Sunny exhaled slowly as he dragged his blade from the monster's body.
His arms were completely bloodied. He grimaced as he crouched down and began pulling the soul shards from the monster. A process he would never get used to no matter how many times he did it.
A gray-furred wolf appeared beside him, holding two shiny orbs carefully in her mouth. Her deep blue eyes stared at him.
Sunny turned around and smiled.
"Good girl, Lyka."
He took the soul shards, gave her ears a brief rub, and stood up.
After securing the strips of meat into his bag, he began walking away from the slaughter without looking back at it.
'That should be enough for the week.'
He walked in silence, with the wolf tailing behind him, imperceptible to the normal eye. An old cathedral emerged ahead of them.
Sunny remembered the day he had discovered the cathedral, and shuddered. He had barely escaped the thing inside there. If not for the crown, he would've already been dead.
The two slipped into the shadows and disappeared.
The secret room was exactly as he had left it.
He exhaled slowly as he put the soul shards into his chest. The huge box was almost filled with soul shards that he didn't need.
He looked at Leon, who was lying on the bed in the secret room.
It had been a week since Leon had fallen unconscious. He had shown no signs of waking up at all. The crimson crown rested on his chest, rising and falling with him.
Lyka approached the bed quietly and sniffed at his hand.
"Don't worry." Sunny reached over and ruffled the fur at her neck. "He'll wake up soon."
Lyka huffed and licked his fingers.
'Let's hope he does...'
***
There was once a quiet boy who lived in the corner of an orphanage playroom. He never joined the other children — he only watched them play or fight around.
A young woman began visiting him each week, bringing him books — stories of swords pulled from stones, of men with wax wings, of ordinary people who became something more. He read each one carefully, asking questions only the pictures could answer. She was the first person whose presence he had learned to expect.
Then she stopped coming.
The weeks passed and the door kept opening, but it was never her. Eventually, a caretaker told him the truth in a small, gentle voice. The woman was gone, forever. The child returned to his room and sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the picture of the boy falling from the sky. He had always wondered why someone would fly higher when they already knew what would happen. Now there was a second question beside that one. And unlike the first, this one had no pictures to help him think.
He still sat in the corner.
The room was the same. The children were the same. The toys scattered and collected and scattered again, and the caretakers moved through it like always.
But the child had stopped watching the door.
He held the book in his lap most days, though he rarely opened it anymore. His eyes moved slowly around the room instead — not because something interesting was happening. Nothing interesting ever happened here.
He was looking for something else now.
He had been thinking about it for a while. The stories the woman had brought him always began the same way. Someone ordinary, standing somewhere ordinary. And then something happened.
A sword in a stone. A pair of wings. A field, a road, a door left open.
Something happened first. That was the important part.
He just had to wait for his something.
The first sign came on a Tuesday.
A boy across the room dropped a toy horse, and it slid across the floor and stopped exactly at the child's foot. He picked it up slowly and looked at it.
It was made of wood, painted brown, and one of its legs slightly chipped.
He set it down beside him.
It meant something. He was certain of it. He wasn't sure what, but in every story the woman had brought him, things arrived without being expected. The horse had come to him — he hadn't gone to it.
He watched it carefully for the rest of the afternoon.
When a caretaker collected it at the end of the day, he let her take it without protest. He sat quietly and thought about it.
'Maybe that wasn't it.'
He kept watching.
Over the following weeks, he began to notice things he hadn't paid attention to before. Patterns that seemed almost deliberate.
A bird that landed on the windowsill three days in a row. A caretaker who always looked in his direction when she entered the room — though she never came to him. Rain on a morning.
He told himself these things mattered.
He sat very still when they happened and tried to feel something shift.
But nothing shifted.
The bird flew away. The caretaker always had somewhere else to be. The rain stopped, and the sky became ordinary again.
He turned the pages of the book slowly one evening and looked at the boy flying above the sea.
He already knew what would happen. He knew how it ended. But the boy in the picture had kept flying anyway.
'Maybe the sign already happened and I missed it.'
He pressed his lips together and looked at the ceiling.
'Or maybe I need to look harder.'
***
Spring came and went. The orphanage took in new children, and some of the older ones were taken away by quiet, nervous adults who shook hands with the caretakers and signed papers at the front desk.
The child watched these departures from the doorway of the playroom, his book held loosely at his side.
Each time, he waited to see if someone would turn and look at him. If a hand would be extended in his direction. If one of those quiet, nervous adults would stop walking and look at the child standing alone in the doorway and feel something.
