I yanked my sword out of the netherbeast, stepping back to regain my balance. My chest heaved with deep breaths, the adrenaline pumping in my body slowly ebbing to reveal the wave of exhaustion washing over me.
"That's a good haul, don't you think?" Kinver, the leader of the party I happened to join as Dragnasand's representative, said, giving my shoulder a heavy pat in passing me by. "We're so glad we have you with us."
He fixed the rifle slung over his arm and trudged off to join the rest of his party, all equally absorbed in ripping loot from the carcasses. We needed it both for proof we completed the mission and for whatever the guild's research department would be using it for.
I moved to catch up to them when a familiar purple light caught my eye. Hidden beneath a shower of leaves and vines, another symbol glowed with faint violet rays bleeding through the green and brown around it. Another one? I summoned my notebook and pen from inventory and started sketching this new symbol.
The previous page listed all of the symbols I have come across in most of my missions. Adding this current one, it totalled to about fifteen. There might be more I've missed, but seeing this in almost every mission with an infestation of nether beasts to the scale of the jjangkai mission, it wouldn't be far-off to assume these symbols had something to do with the rising abundance of creatures in Solarlume.
Running my finger across the list including the town I found them in, I frowned. When I visited the Great Archives with Cavya, we didn't find anything of significance as to what these symbols could mean. Dragnasand, with its abundance of scholars and archivists, has failed to help us. During the search, I managed to sneak my own agenda in between. Like the information about the symbols, I also found none about jumping worlds or anything close to what happened to me. As far as I was concerned, nobody here thought there were other worlds beyond them apart from their own.
Well, there's that.
Cavya told me he'd shop around for any scholar outside the Central Empire who might know the script the symbols were written in. It's been a couple of weeks since then and I still haven't heard anything about it back.
The journey back to Mystriae was muted. I engaged with the Twin Scales for as long as it was necessary, at least until the familiar bustle of the street leading to the guild house came up. After that, I was on my own while Kinver went and updated his party's stats and merits.
My footsteps dragged on my way towards my room. The days spent on the road were no joke. Still, it wasn't any different from what I experienced back home. I was tired there just as I was now. The only difference was, this time around, no one was forcing me to do what I was doing. I just...didn't like staying sedentary. The feeling of worthlessness crept up every time I sat still for a moment.
I hated feeling that way.
The door croaked weakly when I entered my room. My bed, made of some netherbeast's down, had never looked so inviting. I collapsed on it, sparing a moment to withdraw all of my gear back into inventory.
I awoke to the sound of the rotary phone ringing. Like mad.
Groaning, I rubbed the sleep off my face and slithered off the bed. My legs didn't want to stick the rest of my body upright, but I forced them to. Work called. Just like home, right?
I yanked the receiver from the hook and placed it into my ear. "Yeah?" I said, not even caring who was hearing it from the other side. It could have been the guildmasters and I wouldn't have cared. They disturbed my sleep—something I didn't have much time for these days.
By the Divines' graces, it was Nazran. "Cav's called a meeting," he said. "In five."
I nodded even though no one could really see it. "Got it."
The hook made a distinct click when I hung up the call. I went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water into my face. Thank heavens Solarlume has the concept of indoor plumbing.
I made my way to the guild room assigned to our specific party. It sat at the end of the hall, just a few steps from the rest of our rooms. When I reached the doors, the voices curling from inside made my eyebrows squeeze together. It couldn't have been just the rest of the Knights in there.
Someone else was inside.
The question was—would it be better or worse? Was this the reason why Cavya called for a meeting this early in the morning?
I cranked the handle down, bursting inside with the last of my confidence. Cavya's whiskers twitched at the sight of me. "Ah, Kora. Great timing as always," he said, uncrossing his arms and sitting straighter from his seat. "I was just having a conversation with our guests and they happened to mention you."
What guests?
I answered my own question when my gaze landed on the rest of the people who shouldn't be in this room. They're familiar, especially that woman...
"You remember the Crimson Scouts, I hope?" Cavya waved his gloved hand towards the curve of people from the jjangkai mission. "Sit down, so I can brief you."
With my gut being weighed down by a thousand boulders of dread, I sank into my designated seat, between Nazran and Ahrian. Valren gave me a brief nod from beside Cavya. Without Yaora and Mirani, this room has just been so empty.
