January 6th, 1862/8 — Evening
Kiyokazu Lazar — POV
The path back to the village was darker than it had been on the way out.
The sun had already dropped behind the tree line by the time Father and I left the bench, taking the orange from the sky and leaving behind a pale, cold blue that deepened with every minute we walked. Our boots crunched in the snow in an easy, unhurried rhythm. Neither of us spoke for a while, and the silence between us was different from the one that had settled on the bench — lighter, somehow. Easier to carry.
It was Father who broke the silence.
"Do you want to know more about essencers?"
I glanced at him. His hands were in his pockets, his breath visible in the cold air, his eyes locked on the path ahead.
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
He nodded slowly, as if he had expected that answer.
"Everyone is born with mana and energy inside them," he began. "The essence — two separate things, yet the same, though people often confuse them. Both flow through channels inside the body. Those channels can be trained over time. The more you work on your essence control, they become faster. Tougher. More durable."
"What's the difference between them?"
"Mana lets you create things — both outside your body and within. Fire, water, wind, earth, and all the other elements. Special techniques as well. You draw mana through your channels and shape it into something. Energy works differently It strengthens the body itself — your speed, your endurance, your senses." He paused.
"Or at least that's how they will teach you to use it. But energy can do many of the same things mana can. There are only a few differences between them, though those differences matter."
"What differences?"
"Mana is naturally stronger. The techniques and elements you summon through it are more powerful than the same techniques summoned through energy. With mana, your elements hit harder — but mana regenerates slowly. Energy is weaker, but it returns fast. In my opinion, energy is the more useful of the two in a real fight. If you lose forty or fifty percent of your energy, you recover it in five to ten minutes. The same loss of mana takes forty minutes or more."
"I see."
"Although — and this is important — it depends entirely on the individual. Not every person's mana and energy work the same way. Some recover faster than others, some people cannot use mana. Many factors decide that." He glanced at me sideways. "But there are ways to speed up mana recovery beyond simply waiting for it to regenerate."
"Such as?"
He smiled faintly. "You can draw mana from the world around you. From nature itself — the trees, the snow, the air. Everywhere around us. You can Pull traces of mana from your surroundings and feed them into your own channels. It's a hard process to learn, but once you learn it I'ts easy to do."
I looked at the snow beneath my boots. "You can do that?"
"I cannot," he said simply. "I was never able to understand how, let alone manage it. But there are those who can. There is also a second method — using energy to accelerate mana regeneration. You can make your mana return faster by using your energy. The reverse, however, doesn't work. Energy cannot be sped up by mana."
He was quiet for a moment before continuing.
"But don't mistake any of this for something simple. I cannot use energy at all. I cannot draw mana from nature. I cannot wield more than one element — I can only manifest the one I awakened. Everything I just described, I learned from books and from watching others do it. Most of it remains out of my reach."
As we walked I thought about the flame he had held above his palm on the bench. Small. Steady. Completely under his control.
"How long did it take you?" I asked. "To create fire the way you did earlier."
He made a quiet sound and looked up at the darkening sky. "About a year and two months. It was hard to shape it into something since fire spread quickly and I could hurt more people than I wanted." He was quiet for a moment. "I was not born talented, Lazar. I worked hard for everything I have."
"Then why did you say you got nothing from it?"
He didn't answer immediately. We walked in silence for a stretch.
"Because I made it the only thing I wanted," he said at last. "And when you pour everything into one thing and leave nothing for anything else — you look up one day and realize there is someone else who always better at that same thing. And in that moment you realize how empty everything around that one thing has become." He glanced at me. "I don't want that for you."
"I understand," I said.
He placed his hand briefly on my back — tapped me three times — and then took it away. We walked the rest of the way home in silence.
The house was warm.
Mother had lit the lamps in the living room, and the smell of something cooking reached us before we had even gotten our boots off. Sarah appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing an apron — white, printed with sunflowers, a small butterfly resting on one of them.
"You're back," she said.
"We're back," I confirmed.
"How was the roof?" Mother called from inside the kitchen.
"Fixed," Father said, hanging his jacket by the door. He looked at Sarah and smiled. "You stayed."
"Miss Maya was busy with making dinner. I helped where I could."
Mother appeared behind Sarah, wiping her hands on a cloth. "Sit down, both of you. It's almost ready."
Father settled into his chair. I dropped onto the sofa — not close to where Sarah had been sitting, but close enough to notice the book resting there, a ribbon tucked between its pages to mark her place. The book was one of mine. The one about Vallaria's geography and climate.
"The hot springs chapter," she said before I could ask, settling back beside me.
"There are seventeen of them in the southern region alone."
"I know."
"Did you know the water temperature in some of them stays above forty degrees even in winter?"
"I knew that too."
"Of course it does," Father said from his chair, without looking up. "Vallaria's winter is nowhere near ours. Their climate runs at least thirteen degrees warmer."
Sarah looked at the book for a moment, then set it on the table.
