[ Ayame's POV]
I think about human expressions. I have seen them smile. They lift the corners of their mouths, revealing teeth. It signifies pleasure, or friendship, or sometimes a deceptive kind of welcome. Lucid's mist often shifts in a particular way when I believe he is smiling. The edges seem to soften, to become less severe.
Curiosity stirs. I attempt to replicate the expression. I consciously lift the corners of my own mouth. I feel the unfamiliar muscles stretch my lips taut. It feels artificial. Tight. Wrong on the architecture of my face. What is the functional purpose of such a gesture? To show you are not a threat? But showing teeth is a primal sign of threat. Human communication is inefficient and contradictory.
A sudden, hot wave of self-consciousness washes over me. Embarrassment. The feeling is sharp and new. I quickly let my face relax into its usual impassive mask. I glance at Lucid, hoping he did not witness my failed experiment. I compose my features into an expression of detached curiosity. Indifference.
He stands, brushing dust from his trousers. "Come on. We should keep moving."
We leave the shelter of the woodpile. As we walk back toward the town's muddy center, Lucid stops short. He has seen someone. A small boy. I recall this child from the tavern earlier. He was sitting alone in a shadowed corner. He looks utterly lost now, his small face pale and streaked with dirt and tears.
Lucid approaches him. He does not stand over the boy; he crouches down, bringing himself to the child's eye level. "Hey," he says, and his voice is so soft it is almost a whisper. "Are you alright?"
The boy sniffles, a ragged, wet sound. "I can't find my dad. He went to look for work, they sent him into the woods. He said he'd be back by noon." It is long past noon. The sun is beginning its descent.
Lucid asks a few calm, clear questions. The story is simple and bleak. The father, a traveling laborer, ventured into the Blue Shroud woods. He has not returned. The boy, brave and frightened, asked the town guards for help. They shrugged. The woods are big, they said. Maybe he was unfortunate. Maybe the Unfaithful took him.
Lucid looks at the boy's tear-filled eyes. He looks at the lengthening shadows of the forest edge. He looks at me, and in that glance, I see the decision solidify. It is a decision that defies efficiency.
"Let's go find him," Lucid says.
He takes the boy's small, grimy hand in his own. We spend the remaining hours of daylight searching the fringes of the Blue Shroud. Lucid calls the man's name into the silent trees. He follows faint, almost invisible game trails. He asks the boy gentle, probing questions about his father's skills, where he might have looked for specific herbs or game. He is methodical. Patient. The boy clings to his hand, small fingers wrapped tightly around Lucid's larger ones, as if he is the only solid thing in a tilting world.
I follow. My eyes scan the darkening woods, my ears tuned for the snap of a twig or the low growl of corruption. But a part of my attention remains fixed on Lucid. On the careful, gentle way he speaks to the child. On the way he physically pushes aside thorny branches to clear a path for the boy. The false, hardened voice he uses for the town is gone, completely erased. In its place is nothing but pure, patient sincerity.
I admire him for this. This action is illogical. It delays our primary objective. It expends energy we can ill afford to waste. It offers us no tangible reward. Yet he does it. Without hesitation. Because a child is afraid. Because it is, in his human moral calculus, the right thing to do. This concept of "rightness" detached from survival or gain is still foreign to me, but I am beginning to appreciate its strange power.
The sun finally vanishes, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and black. The blue woods become a wall of impenetrable shadow. There is no sign of the father. The boy is crying quietly now, his small body shuddering with suppressed sobs, trying so hard to be brave.
Lucid stops. He kneels in the leaf litter in front of the boy, putting them at eye level again. "We won't find him in the dark. It's not safe for you out here now. We'll go back to the inn. You can stay with us tonight. In the morning, we'll look again with proper light. And we'll make those guards do their job and help."
The boy nods, a jerky, hopeless motion, and wipes his running nose on his sleeve.
We return to the inn. The innkeeper's eyes narrow with displeasure when he sees the extra child, but Lucid places another coin on the counter for a meal, and the man's objections die unspoken.
In our small room, the boy sits curled on the floor, dwarfed by Lucid's fur cloak wrapped around him. He nibbles listlessly on the heel of bread Lucid procured for him. He is calmer now, the sheer exhaustion and the solid presence of Lucid providing a fragile sense of security.
Lucid sits on the edge of the narrow bed, speaking to him in a low, steady monologue. Asking about his mother, about where they call home. Keeping the child's mind occupied, building a wall of normalcy against the fear.
I take my position, leaning against the wall by the door. My customary post. But something is deeply wrong.
A profound, heavy tiredness is pulling at the core of my being. It is more than the physical fatigue of muscles. It is a weight settling in my mind, turning my thoughts slow and viscous, like cold tar. I have not slept for two full days. This is not uncommon for my kind; we are endurance hunters, capable of long periods of sustained wakefulness. But the cataclysmic fight with the S-Grade beast, the massive expenditure of energy to heal, the constant, unrelenting vigilance since the cave... it has created a deficit. The debt is now due.
My legs feel unsteady, their strength abandoning them. I slide down the wall until I am sitting hard on the wooden floor. My head lolls back against the planks. It is a monumental effort to keep my eyes open, to keep them focused on the line of the door, the square of the dark window.
I can hear Lucid's voice, a low rumble. The boy's softer, hesitant replies. The sounds are beginning to blur at the edges, losing their distinct shapes, melting into a meaningless drone.
This is unacceptable. I cannot sleep. Not here. Not with a vulnerable child in the room. Not with this wrong, watchful town pressing in from all sides. My vow...
I force my eyelids up. I stare at the grain of the door until my vision blurs. I count the lines in the wood. One. Two. Three.
My eyelids are like stone shutters. They demand to be closed. To surrender to the sweet, tempting pull of darkness.
I fight it. I am Ayame. I do not fall asleep on watch. I am a weapon that never dulls. I am a guardian that never rests.
But the weapon's edge is chipped. The guardian's resolve is crumbling.
Lucid's voice stops mid-sentence. I feel the weight of his gaze upon me. I try to summon the strength to sit up straight, to appear alert. I fail. My muscles simply will not obey.
"Ayame?" His voice is close. He has crossed the room silently. He crouches before me. The ever-present mist is a pale, swirling cloud in my failing vision. "You need to sleep."
"No," I say, but the word is thick and slurred. "Watch."
"You can't watch like this. You're barely conscious." His hand touches my shoulder, a firm, warm pressure. "The boy is here. I'm here. I will watch. Nothing will happen. Sleep."
It is an order. Delivered with gentleness, but an order nonetheless.
My body, traitorously, agrees with him. The last shred of my willpower disintegrates. The tide of exhaustion wins, sweeping over the last defenses of my mind.
"One hour," I mumble, a weak, pathetic compromise with my own failing duty.
"Okay," he says, his voice impossibly soft. "One hour."
His hands are under my arms, helping me to stand. My legs are useless. He does not guide me back to my place on the floor. He guides me to the bed. I try to form a protest, but no sound emerges. My body sinks into the thin mattress, which feels like the most luxurious down. The rough wool blanket is drawn over me.
My eyes close. The world dissolves into a deep, velvety, and utterly welcoming blackness.
The last conscious sensation I am aware of is not sight or sound. It is a presence. A solid, warm weight settling on the floor beside the bed, its back against the wooden frame. A silhouette on guard.
He is watching now.
The vow is temporarily transferred. And in my surrender, I feel, for the first time, a different kind of safety. Not the safety of my own vigilance, but the safety of being guarded. It is a strange, vulnerable, and deeply unsettling feeling. And as I fall, I cling to it.