Wednesday was his day off.
Lymur stood at the edge of the Beast Glades at nine in the morning with his sunglasses on and a scarf around his neck and thought, I haven't done this in a while.
Not adventuring in general since he still took guild work occasionally (just enough to stay active), but coming out here with nothing specific to do and nowhere specific to be, just walking around and seeing what happened.
He'd thought about going to the guild first and decided against it.
The itch he'd been feeling for the past two years wasn't exactly the type that a posted mission would scratch. He couldn't pin it to anything specific, either. He just knew it was there. In the background, as a feeling that was building toward something like pressure before a storm.
He wasn't scared. That wasn't the feeling. If something catastrophic came to Dicathen and leveled the continent, the last person standing would be him, and he knew that with absolute confidence.
I'm probably the last person on this continent who needs to worry about his own safety, he thought, putting his hands in the pockets of his jacket. But that's not the part I'm worried about.
He thought that if that happened, if he really was the last person standing on this continent, then it would be... lonely. And he didn't want it.
"When did that even happen?" He whispered to himself with a wry smile. It was the first time that it had occurred to him clearly.
Lymur was used to being alone since he was regarded as a freak of both society and nature for as long as he could remember, but somewhere along the way, that stopped being the case. Somewhere between Gerald the plant and Aldric's terrible opinions about historical mana theory — somewhere in the middle of all of that, Lymur had developed the "inconvenient" habit of caring about whether people were okay.
He'd never admit it out loud. He was still working through the embarrassment of it privately.
So here he was, in the Glades, by himself.
See what was actually out here and whether the itch had a source.
For the first two hours, nothing interesting really happened.
The usual beast attacked him and he dealt with it without breaking pace. Incision through one, Ruler's Authority picking another up and depositing it somewhere else at speed, a third one he just sidestepped because it was moving slow enough that the effort felt excessive.
The Glades were dense and old this far in, the trees enormous, the light coming through in thin columns. Normal adventurers had no business this far in without a serious party, but Lymur continued walking.
Nothing special today as well, he thought. It's very peaceful. Relaxing, even.
He was somewhere in the middle-deep stretch, sitting on a fallen log eating one of the sandwiches he'd packed, when he noticed a peculiar cat.
It was sitting on a rock about fifteen meters ahead of him, watching him. Black fur, completely still. Normal enough, except cats weren't typically a feature of the deeper parts of the Beast Glades, and what really caught Lymur's attention were the eyes — deep blue, and inside them a pattern of white pinpoints that moved like they were suspended in liquid. Like looking at a piece of sky from very far below.
The cat looked at him.
He looked at the cat.
They made eye contact for about two seconds, and then boom.
The explosion was enormous and went upward and outward in every direction from the point where the cat had been sitting. Trees for a half-kilometer radius went flat, the hills beyond them cracked. The fireball climbed high enough that Lymur could see it from outside the smoke, floating above the mushroom cloud with his scarf on fire and his sunglasses slightly askew, looking down at the expanding ring of destruction below.
Out of the smoke, rising to his level, came a man.
Impeccably dressed in black with gold trim, not a thread out of place, which was impressive given what had just happened. Blonde hair, well-kept. And those same eyes — deep blue with the galaxy pattern, looking at Lymur.
Lymur took his sunglasses off. Looked at the burning scarf. Took it off too.
He smiled. "Who are you supposed to be?"
The man looked at him with an impassive face. "I don't particularly find it appropriate to give my name to a lesser." He paused. "But something tells me you aren't exactly that." Another pause. "You may call me Windsom. I have to return your question. Who are you?"
"Are you another one of those Asuras?" Lymur asked, not answering the man's question.
Windsom's face twitched a little. "Oh? You know of the Asuras?"
"Sort of, yeah. I think it was actually around here that I ran into the last one, actually. It was a phoenix guy, kind of—"
Windsom moved and it produced its own explosion, the air cracking from the speed of it, as he impacted the space where Lymur had been an instant earlier with enough force to crater the air itself for a half-second before the distortion closed around it.
Lymur had already moved, floating calmly a few meters above and to the right, looking down.
"Okay so first," he said, irritatedly, "you didn't let me finish. And second — are all of you guys like this?! I have never once met an Asura without being immediately attacked. Is that a cultural thing? You're all incredibly rude, I just want to say that."
