Chapter 651: A Wish And The World’s Reply

The tavern was loud and smelled of stale barley mash as well as weed.

Mercenaries, low-tier Awakened prospectors, and caravan guards sat crammed elbow-to-elbow along the pine benches, shouting over dice and slamming wooden tankards against the tables.

CREAK!

The heavy sand-scoured oak door swung open.

’I really dislike this place...’

The tavern did not quiet at once, but a cold sharp drop in atmospheric pressure rolled through the doorway like an icy draft.

A tall figure stepped across the threshold, ducking her chin to clear the low beam.

Her silver hair hung in frayed uneven locks past her shoulder blades, caked in white dust and her traveler’s cloak was shredded at the hem, pinned over a tarnished cuirass that had lost its polish three centuries ago while the forearms that emerged from its torn sleeves were corded with lean hard muscle, crossed with old white scars.

The delicate stellar markings on her pale cheekbones caught the dim lantern light while her piercing blue eyes, rimmed with an exhausted bloodshot look swept the room with the flat indifference of a reaper checking its victims.

The noise in the tavern died by half.

Drunk mercenaries froze with tankards halfway to their lips.

Men who had been boasting about hunting desert hyenas leaned back and slid their daggers further under the benches.

A dice game stopped mid-throw, and somebody’s cup rolled off a table and landed with a hollow clatter nobody dared to pick up.

Four men by the hearth did not freeze with the others.

They wore the gray scarves of a bounty guild, and the biggest of them had a rolled parchment tucked into his belt, with a smudged charcoal sketch of silver hair.

He stood, loosening a chain-flail from his hip.

"That’s her... Twelve thousand credits for the head."

Ther’Abella did not break stride.

She turned her head the barest fraction of an inch, and the starlight in her eyes flared once in a brief cold lilac that lit every face in the room.

The big man’s flail slid from his fingers and rang on the floorboards as the other three sat back down.

It was not simply a threat... It was a verdict, delivered so quietly that the barkeep, who had seen three brawls a week for twenty years, could swear that he hadn’t seen her do anything at all.

Ther’Abella ignored them all.

She walked straight to the wooden counter with her boots making a dry scuffing scrape against the floorboards, and rested two calloused fingers against the scarred wood.

"A room," She said and her voice was raspy as unwatered gravel. "A washbasin. Key."

The tavern owner, a balding middle-aged man with thick forearms and an apron stained with grease, stared at her.

His eyes went wide as saucers, dropping to her scarred polearm, then darting to the constellations on her face.

"Y-You," he stammered, and dropped the rag he was holding, nearly knocking over a row of pewter mugs as he stumbled around the counter. "You’re her! The silver woman from the Southern Ridge! Three weeks ago my daughter, Mara, was leading an escort wagon through the dunes when a pack of sand-crawlers hit them... You slaughtered the whole brood and dragged her cart out of the pit!"

"Key," Ther’Abella said.

"Please, My Lady!" the man pleaded, tears welling in his red eyes as he fumbled beneath the till, dragging out a heavy iron key with both hands. "Stay as long as you wish! A month! A year! The top suite, clean sheets, a private cistern, anything! Let me roast a flank of mountain goat for you! Mara has been wanting to thank you... If you could only sign your name on her guild token, she would cherish it forever!"

Ther’Abella took the iron key from his palm before his fingers could close but she did not look at him.

She did not look at the meat skewers roasting over the hearth, even though her stomach turned over once at the smell.

She turned on her heel and started toward the narrow wooden staircase with her shoulders hunched beneath the torn cloak.

"Hey!" a drunken brawler at a corner table sneered, slamming his fist onto the pine. "The barkeep is offering you free meat, you stuck-up pointy-eared bitch! You can’t even say thank you?!"

Ther’Abella did not stop.

She walked up the stairs, each heavy step creaking under her weight, and disappeared into the dark corridor above.

"Rude bastard," someone grumbled into his ale down below. "Save your life and she treats you like dirt on her heel... Let her rot in the desert..."

CLICK!

She turned the iron key in the lock, shoved the warped pine door open, and stepped inside.

