Chapter 114: Firelight and Fallen Giants

  The fire crackled to life, a defiant orange eye in the vast, dark pin. Grok had produced a small pot and was now tending to a stew, the rich aroma of herbs and dried meat beginning to unfurl into the cool air. It smelled good. Too good, maybe, for a camp this close to the Edelmere's whispering edge. But my mind wasn't on monsters drawn by scent. It was on the numbers.

  287:59:59... 58... 57...

  Thirty-two hours. One full, long, relentless day of this world had bled away since I accepted the quest. Nine more stretched ahead, each one a thirty-two hour marathon of tension and danger. I'd been here almost two months, and my body had adapted to the rhythm, but my soul still sometimes counted in twenty-four hour segments. I’d catch myself thinking, It’s getting te, only to realize the sun had hours left to set. This wasn't Earth. This was a pce of longer shadows, deeper nights, and a technology tree that had taken a hard left at "magic" instead of "internal combustion."

  No guns. No electricity. But they had steam engines on some of the major trade routes, and magic stones powered everything from streetmps in rich districts to the enchantments on high-end armor. It was a weird, anachronistic blend of 19th-century aesthetics with a fantastical power grid.

  I watched Grok stir the pot, his movements economical. Lashley and Neralia had moved a short distance away, their heads close together, speaking in low, intense tones I couldn't make out. The story I’d told had done its work. The brittle, performative anger was gone, repced by a sullen, thoughtful silence. They were seeing the gulf now, and it made them wary.

  But the story had stirred something in me, too. A loose thread, frayed and nagging.

  I stood up, the firelight painting long, dancing shadows behind me. I walked over and crouched by the fmes, the heat welcome on my face. The twins stopped talking and looked at me.

  I didn't preamble. "What do you two know about Freya?"

  Lashley's head snapped up. His expression shifted from thoughtful to something sharper, more possessive. "Why do you ask about her?" The jealousy in his voice was so thick you could spread it on bread.

  "I'm just curious," I said, keeping my tone neutral, poking the edge of the fire with a stick. "A normal city guard, a knight-captain, sure. But she's in meetings with the Guild Master and the City Lord like she's part of the furniture. She seems... close to your family. I'm just trying to understand the board I'm pying on."

  Neralia studied me, her earlier haughtiness repced by a calcuting look. "It's not really about Freya herself," she said, answering when Lashley seemed too tangled in his own green-eyed reaction to speak. "It's about who her father is."

  I frowned. "Erik? What does the innkeeper have to do with any of this?" Even as I said it, the memory surfaced. Erik in the City Lord's study after the beast invasion, not as a servant, but as a presence. The easy, grim camaraderie with Boromir. I'd written it off as an old soldier's connection, but maybe it was more.

  The twins exchanged a long look, a silent debate about my worthiness. Lashley finally let out a long, exasperated sigh, as if expining the sky was blue to a particurly dense child.

  "Only a complete foreigner wouldn't know about Erik," he said, his voice ced with condescension. "But even in nearby kingdoms, he is a famous man."

  Neralia nodded. "Erik the Red, he was called. Back in the day."

  My stick paused in the fire. The Red? I pictured the tall, skinny, perpetually unimpressed barkeep. The name didn't fit. At all.

  "Former S-Css adventurer," Lashley continued, watching my face for a reaction. "Arguably the strongest adventurer the Rostalio Kingdom has produced in the st hundred years."

  A cold trickle, unreted to the night air, went down my spine. S-Css. The pinnacle. The people who dealt with continent-level threats. The Iron Fangs were A-Css, and they had erased a small army of magic beasts with a single spell. What did an S-Css do?

  "Especially after the events five years ago," Neralia added, her voice dropping slightly. "The incident that made him a national hero."

  "A national hero?" The words felt absurd in my mouth. Erik, who poured my whiskey and told me I smelled like a corpse, a national hero?

  Lashley stared at me, genuine confusion breaking through his annoyance. "Were you living under a rock? How can you not know what happened five years ago?"

  "I'm from very, very far away," I said, which was technically true. It was the truest thing I'd said all night.

  Lashley took another exhausted sigh, as if the weight of my ignorance was a physical burden. He leaned forward, the firelight carving his features into sharp relief.

  "About twenty-five years ago," he began, "the Vermillion Empire was on another of its periodic attempts to expand beyond the Edelmere. They wanted a foothold on this part of the continent, the part that the forest has always shielded from them. The war was brutal for Rostalio. We held, but just barely. Mountains of casualties. Then, five years ago..."

  He paused, gathering the story. "The Empire made a trade deal with the Mevrao Kingdom, south of us. To make it official, they sent a pair of Magic Knights."

  I blinked. "Magic Knights? They sent two diplomats with a fancy title?"

  Neralia let out a sharp, bitter ugh. "Diplomats? A Magic Knight is the equivalent of a natural disaster. One is able to take on an entire army by himself. They are said to be ten times the power of an S-Css adventurer."

  The numbers meant nothing, but the scale clicked into a terrifying pce. The Iron Fangs were a localized cataclysm. A Magic Knight was a walking extinction event.

  "It was the first time since the war sixty years ago, since Fort Defal fell, that two Magic Knights had set foot in this corner of the continent," Lashley continued. "Our king... was paranoid. Scarred by the old wars. He saw it not as diplomacy, but as the precursor to an invasion. He sent an army. Ten thousand soldiers. To intercept two men."

  Ten thousand. The number hung in the air, grotesque. "Why would he send ten thousand for only two men?" I asked, dread coiling in my gut.

  "Because two was all it took," Lashley said, his voice hollow. "Of those ten thousand men, only five hundred survived. The rest were... erased. Not defeated. Erased. They only survived because Erik the Red was there. He held off both Magic Knights, somehow, long enough for the remnants to escape with their lives."

  The image was impossible to reconcile. The nky innkeeper, matching blows with beings that could shatter armies. Holding a line against two walking apocalypses.

  "Because of that," Neralia said quietly, "Erik is now a shell of his former self. Holding off two Magic Knights... it did something to him. Broke something fundamental. When the dust settled, it was Erik who was recognized by the kingdom. Given honors, a pension, his pick of anywhere to retire. He chose to open an inn in a frontier city. No one knows why. That's why Freya, his daughter, has known important people from the cradle. She grew up in the shadow of a fallen giant."

  I stared into the fire, the fmes blurring. A national hero. A broken S-Css. A man who had faced down two living natural disasters to save five hundred souls.

  And the System didn't care.

  The System's focus, its inexplicable priority, had been Freya. Protect Freya Mikaelson. Not "beware of her father, the living legend." Not "align yourself with Erik the Red." Freya.

  It made the mystery deeper, more unsettling. Erik was a piece of history, a powerful, wounded relic. But Freya was the key to something. A trigger. A destiny. Or a weakness.

  And I had been casually calling him "Erik," compining about my training, accepting his drinks and his dry, fatherly advice. I’d been bantering with a monument.

  Grok grunted, announcing the stew was ready. The smell was heavenly. But my appetite was gone, repced by a cold, calcuting reassessment of every interaction I'd had under that roof.

  The fire popped, sending a shower of sparks into the dark. The countdown glowed, indifferent to fallen heroes and their daughters.

  287:41:22... 21... 20...

  We had nine days left. And I was only just beginning to understand how deep the game ran.

  Toshiro98