Windsom rose to meet him, eyes sharp.
"You guys must be pretty racist honestly," Lymur continued. "Where do you even come from? Is there a place? Can you visit?"
Stronger than the phoenix, too, he noted. And faster.
Windsom came at him again and the fight started properly.
What became clear inside the first ten minutes was that Windsom was fast — physically and tactically. He read attacks, adjusted, created distance when he needed it and closed it when he didn't, and he had a frustrating habit of getting out of positions that should have been finished. Every time Lymur thought he had the geometry of the fight locked down, Windsom found the edge of it and slipped through.
They tore through the upper forest, above the canopy, trading attacks that each left destructive marks on the land below. A mountain ridge to the east took a hit from a redirected blast and a small lake somewhere to the south got a lot less lake-shaped.
"You're tight and slippery," Lymur said, at some point during hour three. He didn't sound annoyed. He sounded interested.
Windsom didn't answer. He attacked instead, which was its own kind of answer.
"That's a compliment," Lymur added, ducking under the strike. "Just so you know."
In hour four, they were lower now, back among the trees, the fight having naturally descended through several altitude changes. Lymur had been trying to land something definitive for the better part of an hour and Windsom kept finding the exit.
"I thought I should ask but..." Lymur said as he ducked under a haymaker punch. "What exactly is it are you after?"
"You need not concern yourself with the deities' affairs, lesser."
It was then that Windsom landed something. It was a technique — compressed pure mana or something like it, a concentrated directional blast that Lymur hadn't seen the setup for because he'd been watching the other hand — and it hit his left arm at the elbow with enough focused force that the arm went ahead to the afterlife.
Lymur stumbled slightly in the air from the force of it.
He glanced at the stump and stared at it for a good five seconds.
The arm was already regenerating, flesh and bone rebuilding from the elbow outward, the whole process taking maybe eight seconds — and Lymur watched it happen silently.
"You blew my arm off..." he said.
Windsom, who had landed at a distance and was watching cautiously, said nothing.
"That has never happened before, you know?" Lymur flexed the regenerated hand, testing the grip, checking the fingers one by one. "Not once. In this whole world." He looked up at Windsom, strangely delighted at the situation. "That was great, though. It hurt a lot but it was great!"
Windsom looked at him and seemed to decide, correctly, that this was a bad sign.
Lymur stopped talking, then.
During the fifth hour, the pressure he'd been keeping managed came off, and Ruler's Ambition released at a level it hadn't ever before.
Windsom was strong. He was genuinely, impressively strong, and he gave Lymur more of a fight in the last five hours than nearly everything had in years. He was the strongest Lymur ever fought. And so he became relentless and brutally aggressive, not giving Windsom the reset distance he needed.
Okay, Lymur thought. Let's try something different.
And so he stopped chasing. Instead, he pulled inward, reaching all the way down to the Void underneath the unique skill Collapse. Confluence drew from it and what he was about to use now pulled from both subskills at once, Void Space to tear open a point and Confluence to load it with everything he had in the divergent direction.
The space around his outstretched hand turned white. Or rather, it stopped being a color and started being an absence of everything else. A small sphere of such whiteness, encompassing an inner circle of utter blackness — the singularity — formed between his fingers and the space around it began to distort, bending away from the point.
Windsom felt it before he saw it. He stopped moving for the first time in five hours and looked at the white point in Lymur's hand, concern flashing across his face for the first time since the fight began.
Lymur released it.
"Maximum: Rupture."
It was a technique that released Confluence in the repulsion direction at a high enough output to produce a divergent singularity. The white hole opened and the repulsion came out as a single catastrophic expansion. Matter, energy, air, trees, the top layer of the hills, Windsom — all of it ejected violently outward from the point of origin in every direction simultaneously.
The sound that the release made wasn't a boom. It was closer to silence at a volume that shouldn't be silent. The shockwave carved a perfect sphere of destruction into the landscape, everything within it flung to the outer edge, and where the center had been, there was just nothing. A clean, empty point where things had stopped existing for a half-second before the world rushed back in to fill it.
The environmental damage was disastrous.
