Axiros slowly opened his eyes.
The first thing he felt was weakness. Not ordinary exhaustion, but a deep, suffocating weakness that seemed to seep into every part of his body. His limbs trembled uncontrollably.
His muscles felt hollow and fragile, as if they might tear apart if he moved too much. Even breathing was difficult. Each breath scraped painfully through his chest, shallow and uneven, leaving him dizzy and lightheaded.
It felt as though he had been emptied out and stuffed back into a broken shell.
His vision was blurred, swimming in and out of focus. Colors were dull and distorted, shapes bleeding into one another like wet ink on paper. It took several long, agonizing seconds before his sight slowly began to stabilize.
When it finally did, the first thing he saw was a man standing a short distance away, sword in hand, head bowed low, quietly murmuring something that sounded like a farewell.
"…May you rest in peace."
Axiros stared blankly at the scene.
For a moment, his mind went completely empty.
Then, like a dam finally giving way, everything came rushing back all at once. The endless darkness of the void. The crushing, suffocating silence. The loneliness that had lasted so long it had stopped feeling like loneliness and started feeling like the natural state of existence.
The eternity — no, far beyond eternity — spent drifting through nothingness, fading away piece by piece. The quiet, creeping horror of feeling himself being erased.
His head began to throb violently.
'How… am I alive?'
No. That wasn't the right question.
'Who saved me?'
Before he could untangle his thoughts, irritation and confusion mixed together and spilled out of him before he could stop them.
"Aww… what the fuck is going on here?" he muttered hoarsely.
His voice sounded completely unfamiliar. Weak and strained, like he had borrowed someone else's throat. He instinctively raised a hand to clutch his head, winced as pain shot through his arm, and with considerable effort forced himself to sit upright. The movement was slow and unsteady, his body protesting every inch of it.
'So many questions,' he thought calmly. 'And not a single answer.'
The moment he moved, the man in front of him stiffened.
The veteran turned around.
And froze.
His eyes went wide. His breath caught somewhere in his throat. For a brief, stretched moment, he stood completely still, as if his mind was genuinely refusing to process what his eyes were seeing.
That boy was dead.
He was certain of it. Completely, unshakeably certain. He had felt his blade pierce through flesh. He had watched the blood spill. He had seen the light drain from the boy's eyes with his own. There had been no ambiguity, no room for doubt whatsoever.
And yet.
Here he was.
Sitting up.
Alive.
His instincts screamed at him before reason had any chance to catch up.
His hand moved on its own.
He drew his sword.
The sound of steel clearing its sheath rang out faintly across the ruined battlefield. His heart hammered violently against his ribs, fear flooding through his veins in cold, rapid waves. Something that could return from death was no longer human. It was unnatural. It was something that existed beyond any framework he had for understanding the world.
If this being had truly reversed death itself, then the sword in his hand was probably meaningless.
He gripped it tighter anyway.
Axiros noticed the movement immediately. His gaze shifted toward the man, calm and unhurried despite the trembling in his own limbs. He let out a slow, tired sigh and rubbed his temple.
"…Chill," he said quietly.
"I'm not going to kill you unless you attack me. And right now, I actually need you alive. I've got questions."
He cracked his neck lightly to one side, as if trying to ease some lingering stiffness, even though his body was barely holding itself together as it was.
The veteran's hands were trembling.
Not just from fear. From something heavier than fear. From despair. From helplessness. From the slow, sickening realization that he was standing in front of something he had no way of understanding, no way of measuring, and absolutely no way of fighting. The wounded child in front of him no longer felt like a wounded child at all.
He felt like a monster wearing human skin.
'I don't want to die.'
'Evelyn… I'm sorry.'
Those thoughts flashed through his mind in rapid, desperate bursts. And underneath them, quieter but just as insistent — if he was going to die anyway, he refused to die without trying.
With a shout, he lunged forward.
His sword swept toward Axiros's neck in a clean, practiced arc.
"Tch," Axiros clicked his tongue.
"I told you not to attack."
The very first person he had encountered after an eternity of complete and utter solitude, and they were already trying to take his head off.
What absolutely terrible luck.
The veteran didn't stop. He followed through immediately, raising his blade again and striking with everything he had, desperation pouring into every movement, every shift of his weight, every angle he chose.
Axiros watched him quietly.
'Such an amateur,' he thought, without any particular unkindness. 'So many openings. So many flaws.'
As each blow came down, he moved — just barely, just enough. The width of a single strand of hair. No panic, no wasted motion. Just the kind of effortless, bone-deep precision that came from refining the same instincts across more lifetimes than he cared to count.
Not one strike landed.
The veteran's eyes changed as he felt it. He attacked again. And again. A frantic, relentless flurry of strikes that cut through nothing but empty air, each one landing exactly nowhere. And with each miss, the horrible truth crept a little closer to the surface.
He was fighting someone on a completely different level.
Not just better. Not just more experienced. Something else entirely.
---
Eventually, he had nothing left.
His breathing had broken down into ragged, uneven gasps that burned on the way up. Sweat soaked through his clothes and ran down his face in cold rivulets, stinging at the corners of his eyes.
