Part 1 — Exploration of the Big City
I forced my legs to move. Each step felt like walking through syrup, my muscles protesting, my lungs still tasting of blood and sand.
The two guards at the gate were mountains in armor—six feet and more, plate clinking with each small shift.
Swords rested across their backs like the spines of sleeping beasts.
When I was two-thirds of the way to the gate I tried to slip past them, to become nothing more than another shadow flowing into the city, but the left guard's voice cut me off like a rope around the throat.
"Stop there."
He stepped forward, eyes sharp as flint. Up close I could see the desert had done nothing to soften the way he looked at me—like I'd been some peculiar animal dragged into his sight.
"How did you survive this desert?" he asked.
My throat was a desert too. I sounded like I had sand in my mouth when I answered.
"I—don't know. I woke up out there and walked."
He scanned me as if I were a badly made cloak, suspicious and precise. The other guard, voice colder and more formal, spoke next.
"Go to the nearest party office and receive first aid, Earthling. Your body is bleeding."
Earthling.
The single word landed in my chest like a stone. The guards called me that—like I belonged to somewhere else entirely.
I didn't have the energy to ask what it meant. Fear is a good teacher; it tells you when to obey.
"Party office," I repeated, and stumbled away toward the promise of a healer, finally stepping fully into the city.
The first thing that hit me was how wrong it felt.
Not wrong like broken, but wrong like a dream where the furniture is familiar but everything else has been put in the wrong century.
Stone foundations, timber frames, thatched roofs—this place wasn't a neon metropolis.
It was a market town lifted straight out of some history book and dropped into a world that also had strange flying birds and… whatever those guards called Earthlings.
From the slope I'd seen how immense the place was; now, within its streets, the scale became personal.
The desert stopped at the city walls and on the other side—forests, mountain ranges capped with snow, a patchwork of biomes that made my head spin.
This wasn't just a city. It was a world beyond it.
I tried to keep my focus practical. Find party office. Patch up. Get water. Don't be killed.
Simple list, save for the fact that everyone here looked like they'd stepped out of a painter's wildest fantasies.
Men and women wore robes and tunics—some heavy, some light for the sand—with belts that held swords and odd, rodlike objects I assumed were staves.
Children darted between stalls in tiny versions of armor.
Hair colors ranged from jet black and ruddy brown to a shocking blue, and eyes—their eyes—gleamed with irises in unnatural hues, some glittering green, some pale as gemstones.
Pupils weren't always round. Some were vertical slits, others seemed to glow faintly when they laughed.
Not my homeland. Not even close.
"Excuse me!" I called, louder than I meant to. "Where's the party office? I need someone—please, I need first aid!"
A few heads turned. A woman walked by tapping the hem of her robe with a needle, unimpressed.
The market noise swallowed my desperate plea, and I hurried on, scanning for someone my height—someone who might be less likely to crush me with a swaggering joke or some accidental brutality.
Part 2 — Miscalculation! Who Is My Savior?
The man I picked looked harmless enough—about my size, face a little rough, clothes wrinkled.
He squinted at me and then, grin awkward and slow, he lurch-sighed, "Party office? Why you wanna go there? Where is your party? Huh? Where's your party?"
"I don't have any party," I said, the words tight. "I need first aid."
He stepped closer. Smell hit me—stale beer, sour and sourer. He was drunk, and when someone like that spots a bleeding, bewildered foreigner, it's like signaling prey.
"How come you got so many scratches, huh?" he slurred. "Why should I care? Earthling—" He spat the word like it tasted rotten.
My first instinct was to move away, to pretend I'd been mistaken, that this man was merely a nuisance.
But he reached out faster than my exhausted legs could take me—fingers like ropes yanking at my hair. Pain flared as my face met the cobbles.
A heavy iron-heeled boot hammered down on my cheek.
Pain. Cobblestones. A boot hammered down. Once. Twice. Three times.
The world pinwheeled and then went black at the edges.
