Chapter 194: Our Little March Against Fate On Destiny’s Back

The forest was one of the few things that did not immediately require scheming around.

No Entropy, no folks trying to get me involved with them, no politics, just trees, cold air, and the sound of birds arguing about something in the canopy forty meters up.

The sunlight came through the leaves in moving fragments, the kind that shift and resettle with every breath of wind. The path we were on was not really a path either, just moss and occasional shallow puddles that caught the light.

[The calm here is almost anus-unclenching in its serenity...] The thought surfaced as I stepped over a shallow puddle.

Nom-Nom was walking beside me and had said nothing for nearly an hour now.

And that was just as notable as the calm of the forest.

Nom-Nom on a walk through somewhere new typically produced: humming, pointing at interesting rocks, asking whether various plants were edible, and at least one request to investigate a strange smell coming from somewhere she should not investigate.

What she was doing instead was staring at the small gold speck floating beside my right shoulder.

She... well, we all knew what it entailed, beyond just the mid-bogging amounts of mana.

The speck looked harmless. Tiny, warm-glowing, rotating in its slow orbit. Almost pretty.

[She’s been staring at that thing like it personally insulted her bloodline...] I thought. [Which it might actually have.]

Brushing a low branch aside, Peko broke the silence that had been stretching for nearly an hour now.

"I have been meaning to ask you something."

I glanced over.

She was looking ahead through the trees, and I could tell, whatever it was, she really had been meaning to ask it for a while now.

"Go ahead."

"Where do you think it all ends?"

"Preferably somewhere with enough room for Nom to commit environmental damage comfortably."

"You know that is not what I meant," Peko said, giving me the look.

I did know.

I chuckled, and that chuckle wound down into something quieter as I looked up at the sky through the gaps in the canopy, at the blue coming through in irregular shapes between the rustling leaves.

"It ends with me going back home to my family..."

That made both of them go still.

Peko’s eyes widened first, then Nom-Nom’s followed a second later, and the two of them looked at me like I had just announced something taboo.

I kept walking while I talked, because if I stopped moving, then the words would start sounding too much like a speech, and I did not want that.

"You already know I spent most of my life with a disease I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy..." I said, keeping my eyes on the path ahead while the forest kept its quiet breathing around us, "The treatment... forget treatment, just keeping me alive was expensive as hell. I haven’t forgotten the days when my mother, after working two jobs, would come to the hospital to sit with me, often sleeping on plastic chairs because I was scared that I was going to die... come morning, she would go straight back to work."

I paused to step over a root.

"And my little brother basically raised himself through most of it, because mom was always either at work or at the hospital, and I was always at the hospital, so he was just... around, doing what needed doing, without anyone asking him to."

The forest hummed around us. A bird called somewhere high up, and another answered it from further away.

"Look, the point is, the point is that both of them gave up far too much just to keep me alive for eight long years..." I said, turning to look at both of them. "If I were actually dead, that would’ve been the end of it... But I’m not. I’m right here, and I owe it to them to get back, tell them I’m okay, finally okay... and make sure they spend the rest of their days like royalty."

"I see," Peko said softly, in a way that made it clear she understood more than she was saying out loud.

Nom-Nom looked like she wanted to ask something but had decided against it, which for her was basically a full-on philosophical restraint exercise, and I appreciated it enough to keep going before the silence got too heavy.

"These dungeons, and the Night of the Red Moon, and the weird dimensional nonsense hiding underneath all of it..." I said, glancing down at the path while we walked, "Well, they’re proof that inter-dimensional travel is possible, which means with enough strength, enough time, and enough bullshitery, I can find a way back home."

"I will search my inheritance," Peko said, and she said it immediately, without the half-second pause she normally took before committing to something.

And I noticed that.

"Yeah, you do that..." I said, keeping my voice level despite what it did to something in my chest to hear her say it that fast. " But there is no rush, because there is still the whole Destined Hero thing... After all, destiny itself will drag me to it. But then again, handling it would net us a lot of influence, and with that would come access to high-tier magic, artefacts, and people who may know a thing or two about hopping between worlds. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even figure out a way to deal with the Red Moons too..."

The silence reconvened around us, along with the birds and insects and wind through leaves, and I let it all sit for a moment before I grinned and turned to face them.

