Chapter 39: Reunion, and an Almost Peaceful Journey
After several days on the run with Elsa, we finally reached the nearest big city, Ortensia.
From so long spent living in the forests, I’d almost forgotten — this world was only backward outside its great cities, and Ortensia was anything but. Built upon the water, it unrolled a maze of canals between buildings of pale stone linked by bridges with rails running across them. A mana train slid from one district to the next in a breath of blue steam, while higher up a zeppelin drifted lazily over the rooftops. It was a beautiful city, truly.
But I paid it only distracted attention, my thoughts elsewhere, turned toward Alice and the moment I’d finally see her again.
At the gate, Elsa presented her rank-S guild ring, and we passed without the slightest trouble, a little respect in the guards’ eyes as they read the rank on it. She then led me through the alleys to a bar set on a quay.
I’d barely crossed the threshold when a white shape came flying at me.
"Kurooooo!"
Alice. She threw herself around my neck before I could so much as move, and I caught her on instinct, half lifting her off the ground.
"I missed you so much, Kurooooo..."
She was crying a little, her voice muffled against my shoulder, her arms clamped tight enough to steal my breath.
Right. She’s not angry with me. Good — I’d half dreaded the opposite.
"I missed you too, Alice."
We stayed like that a while, neither of us moving.
Then the door opened again, letting through a broad-framed man who tried to shoulder me aside as he passed.
"Move it, kid."
My body didn’t give an inch, and his shoulder struck me as though it had struck a wall, so that it was him who lost his balance. I turned to look at him, and what I read on his face had nothing to do with a shoulder-check gone wrong: a bare, disproportionate fear, the fear of a man who has just realized he’s made a grave mistake. He backed away, pale, and cleared off without another word.
I didn’t even do anything.
I glanced at Alice, who was smiling at me as if nothing were amiss. She had to have done something — a look, a spell — that she was hiding behind that smile, but I didn’t push it. I was simply glad to see her again, and the rest didn’t matter.
I brought her over to the table where Sylwen and Elsa were waiting, ordered drinks, and got the conversation going.
"Thank you for taking care of Alice all this time, Lady Sylwen."
"The honor was mine." She inclined her head, a smile on her lips. "She’s the student any teacher dreams of. A shame it only lasted this long."
There was a faint edge behind her words, as though she weren’t saying everything, but before I could pick at it, Elsa took my shoulder.
"In any case, it’s good to see the two of you back together. You must have missed each other, and I imagine you’ve a heap of things to tell one another."
And we talked for a good while.
I told them what I’d accomplished in the forest, the goblins, the orcs, the month spent alone training. I skipped over the bloodier details, but Elsa filled the gaps with a dry remark here and there, her good eye amused, as though all of it had worn on her less than on me.
Then it was Alice’s turn.
She’d learned to draw the mana of the world to replenish her own, all while moving and casting several spells at once, and the fruit of that training had a name: Parallel Mind. I knew that kind of skill well, the sort that, in the novels I used to write, I’d have filed among the strongest — the kind you reserve for the character who no longer has a clear ceiling. For a mage and healer, it was enormous: to heal, protect, and strike all at once, without ever running dry, since she drew the mana back from the world as she went.
"She absorbed everything faster than I could teach it," Sylwen said, a genuine pride in her voice. "What takes my kind years, she did in a matter of weeks."
Alice looked down at her glass, modest, a smile on her lips.
"And I learned a bunch of new lightning spells too," she added, lifting her head toward me.
"I can’t wait to see you in action. You worked so hard, didn’t you."
"I had your letter~" She nestled against my arm, glowing. "I read it again every night, and every time it felt like you were there, pushing me on."
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, so I simply rested a hand on her head, and she closed her eyes, content. Across from us, Elsa watched over the rim of her glass, half a smile at the corner of her mouth, while Sylwen kept that same gentle look she’d worn from the start — but her gaze lingered on Alice a second too long, as if searching for something there.
We traded stories a while longer, cheerfully enough, until Sylwen rose.
"I’ll leave you to it." She gathered her cloak. "Good luck to you, hero."
"Thank you again, for everything you did for her."
She paused a moment.
"Make the right choices, Kuro."
