Rudeus stood there, his hand still outstretched, his breathing labored and heavy. The remaining energy in his body was fading fast he could feel it draining out of him like water through cracked stone, his limbs trembling faintly with the effort of simply staying upright.deliberately he sheathed his sword. The sound of metal sliding home felt too loud in the silence that had swallowed the room.
He turned around.
Sylvia was standing exactly where he had left her, completely still, her eyes fixed on the decapitated head that sat on the floor before her. She hadn't moved. She wasn't blinking. The color had drained entirely from her face, leaving her pale in a way that made her look almost translucent, like she might shatter if someone spoke too sharply.
Damn. He had hoped she would've looked away on her own.
His body protested every step, muscles screaming under the strain, but he pushed himself forward anyway. He crossed the distance between them slowly rather than with the urgency he wanted, each step controlled and deliberate because that was all he could manage right now. His right leg in particular ached deep in the joint a dull, grinding pain he decided to worry about later.
"Don't just stare at it," he said quietly.
She blinked. Once, twice, like someone surfacing from underwater. Her eyes traveled up from the floor to his face and he could see it clearly now the shallow, rapid pull of her breath, the slight tremor in her jaw, the way her hands had balled themselves into fists at her sides without her seeming to realize it. She was holding herself together by a very thin thread.
She's about to lose it.
He didn't think about it. He simply raised his hand and placed it gently over her eyes, shielding her from the sight on the floor. His palm was warm against her face, steady in a way the rest of him currently was not.
"I'm sorry you had to see that," he said, his voice low. It came out quieter than he intended.
He felt her exhale a long, shaking breath against his wrist.
They didn't speak as they left.
Rudeus kept his hand near his sword as they walked, more out of habit now than necessity. His body was in no condition for another fight but the posture was automatic, something carved into him over years of one dangerous road after another. Sylvia walked just slightly behind him, her footsteps quieter than before, like she was being careful not to disturb whatever fragile stillness they had wrapped around themselves.
The corridor leading out was not empty.
A guard rounded the corner ahead of them, weapon already half-drawn, eyes going wide the moment he registered who he was looking at. He opened his mouth.
Rudeus raised one finger.
A small, tight current of wind magic barely more than a whisper of mana caught the man at the throat with precise, surgical force. He dropped without a sound.
They kept walking.
Two more guards at the stairwell. Rudeus dispatched them both before they had fully registered his presence one with a muted earth spell that knocked him hard into the wall, the other with a simple fireball that sent him tumbling down a short flight of steps.
Good enough.
Outside, the night air was cool against his face. He pulled in a slow breath of it, let it settle in his chest. The city around them was still alive with its usual noise distant voices, the warm glow of lamplit windows, the smell of something being cooked somewhere down the street. The world was completely indifferent to what had just happened in that building, and for once Rudeus found that comforting rather than bleak.
They walked.
The quiet between them was not uncomfortable, exactly. It was the kind of silence that had weight and texture to it the silence of two people who had just been through something and had not yet figured out what words were supposed to come after. Rudeus didn't try to fill it. He had never been particularly good at filling silences and he suspected Sylvia didn't want him to.
They were perhaps halfway back to the hotel when she spoke.
"What's the next move?"
Her voice was steadier than he expected. A little flat, a little worn at the edges, but steady.
Rudeus considered the question for a moment, watching the street ahead of them. "We keep moving," he said. "Toward the demon continent. We haven't made up the time we lost here and standing still any longer isn't going to help us do that."
Sylvia didn't respond. She just nodded slightly, almost to herself, and went quiet again.
She's processing. He understood that. There was nothing else to say right now that wouldn't come out hollow, so he let the silence be.
The hotel room was dark and warm when they returned. Neither of them bothered with conversation. Rudeus sat on the edge of his bed, pulled off his boots with the mechanical exhaustion of someone operating purely on residual momentum, and was horizontal before he'd finished the thought of lying down. Sleep took him almost instantly, like a door swinging shut.
He woke to an empty room.
Rudeus lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, registering the sounds of the hotel around him someone moving in the room above, the faint creak of floorboards in the hallway, a distant door. He turned his head. Sylvia's side of the room was neat. Her pack was still there, which meant she hadn't left for good, but she had been up long enough to tidy after herself.
Where did she go.
He had a feeling he already knew.
He checked the guild first, out of some faint obligation to thoroughness. A quick pass through the main hall confirmed what he'd suspected no sign of her. The morning crowd was already in full swing, a low din of adventurers and merchants and the smell of bad coffee, and Sylvia was not among them.
Rudeus turned and walked back out into the street.
He didn't need to think hard about the destination.
He heard the warehouse before he reached it.
Even from down the block, through the wall and the distance, he could make out the sound of crying. Not the desperate, broken kind something more complicated than that. Relief, maybe. The kind of crying that happened when something terrible was finally over.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The space had been transformed by the presence of the people in it. They were clustered together in loose groups, some sitting on the floor, some standing, some holding each other. Many of them were crying. Others were speaking in low, overwhelmed voices, reaching out to touch one another like they needed to confirm this was real. The dim light of the warehouse, the same light that had felt so grim the night before, seemed somehow different now with all of them filling it.
And in the middle of all of it, Sylvia.
She was crouched down talking to an older woman, her expression attentive and gentle, her voice too low for Rudeus to make out from where he stood. She looked tired there were shadows under her eyes and her posture carried the weight of someone running on will alone but she was present. Fully present in a way that Rudeus found himself observing with something like quiet respect.