Windsom, who was unable to defend, hit something in the distance hard and was, for the first time in the fight, genuinely stunned and unable to move. Lymur could see it from across the destroyed land and he wasn't about to let the opportunity go.
He crossed the distance in no time, closing in while Windsom was still picking up his awareness of where he was and what had just happened, and grabbed him by the front of the immaculate black jacket.
"Gotchu~!"
And then he drove them both downward.
They hit the ground at a speed that the ground found very objectionable. The earth split and caved and kept caving, the impact punching through the surface layer, through the substrate, through whatever was under that, and then they were falling through open air inside a cavern and hit the floor of it with a second impact that sent cracks spiderwebbing out in every direction from the point of contact.
Dust, silence. Lymur stood up and looked around.
Is this a dungeon?
The cavern was enormous, high-ceilinged, lit by whatever bioluminescent moss thing was growing on the walls. And covering most of the floor in a wide radius was frost. In the center of the space was a large dead beast — the scale of it said S-rank, the species said Elderwood Guardian, the frost around it said the ice had been involved in killing it.
He recognized the residual mana from the ice.
Familiar, he thought. He couldn't place it exactly but it was familiar.
He'd been about to examine it when he realized that Windsom was gone.
He looked around the cavern.
No Windsom.
The space where he'd been holding him was empty.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Lymur said.
He stood in the middle of the frost-covered cavern and experienced genuine annoyance for the first time all day. Five hours of fighting and the man just got away, again, while Lymur was distracted by an interesting monster corpse.
He stayed annoyed about it for about thirty more seconds and then he stood up and brushed the rock dust off his jacket before looking around properly.
Though I suspect that guy wasn't giving it his all. Neither was I but it felt like he was looking for something as we fought, but what...? He scratched his head, exasperated.
"This is embarrassing."
Then Theosophy swept the cavern and found people — one isolated, three together somewhere further in — and the annoyance got filed away for later.
The isolated one was closer and behind an earthly dome, so he went to that one first. He shattered it with minimal effort and found a blonde young girl unconscious inside, clutching a beast core to her chest. The Elderwood Guardian's, probably.
"What even happened here?" But there was noone around to answer his question.
He picked the girl up carefully, which felt strange because she was very small and he was not used to carrying unconscious people through caverns, and went to find the other three.
Their dome he also shattered.
Three people, various states of beaten up, were inside. Two of them looked up at him and he recognized them immediately.
"Hey, uh... Arthur, right? Hi, Jasmine," he greeted with a smile. "It's been a while."
He looked at the state of all three of them. Cuts, bruising, and the appearance of people who had recently been through something seriously bad.
"You both look like shit," he added. "Y'all look like complete shit."
Jasmine made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan and let her head fall back. "Ahahahaha... nice to see you too, Lymur."
Arthur looked at him, unable to decide whether to be relieved or unsettled and landing on both. "What are you doing here?"
The third one was young, around Arthur's age. Lymur didn't know him, and the boy was shorter than the other two and had the bright-eyed look of someone who had just processed that an S-rank had walked into the cave, so he scrambled upright.
"You're — you're Lymur. The Brightburn. The S-rank—"
"Yeah, that's me," Lymur said, proudly setting his jacket collar back right. "Hi."
"I'm Elijah Knight," the boy said. "I've wanted to meet you, this is — well, the circumstances aren't great but—"
"Good to meet you, Elijah." Lymur looked back at Arthur. "You two good enough to move?"
"Working on it," Arthur said.
"To answer your question — I was in the middle of smacking something around and it ran away and we happened to crash through the ceiling." Lymur added as he pointed upward at the hole they'd come through, currently letting in a column of smoky light from the destroyed surface above. "And then the bastard got away because I got distracted." He pointed at the dead Elderwood Guardian. "...Briefly. And I'm annoyed about it."
"Who were you fighting?" Jasmine asked.
"It's something that calls itself an Asura. Called himself Windsom." Lymur looked at the hole again. "Very adept at running, apparently. I'm going to keep that in mind."
The three only looked at him in confusion.
"I found a kid, by the way—" he held up the unconscious girl, who was still out cold, "—she yours?"
"Oh, Samantha! She's a fellow adventurer," Jasmine said, pushing herself upright. "The others died during the fight so it seems only the four of us from the original team are left."
