The leader’s expression shifted — not warmer, exactly, but accommodating, the way a person looked when they were about to offer something they considered generous.

"You helped us," he said.

"You pointed him out. Without that — "

He glanced at Jake, then back. "It might have taken considerably longer. We might have had to be less clean about the process."

He paused for a moment.

"For that, I’m letting you leave."

Jake was completely shocked to hear it.

The word landed with the weight of something that sounded like a gift and felt like a blade held flat against skin — not cutting yet, but present, and the decision about whether it cut was entirely in the leader’s hands.

"Leave?" Eskar repeated as he was confused and unsure.

"Now," the leader said pleasantly.

"Before my generosity finishes."

Eskar looked at him.

He looked at the figures between himself and Jake, positioned with the overlapping coverage of professionals, and even a Class IV Warrior with fifteen years behind him ran the arithmetic on trained blades in a closed perimeter and arrived at odds that did not favor heroism.

He looked at Jake.

Jake was looking back at him.

Jake’s face was — it was a face that Eskar had known for years, that he’d watched go from a younger age to eighteen with the slightly bewildering speed that young people managed, that he’d seen in guild offices and on horses and across Chelsea’s dinner table and in the Greyswood this very afternoon — and what was on that face right now was something that Eskar had never seen on it before.

It wasn’t fear exactly but something underneath fear.

The specific expression of a person watching something happen that they cannot yet make real in their mind, which keeps sliding off the surface of comprehension because the mind simply refuses to file it correctly.

A bad dream, worn on a waking face.

Eskar’s chest did something complicated; he quickly averted his gaze from Jake.

Jake was good at hiding his emotions, so there was completely a blank expression on his face right now and he looked right at Eskar.

In the end, Eskar breathed and ran away.

He hated himself for it before his second stride and he ran anyway because the alternative was dying at the rest stop beside the old stone wall and that helped nobody and least of all Jake and Eskar Brund had survived fifteen years by knowing the difference between courage and waste. He ran and he didn’t look back and the valley road came up under his boots and he ran.

Jake watched him go.

He watched Eskar’s broad back cross the rest stop and reach the road and disappear around the curve where the valley dipped, and then there was just the road, empty, the afternoon light falling across it with its total indifference, and Jake stood in the rest stop with the eastern men and their figures and the bodies on the ground and felt the last solid thing in the situation leave with the sound of retreating boots.

His hands were shaking harder now.

Not the fine tremor from before. A real shaking, the kind that came from the body running its emergency systems at full capacity and having nowhere to direct the output. His legs were doing something similar — a deep, structural unsteadiness that had nothing to do with his injured ribs and everything to do with the part of the human nervous system that existed specifically to report this is very bad in the clearest possible biological terms.

He had not moved.

He stood in the center of the rest stop with his sword still in his hand and could not, in the most immediate and physical sense of the word, move. Not from cowardice — at least he told himself it wasn’t cowardice, and some distant, functioning part of his mind agreed — but from the specific paralysis of a situation that had no shape.

You could not respond to a shapeless thing. You could not fight or flee or negotiate with something that the mind hadn’t finished processing yet.

Eskar, he thought.

The name arrived with a feeling attached to it that was too large and too complicated and too immediate to be useful, so he put it somewhere and closed the door on it, because the men in the rest stop were still there and closing doors on feelings was a skill he’d been developing for eighteen years.

Eskar told them. Eskar pointed at me. Eskar looked at me and then he ran.

He cursed - ’Fucking spineless cowardly dogshit bastard!!!’

Internally, comprehensively, in the vocabulary of two languages — the one he’d been born speaking in this life and the one he’d carried over from the last, which had certain specific expressions that this world’s language hadn’t yet invented and which felt, in this moment, uniquely necessary.

The system was silent.

He pushed at it — not gently like a casual prodding of a lazy afternoon, but the hard, urgent push of genuine need, the kind of asking that had real weight behind it.

Do something!! Say something!! Show me something!!

The ledger behind his thoughts sat open and lit and perfectly, infuriatingly still.

He tried the goddess.

Nothing.

Asurani, who had come to him in golden light and told him she thought he’d do better here, who had given him the system and the second chance and the dry, warm amusement of a divine being who found him genuinely interesting — she had nothing to say.

The frequency where she existed was quiet as a stopped clock.