The second day of travel brought a different kind of landscape with it.
Gone were the wide open plains and dry golden hills that had carried them through the first day. In their place, the road descended gradually into a valley that seemed to exist in its own world entirely — greener, cooler, the air carrying the faint smell of river water and something almost sweet, like grass after rain. On either side, mountain walls rose high and close, and at their center a massive crater split the rock face clean in two, a natural archway wide enough for the carriage to pass through comfortably, with room to spare.
Two villages called this valley home. One nestled in the belly of it, sheltered on all sides by the mountain walls, its rooftops barely visible from the road until you were almost on top of them. The other sat on the far side of the crater, smaller, quieter, connected to the first by the only road that passed through the split rock.
The carriage rolled through the crater pass and into the first village just past midmorning, the wheels kicking up dust on the narrow square road as the settlement opened up around them. It was a modest place — low stone buildings, market stalls not yet fully set up for the day, a well at the center of the square with a wooden bench beside it worn smooth from years of use.
The carriage stopped.
Almost immediately, the villagers began gathering. It wasn't alarm exactly — more like recognition. People emerged from doorways and stalls, clustering around the carriage with murmuring curiosity, children pushing to the front while elders hung back with more dignity but no less interest.
Then an old man moved through the gathered crowd with the easy authority of someone who had never needed to raise his voice to be listened to. He was slight, weathered, with sharp eyes that had clearly seen enough of the world to stop being impressed by most of it — though something in them softened when the carriage door opened.
Anoki stepped down.
"Sir Anoki." The old man bowed his head, and there was genuine warmth in it. "It is an honor to have you with us again."
"I'm pleased to be here," Anoki replied, and then, quietly enough that only the old man could hear: "Where is he?"
"At my house. He's getting better — slowly, but surely." The old man gestured back toward the far end of the square. "I'll take you to him now, if you'd like."
Anoki nodded. He turned briefly, looking up at the two Guardian officers seated at the front of the carriage and the cart behind it. His voice was calm and simple. "Head to the next town and wait for me there. I'll meet up with all of you shortly."
Then he walked away with the old man without another word, disappearing between the buildings.
The four members of the squad sat in the carriage in silence for a moment, staring at the space where their sensei had just been.
"...Does anyone else have absolutely no idea what that was about?" Hori finally asked.
"Yes," said Hayatte.
"Obviously," said Peiren.
Kei just watched the alley Anoki had vanished into with his brow furrowed, something turning quietly behind his eyes. Then he sat back and said nothing further.
The carriage rolled on.
---
The next town was livelier by a considerable margin.
It sat just on the other side of the crater, spread wider than the valley village, built with a little more permanence and a little more noise. Market stalls lined the main road in both directions, vendors calling out across the thoroughfare, the smell of cooked food drifting from at least three different directions at once. Travelers moved through in clusters — merchants,laborers and tourists. Somewhere down a side street someone was playing an instrument badly but enthusiastically.
The carriage pulled up outside an inn set back slightly from the main road — a broad, two-storey building with a carved sign above the door and a stable to one side. The two Guardian officers — veterans assigned to escort and oversee the squad in Anoki's absence — handled the arrangements efficiently, securing a room upstairs with two beds and a floor mat, large enough for four people with some creative negotiation of space.
The squad filed in, dropped their bags, and then immediately gathered at the window.
Below them, the town buzzed and moved and existed in full, vivid, wonderful detail.
"We need to go down there," Kei said, before anyone else had even fully formed the thought.
"Agreed," said Hori.
"Obviously," said Peiren, though he said it while already looking at the market stalls below with the focused expression of a man doing threat assessment, which on Peiren looked indistinguishable from wanting to visit.
Hayatte said nothing, but she had also not moved away from the window.
Kei turned toward the two officers standing near the door. He put on his most reasonable expression — the one he used when he was about to ask for something unreasonable. "So. We were thinking—"
"No," said Officer Rei, the taller of the two.
Kei blinked. "I haven't even—"
"You're going to ask if you can go explore the town," said Officer Dant, the shorter one, folding his arms. "And the answer is no. The Regent left you in our care and our care means you stay in this room until he returns."
"But we won't go far," Hori said, stepping forward with her most disarming smile. "Just to the market below, maybe one street over at most. We'll be back before you even notice we've gone."
