3. The Strangers
Two days.
Silas had been walking for two days without stopping, without sleeping, without eating or drinking a single thing. For anyone else, that would have meant cracked lips and trembling legs and a mind that had started bargaining with itself. But Silas fed himself the way a fire feeds itself—from within. His own spiritual force moved through him in a slow, steady current, replacing what his body needed, keeping the machine running. It wasn't comfortable. It was simply sufficient.
The landscape had shifted around him without his particular interest. Dark woodland had replaced the open terrain of the orc settlement, the trees growing denser and older the further he walked, their roots buckling the earth beneath his boots. He didn't know where he was going. He knew only that standing still felt like an invitation.
He stopped.
The silence that rushed in to fill the absence of his footsteps wasn't quite silence at all. The trees breathed around him, leaves turning against each other in a low, restless rustle. His eyes stayed forward.
His right arm extended to the side without hurry, without looking.
There was a sound—a sudden displacement of air, a yelp cutting through the trees from some distance away—and then a boy materialized in his grip. Small, maybe nine or ten, wearing clothes that had been washed and rewashed until the fabric had given up its original color entirely. Silas's fingers closed around his neck, not tight enough to stop breath, tight enough to stop argument.
"Ah! Momma!"
Silas didn't look at him.
A woman pushed through the treeline. She was pregnant—heavily, uncomfortably so, her belly straining against a frame that didn't look built to carry it. She held a single-barrel shotgun leveled at him, both hands white-knuckled on the stock. Her eyes were wild and fixed and utterly certain in the way only a mother's eyes got when something had her child.
She looked into his eyes and whatever she'd been preparing to say died in her throat.
His eyes were gold. Vacant and luminous and entirely without warmth, like looking into the eyes of something that had once been a person and had since become something else entirely.
She threw the shotgun.
"Let him go!"
"𝑰𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈."
The thought moved through him quietly, unhurried. He could see it—the aura of it, the invisible current of spiritual energy that moved through her like heat shimmer off summer asphalt. It was in the boy too. And in the shapes still hidden back in the trees, crouched and holding their breath and thinking they were invisible. He could feel every one of them.
None of them should have had this. Not at this level atleast. Regular humans didn't carry energy like this. Neither did mutants, as a rule. One had to build up to it, master one's soul. Whatever these people were, they were something he found intriguing.
"Giving you five seconds," he said, his voice flat and without performance, "to call the rest out. Or he dies."
He pressed his fingers in.
The boy screamed.
"Okay, okay! Just—please—"
"One."
The pain hit him before the word was fully out. Sharp and specific, seated in his chest, not the body's pain but something older. He knew this feeling. He'd felt it in moments he'd spent years burying—moments from before, from the life that existed prior to imprisonment, when he'd still been capable of something resembling softness. He hadn't missed those moments. He hadn't let himself.
"Two—"
"Stop!"
A bearded man crashed out of the undergrowth with the energy of someone who'd argued with himself right up until the last second. Behind him came a teenage girl, long-limbed and sharp-eyed, and two men who moved identically—twins, both raising rifles as they stepped clear of the trees.
"There. We're all out now, plea—"
"Three."
The silence that followed was the kind people made when they couldn't believe what they'd just heard.
"Son of a bitch," one of the twins said, his voice climbing. "We'll blow your fucking head off."
"And I'll snap his neck before you do." Silas's tone didn't change. He might have been discussing weather. "Stop playing games and step out."
The leaves directly behind him moved.
In the same instant, Silas turned—the boy swinging with him, repositioned, held now as a shield—and a blade passed through the space his spine had occupied half a second earlier. And right there, a man holding it stopped his lunge mid-follow-through, sword arm fully extended, and stared.
The armor was a patchwork of materials—steel plates over leather, sections of something scaled and dark that Silas recognized as dragon hide, metal gauntlets that had seen serious use. The face behind the sword was still and controlled in a way that took training to achieve. Blue eyes, pale and sharp, moved from Silas's face down to the boy and back up again.
The mother screamed a name. "Ace!"
"Let the boy go," the man said.
"Tell them to drop their weapons first," Silas replied.
The man's jaw tightened slightly. The boy hung between them, wide-eyed and sheened with cold sweat, his breath coming in shallow, rapid pulls.
"Drop your weapons." The man said it to the group. The authority in it was casual, which meant it was real.
"I've got a clear shot," one of the twins murmured, already adjusting his angle.
The teenage girl pushed the barrel of his rifle toward the ground. "You heard him."
One by one, weapons lowered. The man's sword stayed in his hand.
"Drop them," Silas said. "Not hold."
The sword hit the ground. The rifles followed. Everyone's hands came up and away—
Except Melissa.
Her shotgun was still raised, shaking with the effort it cost her to keep it there. Silas's back was to her. One shot, at this range, through the gap in his cloak—she was doing the math, he could tell without looking. Every mother did the math.
"Melissa." The bearded man's voice was low and careful. "Put it down."
"I—my son—"
"Will die if you don't."
Her teeth came together. The barrel rose a fraction.
The teenage girl stepped in front of her, not quickly, not dramatically. She just placed her palm flat against the side of the shotgun and looked at the woman the way someone looked when they needed to be believed.
"Melissa. Don't."
The gun came down. She set it on the ground with both hands, like she was setting down something she'd never be able to pick back up again, and when she straightened her face was wet.
Silas let go of the boy.