The room was small, containing a low cot with a scratchy wool blanket, a three-legged wooden stool, and a cracked ceramic basin filled with lukewarm yellow-tinted well water.

She dropped her polearm against the wall, and the metal clattered against the plaster with a heavy dead thud then she walked to the basin, leaned over it, gripping the chipped porcelain rim until her knuckles went white, and stared down into the cloudy water.

Her reflection stared back.

She had a pale hollow face, with dark purple bags hanging beneath bloodshot eyes.

The silver constellations along her cheekbones looked like scars left by an iron brand.

The ancient viridian-woven fabric beneath her cloak was shredded and caked in the dried fluids of a thousand dead monsters.

"Disgrace," she croaked into the empty room.

The hands in the water were not the hands of the girl who had once been afraid of resin vats.

They were wide-knuckled and scarred, with calluses she could have struck sparks from.

She plunged them in and splashed her face with rough aggressive strokes.

SPLASH! SPLASH!

The cold stung her chapped lips and the cuts along her temple, but she did not stop.

She scrubbed at her skin as though she could scour away the grit, the blood, and the four hundred years that clung to her pores like grease.

When she lifted her dripping face, the cracked mirror on the wall showed the same stranger.

"Four hundred years," she whispered to the glass with her breath hitching. "And what have you done, Ther’Abella? What have you accomplished?"

...Nothing.

She had not saved her Lady... She had not avenged her Guard... She had not even managed to be kind to the people who tried to be kind to her...

If a record existed, it would be quite empty.

She had killed beasts... She had swung her blade until her wrists went numb and her muscles burned like hot wire... She had accumulated skills, refined her starlight to a lethal razor’s edge, and pushed her level to heights that ordinary elves could only dream of and for what?

’Lady Eluned.’

The name carved through her thoughts like a rusted saw.

Time within Yggdrasil moved faster than the wastes.

An hour in the wastes could stretch into days upon the great bough, and stripped of her divine mantle, how long could Eluned survive?

Ellvi had taken the core.

What if four centuries out here had been millennia in the roots? What if Lady Eluned was already dead, reduced to petrified ash in that lightless chasm while Ther’Abella scrubbed dirt off her chin in a two-bit desert tavern?

’If I go to Yggdrasil,’ she thought with water dripping from her silver bangs onto the floorboards, ’all I will do is get myself killed.’

The bitter shameful truth tasted like bile in her throat. She was afraid of dying.

...Not because she valued this miserable dust-choked existence, since she would have slit her own throat four centuries ago if it meant paying for her failure, but because she was afraid of dying before she reached the roots.

If she fell to Ellvi’s guards at the gate, no one would ever know the truth.

The world would forever remember Eluned as a fratricidal monster and friends? Comrades?

A shudder ran through her shoulders. Every time an adventurer tried to speak to her, every time a mercenary offered to share a watch, her mind flashed back to the rain-slick causeway.

To Captain Kaelith crying while she swung a greataxe... To Caelia and Evandra sobbing while their scimitars carved through her flesh... Ellvi’s poisoned words had burned themselves into her marrow... All I did was amplify what was already there.

...She could not trust anyone.

If her own sisters, the women who had braided her hair and sworn their lives to the same bough, had harbored that kind of lethal envy beneath their smiles, what would a stranger do?

Ther’Abella turned away from the mirror with her legs trembling, and collapsed onto the thin mattress, staring blankly up at the water-stained cedar rafters.

She reached into her tattered belt pouch and turned it upside down.

Clink!

A single worn copper coin rolled onto the rough blanket, followed by a pinch of dried salt.

That was her entire earthly wealth after four centuries of warfare... She had given away every pelt, tossed every reward pouch back into the dirt, and walked away from every merchant who tried to pay her.

A woman who refused to take a single scrap, left with an empty pocket in a rat-infested room.

She stared at the copper coin, and a humorless chuckle rattled in her chest.

"Right," she murmured to the dark ceiling. "Today is my birthday."

Every year on this day, the Guard had pretended to forget.

