Within monts, the beach was littered with direwolf corpses. The white sand was now marred with patches of crimson blood, mingling with the endless sea before them.
"Wow... this takes back!" Sophia grinned, her face glowing with joy, and Adrian couldn’t keep his eyes off her. "Is there sothing on my face?"
"Nah... I was rembering the last ti we were stuck in an instance dungeon," Adrian replied before they got busy butchering the monster corpses for valuables.
Like him, Sophia had been weak in the beginning when they first arrived in Nexaria. In fact, she was the last one in their group to manifest an ability.
But before that ti, Adrian and Sophia were the support team mbers. In other terms, they were the porters for the other heroes. During those tis, their relationship blossod and never changed, even when Sophia beca the strongest hero in their batch.
Back in their support team days, they used to butcher many monster corpses. Now, as they found themselves doing it again, a wave of nostalgia washed over them.
While Sophia couldn’t care less about the loot, Adrian couldn’t let the opportunity to earn money go away. So she decided to help him out, like in the old days.
"That reminds , you killed that minotaur, right?" Sophia asked, turning to face Adrian. "I an, you’re... Nevermind-"
"Relax, will you?" Adrian chuckled.
He understood that Sophia was curious about how he was able to defeat a Minotaur despite being weak. But she didn’t want to offend him by calling him weak, so she didn’t bother asking the question.
That said, Adrian didn’t know how much he should tell her. While Sophia would never betray him, Adrian didn’t want her to view him as the monster he had beco.
In her eyes, he still saw himself as human, despite being a Chimaera and wanted to keep things as they were. For that reason, he wasn’t absorbing organs from the monsters they killed. It wasn’t like they had anything worth the pain either, so he wasn’t losing anything.
Back to the topic, Addrian was confident Sophia already knew so of the story from the ones Adrian had unintentionally helped in that dungeon.
’She probably wants to know how I beca ’strong’.’
Adrian thought, rembering how she was eyeing him with his bare hands while he fought with the direwolves. Still, he did not want to reveal his Devourer class to her, so Adrian went for the subsequent plausible explanation.
"Have you ever heard about the entities?" Adrian mumbled, stopping his work to assess Sophia’s expression.
Sophia smiled at first, but then her expression soured. While Adrian had always been transparent with her, she couldn’t say the sa. She had kept the knowledge of the entities and their blessings hidden from him.
"Yes..." Sophia spoke softly.
"Well, then you should know," With a smile, Adrian got back to work.
Adrian’s question and his answer both held deep aning. Upon discovering the existence of entities and their ’sponsorships’, he knew one of them had to have given Sophia a gift for magic affinity. Otherwise, her sudden rise to power wouldn’t make sense.
Now that he knew the truth, he didn’t know how to feel about it. Though he tried to keep up a facade of a smile, inside, he wondered how blind he had been in his last life.
Even the one person he thought would always be truthful to him had been hiding sothing. Leaving him questioning everything he once believed about the people he knew in Nexaria.
"I wanted to tell you about it," Sophia said, imdiately going into damage control mode. "But I was forbidden-"
"By who? An entity?" Adrian asked calmly.
Sophia sighed. She knew her answer would upset him, but lying wouldn’t help the situation either.
"The Church..." she admitted.
Hearing that, Adrian gave a long and deep sigh before shaking his head. Sophia knew exactly how he felt about the Church, yet she valued their instructions more than respect for her partner.
Adrian felt a more profound pain, not from the deceit itself but from the realisation that Sophia had concealed information that might have been beneficial to him.
Had he known about the entities, he could have sought their attention and gained their blessing. Ard with a blessing, he might have avoided the fatal encounter with the assassins. He could have survived and lived as a human... not a creature of the dark.
His head began throbbing as anger surged within him. Thankfully, Adrian had a perfect corpse before him to take his anger out on, and he began stabbing the damn thing over and over as the wolf’s blood splattered all over him.
Sophia had never seen Adrian like that before and tried reaching out to him. But Adrian stopped her, stashing the spoils acquired from the mob in his inventory before standing up.
"Let’s not waste our ti here," he said. "The sooner we deal with this ss, the sooner we’ll be out of here. I wouldn’t want to make your beloved Church search for their ’star’."
Sophia’s outstretched hand hung in the air for a mont as Adrian’s words echoed in her mind. She had ’wronged’ Adrian; that much was true, but the harshness of his response stung more than she expected.
"Co on, let’s go-" Adrian reiterated as he turned to face her.
Adrian’s cold gaze t hers, and Sophia could see the resentnt in his eyes. Sophia’s shoulders slumped, and she withdrew her hand slowly, a silent realisation of the emotional distance that had suddenly grown between them.
"Adrian, I... I didn’t an to-" she began, her voice faltering.
"Save it. We have more pressing matters to attend to first," Adrian, however, cut her off with a dismissive wave. "Besides, it’ll be better if we take so ti before talking about this again, alright?"
Sophia’s brows furrowed as regret and frustration clouded her face. She bit her lip, suppressing the urge to speak up. But in the end, she decided to keep her thoughts to herself for the mont.
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