The night air was a very sharp contrast to the dusty murk that was the air inside the building. Stepping out into it, Aiden inhaled deeply, like a man just leaving prison.

  “That’s good air,” he muttered under his breath.

  Behind him, Valdan and Elaswit stepped out, appreciating the air in their own ways. Valdan was more reserved about it. He inhaled quietly but Aiden heard it.

  Elaswit was a bit more vocal about hers. “Is there a reason you’ve chosen to sleep in that dust ridden place? Are we at least going to clean out a room?”

  Aiden didn’t see any reason to clean out any of the rooms. As far as he could remember, there were no rooms with actual beds. The place was not designed to be slept in, only to be worked in. Also, they only needed it for a day. Two, at the most, if his plans did not work out well.

  A lock of hair fell over his forehead, resting on his eyebrow, and he ran a hand through his hair to get rid of it. He was almost due for a haircut.

  “So, who came with my brother and his frie—” Aiden cut his question short and turned to Elaswit, remembering she’d actually asked a question that he had not answered. “We’re not cleaning the place because we won’t be here long. In fact, I don’t even think we are allowed to be here.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “I told you. Because I have some level of power over it.” Aiden’s attention then swiveled to Valdan. “So, which of the knights came with my brother and his group?”

  “Sir Thompfer,” Valdan answered.

  Aiden wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be surprised or not. With all the changes his very presence had caused, he’d expected a different knight from his past life to be here. It was odd to find the same knight had been selected by the king.

  He wondered if it was some kind of inevitability in the timeline. Did such things even exist? Where there things that regardless of what he did would not change? He remembered watching an anime once upon a time that seemed to imply such a concept.

  Don’t go taking inspiration for real life from anime, he scolded himself.

  “Do you have a way of contacting him?” he asked Valdan, his attention going to the east.

  “There is an inn he would’ve checked into. We can check it first.”

  Aiden shook his head. “No. We stick to the plan. If we can, I’d prefer we be on our way back by sunrise, latest dusk.”

  “And how do you know this plan will work?” Elaswit asked. “You seemed quite certain of it.”

  “You have doubts,” Aiden said with a tone of indifference. “Understandable. Truthfully, the plan only requires one person to carry out.”

  “It’s a three-person plan,” Elaswit pointed out, disagreeing with some heat to her voice. “It cannot require one person.”

  “One person makes it longer to execute but not impossible.” Aiden turned to face her and Valdan. “I cannot be in three places at once, but I can be in three places over a period of time.”

  Elaswit looked to Valdan in hopes of some kind of assistance, but the knight said nothing. He seemed more than content to follow Aiden’s plan.

  Such a level of dedication was something Aiden could use in this timeline. He’d had it once, when he’d been with the Order. Teammates that did not question his plans unless they were absurd and downright ludicrous. Apart from Zen, Aiden knew the rest of his teammates had not possessed blind obedience, though.

  He was their delegated leader and that was why they listened to him. As for Shewa… well, he always paid her handsomely. As a mercenary, her duty was to take his money and do her job. Regardless of what history they’d had together, she understood that. He never stiffed her on her pay or tried to pay less due to their history, and she never did less than what her job was.

  Having a companion that was willing to obey him the way Valdan displayed sounded like a good way to start his life. Sadly, with everything that had happened, Aiden knew better. Valdan would not be following him. If king Brandis had done what he’d done and the knight was still more than willing to defend him, then that said all Aiden needed to know.

  It’s not like you didn’t know he wouldn’t leave.

  Elaswit looked at Aiden then Valdan. Her eyes moved between them twice more before Aiden realized that he’d been looking at the knight.

  Shaking himself out of his thoughts, he said, “Run the plan by me once more.”

  “In details?” Elaswit asked, surprised. “That’s going to steal more of our time.”

  “Not in details. Just the main thing.”

  “I’m going to the forest,” Valdan said, summarizing his tasks to a few words. There was more to it than that. Much more.

  Elaswit folded her arms as if she was tired of just having them hang at her sides. “I’m going to the inn where Sir Thompfer is supposed to be to meet up with him and get updated.”

  “Good,” Aiden said, infecting the word with some tone of appreciation. “Valdan, the three of us will head to the forest together. Elaswit and I will leave you there and go about our own tasks.”

  “You haven’t said what you are going to be doing,” Elaswit pointed out, unhappy to have secrets kept from her.

