In the cave, the fire crackled quietly, its light dancing across the stone walls as night settled fully over the world outside. In the distance, beyond the forest, Lirath was slowly beginning to breathe again, voices, movent, the muffled sound of people starting to piece things back together.
People were still coming to terms with what had happened, while the more powerful among them were on full alert for any further portals. A single one, after so much ti, had put everyone on edge across the region and beyond, and with the Calamity Dragon awake, the entire continent was watching.
In here, though, there was silence.
Only the quiet crackling of the fire, its warmth spreading through the cave before thinning out toward the entrance, where it dissolved into a calm night and a light, pleasant breeze.
Two figures lay on thick branches of a tall trees, in opposite direction, with the trunk of a large tree serving as an invisible boundary between them. Evan had his eyes closed, arms crossed over his chest, wearing the expression of soone who might be asleep or might simply be tired of the world. Luna was awake, eyes open on the star-filled sky, lost in thoughts she hadn’t yet decided to put into words.
The silence between them was strange. Comfortable at first glance, but maybe Uncomfortable for one of them.
She was the one to break it.
She didn’t move, didn’t turn her head. She stayed exactly as she was, eyes on the sky, when she said:
"Thank you."
A single word. No apparent emotion in her voice, or perhaps there was, sothing very subtle, sothing felt more than heard. Evan caught it regardless.
He answered without opening his eyes.
"Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s not like I’m running short on ga." He paused for a second. "I will say, though, for soone as thin as you are, you put away considerably more at than I did. Almost embarrassing to admit, if I’m being honest."
After she had woken up, there had been a strange mont, her staring at him, touching his face as if to make sure he was real, asking again and again whether it was actually him or just another one of his bizarre tricks.
Evan had never explicitly told her he operated through the body of a clone, but after nearly a week of hunting together she had figured out that sothing didn’t add up, especially during the morning hours, when he couldn’t use clone’s body. She had never asked directly, but it was clear she had her theories. And now that she had seen him in the flesh, a lot of things must have fallen into place on their own, at least in part.
The silence returned for a mont.
"No, that’s not what I ant." A brief pause. "Well, thank you for that too. But I ant... all this ti I never thanked you for that night. For saving ."
There was sothing different in her voice now. Not the cold, flat indifference she had worn almost without interruption these past few days, sothing more alive, even if only slightly.
"Hmm." Evan considered it for a second. "Don’t ntion it. I happened to be there, and it’s not like I didn’t get sothing out of it. Call it mutual benefit."
He paused, then opened one eye.
Luna was no longer on the other side of the trunk.
She was sitting on the sa branch as him, a short distance away, though she was looking downward. She had moved in an instant without making a sound, and if the Soulbound hadn’t kept them connected, he might have struggled to sense her at all.
He looked at her for a mont without saying anything.
She was around twenty, older than him by age. But he could see, perhaps for the first ti, really, that behind that adult exterior there was fear, worry, and sothing that resembled ambition still alive despite everything.
Things that were almost never visible in her. Now they were, barely, like sothing that had stopped trying to hide.
Evan didn’t know how to interpret that. He thought about it for a second and concluded that perhaps the girl had decided to trust him. Genuinely. She hadn’t done that even after the Soulbound, and there was no reason to expect otherwise, given how little they knew each other and everything that had happened. So things are hard to carry with your head held high. Even for him. He knew that well enough.
"You said you wanted to travel," she said. "See what the world had to offer."
Evan nodded, eyes closed again.
"It’s a good goal. I wouldn’t mind travelling myself. Maybe it’ll help leave the past behind."
"Ah." A small pause. "So you no longer intend to take your own life?"
She didn’t answer right away. He opened one eye and looked at her, and saw the reaction, subtle but there.
"So you already knew. Is that one of the perks of the bond?"
"Not exactly. Just a feeling."
Silence for a few seconds. Then:
"It was the plan." Her voice was more broken now, but she didn’t stop. "With Emily gone, the world feels empty. For years I had set myself the goal of getting stronger, strong enough to give us both a carefree life. I failed. Spectacularly. And the ironic thing is that it isn’t even entirely Nicolas’s fault. Even if he hadn’t sent his n, she was always going to die. All because of what I am."