People watched. Not one of them moved. They watched like an audience at a puppet show—interested spectators, not rescuers.
"You brat! Earthling scum! I'll—" he kept shouting, each syllable a rain of muck. The word Earthling clanged in my skull until it became a drumbeat.
Then a voice cut through the noise. Sharp. Controlled.
"Stop there!"
The drunk's foot paused mid-arc. Everything in the market slowed—like someone had reached down and put a hand on the city's pulse. I tasted adrenaline and metal.
A man had appeared behind the mob like a shadow that owned the space.
He looked mid-thirties; his braid fell to his waist and his shoulders were the kind of dangerous a person gets from being forged in a thousand fights.
Thick forearms. The kind of scars that read like maps of survival—one, in particular, split his left eye and cheek.
The scar looked clawed, jagged, as if something had ripped across him and left a permanent reminder.
One eye was a calm, unreadable black. The other—beside that scar—burned with something like old fire and older hunger.
Relief washed through me so hot I nearly vomited with it. Finally. But relief is fragile. It can break in a single movement.
The swordsman moved like he was doing the simplest, most boring thing in the world:
he yanked me back by my shirt as if I weighed nothing, pulling me out of range.
The drunk jerked back only a second later—too late. The man drew his blade and spoke to the attacker in a voice that sat heavy in the air.
"You know it's forbidden to kill Earthlings in this kingdom," he said. The words were low, measured. They landed like a verdict.
The drunk laughed, slurred and defiant. "Rules—what rules? He ignored me. No respect. That's the crime." He brandished his sword, his movements sloppy with drink. "I'll cut his head off!"
"Then we fight," the swordsman said coldly. "You win, you take him. You lose—" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
The drunk lunged with sudden, animal speed—perhaps thinking the swordsman would be slow, humanly slow—and slashed upward toward his neck. Time fractured.
A blade came up. Flesh shivered. And then, impossibly, the swordsman stopped the blade with his bare hand.
For a moment the world registered the wrongness of that—metal against skin—and then the drunk's sword snapped like a twig between two great hands.
Everyone's breath left at once.
Before the drunk could blink, the swordsman's hand closed around his throat and lifted. The crowd could see the man's panic:
a wild, flailing mouth, the stupid drunkness stripped away until only animal fear remained.
With a single, precise motion the swordsman—calm as night—cleaved the drunkard's left leg away.
Everything after that happened like a cruel dream. Screams, the wet sound of flesh, the drunk's body collapsing into a heap, the iron smell of blood.
The market grew unbearably loud and then strangely small, as if someone had pinched the world to a point.
The swordsman flung the man aside with the casual brutality of ejecting trash and dropped his eyes on me.
"You are not a swordsman anymore," he said slowly, as if explaining an arithmetic problem. "Which means this boy has committed no crime".
The man's shadow loomed over me as he knelt, his scarred face softening for the first time.
"Are you all right?" he asked, voice low but edged with urgency.
I opened my mouth. I wanted to say it—Yes… I'm all right… thank you…
The words trembled on my tongue, but before they could leave, a cold light flickered across my vision.
Flux say in cold and warmth voice.
[ Flux ] : Warning — blood loss critical. Fatigue level: 87%.
Flux's voice was both cold and warm as it echoed in my skull.
The text didn't just appear this time—it pulsed, each line echoing like a heartbeat against my skull.
My vision warped, colors washing into blue at the edges. My lips moved soundlessly.
The man's voice came again, closer now, almost frantic. "What happened? Can you hear me?
His rough hands hovered above me, not sure where to touch, afraid to make it worse.
I wanted—no, needed—to thank him. Just one word. Anything.
But my throat constricted, my tongue heavy as stone. The blue haze swallowed the world.
[ Flux ] : Consciousness level dropping…
My last glimpse was of his dark eye burning with worry above me. I thought—thank you—but no sound came.
And then, like a candle snuffed out, everything went black.