The silence after the outburst had barely settled when something shifted in Flinn's eyes. Just slightly. Reading the room. Reading her.
"Did you..." A swallow. "Did you tell him?"
The sound of water ran steady from behind the washroom door. Unhurried. Oblivious.
"No," said Anthierin.
One word. Flat as a workbench. No explanation attached, no comfort offered — which was its own kind of answer.
Flinn searched her face for something — mercy, amusement, leverage — and found only the particular stillness of someone who had already decided what they thought and was waiting to see if the facts would argue back.
"I've heard the stories," said Anthierin, crossing her arms, "about the Thief job class."
The water kept running.
"High agility. Low morale. High dexterity, low strength." She picked up the hammer from beside her chair and began turning it idly. "Nimble as they need to be. Light where it counts."
"That's..." Flinn's smile arrived half a second too late to look natural. "That's who we are. Hehe."
"But the next tier is more sophisticated," Anthierin continued, as if the nervous laugh hadn't happened. Her thumb ran along the hammerhead. "If I'm not mistaken — Rogue. Assassin." A pause. Eyes coming up, level and unhurried. "Or..."
"Let's stop there." The smile had settled into something drier. More honest. "I get what you mean."
The water ran. A coal shifted somewhere in the hearth. Anthierin held the pause the way a smith holds tension in metal — long enough to see what it does under pressure.
"So." She let the hammer rest across her knees. "Why are you thieving in a remote village? Bevil, specifically." A tilt of the head. "What could possibly need stealing there? Except for the obvious gold the late village chief was hoarding."
A moment of quiet. Then — "The answer to that isn't simple."
"Try me," said Anthierin, and tapped the hammerhead once against her open palm.
Something moved behind Flinn's eyes. Calculation, maybe. Or the older, slower thing underneath calculation — the thing that decides whether a person is worth the truth.
"Anthierin." Flinn's voice shifted. Lighter on the surface, careful underneath. "You know you won't be able to—"
The wound announced itself.
Breath cut short. One hand pressing hard against the bandaging. For a moment the careful lightness evaporated entirely, leaving something younger and less composed in its place.
Anthierin waited.
"...Alright." A slow exhale. Settling back against the pillow. "Alright. But I want to be clear — I'm not obligated to answer you."
"Nobody said you were."
"Right." A beat. "So. In exchange for dropping this matter entirely—" Flinn met her eyes and held them. "—I can tell you anything you want to know about your mother."
The hammer stopped moving.
Anthierin's hands were still in her lap. The hearth crackled once. The water from the washroom kept running, soft and indifferent, filling the space where her response should have been.
Her expression did something she hadn't given it permission to do.
"...What," she said. Not a question. The word that comes out when a question is too large to fit its proper shape.
Flinn watched her — not quite sympathy, not quite strategy. The wry grin had softened at the edges.
"I told you," Flinn said quietly. "The answer isn't simple."
Got it. Here's the full scene with all internal thoughts in proper italics, cleaned up.
The washroom door swung open and Lexel emerged in a cloud of steam, loose shirt, loose trousers, a towel draped over his head like he'd forgotten it was there. He rubbed at his hair absently and looked around the room.
Something was off.
Anthierin was sitting with her hammer across her knees, eyes forward, expression sealed. Flinn was watching the ceiling with the careful neutrality of someone who had recently said something and was not going to say it again.
"What's up, guys?" Lexel pulled the towel off his head. "The air seems weird."
"Nothing," said Anthierin.
"That's definitely something," said Lexel. He sighed through his nose and let it go.
Flinn shifted against the pillow, slow and deliberate, testing weight on the injury with the practiced assessment of someone taking stock of a situation. Then, with a breath that was almost normal —
"Anyway." A thin smile. "Thank you for the hospitality, Lexel. But I need to get going."
"So soon?"
Lexel's hand found the decorative pillow on the chair beside him. He looked at it. Looked at Flinn. And threw it — precisely, without ceremony — directly into the wound.
"Agh!"
Flinn folded around it, breath hissing sharp through clenched teeth, one hand slamming down on the mattress.
