Forty-eight hours.
For a normal person, two days was enough time to pack a bag, say goodbye to family, and maybe write a will if the trip looked dangerous. Revan had other priorities. Where he was going, magic didn't work, so first he needed a weapon that didn't need magic.
The iron door of Volkar's forge groaned when he pushed it open. Hot air hit his face, thick with the smell of soot and metal.
In the middle of the room, the giant was hammering a glowing piece of iron. The hammer stopped mid-swing when he saw who it was, and his amber eyes narrowed.
"I thought you'd be dead in a ditch by now."
"Disappointing, I know. Fate likes watching me suffer too much to let me die that fast."
Volkar snorted and put the hammer down.
"So what brings the little shadow back? Don't tell me you broke another blade already."
Crossing his arms was a mistake, because it pulled at his freshly closed wounds and made him wince.
"Not on purpose. The academy sword I borrowed shattered against an assassin's Aura last night, so I have nothing now."
One thick eyebrow went up as Volkar looked him over. The old smith could probably see every injury Revan was trying to hide.
"And now you want another masterpiece to destroy."
A thin smile was all Revan could manage. There was no point hiding anything from the old man.
"I need something different this time. Nothing that conducts Aura, nothing enchanted, nothing that needs mana to work. Just good, solid steel."
Volkar stared at him.
"Only an idiot or someone going into a Dead Zone asks for something like that."
"Let's say I'm packing for bad weather."
For a long moment the giant only looked at him. Then he went to a rack in the corner covered with a tarp and pulled the canvas back. Out came a longsword in a plain black leather sheath, which he tossed across the forge without warning. Revan caught it.
The sword was heavier than it looked. When he pulled a few inches of the blade out, he saw that it was black, a dull charcoal color that didn't shine in the furnace light. No runes and no Orichalcum core. Just solid, well-balanced steel.
Volkar crossed his huge arms.
"Double-folded carbon steel. It won't carry a spark of your Aura, so you'll be swinging it with muscle and bone. But it won't break, even if you smash it against enchanted armor. Don't expect it to glow."
Back into the sheath it went, and Revan hung it at his hip. The weight felt good.
"Perfect."
'In a Dead Zone, all you get is steel and luck. My luck has never been reliable, so steel it is.'
Volkar waved a big, calloused hand at the door.
"Get out of my forge. And if you don't come back alive, I'm selling your debt to the loan sharks in the lower city."
"You're too kind, Master Volkar."
***
By the time Revan got back to the academy, it was afternoon. Nobody paid any attention to him, which was fine, because he was going to the library. If he was taking a train through hell, he wanted to know the route.
In a dusty corner of the archives, he opened a thick leather book called Cursed Topography: Mapping the Dead Zones of the Unification Era and looked for the word Ashenmoor.
According to the book, Dead Zones were scars. Centuries ago, during the Unification War, weapons of mass magical destruction had been used so heavily that they tore the leylines under the land, and the damage never healed. Inside a Dead Zone, mana couldn't flow or be shaped. The author wrote that for a Mage, entering one felt like being thrown into the sea with stones tied to their ankles.
A few pages later, a paragraph made his blood run cold.
The express route through the Ashenmoor Corridor intersects seventeen distinct Dead Zones. Its longest continuous stretch, colloquially known as the Silent Stretch, requires a transit time of exactly forty-seven minutes.
Forty-seven minutes. For almost an hour, Sylvia von Vespera, who could crush a Master-rank warrior into paste, would be as helpless as any other passenger. Whoever made this schedule, or whoever planned to attack it, knew that.
Then the next paragraph made him want to bang his head against the table.
The most severe anomaly documented within the Silent Stretch occurred twelve years ago. A Royal Military convoy, listed in the official record as transporting high-grade supplies, vanished mid-transit. No bodies, wreckage, or distress signals were ever recovered.
"Fantastic."
The chair creaked as he leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
'If the story hadn't gone this far off track, I'd be relaxing at the academy right now, slowly making a plan to keep Sylvia from falling. I thought I had time.'
He sighed.
"Why is everything going to hell right when the first Arc is about to start?"
His head started to hurt. For almost a minute he sat there without moving, and then a new thought came to him.
'Unless this is exactly how it's supposed to go.'
'The arcs in this game never started slowly. Everything always happened out of nowhere, like a meteor strike. Sylvia's story was the same. One moment she was the ice princess of the academy, and the next she had fallen into darkness. The game never explained what happened in between.'
'Maybe this mission is what happens in between. This could be where it starts.'
A worse thought came when he looked down at the book again.
'And what if the Crimson Tears are what break her?'
In the game, the crystals didn't appear until Arc 4, years after Sylvia fell, so they couldn't have caused it. But in this world they already existed. One of them was sitting in his Shadow Storage right now.
'The game's timeline doesn't fit. Then again, this world stopped following the game the night that crystal showed up.'
None of it could be proven. Still, the idea that this mission was the start of Sylvia's fall made more sense than anything else he had. If he was right, then going was the correct choice, because he would be there when it began. Oddly, that made him feel better. The panic he had felt since the East Tower faded, and he decided he would see this mission through.
***
The next evening, Revan was cutting through the west corridor to the cafeteria, hoping to grab leftovers without making eye contact with any nobles, when he saw a group of students whispering excitedly in front of the notice board.
"...actually called into Instructor Valen's office..."
"Six months, I heard. And the Caldris family didn't even send a letter to defend him!"
Revan slowed down. In the middle of the board was an official notice from the Academy Disciplinary Committee.
Student Erison van Caldris is hereby issued a Level Two Suspension for repeated acts of violence. Arena access revoked. Probationary period: six months.
A smile almost reached his face. Elara had actually done it. The shy girl who used to tremble while holding a lunch tray had walked into Instructor Valen's office with a medical report, and the academy had done exactly what he expected.
Then a little guilt crept in. Erison had nothing to do with the cuts on his back, because The Garden had made those. The idiot had just bullied Revan so often and so publicly that nobody would doubt it.
Rubbing his chin, Revan pushed the feeling away.
'Better him than the truth. He's been riding on his family name for years, acting like a tyrant while being the disappointment of Duke Alaric's bloodline. Using him to cover The Garden's tracks is just good resource management.'
***
At dawn the next day, Revan stood at Valorheim Central Station.
The station was huge, all iron beams and frosted glass, and loud with hissing steam and train whistles. On a private platform away from the public lines, the Z-Class Express waited like a sleeping steel beast, black smoke rising from its chimney into the pale sky.
By the carriages, in his servant's uniform, he waited for Sylvia with his breath turning white in the cold. Before her heels came, heavy footsteps sounded from the security carriage.
He turned his head.
At the end of the platform stood a big man in a faded military coat with the royal crest on it. The man looked like he had been carved out of granite. A jagged scar ran across his face from his left temple, past his eye, down to his jaw, and a wound like that should have killed him.
The scarred man stopped. His cold gray eyes met Revan's through the steam.
For two seconds they looked at each other, and Revan saw recognition in the man's eyes. The stranger knew him. Or maybe, judging by how his eyes narrowed at Revan's stance, he was seeing someone else.
Then the man looked away and climbed into the security carriage without a word.
Revan didn't move. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his ribs.
'Who was that? And who did he think I was?'
'The train to hell hasn't even left yet, and this is already getting more complicated.'