"You've actually read all of these."
"Some of them I read multiple times."
She looked at me — an expression I couldn't quite name — and then stood and went to help Mother in the kitchen.
Dinner was simple. Bread, soup, a salad, dried meat that Mother had been saving. But the table felt fuller than it usually did with four people around it. Father and Mother talked about the village, the roof, a merchant who had passed through village two days ago with news from the east. Sarah asked questions about Nivareth that pulled the conversation toward the capital and kept it there for a long time. I ate slowly and listened, watching them talk.
At some point Sarah said something that made Mother laugh for quite a bit.
It was a good evening.
After dinner, Sarah helped clear the table while Father returned to his chair. I sat on the sofa and did nothing in particular, watching the dark evening through the window. The sounds of the house settled around me — bowls being washed, voices murmuring in the kitchen, the soft creak of Father's chair.
Eventually Sarah appeared in the doorway, her sweater over her arm.
"I should go home. My family will worry."
"I'll walk you," Mother said immediately, already reaching for her coat. "I haven't spoken to Maria in days."
Sarah looked at me. I looked back at her.
"Good night," I said.
"Good night, Lazar."
The front door closed behind them with a soft click as they left the house.
When I looked toward the chair, Father was already asleep.
I went to the kitchen, sat in front of the fire, and thought about nothing in particular. I watched as the fire crackled slowly until I got bored. I put the fireguard in place and went upstairs to my room.
January 7th, 1862/8 — Before Dawn
I lay on my back in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
The room was completely silent. Outside the window the sky was black, thick with stars that gave it a cold, particular beauty. No wind. No sound from the village. Just the cold pressing against the glass and the occasional quiet creak of the house settling around me.
I should be asleep, I thought, closing my eyes.
But I couldn't fall asleep, the tree kept coming back.
I turned onto my side. Tried thinking about other things — the conversation with Father, the flame above his palm, the difference between mana and energy. I turned onto my other side. Stared at the wall.
The tree.
I didn't understand what it was about that damn tree that wouldn't leave my thoughts alone. It was just a tree. An old tree. Bare needles, no snow—unusual, perhaps, but unusual things existed. The forest is full of things I haven't seen. And that was part of the reason I liked the forest.
But something about that tree kept pulling at the edge of my thoughts like a finger tapping on glass. Quiet. Persistent. Refusing to stop.
I closed my eyes again.
Eventually, In all that thinking I slept.
When I woke up, the sky outside the window had shifted to the pale grey that comes just before dawn. The house was still silent. I lay still in my bed for a moment, looking at the ceiling, waiting to feel the moment when I was fully waked up.
After a minute or two, I was completely awake.
The tree.
I lay there arguing with myself. It was early. I had already seen it once with Sarah and found nothing. Whatever feeling I had about it was probably the ordinary restlessness that attaches itself to things when you have too much time to think. I raised my hands behind my head, and stared at the ceiling
Probably.
I got up from the bed, I sneaked out of the house, taking care not to make any noises that would wake up my family. I put on my boots and left the house. The morning smell of the wind was never stronger. It was not too cold nor hot. On the contrary, it was very pleasant, good for morning walk.
The village was still asleep.
I moved through it quietly, my boots pressing careful tracks into the undisturbed snow of the main path. No lights in the windows. No smoke coming out from the chimneys I could saw. The lamp posts along the path gave off a low, yellow light that caught the falling snowflakes and made them briefly visible before they disappeared into the white below.
The forest red gates stood open ahead of me.
I walked through them, stepping into the forest.
Inside the forest, nothing moved.
Usually the wind stirred the needle-heavy branches, sent small falls of snow drifting down from the canopy. But there was no wind this morning. No snowflakes. Just the path ahead of me and the trees on either side, completely still, and the sound of my boots pressing into the snow.
On the path, I noticed wheel tracks — pressed deep, heading further in.
That must be the merchant Father mentioned last night.
I walked for a while. The silence did what it always did — loosened something in my chest, let me breathe more easily. But underneath the quiet, one thing kept returning.
The tree.
I saw it ahead of me before I was ready.
I stopped in front of it and studied it the way I had studied it before — the bare needles, the stillness, the sense of wrongness I couldn't locate in any specific detail but couldn't shake either. I pressed my hand against the bark.
Cold. Rough. Ordinary.
I walked slowly around its base, looking at the ground. Undisturbed snow. No tracks. No marks. Nothing.
I stood there a moment longer.
From the tree beside it, a mass of snow broke free and dropped to the ground with a soft impact, close enough to make my heart skip a beat. I looked up. But saw nothing. Just branches.
"You're here, aren't you?" I said, looking at the tree.
Silence.
"Puh," I exhaled. "What am I doing? Talking to a damn tree."
I turned and continued down the path toward the lake.
The lake was still.
I watched the morning come in slowly over the water — grey bleeding into pale blue, then warming at the edges as the sun rose somewhere behind the softwood trees. The lake's surface reflected all of it perfectly not hiding any detail, a flawless mirror of the sky above.