  For someone older than him in both timelines, she seemed so young standing in front of him. Her justified reactions of annoyance and anger seemed to Aiden like childish tantrums. He had half the mind to tell her she wasn’t old enough to know what he was going to do.

  “I’m going to find my brother,” he said after a while. “Like I told you once upon a time, I have urgent business with him. Then I’ll go see the man in charge.”

  “And you think that’s a good idea?” she asked, skeptical. “Seeing the head of the town in the middle of the night.”

  “It’s actually the early hours of the morning,” Aiden corrected, not that it mattered. “And yes, it’s going to more accurately convey the importance of what we are here to do. Especially when he sees the royal pass.”

  Valdan looked at him as if he knew that there was more to it than he was saying but did not speak on the matter. This was the problem with spending too much time with a person. They ended up learning how to read you.

  “So which way’s the forest?” Valdan asked, pushing the conversation along.

  Aiden pointed east. “That way.”

  Elaswit looked in the direction he was pointing, then back at him. “You know far too much about the mission. And I don’t know what bothers me more, that you know so much or that Valdan doesn’t seem bothered by how much you know.”

  Aiden shrugged. It was all the response he had to give her.

  Since leaving the castle, he’d seen no reason to hide his capabilities any longer. All it would do was unnecessarily slow him down. He might not have addressed it for a while, but he still had so many things to do.

  He needed to know more about the people that had existed on Nastild with the [Demon King] title. Apart from the Order archives, in places that had been beyond his reach in his past life, the library of Living Truth was the only place he could think of looking for answers in on this side of Nastild.

  There was also the [Crystal of Existence] and the [Heart of Nosrath] to deal with. With every day he spent dallying, their respawn dates drew nearer. The last thing he wanted was to show up late and find out that some royal or noble lord had claimed them.

  He walked up to Elaswit and placed a hand on her shoulder. She looked at his hand, then at him. An odd expression crossed her face, as if he was acting out of place. Which he was.

  “Everything,” he said slowly, as if speaking to someone who barely understood the language being spoken, “will be clear when we get back. Until then, we need to sort this out.”

  He watched all the arguments leave her in a single breath. She deflated a little.

  “Why am I the one meeting the knight?” she muttered in a muted complain. “Wouldn’t it be better for Valdan to meet the knight?”

  Her problem wasn’t with meeting the knight. It was with the fact that to her, it didn’t seem important. There was also the part where there would most likely be no combat involved.

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  Aiden took his hand from her shoulder. “Because Valdan has the skills and level requirement for me to not be worried about him when he’s in the forest. Also, Thompfer will be more than happy to answer to you.”

  With those words, he turned around and started heading east.

  They walked for a few minutes before he remembered another key detail of their trip.

  “Also,” he announced, “we will be doing a lot of sneaking around. Elaswit, keep your cleaver on your back until you get to Thompfer.”

  “If we are sneaking around, shouldn’t I keep it hidden?”

  “Life out here isn’t as free and kind as people have been led to believe. Remember, tourists have been going missing. The last thing we want is for the princess to go missing without at least putting up a fight.”

  Elaswit reached over her shoulder with one hand and summoned her weapon. It appeared in a dazzle of muffled light, latching on to her back automatically. Aiden suspected some enchantment was in charge of the automatic latch but paid it no mind.

  True to his words, they had done more of sneaking about than walking. Buildings with lights behind their windows were avoided as best as possible. When they could not be avoided, Aiden led them in a crouched rush, raising as little dust as possible and moving as quietly as possible.

  A town like this one had no dead ends. And while they had alleyways, they didn’t feel like alleyways. Just spaces between two buildings.

  Aiden kept an eye out with each move they made. If memory served him well, the town only had two adventurers. As for their names, his memory didn’t serve him well enough to remember them.

  He remembered that they were not friendlies, though.

  The real threat, however, did not lie in the adventurers. It lay in the town chief. As for the town folks most of them had domestic classes. Lacking combat classes did not make them ignorable problems, though, the title of [Cannibal] giving them all the advantages they needed. Increased strength against opponents of the same species. Predatory perception levels when hunting their species. Increased speed.

  This was a small town of people designed to hunt and kill people by the very basis of their title.

  Luckily for Aiden and his team, not all of them had the title. But enough of them had it. And enough of them was far too many to be safe.