"No."
"We're trained Guardians," Peiren said flatly. "We can handle a market street."
"Rookie Guardians," Rei corrected, with the tone of a man who had heard this exact argument before and had built considerable structural reinforcement against it. "The answer is no."
Kei tried a different approach. "Okay, but consider — we've been in a carriage for two days. Our muscles are tightening. It's actually a health concern. A short walk would be medically beneficial to our—"
"No."
"What if we signed something," Hori tried. "Like a document. Stating that anything that happens to us is entirely our responsibility and not yours."
"Absolutely not."
"I'll buy you food," Kei said.
"With whose money?" Dant asked.
Kei opened his mouth. Closed it.
"We could rotate," Hayatte said, drawing everyone's attention — partly because the suggestion was practical, and partly because Hayatte rarely expended words on a losing argument, which meant she'd assessed this one as potentially winnable. "Two of us go, two stay. You only need to monitor half of us at a time."
A flicker of something passed across Rei's face — the brief, involuntary expression of a man who had found a point harder to immediately dismiss than the others. It lasted approximately one second before Dant stepped smoothly on it.
"No. All four of you, in this room, until the Regent returns. That is the assignment."
The squad exchanged a look.
The officers did not notice the look.
---
An hour passed. The town continued to exist below the window in an aggressively enjoyable manner.
When the officers announced it was time to head down to the inn's hall for the midday meal, the squad obediently gathered at the door and followed them out into the corridor, filing down the staircase in a single, compliant line.
Halfway down the stairs, Hori caught Peiren's eye. She tilted her head — barely a movement. Peiren's jaw shifted slightly. Kei, on his other side, looked between them and immediately understood. He glanced at Hayatte behind him. Hayatte gave one slow, deliberate blink.
Agreement reached. No words spoken.
They reached the bottom of the stairs, the hall opening up ahead of them — tables half full with travelers and locals, the smell of stew and bread thick in the air.
"Sirs," Hori said, her voice gentle and perfectly calibrated — soft enough to make both officers turn instinctively, too polite to ignore.
They turned.
CLANG — CLANG.
Two metal vases, pulled from the decorative alcove beside the staircase, connected simultaneously with two guardian skulls in a single synchronized arc — Kei on the left, Peiren on the right, both mid-air for a half-second, both landing back on their feet in the same breath.
Officer Rei and Officer Dant went down like felled trees, out before they'd even fully registered what had hit them.
The hall went quiet. A few travelers at nearby tables stared.
Kei looked at Peiren. Peiren looked at Kei. Both of them looked at the two unconscious men on the floor.
"That worked faster than I expected," Kei admitted.
"Don't stand there," Hayatte said, already moving.
They hauled both officers back upstairs with considerably more effort than it had taken to knock them out, deposited them sitting upright on the floor with their backs against the beds, and tied them together with the extra cord from Hori's travel bag — secure but not uncomfortable.
Hori crouched down in front of them, pulled a small piece of paper from her pocket, and tucked it into Dant's loosely folded hands. She'd written it on the stairs on the way back up.
*We're sorry, sirs. We'll be back soon. Please don't report this to sensei. — The Squad*
She looked at it for a second, then added a small drawing of a flower in the corner, because it felt like the right thing to do.
"Let's go," Peiren said from the doorway.
They went.
---
Outside, the town received them with open arms.
The market was even better up close than it had looked from the window — wide and loud and packed with things to look at, stalls selling food and cloth and small carved trinkets, the kind of place where you could spend an hour without covering half of it. The afternoon sun sat warm on their shoulders and the crowd moved around them in a comfortable, unhurried flow.
Kei immediately beelined for the nearest food stall and returned with something skewered and steaming that he ate in three bites before going back for more. Hori drifted toward a stall selling dried flowers and little glass bottles, picking each one up with the focused attention of someone who had strong feelings about decorative items. Peiren walked with his hands in his pockets, not buying anything, not stopping anywhere — just moving through the market with his eyes taking in everything without his expression giving anything away.
Hayatte paused at a stall selling finely made hair pins, studied them briefly, then picked one up, examined the craftsmanship, and set it back down without purchasing it. The stall owner watched her hopefully. She moved on.
