The generous moonlight spilled across the sprawling garden tonight, blanketing the overgrown hedges and trembling leaves in a soft, silver glow.
It perfectly illuminated the quiet outline of a small boy sitting comfortably beneath a massive tree, peacefully reading a thick book as if this were a completely ordinary thing to do at such a late hour.
Yong Hae Shi looked at the tiny figure for a long moment. Then, he looked at Ruth. Ruth simply looked back.
"This kid..." Ruth muttered flatly.
"I know," Yong replied.
Neither of the intruders moved, and Fainyx calmly turned another page without even bothering to look up.
Yong scratched the back of his head and finally stepped forward, stopping just a few feet away.
He crouched down to directly meet Fainyx's eye level, keeping his hands casually stuffed in his pockets and tilting his head slightly to one side.
"So," Yong began, deliberately keeping his tone light and conversational. "Are you always this perfectly calm when terrifying strangers suddenly appear in your private garden at midnight?"
Fainyx elegantly closed his book. He stared blankly at Yong for a moment, then reached smoothly into his sleeve.
He pulled out his trusty notebook and pen, scrawled a swift message, and held it up to the moonlight.
[ Only when I already know they are coming. ]
Yong blinked in genuine surprise. Then, he let out a short, authentic laugh. "Fair enough."
Ruth stepped forward from the shadows as well, coming to a halt just slightly behind Yong's shoulder.
Even while trapped in a suppressed human form, the dragon's presence carried an immense, suffocating weight.
It was the particular, terrifying quality of something ancient and entirely unhurried, an aura that had absolutely nothing to do with how he was physically standing and everything to do with what he fundamentally was as a creature.
His glowing golden eyes settled heavily on Fainyx with open, unblinking curiosity and absolutely refused to move.
Fainyx noticed the heavy scrutiny immediately.
'That mana...' Fainyx analyzed silently.
'It is incredibly dense, perfectly layered, and structured in a bizarre way that feels absolutely nothing like any human mana I have ever encountered...
It is not exactly wrong or corrupted, but it is completely different from anything this specific world could ever naturally produce.'
He kept his delicate face a mask of perfect neutrality, though his tiny grip on the pen tightened just a fraction of an inch.
'A literal dragon.'
Yong gestured loosely between the group.
"I suppose we should handle introductions first. I am Yong Hae Shi. But I assume you already know that much."
He then casually tilted his head backward toward the towering blonde man.
Ruth exhaled a sharp breath through his nose, acting as if the very concept of introductions was significantly beneath his dignity, but he spoke anyway.
"...Rutherio Alexander Eixthr." A heavy pause followed before he added with clear, bitter reluctance,
"He just calls me Ruth."
"I call him that because it is significantly easier to say," Yong added pleasantly.
"You call me that because you are incredibly lazy."
"It is the exact same thing."
Fainyx observed the bizarre, bickering exchange in complete silence. His outward expression revealed absolutely nothing, but his internal reaction was spiraling into pure disbelief.
'Are they seriously always like this?' he wondered, fighting a rising headache.
He looked down at his open notebook and wrote his response.
[ Fainyx Von Nocte. ]
Yong read the paper and repeated the aristocratic name slowly, as if he were actively tasting the syllables. "Hoh, the rumored youngest son of Duke Nocte. That is a massively powerful house."
Ruth's glowing golden eyes still had not moved an inch from Fainyx's face.
"Hm," the dragon rumbled deeply.
"This is honestly my very first time ever hearing rumors about a third son existing in that household. It is almost like you are actively hidden away. You are certainly not recognized publicly."
It was a heavy statement, absolutely not a question.
Fainyx's pen did not move. He simply stared directly up at Ruth, and Ruth stared intensely back down at him. Neither of them broke eye contact or looked away for a long, heavy moment.
Yong watched the silent standoff with mild, genuine interest before leaning forward slightly. "Let us try a completely different question then. Exactly how old are you, kid?"
Fainyx wrote swiftly.
[ Three. ]
Yong stared blankly at the paper. Then he looked at Fainyx. Then he slowly looked back at the paper.
"...Three."
"Three," Ruth echoed from behind, his deep voice sounding completely, utterly flat with disbelief.
A brief, stunned silence settled heavily over the garden before Yong finally exhaled.
"Right... Okay." He miraculously did not say anything else about the impossible revelation, which was easily the wisest decision the man had made all evening.
Ruth slowly crouched down, bringing his massive frame significantly closer than Yong. His golden eyes settled directly on Fainyx with that exact same terrifying, highly focused attention.
