Chapter 83 – Reunion?
By the time the soreness faded enough that breathing didn't feel like someone was sanding his ribs from the inside, the thought finally settled.
I have to go home.
Not the cave. Not the mountain. Not Safon and its mad thousand-year fist.
Home.
House Milton. His father's voice. Alice's dry commentary. Valeria hiding behind a ledger and thinking no one saw her.
Graduation was close. The rune-stone in his pocket pulsed faintly every day now, like a heartbeat out of sync with his own.
So Sang-kyu chewed on a lump of something that looked like honeycomb and probably wasn't.
"You have that look," he said around the mouthful.
"What look?" Erynd asked.
"The 'if I don't move now I'll start chewing on myself' look," So Sang-kyu said. "Good. I was getting bored of your waterfall face."
Erynd snorted.
"I'm going back to the capital," he said. "My father. My… people. It's almost graduation."
"Mm." So Sang-kyu swallowed, wiped his hand on his robes. "Good. Go see your roots, boy. Trees that forget where they grew fall over very ugly."
Melody hovered at his shoulder, visible only to him, long black hair swaying in the mountain wind.
"Tell him thank you," she murmured. "He kept you alive while I had to watch you die."
Erynd dipped his head.
"Thank you," he said simply. "For the training. For… not letting me die uselessly."
So Sang-kyu snorted again, but his eyes were sharp.
"You didn't die because you are too stubborn to stop," he said. "I just pointed at rocks and made you carry heavy things. Now go. Before I change my mind and throw you at another waterfall."
They parted without ceremony.
No bow. No flowery vows.
Just a nod, a grunt, the quiet understanding between two monsters who'd seen too much of each other's limits.
***
Flying used to feel like theft.
Like cheating the world a little, stealing height and distance with tricked vectors and shaped mana.
Now it felt… natural.
He drew a long invisible line through the air with Vector, set his weight on it, and let wind magic push him along like a hand on his back.
Before, it had taken four days to reach the capital from this far.
Now the world slid underneath him like a painted map.
Qi made a difference.
Not as glowing, flashy power. As something quieter, deeper. His body didn't fight the strain anymore; it rode it. Muscles that had been carved and rebuilt in the cave took the pressure and fed it back. Bones that had been thinned and regrown held.
By dusk of the first day, the familiar shape of the capital's outer hills rose ahead.
By moonrise, the land he'd claimed as "near home" spread under him.
By the time he reached the road that led to the Milton estate, the sky was starting to pale.
He expected to see smoke from chimneys.
Lanterns.
The faint sound of steel from the training yard.
Instead, he saw nothing.
No guards at the outer path.
No farmers moving in the fields.
Just… stillness.
A stillness with a smell.
***
The Milton gate stood half-open.
One leaf hung askew, the hinge warped, iron bent as if something had hit it very hard from the outside.
Weeds grew where wheel ruts should have been.
Erynd dropped from the sky, landing light on the gravel.
His boots crunched.
The sound felt wrong in the quiet.
Melody drifted down beside him, bare feet not disturbing a single stone. Her eyes were dark, already scanning.
"Master," she whispered. "Something is… off."
He didn't answer.
He stepped through the gate.
The front yard looked… familiar and not.
The training posts still stood in their row, scarred by years of sword strikes. The old oak on the left still spread its branches like an umbrella.
But the yard was empty.
No trainees. No servants crossing with laundry. No stableboy sneaking a nap against the fence.
Windows were shuttered.
One was broken, glass melted instead of shattered, like it had half-remembered being sand.
Flies buzzed.
He followed the sound.
The first corpse lay near the well.
Or what had been the well.
Stone was cracked, bucket overturned, rope frayed.
The body slumped against the side, jaw slack, eyes eaten away.
At first he thought, old staff, poorly buried, time did the rest.
Then he saw the legs.
The bones were wrong.
Too long in some places, too short in others. Knees had extra knobs of bone. Toes fused in clumps like someone had tried to sculpt a foot out of wax and lost patience halfway.
The skin—what was left of it—bubbled and sagged in places, like it had started to rot, then stopped, then started again.
The smell hit fully when he knelt.
Not just death.
Death that had changed its mind several times.
Melody's hand—cold, unreal—touched his shoulder.