"This is worth the consequences," Hori declared, rejoining Kei with a small glass bottle of something blue hanging from her fingers.
"Completely," Kei agreed, starting on his third skewer.
Even Peiren, who had committed firmly to the stance of not being visibly impressed by anything, had slowed slightly near a stall selling throwing knives, studying the display with narrowed eyes that had nothing indifferent about them at all.
"Peiren," Kei called from several stalls away.
"What."
"You're smiling."
"I'm not."
"You are, on the inside."
"Get away from me."
Hori laughed, and for a while they moved through the market like that.
Then, simultaneously, all four of them felt it.
Not a blow — softer than that, quicker. The lightest contact, a brush of fingers so deft it barely registered as touch. Like wind that happened to pass exactly where the coin purses hung from their belts.
Kei's hand dropped to his side.
His purse was gone.
He looked at the others. From their expressions, the answer was already there.
"There," Peiren said, his voice dropping flat and sharp, his eyes cutting upward.
On the rooftop of the building across the narrow side street, a figure crouched for just a half-second — long enough to be seen, not long enough to be caught — then straightened and ran.
They moved without discussing it.
---
The chase crossed six rooftops before it left the market district entirely.
The figure ahead of them was fast — genuinely fast, quick-footed across the uneven tiles and sudden drops, using the roofline like a road it had traveled a hundred times before. Kei pushed hardest after it, legs driving, the gap closing agonizingly slowly. Peiren flanked left, cutting through a lower alley and vaulting back up to try to cut the angle. Hori kept pace a rooftop behind, and Hayatte moved with eerie, unhurried efficiency, her path neither the shortest nor the most obvious — but always somehow exactly where she needed to be.
The figure hit the edge of the town where the rooftops ended and the ground dropped away sharply — a cliff face, rough rock plunging down to a river below, wide and moving fast in the valley shadows. The drop was survivable, probably, if you hit the water right. Maybe.
The figure stopped at the edge. For a single instant, it looked down — measuring the fall, making the calculation — and that half-second was everything.
Kei left the last rooftop in a single leap, sailing over the gap between the building's edge and the cliff, and came down with both feet driving into the figure's back in a clean, decisive strike.
They hit the ground hard, a tangle of limbs, stopping a bare meter from the cliff's edge. Before the figure could even process what had happened, Peiren was there — twisting one arm behind its back, pressing it chest-down against the rock, one knee planted firmly in the middle of its spine.
The squad closed in.
And looking down at the figure on the ground, they all registered the same thing at roughly the same moment.
He was a boy. Maybe two years older than them, no more. Thin — not lean, not athletic, but the thin that came from not eating enough and working too hard for too long. His clothes were worn past the point where patches could fix them, the fabric faded so thoroughly it had lost most of whatever color it had started as. His breathing was ragged, partly from the chase, partly from Peiren's knee, partly from something else — something behind his eyes that had gone hard and closed and entirely unreachable.
Kei crouched down to look at him properly. "Who are you?"
Nothing. The boy's jaw was set, eyes fixed on the rock in front of him.
"Answer," Peiren said, his voice losing whatever lightness it occasionally carried. "Who are you?"
Still nothing. The boy's breathing slowed deliberately, like he was building a wall behind his face and adding bricks to it in real time.
Hori crouched too, studying him with the instinct of someone who read people more than she read situations. There was something she recognized in his expression — not the stubbornness, but what was underneath it.
Then Hayatte stepped forward.
She walked around to the side he was facing, crouched until she was level with his eye line — close enough that he could see her face clearly, far enough that it wasn't threatening. Her expression was its usual still surface. No anger in it, no impatience. Just a cold, quiet directness that somehow demanded more than shouting would have.
"What is your name?" she asked.
The silence stretched out for a long moment.
Then, almost imperceptibly, something in the boy's locked jaw shifted. His eyes moved to her face. He stared at her for a second that felt longer than it was — and then, as if the word cost him something:
"...Sora."
The name fell into the quiet between them, and the cliff wind took it, and nobody said anything for a long moment.
Kei looked at Peiren. Peiren looked at Kei. Below them, the river moved on indifferently, and the town they'd just chased across sat at their backs, still busy, still alive, entirely unaware.