I stayed there for a long time.
The cold didn't bother me. The stillness of the air made the temperature feel less severe than it was. I watched a bird land on the other side of lake, she drank the water, and fly away. I watched the bird fly away as light continue to change.
At some point I noticed I wasn't thinking about anything anymore. I was just watching. Just present, in the specific way this place always made possible — the quiet of everything beneath the surface of my thoughts, the world reduced to only what was directly in front of me.
I exhaled slowly.
I turned around and looked up, I saw some smoke, barely noticeable — a thin, dark thread rising above the treeline to the south, easy to mistake it for chimney smoke from some early morning fire. I looked at it without urgency, my mind still half-lost in the stillness of the lake.
Then a second thread appeared. A third. A fourth. They kept on coming.
All rising from the same direction. All the same heavy, dark color — not the pale gray of burning wood, but something thicker, wrong. The kind of smoke that came from things that were never meant to burn.
I ran straight back to my village.
Huh. Huh. Huh.
My breath came out in short bursts, visible in the cold air, vanishing behind me as I ran. The path blurred on both sides. Snow exploded from under my boots with every step. I could feel the air hitting my throat as I ran, while same words kept slamming through my head—
What is this?
What happened?
Who did this?
I passed the tree without looking at it.
The more I ran toward my village, the thicker the smokes become. The smell hit me before I passed the village gates, it was sharp, penetrating, and wrong. Not the clean smoke of wood, but something beneath it—metallic, heavy, sticking to my throat like ash and blood.
The red gates appeared ahead.
I ran through them.
And stopped, catching for my breath.
I looked ahead, every house in the village was burning. Some still standing, their walls destroyed through from the inside, fire roaring from open windows and doorways. Others already collapsed — nothing left but smoldering wreckage and rising smoke. The snow along the path had melted in patches where embers had fallen, dark water running in thin streams along the path.
The smell of blood was everywhere. It's smell disgusted me, turning my stomach upwards.
I continued down the path toward my house.
It was in ruins.
The walls had fallen inward. The roof was gone. Smoke rose from the wreckage in lazy, dark columns. The front door — the same door I had eased shut not so much ago — lay flat in the snow, gone. Its hinges torn free by something far stronger than any human could do.
I reached the yard and stopped.
I pressed one hand against the one section of wall still standing and bent forward, and everything I had eaten the night before came up into the snow. I stayed like that for a moment, eyes shut, breathing through my mouth, waiting for the world to collapse.
Get up.
I straightened.
At the back of the house, half-buried in snow, lay a severed blue skinned hand. Thick. Covered in coarse brown fur. Around it the snow was stained dark in a wide, already-freezing circle.
I looked at the rest of the village, every other house had the same destiny as my house, they were all destroyed, fire being the only things that rose from the ruins.
Then I saw the rise.
To the right of the main path — on a small hill, higher than the surrounding ground. Four large figures moving around something at its center. A post. Branches piled at its base.
And someone tied to the post —
I was already running before I had finished the thought.
As I came closer, I could see the person on the post.
I could see her.
It was Sarah hung against the ropes that bound her to the post, her head dropped forward, brown hair falling across her face, a blindfold over her eyes. Her clothes were torn at the shoulder. No blood that I could see — but she was completely still, and that was worse than blood would have been.
At the base of the post, something small lay in the snow. An animal — about the size of a puppy, maybe slightly bigger it didn't move or give any signs of life.
Four blue-skinned shapes stood around the pyre. They turned toward me as I came up the rise. One of them was enormously larger than the rest — his shoulders so wide they looked like two boulders set side by side.
Two of them stepped forward.
Then the roar came.
"RRRRAAAAAAAGHHHH!"
It didn't come from one direction. It seemed to come from everywhere at once — from my left, from my right, from the ground beneath my feet, from the air itself. The two trolls stopped immediately. Turned back. Returned to their places around the pyre without another look at me, they dropped to their knees, eyes cast down at the snow.
The one that roared started stepping forward.
His footsteps sounded like boulders dropped onto stone. Each one landed with a weight that seemed to shift the ground beneath it.
Are these trolls?
I had heard an old man describe them once — their size, the coarse fur on their forearms, the tusks curving up from their lower jaws. At the time I had assumed the old man was exaggerating.
But he wasn't, they looked exactly like how he explained.
"I wouldn't like to meet another one ever again."
My legs stopped, numb from what I was seeing with my eyes, and what was right in front of me, just a few steps ahead...
I didn't tell them to stop. They simply stopped, and I stood in the snow staring up at him, the distance between us feeling both too great and too small at the same time. I had the feeling that even from that distance he could grab me if he wanted to. My hands were shaking. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, behind my eyes, in every ragged breath.
Move, I told myself. Go to her. Move.
But nothing. The body didn't listened.