They never did.
He went back to his corner each time.
The new boy who had spoken to him once was gone now. The child had watched from the window as the boy climbed into the backseat of a car and didn't look back.
He sat down again and opened his book.
The story still ended the same way.
He waited through the summer.
By autumn, something in him had grown tired.
He sat in his corner one afternoon and looked around the room slowly. A child was crying near the window. Two kids argued quietly over a piece of chalk. A caretaker carried a stack of folded towels past the doorway.
The child looked at his own hands.
He had been waiting for a very long time. For the horse, for the bird, for a stranger who would stop and notice something in him that no one else had seen.
He had watched the door and the window and the sky and the floor, and nothing had arrived for him. Nothing had slid across the room and stopped at his foot.
He knew that now.
He had known it for a while.
The horse had just been a toy dropped by a careless child. The bird had only been a bird. These things happened all the time to people, and those people didn't think it meant anything at all.
There was no sword in the stone.
He closed the book.
'I need to make it happen.'
The thought was very calm and quiet.
In every story the woman had brought him, someone had walked toward something. The boy hadn't waited beside the stone for the sword to fall into his hands. He had stepped forward. He had reached out and taken hold of it.
The child looked at the door at the far end of the room, the one that led outside the orphanage.
He looked at it for a long time.
***
He left on a Wednesday morning, when the caretakers were occupied with the younger children. He had made sure of that after observing them for weeks.
He took the book. He took the small wool sweater folded beneath his mattress. He took nothing else, because there was nothing else to take.
The hallway was empty. The front door was unlocked.
He pushed it open and stepped outside.
The street stretched out ahead of him. He stood on the steps for a moment, looking at it.
Cars moved past at the far end of the road. A woman walked by with a dog on a short leash. Pigeons scattered from the pavement.
The child breathed in slowly.
His story was starting now. He was certain of it.
He stepped off the last stair and began walking.
***
He didn't know where the woman lived.
He hadn't thought to ask before he left, and now there was no one to ask. He wandered the streets near the orphanage for the rest of that first day, telling himself he would find something.
A sign, a street that looked right, or a window with a light on that felt familiar.
He found nothing.
By evening, the cold had settled properly into the air. He sat near a closed shop and pulled his sweater tighter and watched people move past on the pavement. They walked quickly, chins tucked against the wind, and none of them looked at him.
He had thought someone might stop.
He sat there until the sky went fully dark. His stomach ached. He had not eaten since breakfast, which he had eaten without thinking, not knowing it would be his last meal from the orphanage.
He pressed his back against the wall and held the book in his lap.
He did not open it.
The first few days were difficult in ways he hadn't imagined.
He was hungry almost constantly. He found half-eaten things near bins sometimes, and he ate them without much thought.
Rain came on the third day. He had not thought about rain.
He found a place under a bridge where the ground was mostly dry. Other people were under the bridge as well. A man with a torn coat who slept with his back to everyone. A woman who spoke quietly to herself and didn't seem to notice the child was there. He sat as far from them as possible and said nothing.
He was very good at saying nothing.
He had thought the streets would feel like the beginning of something. He had imagined turning a corner and seeing a thing that made sense of everything.
That was how it worked in stories. The journey always looked like something.
But this looked like a wet road and a bridge and a hollow stomach. It looked like the backs of strangers.
He turned the damp pages of his book slowly one evening and looked at the picture of the man with wax wings.
He closed it again.
He was still looking for her, that hadn't changed. He just didn't know which direction to look.
***
He found the cemetery by accident one day.
He had been walking aimlessly, when the iron gate appeared between two old stone walls. He stopped and looked at it. Beyond the gate, rows of grey stones stretched in symmetrical lines on the grass.
He almost walked past the cemetery.
But an old man was sitting just inside the gate on a small wooden bench, feeding pigeons from a paper bag. He looked up when the child stopped.
"You lost?" the old man asked.
The child looked at the stones behind him.
"I'm looking for someone," he said.
The old man studied him for a moment. "Who?"
The child thought about how to say it.
"A lady. She brought me books." He paused. "She got a big ouchie. She's somewhere getting better."
The old man was quiet for a moment. The pigeons pecked at the ground around his feet.
"What's her name?" he asked, his voice careful now.
The child looked down, and then shifted his gaze at the book he held.
He walked toward the old man and gave the book to him. The old man was confused at first, but slowly went through the first few pages of the book, and found the name.
