Adrien exhaled a long, heavy sigh as he collapsed onto the creaking inn bed, every muscle aching from the relentless pace of the day. They had spent almost the entire day running a chaotic gauntlet. First, they had to dance through a conversational minefield to trick the Vicar into granting them a free baptism. Immediately after, they were sprint-pacing back to the mercenary guild to turn in their monster bounties, followed by a tense, impromptu audience with the Baroness herself.
While the baptism was a massive milestone, officially unlocking their active skill slots and granting access to the system's class selection menu, neither of them had actually chosen a path yet. The default options presented by the local altar were underwhelmingly basic. Thankfully, the system interface allowed them to finalise their choice remotely from anywhere in the world, leaving them no reason to linger around the high-handed Church of the Golden Hand, and thus waiting for better options was a no-brainer.
Adrien rolled over onto his side, propping his head up on his hand as he watched his companion prepare to open her main menu. "Logging off already, Vera?"
Vera offered a weak, utterly exhausted smile. "Yeah, duty calls. My parents are dragging me to some high-society charity gala tonight, and I need to get ready."
"Ouch. Stay strong, soldier," Adrien teased, his lips curling into a wicked grin. "Don't let the small talk get you."
Vera let out an annoyed puff of air, crossing her arms playfully, "Oh, laugh it up. Just because you're done with school doesn't mean you're safe, and just give it a year or two. Your family is going to start dragging you to these same networking nightmares, and you'll realise just how soul-crushing they really are."
Adrien chuckled, conceding the point with a slight nod.
Vera softened, her hand hovering over the glowing log-out prompt floating in her vision. "So, what's your plan while I'm stuck dealing with snobs?"
"Nothing too crazy," Adrien said, stretching his legs out. "I've still got an hour or so before I have to log off for dinner. I think I'll dive into Krsto's memoir and see if I can cross-reference anything to shed some light on this key."
"Spoken like a true nerd. Well, enjoy your light reading," Vera laughed.
Vera lay down on the bed, and her avatar went still like it had fallen into a deep sleep, as Vera logged off from the game. Left in the quiet stillness of the inn, Adrien reached into his dimensional inventory, pulled out the weathered leather-bound journal of the old mercenary, and flipped to the first page.
As Adrien turned the brittle, yellowed pages, the scratchy, uneven ink strokes began to paint a vivid picture in his mind, and it wasn't just reading a historical log, but he was peering into the raw, unguarded soul of a young knight drowning in a hopeless, blinding adoration.
"Princess Danica Lavović, the First Princess, and the second eldest daughter of the Holy Emperor. Her hair, dark as a moonless night, cascades down her shoulders like a silken waterfall. Her face… I could write a thousand pages and still fail to capture its grace. I fear I am utterly, irrevocably in love with her."
A faint, sympathetic smile softened Adrien's eyes, as he could almost see the young Krsto, chest swelling with youthful pride, polishing his armour just for a fleeting glance from the royal balcony, but as Adrien's fingers slid down the page, skimming through the entries that followed, his smile slowly withered away. The ink grew more erratic, smudged with what looked like ancient, dried teardrops.
'Damn,' Adrien thought, a heavy sinking feeling settling deep in his chest. 'I actually feel incredibly sorry for him. Poor bastard.'
It was the classic, devastating tragedy of a commoner who climbed too high. Krsto had clawed his way out of poverty, achieving legendary feats at a remarkably young age just to be noticed, and it had worked. The Princess had looked his way, but only because he was the shining new prodigy of the empire, a shiny trophy to be admired, not a man to be loved.
Adrien turned to a heavily stained page near the middle of the journal, and his breath suddenly hitched. The words written there felt like a physical blow to the chest, dripping with a quiet, agonising despair that time hadn't managed to dull.
"I reached for the moon, believing its light belonged to me because I flew so high. But the moon was always too far. And when my fingertips finally touched its cold surface, I realised it already shone for someone else."
Adrien stared at the line, the sheer weight of the heartbreak echoing in the quiet inn room. To love someone with every fibre of your being, to conquer battlefields just to be worthy of them, only to stand in the shadows and watch them willingly give their heart to another, but what made Adrien's stomach twist even more was the cruel delusion of it all. Reading between the lines of their conversations, the truth was glaringly obvious. Krsto had viewed her through a desperate, love-blind lens, interpreting every polite nod as affection. To Danica, however, he was never an equal, a novelty perhaps, and definitely, a loyal, exceptionally talented pet to be patted on the head and flaunted at court, completely blind to the fact that she secretly looked down on his humble blood.