  After a little more than half an hour of moving Aiden pulled them to a stop. Hand raised beside his head in a fist, he signaled them to a halt. Valdan came to a stop first, tapping him on the shoulder as a sign of his arrival. Elaswit stopped next.

  They were crouched next to a residential building. Made of planks and other simple materials, it was sure to crumble under the weight of any real natural disaster from Earth.

  Aiden hugged the wall, flattening his back against it, and listened. He’d heard footsteps, then voices. It was what had stopped him.

  The voices came flowing through the air after a moment of silence, carried in the night’s gentle breeze.

  “I always said the knight was going to be a problem,” one of the voices said. It sounded angry, rumbling with a deep baritone.

  “Keep your voice down,” the second voice said. “The knight isn’t a real problem. Remember what the chief said. They’ll check, see nothing, and move on. We just gotta touch none of them.”

  “One of the kids came looking for me this afternoon, though,” the first voice offered. “Wanted me to help out of the goodness of my heart.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. Told him to fuck off.” The voice chuckled. “Then he offered money. Could’ve been the king’s bastard for all the money he seemed to have. Too bad he had one of them new age bank cards they be using outside.”

  It seemed like one of the others had tried to hire someone to help. Aiden didn’t know if someone had done something like that in his past life. If someone had, he wouldn’t be surprised that he had never been aware of it. There had been a lot of things he had never been aware of in his old life.

  “Why would they go so far?” the second voice mused. “No one’s been missing in weeks. Why would they come to you?”

  “I think they were looking for one of their own. The boy said the person went missing in the forest.”

  Aiden’s brows creased in confusion. There it was, the events changing. They had not lost someone here. Then again, he’d never killed a knight or fought a [Sage] in his past life, so he couldn’t really say he was surprised.

  And Sam hadn’t started killing until we got back from this place.

  “That makes sense,” the second voice was saying. “I remember seeing a group of them with the knight headed towards bone marrow.”

  “Bone marrow?” Elaswit’s voice was a whisper, lilting through the air to caress Aiden’s ears.

  “An inn,” Aiden said in explanation. “Valdan?”

  Valdan inched closer to him. “Yes?”

  “There’s a very high chance you’re going to run into these two in the forest.” Aiden turned and looked him in the eye. “Kill them here or kill them there. It’s up to you.”

  “Do they have to die?” Valdan asked.

  “No,” Aiden answered. “But it would be best if they did.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the sounds of footsteps. They held their tongues, unwilling to draw attention to themselves. Aiden inched backwards with every step they took as both men slowly walked into view.

  The moment Aiden saw the face of the men, he stopped moving. He knew their faces, recognized them as a child would their mother.

  “Change of plans, Valdan,” Aiden said through gritted teeth. “Their death is necessary.”

  With a sigh Valdan pulled an inch of his blade free. Aiden’s hand snapped out to stop him from drawing it completely free.

  “Not yet.” His heart beat heavily in his chest. With the weight that he always carried around in his heart since killing the man that had helped him gain the title of [Giant Slayer], it weighed a little too heavily on him. Adrenaline pumped through Aiden, begging him to take the lives of both men. He held himself tight, bound himself to the spot he stood with nothing but his will. “Chances are they’ll head to the forest. Following them might help make your task easier.”

  The two men continued walking until they were too far to make any clear details out of. They were heading east, straight for the forest.

  “Are you sure the entire town is in on what’s going on?” Elaswit asked now that the two men were out of earshot.

  “Not the entire town,” Aiden answered. “But enough of them. Those who aren’t a part of it are aware of it.”

  “Then where are the bodies? What do they use them for?”

  Aiden wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. As for Valdan, if luck smiled on him tonight, he would get the answer to that question before the sun was up.

  “Change of plans,” Aiden announced.

  Elaswit moved from where she was and grabbed his arm. “Are you sure that’s a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with the first plan.”

  “But we have a modified plan.” Aiden looked west, spotted the inn the knight, Thompfer, was supposed to be in. He hated that he didn’t know how deadly the inn was. With his free hand he pointed out the building. “You’re headed in that direction,” he told Elaswit. “That’s where Thompfer booked.”

  “How do you know this?” Elaswit asked, voice heavy with doubt and suspicion and a touch of imploration. “How do you know all these things?”

  “Ask me when you’re done with your part of the quest.” Aiden moved his attention to Valdan. The knight had his eyes fixed on the two men disappearing into the distance. “Stay on them. With the way things are going, they’ll lead you to your destination. When you find what you’re looking for, I won’t need to motivate you to kill them.”