The old man's expression shifted.
"Come with me," the old man said.
He stood slowly and led the child through the gate. The child followed, looking at the names as he passed. He didn't know why they were here. He assumed it was some kind of garden.
The old man stopped after a while.
He pointed down.
There was a stone. A small photograph was set into it, round and framed in metal. The child looked at the photograph.
He recognized her face immediately.
He stood very still.
"Why is her picture here?" he asked.
The old man sat down slowly on the grass beside the stone, his knees were struggling. He looked up at the child.
"Do you know what this place is?" he asked.
The child shook his head.
The old man was quiet for a moment. He looked at the stone, then back at the child.
"When people get hurt very badly," he said slowly, "sometimes their body stops working. It can't be fixed anymore."
He paused. "When that happens... the person isn't anywhere anymore. They're not far away, not getting better somewhere."
He looked at the child carefully.
"They're gone. And we put them here, in the ground, so we know where they are. So we can come and remember them."
The child stared at him.
"In the ground," he repeated.
The old man nodded.
The child looked down at the stone. At the grass beneath it — at the earth.
"She's..." His voice came out very small. "She's under there?"
"Yes."
The child took a step back.
His mouth opened slightly and then closed again. He looked at the photograph on the stone, at her expression. That patient and quiet look he remembered from the corner of the playroom.
"But she was just..." He stopped.
He tried again.
"She was just here," he said. "She came every week."
The old man said nothing. He let the child speak.
"She brought me books." The child's voice had gone very flat. "She sat next to me. She—" He stopped again.
He looked at the ground.
His expression, he couldn't see it. But he could feel his eyes water up.
"She's not getting better," he said quietly.
"No," the old man said. "She isn't."
The child stood there for a long moment. The pigeons had followed them and pecked quietly at the path nearby. Wind moved through the grass.
He crouched down slowly. He kept the book beside the stone that had her name.
The old man looked at him for a moment, and let out a soft breath.
"What is your name, child?"
The child stood back up. He looked at her grave for a moment, and softly spoke.
"Leonar."
The old man chuckled.
"Quite the name."
The child looked at the old man.
"What is your name."
The old man chuckled.
"Names are a lost memory for old ones like me."
He paused, slowly looking up.
"I'm just the forgotten one now."
The child didn't bother answering. His mind was still occupied with the grave.
There was no place she was coming back from. There was no week she would finally walk through the door again with her bag over one shoulder. There was no story where she returned in the final pages and everything made sense.
He walked for a long time that evening without paying attention to where he was going.
***
Leon opened his eyes and found himself standing in his Soul Sea.
His memories of the fight against Nephis were fresh. Even his emotions. He could still feel the weight of every blow.
He even remembered the person that abondoned him.
A girl was standing a short distance away, watching him.
His expression grew into something cold.
"What do you have to say for yourself?"
Aurelia frowned. "Listen to me."
"I already tried that." He shook his head. "I'm done with it."
She sighed. "You didn't, Leon. Not really."
"Don't."
She froze.
His face twisted.
"I think you've had your revenge. Betraying me at such an important moment. That's about as thorough as it gets."
He held her gaze. "So how about you pass on."
Aurelia's mouth opened, while her expression grew into something that looked close to grief.
Leon just kept talking.
"I never wanted you in my Soul Sea in the first place."
He tried to leave his Soul Sea.
But it didn't work.
He grimaced. Then Birdie materialized at the edge of his Soul Sea, stepping forward with its usual quietness.
Leon looked at it.
"Don't even get me started on you."
Birdie froze, then lowered its head slowly toward the ground.
Suddenly, without warning, Leon felt himself being pulled out the Soul Sea.
***
Leon's eyes opened, as he looked up at an unfamiliar ceiling.
He sat up slowly. Everything hurt. Every bone, every muscle, even his head.
He looked around.
The stone walls were engraved with intricate patterns. The furniture was made out of pale polished wood, with several mismatched pieces.
The room had no windows, however, there were light wells cunningly hidden here and there.
He took a deep breath, while his head seared in pain. Overusing his aspect had taken quite a toll of him.
He then noticed Sunny looking at him with his eyes widened.
"Leon."
Dealing with the immense headache, Leon stood up slowly and walled toward Sunny. His body limped forward, unable to really tell what was broken.
Sunny started to smile.
Leon punched him in the face.
Sunny fell back, and stared at Leon with an expression mixed with anger and confusion. Sunny kept quiet, but he had felt a spark of electricity pass through him.