She noticed him. Their eyes met across the room and she straightened up, giving the older woman's hands a brief, reassuring squeeze before crossing toward him.
"I came early," Sylvia said, keeping her voice down. "I needed to find the key before anyone else arrived. I wanted to free them myself." She paused, and there was something in her expression that was harder to read. "I needed to do something this morning. Something I could actually see the end of."
He understood that more than he let on.
The reaction from the crowd, once word spread that the person who had opened the locks was standing in the room, was immediate and overwhelming. People turned toward her with expressions of gratitude so raw it was almost difficult to look at directly. A few of them called her a hero. Someone started crying harder just at the word. Sylvia's face went pink and she shook her head quickly, holding up one hand.
"I wouldn't be here at all," she said, loud enough to carry, "if not for him stopping the man who was running this place." She gestured back toward Rudeus.
And then all of them were looking at him.
Rudeus became very still. He was not, by nature, comfortable with this kind of attentionthe grateful kind, the sincere kind, the kind that asked nothing of him in return. He gave a short nod, absorbing the thanks with an expression he hoped read as composed rather than deeply uncomfortable, and was already taking a small step backward toward the door when he heard a voice from somewhere lower than the rest.
"Thank you, mister."
He stopped.
She was young. Maybe seven, maybe eight, with small serious eyes and the kind of smile that had no strategy behind it whatsoever just pure, uncomplicated joy wearing a slightly gap-toothed expression. She was looking up at him with complete and trusting happiness.
"I'll finally be able to see my sister again," she said. The smile widened. "She's going to be so happy."
The words landed in his chest like something cold.
He stood completely still, looking down at her face, and did not say anything. He couldn't. There was no version of a response that was true and also bearable to say out loud, so he said nothing at all. He looked at her smile for one long moment, her bright and hopeful and entirely innocent smile, and then he looked away.
He walked out of the warehouse.
The walk back was longer than it needed to be.
He didn't take the direct route. He wasn't ready for that yet. Instead he moved through the quieter side streets, hands in his pockets, and let his thoughts unspool without trying to organize them into anything useful.
The girl's sister. He had killed her. He had made the choice to kill her there had been a reason, he had weighed it, he had made the call and now there was a small girl in that warehouse counting down the minutes until she could run home to someone who was not going to be there.
Glen. He had made that call too.
The people in that building. He had freed them. That part was true. But freedom was not the end of the story, it was the beginning of a much harder one, and he was not naive enough to pretend otherwise. Some of them had homes and people waiting for them. Some of them didn't. Some of them had been in the network long enough that the outside world was going to feel more hostile than familiar. Some of them were going to find their way back to exactly this kind of situation because it was the only world they knew, and someone would be ready and waiting to take them in.
Was it worth it. The question felt almost embarrassing to ask himself. It was too large and too small at the same time.
Was it the right choice.
He didn't know. That was the honest answer and it sat badly in his gut. The good and the harm were so tangled up together that trying to separate them felt like trying to pull a knot apart by pulling both ends. He had helped people today. He was nearly certain of that. He had also destroyed things today that couldn't be put back. Both of those things were equally true and neither of them erased the other.
The nausea hit him slowly, building up from somewhere in his midsection, and he breathed through it carefully and kept walking.
There's no clean version of this. There never was. He had known that long before today.
It didn't make it sit any easier.
The guild was bright and loud when he walked in, and he was grateful for both. He found an empty chair in a corner, sat down in it, and simply let the noise of the place wash over him. Voices overlapping, someone laughing too loudly across the room, the sound of chairs scraping on stone floors, the smell of food coming from somewhere in the back. Living, ordinary, indifferent noise.
He closed his eyes.
He didn't try to solve anything. He didn't try to process anything. He just sat there and let it all blur together into a low, steady hum, and let his mind go quiet for a few minutes. Just existing inside the sound and the warmth and the smell of bad food, and letting himself be a person who was sitting in a chair and nothing more than that.
It lasted perhaps five minutes before he felt a hand on his shoulder.
He opened his eyes. Sylvia settled into the chair across from him, setting her elbows on the table and folding her hands together. She looked tired in the specific, depleted way of someone who had given more of themselves than they'd had available that morning. But she also looked steadier than she had the night before. Like she'd worked something through.
"I decided not to try to organize all of them," she said without preamble. "Getting them somewhere, figuring out who needs what, coordinating all of that" She shook her head. "I know what my limits are right now. And I'm already past them." Something flickered across her face regret, maybe, or the particular discomfort of a person who wanted to do more than they were capable of doing. "I feel guilty about it. But I can't be useful to anyone if I run myself into the ground, so."
She looked at him steadily.
"Are you ready to keep moving?"
Rudeus looked at her for a moment. He thought about the girl's smile. He thought about the long walk through the side streets and the nausea and the question he still didn't have an answer to. He thought about the road still ahead of them, and how long it was, and how none of what had happened here changed the fact that it still needed to be traveled.
He nodded.
"Okay," Sylvia said simply. She pushed her chair back and stood. "Then we leave soon. Let's go get our things."
They checked out of the hotel without ceremony and stood on the street with their things while Rudeus got directions from a man outside a merchant stall next city, best road, how long on foot. The man was cheerful and helpful and had no idea who he was talking to or what they'd done, and that felt like the most normal thing that had happened in days.
They left the town as the morning was still working its way toward noon, stepping out through the main road with the sounds of the city fading gradually behind them. Neither of them spoke for the first stretch. The road ahead was open and pale in the daylight, cutting through flat land that would eventually give way to something else.
Rudeus settled into the familiar rhythm of walking.