"Me? You're recruiting me?"
The words slipped from my lips—a frozen whisper, barely more than a ghost in the air. Inside my skull, my thoughts exploded like a night market struck by lightning. Recruit me? For what? To be the honorary mascot for some ragtag beggars' guild?
My fingers, once relaxed, now stood rigid atop the table, as if pinned there by invisible frost.
"Uh, maybe you've got the wrong person?" I tried to laugh it off, but what came out was a dry, pitiful click of my tongue.
"Oh, we're not mistaken," Hozi replied, his tone light as a feather but the word heavy as a gravestone. The fork in his hand spun with a dancer's grace, catching the dim lamp's glow. "Fionn mac Cumhaill. Golden hair, sapphire eyes. The guide who led heroes into the Heart of Wetlands dungeon—including Kaleb, crown prince of Tytoal-ba."
Each word was a nail hammered into my coffin.
He leaned in, a sly glint flickering in his eyes. "You led them in, and walked out as the only one still breathing."
Gulp. Swallowing felt like forcing down a mouthful of sand. Sweat trickled down my temple, turning into a wild little river that soaked the tips of my hair.
"Ironic, isn't it?" Hozi chuckled softly. "Especially since they weren't just some dime-a-dozen heroes. The Fiammie siblings—their names alone can shake the Continent. Especially Dunoa, rumored to be an Archiveline of Ashen—an existence so rare, even brushing against their system is nearly impossible."
My world shrank, collapsing to the size of a needle's eye. I could only sit there, petrified.
"Sophia Aecundus, the Queen of Proserpine Garden," he continued, as if reciting the world's deadliest shopping list. "I can only imagine the chaos among her loyalists now. Their queen vanished, her fate a mystery. Who knows what's become of their organization?"
"Not to mention Kaleb," Hozi went on, his voice trailing like a shadow at dusk. "He was the one who brought those heroes together, and his loss struck the Tytoal-ba council harder than a hammer to the heart—especially considering the way he died…"
He let the words hang in the air, heavy and unspoken.
"They're scrambling to pin Kaleb's death on the Wetlands," Hozi continued, a bitter edge curling his lips. "Especially now that they know someone made it out alive."
He let out a dramatic sigh. "Ah, we'd be here all night if we tried to dissect every hero's backstory. The point is—they're regarded as the most powerful Archiveline around these days. At least, as far as we know."
Hozi paused deliberately, letting a deafening silence gnaw at me. I glanced at Castenyan and Cella. The laid-back aura they'd worn earlier was nothing but a cheap mask; now both of them watched me with the calm intensity of predators who'd finally cornered their prey. The air around us thickened, turning to jelly, ready to swallow me whole.
"I…" My voice caught in my throat. My thumb reflexively scraped the last bits of marrow from the chicken bone on my plate.
Then Hozi dropped his final bombshell.
"We've already checked the dungeon."
"You—WHAT?!"
The words hit me like an invisible hurricane. My chair jerked backward with a harsh scrape, nearly sending me sprawling to the floor.
"They were all dead—horribly so, from what we saw," Cella cut in, her tone flat as if she were reading the weather report. "Entrails and body parts scattered everywhere, like bloody confetti. Especially Kaleb and Dunoa—you could barely tell which pieces belonged to whom."
"The most logical hypothesis: the dungeon boss who guarding that dungeon is an anomaly of power," Castenyan added, his analysis as cold and precise as ever. "A walking catastrophe, strong enough to massacre eight cross-continental heroes as if they were nothing but a flock of lambs."
"What… what do you mean you checked that dungeon?" My voice trembled. Goosebumps prickled my arms, standing up like a miniature forest of spears. Cold sweat began to flood my pores, and the floor beneath my shoes felt like it was turning to jelly.
Cella shot Hozi a sideways glance, one eyebrow arched. "Hey, Hozi. You said he was smart. So why's he asking questions with such obvious answers?"
I tuned her out. My throat tightened as I managed, "How many… how many did you count in there?"
Silence. Three pairs of eyes fixed on me as if I'd just sprouted a second head. I could almost feel a giant, invisible question mark hovering over our dinner table.
"Ten," Cella finally replied, breaking the hush. "Ten bodies. Every hero who went in, Kaleb and his assistant—none made it out alive."
Ten. My heart seemed to forget how to beat for a few seconds. My mind raced in wild circles. That means… they didn't find the real Fionn's corpse? How is that possible? I was a hundred percent sure his body was still rotting in there!
"Cornering me like this won't get you anywhere!" I snapped. "You don't have a single shred of evidence pointing to me!"
"Oh, no one's accusing you, Fionn," Hozi said, shrugging nonchalantly. "Jumping to the conclusion that you're the culprit would be a leap of logic worthy of a madman. That's just an unfounded assumption." He smiled—a fox's grin, the kind you'd expect from someone who just found the key to the henhouse.
"You're an Archiveline, aren't you? Which system did you choose? What exactly did you witness in there?"
The question scrambled my thoughts like eggs in a pan. Archiveline? That strange word had been buzzing in my ears like a mosquito all this time. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Escaping the deadliest dungeon in the world—the oldest, most legendary dungeon said to have stood since the very first Echoes—that's not just dumb luck," Hozi pressed on, his tone now sweet as honey. "That's a monumental feat. The kind of achievement that could earn you eternal glory."
"Could he have entered the System of Specialist? A Archiveline of Guide, perhaps?" Castenyan mused, his eyes sizing me up. "That's one of the rarest Archiveline, especially since the activation potion's ingredients are so hard to come by."