"Not demonkin," she said quietly. "Their cruelty has… flavour. This is something else."
He stood.
Walked.
The second body lay near the stables.
This one was mostly bone, picked clean by time and scavengers.
Except for patches.
Pieces of muscle clung to the ribs, alive and pulsing slowly like overripe fruit, ignoring the fact there was no heart to pump.
The jawbone still had strips of tongue attached, twitching in dry air.
It tried to form words as he passed.
Nothing came.
He did not stop.
More bodies.
A maid he half-remembered, face eaten away, hair still tied in the neat bun Alice insisted on. Hands warped into claws. One arm fused into the stone floor up to the elbow.
A guard, armour rusted, sword snapped. Half his skull gone, brain tissue dried and cracked, and yet the remaining eye tracked Erynd as he walked by.
The body tried to stand.
Failed.
Collapsed with a sound like wet paper.
No Alice.
No Viester.
No Valeria.
Just the remnants of people who should have been saved by them.
Erynd moved through his own house like a ghost.
He pushed open the kitchen door. Rats scattered, some with too many legs, some with transparent fur and visible organs that squirmed wrong. Pots lay overturned. A pot-boy's knife sat in the middle of the floor, buried up to the hilt in nothing at all—as if he'd tried to stab the air and been half-successful.
The training yard's sand was stained dark in places that never quite dried.
The practice dummies bore marks that were not from swords—long, dragging gouges, as if something had tried to pull itself through them.
He climbed the stairs.
His own room was… untouched.
The bed neatly made.
Books stacked where he'd left them years ago.
Dust lay everywhere, thick enough that his fingers left clear trails.
No one had slept here since he left.
His father's study was worse.
The door was off its hinges.
The big desk lay on its side, drawers spilled. Papers were scattered, some blank, some covered in ink that had run together into meaningless black swirls.
The ledger shelf was half empty.
Erynd knelt among the mess, picking up pages, scanning for handwriting.
He found Alice's neat script, notes half-finished.
"—reports from Nitelia continue to contradict each other. Viester suspects—"
The ink dissolved mid-word, smearing into nothing.
He found a letter in a stranger's hand, bearing the Imperial seal.
"Lord Viester Milton, by command of His Majesty you are hereby requested to present yourself in the capital regarding anomalous events in the duchy of Nitelia…"
No reply.
No final message.
Just absence.
The rune-stone in his pocket pulsed once.
Graduation calling.
The normal world ticking along.
He closed his fingers around it until the edges dug into his palm.
"Master," Melody whispered. "The villagers?"
He had to check.
He left the ruined house and walked down the road toward the nearest hamlet.
Once, it had been a cluster of houses, fields around, children running underfoot, farmers tugging forelocks when he rode by with his father.
Now… silence.
Doors hung open.
One house burned halfway, frozen in the act, flames turned to brittle red glass mid-curl, never finishing.
Bodies lay in streets and doorways.
Some still, truly dead.
Others in that wrong state between.
A dog with its guts half-spilled trotted in circles near a well, entrails dragging like a second tail, never quite finishing falling out. Its eyes were gone; small flowers bloomed in the sockets, opening and closing like blinking.
He slit its throat.
It fell.
For a moment, everything sagged like it would finally stay down.
Then the blood crawled back in, thread by thread, and the body twitched.
He burned it.
Only ash stayed ash.
That had to count for something.
House by house, he found more.
Families curled together in bed, bones tangled, with patches of fresh meat clinging stubbornly here and there. A mother's hand fused into her child's chest. A man whose spine had twisted into a knot, vertebrae spiralling in impossible directions.
He stopped counting.
At some point, the numbers stopped being useful and started being a way to go insane.
He stood in the middle of what had once been a village square, surrounded by the evidence of stupidity and failure and things-that-should-not-be.
Anger rose.
Not the hot, clean anger of battle.
The cold kind.
The kind that remembered every decision along the way.
I left.
I let Father go to Nitelia.
I trusted the Empire to handle a mess that smelled wrong.
He couldn't even blame the System this time, or the game, or outer entities.
He'd chosen the cave.
He'd chosen to skip years.
And while he was sitting in the dark trying to crush his own mind into silence, the world had bled.
He exhaled slowly.
"Melody," he said.
"Yes?" Her voice was small.