He looked at me for a long moment, his golden eyes steady and unhurried stared into me. Then his giant mouth opened slowly, and the sound that came out wasn't a roar — it was way lower. More rhythmic. Almost conversational.
"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."
He was laughing. Large smile found on his face
Behind him, on the right side one of the trolls reached for a torch propped in the snow. The flame caught the branches at the base of the post, orange light spreading through the stacked wood.
Something moved in me.
Not thought — something faster than thought, something that bypassed all of it entirely. My hand closed around a fistful of snow before I had decided to move. I packed it between my palms and threw it as hard as I could.
It hit the torch square on. The flame hissed and died.
The troll stared at the extinguished torch. Then at me.
I turned my gaze toward the biggest troll on the left — but he was gone.
The shadow fell across me before I even realized what happened.
He was directly behind me. He was so tall that I barely had to lift my head to see his bottom face. He looked down, his eyes stared directly at me, glowing in golden color — unhurried, almost curious — then he placed his right hand on my shoulder and pushed me ahead.
His force just from a simple push was so strong, I stumbled forward into the circle of trolls.
They all closed around me.
What do I do?
Is this it?
What do I do?
I kept wondering, my body was still shaking, but I could move a little.
I looked at Sarah on the pole. I looked at the ropes that were tightly tightening her wrists. I walked over to her and put my fingers on the knot, trying to untie it.
A fist caught me in the right side the moment I touched ropes.
The impact lifted me completely off the ground. I hit the snow and slid, and the pain arrived half a second later — a deep, grinding pressure in my ribs that made breathing feel impossible. I lay face-down for a moment, trying to remember how to inhale.
A high, chittering sound came from somewhere nearby. I turned my head and found the source — another troll, small, barely reaching my waist, carrying small dagger in one hand and that awful rhythmic sound coming out of him in short bursts.
Laughing.
I pushed myself upright.
Another blow landed in the exactly same place before, in my ribs. The pain was blinding. I coughed and tasted blood, and the world tilted sideways before righting itself. I could hear something cracking inside my chest, as I tried to move.
The troll holding the torch relit it again.
I grabbed snow. Packed it. Threw.
The flame died a second time.
I was still looking at the pyre when I felt something grabbed me by the back of the head. As soon as I felt the touch I got slammed into the ground. The impact took my breath away. I clawed at the snow, trying to push myself away, but a strong weight hold me to the ground, as I tried to rise up the weight simply increased until there was nothing I could do.
I threw my arms around the snow, trying to get up, I did that until I felt a heavy weight landing onto my right hand. Foot come down on my wrist, the pressure building slowly, deliberately until—
Crack.
"AAAAAAAARRGGGGH!"
The snap was quiet, yet painfull.
The pain exploded through me — pure, blinding white — emptying my head of every thought. For one endless moment there was nothing but pure agony that lasted for eternity.
When the world returned, I was still pinned face-down in the snow. My right hand refusing to move.
Somewhere around me the small troll was still making that sound — high, delighted, almost childish.
I forced my head to turn.
He was dragging something across the snow toward me. A shape that moved the way things move when nothing inside them is still fighting.
He dropped it in front of my face.
The body settled with a soft crunch. The face turned toward mine.
My mother's eyes were open.
For a moment they found me — wide, full of pain and something heavier than pain, a desperate to survive. Then, slowly, the light in them began to fade.
"La… zar…"
Her voice was nothing more than a broken whisper, barely shaping the air.
"…Pro…tect… Sar…ah."
Her fingers twitched once against the snow — weak, trembling for the final time— before they went still.
Then her eyes… simply went empty.
My eyes became watery, tears flowed down, falling onto the snow that soaked them up like a sponge. They didn't stop, they just flowed and flowed, like waterfalls, each one containing a pain that could not be described.
Her eyes didn't close. They simply emptied. The warmth that had always lived in them — that particular warmth I had known for my entire life — was now gone, and what remained were only two cold, glassy things that were no longer hers.
I don't know how long I lay there in the snow, face inches from my mother's lifeless eyes.
Something inside me broke.
It wasn't the sharp, blinding pain from before. This was deeper. More heavier. Like a part of me had died with her and was now rotting somewhere deep in my chest. A hollow, aching void that kept growing with every second passed.
Long enough for the cold to soak through my clothes and bite into my skin.
Long enough for the crackling of the fires to become the only sound left in the world.
Long enough for everything I had felt since I ran through those gates — the smoke, the blood, the smell of burning homes and burning lives — to finally reach its limit.
I felt it before I understood what it was.
The heat. It just kept coming, without letting up.
The weight on my back vanished. I could feel a hand closing around the back of my neck that lifted me off the ground, turning me slowly until I was facing him.
I was staring in his face, in his eyes.
His golden eyes had never shone brighter than they did in that moment.
Do troll eyes even worth anything?
I thought looking down.
From my left hand, a small flame rise, barely visible,
It moved the way a candle flame moves — alive, responsive, extending from my palm as if it had always been there. I stared at it, and the heat in my chest answered, growing larger until —
"BOOM"
It exploded. I felt a huge blow inside my body that made the troll drop me to the ground.