"You successfully sensed the tracking spell..."
Again, it was absolutely not a question.
[ Yes. ]
"...And yet you deliberately did not remove it."
[ It was not hostile. ]
Ruth stared deeply into the child's violet eyes for a long moment, and then let out a quiet, rumbling sound from his chest that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else. It landed somewhere firmly in the rare territory of reluctant, genuine acknowledgment. "...Hah."
"See? He absolutely likes you," Yong said directly to Fainyx, sounding completely serious.
"I absolutely do not like anyone," Ruth corrected instantly.
"He tolerates you, then."
"...Barely."
Fainyx watched the two ancient beings and immediately noticed something fascinating about the specific way they moved effortlessly through this kind of verbal exchange.
It was incredibly easy and entirely automatic. It carried the highly particular, comfortable rhythm of two powerful people who had been firmly in each other's company for so long that their constant disagreements required absolutely no real energy or effort from either side.
Yong casually dropped backward onto the damp grass, sitting cross legged without a single ounce of aristocratic embarrassment, settling in to get comfortable.
"So, Fainyx. What exactly were you reading out here in the dark?"
Fainyx glanced down at the thick book resting beside him and picked up his pen.
[ It is simply a book covering advanced mana theory. ]
Yong looked closely at the worn cover and was dead quiet for a long second. "...At three years old," Yong muttered, speaking vastly more to himself than anyone else in the garden.
Fainyx looked calmly between the two stunned men and wrote another message.
[ You were already talking about me before you arrived tonight. ]
It was not framed as a defensive accusation. It was just a cold, logical observation, offered in the exact same blunt way he offered most things, directly and without any particular emotion attached to the ink.
Yong met his violet eyes perfectly. "Yeah," Yong admitted easily. "I definitely was. I was just so curious about you."
There was no cowardly deflection, no clever redirection. It was just raw honesty offered without any useless ceremony, exactly the way he seemed to offer most things in life.
Fainyx studied the strange man intensely.
This black haired man absolutely did not speak like proper nobility, nor did he carry himself with the stiff pride of a grand scholar or a hardened soldier.
His speech patterns were far too casual, far too unguarded for anyone who had actually grown up in a rigid fantasy world where every single misplaced word in front of the wrong powerful person carried lethal consequences.
Furthermore, his restaurant food had been completely unlike anything native to this continent.
And most glaringly, his monstrous mana had been the very first thing Fainyx noticed when the man sat down at their table.
It was impossibly deep and dense, structured according to entirely foreign rules that absolutely did not match this specific world's established magic system at all.
It was not corrupted or wrong, it was just different in the highly specific, undeniable way that things from another universe were different.
He wrote one more probing line.
[ Why focus on me specifically? There are significantly stronger people sleeping inside that mansion right now, or in countless other places across the capital. ]
Yong read the note and was unusually quiet for a long, heavy moment. Then he smiled. It was not his usual, easy surface smile, but rather something hiding underneath it that was vastly more genuine and much more considered.
"I focused on you because the stronger people are simply not interesting," Yong explained softly, tilting his head. "You, however, were."
The overgrown garden went completely quiet around them. The night wind moved gently through the ancient trees, and somewhere far in the distance, a nocturnal bird called out once before falling entirely silent.
Fainyx looked down at his small notebook and thought deeply about the bizarre man sitting cross legged on the dirt in front of him.
A man who successfully ran a modern restaurant, casually traveled alongside an ancient dragon, sneakily left high tier tracking spells on three year old children purely out of intellectual curiosity, and happily sat in garden dirt at midnight without a second thought about the absurdity of it all.
'What exactly are you...?' Fainyx wondered silently.
He wisely kept that dangerous question entirely to himself.
Ruth glanced briefly up at the starry sky. "...It is getting incredibly late."
"I know," Yong hummed.
"This human child should be asleep."
"I know that perfectly well too."
"He is perfectly fine," Yong argued softly, looking directly at Fainyx. "He explicitly chose to be out here."
Ruth looked down at Fainyx as well, studying his blank face, and then after a long moment, the dragon gave a small, quiet nod. It was the specific kind of nod that did not need any words attached to it to actually mean something profound.
'This one is entirely different,' Ruth seemed to conclude.
The beautiful night continued to stretch around them, feeling wonderfully unhurried and completely undemanding. The three of them simply stayed together beneath the silver moonlight without any particular sense of urgency.
Fainyx thought quietly that whatever this bizarre situation truly was, it carried the distinct, undeniable feeling of something that was just beginning, rather than something that was already finished.