"We're going to the capital," he said. "Now."
She nodded.
"Good," she whispered. "I don't like this place anymore."
***
He looted clothing from the ruins before he left.
Not from corpses.
From chests that had never been opened in time.
A coat that had belonged to Viester once, before he'd grown broader in the shoulders.
A simple tunic in Milton grey, not noble enough to attract thieves, not poor enough to invite pity.
He washed what he could. Burned what he couldn't.
By the time he approached the capital's outer gate, he looked like a minor noble's bastard son or private retainer—better dressed than a peasant, worse than a courtier.
The guards at the main gate had seen better days.
Armour scuffed. Eyes ringed with circles of exhaustion. Spears held with the lax grip of men who've been told to watch nothing happening for too long.
"Halt," one of them said automatically. "State your—"
Erynd walked past him.
The man moved to block him.
Erynd stepped left, right, centre, so smoothly it looked like a dance.
Three guards lay on the ground before anyone realised he'd moved.
No broken bones. No slashed throats.
Just bodies twitching with pain, weapons out of their hands, hands numb.
"No time," he said, voice flat. "I need to see His Majesty. Now."
"Y-you can't just—" another guard began.
Erynd's gaze flicked to him.
Something in the boy's throat closed.
Not with magic.
Just with the realisation that the person in front of him moved like So Sang-kyu and looked like he'd walked out of a very long night and found no sunrise waiting.
"Announce me," Erynd said. "Or try to stop me. Those are your two choices. Choose quickly."
They chose.
***
The Emperor looked… smaller.
Not physically.
A piece worn thinner.
Lines carved deeper into his face. A set to his shoulders that spoke of not enough sleep and too many impossible decisions.
The audience chamber was one of the small ones. No courtiers. No velvet crowd. Just the Emperor, a Crown Temple priest, two weary guards, and Erynd.
Olivia stood by the wall.
He saw the flash of white-blonde hair, the small, tense hands.
He filed it away and didn't let it touch his expression.
"Erynd Milton," the Emperor said.
No titles.
"You've grown," he added, as if that would make any of this normal.
"Everyone keeps telling me that," Erynd said. "Must be true."
The attempt at levity died quickly.
"You went to your estate," the Emperor said.
"Yes," Erynd answered. "What's left of it."
The Emperor's mouth tightened.
"I am… sorry," he said.
"Good," Erynd said. "Then we don't have to waste time pretending it's fine."
The priest flinched at his tone.
"What happened?" Erynd asked. "After my father left for Nitelia."
The Emperor took a slow breath.
"We sent him because I trusted him," he said. "Because strange things were happening, and he has always been the man I point at the cracks. You know this."
"Yes," Erynd said.
"At first, reports came. Confused, but they came," the Emperor continued. "Dispatches that contradicted themselves. One saying all was well. Another, written the same day, speaking of horrors. Priests tried scrying. We tried rites. We got… static. Smudged impressions. As if the place itself didn't know what it was."
The priest stepped forward, clutching his holy symbol.
"It was not Outer taint," he said quickly. "The feel is different. No vast hunger, no pressure of beyond. This is something else. A… corruption of records. Of cause and effect."
Erynd listened.
Filed the judgment.
Marked it: priest certain; priest probably wrong; keep that in mind.
"At some point," the Emperor said softly, "we lost even the echoes. No clear death. No clear survival. Just… nothing. Then Nitelia broke properly."
The priest's face went grey.
"It started leaking," he whispered. "Animals that would not rot. Men who were alive and dead in alternating hours. Dates rewriting themselves in parish ledgers. For a time, corrupted beasts wandered out of Nitelia's borders—into neighbouring lands, toward the capital. We burned what we could. We raised wards. We paid blood to anchor them."
His voice roughened.
"Now the duchy is sealed. No one in or out without layers of rites. The leaks have… mostly stopped. The zombie-things you saw near your estate, Viscount, escaped in that early chaos."
"Mostly stopped," Erynd repeated.
The priest swallowed.
"We patch what we can," he said. "But it is like plugging holes in a ship you cannot see."
The Emperor met Erynd's eyes.
"I will not pretend I did enough," he said. "I will not pretend I did not fail your house. Your father. Alice. The girl. But I will not lie either: I have an Empire held together with prayer and ink. Every wall I raise in Nitelia costs me strength somewhere else."