Evan listened without speaking.
"I intended to avenge her death and then put an end to my own suffering. But after the fight with that Elite, I realized I wasn’t finished with this world yet." She paused. "I want to know. Know why I was born this way. Who put us in this situation."
She looked up.
"I want to go to my parents’ hotown."
"And you think you’ll find answers there?" he asked, sitting up on the trunk.
"Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. But I have to do it. I have to understand why Emily and I had to go through all of this." A small pause. "My parents weren’t originally from Lirath. They moved here around the ti I was born. I don’t know exactly why, but I always sensed a strange tension from them whenever their family was ntioned. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was born the way I am. And I doubt the sa wasn’t true for Emily."
She looked at him.
"I’m afraid I won’t be able to follow you on your travels. Not for now."
Those were her parting words.
Evan could have gone with her, he considered it, briefly. But he understood that so things had to be faced alone.
He didn’t know how to feel about it. Honestly.
’Maybe this is what they an when they say getting dumped by a girl?’ he thought. ’But then again, don’t you need sothing resembling a relationship before you can get dumped?’
It was the kind of thing Evan didn’t understand, and he had a feeling that trying to would be a form of ntal torture he didn’t need.
The following morning, they went their separate ways.
He headed northeast. She headed west, toward a small mountain range at whose foot sat a large city, the place where, she had said, her parents’ family was rooted.
Neither of them noticed that a presence had drifted into the skies above the forest and watched them in silence until they had each gone their own way.
"That boy," said the woman with silver-white hair, ageless and ancient in bearing, suspended in the air with her back straight and eyes that seed to cover thousands of kiloters in a single glance. "He has a strange presence. But he shouldn’t be the cause of that portal."
Her gaze shifted, settling on a figure with long dark hair, surrounded by the bodies of beasts of every rank, cutting through them without slowing down.
"To think I would find a half-Hollow in this era," she murmured. "It seems she may be the cause of all of it."
An instant later, she was gone.
Luna had no idea she had just drawn the interest of one of the most feared and terrifying beings in the entire world.
An interest that would lead to complications Evan could never have predicted — nor imagined possible, not even in his wildest dreams.
***
The road leading to Branleaf’s eastern gate was quiet at that hour.
Or at least, it should have been.
The man running down it was not quiet. He was making quite a lot of noise, actually, ragged breathing, boots hitting dirt at the desperate rhythm of soone who had long since stopped thinking and was operating purely on the instructions of his own survival instinct.
Behind him, the treeline was alive.
Three F-rank beasts and two E-ranks, none of them small, none of them slow, crashing through the undergrowth with the single-minded focus of things that had already decided how this ended.
He wasn’t a hunter. Wasn’t an adventurer. Had never awakened, not even a flicker. He was just a man who had taken the wrong shortcut through the wrong stretch of forest at the wrong ti of night, and now the walls of Branleaf were visible ahead, visible, but not close enough. Not nearly close enough.
His legs were giving out.
He could hear them gaining.
’This is it,’ so quiet part of his mind said, almost calmly. ’This is actually it.’
Then sothing moved past him.
He didn’t see it clearly, just a blur, fast and low, cutting across his path from the left. He stumbled, nearly fell, caught himself, and turned.
The beasts had stopped.
All five of them.
What remained of them, anyway.
It had taken perhaps four seconds. Maybe less. The two E-ranks were already down, and the last of the F-ranks dropped as he watched, collapsing sideways into the dirt without so much as a sound.
Standing among them was a boy
Young, younger than him, certainly. Tall for his age, with long dark hair and a sword in one hand that was doing a poor job of hiding what it had just been used for. The blade was dark with blood from tip to guard, and he was already lowering it with the unhurried ease of soone who had just done sothing entirely routine.
he turned.
He looked at him the way one looks at sothing mildly unexpected, not threatening, not particularly interested.
A beat of silence passed between them.
"Sorry for the interruption." A brief pause. "But I really needed soone to point toward Branleaf. Would you happen to know the way?"
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