After their conversation with Noctis was done, Sunny and Veliona left the sorcerer alone. The immortal needed some time to make preparations, so they had a few hours left before the archer's treatment was going to begin.
After that, they were not going to see each other again until it was over, which would take at least a week.
Walking through the beautiful garden of the Sanctuary, Veliona blinked.
"Huh… that was easy."
Sunny glanced at her with a skeptic expression.
"You think?"
She shrugged, then frowned a little. The bandages covering the right side of her disfigured face moved, revealing a confused expression.
"Was it not?"
Sunny shook his head.
"No. We have been swindled, actually. Think about it… I wanted to get three things out of Noctis in exchange for revealing the location of the Glass Knife to him. Heal you, rescue March, and receive his enchanted coins. Not only did he force the secret out of me without even lifting a finger, he even fooled us into retrieving the knife in his stead… while thinking that it was our own idea, no less."
He grimaced, then let out a heavy sigh.
"…Basically, we almost got scammed. It's fine though. Noctis will heal your body, nothing else matters."
Veliona frowned when Sunny mentioned Hope's influence, but didn't ask anything, revealing that she had made the discovery himself. After a while, she said:
"…If we were being scammed, why didn't you play a little… I don't know… hard to get?"
Sunny shrugged.
"There was no point to. I did not expect him to accept all three of my requests, anyway… two of them were just for show. While those coins of his are useful, I can do without them. As for rescuing March, that is our own task. I would not have entrusted it to an outsider, especially an ancient Transcendent with mysterious motives."
He remained silent for a few moments, and then added:
"We will have to ally ourselves with at least one of the Chain Lords in order to conquer this Nightmare, but becoming dependent on someone else's strength is a slippery slope. In the end, we can only put trust in our own efforts."
Veliona tilted her head.
"So… you were baiting Noctis, and you only wanted him to heal me?"
Lost in thought, Sunny simply nodded.
A confused expression appeared on Veliona's face as she mumbled:
"Then wasn't Noctis the one who got swindled…?"
They reached their corner of the garden in silence and sat down on the grass.
Sunny sat in silence, letting the weight of the exchange with Noctis settle. The Sanctuary's garden was quiet, serene, the air heavy with the perfume of blossoms and the distant song of unseen birds. It was beautiful, impossibly so, and yet it only reminded him how far removed they were from the truth of the Nightmare. Beauty was often just another disguise, a veil stretched over rot.
He leaned back on the grass, staring up at the dim sky above the floating isles. The scarlet sun loomed in the distance like a wound that never closed. His thoughts drifted — not to Noctis, nor to Veliona sitting nearby, but to the others. The ones scattered across the Chained Isles, living or dead.
March was the only one whose whereabouts he actually knew, and somehow that did not make things better. She was in the Temple of the Chalice, surrounded by zealots who worshipped violence and sharpened themselves into weapons. A sect of warriors. Sunny could almost picture her there, straining beneath the role the Nightmare had forced onto her, forced to brandish her bow in a place where compassion was a liability and innocence a curse.
Half-jokingly, he thought that perhaps March had already killed herself — not from despair, but from the unbearable dissonance of being remade as something so far from her carefully cherished self-image of a harmless, adorable girl. Harmless, of course, had never been the truth. Beneath her smile was steel, and beneath her sweetness, the kind of strength that did not need polish to shine. Still… the Temple would test that strength, and he did not know whether it would leave her unbroken or grind her into dust.
Dan Heng was different. Sunny wasn't worried about him, not in the same way. The man was steady, disciplined, reliable to a fault — the sort of person you could count on to keep walking even while the ground fell away beneath him. If there was anyone who could carve out a path in this cursed place, it was him.
And yet, that very reliability was what made Sunny uneasy. Dan Heng's Flaw bound him like chains: he cannot betray. Not others, not himself, not even the ideals carved into his bones. A man that inflexible was strong, yes… but brittle. Sunny could already imagine situations in which such ironclad loyalty would doom him, or worse, doom everyone around him. The Nightmare was merciless to those who refused to bend.
Sparkle was another story. In terms of combat, in terms of survival, he wasn't worried. She had a way of wriggling out of danger, of turning any situation into a performance and walking away with the curtain call. That much he could trust. What gnawed at him, though, was her mouth — her endless appetite for games, tricks, pranks.
In this maddened Kingdom of Hope, laughter could get you killed if it was directed at the wrong person, and Sparkle had never learned the meaning of restraint. He could only hope she hadn't managed to irritate someone powerful enough to find the joke less than funny. With her, the danger wasn't that she couldn't survive, but that she might make someone else decide she shouldn't.
Then there was Seele. With her, Sunny didn't even bother to weigh chances. Without Veliona, she was nothing — her Aspect locked away, her strength gutted, her survival dependent on talents she simply didn't have. There was no sharp edge to her, and despite the viciousness often found in people like herself, it wasn't even sharpened into a proper weapon.
He didn't necessarily want her to die, but he had no illusions either. If Seele was out there alone, then she was already gone. In his mind, she was a name struck from the list, a companion accounted for only in memory, not reality.
At the very least, Sunny hoped that she had locked herself into some kind of underground airtight container, and had no interactions with anything else.
Maybe then, she'd have a sliver of a chance.