"Keep her," Leon said.
He turned away and began looking for a way out of the room. He assumed Sunny would understand — the crown, Aurelia, whoever was inside it. He didn't care whether he did or not.
Sunny summoned the Crown of Ember from and held it, saying nothing.
Leon was already trying to climb the roof in the room, trying to get out. He found a potential exit, reached for it — and fell back down with a loud thud.
He ended up on his knees on the floor, teeth pressed together, breathing through the pain.
'Still so weak...'
Sunny approached him. "Are you alright?"
Leon said nothing. He didn't want to talk to anyone. He equipped his cloak and disappeared from Sunny's sight.
Sunny exhaled slowly and narrowed his eyes.
"You realize I can still sense you."
Leon didn't care, he just wanted to be alone right now.
Eventually, he got on to the cathedral's roof. Climbing down the unusually high roof of the cathedral, Leon began walking through the dark city.
Sunny looked at Leon's disappearing figure and asked Lyka to follow him.
He walked through the ruins of the dark city, while his mind raced with thoughts.
Why had he deserved any of this?
'A transmigrator? Change the world?'
He stopped near a collapsed wall. His body was trembling because of the anger he felt.
He'd never asked for any of this. Not the transmigration. Not the nightmare realm. Not a single moment of what had followed.
Leon screamed in anger. His fists found the side of a ruined building and he hit it without stopping. The flesh at his knuckles ripped, but he didn't stop.
'I never asked to be sent here. I never asked to go through all of this.'
After a while, he stopped. Blood poured from his hands and disappeared into the dark ground below.
"I miss home..."
He muttered under his breath.
The words left a strange taste in his mouth. He looked up at the dark, starless sky.
Missed home?
He chuckled.
'What home?'
He hadn't had a place to belong in his past life either. That was the entire point. Wasn't that why he was so excited to be here in the first place? Because the possibilities were endless?
He started laughing. His laughter slowly turning into insanity.
'Endless? A life of luxury?'
White flames surged up his arms without him fully meaning them to. He turned and drove his fist into the side of a half-collapsed building. The structure collapsed entirely.
He dropped to his knees. His head was splitting again. He looked at what was left of the building. Then at the starless sky. Then at nothing in particular.
At the end of it all, he was an extra in someone else's story. A background character who had read the novel and thought that made him special.
Thought that knowing what was coming meant he was meant to change it.
What had he actually changed?
The trio was a bit stronger? Did it even matter in the long run?
'Perhaps... I will never belong.'
He only had himself to blame.
Aurelia's betrayal — he had betrayed her first. Nephis's fight — he had never given her a reason to trust him. Sunny's indifference — he had always been reckless, why would he care for someone like that?
Every problem led back to the same place. The real problem was simple.
"Me."
It was always him. Even in his past life, if he was being truly honest — the suffering he'd grown up in was no one's fault. No one asked him to run away. No one asked him to steal. No one... ever asked him anything.
And here he was again.
His head dropped toward the ground, thoughts spiraling into self apathy.
He didn't notice the Carapace Centurion until it was already close. His invisibility had never properly activated — not with his mind this loud and chaotic.
He gritted his teeth, almost summoning the Broken Halo, but soon stopped.
The centurion kept charging at him, and Leon simply stared back. His hands fell to the ground.
'Maybe...'
His expression softened, and his shoulders dropped.
'Maybe this is for the best.'
The centurion was right in front of him. It raised its boney scythe.
A blade appeared from nowhere and deflected it.
Sunny stepped from the shadows just before the centurion could bring its scythe down.
Leon's eyes twitched.
'Just let me die peacefully...'
He was so tired of fighting against the current. What was even the point? His life had ended once already. What exactly was he preserving here?
Sunny made short work of the centurion. Lyka moved at his side. The fight was over before it had even begun.
Leon's eyes grew tired. His gaze turned to the ground again.
Sunny then turned around.
He crossed the distance between them and grabbed Leon by the shoulders.
"Bastard! Why did you just sit there?!"
Leon didn't answer. He wasn't entirely sure himself. The suicidal impulse had just arrived.
Sunny just stared at him. His expression slowly shifted. Exhaling slowly, he tried helping Leon to his feet.
Leon pushed him away.
"Just go away, Sunless."
Sunny frowned.
"If this is about Nephis—"
Leon snapped. He lunged at Sunny.
"About Nephis?" His voice cracked at the edges. "You think any of this is about Nephis?"
