Lymur stopped walking and stood on the pavement with his chin in his hand trying very hard to remember something. He tapped his chin twice. Tilted his head left, then right. He held up a finger like a point was about to be made, then lowered it. And tilted his head the other way.
This street…
"Now where have I seen this before…"
He knew this street for sure. He'd walked it before, he was certain of that, but he was approaching from a different direction and the angle was throwing him off. He stayed with it, eyes narrowed, finger back up —
"Oh. Oh! Lara!"
That was it. Lara lived around here somewhere. The old woman who'd asked him for help with a bag of groceries and then handed him significantly more money than the situation required and told him to take care of himself, and whose name he had thought about a few times in the three years since. He'd been meaning to come back and visit for, well, three years — which was not great, but he was here now.
He thought it would be nice to see her again, so he looked around for someone to ask.
The first person he stopped, a man buying bread from a nearby stall, recognized him immediately, which was normal, but then got a slightly odd look on his face when Lymur asked about the old woman on this street.
"Right… she lived somewhere around here."
He gave directions, pointing Lymur further down the road, but there was something off about his expression.
"Thanks," Lymur said, and kept walking.
The second person he asked did the same thing.
"Hey, do you know Lara? Old lady, lives around here?"
She recognized him, answered the question, but with that same uncertain look. Eyes going somewhere else for a second before coming back.
What is that about, Lymur thought, frowning slightly. He kept going, too focused on finding the house to think much more about it.
Eventually—
"Hmm. This should be it."
He knew it was the right house, but it took him a moment to see the tape across the entrance. Yellow and marked with official text.
CRIME SCENE — NO ENTRY
A couple of uniformed investigators moved around inside, visible through the open front door.
Oh, he thought. He already knew what to expect, but he went inside anyway.
An investigator near the door moved to stop him immediately. "Sir, this is a restricted — " and then stopped, and stared. "— oh. Sir Lymur. My apologies, I didn't — "
"What happened here?" Lymur asked.
He hadn't meant it to come out as flat as it did. The investigator straightened his back and switched into professional mode as he explained.
Apparently, it happened two days ago. Two AA-class adventurers with an existing rivalry had crossed paths in Xyrus at the same time. A battle broke out. Three people in the surrounding area ended up dead as collateral and Lara was one of them.
Lymur listened to all of it without speaking.
He'd noticed the infrastructure damage on the surrounding blocks when he walked over, but for two AA-class adventurers going at each other, it was actually pretty minor.
"That's not much damage for two AAs," he said.
"From what witnesses say, it was short and more of a provocation than a real fight." The investigator paused. "But three people still died, and given that both adventurers have significant legal history and a rivalry that's been going on for years, the courts are having a hard time establishing clear culpability."
Having difficulty, Lymur thought. He said nothing. Yeah, right.
"Did you know the resident personally, sir?"
"Yes," Lymur said. Then, after a second, "She was a very good lady." He held out his hand. "The profile papers on the two adventurers… do you have them?"
The investigator hesitated for only a moment before taking them out and handing them over. Lymur took them, folded them once, and tucked them into his coat. He thanked the investigator and turned for the door.
He stopped just before stepping off the property.
"The funeral," he said, without turning around. "Any idea when it is?"
"Two weeks from now, sir."
Lymur nodded once and left.
He ended up at a park. He didn't particularly decide to go there, he just walked until he sat down, and there was a bench, so he sat on it.
He didn't really think about anything for a while. Just sat.
Eventually he took out the papers and opened them.
AA-class adventurer Jason.
AA-class adventurer Wayne.
He read through both profiles slowly. Faces, builds, known abilities, registered mission history, last known locations — he went through every detail twice and by the end he could've drawn both of them from memory.
Wayne had already left Xyrus. Destination was unknown, but there were enough crumbs in the mission logs to narrow it down.
Jason was still here and taking work in the Beast Glades, which meant a general area and a pattern.
Lymur folded the papers and held them in his hand.
He noticed, after a moment, that his knuckles were clenched. The papers were creased where his fingers had tightened around them without him noticing. He loosened his grip and smoothed them out absently.
Then something hit his hand.
He looked down.
A small dark spot on the back of his hand, just above the knuckle. He stared at it, genuinely confused for a second, and then another one landed beside it.
He touched his own face.
Huh.
They were tears.
He'd never done this before. Didn't fully understand, in the moment, what was happening or what had caused it. Lara was the obvious answer, but he pondered that over and found himself uncertain — they had known each other for one day, three years ago.
He hadn't thought about her every day since.
It wasn't like losing someone who'd been in his life.
But then he thought about the money she'd given him, more than he'd deserved. The way she'd looked at his dirty clothes and said something because she'd noticed and cared enough to say it. The warmth of being told, by a stranger, to take care of himself.
How all that had landed somewhere it hadn't expected to land.
Maybe it wasn't just Lara specifically. Maybe it was the fact that someone like that — genuinely kind — had ended up dead in a feud that had nothing to do with her, on a street in front of her own home, because two people with too much power and too little care happened to be in the same place.
He stayed on the bench a while longer, not moving. Then he stood, put the papers in his coat, and began walking.