"So you stopped the worst of the leaking," Erynd said quietly. "And my people died in the gap between 'we noticed' and 'we fixed it.'"
The Emperor flinched.
"Yes," he said. "That is the ugly truth."
Silence.
"What do you want?" the Emperor asked finally. "If I can give it without collapsing everything else, I will."
Erynd let the question sit.
Then:
"First," he said. "Restore the Viscount title to House Milton. Properly. Not as a favour. As law."
The Emperor blinked.
"That is easy," he said. "Done."
He raised a hand.
The priest murmured, weaving a short binding phrase. Paper appeared on the small table beside the Emperor in a flicker of magic. Ink wrote itself in neat lines. A seal pressed down, glowing briefly.
"Viscount Erynd Milton," the Emperor said. "Lord of the house by blood and by right. You have it."
"Good," Erynd said. His voice didn't change.
He should have felt something.
Pride. Satisfaction.
All he felt was… obligation.
"Second," he said. "Every stretch of land around the capital, from the outer walls outwards, until you hit an established noble border. All of it that is currently 'barren,' 'unproductive,' 'unclaimed,' or written off as 'problematic.' Put it under House Milton. On record."
The Emperor stared.
"Those lands are wasteland," he said. "Cracked soil, bad drainage, old battlefields, half-finished projects. They bring no taxes. They eat men. Why would you—"
"Because no one else will touch them," Erynd said. "They're broken. Warped. Nightmare-adjacent. Perfect for me."
The Emperor exhaled, half-laugh, half-sigh.
"You do not ask for small things," he said.
"You said you'd give what you could," Erynd replied. "This won't cost you soldiers you're already wasting. Just ink."
The Emperor's gaze sharpened.
"You mean to… fix them?" he asked.
"Eventually," Erynd said. "Or break them properly. Either way, they're mine now."
The Emperor hesitated.
Then nodded.
"Fine," he said. "Done."
Another gesture. Another piece of parchment. More ink.
"Viscount Erynd Milton," the Emperor intoned. "Lord of the Milton estate, and of the outer ring lands from the capital walls to the boundaries of Orvel, and Nortern Melten. May Vastriel have mercy on your back, because those fields will not."
Erynd inclined his head.
"Thank you, Your Majesty," he said.
He turned.
His gaze passed over Olivia.
She stood very straight, hands clenched in her skirts, eyes wide.
"Erynd," she began, voice small.
He met her eyes.
Paused.
There were a hundred things he could have said.
I'm glad you're alive.
I'm sorry I vanished.
I need your help.
Instead he simply nodded once, not friend, not enemy—just acknowledgement.
Then he walked out.
Olivia's hand lifted, fingers curling as if to grab his sleeve.
She let it fall.
***
"Cold," Melody murmured as they left the palace. "You didn't even tease her once."
"I don't have the right to tease anyone right now," Erynd said. "Not until I've fixed… something."
"Fixed?" Melody echoed. "Master, there are corpses trying to decide if they're allowed to rot. This is not a broken chair. This is—"
"I know what it is," he cut in.
The city felt… smaller than he remembered.
Or maybe he'd just grown.
People moved through the streets with that brittle caution of those who've seen too much weirdness too close and are trying to pretend their day is normal.
Rumours whispered.
"—Nitelia's cursed—"
"—they say cows are walking without skins—"
"—Milton boy is back—"
He ignored them.
He had work.
***
The Milton estate was a ruin.
That made it… easier.
You can't ruin something that's already broken.
He started with walls.
Stone moved under his will. Not like an earth mage trained in the Academy, with neat circles and carefully prepared diagrams. More like a surgeon setting bones that had been shattered in a street brawl.
He pulled out pieces that hummed with wrongness—stones that refused to decide if they were here or somewhere else—and burned them to ash with tightly controlled flame. He layered fresh rock on the gaps, binding them with mana, qi, and sheer stubbornness.
He walked the boundary lines of his new lands.
Out into the cracked earth where nothing grew.
Down into gullies where old battlefields slept uneasily, bones tangled with rusted steel.
Melody followed, silent most of the time, occasionally pointing out a patch where shadows bent strangely or where the air tasted like unwanted memory.
He planted.
Not just seeds.
