[Claude POV]
The imposing architecture of Milshion rose around us as we entered the capital of the Holy Millis Kingdom. Whitewashed buildings gleamed in the sunlight, their spires reaching toward the heavens like prayers made manifest.
The scent of incense hung in the air—sweet, cloying, and faintly oppressive—mingling with the ordinary smells of any large settlement: sweat, livestock, and commerce.
I found myself withdrawing inward, my consciousness sorting through memory fragments that didn't quite belong to me.
In one timeline, this place had been a site of profound disappointment for Rudeus. In another, it represented a turning point where paths diverged irrevocably. The contradictions made my temples throb with a dull, persistent ache.
"Hey, Claude, what are you doing?"
Rudeus' voice seemed to come from far away, despite him walking beside me. I ignored him, my mind preoccupied with the inevitable confrontation that awaited him. The memory of a different Claude—the third variant whose experiences flickered within my consciousness—provided fragments of knowledge about this timeline.
Paul would be here. They would fight. Some things seemed fixed across all timelines, immutable despite my interventions.
There were numerous things I wished to change during our journey—butterfly wings I longed to set in motion—but the weight of causality pressed down upon my shoulders like a physical burden.
I can't.
The thought manifested with crushing certainty. The main timeline exerted a gravitational pull that was nearly impossible to escape.
Even with my foreknowledge and careful manipulations, the story clung stubbornly to its ordained path.
There would be variations—ripples caused by my presence—but the fundamental course remained largely unchanged.
Rudeus continued speaking, his words an unintelligible buzz against the roar of conflicting memories in my mind. His expression shifted from curiosity to concern as I remained unresponsive.
Finally, when his insistent voice threatened to draw unwanted attention from passers-by, I reached out and clamped my hand over his mouth.
My fingers pressed against his face with perhaps more force than necessary, a physical manifestation of my internal frustration.
"What?" I snapped, irritation bleeding into my tone.
Rudeus pried my fingers from his mouth, his eyes widening slightly at my uncharacteristic aggression. "We've arrived at the inn already!"
I blinked, reality reasserting itself around me. We stood before a modest establishment, its wooden sign swinging gently in the breeze.
The building was two stories tall with whitewashed walls that had begun to yellow with age. Small, diamond-paned windows reflected the late afternoon sunlight.
Focus. Stay present. I chided myself silently. I needed to maintain awareness of my surroundings rather than obsessing over Geese's presence and the fragments of knowledge his association with the Human God stirred within me.
Geese wasn't a threat at this moment—quite the opposite. He would be an invaluable source of information regarding Zenith's eventual location.
My irrational aversion to him could jeopardize our mission if I allowed it to dictate my actions.
Eris pushed past us with characteristic impatience, her red hair catching the sunlight like copper flame. Ruijerd followed close behind, his tall form and distinctive green hair drawing wary glances from passers-by.
The stigma of the Superd race was evident even here, in hushed whispers and averted gazes.
I released Rudeus, watching as he hurried to catch up with Eris. They disappeared into the inn's shadowed interior, leaving Geese and me momentarily alone outside.
"You two are close," Geese observed, a knowing smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.
I shrugged, feigning nonchalance despite the tension coiling within me. "Well, he's my childhood friend, after all. There's no way I will be far from him."
"Not many childhood ties can last, you know?" Geese's expression softened with something resembling nostalgia. "Even my party members lived their own lives after the party disbanded." A shadow of melancholy crossed his features—genuine emotion from a man known for his duplicity in other timeline fragments.
"Well, that's what life is," I replied, surprised by the philosophical tone that emerged unbidden. "Partings will be another kind of bond by themselves. As long as you still maintain a good relationship with each other, you can still meet and greet new people along the way. Won't that be more amusing?"
Geese studied me with new interest, his head tilted slightly to one side. "Hahaha, I sometimes doubt you were a child, like Rudeus and Eris."
His words struck uncomfortably close to the truth. I wasn't merely a child—I was a convergence point of multiple lives, a collection of fragments assembled into something approximating a coherent identity.
"Want to try being sent to a dungeon for seven months and survive there?" I asked, my tone deliberately light despite the weight of the memory.
The Nightmare Dungeon had tested me beyond endurance, forcing adaptation and growth that no child should undergo.
"Hah, no thanks," Geese replied with a chuckle that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Surely, I would die on the first night."
I studied him as we finally entered the inn together. He was someone genuinely pleasant in many ways—affable, intelligent, resourceful.