"You two can come too, you know... My folks would absolutely lose their minds over both of you~"

Peko’s mouth twitched in the direction of a smile.

"Yes!" Nom-Nom said immediately, with complete conviction as though she had been waiting for the invitation. "I wanna go!"

Peko thought for two seconds, which was longer than Nom-Nom and shorter than I expected, and said, "It would solve the Pantheon problem. We would be entirely out of their operational sphere."

How very Peko of her. Even the possibility of meeting my family got processed through the tactical lens first.

"Or..." Nom-Nom said, her tone being the one she used when an idea had arrived that she found genuinely exciting, "We bring them here."

That made me freeze mid-step, because I had not considered that specific version of the plan even though it was now sitting there in front of me looking disturbingly obvious.

I stared at her for a beat before the idea hit me hard enough to make me laugh.

"Oh, that..." I said, and I could already feel my brain sprinting through the possibilities while the butterflies in my stomach break-danced like hell. "That sounds even better!"

Peko looked between the two of us with that small, patient expression she wore whenever she was watching me accidentally turn a ridiculous idea into a future strategy, and I could tell she was following the thought as it built itself inside my own head.

"My brother would go absolutely insane..." I said, because there was no point pretending otherwise now that the idea had arrived fully formed, and the mental image of him seeing shooting fireballs in a dungeon was already turning the grin on my face into a loud laugh.

Nom-Nom was nodding with absolute seriousness, fully invested in a plan that had existed for approximately seven seconds.

"And my mother..." I continued, and the warmth of it hit me harder than any I had felt since waking up in this world, "She would finally just get to rest... have fun herself. Have a fresh start. And what better place to do that in a world of literal fantasies?"

"Nom..." I turned to Nom-Nom and spoke with complete sincerity, "You are an absolute genius."

Nom-Nom looked back at me with sincerity even more complete than mine, and nodded, "I know."

Peko let out a soft chuckle, already thinking past the emotional punch of the idea and into the practical cost of making it happen, because she knew that once a future sounded good enough, then I immediately started treating it like a project.

"But that would require..." Peko said carefully.

"I know, I know..." I said, forcing the butterflies down. "It would require handling the Red Moons, the destined hero situation, maybe even putting Entropy in the ground, but absolutely and permanently pacifying Pantheon."

"Why pacify Pantheon?" Peko asked, tilting her head. "Why not eradicate them?"

"Well, if we go the vengeful route, then yeah, we eradicate them..." I said, narrowing my eyes at the sky, "But if we take the route that ends with us living the life we wish to, without ghosts of our past haunting us... We pacify them."

Peko tilted her head at me.

And looking at her, I couldn’t help but chuckle, "Come on, now, you told me yourself, they were the ones who started the Age of Unity. They are the reason no two nations have declared war on each other for the past 3000 years... they established treaties, trade routes, and enough infrastructure to keep the whole thing from tearing itself apart every time some regional idiot got ambitious."

I looked through the trees ahead.

"So no, we don’t eradicate them... we can’t. I know they’re a bunch of evil bastards. But they’re a necessary bunch of evil bastards. So we gotta get big... Big enough that we are no longer worth the effort. And the fastest path to that is...?"

"The destined journey..." Peko breathed in a voice quieter than usual. "We go to Cardella."

"Exactly." I snapped my fingers.

And at that exact moment, the trees ahead of us opened.

The clearing we stepped into was wide, maybe sixty meters across, with tall grass running across the center, old trees framing the edges.

Just enough room for what I had in mind.

I looked at it for a moment.

"But know this, Destiny may be on our side here, but Fate itself will do whatever it takes to make sure we fail..." I said, turning to both of them, feeling the grin slowly spread across my face, "And so, our little march against Fate on Destiny’s back starts right here."

The gold speck was still orbiting beside my shoulder, slow, small, and warm, and Nom-Nom was looking at it again, but the look had changed.

The competitive sharpness that had been there when I first began charging it was still present, but underneath it now was something more.

A conviction towards a woman in a hospital chair, whom she had never met before.

Towards a brother teaching himself to be fine.

Conviction to a home she had offered to help carry on her back.

And so, stood there an apex predator of five hundred years, with something real to prove and something real to protect.