Stone pillars at measured intervals, inscribed with arrays that would slowly nudge reality back toward one version of itself.
Simple things.
"Here the soil is dry."
"Here the river flows that way."
"Here dead things stay dead."
He couldn't flood the land with miracles without ripping it further.
But he could… bias it.
Nudging.
Adjusting.
Like putting a hand on a spinning top and coaxing it away from the edge of the table.
In the fields, he taught the few remaining farmers—those who'd fled before the worst and come back after hearing someone was doing something—to use crop rotations that wouldn't exhaust the soil.
He introduced simple fertilizers—crushed bone, ash, compost in proper ratios.
He showed them how to build grain silos that wouldn't rot from the inside.
He didn't bring guns.
Or electricity.
Or anything that would scream this does not belong here louder than the already screaming lands.
Just… improvements.
Better wheels on carts that didn't chew through axles every season.
Harness designs that were kinder to horses.
Kilns that wasted less fuel.
Wells shored up with proper stone linings.
Small things.
The kind people could look at and say, "Oh, of course," instead of, "What demon drew this?"
It took months.
Sweat.
Blood, sometimes.
Nightmares, often.
He rebuilt the mansion last.
Not as it had been.
Better.
Foundations deepened, reinforced with concrete he and Ethan had refined back in Yggdrasil. Walls lined with hidden channels for arrays. A training yard with proper drainage and sand that wouldn't turn to soup after the first rain.
From the outside, it looked like a slightly grander noble house.
From the inside, it was a fortress pretending to be polite.
One wing stayed unfinished.
Intentionally.
Rooms with no furniture yet.
Beds not bought.
Spaces held empty.
Waiting.
For a father who might walk back through the door one day, sword over his shoulder, complaining about paperwork.
For a maid who might shuffle in rubbing her temples, grumbling about food and cleanliness.
For a girl who might hover at the library doorway, unsure if she was allowed to come in, fingers already twitching for a ledger.
Every time he passed that wing, his chest hurt.
He didn't fix it.
You don't brick over hope.
You just build around it.
***
One evening, as the sun bled orange over the half-healed fields, Melody sat on the rebuilt wall, legs swinging through air she couldn't quite touch.
"You've done a lot," she said. "For someone who supposedly has no heart left."
Erynd leaned against a pillar, arms folded.
"I don't," he said. "I traded it for qi cores and a spine that doesn't break under waterfalls."
"Liar," she said softly.
He didn't argue.
The rune-stone in his pocket shivered.
He pulled it out.
Its surface glowed steadily now, not in thready pulses.
The sigils on it had shifted.
Graduation.
The Academy was calling in its scattered students, tallying achievements, promotions, failures.
He turned it over in his fingers.
"Melody," he said.
"Yes?"
"What now?" he asked.
She hopped down from the wall—not quite touching the ground, ghost-light toes hovering an inch above.
"Now," she said, "you go get your diploma like a good little honour student."
He snorted.
"And after that?" he asked.
Her smile was small.
Sharp.
"We find Father," she said. "And Alice. And the girl who thinks she's still collateral. And then we set fire to whatever wrote them out of their own story."
The idea settled in his bones like another weight.
Not the kind that crushed.
The kind you trained with until it became part of you.
He slipped the rune-stone back into his pocket.
Straightened.
The Milton estate behind him hummed with new wards and old ghosts.
The lands around the capital were still broken, still bleeding, but less.
He'd given them a shape.
He'd given himself a starting point.
"Graduation first," he said. "Then… everything else."
Melody stepped closer, invisible hand brushing his.
"Good," she said. "I want to see their faces when they realise the quiet boy they thought they knew has turned into this."
"Which 'this'?" he asked.
She tilted her head.
"Erynd," she said. "Odin. Harbard. Whatever name you wrap around yourself. You're still the same idiot who decided to carry the world on a spine that barely fit in a twelve-year-old's body. Just taller."
He huffed a laugh.
"Come on," he said.
He turned toward the road.
The rune-stone warmed against his palm like a brand.
The Academy waited.
So did the ghosts of waiting girls, a Yggdrasil under the earth, an Emperor juggling cracks in reality, and a goddess who'd had just enough time to say divine authority before he'd been dragged back.
Reunion, then.
One step at a time.
He started walking.