After a few moments, he managed to calm himself. In a whisper so soft it was almost inaudible, he murmured, "Ethan… is that my name?"
A faint smile tugged at his lips. "So, I do have a name after all."
The simple realization warmed something deep inside him—a feeling he had never felt before. For the first time in years, he allowed himself to hope. Maybe he wasn't just some leech or parasite. Maybe somewhere out there, he had a real family, a home, a future not shaped by the filth and cruelty of this so-called Village Of The Tarnished.
From that moment on, he made a decision. He would no longer be nameless. Ethan. That would be his name. It might have come from a dream, or perhaps it was just his imagination—but it was enough. A name was identity. A name was power. A name meant he mattered.
With that name came a spark of determination.
He would escape this village.
It wouldn't be easy. He might fail again and again. But he would keep trying. The newly arrived gang offered an opportunity—dangerous, uncertain, but still a chance. He would tread carefully. Trust came hard in the Village of the Tarnished, and betrayal was the only thing people gave freely.
Still, one truth reassured him: no matter how many times he fought Stanley, or tried to slip away, Stanley always dragged him back alive. Ethan had long since concluded someone had ordered the fat bastard to keep him breathing. Otherwise, Stanley would have fed him to the beasts years ago.
As dawn crept through the cracks of the shack, Ethan sat upright, his thoughts clear for the first time in days. He would find a way out of this place—no matter what it took.
Like clockwork, Stanley's morning scream ripped through the silence, his voice echoing across the village like a dying rooster.
Ethan rose from his corner, joints stiff and body aching from the cold. He crept back into the house, grabbed a stale piece of bread from Wayla's poorly stocked shelf, and slipped out before anyone could speak.
Outside, the morning chill bit into his skin, but he barely flinched. The village was trapped between extremes—scorching summers and bitter winters, no mild seasons in between. His tattered clothes did little to protect him, but endurance had become his armor.
As he walked toward the woods, nibbling on the bread, his thoughts turned to the forest. It was the only place that felt remotely like peace. Not safe, but at least honest. A place where hunger, cold, and danger didn't pretend to be anything else.
Meanwhile — Five Days Away
Far from the lawless village Ethan called home, deep in the marbled halls of power, Marquise Donovas Ross paced inside his study.
The letter from the capital trembled slightly in his hand.
His sharp gray eyes were heavy with dread. He had weathered countless political storms in his decades of service to the Slain Kingdom, but this order from the royal court unsettled him in a way few things ever had.
He paused at the fireplace, staring into the flames.
The Slain Kingdom—once a realm of diversity, where elves, dwarves, beastmen, and humans coexisted in uneasy truce—had rotted from within under the reign of its new king. The Parsin family had ruled for centuries, but the current monarch had poisoned the crown with radical ideology.
Non-humans had been stripped of their lands, titles, and rights. Resistance meant annihilation. Survivors either fled to other kingdoms or vanished into the forbidden zones—those uncharted lands where monsters ruled and maps ended.
And that wasn't the only madness.
The king had banned the use of aura and mana among commoners. Academies were shut down. Scrolls burned. Instructors publicly executed. Anyone born without a noble pedigree who showed potential was either eliminated or conscripted as a disposable tool of war. Many had been framed for treason, their corpses displayed as examples.
Paranoia was not just policy—it was law.
Now the king's gaze had turned west. The forbidden forest. A place no army had ever conquered.
Donovas clenched the parchment in his fist. The letter was an official order: an expedition, ten thousand strong, would soon pass through his domain. Leading them was none other than the crown prince himself, backed by a hundred aura users and sixty mana practitioners.
And Donovas was expected to assist.
His ancestors had tried to conquer that forest. They had failed. Not because of poor planning or cowardice, but because that land—untamed and ancient—was never meant to be subdued.
He turned toward the massive window overlooking the far western horizon. The sky there was always darker. The wind colder.
A knock broke his thoughts.
His butler, a man of dignified age and tone, stepped in and bowed. "My lord, your retainers and city commanders have been summoned. They will arrive before nightfall."
Donovas gave a weary nod. "Prepare the conference hall. We must plan for both victory… and disaster."
"As you wish, my lord."
When the butler departed, Donovas stepped out onto his stone balcony, letting the wind tousle his graying hair. In the distance, like a jagged scar across the earth, the outline of the forbidden zone can't even be seen but for him it felt like it was close.
"Fool of a king," he muttered. "If ten thousand men could conquer that place, we would have done so a century ago when this kingdom was an actual superpower not like this not this sucked and impoverished piece of land."
He stared westward long after the wind turned sharp.
And softly, beneath his breath, came a final, bitter whisper.
"I pray this madness doesn't wake what sleeps in that forest otherwise my ancestors would cry in their grave."
The Marquise was a man proud of his lineage. He had read every record and tale passed down by his forefathers—stories of how they rose to nobility, how they claimed their lands, and the triumphs and trials that followed. Among those trials was a dark chapter: the day they dared to subjugate what would later be known—after their bitter failure—as the Forbidden Forest.