Chapter 28
Nobody spoke for a long time after Luna left.
Torben’s group handled their dead. They wrapped Hadric in a bedroll, the tall man and the woman with cropped hair doing the work while the rest stood around in the obvious uselessness of their situation. Torben watched, arms crossed, jaw locked, eyes fixed on the treeline where Luna had vanished.
Arleria’s shimmer dropped. She appeared beside the cart, exactly where she’d been sitting before, as if she’d never moved. Her concealment spell had been flawless. Alsen hadn’t even felt it dissolve.
She was pale. Alsen walked beside her. The moment he sat down, she moved closer to him. Not dramatically. She didn’t grab his arm or press against his side. She just shifted, a half-step that closed the gap between them until her shoulder almost touched his.
Close enough that his magical presence washed over her.
He recognized the instinct. She was positioning herself behind the strongest thing available.
It was unconscious, the way a child moved behind a parent when a stranger approached, except Arleria was a D-rank adventurer who had just watched a woman perform something impossible, and the strongest thing available was him.
“We should move camps,” Derell said. His voice was rough, but controlled. He hadn’t sheathed his sword. “Now.”
“Where?” Malick asked. “It’s dark, terrain’s unfamiliar, and the cart—”
“I don’t give a damn about the cart. That woman just gutted a man without drawing a weapon.”
“She drew a weapon,” Kern said from somewhere to the left. Alsen hadn’t seen him move there. “Most likely from her sleeve, where she instantly hid it after using it.”
Everyone looked at him.
“I didn’t see a draw,” Derell said.
“Neither did I.” Kern’s voice carried the particular flatness of a man admitting something he didn’t enjoy admitting. “But it’s the obvious conclusion.”
Arleria spoke for the first time. “That technique.” Her voice was steady, but only because she was making it steady. Alsen could feel the faint tremor of mana running through her, the magical equivalent of adrenaline. “That vision affected everyone.”
“That wasn’t a vision,” Alsen said quietly.
She looked at him. Her dark eyes held a sharpness that cut through the evening air. “What was it?”
He didn’t remember the System name for it.
But he had seen it when browsing through it.
He opened the skill tree, navigating to the assassin class.
The branches were deep and intricate, paths splitting and reconverging in ways that rewarded extreme specialization.
He followed the main trunk past the level ten node, past twenty, past thirty, into territory he’d never bothered examining.
There.
“In the assassin specialization, the level fifty major node. Last vision.” He read the skill himself:
Skill name: Last vision.
Required level: Fifty.
Description: Passively suppress all bloodlust and killing intent. Upon activation, release the stored bloodlust and killing intent to stun all targets in range, forcing upon them a vision of their own death.
Usage: Passive and active.
Arleria’s eyes widened. “Level fifty,” she whispered.
Luna didn’t have it from the System, most likely. It was simply something she learned in her previous life.
Arleria shook her head, her composure visibly reassembling itself. It was one thing to know, intellectually, that something was off about Luna. It was another to attach a number to it. Level fifty was a threshold where adventurers started to be classified as C-ranks.
Only Savnoj in Vellhorn was a C-rank.
Kern appeared beside them. He’d moved without sound, which, under the circumstances, Alsen found deeply irritating. “She’s been traveling with you since before Vellhorn.”
It wasn’t a question. The implication was clear. If Luna was level-fifty equivalent, and she’d been at Alsen’s side for weeks, then Alsen was implicitly classified as being at least at the same power level. Especially since he presented her as his attendant. He had to stop doing that.
Alsen saw the recalculation happen in real time. Kern looked at him differently, with the professional reassessment of a man who’d just realized the map was wrong.
I’m not level fifty, Alsen wanted to say. But he knew better. He had no idea what rank his best spells would put him in, and whether he told the truth was irrelevant.
Derell had moved to stand between the cart and Torben’s camp. He kept his sword drawn, though Alsen suspected it was for comfort rather than utility. “We’re sleeping with doubled guard,” he said. “I’ll take first watch with Malick.”
“I’ll take second,” Kern said.
“And what about her?” Derell asked, his voice dropping. “When she comes back.”
Arleria straightened. The half-step she’d taken toward Alsen was still there, her shoulder close to his, but her voice came out with the authority of a party leader. “She’s not coming back tonight. She left to hunt. She’ll return in the morning, if she returns at all.”
“And if she does?”