He'd read about vengeance. He understood the word, the concept, the chain of events that led people there. He'd always found it straightforward to understand intellectually and harder to actually feel. He never really had much reason to feel a desire for vengeance.
He only began feeling it now, and then realized he was, surprisingly, a fan of it.
So he left for the Beast Glades.
◢◣◢◣◢◣
There existed eight S-rank adventurers in the world.
Eight, out of every living person across every kingdom in the continent, and the gap between them and everything below wasn't a gap so much as a completely different category.
But not all of them were really adventurers at all. The terms S-rank or S-class were just commonly accepted alternatives to a lengthy, more paperwork-based term.
The official and original designation was Special Grade, which referred to beings with destructive potential comparable to a natural disaster, and whose existence on a battlefield changed the battlefield itself.
The absolute bare minimum to qualify was to be at the very peak of the silver stage, which most adventurers spent their entire careers never getting close to. The eight people—adventurer or otherwise—who had crossed that threshold were less like exceptional people and more like exceptional phenomena that happened to be walking around.
"I'd like to borrow a little something, please."
"Uhm…"
"Please?"
This was exactly why when Lymur walked into the guild's administrative office that morning and asked for Jason's current mission information — which was supposed to be confidential given Jason's AA-rank status — the clerk had looked at him for exactly two seconds before printing it.
"Thanks!"
I should do this more often, Lymur had thought, folding the paper into his coat. Wait… is this what they call abuse of power?
Lymur decided not to think so much about it. He had more pressing matters at hand, or so was his excuse.
...…
The Beast Glades was loud like it always was. Once in the deeper parts, there was almost always something moving in every direction if you paid attention. Lymur paid attention to none of it and walked at a leisurely pace through the deeper sections with two folded papers in hand, one being Jason's mission details and the other being the profile he'd taken from Lara's house.
Eventually, after about two hours of walking around, an A-class beast came out of the undergrowth to his left and lunged at him. Without breaking stride, Lymur pinpointed the space it occupied and used Confluence on it. The sound it made lasted a second and the result was small. He kept walking.
Another one dropped from above. He drew a line through the air with one finger and it came apart cleanly and he kept walking.
"Them beasts sure are awful optimistic today," he commented after killing his tenth A-class beast in a single venture to the Glades.
At some point, he began to doubt whether this Jason guy was remotely close to being skilled enough to venture this deep into the Glades alone, but he continued walking anyway.
The forest got increasingly denser and progressively louder with things that wanted to eat him, and he dealt with each one of them. He used Confluence for the ones he noticed early, and Incision for the ones that got close.
The Confluence was his favorite in open space. He'd specify a point, set the radius, and whatever was inside that radius would have its volume collapsed to zero — or expanded into the surrounding space. The skill was all about collapsing or explosively expanding space, after all.
The Incision lines are one-dimensional and thus have no thickness and therefore bypass all resistance. Because the lines possess length but no width or depth, they therefore occupy no volume and possess infinite sharpness.
Both worked fine and needed around the same amount of attention as swatting flies, which was the part he was trying not to think about too hard right now.
Jason, he kept thinking instead. Jason, Beast Glades, active. Jason, beige suit, blond hair, A-class subjugation missions. Jason who was there that day and thought nothing of it~.
He'd memorized the profile paper before he left the park. He didn't need to look at it again.
He walked for an hour more.
Then he felt a large pulse of mana, several kilometers back in the direction he'd come from. He folded the papers into his coat, pushed off the ground and into the air, and flew the distance in a few minutes.
I should've known I already passed by him.
He arrived at a scene that was already mostly finished.
The place was a torn-up clearing with several bodies of lower-ranked adventurers on the ground — B or C-class by the look of their gear. They looked like a team that had clearly run into something they couldn't handle. The A-class beast responsible was also on the ground, very very dead, and standing over it was a man Lymur recognized immediately from the profile paper.
There's my boy.
Jason was very tall, broad through the shoulders, wearing a beige suit that had no business being in the Beast Glades and had his blonde hair slicked back. The face was the thing that stuck though, it was wide and smiling and it was creepy — and ugly, Lymur made sure to add.
He was crouched beside one of the injured adventurers. From a distance it might have looked like he was helping.
But no, he was snapping their fingers and immediately after, plucked them. One at a time, working through the hand, laughing quietly at each one. The adventurer on the ground was making noises that sounded like it travelled the entire Beast Glades.
Lymur watched this for a moment.
Then he walked into the open space.
The sound of his footstep on the dirt was enough. Jason looked up and saw who it was and was on his feet instantly. He immediately raised his hands as a sign of surrender and his smile changed into something that worked hard to look innocent.
"Lymur!" He said it with the warmth of running into an old friend. "Perfect timing, honestly. These poor guys — monsters got them bad, I only just found them. I already handled the beast but — " he gestured at the adventurers with genuine-looking regret, " — honestly it was already too late by the time I got here. Terrible thing. Really." He shook his head slowly. "The Glades have been especially rough lately, I think something's disrupted the migration routes and the beasts have been ranging further than — "
What is he even trying to prove? Lymur couldn't see the point of it. He just kept walking toward him.