I wanted to become an essencer more than anything else in the world.
Father's voice. Last night. The bench above the village. The small steady flame above his open palm.
It's all possible because of the mana and energy in their bodies.
The alpha's golden eyes dropped to my hand.
Something shifted in them — not fear, exactly, but something more careful than contempt. Something that recognized what it was looking at.
He reached one of his hands for me.
The small creature lying in the snow near the pillar moved in.
It crossed the distance between him faster than I could keep up, in the blink of an eye, that little animal laying in snow bite the alpha in the area below the knee sinking his teeth into his flesh.
The troll moved—a step to the side, more out of surprise than anything else—and for just a moment, its hand wasn't clenched around my throat.
The creature turned and looked at me.
Its yellowish eyes were calm. In them was something that wasn't hostility — something that wanted to help. It turned back and placed itself between troll and me, low to the ground, every line of its small body focused on him.
I looked at the pyre.
Sarah's head had lifted. Just barely — enough for her blindfolded face to turn toward me, as if she could hear something I couldn't. Her fingers slightly moved against the rope.
The troll with the torch was moving toward the pyre again.
I got to my feet.
I ran straight at the troll and swung my left arm as much as I could at him, hitting his body felt like I have hit a solid metal, but I didn't stopped there, I just kept pushing. Eventually I pushed him out of way, stopping him from igniting the pyre once again.
As the troll fell to the ground, I turned around. A huge hand flew towards me, grabbing me by the neck again, it was the same hand that hold me couple seconds ago, from the biggest troll.
He lifted me off the ground as if I weighed nothing. In his other hand, squeezed tight, was the small creature — its small body limp against his grip.
His fingers tightened around my neck. Slow. Deliberate. Unhurried.
My legs kicked uselessly through empty air. I punched and thrashed, again and again, but his expression never changed. He looked at me the way a hunter looks at prey that has finally stopped running — calm, patient, almost bored. In his golden eyes there was no anger, or hate. Only the quiet satisfaction of something that knew it had already won.
The pressure on my throat grew worse.
My vision began to grey at the edges.
I kept hitting him. Weaker. Desperate to survive.
The grey moved inward fast.
The world grew muffled.
I kept —
Darkness.
January 6th, 1862/8 — afternoon
Lucas Aoki — POV
We searched the forest for the entire day and found nothing.
Not a track. Not a single trace of mana left. Not even a broken branch that hadn't already been buried under a fresh layer of snow. The Naxana intruder had done his job well — whatever trail the trolls had left behind, it was gone. Deliberately. Thoroughly. Professionally.
Marcus had contacted me via essence scroll not so long ago after I told him to guard the Kinuki Bridge. He said that everything is under control now, Daxell had arrived with reinforcements securing the bridge.
Good. At least something was.
The sun was already low when I finally admitted to myself that we weren't going to find anything else today. The biggest problem I had — and I had several — was that I couldn't move freely with Tira and Luka being behind me. I couldn't push ahead alone. I couldn't cover more ground by splitting off. I had to stay with them, move at their pace, and keep them in sight.
It didn't make it any less frustrating.
We stopped in a small village just as the last light left the sky. We asked to be escorted, and the Innkeeper didn't ask any questions once he saw me. He showed us our rooms and then left.
"Ehhh…" Tira collapsed into a chair the moment we stepped inside. "I am so tired, I want to go to bed. My legs are finished. Completely finished. I am never running this much again in my life."
"You'll run longer than that tomorrow," I said.
She looked at me with the expression when someone receive very bad news.
"I warned you this wouldn't be easy," I added.
"You said it wouldn't be easy. You didn't say it would be this." She said gesturing vaguely at her entire body.
"Go and get some rest." I turned toward my room. "Both of you. We will start early tomorrow again. And be careful to not oversleep, otherwise you will get punished."
"Geez, why are you so serious?"
"How is that even—"
I closed the door, not hearing the ending of the sentence.
The room was small. A bed, a window, a candle burning low on the sill. I sat on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
One of the three S's of Nivalis ha?
I had heard that title so many times it had stopped meaning anything. Today this nickname felt like a bad joke. I hadn't found the trolls. I hadn't stopped the curse. I hadn't arrived at the bridge in time to help John's squad. The only useful thing I had done was break a barrier someone else had put up.
Pathetic.
I thought about it for quite time, until I fall asleep.
January 7th, 1862/8 — Morning
I opened my eyes, and the ceiling of the room was the first thing to greet me. I got out of bed, dressed up, and walked out into the hallway.
I walked down the hallway, heading towards the stairs that led to the ground floor of the house where we stayed for the night.
I found Tira and Luka already waiting for me, sitting on chairs not so far away from the exit. Tira looked like she had slept approximately four minutes at max, while Luka looked normal, as always, like nothing had happened.
"Here you are." Tira said.