Cavya turned to Heather who tapped a claw against the wooden table, light enough to not splinter the surface but hard enough to make it seem like so. "If you please, min khari," he said. "Let's start from the beginning."
Heather cleared her throat, looking straight at me. Her almost luminous eyes dug into my very being, making me squirm. "We've just cut ties with Raventhorne and found ourselves to be without a license to operate, not even as a scouting party," she said. "We've come to Dragnasand to offer a proposition."
I arched an eyebrow, studying the rest of her teammates. Farthest from her and closest to Nazran sat the person I never thought I'd see again after that jjangkai fiasco. Hye-jin. Rather, Seline. "Which is?" I said aloud, making the rest of the scouts' eyes flick to me. Even Trink, his ears standing up in attention.
"We wish to become an adventuring party under Dragnasand," Heather said without missing a beat. "But with our current attributes and rank, we wouldn't be able to stand on our own. So, we've come to request one of your members to stand in as our leader, registering us as one. We need someone with at least a veteran rank to be considered as per the rules in this guild."
"Which I initially refused, seeing as we're also short on members," Cavya bobbed his head, his ears swiveling from one direction to the other. "But they've brought some ammunition with them—something I can't let go of."
"We are willing to be a branch of the Dragnasand Knights," Heather said. "We just need a different name, but as payment for lending us one of your members, all of our merits and loot will be registered under your party."
Cavya folded his hands together, his eyes gleaming with yet another calculation running through his twisted mind. "It's not that we are in need of merits," he said. "I just thought it would be the best time for us to rest without raising the masters' suspicion. On paper, we would look like we're going on missions, but really, we're on vacation. Think about it."
I turned to our leader. "Other than the fact that you're thinking of sacrificing me to chaperone these...people, while you're off on your vacation."
Cavya returned my attention with a brief glance. "But it's what you wanted, yes?" he said. "You've already been doing a lot of parties under Dragnasand a favor by going on missions with them. What's one more?"
Right. Even in this world, hard work was still being repaid by more work. It wasn't like I wanted to go on missions. There was just this unrelenting hope inside me saying I'd find some clue to going home by scouring the rest of the world like a madman.
"What about these three?" I jerked my thumbs in Nazran and Ahrian's directions. "Shouldn't they be more eligible than me due to their ranks?"
An amused look passed across Cavya's face. "My fault for not informing you beforehand," he drew a silver plaque from the pocket of his suit—peach-colored as of today—and slid it over to me. It was the same one they used in testing for a person's attributes. I bit my lip and drew out a dagger from the inventory. Pricking my finger in its tip, I watched as a small droplet of blood bloomed. I pressed it into the plaque.
A burst of light erupted from the plaque. It showed me a magigraph of my own attributes. Over the months seeing it in others, I've learned to read it on my own. All spheres have the polygons' tips extending past the seventh tier. Which made me...
"Major Veteran," Cavya finished my thought for me. "Who's on your way towards Vice."
I blinked. Veteran. Wasn't that like...in the realms up there? What was I doing there? Last I checked, I was somewhere in the Initiate levels. Unless...
Cavya gave me a knowing look. That mission with the danburki where I was forced to match my magic against his to execute Rhanteira. Was that when the massive leap happened? With the flurry of activity following that mission, I guess I never really had the time to check or worry about ranks.
"To answer your question, you are as eligible as them." Cavya sighed as he crossed his arms over his chest once more and cocked his head to one side. "But that's really not what you're asking, right?"
I clenched my jaw. He saw through me again. "Why me?"
"I have my hands full with the Bridge program," Ahrian said, her eye bobbing from its socket as she tried focusing on me. "You know how those fools in the Western Tower are."
Nazran nodded in sympathy. "And I've dug my grave by being assigned into the summoner camp where we outreach a lot of budding creature spirias," he said. "We don't want too many casualties resulting from mismanagement of magic."
Right. As he and Revery explained before, summoning and crafting beasts from the netherside was a dangerous art. I turned to Valren. "How about you? Got any excuse to get you out of this?"
The second-in-command shrugged, his armor clinking against each other as he fixed his sitting posture. "It's costly to be Dragnasand's best," he said, his tone laced with sympathy. "I've been assigned to the Southern tribes, to extend the Central Empire's proposition of alliance. It's a whole lot of work, honestly."