The tragic crescendo of Krsto's heartbreak arrived in the form of a nobleman named Miloš von Vane. Miloš was everything Krsto was not, born of high blood, effortlessly elegant, and the undisputed owner of Princess Danica's heart. In the journal entries that followed, Krsto's agony bled through every line as he detailed the torture of standing guard, frozen like a statue, forced to watch the woman he loved flirt, laugh, and lean into another man's touch.
Then came the day that shattered everything, and Adrien read the frantic, ink-smeared entry detailing an afternoon in the palace gardens. Miloš had arrived trailing a massive, terrifying beast, an imposing, apex predator of the wild, as a grand romantic tribute. Standing before Danica and her court of giggling, high-born friends, Miloš puffed out his chest, grandiosely regaling them with a tale of his unmatched bravery. He claimed he had tracked the formidable creature alone, slaying it single-handedly with nothing but a slender rapier, but Krsto was a true warrior, and he knew the stark, brutal reality of the battlefield. Looking at the carcass, he didn't see the clean, precise punctures of a rapier. He saw the gaping, torn flesh of heavy ballista bolts and a dozen deep arrow wounds that had clearly brought the beast to its knees before it was ever finished off.
Blinded by a sudden spike of bitter resentment, Krsto made a fatal mistake. The truth slipped past his lips before his training could stop it. In a quiet but clear voice, he blurted out that the creature had been taken down by archers, not a rapier.
The silence that followed was suffocating. Adrien could feel the phantom chill of that moment jumping off the page. It was as if Krsto had committed regicide on the spot. He had not just called a nobleman a liar; he had humiliated the Princess's beloved in front of her entire social circle.
The aftermath was brutal. Krsto wrote down the furious words of his commanding officer, the Grand Knight, who had dragged him into the barracks immediately afterwards. The jagged, deeply pressed ink captured the sheer fury of the man screaming into Krsto's face, "How foolish could you be, Krsto?! What possessed you to speak up in front of them?! Did you not understand the concept of being invisible? Why did you point out the mistake?!"
Adrien turned the page, finding Krsto's own retrospective lament, written in a hand so shaky the letters were barely legible.
"I realised my grave error the moment the words left my mouth. The Princess did not thank me for exposing the truth. She looked at me with pure, unadulterated disgust for embarrassing her, and overnight, my fortune flipped. From a respected, rising knight to a social pariah, treated worse than a criminal. All because I dared to call out the pathetic lies of a braying, vain braggart. From that hour onward, they made my life a living hell. The court turned on me, the guards mocked me, and the Princess looked through me as if I were dirt beneath her boot. I do not know what to write anymore; the ink feels heavy, and I hate myself. I hate what I did, and most of all, I hate that I still love her."
"Damn, dude," Adrien muttered aloud to the empty room, a heavy knot forming in his throat. "That is just pure, unadulterated tragedy."
He turned the page, expecting to read more about the immediate fallout of the court's cruelty, but found only blank parchment, and he flipped through another page, and then another, but there was total silence. The empty sheets felt like a heavy, suffocating pause in Krsto's life, a representation of weeks or perhaps months spent in isolated, agonising misery.
Then, the ink returned, but the handwriting had completely changed. It was no longer the neat, disciplined script of a proud palace guard, nor the shaky lament of a heartbroken boy. It was aggressive, frantic, and deeply scratched into the paper, as if written in a desperate rush for survival.
"What a pathetic, blind fool I was," the text screamed off the page. "And now, my blind loyalty has sealed my fate. I am trapped deep within the dark belly of this cavern, entombed alongside the Princess's very own retinue."
Adrien leaned closer, his eyes scanning the chaotic lines as the story took a sudden, dark turn.
"When they called upon me again, I thought it was a miracle. I was so incredibly happy when I was told I was allowed to serve her once more, to be her shield on this expedition. My heart swelled with pathetic hope. I grew hopelessly complacent, believing my exile was over and that she had finally seen my worth, but it was a trap. It was always a trap, and now, we are all suffocating inside this cavern, completely cut off from the world, trapped by this unbreakable, cursed barrier."