"Yeah, good morning you two"
"Let's go."
"Where should we go now?" Tira asked.
"Where could we?" I added, "We checked the east area last day, let's go opposite from it now, to the west.
And so we began to walk.
We had covered the eastern section of the forest the day before — nothing. West was the logical next direction. The trolls had to be somewhere over there. They had to eat, move. Leave some traces, even if someone was working to erase them.
We just had to find them.
"Alright captain, you are leading." Tira said.
The three of us spread out slightly as we moved, each directing small amounts of mana—enough to feel for any remaining traces in the area without giving away our position. Slow work. Careful work. The kind that looked like nothing special on the outside.
The most of our time was quiet, we were all focused on our essence into finding any traces of the trolls.
"Tch," I gritted my teeth.
We are already here for almost an hour, but there is no signs of trolls nearby, just where could they go? I asked myself,
"What's the matter sir?" Luka asked forcing me out of my thoughts.
"You're really quiet today," Tira added in some worried voice I'd say.
"It's just that we cannot find these trolls, It's really getting onto my nerves."
"We'll find them," Tira said gratefully, trying to cheer me up. "After all they are over here somewhere, they can't hide forever. They have to eat, drink, or move—"
"That's exactly the problem." I cut her sentence. "There are villages all through this region. Small ones, with no Snow Guards or even soldiers, to protect them. If those trolls reach one of them villages before we find them, do you know what is going to happen?" I stopped.
"Who is going to protect them if they attack Tira?"
Tira was quiet, staring at me.
"Well… The army is supposed to protect them," she said carefully. "Isn't it? It's not like we can be everywhere at once sir."
"Yeah, that's true. That's how it should be, but Nivalis doesn't have that many soldiers to cover every village. That's why the S's as well as Snow Guards run daily missions across the country on different locations. Because there is no one who can protect those villages." I looked at her. "That's why we exist Tira, It's not a matter of whether we can do it or no. We have to."
She had nothing to say to that. Neither did Luka, he even looked more offended than Tira did.
They were both quiet, I let out what I wanted to say since last night, I may sound harsh to them but it let me calm down a little.
"Let's go," I said stepping faster.
We crossed a huge part of the western territory, but so far we have not had any luck. Most of our walk was quiet, Tira wasn't as active as she was, probably because of the way I talked to her since last night.
We continued walking until the terrain rose up ahead of us - a long hill, gentle at first, then steeper. At the top, the forest thinned out and for the first time in hours I could see a long way in all directions.
Luka stopped beside me.
"Isn't Liva village somewhere around here?" he asked.
Tira unfolded the map she carried. Studied it. "You're right Luka. The village is just ahead from our position."
"Okay, then let's go there and see what's the situation. We'll take a short break there and then we'll continue searching. Is everyone okay with that?"
"Yes!" Tira said immediately, with considerably more enthusiasm than strictly necessary.
Then the blast hit.
I stopped.
It came from directly ahead — sharp, sudden, completely uncontrolled. Raw mana, the kind that release when someone awaken their element for the first time. It was there for a moment, then vanished but the afterimage burned in my senses clear as a struck bell.
"Sir?" Luka said.
"Did you feel that?" I asked.
"Feel what?" Tira added.
Above the ridge ahead of us, dark smoke was rising — multiple columns, all from the same place, all the same heavy, wrong color.
I channeled energy into my legs and launched upward, I let wind element push me in the air as I went towards the smoke.
"I'll meet you both down there!" I called, already mid-flight.
Wind element pushed my body and carried me forward. The forest blurred beneath me. The ridge fell away. And beyond it, Liva village appeared.
From above, the damage was total. Flames rose from every structure. The snow between the houses was stained dark in patterns I recognized from Kinuki Bridge. On a small rise to the right of the main path, six figures moved around a post.
Trolls. So this is where you have been.
I pushed more mana into my wind technique and accelerated toward the rise.
As I closed the distance, the details sharpened. A girl tied to the post — young, blindfolded, not moving. A boy held by his throat in the grip of the largest troll, suspended off the ground, not moving as well. And on the snow nearby, a woman. Unmoving. Her stomach cut open the same way I had seen on the bridge the day before.
The largest troll — the alpha — stood with his back to me, his full attention on the boy in his grip.
I hit him boots-first in the left ribs.
The impact was sharp and precise. The alpha was blown sideways by the force of it, his grip releasing. The boy dropped of his hands, alongside with some black colored animal that I haven't saw.
I caught him before he hit the ground and checked for his injuries. His face was pale, his breathing shallow but still present. His right arm was broken, badly swollen. Several cracked ribs on the right side of his body. Serious injuries, but nothing Tira's revia technique couldn't handle.
Beside him in the snow, I noticed the small animal — a creature the size of a dog puppy, It fell on the ground and stopped moving. As I glanced at it, I felt a faint warmth near my left knee. I looked at the boy's hand. There was a flame in his palm that went out a few seconds after I saw it.
