Rena had been on the road for many hours, and it was already becoming hell of a journey.

The BSP map had been doing her a favor by preventing her from getting lost, and she had fine quite far into the Center when three figures suddenly stepped out from the treeline and blocked her path.

She brought the runner to a stop and sat for a moment with the engine still humming, looking at them through the windshield.

They were really big figures...

Not in the way that high Strength stat Entrants were big, where the size came from something deliberate and trained.

This was rougher than that. The kind of size that came from years of hard, physical, unregulated living. The one in the middle had a weapon resting across his shoulder that looked like it had started life as a door or a gate before someone had decided it worked better as something to hit people with.

The two flanking him were carrying shorter, heavier things that were harder to identify but no less serious looking.

The road through this section of the Center was not well patrolled and she had known that before she chose the route. She had looked at the map, calculated the risk, decided the time saved was worth it, and kept driving.

She was looking at that decision now and finding it slightly less sound than it had seemed an hour ago.

The one in the middle took a few steps toward the runner and stopped.

"Out of the vehicle," he said. The kind of voice that had said those exact words enough times that it had stopped feeling like a request and become something closer to a reflex.

Rena had decided to not move.

She went through her Assassin skills in her quickly and honestly... [Phantom Shift] was built for repositioning in tight spaces and getting behind a target cleanly.

[Void Strike] was a precision tool for a single, unsuspecting target.

Three large, alert Bandits on an open road in full daylight with no cover and a vehicle blocking her rear was not the environment any of those skills were built for... Maybe.

She could probably take one of them cleanly before the other two adjusted. But probably was not good enough when the other two were that size and that close.

The next moment, she looked at her Talent stat readout.

She had been looking at it for many days. Opening it, reading the numbers, closing it again. Thinking about what it meant to release that kind of output and whether she was ready for it, whether she would be able to manage the aftermath, whether the moment was right.

And again, she landed to thinking about Roman standing in the Citadel City market with a cut on his arm and a dark face, telling her to run.

That sparked a fuse deep in her heart, as she immediately opened the door and stepped out onto the road.

The middle Bandit smiled when she got out and started walking toward her with the unhurried confidence of someone who had assessed the situation and found it entirely in his favour. The two on either side spread out slightly, the instinctive positioning of people who had done this as a group before.

"Smart girl," the middle one said. "This goes easier when people cooperate."

Rena looked at him and chuckled softly, and then she turned to her Talent stat.

The stat readout appeared at the corner of her vision in the clean, clinical way that Talent activations always presented themselves.

[Talent Activated.]

[Damages: 24.]

[Energy: 1400.]

[Strength: 1000.]

[Damages of both Energy and Strength multiplied by one hundred upon storage!]

The middle Bandit raised his weapon and started the swing, trying to take advantage at once.

However, the next moment, Rena moved.

She crossed the distance between them in a way that she did not fully process until after it was done, the Strength release carrying her forward with a force that felt like something breaking loose from inside her chest. She got both hands into position under his arm and his centre of mass and she threw him.

Not shoved.

Not tackled...

Simply threw him, with the full output of one thousand Strength, released in a single upward motion that she felt travel from her feet through the road surface and out through her arms like a current finding its exit.

He left the ground and kept going, clearing the treeline.

And then he was a small shape getting smaller against the open sky above the trees, and then he was not visible at all, and there was no sound of landing because whatever landing happened was not within hearing distance.

The two remaining Bandits had not moved, as they had their eyes widened in awe.

And at once, Rena turned to the one on her left.

This time, she released Energy in full.

She had not known exactly what to expect from an Energy release at that output level and she understood immediately afterward that nothing could have prepared her for it properly.

It was total.

The kind of force that did not leave gradations or partial outcomes. The Bandit on her left was there and then the space where he had been was not the same space anymore as he had been bursted into terrifying particles in seconds, and the third Bandit, the one on her right, was standing completely still and covered in blood and flesh.

He was staring at Rena with an expression that had moved so far past aggression that it had come out the other side into something that looked like a man genuinely reviewing his entire life in real time.

Before he knew it, he turned with his legs jerking, as he screamed lightly. And with discovering that he was giving a chance to run, he made sure he made good use of that opportunity.

He did not look back once, and the sound of his footsteps on the road faded quickly as the distance between him and Rena grew at a speed that suggested he had found a level of motivation he had probably never accessed before.

Rena stood on the road and looked at her hands.

She turned them over slowly, looking at her palms and then the backs and then her palms again, the way you look at something that just did a thing you told it to do but did not fully believe it could do.

She looked up at the sky above the treeline where the first one had disappeared.

She looked at the empty space to her left.

She looked at the road ahead of her, straight and open and stretching out toward the horizon.

"Interesting," she said quietly.

She stood there for another few seconds, just breathing, letting the reality of what her Talent actually was settle into something she could carry without it feeling like it was sitting on top of her.

Then she walked back to the runner, got in, and pulled the door shut.

The engine was still running. The Mana gauge had not moved, and the road ahead was clear.

And again, her thought drifted to Roman.

About the grey uniforms and the four hundred miles of road between her and wherever they had taken him. She thought about what she was going to do when she got there, and for the first time since leaving Citadel City, the answer to that question did not feel uncertain.

She pressed the accelerator forward.

The runner moved back onto the road and picked up speed, and the scene behind her shrank in the mirror and then disappeared as the road curved and the trees closed back in on either side.

Somewhere ahead of her was the Heartlands.

Somewhere in the Heartlands was Roman... Probably.

And somewhere on the way towards the Heartlands was her finding him.

If she would have to go against her father to get him back, then she would have to do it...

With pleasure.

.

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[A/N: Okay here’s a time to talk about how the story has been going so far. Is it slow? Fast? What are your opinions and suggestions? We can make it better together! Thanks for supporting and participating!]