Evandra would announce that the third rotation needed extra drills, Captain Kaelith would assign her the resin vats, and Moriel would "accidentally" leave the training yard gate open so that Ther’Abella took the long way around.

And every year, when she finally dragged herself back to the barracks at midnight, there was a single white star-lotus pressed on her pillow, its petals still wet with dew, with no note and no name.

She had known whose hand had left it, and Lady Eluned had known that she knew but neither of them had ever mentioned it.

She closed her eyes, letting her head sink into the lumpy straw pillow.

Her mind drifted back to the quiet library, to the smell of blooming star-lotuses, to a green-clad Goddess pouting over a romance novel and wondering what it felt like to love someone.

’I have a wish,’ Ther’Abella thought, her hands folding over her torn tunic. ’Whatever deity is listening, whatever higher power watches over this miserable broken realm, I don’t care about my life... I don’t care about my soul... Just please... Reunite me with Lady Eluned...’

DING!

Ther’Abella’s eyes snapped wide.

Floating in the empty air three inches before her nose was a pale, translucent interface glowing with a cold blue light.

[You have been summoned to be a Hero for a Lord.]

[Accept the tether? Y / N]

She sat bolt upright on the cot, her breath catching.

"A Hero summoning," she whispered, her brow furrowing in deep suspicion.

A trick.

...It had to be a trick.

Another cruel hallucination, or a trap woven by the same hands that had hunted her through four centuries of silence.

She knew the laws well.

When an Awakened Lord established a domain, they burned tickets at an altar to pull wandering souls or dimensional remnants into their roster.

To become a summoned Hero meant binding yourself to a territory’s central stone.

’If I become part of a territory,’ she thought with her mind racing. ’A proper lord’s domain provides buffs, resource arrays, fast-travel corridors, and mana springs... The speed at which a summoned Hero can accumulate combat stats is tenfold compared to a wild wanderer.’

She needed power... Real catastrophic power, if she was ever going to break through Yggdrasil and tear Ellvi’s throat out.

Her finger rose, hovering over the glowing letter as she tapped [ Y ].

HUMMMMMMMM.

The interface shifted instantly with text flashing in stark warning crimson.

[Your level will be forcefully reset from Level 555 → Level 1. You will lose some of your Priority Skills; however, you will retain the remaining foundation of your Skill Tree.]

Ther’Abella’s hand froze mid-air.

"Level 555 down to Level 1?!" she choked out, her blood running cold.

Four hundred years... Four hundred years of bleeding in the dust, cracking her bones against monsters, grinding her meridians to powder just to forge her level into a powerful weapon... And this damn system wanted to wipe it clean in a single stroke?

Strip her priority skills? Reduce her to the strength of a newly awakened child?

’Why the hell would I throw four centuries of agony down the drain?!’

Her teeth ground together so hard her jaw ached.

To lose her level was to become weak again... It was to become that helpless squire who stood on the terrace while her Lady was dragged into the dirt...

She stared at the pulsing crimson prompt, and then, slowly, she swallowed the dry lump in her throat.

’Wait.’

A dark calculating thought flickered behind her piercing blue eyes.

’Where is this Lord summoning me?’

If the summoning was taking place in one of the high-tier outer rings, an Unknown Zone or an active sovereign battlefield crawling with high-rank monsters, she wouldn’t need four hundred years to rebuild her stats.

Her martial mastery wasn’t gone, her combat instincts, her blade katas, and her stellar control were carved into her soul so a Level 1 warrior with the reflexes of an apex killer could slaughter high-tier beasts and skyrocket her level in weeks.

’And the Lord,’ she thought, her jaw hardening into stone. ’If this Lord is weak... If this Lord tries to hold me back, tries to use me as an ornamental guard or dictate my path.’

She could kill the Lord.

Break the boundary stone, reclaim her rogue status, and use the territory’s carcass as a launching pad to wage war on Yggdrasil.

"Fine," Ther’Abella growled through her teeth. "Take the levels."

She jabbed her index finger straight into the glowing [ Y ].

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A colossal vortex of golden light swallowed the tavern room whole.