So that was the pulse. I thought.
The four remaining trolls rushed at me immediately. I sent a compressed burst of wind outward, scattering them in every direction.
I moved.
I set the boy down and straightened. As I straightened, the alpha looked for an attack to my right, his fist flying towards me, tearing the air itself.
Before he could even make physical contact with me, I compressed the wind, then launched it at his arm. It cut across his forearm in three clean lines his arm dropping onto the ground, forcing him to step back from me.
You trolls really deserve to be punished…
"RRROOOOAAARRRR!"
The remaining trolls came at me the moment they heard his roar — as if he commanded them to attack me. One from the left, two from behind. I compressed wind and fired it at the one on the far left, his head left his shoulders and hit the snow before his body did, blood spreading outward in a dark circle coloring the snow.
I turned around at those two trolls that ran at me. I bring my hand and from the earth I summoned two earth pieces that enclosing them completely. Then I created spikes from the earth element and shot them towards the earthen circle they were trapped in.
The earth cage opened as my projectiles approached near it, they pierced through their bodies, finishing them off. As I let the earthen cage vanish and the earth disappear into ashes, their bodies were the only that was left there.
The alpha had used the moment to close the distance. His leg swung at me — fast, low. I caught it with both of my forearms that I reinforced with mana, the impact driving me back. I planted myself with earth element and held.
I caught a glimpse of something on his neck as he recovered — a dark mark, more looking like some kind of a symbol.
The curse…
Mark… After all it seems you got to find your murderer.
His arm that I cut before had already healed by now. He squared himself and came at me again — a barrage of strikes, fast and continuous, each one heavier than previous. I moved around them, not engaging directly in combat with him.
As I dodged his attacks I send another wind slash at him, but he dodged it. Simply stepping away from the technique letting it pass near him and disappearing into the air.
Where is the little troll? I thought rushing forward to him
I applied mana to my legs and in a matter of seconds I was behind the alpha's back.
The small troll was hiding behind his back, he raised his dagger and jumped at me.
From the earth I pulled two earthen hands, grabbing him.
The alpha went for another attack, he turned around after seeing that I am behind him and sent multiple attacks that I easily dodged.
I squeezed my hand, and the earthen hands that I summoned started pulling little troll onto two different side. Tearing him into two separate pieces. His body parts fell onto the snow like apples, blood drifting everywhere across the snow. It didn't took much for blue bubbles to appear on his torn parts and began to heal, pulling them back together.
Alpha realized this and went for another attack that I dodged by simply jumping into the air. As I jumped I pushed myself with wind, making me float in the air. As I floated I summoned three more pillars from the ground that tore straight through little troll body. As the pillars torn through his body, blue bubbles disappeared ending his life.
As I descended the alpha stopped and watched.
Our gazes met.
His gold eyes moved over me with that unhurried, calculating attention I had seen in the strongest of them — the ones who understood, on some level, what they were facing. He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he switched his look at the boy, than back at me. He made a sound and rushed toward me.
"I am so tired of you."
He threw one of the dead troll's bodies at me as he came. The blood splashed everywhere obscuring my vision for half a second. I just threw the body aside with my wind element, and found him already in front of me, his fist driving toward my head.
I jumped in the air again.
From above, I sent wind slashes across his back and shoulders, then followed with earthen spikes fired downward — they sank deep into his upper body but didn't managed to pierce through. He snarled and reached up, trying to grip them. Little he knew was that on those spikes were small hooks around it, and they hurt more you try to pull them out.
"I guess this is how a pathetic creatures like you deserves to die. All alone, no one to help you. Just you and me, and soon it will just be me." I said staring directly into his golden eyes while I compressed wind slash that I was about to send at him.
The alpha fall onto the ground from the pain, in the process he made dent into a snow, he tried running away on all four limbs, but I didn't let him escape. I summoned another pair of earth hands from the ground and hold his arms, then I pinned him on the ground, while I was preparing to send my wind slash at him.
"RRRRAUGH!"
"RRRRAUGH!"
"Scream however you want, but this is it for you." I said sending wind slash at his neck. The wind slash pierced through his neck, and his head fell over his body, hitting the ground.
The sound it made was quiet.
His head hit the snow.
I let out a slow breath.
Behind me, Tira and Luka landed on the rise.
"What happened here?" Tira said quietly looking at trolls bodies around us.
I walked to the post and began working at the ropes. Thick. Clumsily knotted. The small dark creature in the snow nearby hadn't moved. I looked at it properly for the first time as I freed the girl's wrists — it was black, small, its little fangs barely visible at the corners of its mouth. Its mana channels were active. Even in such state.
Someone told me about something like this, once. A long time ago.
I looked at the girl's face. Young. Brown hair. A cut on her cheek that had mostly stopped bleeding by now.
Then I looked at the boy.
White hair. Green-blue eyes, half-open, unfocused.
First ignition, I thought. In the middle of all this.