In another life, another circumstance, I might have welcomed his friendship without reservation.
He's someone nice.
The thought emerged with startling clarity.
I know that, but someone like him is easily used by the bad guys...
And wasn't that the true tragedy? Good people, manipulated by forces they couldn't comprehend.
Pawns moved across a cosmic chessboard by divine hands that cared nothing for individual suffering.
As we entered the common room of the inn, with its low-beamed ceiling and smell of stale beer, I resolved to moderate my antipathy toward Geese.
Practicality demanded cooperation, regardless of my instinctive aversion to his connection with the Human God.
Some battles couldn't be fought yet. Some knowledge was best kept hidden behind a facade of ordinary childhood friendship.
For now.
[Somar POV]
The Holy Millis Kingdom gleamed with religious fervor and architectural grandeur that belied the rot festering within its shadowed corners.
I took in my surroundings with eyes trained to notice details others overlooked—a skill honed through necessity and one man's ruthless tutelage.
I am Somar.
Out of the three of us—Mike, Claude, and myself—I am the most normal. In any story, I would be your average background character, unremarkable and easily forgotten. Just another face in the crowd, destined for neither greatness nor infamy.
Well, leaving that aside.
After we bullied Sylphy and were subsequently thrashed by Rudeus, we returned to our homes in shame. That's when my mother seized the opportunity to ingratiate herself with Paul, shifting blame to Rudeus for his "excessive" retaliation. The fact that my wounds—the worst among us—came primarily from Claude's intervention is something I cannot deny, though my mother conveniently overlooked this detail.
My mother's infatuation with Paul continued until the day he was discovered cheating with his maid.
Only then did her lingering affection finally wither, prompting her to redirect her attention toward my father—a man who had watched from the sidelines with quiet desperation.
Despite his rural upbringing and simple ways, my father adored my mother with a devotion that bordered on worship.
He would have done anything for her—indeed, had done everything within his power—often at the expense of his relationship with me.
After the incident with Paul, I noticed a subtle shift. My father began spending more time in my company. His affection for my mother hadn't diminished, but he had placed boundaries around it, containing it like a dangerous fire that had once threatened to consume him.
His disappointment in her behavior had created a distance he couldn't quite bridge, despite his lingering love.
Thus, he turned to me—not out of sudden paternal devotion, but as an escape from his marital disillusionment.
We forged a tentative bond in the workshop, his callused hands guiding mine as he taught me the carpenter's trade that had sustained our family for generations.
Then Claude happened.
His unexpected elevation to the position of youngest village guardian in Buena's history made me acutely aware of my own mediocrity.
While he ascended to unprecedented heights, I remained firmly on the ground, exceptional only in my ordinariness.
That realization drove me deeper into my father's craft. If I couldn't match Claude's martial prowess or Rudeus' magical talent, perhaps I could find purpose in creating rather than destroying.
Months passed in relative peace before Claude unleashed his particular brand of tyranny upon the village children.
Under the pretense of "training," he instituted a regimen so brutal that it would have made military drill instructors blanch.
"Run! Claude is here!" The warning would echo through the village streets, sending children scattering like frightened birds.
I found myself, improbably, assuming leadership of this chaotic retreat. Children both older and younger looked to me for direction as we fled Claude's approaching shadow.
His training methods bordered on sadistic. We ran circuits around the village until our lungs burned and our legs trembled.
We swung wooden swords until blisters formed, burst, and reformed on our palms. When we finally dragged ourselves home, exhausted beyond measure, our parents would simply smile, tend to our wounds, and whisper ominously about the dangers that lurked beyond our village—slave traders who preyed on untrained, unprepared children.
Damn it, what did he do to our parents?
Their complicity in our torture was perhaps more bewildering than Claude's brutality itself.
Thus, the Coalition of Buena Village Children was born—a resistance movement formed in the shadow of our oppressor.
We met in secret, pooling our meager resources and collective intelligence to defy Claude's tyrannical regime.
As the coalition's reluctant leader, I immersed myself in the art of espionage. We studied stealth, observation, and covert communication—skills that would later prove more valuable than any of us could have anticipated.
The irony, of course, was that Claude's brutal training provided the very foundation for our resistance against him.
Months of his grueling regimen had forged us into something resembling competence.
"Delta, what's the current target location?" I whispered into a hollow reed—our primitive communication device—from my position behind old man Garan's storage shed.
"He's currently supervising the road's construction," came the hushed reply. "He's been diligently following his daily schedule. Delta, over."
