Chapter 267: Back

The distant sound of searching footsteps faded into rumble of the district.

“Come on,” Kai whispered, motioning toward the mouth of the alley with his staff. “My place is just three blocks down. We can’t stay out in the open.”

With a silent mental command, Hide willed the thin layer of Abyssal Slime back over his face, dulling his silver locks into plain ash-brown and flattening his sharp features. Kiko pulled her hood low.

Kai led them through a maze of cracked service lanes and collapsed fire escapes, deliberately avoiding the main boulevards.

They stopped before a rusted, corrugated metal roll-up door at the rear of an abandoned auto repair workshop—a place half-swallowed by concrete debris from a fallen elevated rail. Kai reached beneath an overturned oil drum, entered a manual keycode into a hidden analog box, and lifted the door just enough for the three of them to duck underneath.

Inside, the air smelled of dust.

A single canvas cot sat in the corner beside a battery-powered lantern, flanked by a crate of ration bars and basic medical wraps.

“Not much, but it’s safe and the only one I have left,” Kai sighed, leaning his staff against the wall.

In the center of the garage like place, resting beneath a heavy, dust-covered canvas tarp, was a vehicle. Kai walked over and pulled the tarp away with a flourish of his arm.

It was his car—the dark blue, transit vehicle he had driven back when they were high school students.

“You kept it?” Hide asked, feeling a faint trace of nostalgia.

“Barely,” Kai admitted with a wry chuckle, tapping the hood. “I haven’t driven it in a while. I only got this robotic limb fitted a month ago, and between relearning how to walk and defending the city, I haven’t had a second to breathe. But we need it now. In this, we can take the forgotten secondary maintenance roads straight to Area Five.”

“Area Five?” Kiko asked, glancing between them. “I thought you said your friends were hiding somewhere safe.”

“They are,” Kai said firmly. “It is the safest place. The main hideout is in the capital. That’s where the rest of our people are.”

Within ten minutes, the garage door rolled open.

VROOOM.

The car’s engine purred with a deep, muffled hum. Hide sat in the passenger seat, while Kiko curled up in the back. Kai eased the vehicle into gear, testing his prosthetic foot with careful precision before pulling out into the streets.

The journey across the provincial borders toward Area 5 took hours of tense, vigilant maneuvering.

Kai navigated through old quarry routes, deactivated industrial drainage canals, and dangerous secondary access roads that bypassed the corporate military cordons. They did encounter a few horde of beasts that were taken care of by Hide within seconds, fortunately they did not chance upon any active gate.

By the time they crossed into the outer rim of Area 5, the morning was bleak, covered by bruised-purple clouds that choked the horizon.

Hide stared out the passenger window.

Area 5 had once been the glittering crown of Varisus. Hide remembered the high-rise spires of polished glass, the immaculate elevated walkways where pristine magnetic trams glided above the crowds, and the purified air that smelled artificially clean when he first arrived here.

Now, the capital was a broken graveyard.

Nearly half of the grand skyscrapers were cracked in two or completely sheared down to their concrete skeletons. Whole city blocks had pancaked into smoking craters from uncontained gate breaks.

The elevated transit bridges had collapsed onto the lower roadways, crushing commercial plazas into slag. In the squares, weary civil defense workers and medical teams were still pulling survivors from heaps of pulverized masonry, loading wounded civilians onto triage trucks. The air was thick with the stench of burned drywall, wet cement and blood and rot.

“It happened two weeks ago,” Kai murmured quietly. “A coordinated cluster of three-Star gates manifested right in the center of the city core. NEA lost three of its best exterminators.”

Kai turned the car down an overgrown, cracked alleyway in the old industrial outskirts of the city—a sector abandoned long before the recent disasters.

He pulled the car into the cavernous basement of a long-abandoned textile warehouse, cutting the engine.

“We’re here,” Kai said, exhaling a long, steady breath.

Hide and Kiko stepped out of the vehicle. Kai led them toward a reinforced emergency stairwell behind a row of severed ventilation ducts.

He knocked on a heavy, lead-lined blast door—three rapid taps, a pause, then two heavy thuds.

CLACK.

The mechanical deadbolts slid back, and the heavy door opened a crack.

Toma’s exhausted, pale face appeared in the gap, adjusting his glasses nervously. “Aren’t you two back too soon? I thought it would be like four or five -“

He paused and blinked. “Is that you Kai? What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be -“

Toma’s words froze in his throat as his eyes flicked past Kai to the two strangers standing behind him.

“It’s fine, Toma. Let us in,” Kai urged gently.

Toma hesitated, but pulled the door wide.

The room inside was a sprawling shelter lined with mana reinforced concrete pillars. There were ten doors, leading to ten rooms. Crates of ammunition, food rations, and medical supplies were stacked against the walls. In the center of the hall, glowing communication consoles and mapping holo-tables were working continuously.

Ryan was hunched over a terminal, his fingers flying across the keys.

Gideon and Evelyn were not there—out on an essential reconnaissance and supply run across the ruined perimeter.

And standing near the center of the room, her hand resting tense and ready on the hilt of her rapier, was Sora.

She wore a dark gear, hair tied in a loose ponytail, dark circles bruising the skin beneath her eyes. She had clearly not slept in days. The moment Kai stepped through with two unfamiliar people, her body tensed.

“Kai,” Sora said, her voice sharp with exhaustion. “Who are they? You know we can’t bring outsiders here.”

Kai didn’t explain. He stepped aside, leaning lightly on his staff, his eyes glistening with unshed tears as he looked toward Hide.

Hide stepped forward into the dim light of the overhead lamps.

He looked at Sora.

He saw the strain on her shoulders, the grief she had been burying deep within herself, and the stubborn fire that had kept her standing.

The thin membrane across Hide’s face and hair liquefied and sank back beneath his collar.

Gasp.

Behind the terminal, Ryan stopped typing, his spectacles sliding down his nose in utter shock. Toma covered his mouth with both hands, stumbling back against a stack of crates.

Sora froze.

Her breath caught in her throat. The color drained from her cheeks, then rushed back in a burning, violent wave. Her hand fell from her rapier, her fingers trembling uncontrollably.

“Hide…?” she whispered, her voice cracking into a high, fragile rasp.

Hide offered her a faint, tired smile. “I’m back.”

She didn’t wait, didn’t ask how he survived or demand explanations.

Sora threw herself across the room in a desperate, blinding sprint.

She collided violently with Hide’s chest, throwing both arms around his neck and burying her face into his shoulder with all the strength in her body.

“You idiot!” she sobbed openly, her voice muffled against his blue jacket.

Heavy, hot tears soaked through the fabric of Hide’s collar as ragged, suffocating sobs tore through her chest. Her whole frame trembled against him, clutching his back as if she were terrified that if she loosened her grip for even a fraction of a second, he would dissolve back into the smoke.

“I’m sorry,” Hide murmured softly into the quiet room. “I’m right here.”