  Valdan was already moving before he was done talking, but Aiden stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “I don’t know their classes,” he told him. “But I know that they’re both somewhere close to level fifty, and they’re both adventurers. Be careful. And if you see any creature vanish into thin air, ignore it.”

  Valdan nodded once. Then, crouched as he was, he darted into the night, tailing both men.

  “How do you know so much, Aiden?” Elaswit asked. Her voice was weak. She sounded scared… of him.

  Aiden turned and took her shoulders in both arms, fixing her in place. “You’re afraid of the wrong person, princess. You asked me what I thought about your mother before we left the capital city. Well, here’s the answer. Your mother is a good woman, but she is a terrifying woman who knows far more than you can possibly fathom.”

  Elaswit’s eyes widened in horror. “She knows about what has been happening here and did nothing?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Aiden answered, careful with his words. “She has spies everywhere, something that shouldn’t be news to you. Her spies bring information back to her. She shared some of that information with me before we left.”

  Elaswit’s shoulders began to shake. “What kind of parents do I have?” she lamented.

  Was she crying? Aiden couldn’t tell. It sounded like she was. But this was no time for tears.

  “You are a princess,” he told her. “You do not have the luxury of having normal parents. Your parents are monarchs. By that simple virtue, the world cannot allow them to be normal, if not they will succumb to the world. They will possess good and evil and make mistakes. Your job is to learn and accept them.”

  Valdan and the men he was tailing had vanished out of sight now. Gone like the wind. Aiden doubted he would be able to see them even under a perception enchantment.

  “Do what you have to do, Elaswit,” he said to the princess. “You’ve come here to live a life outside the control of your parents. This is what that kind of life is. You listen to those who know and learn until you become one of those who know.”

  Elaswit sniffled once, handling the discovery of just how dangerous her mother was well. She was still young. Despite whatever it was she had gone through, she was just a sheltered girl. Unlike most women her age, her shelter simply extended from one house to an entire kingdom.

  With a single nod, Elaswit turned and left Aiden. Crouched low, she headed in the direction of the inn she was supposed to find Thompfer in. Aiden knew she wasn’t going to find the knight there.

  In his past life, they’d spent their first two to three days investigating the forest during the day. When they had found nothing to go on, they’d gone to the forest at night. That was when they had seen the strangest things. Disappearing goblins. Moving footprints without bodies.

  They’d never found an explanation for the disappearing goblins. Since no one had ever been ambushed by any of the disappearing goblin, they didn’t let it bother them too much.

  Watching Elaswit sneak through the buildings, Aiden almost felt bad for leading her astray. She would walk into the inn and ask for the knight only to be told that he was most likely not around. But keeping her out of direct danger was all Aiden could do for her.

  He hoped she would be fine. As for her forgiveness for keeping her out of harm’s way, it was unimportant. After all, this would most likely be the last place they would see each other.

  Rising to his full height, Aiden stepped out into the open. Now that he was alone, he had no interest in hiding. Senseless violence wasn’t going to do him much good since he was currently at level forty-nine. Whatever he did, he would not level up until he created a manifesting skill.

  As for his manifesting skill, he had been giving it some thought. In his past life, he’d developed something of a boring manifesting skill. [Enchanter’s Domain] it had been called. It increased the effects of enchantments cast around him and by him when it was active by at least two folds. It also allowed him to manipulate the effect of any enchantments he activated, pushing them beyond their limits or suppressing an opponent’s exponentially. He just needed to know what the enchantment did to affect it.

  If his opponent used an [Enchantment of Lesser Madness], his manifesting skill allowed him to limit its range or just how much chaos the enchantment caused. It was useful in its own way, but Aiden had no interest in it in this life.

  What he wanted this time around was a more combat oriented manifesting skill. Something that played a very active role in a fight not a support role. He already knew how to gain the skill. What he needed was the right situation to develop it.

  A fight against cannibals was certainly not the right situation.

  “Well, let’s get this over with,” he muttered to himself as he walked out into the open town.

  It was time to go visit the head of the operation, a man he had dreamt of killing for a few months before forgetting about it in his past life.

  It was time to go have a chat with the town chief.

  Senseless violence would be of no benefit to him, but nobody said anything about reasonable violence.

  Sometimes to solve a problem you just had to kill the right person.