"Alpha confirmed. Go and hide now."
"Delta confirmed."
Thanks to Claude's merciless training, we developed almost preternatural awareness of our surroundings.
We could detect his presence within a thirty-meter radius—a skill that allowed us to vanish before he became aware of our surveillance.
Usually.
"Teta here... HELP!!!"
The panicked cry shattered our carefully maintained silence. Another comrade fallen to Claude's uncanny perception.
"Alpha to all, run for your life! Claude has got Teta!"
We didn't always succeed in evading him. For every victory we claimed, Claude seemed to grow more perceptive, more cunning—as if our resistance was itself another form of training he had orchestrated.
The only respite came during his periodic journeys to Roa with Mike. Those blessed days of freedom were treasured like precious jewels, allowing our battered bodies and spirits to recover before the next round of "training" began.
Throughout this ordeal, we studied relentlessly. Claude had, inexplicably, written and distributed a comprehensive text on espionage tactics and evasion techniques—a book that became our resistance bible.
Even more strangely, he periodically "misplaced" journals detailing our weaknesses, predictable hiding spots, and suggestions for improvement.
With the clarity of hindsight, I now recognize the elaborate game he was playing. His seemingly contradictory actions—training us mercilessly while simultaneously providing the tools to resist that training—served a single purpose that none of us could have foreseen.
His damn mind is too insidious...
To think that he had prepared us for what was to come—had known, somehow, that we would need these skills to survive.
The day of the teleportation catastrophe arrived without warning. Brilliant light engulfed Buena Village, and in an instant, everything familiar vanished.
I found myself stumbling on unfamiliar cobblestones, the air thick with strange scents and the cacophony of unfamiliar voices.
Disoriented but not paralyzed, I watched as more people materialized around me—victims of the same mysterious phenomenon that had torn me from home.
We stood in what appeared to be a town square, surrounded by buildings constructed in an architectural style I had never seen before.
Drawing upon Claude's ruthless lessons, I suppressed my panic and assessed the situation. Information gathering took precedence over emotional reaction.
This place, I soon discovered, was a den of iniquity within the supposedly pious Holy Kingdom of Millis—a criminal enclave where illicit trades flourished beneath a veneer of religious propriety. The air reeked of unwashed bodies, spilled alcohol, and fear.
Horror seized me when I spotted familiar faces in the slave market—children from Buena Village, including several coalition members, displayed like livestock.
Yet amid their terror, I noted with pride that code-name Beta maintained his composure, his eyes scanning continuously for opportunities.
Using our secret communication methods, we exchanged information. Beta had already infiltrated the slavers' operation, gathering intelligence that would prove crucial in the coming days.
Armed with knowledge and desperation, we exploited vulnerabilities in the slave market's security.
The ensuing chaos allowed us to free not only our fellow villagers but also numerous beast-race children who had been kidnapped from the Great Forest.
It took three grueling months to systematically dismantle the criminal operations that plagued this shadow city.
During that time, we learned the Beast God's language from our rescued allies—another tool in our expanding arsenal.
Information is knowledge. Knowledge is power. Know thy foe and thyself, and you can win every battle.
Claude's words, inscribed in the book that had once seemed like nothing more than a cruel joke, now guided our every move.
They became our mantra, our north star in a world turned upside down.
By the fourth month of our displacement, we had established a rudimentary information guild within the criminal city—a network of observers, messengers, and operators who systematically identified victims, tracked criminal movements, and orchestrated rescue operations.
Day by day, we located more children from Buena Village. Each reunion strengthened our resolve and expanded our capabilities.
What had begun as a desperate bid for survival evolved into something more purposeful—a shadow organization dedicated to protecting the vulnerable in a city where official justice turned a blind eye.
Even now, as our network grows and our influence extends throughout the criminal underbelly of Milshion, we continue to gather information and save those who cannot save themselves.
The irony isn't lost on me. Claude's tyranny—his insistence on training us beyond the breaking point—had prepared us for exactly this moment.
Had he known? Had he somehow foreseen the catastrophe that would scatter us across the continent?
These questions plague me during quiet moments, but I push them aside in favor of more immediate concerns.
There will be time for answers when we find our way home—if such a thing is still possible.
For now, we continue to build our information network, slowly wresting control of the criminal city from the shadows.
What began as survival has transformed into a mission—one that might never have been possible without the cruel lessons of the boy who had seemed to be nothing more than a childhood tormentor.
Perhaps I am not so ordinary after all.
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