After a while of driving back, they had reached the junction that diverted them to Liberty Road.

Liberty Road was nothing like the main highway. Sure, it led to the famous Liberty City, but you wouldn’t compare it to the Grand Passage.

It was almost narrower, quieter, and the trees on both sides grew close enough to the road that the branches almost touched overhead in certain stretches, blocking out most of the sky and giving the whole journey the feeling of moving through a long tunnel that never quite ended.

The light that filtered through came in broken fragments, shifting across the caravan floor as they moved, and the sound of the wheels against the road was different here too, softer, like the road itself had been used less and had not fully hardened under years of heavy traffic.

The caravan rolled along at a steady pace, and up front the three messengers had gone quiet after agreeing on the route change, each of them settled into their own corner of focus.

Crest had his eyes on the road ahead. Dax had his arms folded and his head turned toward the window on his side. Sera seemed to be checking something on her BSP, her expression the same as it always was, which was to say unreadable.

At the back, Roman and Arnold sat across from each other with their wrists chained and the same silence between them that they had been carrying for the past several hours.

And after what looked like eternity, It was Arnold who broke it.

"We missed Privilege Day," he said.

He was not looking at Roman when he said it. He was looking at the caravan floor, and his voice carried the particular flatness of someone saying something out loud that they had been turning over in their head for a long time.

"Never in my life did I think I would not make it back to my city after seven days. My family is going to be sitting there waiting and waiting and eventually deciding that I did not make it."

He sighed and paused.

"That I am dead."

Roman looked at him for a moment.

"Same here," he said, and a small smile crossed his face without him fully intending it.

Arnold caught it and frowned. "How are you smiling right now?"

"I am not smiling about that specifically," Roman said.

"Then what are you smiling about? We are sitting here in chains, we have missed the one day we were supposed to go home, and you are sitting there with a look on your face like you are on your way somewhere you actually want to be."

Roman did not answer that directly, and Arnold stared at him for a long enough moment that the silence itself became its own kind of answer. Arnold’s frown deepened slightly, and then he shook his head and looked back at the floor.

"You are strange," Arnold said.

"You are not the first person to say that," Roman said.

They were quiet again for a while. The road outside continued its steady, tree-lined stretch, and the caravan rocked gently over an uneven section before smoothing back out.

"Why did you step in back there?" Roman asked eventually. "In the market. You have never once done anything that suggested you wanted good things for me. Then suddenly you are throwing strikes at A rankers on my behalf."

Arnold was quiet for long enough that Roman thought the question was going to go unanswered entirely.

"I don’t know," Arnold said finally. "It was not a decision I made. It just happened."

"Things like that do not just happen," Roman said.

"This one did," Arnold replied, and his tone made it clear that was where that particular conversation was going to end.

Roman leaned his head back against the caravan wall and looked up at the ceiling. Outside, the trees kept rolling past in their quiet, continuous way.

"I guess your family is wealthy," Roman said after a while.

"Yes," Arnold said.

"Then they will find out you are alive before most people’s families will. Money moves information. They will have people looking within hours of the arrival window closing."

Arnold looked at him again, and something in his expression shifted very slightly. Not warmth. But the edge that had been there since the first week at Blood Trail Outpost was a little less sharp.

"What about yours?" Arnold asked.

"My mother will hold it together," Roman said without hesitation. "She always does. Whatever is happening at home right now, she is the one keeping it standing."

"And your father?"

Roman was quiet for a moment, and when he answered his voice was even but thoughtful.

"Honestly I don’t know. He has been broken for a long time, and news like this could go either way with him. It either finishes something in him or it wakes something up. I cannot call it."

Arnold nodded slowly. He did not push it further, and Roman did not offer anything more, and the silence that settled between them after that was a different kind than the ones before it.

It still wasn’t comfortable.

But the sharpness has gone out of it, and what was left was just two people sitting in a difficult situation with nothing useful to do about it.

Roman looked down at his chained wrists.

He had been thinking about King and Queen and Alpha sitting in the Soul Bank, waiting with the particular patience of souls that had no concept of time.

He thought about Terror Lake. About what North had written in the group chat on that first night, heading to Terror Lake with her crew. He thought about what kind of creatures lived in water that dark and deep, and what kind of EXP they carried, and what their souls would look like listed in the Soul Bank after he was finished.

He thought about the Dire Wolf Alpha’s fierceness in the Ravine of Bones, the amber glow brightening, that slow turn of the head toward him.

He was still running through it when Crest’s voice came through from the front of the caravan, pitched toward the other two but loud enough to carry to the back.

"We are almost at Goldfire Refuge. Strength City is less than fifteen kilometres."

Roman immediately smiled, and ot appeared that Arnold had just noticed him again.

"What now?"

"Nothing," Roman said.

"You keep saying nothing and you keep smiling like something."

"I just love hearing that name "Strength City," Roman said. "That is all."

Arnold stared at him for a moment with the expression of someone doing slow arithmetic and not fully liking where the numbers were pointing. Then he turned back to the window.

"You are genuinely one of the strangest people I have ever met," Arnold said.

"Probably," Roman agreed.

Outside, the trees began to thin as the road widened slightly, and through the gaps in the treeline the distant outline of Goldfire Refuge became visible on the horizon, small and quiet from this distance, a cluster of buildings sitting in the flat land between the road and the city beyond it.

Strength City was fifteen kilometres away...!

Roman settled back against the caravan wall and let the smile stay.

Arnold said nothing more and went back to looking out the window.

And the caravan kept rolling forward down Liberty Road, steady and unhurried, while the afternoon light continued its slow shift toward evening through the gaps in the branches overhead.

Roman kept smiling.