I led the group toward the forest beside the settlement.
Seven men. Favio, Leopold, Benneth, Harold, Nalvik, Gringo, and Kalan.
They chose this. They wanted to hunt for themselves. So I let them.
When we reached the deeper part of the forest, everyone gathered around me.
"What do you want to hunt?" I asked.
"We could try the boar. With all of us here, maybe we could take one down." Favio said.
I glared at him.
"Too ambitious."
They all stiffened. They had learned by now that I didn't bluff.
"What should we start with then? We've always relied on our crops. We never ventured this far into the forest. We don't even come close to the edges since we know it's full of beasts." Kalan said, pulling out his daggers as he spoke.
I looked at the daggers.
My eyes narrowed.
They wanted to hunt and came out here with weapons like that.
"You plan to die?" I tilted my head and opened my item box. I pulled out short swords and handed one to each of them.
"Leigh, do you have a bow and arrows?" Gringo leaned over, peering into the item box, waiting to see what came out next.
"Do you know how to shoot?"
"No... But you could train me-"
"No."
I cut him off before he built the idea up any further.
Then.....
I shoved a bow and quiver at him without looking at his reaction.
"A waste of space."
We went deeper into the forest. Monsters greeted us almost immediately. I stepped back and leaned against a tree.
They wanted this. They could fight for it.
A few horned rabbits came hopping toward the group, already moving to attack. Nobody reacted in time. The rabbits struck first, horns and teeth finding gaps before any sword came up in defense.
Kalan swung first and connected with one. The others followed, blades swinging without much control. Gringo hadn't managed to load a single arrow. His hands were shaking and the bowstring kept slipping.
I shook my head.
"You all planned to die, not hunt."
I pushed off from the tree and put the rabbits down barehanded, one after another, until the area was clear. Then I moved through the group and healed each of them, frowning as I went.
"You know how to use a shovel and a plow. You don't know how to use a sword."
When everyone was patched up, they looked at the rabbits on the ground and at each other. The determination from breakfast had gone somewhere.
They looked like men who had just been reminded of something they already suspected about themselves.
Tsk.
I caught myself doing that. An annoyed reaction, out in the open, at the sight of their deflated faces.
"Raise your swords."
They raised them.
"Line up."
They lined up.
I moved in front of them and drew my own sword. Raised it. Put one foot forward.
And stopped.
I had never taught anyone before. Doing it this way, standing in front of people and demonstrating, felt strange in a way I hadn't prepared for.
I didn't know how to take what I knew and pass it to someone else. I had never needed to.
"Leigh? What do we do next?" Harold's arms were already trembling from holding the sword raised.
I turned to face them.
They were staring at me with expressions I didn't immediately recognize. Then they started shifting, pressing their lips together, shoulders moving.
They were trying not to laugh.
"L-Leigh..." Gringo's voice came out strained. "You're blushing. Are you embarrassed?"
"I AM NOT."
I left. Just like that.
I teleported to the first giant boar my search magic found and killed it. Then the next one. And the one after that.
I was not embarrassed. I had never been embarrassed in my life.
But before I had left them, I had set a barrier around the group without thinking about it.
Not because I was worried. I just didn't want to waste mana healing them again later.
After a while I teleported back, every hunt stored in my item box, and looked at them.
"We're leaving."
I held my glare steady, cutting off anything anyone was considering saying about my face.
"Already?" Favio had the tied-up horned rabbits in hand, clearly having expected to stay longer.
"Yes."
I teleported us all back to the Sequoia tree.
I pulled out everything I had hunted and dropped it. Dreadfowls, horned rabbits, giant boars, and a water serpent.
The pile was significant.
I left the swords with them and stepped back while they stood there in silence, looking at it.
"Leigh's in a bad mood." Torra announced, already tugging a horned rabbit from the bottom of the pile.
The whole stack shifted.
Benneth grabbed him by the back of his shirt and hauled him clear just before the pile collapsed on top of him.
I had already started turning away when it happened.
My body stopped on its own.
I turned back. Torra was fine, dangling in Benneth's grip, laughing.
I turned away again.
My body had been doing that more often the longer I stayed here. Moving before I told it to. Turning toward the noise instead of away from it.
Elder Elka organized the butchering and set everyone to work. It would take most of the day to get through all of it. The children helped pass tools.
The women were with Oliver and Olivia, likely helping with the fabrics.
"It would be too much to ask Leigh to store the meat. He already said the weapons were a waste of space in his item box." Leopold said, still holding his new short sword like it was something fragile and precious. Still believing the lie, I said.
"I know. Best not to bother him. We'll just cure and dry everything." Elder Elka sorted the animals by size as she spoke.
I heard it clearly.
They could have just asked.
But they didn't.
Was it pride?
Was it genuinely that they didn't want to bother me?
Because I didn't feel bothered. Not by that.
They were being idiots about it.
I went to the storage house and stood looking at it.
Their actual problem was simple. Storing perishable goods. Easy to solve. Why were they making it complicated.
I used the plot beside it and built a second storage house.
This one fully sealed.
No windows.
Double-layered interior walls with magic stones embedded at the four corners, all set to ice magic, encrypted with rune magic to run automatically.
Preservation magic layered over everything inside to prevent spoiling.
Working alone, uninterrupted, was exactly what I needed.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, a small part kept anticipating the door flying open. Torra launching himself through it. The other children crowding the doorway with questions. One of the adults coming to see what I was doing now.
They were all busy.
They didn't come.
What was this feeling.
I had always been fine working alone. I had spent eight years preferring it. But now, sitting in the quiet of the newly built storage, it felt hollow in a way it hadn't before.
Since when had I started enjoying the noise.
Since when had the disturbance become something I waited for.
I crouched in the middle of the empty room and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. Then stood, checked everything once more, and went out.
I passed the workstation on the way back and stopped at the window without stepping into view.
Inside, the women were cutting fabric. Oliver and Olivia were at the sewing machines working on shirts. Favio's teenage daughter Mikayla sat at a third machine, her stitching slow but her focus absolute.
They were talking.
Laughing at something.
Alive in the way people are when they have stopped just surviving and started doing something they want to do.
I stepped away and walked back to the Sequoia tree.
They had barely made a dent in the pile.
Their pace was slow. Nobody was complaining about it.
I leaned against the trunk and watched.
No.
I was waiting.
Waiting for one of them to look up and call my name. Waiting for someone to say they needed help.
Waiting to be asked.
Moments passed. Nothing.
Torra was busy handing Favio a dagger every time he asked for it, eyes down, focused, not once looking my way.
I waited longer.
I was getting impatient.
I had always been the one people came to.
Asked things of.
Commanded.
I had resented it, every time, for eight years.
And now that no one was asking, I didn't know what to do with myself.
My head started ringing. Logic and emotion, going at each other inside me, and I was the one stuck between them suffering for it.
I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing.
Then the memories came, the way they sometimes did when things went quiet enough to let them through.
A glass-walled office. Floor-to-ceiling windows behind a clean, minimalist desk. Assistants standing in front of it with their eyes on the floor, flinching at the sound of each page turning.
Even then...
Even in that life.
I had been called something fearsome.
A different title in a different world, but the look on people's faces when they finally got to leave the room was the same.
That particular exhale.
The visible relief of stepping out of the lion's den.
That was what I had always been to people, in both lives.
And now I was standing under a tree in an unnamed village, impatient because no one was looking at me.
Yet here I am...
Scared, that these people I started opening up to, would look at me the same.