Lys kept pace beside Vessa as she walked ahead of him. The village sounds faded behind them as they approached the back gate, a smaller, rougher entrance than the main gate he usually used till now. The morning air was still cool, but the sun was climbing fast, turning the dirt road warm under their boots.
She walked like she had a schedule and wasn't interested in wasting breath explaining it to Lys. He also didn't push her to know. He'd learned that much from doing drills under her for just one day.
But when 10 minutes had passed with them just walking in silence, Lys couldn't take this anymore. He finally asked where they were going, and she answered, without looking back, pointing toward the outside of the village. "East side of the Gaiya Forest."
Lys didn't ask any more questions after this short answer.
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The back gate was nothing like the main entrance. No heavy timbers, no iron reinforcements, no Joren demanding explanations. Just a simple wooden barrier and a single guard leaning against the post with her spear propped beside her.
She straightened when she saw Vessa, giving her a quick, familiar nod, as if she knew her. Then her eyes moved to Lys. She looked him over, with a slow, deliberate look, taking in the view of the sword at his hip, and the guild card hanging over his chest. Whatever she saw must have satisfied her, because she gave a short wave and stepped aside without a single question.
Lys caught her gaze as they passed by her. She didn't look away. There was no suspicion in her eyes, no hunger, no Joren's casual contempt. Just the flat acknowledgment of someone who had seen enough to know when to ask and when to let people through.
She went back to leaning on her post before they'd even cleared the gate.
Just as Lys stepped outside the wall, he saw a completely different world than the one he was used to seeing after coming to this world.
He had known, in theory, that people lived outside the village's proper wall and barrier. The settlement maps showed clusters of dwellings beyond the main gate. But those were huts like the old one he used to live in before buying his new house, cramped but standing, walls of packed mud and thatch roofs that at least kept the rain out.
But what he was seeing now was completely different.
These houses here weren't houses at all.
Some were just pits, shallow depressions scraped out of the earth, a frame of bent branches over the top, leaves piled thick to keep out the rain or snow. Others were lean-tos made from whatever could be found: worn-out clothes, dried mud panels, sheets of bark peeled from dead trees, propped against a rock or a fallen log. A few had walls, if you could call them that, woven branches packed with mud that had long since cracked and crumbled back to dust.
One shelter was nothing more than a tarp pegged into the dirt, so old the fabric had gone translucent, showing the shapes of the family inside. Another was a dome of sticks and leaves that looked like it would collapse if you breathed on it too hard. A woman was cooking over a fire pit in front of a frame that had once been a proper wattle-and-daub structure; now, just the wooden skeleton remained, the mud washed away, a few scraps of thatch clinging to the rafters.
Further on, a family of five shared a space that couldn't have been more than a few feet across. A sheet of bark propped against a boulder. A fire pit scraped into the dirt. A single blanket spread over packed earth. That was their home.
Children with hollow cheeks watched them pass. They didn't wave. They didn't smile. Their eyes had the flat, uncurious look of people who had learned not to hope for anything from strangers passing by them.
Lys's stomach tightened seeing this pitiful sight.
He understood now, finally, why he had seen women bathing in the river without clothes back when he had first come into this world. Back when he'd first arrived, he'd assumed it was the curse, as the goddess showed him on her dark orb, with the shortage of men, the twisted social norms, etc.
But now he knew that only some of that was true, maybe. But mostly, these people simply didn't have walls to hide behind. They were just barely surviving, not living. And survival didn't leave room for modesty.
Most of the women they passed stopped their work to stare. Their eyes followed Lys with an intensity that made his chest ache. Not desire, not the hungry looks he'd grown used to from women inside the village who saw him as a rare, healthy man. This was something else. Something closer to desperation.
A young woman holding a basket stopped mid-step, her gaze fixed on him like he was the first good thing she'd seen in months. An old woman with hands like dried roots straightened from her garden, was watching them until they rounded a corner. A girl who couldn't have been older than Mira froze with a bucket of water halfway to her hip, water sloshing over the rim, forgotten as she stared at Lys with something Lys didn't dare to guess.
Lys looked away first, but the weight of their stares stayed on his back.
Vessa had been watching him all this time from the corner of her eye. Her voice came low and matter-of-fact.
"Don't feel pity for them."
Lys looked at her. Her face was calm, her eyes fixed ahead, but there was something different in her voice. Softer than he'd heard before.
"They don't deserve your Pity," she continued. "They're doing everything they can to survive. That's not something to be pitied." She glanced at him, quick and sharp. "What they need is some help, if you can spare it. That's what they deserve. Not someone feeling sorry for them from the other side of the village."
Lys was quiet for a moment, watching the outer settlement pass. An old man, one of the few he'd seen, was mending a broken clay jar with muddied, careful, patient hands. He was teaching a girl barely Lys's age, like this were the only inheritance he had to give.
'Maybe I judged her wrong. She might be a good person all along,' he thought about Vessa.
He didn't say it out loud. But something in his chest shifted as her advice touched deep inside him.
They walked in silence after that. The shelters grew sparser, the path narrowing, and finally the last dwelling fell behind them as the forest trees closed in, their trunks thick with moss and age.
Lys had studied the village settlement of theirs on maps enough to know the layout on paper, but walking through the outside area, the real place, not the lines on parchment, felt very different. The air smelled greener and heavier here, with the scent of pine resin and wet earth.