The faint gray light of the late afternoon hung over the ruined estate. The crew finished rummaging through the cellar. They climbed slowly back up to the surface.
Leiya walked with a measured pace. Her mind was locked onto the structural details she'd just recovered from the shadows of the vault. She caught up to Kota. He stood completely still near a collapsed archway.
"Let me see the map and Leona's letter again," Leiya said.
Kota reached into his pocket. He handed the worn parchment over to her without a word.
Leiya took the documents. Her fingers trembled slightly as her eyes traced the faded ink lines. A wave of visible stress and sorrow washed over her face. Her breath caught in her throat while she stared at the old markings. She calculated the distance carefully in her head. She didn't know for certain, but the rough layout made her chest tighten with anxiety.
"I think it'll take a week just to get to that kingdom from here on foot," Leiya said, her voice shaking slightly as she looked up from the parchment. "Are you sure this is what you want to do?"
"Its fine," Kota replied. His voice was flat. "We have traveled to places that was farther than a week."
Leiya sighed. She looked back toward the dark cellar entrance. "Maybe it's fine for us. But not for them."
Kota shrugged. "That's not my problem. They wanted to be apart of this group. They can follow or I'll simply leave them."
"You need to start caring about the people in your group more, Kota," Leiya said. Her jaw tightening.
Kota didn't answer. He turned and walked off leaving her standing entirely alone by the debris.
Leiya turned around. Her expression was tense as she reviewed the paths in her mind.
"So annoying," she muttered under her breath. Lost in her thoughts, she took a blind step forward and crashed hard against a solid chest.
She stumbled backward, but Jaeger was already grounding his weight to steady them both. The abrupt collision caught him entirely off guard, breaking his quiet watch. He looked down at her with an alert yet neutral expression, the shadows of his charcoal linen framing his face.
"Are you alright?" Jaeger asked.
"Fine," Leiya said. She shook her head to clear her thoughts. "Just distracted."
Thorne stepped closer looking between them. Then he glared in the direction Kota had gone.
"Why can't we just leave right now?" Thorne asked.
Leiya sighed. She rubbed her temples. "I'm sure he's still tired from the outburst earlier. Besides, I'm completely exhausted too."
"We're all exhausted," Mira chimed in. While dragging her small boots through the gray ash. She stopped and looked at Thorne with a deeply serious frown.
"I want real food," Mira said. "Not hard bread. I want meat."
Thorne raised an eyebrow. "Meat?"
"Let's go hunting," she insisted, spinning on her heel to point a small, urgent finger past the broken edge of the estate ruins toward the massive, dark perimeter of trees looming far in the distance. "I'm sure there's bunnies or something around in that forest. Let's go."
"You stay here, I'll go," Thorne said. He rolled his shoulders. He looked over at Jaeger. "Jaeger, join me?"
"No," Jaeger declined flatly. "I do not eat."
Leiya let out a short, cynical breath. "You and Kota are exactly the same he doesn't eat either."
"Why is that?" Mira asked, crossing her small arms in pure confusion. "Everyone should eat."
"People who have high extensive amounts of Yen can go nearly two weeks without food consumption," Jaeger boringly said.
He walked slowly toward Mira, closing the distance between them before reaching out to guide her hand directly against the center of his chest.
"Do you feel that?" Jaeger said.
Mira went perfectly still. Her eyes widened as she felt the strange, unnatural rhythm pulsing deep within his ribs where a fully formed organ should have been.
"Why do you have two heartbeats?" Mira whispered, pulling her hand back in surprise.
Jaeger offered no response. He had never actually crossed over that brutal physical threshold into fully cultivating his second heart. The phantom pulse remained anyway, a lingering signature of intense training beating like a quiet echo under his skin.
"Thorne, don't be too long," Leiya interrupted, cutting through the heavy silence as she scanned the dimming horizon. "It'll be night soon."
Thorne turned and left the ruins behind, his boots sinking into the rotting layer of damp pine needles as the deep shadows of the distant canopy swallowed his frame. The heavy silence of the forest felt completely unnatural.
Koma's catastrophic structural shockwaves had thoroughly decimated the natural lifecycle of the surrounding territories, leaving branches devoid of rustling birds and the dirt clear of tracks.
Yet, despite the wasteland conditions, a sudden, unexpected flash of movement caught his eye near a collapsed hollow log.
A large, gray hare was darting through the brush, an absolute anomaly amidst the desolation. Thorne moved with practiced, heavy efficiency, swinging his hand downward to pin the creature against the root system before hoisting it up by the ears with a heavy grunt.
The light was rapidly dying over the estate ruins by the time Thorne returned, carrying the fresh prize by its ears. He dropped his pack onto the soot and immediately set to work, skinning and preparing the meat over a newly built fire.
Kota, who had been sitting completely alone as a dark silhouette against the cracked stone, moved silently across the dark ash to join the others around the flickering embers.
Mira tilted her head, catching Kota's blank expression in the firelight. "Are you okay?"
Kota didn't respond, his posture remaining rigid as the smell of cooking meat filled the cold evening air.
Far away from the ash of the Speedhardt estate, a different power was shifting the balance of the world. The air didn't just grow heavy, it became a physical weight as a celestial goddess descended into the world of the living.
Tired of her stagnant existence, she sought a lineage, but a goddess doesn't settle for the weak. She had been watching the Speedhardt bloodline from the cosmos.
Koma and Hykee were the ones who truly intrigued her. She specifically kept her gaze fixed on the two brothers. Koma was scratching at the door of godhood, an ambition that she grew quiet fond of while secretly watching him and Hykee drew her absolute attention solely because he possessed the Eye of Storms.
At the Null Haven, Koma was still recovering in his private room. It had been a few days since the fight in the woods with Hykee and he fully expected the heavy weight of sleep to claim him.
Instead, the very air of the room warped. The celestial presence stepped through the fabric of space with an elegance that felt like a hammer to the lungs, forcing Koma to his feet, looking uneasy as he stared at the magnificent stranger standing before him.