Lymur looked at Samantha, then at Jasmine. "Hm. Okay." He adjusted his hold on her. "I'll carry her. Let's—"
He stopped.
Something had entered his perception and it wasn't a mana signature. It wasn't a sound. It wasn't anything he had a clean category for, which was why it stopped him so completely — Lymur had categories for most things, and this didn't fit any of them. It was a feeling, and the feeling was specifically and intensely wrong in a way that hit below rational thought.
He went very still.
Behind him, the other four had all noticed and became tense. Elijah looked between Lymur and the rest of the cavern, uncertain. Arthur's hand had gone to his weapon without him appearing to decide to do it. Jasmine was already on her feet properly, reading Lymur's posture.
Everyone here had seen Lymur fight. They'd seen or heard about most of what he was capable of. They knew everyone called him the strongest for a reason. And that same Lymur had just gone rigid like something had touched the back of his neck.
That was, objectively, frightening.
"What is it?" Jasmine asked quietly.
Lymur exhaled once and his posture came back to normal and he turned back to the group.
"Nothing," he said with a reassuring smile. "Just a false alarm."
Nobody looked convinced. Jasmine especially.
He waved a hand, laughing. "Seriously, it's—"
The presence came back, and it was stronger. Lymur didn't take any chances this time. He moved at maximum speed and the cavern floor where he'd been standing caved from the force of the launch, a shockwave rolling outward that hit all four of the others and sent them staggering backward. He heard one of them shout something behind him but it was already distant because he was across the cavern in a fraction of a second and the impact of meeting the presence hit like an immovable wall.
He came face-to-face with a man.
It was a tall man. Enormous, actually — wide and tall both, built like a building dressed in formal black clothes and a cylindrical hat like something from a circus performance. He was completely hairless, not even a single eyebrow, and his skin was pale enough to look almost white.
And he was laughing with that deranged face of his. Quietly, to himself, like something had tickled him.
Lymur stared at him, wide-eyed and in disbelief.
What the fuck?
The man looked back, still smiling, and the smile was fine — it had all the right shapes — and something about it was the most wrong thing Lymur had seen in his life.
He'd felt genuinely unsettled twice in his life. The golden-eyed person in his dreams, and whatever he was feeling right now. It was different from danger, but he couldn't exactly figure it out.
He blinked, and the hairless, laughing man was gone.
Lymur stood in the spot where he'd been and looked at the empty space for a long moment. He looked down at the ground.
Written there, in something dark and wet that he didn't look at closely enough to confirm was: Greetings from the Judge!
The lettering was neat enough and the exclamation mark was somehow what stood out the most for Lymur.
Whose blood is that...
Panic crept to his chest. He hurriedly turned and looked back at the others, who were all upright and staring at him from across the cavern. He swept Theosophy over all four of them quickly. They were still them, still injured from earlier and the shockwave had added to it, but alive and them.
He exhaled.
Not theirs, then.
He didn't know whose it was and he was going to think about that later.
He walked back across the cavern.
"You're all okay," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"We were better before you launched off the ground and nearly blew us over," Jasmine said. She was holding her ribs.
"Ahahaha, sorry." He looked at Arthur. "Really sorry about that."
Arthur looked past him at the empty spot on the far side of the cavern. "So? What was it?"
Lymur was quiet for a second. "No freaking clue," he replied, shrugging. "It was a big guy. No hair, no eyebrows, nothing. And he was laughing and he was gone when I blinked. Creepy, ain't it?"
The four of them were quiet.
Elijah looked at the others like he was checking whether they were reacting appropriately to whatever this was.
"Is that—" Arthur started.
"I don't know," Lymur said. "I'll figure it out later so don't worry about it." He picked up the unconscious girl again, who had somehow slept through all of it, and looked at the group. "We need to leave. Also I'm starving, I haven't eaten since this morning, and I've had an extremely long day."
And so they walked. Arthur fell into step beside Lymur, still looking like he had about fifteen follow-up questions.
"Hey, Lymur."
"Mm."
"Are you actually okay?"
Lymur considered the question honestly for a second.
"Yeah," he replied. "I just think I found what I came out here looking for." He glanced at Arthur. "Which is annoying, because I was hoping it was nothing."