dinsional travel is possible, which ans with enough strength, enough ti, and enough bullshitery, I can find a way back ho."
"I will search my inheritance," Peko said, and she said it imdiately, without the half-second pause she normally took before committing to sothing.
And I noticed that.
"Yeah, you do that..." I said, keeping my voice level despite what it did to sothing in my chest to hear her say it that fast. " But there is no rush, because there is still the whole Destined Hero thing... After all, destiny itself will drag to it. But then again, handling it would net us a lot of influence, and with that would co access to high-tier magic, artefacts, and people who may know a thing or two about hopping between worlds. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even figure out a way to deal with the Red Moons too..."
The silence reconvened around us, along with the birds and insects and wind through leaves, and I let it all sit for a mont before I grinned and turned to face them.
"You two can co too, you know... My folks would absolutely lose their minds over both of you~"
Peko’s mouth twitched in the direction of a smile.
"Yes!" Nom-Nom said imdiately, with complete conviction as though she had been waiting for the invitation. "I wanna go!"
Peko thought for two seconds, which was longer than Nom-Nom and shorter than I expected, and said, "It would solve the Pantheon problem. We would be entirely out of their operational sphere."
How very Peko of her. Even the possibility of eting my family got processed through the tactical lens first.
"Or..." Nom-Nom said, her tone being the one she used when an idea had arrived that she found genuinely exciting, "We bring them here."
That made freeze mid-step, because I had not considered that specific version of the plan even though it was now sitting there in front of looking disturbingly obvious.
I stared at her for a beat before the idea hit hard enough to make laugh.
"Oh, that..." I said, and I could already feel my brain sprinting through the possibilities while the butterflies in my stomach break-danced like hell. "That sounds even better!"
Peko looked between the two of us with that small, patient expression she wore whenever she was watching accidentally turn a ridiculous idea into a future strategy, and I could tell she was following the thought as it built itself inside my own head.
"My brother would go absolutely insane..." I said, because there was no point pretending otherwise now that the idea had arrived fully ford, and the ntal image of him seeing shooting fireballs in a dungeon was already turning the grin on my face into a loud laugh.
Nom-Nom was nodding with absolute seriousness, fully invested in a plan that had existed for approximately seven seconds.
"And my mother..." I continued, and the warmth of it hit harder than any I had felt since waking up in this world, "She would finally just get to rest... have fun herself. Have a fresh start. And what better place to do that in a world of literal fantasies?"
"Nom..." I turned to Nom-Nom and spoke with complete sincerity, "You are an absolute genius."
Nom-Nom looked back at with sincerity even more complete than mine, and nodded, "I know."
Peko let out a soft chuckle, already thinking past the emotional punch of the idea and into the practical cost of making it happen, because she knew that once a future sounded good enough, then I imdiately started treating it like a project.
"But that would require..." Peko said carefully.
"I know, I know..." I said, forcing the butterflies down. "It would require handling the Red Moons, the destined hero situation, maybe even putting Entropy in the ground, but absolutely and permanently pacifying Pantheon."
"Why pacify Pantheon?" Peko asked, tilting her head. "Why not eradicate them?"
"Well, if we go the vengeful route, then yeah, we eradicate them..." I said, narrowing my eyes at the sky, "But if we take the route that ends with us living the life we wish to, without ghosts of our past haunting us... We pacify them."
Peko tilted her head at .
And looking at her, I couldn’t help but chuckle, "Co on, now, you told yourself, they were the ones who started the Age of Unity. They are the reason no two nations have declared war on each other for the past 3000 years... they established treaties, trade routes, and enough infrastructure to keep the whole thing from tearing itself apart every ti so regional idiot got ambitious."
I looked through the trees ahead.
"So no, we don’t eradicate them... we can’t. I know they’re a bunch of evil bastards. But they’re a necessary bunch of evil bastards. So we gotta get big... Big enough that we are no longer worth the effort. And the fastest path to that is...?"
"The destined journey..." Peko breathed in a voice quieter than usual. "We go to Cardella."
"Exactly." I snapped my fingers.
And at that exact mont, the trees ahead of us opened.
The clearing we stepped into was wide, maybe sixty ters across, with tall grass running across the center, old trees framing the edges.
Just enough room for what I had in mind.
I looked at it for a mont.
"But know this, Destiny may be on our side here, but Fate itself will do whatever it takes to make sure we fail..." I said, turning to both of them, feeling the grin slowly spread across my face, "And so, our little march against Fate on Destiny’s back starts right here."
The gold speck was still orbiting beside my shoulder, slow, small, and warm, and Nom-Nom was looking at it again, but the look had changed.
The competitive sharpness that had been there when I first began charging it was still present, but underneath it now was sothing more.
A conviction towards a woman in a hospital chair, whom she had never t before.
Towards a brother teaching himself to be fine.
Conviction to a ho she had offered to help carry on her back.
And so, stood there an apex predator of five hundred years, with sothing real to prove and sothing real to protect.
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