"Tira." I kept my voice level. "The boy is badly injured. Heal him."
She was already moving toward him, the faint gold light of revia technique spreading from her palms before she had fully knelt in the snow.
"Right."
"Sir," Luka said carefully. "What should we do with them?"
I looked at the burning village. Then at the two unconscious figures. Then at the small creature lying still in the snow.
"Their village is gone. The people they knew are gone as well. They have nowhere else to go, if we leave them here, they will just die." I continued. "We will take them with us."
"Where exactly?" Tira asked.
I turned toward the southwest, where the sky was still clear above the distant ridge. Toward Nivareth.
"Somewhere safe," I said. "And somewhere they can become more than this."
"And where exactly is that?" Tira added.
"Nivareth of course. I can sense essence flowing within that boy body. They will both participate in the upcoming Project S."
"What do you mean?" Luka asked confusedly.
Oh right…
that was supposed to be a secret…
"Ehh. Nothing special. Forget about it."
"Stop lying Lucas," Tira added.
"Really, it's nothing. The high council asked me to keep an eye out for young people between fifteen and twenty as I travel across the country. That's all."
"And why would they do that?" Luka asked.
"I genuinely don't know. Maybe they want to create special soldiers or something like that." I scratched my cheek.
I cannot tell them what exactly it is.
"How much longer, Tira?"
"Shut up," she snapped,
"This isn't as easy as it looks. If you can do it faster than me just do it yourself."
"You do know I still can't use revia don't you?"
"Then leave me alone, I have to concentrate for this." She snapped
We waited for Tira to finish healing the boy, as she healed the boy Luka asked me something.
"Sir what are we going to do with all these bodies?
"We will call for the corpse cart to come here and seek for the bodies. Or for those that still remains.
I pulled essence scroll and began to apply mana and energy into the paper, I told what the authorities should do and the words applied onto the paper. After I finished the sentence I applied the last bits of mana and energy and the paper vanished from my hands.
"Done, everything is fixed." Tira said as I send the scroll to authorities.
"Good work. We're going immediately." I crouched and lifted the boy, settling him across my back.
Luka took the girl, and we began walking away from the pyre, leaving the animal in the snow. After few steps a barrier formed in front of Luka stopping him from walking forward, then vanished.
Has the Naxana intruder returned?
I was already scanning the surroundings, mana extended outward, searching for a source. Then I felt it — coming not from the trees or the path but from directly behind us. From the mana channels of the small puppy lying in the snow.
Luka had felt it too. He was looking at the creature, then at me.
"Sir what should we do?"
I took two steps forward myself as I thought about what to do. No barrier.
Interesting.
"Shall we get rid of him?" Luka asked, taking dagger from his cloat.
"Not yet Luka, Try walking away from it I want to test something."
He stepped away from the creature. One step. Two. Then the barrier reappeared, and then disappeared again stopping him again.
I looked at the creature for a long moment.
"Tira," I called. "Go get the puppy."
"Ehhhh?" She complained, "Why me? What if it bites me?"
"That's an order."
She approached carefully, crouched down, and lifted it in both hands. She straightened and turned toward us, cradling it close against her chest.
"Let me see something." I said as I stepped closer to look at it properly.
At first glance it looked like a dog — roughly, vaguely. But the longer I looked at the animal, the less it did looked that way. The proportions were wrong for any dog I had seen. The jaw was wider. The small fangs that showed at the corners of its mouth were too sharp. His fur was too dark, to be a dog.
A panther cub.
Then it moved a little,
It slowly raised its head, still half-conscious, and then let out a sound—a series of quiet, gasping breaths through its nose, almost rhythmic. Pfuff. Pfuff-pffuff. Its little head moved slightly with each exhalation. A quiet vibration began in its chest, something almost like a purr it hadn't quite learned how to perform.
"Ohhh…" Tira's face melted completely.
"Look at him, Lucas, he's snorting," she whispered. "It's—look at him—he's snorting." She laughed, barely louder than a whisper, and carefully stroked her little ear with her finger. The bear pressed his head against the touch and made another sound, his eyes narrowing in pure pleasure.
"It's so cuuuuute—"
"Wasn't you scared of it literally four seconds before you picked it up?" I asked.
She didn't answer. She was already talking to him in the low, slightly uncomfortable voice that people use with small animals.
I turned back toward the path.
"Let's go."
And so we began to walk towards the capital.
Several hours later — Approaching Nivareth
I was carrying the boy when his breathing became slightly stronger, I glanced right and saw his eyes opened.
Just for a moment — a slow, unfocused blink, his gaze drifting across the sky above him without landing on anything. Then it steadied, just barely, and found my face.
"…Where…"
His voice was almost nothing. Cracked at the edges.
I looked at him. "Nivareth," I said. "You're safe now."
He turned his head slowly to the right, toward the outline of the capital's walls rising above the tree line ahead of us. Something moved through his expression — complicated and fast, before his head fell over my back again.
I kept walking, passing the gate.