Northern frowned darkly as he caught Roma's collapsing fra. He held her for a mont, his grip firm yet uncertain, while the others stood frozen in shock.
Her face was pale—far too pale, as if the very rivers of her blood had run dry.
His gaze sharpened. Chaos Eyes flared to life, dissecting the depths of her being, piercing into the essence of her soul.
It was second nature now—an act as effortless as breathing. A re glance into the embrace of a soul told him everything: its condition, its burdens, its truths and deceptions. He could discern the tremors of emotion woven into its very fabric—fear, desire, greed, corruption.
Yet at this mont, one detail seized his full attention.
And when he saw it—his eyes widened.
'I was wrong.'
Rita was not the worst off. Roma was.
Her suffering had been silent, buried beneath an exterior of endurance. Most of her injuries lay within, unseen. Her organs—ruptured, mangled beyond recognition—barely clung to function.
'What the hell did she do?!'
The question burned in his mind but never reached his lips. Now was not the ti for answers.
Now was the ti to move.
He needed to get her to safety.
For a fleeting second, sothing within him stirred—an unsettling awareness, a prickling sensation in the back of his mind.
Why did he care so much?
Why did her state unsettle him this much?
But just as quickly, he dismissed the thought. It didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was keeping her alive.
His gaze lifted, locking onto the three figures walking effortlessly through the ashen veil—humans, untouched by the suffocating clouds.
As they passed through, Rita, caught in the urgency of battle, flinched. Reflexively, she snapped her head back, bracing for an attack, expecting monsters to have broken through.
But what she saw sent conflicting signals racing through her body—both relief and tension coiling at once.
The three figures moved with an unsettling grace.
The gaunt man at the center stood slightly ahead, his very long white hair flowing with the wind, strands drifting like wisps of mist. His alabaster skin, eerily pale beneath the strange cut of his garb, contrasted against the flickering shadows. The tailored fabric flapped peacefully with the gentle breeze, an eerie contradiction to the death and ruin surrounding them.
Beside him, the short-haired woman and the ashen-haired man were no less imposing. Their presence alone was suffocating, not in the way of imminent attack but in sothing far deeper—sothing primal.
Nothing about them suggested hostility. No raised weapons, no outward aggression.
Yet Rita's senses scread.
A pressure coiled at the base of her skull, sothing supre and unfamiliar. Instinct alone told her that standing too close to them was like lingering at the edge of an abyss—one wrong step, and the fall was inevitable.
Tearing her gaze away, she refocused on her talent ability.
What had happened to the monsters that had climbed the bridge?
With a slight gesture, she parted the ashen clouds.
And there it was.
The ground below was a grotesque wasteland of twisted flesh and broken limbs. The monsters had been annihilated.
Her gaze shifted back to the three figures just as they neared the Sage.
Northern, still holding Roma, regarded them with a hard stare. His voice was steady, yet there was an edge beneath it.
"Are any of you capable of healing?"
The question was foolish, and he knew it the mont it left his lips.
Of course they weren't.
It was desperation speaking—raw, uncalculated. A part of him barely understood his own actions in that mont. But as soon as the words left his mouth, he caught himself.
A breath.
A slow inhale.
A steady exhale.
His grip on reality realigned, the urgency still present, but his thoughts no longer tangled in the chaos. His gaze flickered between them once more, this ti calr, more asured.
"I need to get to the city. Quickly."
His tone left no room for argunt.
"The three of you—escort the rest. I won't assu the island is safe just yet."
There was no need to explain further.
Northern gave Bairan a nod.
The Sword King, ever composed, responded with a humble bow of his head.
Without another word, Northern shifted Roma's limp form in his arms, securing her before lifting off the ground. His ascent was slow at first—controlled, deliberate—before he catapulted into the wind.
And just like that, he was gone.
The cohort of travelers remained, left standing with three strange figures—humans, yet sothing far from normal.
For so reason, three deranged and socially wounded beings were now their escort to Lithia.
—
Northern's flight was short.
He pierced the sky like a spear of wind—compressed, honed, unstoppable. The air bent around him, screaming in his wake, his body cutting through the atmosphere as if he were a hurricane made flesh.
Less than three minutes.
That was all it took before he was hovering over Lithia.
And the city—it reeked of death.
The air was thick, oppressive. The skyline lood heavy with shadows of sorrow, as though the city itself was aware of the doom crawling toward it—waiting, dreading, powerless to change its fate.
Northern barely spared it a glance.
His focus was singular.
The girl in his arms.
And then, just for a mont, he faltered.
A flicker.
Roma's words.
They crawled back into his mind, unwelco yet persistent, slithering through the cracks in his detachnt.
She had called his strength aningless—because he fought for nothing.
To her, every life lost was a wound.
It didn't matter if she knew the person. It didn't matter if she could have looked away. She refused to. Every fla snuffed out only fed the fire in her heart.
She did not try to save people to be a hero.
She saved them because she couldn't not.
And Northern, detached, unbothered by the imminent death of an entire city—suddenly felt bad.
Sothing inside him twisted. Sothing foreign and unsettling.
"I think I'm being infected."
His lips curled in slight irritation at the thought.
A disease.
A very annoying disease.
An imdiate, almost primal urge coursed through Northern—the need to detach.
To be rid of this girl.
To cast her away, to put distance between himself and whatever was unsettling inside him.
Yet, despite how fragile and helpless she seed in this mont—she was anything but.
Roma was full of strength.
Even when things seed impossible, when the odds stacked against her, when death lood like an inevitable tide—she never gave up.
Even now, he could imagine her dying with a smile.
Not because she welcod death.
But because she would find fulfillnt in it—because she would believe that dying to save a newborn child was worth it.
Northern knew himself enough to call such things aningless. Stupid.
And yet…
Why?
Why did people like her find purpose in that?
Why was it worth anything at all?
More importantly—why did he care?
Perhaps, on his journey to outgrow his past, to eclipse the foolishness of his forr self, he had lost sothing along the way.
Perhaps he had never paid attention to what mattered most.
And right now, his only clue to reclaiming whatever that was—his only thread to understanding—was the dying girl in his hands.
He mustn't let her die.
Never!
Taking a deep breath, Northern descended into the city.
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