I took it for what it seemed to be, the sort of thing you say to a hero on the threshold of a trial, and I nodded before thanking her one last time. She smiled, and left.
We finished our drinks, then headed for the station.
In this world, trains only linked the great cities to one another; the rest of the way, people normally traveled by carriage — all of them, at least, save Elsa, who’d marched us across half the country on foot without a second thought. Ours was bound for Elfriyaz, the city that housed the Tower of the Fallen Heroes.
We settled into a first-class car, all varnished wood and deep bench seats, a bar at the far end. I took the place by the window, Alice at my side, Elsa across from us.
"Ten hours of travel," Elsa announced. "Get some rest. The Tower won’t do you any favors, so make the most of your last quiet hours."
She rose to go lean against the car’s bar, leaving us the seat.
The train pulled away, and Ortensia drew off through the window, the city on the water shrinking little by little, its canals casting one last glint before the countryside took over — hills, fields, the light slowly fading over all of it.
I sank into the seat. I had nothing to do, nothing to watch for, nothing to run from, nothing to kill, and it had been so long that the feeling turned almost strange: the quiet, the steady sway, the warmth of Alice settling against my arm.
"It’s pretty," she said in a low voice, her eyes on the window.
"Yeah."
"We never really had this, did we. Just... sitting somewhere, without something trying to kill us."
I nearly pointed out that we were headed straight for a tower built to do exactly that, but I held it back.
"No. Not really."
She slipped her hand into mine without another word and tucked herself against my shoulder, and we stayed like that a long while, watching a country neither of us knew slide past, while at the back of the car Elsa nursed her drink and the other passengers dozed to the rhythm of the rails. It was nice. Simply nice.
At some point I opened the Eye, for no particular reason, out of sheer habit, to look at the flow of the world.
And I noticed something.
Above each passenger in the car floated a thread, a thin thread of mana that came from nowhere and fixed itself to the top of their skull. I followed it with my eyes without understanding, for it rose and lost itself without tying to anything at all. Then I met the gaze of one of the passengers, and I held it.
They all stood up at once, as a single body, without a sound.
"So you’ve seen through me."
A single voice, out of every mouth at the same time.
Alice and Elsa went stiff, while I rose calmly. That month spent alone in the forest had at least taught me this: stop overthinking, stop hesitating, and deal with the problem so you can move on the moment something’s wrong.
I set my eyes on the threads.
"Get down."
Alice and Elsa folded low at once, heads down.
I drew Laia, turned on myself, and loosed across the whole car a fine thread of water, compressed to the extreme by my mana. The top halves of the bodies came away from the bottom, and the torsos slid to the floor with an awful sound, blood spattering over the seats and the windows — but not a nick in the wood, not a cracked pane, nothing but the bodies, exactly where I’d meant them to fall.
I sheathed the blade, sat back down, and turned my gaze back to the landscape.
No one spoke. Alice and Elsa had understood I’d done what needed doing, and left me be; only Alice moved closer, resting her head against my shoulder before eventually falling asleep. The hours passed like that, aboard the train, until we arrived.
The conductor who opened our car froze at the carnage. Elsa rose unhurried, showed him her guild badge, and told him we’d been attacked. He nodded, still pale.
"Go get the city guard," she told him. "We’ll answer their questions."
I stepped down from the car, and I saw it.
Beside the city rose a tower, immense, a column of stone that climbed straight into the sky until it lost itself there, so high its summit vanished into the clouds. Alice came to stand beside me, and we lingered a moment, the two of us, gazing at it in silence.
"So that’s where we’re going," she said, and her voice had lost a little of its lightness. "Elsa said even heroes have fallen in there. That’s where its name comes from."
"I know."
"Doesn’t it scare you?"
I thought about it for a second. It probably should have.
"A little. But we don’t really have a choice — it’s that, or not being strong enough for what’s coming." I shrugged. "Might as well be now."
She didn’t answer right away, and when I turned my head toward her, she was staring at me, with something in those red eyes I didn’t usually see there — not fear for herself, but fear for me.
"Stay close to me in there," she said softly. "Whatever happens."
"You too."
I turned my gaze back to the tower, its summit lost in the clouds.
"I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe. Don’t worry."