He grabbed Sunny's armor, while his face contorted in anger.
Sunny didn't pull back, and just watched with a calm expression.
"First I was thrown into a world I didn't ask for." Leon's breathing had gone uneven. His eyes were burning. "Traumatized by the first nightmare. Dropped into a death zone. I tried to help people and they nearly killed me for it."
His grip on the armor tightened.
"You think any of this is about—"
The sentence trailed off.
He let go of Sunny and bent forward, coughing blood.
Sunny's expression soon grew somber.
He placed a hand on Leon's shoulder.
"Fool."
Leon lifted his head slowly.
"You think your life is miserable?" Sunny said. "Everyone's is."
It wasn't the response Leon had expected. There was no gentleness in it.
Leon sat back against the wall of a ruined building.
Sunny sat down beside him.
The dark city stretched out ahead of them.
Leon's chest ached, his throat burned, his mind hurt.
The two sat in silence for a while.
"Did I ever tell you about my sister?"
Leon shook his head weakly.
Sunny was quiet for a moment, looking out at the ruins with an empty expression.
"Our parents died when we were little. She got adopted, but I ended up on the streets. So, young as I was, I simply imagined that it was hard for her as it was for me. That's why I got obsessed with the idea of finding her. I had this fantasy in my head, you know, of saving and protecting her. Becoming a family again."
He looked down at his hands.
"But how could a penniless undesirable like me find anyone? You know how the city databases are. However, I was ready to do anything to accomplish my goal. So, I saved up money. A street kid can't earn much, but even then, I saved up as much as I could."
Leon said nothing.
A dark expression appeared on his face.
"Even if I had almost nothing to eat, I would keep putting away the pathetic amount of credits I had earned through doing all kinds of horrid crap. And after four or five years of this, by the time I was nearly seventeen, I finally had enough to hire a private investigator."
He smiled.
"You see, there was this detective who sometimes hired us nobodies to gather information for him. His services weren't cheap, but I trusted him. Or in him, at least. So I gave all my money to that guy and told him to find my sister. And you know what? He did. One day, about a month after we made the deal, he gave me a piece of paper with an address written on it. So I went there."
Leon looked at Sunny.
He realized how shit Sunny's life was. And yet here was, whining about how he had a shitty one too.
"What happened next?"
Leon asked weakly.
Sunny rubbed his face, glanced at the sky, and said:
"I actually met her near the tram terminal. Only at that time, I didn't recognize her. You see, despite my lofty ideas of being her savior, I couldn't even really remember what she looked like. There was this girl, around twelve years old, wearing a tidy school uniform. She was walking in the same direction as me. I only realized that it was her after she entered the house from the address."
He was silent for a while, then continued, his voice strangely emotionless:
"It was already dark. I think it was raining. The house was situated in a really nice district. They actually had the whole house to themselves. Just one family living in it, can you imagine? Well, I guess you can. Anyway… there was even a lawn. And a window… a big window that shined light outside. Watching them through that window was almost like watching a television show."
Sunny's expression grew dim.
"Standing in the shadows just outside the edge of that light, I observed her family for a while. She had parents who loved her and treated her well. She had real food, and enough of it to never go hungry. She had pretty clothes and expensive textbooks. She even had cute younger siblings. They were all smiling, laughing, and having a great time together."
Leon frowned and asked:
"So what did you do?"
Sunny didn't answer immediately. He seemed to be somewhere else for a moment — standing in the rain outside a lit window, looking at something unreachable.
"The only selfless thing I've ever done," he said. "I turned around and walked away."
His words trailed across the silence of the ruins in the dark city.
Leon looked at him for a moment. Then he looked ahead at the dark.
He didn't say anything for a while. He wasn't sure there was anything to say. He had spent the last hour drowning in the weight of his own life.
Leon summoned the Endless Spring and drank greedily. After the burning sensation in his throat disappeared, he slowly passed the bottle to Sunny.
Sunny took it without a word.
"Sorry for punching you."
Leon said slowly.
Sunny took a long drink. Then he raised his arm and tapped Leon on the cheek with his closed fist — barely any force behind it. A small spark of electricity passed through.
[You have received a Memory.]
Leon closed his eye. He knew which Memory it was.
Sunny stood up, and extended an arm.
Leon looked at it for a moment. Then he reached up and held it.
But as soon he stood up, his vision blurred. He felt like all the strength in his body had left him.
Leon nearly fell to the ground before Sunny caught him.
He had fallen unconscious again.