“Then we deal with it in the morning. Right now, we focus on getting through the night.”
Nobody argued. They set up watches, Derell and Malick taking the first rotation. Kern cleaned his bow, then sharpened arrowheads with a whetstone, the soft scraping sound rhythmic and oddly soothing in the tense quiet.
Arleria moved closer to Alsen, erasing the distance between their shoulders.
“How long have you known her?” Arleria asked.
“For a long time. We set out to adventure together.” He forced out a smile. “And she’s reasonable. Mostly.”
She exhaled. “Alsen, she has a level-fifty skill. She used it as an opener, so there’s a lot more where that came from.”
He knew. That wasn’t some ultimate final technique to her. She would never use her best technique casually. “It’s the first time she has ever fought a person since we set out.”
Arleria closed her eyes. Her mana settled, the tremor fading into something low and tired. “I believe you. That’s the part that frightens me.”
He understood. If Luna had decided their group offended her enough not to be spared, then they were all going to die. “She won’t hurt you. She won’t hurt anyone in this group.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I do.”
Arleria opened her eyes. She looked at him directly, searching. Whatever she found, it softened something in her. Not the fear. The fear stayed. But the tension in her posture eased a notch, the rigid set of her shoulders loosening. “You have a talent for making terrifying things sound reasonable.”
He smiled. “It’s one of my better qualities.”
That got a short exhale that was almost a laugh. Almost. She leaned her head against the cart wheel, staring at the sky. “I hate this.”
“I know.”
They sat together in silence. The fire crackled. The stream ran. Torben’s group had gone quiet, their dead wrapped and laid aside, their camp folded inward like a wound.
After a while, Arleria’s breathing steadied. She drifted into an uneasy sleep, her body still tilted toward his, her shoulder resting against his arm. He didn’t move.
One by one, the camp settled. Malick and Derell stood their watch, though they stood closer together than usual, facing outward, swords drawn. When their shift ended, Kern took over alone, sitting on a rock above the camp with his bow across his knees.
Alsen waited.
He waited until Derell’s breathing turned heavy. Until Malick’s grip on his warhammer slackened. Until Arleria’s weight against his arm became the dead weight of real sleep.
Then he eased himself away from her, carefully enough not to wake her. She shifted, murmured something, and settled deeper against the cart wheel. He arranged his cloak behind her head as a makeshift pillow.
Kern’s eyes found him in the dark.
Alsen met his gaze. He didn’t explain where he was going. Kern didn’t ask. His eyebrows did something that could have been disapproval, acceptance, or the instruction manual for a crossbow. Alsen chose to interpret it as acceptance.
He walked past the camp’s edge, past the stream, and into the foothills.
Alsen fired a broad life scan. He had detected Luna’s signature dozens of times. He would recognize it.
The scan found her about half a mile east, up a slope and over a ridge, in a shallow depression sheltered from the wind by an outcropping of rock. Her life signature pulsed in the quiet darkness, warm and steady, unbothered.
He climbed. The terrain wasn’t kind to him. Loose stone, steep grades, thorn bushes that existed purely out of spite. Luna had picked a spot that was easy to defend and miserable to approach, which said everything about her choice of campsite.
The firelight appeared first. A small campfire, well-contained, burning hot and clean. Then came the smell of already burnt meat. It felt familiar at this point.
Luna sat cross-legged by the fire. She’d rigged a mountain goat on a spit made from green branches, the animal already half-cooked, the fat dripping onto coals with a sharp hiss.
In her left hand, she held the makeshift pipe they’d fashioned back in Vellhorn, a rough thing carved from a piece of hardwood, packed with whatever she’d acquired from the undercity.
She took a long draw and exhaled a thin stream of smoke into the night air. The smoke curled upward, catching the firelight before dissolving into nothing.
She didn’t look up when he approached. She didn’t need to.
“There’s enough goat for two,” she said. “Or five.”
He sat down next to her. The fire’s warmth hit him immediately, the chill of the climb fading from his bones. “It’s burned.”
“I know.” She turned the spit a quarter rotation. “I like it that way. Burnt on the outside, bloody on the inside.”
Alsen looked at her. Firelight and shadow played across her face, catching the gold in her eyes. She looked exactly the same as she always did. Calm, unbothered, comfortable in the wilderness.
She’d killed a man a few hours ago, and she was roasting a goat.
He didn’t know what to do with that. So he just sat there.