His sword arm trembled so badly he could barely keep the blade raised, the weight of it pulling at muscles that had long since given out.
And still, he didn't let go.
His fingers stayed locked around the hilt, knuckles pale, grip white-knuckle tight — as if releasing the sword meant admitting something he wasn't ready to say out loud. He took several stumbling steps backward, planting his feet and fighting to stay upright through sheer stubbornness.
"How…?" he managed.
His voice was hoarse, scraped hollow. Barely recognizable as his own.
"How did none of my strikes connect…?"
He stared at Axiros the way a person stares at something that has no right to exist. He had given everything to those attacks. Every technique he had ever drilled into muscle memory. Every ounce of experience earned through years of brutal, ugly, real fighting. Every last scrap of desperation he had left in him.
And not one of them had touched him.
Axiros looked back at him quietly.
There was no mockery in his expression. No satisfaction, no pride, no cruelty. Nothing as warm or human as any of those things. Just a kind of distant, unhurried calm — the look of someone watching something play out exactly as they expected it would.
"You still have a long way to go," Axiros said. His voice was flat, not unkind, just honest. "You're too inexperienced to even graze a strand of my hair."
He let that settle for a moment.
"Now. Are you done? I have questions."
The veteran didn't answer right away.
He stood there in silence, head hanging, chest still heaving, staring at the ground somewhere between his own feet. The full weight of it came down on him all at once — every illusion of resistance crumbling, every last thread of hope going slack at the same moment. There was nothing left to bargain with. Nothing left to fight with. The math was simple and it was final.
Slowly, he straightened.
He slid his sword back into its sheath. The motion was quiet. Unhurried. Careful, almost — like a gesture of acknowledgment more than defeat.
He knew.
If the being standing in front of him had wanted him dead, he would have been a corpse on the ground before he'd even finished drawing his sword. The realization didn't leave room for anger. Just exhaustion. And beneath that, something quieter — a kind of hollow, reluctant acceptance.
He lifted his gaze.
"…Yeah," he said quietly. "I can't win against you, can I?"
A short, bitter smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
"I've already resigned myself to it. Ask whatever you want. I'll answer."
Deep down, he had already prepared himself for death. He had accepted it as the most likely outcome the moment he'd seen the boy sit up.
"Great," Axiros said. "Now — what exactly is this place?"
The veteran blinked. A flicker of genuine surprise crossed his face. "Wait. You don't know?" He frowned, studying Axiros's expression for a moment. "Weren't you a resident of this world?" He shook his head slowly. "Ah, forget it. This place is called Cinderveil."
"I see," Axiros replied. "Then why are you here? And what kind of war is this?"
The man let out a short, humorless laugh. "To be honest? We're the invaders." His smile was dry and a little hollow. "We're from another universe. It started because of some minor dispute between the higher-ups — one of those pointless arguments that should have stayed contained. But it kept escalating, kept growing, and eventually turned into all of this."
He gestured vaguely at the ruined battlefield surrounding them, at the bodies and the silence and the wreckage stretching out in every direction. "A bunch of grown men throwing a tantrum and calling it war."
Axiros was quiet for a moment, letting that sit. Then he nodded once. "Alright. Last question. Where's the nearest settlement?"
Grimsworth thought for a few seconds. "I don't know this area particularly well," he admitted. "But if I'm remembering correctly, there should be one about three hundred kilometers to the east." He paused. "Pretty close, all things considered."
Axiros nodded slowly. Then, almost as an afterthought — "Do you have any money on you? This world's currency, I mean."
Grimsworth blinked. "Yeah, I do," he said, slightly thrown off by the question. "Why?"
"I'll need something to get by with," Axiros said simply. "Could you lend me a little? Not all of it. Just enough."
Grimsworth hesitated for a brief moment. Then reached into his cloak and pulled out an old, weathered pouch. The leather was cracked with age, the drawstrings frayed from years of being tied and untied. He held it out without a word.
Axiros accepted it without ceremony. He loosened the strings and glanced inside — a few dull coins sitting at the bottom, worn smooth from use, nothing remarkable. He cinched the pouch shut and slipped it into his pocket.
"For now," he murmured to himself, "this should be enough."
He looked up. "Thanks. I'll be on my way then."
Grimsworth hesitated. "You… aren't you going to kill me?" he asked quietly.
Axiros looked at him, and there was something almost puzzled in his expression — like the question itself was slightly strange. "Why would I?" he said. "Why would I waste my time doing something so pointless? There are genuinely strong enemies out there. You haven't harmed me. You haven't wronged me. There's no reason to take your life. I wouldnt waste my strength on someone weak, when disasters are waiting out there." He glanced away. "You should leave too."
The words landed quietly.
But they hit deeper than anything that had happened during the fight.
Grimsworth's jaw tightened. His teeth pressed together. It wasn't anger — not at Axiros, anyway. It was the particular sting that comes from hearing something you already know to be completely, plainly true. Strength ruled this world. And right now, he stood firmly on the weaker side of that equation, and there was simply nothing to be said about it.
Axiros caught the subtle shift in his expression. The tightening around his jaw. The thing Grimsworth was working hard to keep off his face.
He didn't say anything about it.
He just turned and walked away.