"That's right," said Lexel, and sat down in the now-empty chair. He crossed one leg over the other. "You owe me, Flinn."
The pain passed in degrees. Flinn straightened slowly, jaw tight, and looked at him.
"...R-Right." A steadying breath. "What do you want? For me to bail you out? You're a wanted man, you know."
"For killing the Baron?" Lexel tilted his head. "You could do that?"
"No." Flinn's expression said the question was slightly beneath everyone present. "But with enough gold, you can keep it locally suppressed. Bought silence, sealed records, cooperative witnesses." A small shrug. "Though I don't think the capital would care either way."
Anthierin looked up. "Really?"
"The capital is too busy to care about a measly Baron from Einjaar." Flinn's eyes rolled with the exhausted certainty of someone who had operated in the margins of power long enough to understand exactly how much it paid attention. "They've got better things to do."
Lexel stared at the ceiling for a moment. Wow.
"Maybe I should kill a few more, then," he said.
Silence.
"Hey, come on." He looked between them. "It's a joke."
Anthierin fixed him with the particular look she reserved for statements that were almost certainly not entirely jokes. "You killed the village chief. Now the Baron of Einjaar." She set the hammer down carefully. "Is this a pattern?"
"It's not," said Lexel, flat. He let that land, then redirected. "What's the capital so busy about, anyway?"
Flinn waved a hand with the loose generosity of someone who had been waiting for this opening. "Oh, you know. War. Territory. Resources. Yada yada yada." A grin spreading at the edges. "And of course — the Yunjaar Plain Carnage."
Lexel blinked. "The what?"
Anthierin closed her eyes and pressed her palm flat against her own forehead.
"Damn!" Flinn sat up straighter, immediately flinched, ignored it entirely, and leaned forward with the energy of someone for whom a good story overrode minor structural concerns like open wounds. "Alright. Imagine — a full multi-party of Level 90 adventurers. Knights, clerics, rangers, everything in between and above. All of them." A pause for weight. "Wiped out."
Lexel's brow furrowed slowly. "...Wiped out."
"Corpses everywhere. Burnt. Mangled. Maimed." Flinn's voice had dropped into the particular register of someone recounting something they hadn't personally witnessed but had clearly turned over many times. "The forest beside the plain took a hit too. The landscape shifted. No trees left standing. A Dungeon Raid gone catastrophically, historically, magnificently wrong."
"A Dungeon Raid." Lexel leaned forward slightly. "You mean like the ruins? The old—"
"No." Flinn raised one finger. Shook it. "Tsk, tsk, tsk." A second finger joined the first, as if the correction required physical reinforcement. "A Dungeon Raid is where you enter a portal. New scenery. New land entirely. Some people say it's a distant corner of this world — somewhere beyond where the eye can reach." The grin sharpened. "Me? I'd call it a whole new world."
The room narrowed.
Wait a minute.
The thought didn't arrive fully formed. It arrived the way cold does — at the edges first, then all at once.
"I wonder what kind of monster came out of that portal," Flinn continued, settling back with hands folded behind their head, staring up at the ceiling with an almost philosophical ease. "Wiped out the entire company. Never happened before. Not like that."
Lexel said nothing.
The silence stretched. Anthierin was watching him now, and he didn't notice.
That monster.
He turned the shape of it over in his mind. The scale of it. Level 90 adventurers — not rookies, not the unlucky, the elite — reduced to scattered bones and scorched earth. A landscape that didn't survive the encounter.
Most likely...
Something moved in his chest that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite grief. Something older than both, and considerably warmer.
He knew exactly one person in any world capable of that.
A figure formed in his mind — unhurried, massive in implication if not always in presence. The man who had sent him here. The man whose name sat in the title of his own bloodline.
The Zodiac Emperor.
My dad.
Pride swelled up before Lexel could stop it, sudden and embarrassing and completely sincere. He pressed his mouth flat to contain whatever expression was trying to happen on his face.
Lyon Torga had come through a portal into this world.
And the first thing anyone here knew of him was a plain full of corpses and a forest that no longer existed.
...Classic.