The man moved the moment the grip released—sword up off the ground before the boy had finished falling, body already angled into a dashing thrust, perfectly weighted, the kind of movement that came from years of muscle memory rather than thought.
It found nothing.
"What—"
Silas was in the tree. Crouched on a branch ten feet up, cloak hanging still around him, watching the man turn in a slow, recalibrating circle below.
"You're fast," Silas said.
The man found him. Their eyes met—blue and gold, one pair assessing, one pair empty.
"But I'm faster."
"Very," the sword man agreed to himself as he clenched onto his sword tightly.
"Who are you and what were you doing in the Orc's territory?" The sword man asked.
"Silas. And believe it or not, i woke up here."
The man's brow creased. He looked at Silas the way someone looked at a locked door they hadn't been asked to open yet—carefully, with suspicion where curiosity might otherwise have lived.
"Miguel!"
Melissa had already crossed the distance between them, crashing into the boy with the full weight of two days' worth of held breath. She folded around him completely, one hand cradling his head, the other pressed flat against his back, and she didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. The boy clutched her back just as hard, his face buried in her shoulder.
The rest of the group filed out of the treeline and took up position behind the swordsman. The twins had their rifles up again. The bearded man had retrieved his. The teenage girl stood slightly apart from the others, watching Silas with an expression that was more calculating than afraid.
"Woah." Silas raised both hands, unhurried. "If I wanted a fight, I would've killed the kid."
One of the twins made a sound in his throat. "You were going to. So sorry if we find that hard to believe."
Silas didn't argue it.
"Are you a mage?" the swordsman asked.
"Uhm." Silas tilted his head slightly. "Something like that."
The swordsman's eyes didn't move from him. "That explains how he found them all," he thought. Hidden, spread out, deliberately silent—and this man had pulled the boy from twenty meters away without looking. "Not even Dante could do that."
"Tell me," Silas said, his tone shifting into something almost conversational, "why were you all hiding in the bushes?"
Nobody answered.
The question sat in the air between them, and in the silence that followed, something clicked behind Silas's eyes. He looked at them—really looked, past the weapons and the posturing and the fear—and read what was underneath. The ragged clothes. The single barrel shotgun as the group's heaviest weapon before the swordsman arrived. The pregnant woman. The child. The way they'd been moving through dense woodland instead of any road.
Oh.
"Palielin."
It left his lips quietly, almost under his breath.
The teenage girl's head snapped toward him. She saw it before anyone else did—the invisible flame of it, his spiritual force igniting in the air around him—
The pressure hit all of them at once.
The twins went down first, rifles clattering against the roots as their knees buckled and their bodies were driven flat. The bearded man went next, then the swordsman, all of them pinned to the forest floor like insects under glass, the weight distributed evenly and absolutely.
"W-what—" one of the twins started. "What is this—"
"Melissa." The bearded man's voice was strained, forced out through the compression. "Take the boy and run."
Silas dropped from the branch.
He covered the distance in a single instant, boots touching earth directly in front of Melissa before the word 𝒓𝒖𝒏 had finished its echo through the trees. She reacted on instinct—shotgun up, both hands back on the stock, the barrel leveled at his face with a steadiness that her shaking arms didn't fully support.
"Let them go!"
"Don't worry," Silas said. "I will."
He let a beat pass.
"Into the afterlife."
She fired.
He was already aside her, one hand closing around the barrel before the smoke had cleared. He squeezed. The metal gave—not slowly, not with effort, but immediately, the barrel pinching shut between his fingers the way tin foil did. She released it out of reflex and swung her free hand in a punch that he caught at the wrist, mid-arc, without looking at it.
"His strength," she thought, even through the pain that followed. "How—"
He applied pressure.
She went to her knees.
Miguel came at him immediately, fists hammering against Silas's thigh with everything a nine-year-old could put behind it. "Let her go! Let her go!"
"Or else what, kid?"
He shoved him. Not hard, but enough. The boy hit the ground and sat there, winded, staring up.
"You son of a bitch!" "Let her go!" "Please—"
"Quiet."
One word. It landed like a door slamming.
"The next time any of you think about robbing someone," Silas said, his voice low and without heat, "remember this moment as your last."
"Rob?" The twin's voice came up from the ground, compressed and furious. "We're not trying to rob anyone!"
Silas looked down at him. "Yeah? Then what?"
His clothes caught fire.
Not from any external source—from nowhere, from nothing, a sudden full-body combustion that engulfed his tunic and cloak in a clean, controlled flame. Silas released Melissa's wrist immediately, stepping back, already pulling at his cloak.
"What—"
The pressure on the group's backs vanished with his concentration.
He tore the cloak free and threw it aside, and then the light hit him—a ray of it, clean and direct, fired from the swordsman's outstretched palm from fifteen meters away. It caught him square in the chest and drove him back several feet, boots carving twin furrows in the dirt.
He stopped.
Still standing.
He looked down at the burns across his chest, then back up, reassessing. The swordsman was upright. He'd gotten up faster than the others, repositioned while Silas's attention was on Melissa, and he'd done it without making a sound.
"Where did this one come from?"
"Well," said a voice behind him. "This is interesting."
Silas turned.
A man stood at the tree line, dark-haired and unhurried, a leather bag hanging from one hand with the weight of vegetables inside it. His eyes moved across the scene—the pinned group now rising, the scorched earth, the crushed shotgun barrel, the burns on Silas's chest—with the measured calm of someone who had walked into chaos often enough that it no longer required a reaction.