I frowned. "So when you meant 'vacation'..."
Cavya blew a breath. "I meant taking a break from swinging our swords and doing some...diplomatic work for once," he said. "It's that season, Kora. The Crimsons couldn't have come at a bad time."
When I didn't speak and let the unspoken question hang in the air between us, Cavya scratched the insides of his palm. "As for me," he said. "I'd be looking into the curious case you brought up."
Okay. So it's my fault I was stuck with this chaperoning work.
Back home, I wasn't exactly in a position to refuse tasks outside of my paygrade. But now...I have at least some leverage. "No," I pushed my chair away from the table and moved to stand up. "I refuse to take on this assignment."
Cavya narrowed his eyes. He didn't seem surprised by my decision. Why was I keen to decline anyway?
"If that's all about the reason you called me, then I best take my leave," I ducked my head at Cavya who acknowledged me with a small nod and began pacing towards the door.
"You can't be serious," came Seline's pointed voice, stopping me dead in my tracks. "Are you really abandoning me? Again?"
Something snipped what's left of my sanity. I whirled back. "I did not abandon you. Not even once," I hissed. Then, I scoffed at the irony of it all. "If you ask me, you're the one who threw me away. Do you know how much that messed me up? You, of all people, should know."
Seline shot up, her chair grating against the floorboards. "It's not my fault you're so damn near impossible to get through," she said. "I tried, so many times, to knock some sense into your head, to see I was still there even when it's breaking me down. Can you blame me for letting go when I held on for as long as I did?"
Yes. I could. But not without blaming myself first. This wasn't the way I wanted this to go. I should be able to be free from my own past, and not be shoved back into it the first chance the universe got. I shouldn't even be saying this or doing this with her. But seeing her throwing her hurt back at me in order to guilt me into doing what she wanted, it reminded me so much of the hell I have to live through.
"I would like us to have met under a different circumstance, but you can't keep using that argument with me," I said, squinting in her direction. "It's done. We are done. There's no going back to it, since you're the one who made it that way in the first place."
Seline bared her teeth. I never realized spirias had fangs until now. "I can use that argument all I want," she said. "I may be the one who called the shots, but it's only because you are too much of a wimp to call it off yourself. Why? Am I wrong?"
She just called me a wimp. Me, who wanted nothing of the sort to happen. Me, who fought until the end. That did it. "I said no," I continued my journey towards the door. "And for what it's worth, this isn't me hating you for what you did. This is just me doing what I want, for once."
Seline scoffed. "That's rich," she said. "You know what your problem is? You claim to know what you want out of your life, when in fact, you don't. Until now, you don't. What are you even going to do after this, huh?"
I was going to look for the fastest way out of this mess and go back home. And after that...what else? Going back to work, soldering on with Ashley and getting promoted. And after that, maybe retiring? Dying? That's it.
It didn't give Hye-jin the right to say all that out loud though.
So, with incomprehensible anger curling on the base of my gut, I whirled back to her. "And you wanted so much out of your life that you try to control it," I fired. "Then you throw a tantrum when it doesn't go your way, like what you're doing now. Am I wrong?"
Seline opened her mouth to retort when a stern voice cut through our world. "That's enough," Cavya said. That's when reality sank in. We weren't alone in the room. Which meant...
They heard everything.
"Seline, sit down," Heather said, jarring her into submission.
Cavya stood up and rounded the table towards me. "I shouldn't have pressured you into making a decision now," he said. "Think about it, would you? You can give me and them the answer tomorrow."
I could only nod. When I looked at the others seated on the opposite curve of the Crimson Scouts, it confirmed my fears. They now knew there was something going on between me and Seline. And it wouldn't take long for them to start trying to piece it together. Would they arrive at the truth that what happened between us took place in an entirely different realm? What would follow after that?
That's why I needed to be as far from Hye-jin as possible. Being together would only put us both at risk, especially when all she seemed to be doing was to bring back the past I've only been trying to outrun. If it's going to be one disaster after the other each time our fates crossed, then it's better for them to not meet at all, even if I had to be the one to tear it apart.
I made it out of the room, feeling Hye-jin's stare burning the back of my head. Let her stare as she wanted. At least, this time, she'd feel what it's like to have no choice but to accept what's already there. Even if she felt betrayed.
She had to swallow that bitter truth.
Even if it hurt.