Their conversation was spiraling into the absurd. A storm of foreign terminology from far-off lands battered my eardrums without mercy. My fingers spun the chicken bone on my plate at a frantic pace—a panicked outlet as I realized all three pairs of eyes were now locked on me with the intensity of hawks zeroing in on their prey.
"I… honestly don't understand any of this," I finally muttered, bowing my head.
"Nee, Hozi, his wordplay is getting boring," Cella sighed. "Can I just torture this bastard already?" A kunai materialized in her hand. She tossed it into the air and caught it again with practiced ease. a simple gesture, but one that promised a world of pain.
THUD!
Panic was the ejection button. I shot to my feet so fast my thigh slammed into the underside of the table with a bone-rattling crack. My chair skidded back and crashed to the floor with a deafening bang. In an instant, all of us were on high alert. The air in the room crackled with static, so charged that a single wrong move could turn this tidy home into a battlefield.
"Threats are pointless!" I shouted, my voice cracking. "I don't have any information! I don't even know who I am!"
Damn. Damn it. Damn it all! My traitorous tongue had just spilled my biggest secret.
Hozi's eyes widened for a split second before he glanced at Castenyan. The well-endowed woman simply shook her head—a slow gesture that, bizarrely, made her ample assets quiver ever so slightly. Seriously, even in a crisis like this, my eyes still managed a quick pilgrimage.
Screw it. If only I could summon Erin's pitch-black orb right now, at least I'd have a trump card to make me feel a little safer. Damn that kid—still sleeping like the dead. It's been three days already.
My heart exploded in my chest. Every muscle fiber in my legs screamed a single word: RUN. I was already bracing myself to bolt like an arrow from a bow when, in a split second that seemed to freeze time, Hozi raised a hand. Not to attack, but in a peaceful gesture of surrender. And then, that smile bloomed across his face—wide, cheerful, and completely out of place, as if we'd just finished sharing a joke.
"The past belongs in the past, don't you think?" he said brightly. And just like that, all three of them sat back down as if nothing had happened. The conflict that had nearly set this place ablaze seconds ago vanished as if it had never existed.
My brain, which had just been primed for a fight to the death, now crashed into a fatal error. Confusion was written all over my face, impossible to hide. With a stiff, barely-restrained motion, I yanked my chair back into place and dropped into it. "Who… who are you people, really?"
Hozi speared a chunk of chicken, munching away with a grin. "Us?" He waggled his eyebrows. "Think of us as the world's mess cleaners. We mop up trouble, stir the pot, and swipe a few snacks while no one's looking. Sometimes we help the little guy, sometimes we knock the big guys off their fancy chairs. Keeps things interesting, you know?"
So… are these people supposed to be heroes wannabe?
"I am proud to call us…" Hozi suddenly leapt to his feet, spreading his arms wide like an eagle's wings, his face beaming as if he were unveiling his life's masterpiece to the world.
"Awesome City Club."
Silence.
A name so painfully bad, it almost hurt to hear it.
There was a soft thud as Cella jabbed her elbow hard into Hozi's ribs. "I told you never to use that ridiculous name in front of anyone!"
For once, I was a hundred percent on her side.
"Hmph! You're just jealous because you don't have a shred of artistic spirit!" Hozi grumbled, but sat back down. "It's a leader's duty to give his team a grand name!"
"Please forgive this man's idiocy." Castenyan let out a long, suffering sigh—a sigh that spoke of years of enduring nonsense. I tuned out Hozi's muffled complaints in the background. "Among a select few, we're known as… the Fianna."
"Fianna?" The name sounded ancient, echoing with a strange weight on my tongue.
"Fianna is a legacy. It's a group name that may be as old as the continent itself—no one really knows when it first appeared," Castenyan explained, her tone turning serious. "But the lineage of every leader is carved forever into the Stone we keep at Dún Baoiscne."
She paused, her eyes locking onto mine. "Each generation has its own leader and members, sometimes even a different name. Only the very first called themselves Fianna, literally. The rest of us… our existence is little more than a whisper in history.
"And our leader," Castenyan continued, her voice dropping an octave, "in every generation, inherits both an honor and a curse: The Wild Hunt. It's a title every Fianna Captain must bear. They work behind the scenes, quietly steering fate to protect the world. Yet, that same power makes them a double-edged sword—just as capable of saving everything as they are of bringing it all crashing down."
A history lesson, out of nowhere? And this guy is supposed to be the leader of some legendary group? The captain of Fianna? The Wild Hunt himself? What kind of absurdity is this? The world must be drunk off its head.
Hozi snapped me out of my daze with a lopsided, cheeky grin. "Long story short," he said, "we're just folks who play at being heroes. Hired hands, really. People pay us to rough up the villains so the nice, boring people can go back to their nice, boring lives. Everybody wins, right?"
"So… you're fake heroes?" I asked, the words tasting strange in my mouth.
"I don't mind that label." A crooked smile slid onto Hozi's face. "'Fake heroes' actually nails our essence perfectly. We are what we are."
"And… you want to recruit me into this circus?"
"Exactly," Hozi replied. "Anyone who can walk out of a hellhole like the Heart of Wetlands alive is proof you're not just some ordinary human. Plus, that battered old book of yours looks pretty interesting, too."
He paused, his grin fading, replaced by a stare so sharp I felt like a specimen pinned to a display board.
A chill crept down my spine, making the hairs on my neck stand on end.
"And most important of all…" Hozi's voice dropped to a whisper—intimate, yet edged with threat.
"I'm… extremely curious about you."