Jason kept talking, adjusting the story as he went, adding details. He'd heard the rumors about Lymur, the new S-rank. He was powerful, obviously, but emotionally susceptible, a little naive for his strength, and someone who could be managed if you found the right angle. He figured he just needed to hold the line long enough to find the angle.
Just keep talking, Jason thought. Kehehehehe. He's listening, he hasn't done anything yet, so that means he's listening.
" — and honestly the guild should be sending better-equipped teams into this sector, because this is the third time this month I've seen a group get in over their heads, and — "
Lymur stopped one meter away and looked at him.
"Holding your head a little high, don't you think?"
It wasn't a question. Jason opened his mouth and something suddenly went past him.
He didn't see it. He'd dropped to the ground out of pure reflex — or perhaps some survival instinct he didn't know he had — before his brain had even processed the what and the why. He felt the displacement of air above him, then felt something wet on his face. With shaking hands, he touched it and looked at his fingers.
Blood.
His blood, from a shallow cut along his scalp where the very edge of whatever that was had caught him on its way past. Then slowly, he turned around.
The tree line behind him, a hundred meters deep, had been divided in half. Every trunk in a direct line from where Lymur was standing had been cut through as cleanly as paper, the top halves still in the process of sliding off the bottom halves.
If I hadn't dropped to the ground… Jason thought with dread. He didn't want to imagine what would've happened.
Jason stood up slowly, sweat running freely down his face now, mixing with the blood. His hands were still raised. His mind was desperately running through options now that he understood exactly what situation he was in and was now trying to find any door out of it.
Special Grade, he thought. Special Grade, Special Grade, Special Grade —
There were eight of them in the world, and the stories about what they could do to a country if they felt like it weren't stories so much as historical records. He'd always thought of them as exaggeration. He was reconsidering that now, standing in front of a cleared tree line, blood running into his eye.
He turned back around.
"Okay," Jason said, on the verge of panic. "Okay, look. Lymur. Sir. Lord. Let's — let's think about this. Whatever you think happened, I can explain — "
Lymur tilted his head slightly. "What need is there to? You were snapping her fingers, weren't you? I watched you for about thirty seconds before I walked in."
"That's… that's not what that looked like — "
"You know, I actually get it," Lymur cut him off. "What you do, why you do it. I'm not going to pretend I don't." He paused. "Everyone wants something that makes them feel alive, right? You found yours. The pursuit of what makes you happy — that's all anyone's really doing when you get down to it."
Jason stared at him.
What?
"I'd just ask you to understand me too," Lymur continued. "Because this — " he gestured between himself and Jason, " — this is making me happy too, if I'm being honest."
Oh fuck. He's insane, Jason thought. He's completely insane.
"Not the pain part," Lymur added, quickly. "I want to be clear about that, I'm not — I'm not a sicko."
He's absolutely a sicko; Jason genuinely believed so as a man who had met many sickos and recognized Lymur's specific flavor. He's the most dangerous kind of sicko. The self-righteous sicko with the power to back it up.
"It's more that — " Lymur seemed to be genuinely working through the thought, " — apparently you killed an old woman. Just days ago, in Xyrus. The poor lady was collateral during your thing with Wayne." He looked at Jason directly. "I owed her a debt, ya see. She was a good lady and she died in front of her house for no reason and I owe her a debt, so." He spread his hands slightly. "Here we are."
"I — " Jason's voice cracked on the first syllable. "I didn't — look, that was an accident, there were civilians in the area and the situation escalated faster than — "
"I know it was an accident," Lymur replied. "That's not really the part I'm here about."
Jason was running calculations. The distance to the tree line, whether he could get airborne fast enough, whether Lymur would let him try — which seemed unlikely given the last five seconds of evidence.
Beg, something in him said. Just beg. Swallow it, beg, figure out the rest later!
"Please!" Jason was shouting now. "I'll make it right. Compensation, reparations, whatever the family needs, whatever you think is appropriate, I'll do it, I'll disappear, you'll never hear from me again — "
"Also," Lymur cut him off again, "this is actually the first time I've ever felt this. The revenge thing. I'd read about it but it never really… " he paused, searching for the word, "— landed, yes. It never really landed before. So I want to thank you for that genuinely. You gave me something new."
Jason had no response to that. There was no response to that. He looked at Lymur's eyes. He'd been looking for grief in them, but there was nothing like that. What was there instead was curiosity. Open and interested curiosity like he just encountered something for the first time and found it genuinely engaging.
"Don't worry, I'll be gentle," Lymur said, and smiled. "It'll be over soon~."
A sword that had been lying in the dirt a few meters away lifted off the ground and floated to Lymur's hand, hilt-first. He took it, looked at it once, and turned back to Jason.
Jason closed his eyes.
The sword swung… and stopped.
Metal on metal, the clean ringing sound of an intercept, close enough to Jason's head that he felt the air of it. Lymur went very still. There was a genuine surprise in him and then he turned his head and his face became considerably softer when he saw who it was.
"What are you doing, Jasmine?"