Chapter 2: The Traveler's Welcome
The sting of antiseptic bit into Rie's shoulder, sharp and chemical, nothing like the herb poultices the village healer used. She hissed through her teeth, but the pain was almost background noise compared to the fact that a stranger in silver armor was kneeling over her with the calm, practiced focus of someone who had done this a thousand times before.
Lieutenant Gamma. That was the name he'd given them, offered like a formality rather than an introduction.
His hands moved with an unsettling precision — armored fingers that should have been clumsy, working through motions too fast and too sure to be anything but well-worn habit. Whatever the pale liquid was that he pressed against the wound, it hummed faintly against her skin, cool at first, and then almost nothing at all. Within a minute the throbbing that had swallowed her whole world dulled to something she could think past.
"That'll keep infection out," he said. His voice, filtered through the visor, was steady — not cold exactly, but distant, the way a person sounds when they're doing a job rather than helping a friend. "You took a bad bite. You'll be fine. Can you walk?"
Rie opened her mouth to answer and produced, instead, an involuntary little sound somewhere between a wince and a word.
Gamma's head tilted a fraction — she got the distinct impression he was running the noise through some kind of translator and not finding a match. Then, without further discussion, he simply lifted her.
"W-wait, what are you—"
She found herself cradled against a chestplate still faintly warm from the fight, carried with an ease that made the whole ordeal feel almost insulting — like her weight hadn't registered as a variable worth noting.
It wasn't the carrying itself that mortified her. It was that he'd done it without asking, without hesitation, as if consent were a formality that hadn't occurred to him — and it was, unmistakably, unforgivably, bridal style.
"Put. Me. Down." Her face had gone hot enough to be visible even in the dark.
"You're injured," Gamma said, entirely unbothered. "This is the most efficient transport method available."
Yumi, a few paces behind, had gone very quiet in the specific way that meant she was one heartbeat from losing it entirely. She lost. "Oh my — Rie. Rie, I did not think tonight would end with you getting princess-carried by a man who fell out of the sky."
"I am not being princess-carried—"
"You are extremely being princess-carried."
"Yumi."
Gamma, apparently satisfied that neither of them was in immediate danger, adjusted his grip with clinical care and kept walking, entirely indifferent to the argument happening in his arms. "This is standard casualty transport on my world," he offered, as if that settled something. "Is there a problem with the method?"
"Yes! You didn't even ask!"
A pause — long enough that Rie almost believed he was actually considering it. "Understood. I will request permission next time."
"There is no next time, put me—"
"Negative. You are still in active recovery."
Rie let her head fall back against his shoulder with a groan of pure defeat, and behind them Yumi was laughing so hard she'd started wheezing.
"Oh, Rie," Yumi managed between breaths, "you found someone even more stubborn than you. I didn't think that was possible."
By the time they reached the village gates, the festival had thinned into its last, sleepy hour — lanterns burning low, the drums gone quiet, only a few stragglers still nursing cups of warm sake near the shrine steps. That should have meant a quiet, easy return.
It did not.
The moment Gamma stepped through the gate — in full dark armor, blood not entirely his own still drying across the plate, carrying a visibly injured Rie — the last of that sleepy hush shattered.
"Who is that?"
"That armor's not from any kingdom I've ever seen — not even the capital guard."
"Rie? Rie, are you hurt?"
She felt the attention land on her like a physical weight, familiar in its shape — she'd spent her whole life as the one villagers half-watched out of the corners of their eyes, the demon girl who was fine, probably, mostly, as long as nobody looked too closely. This was different. This was every eye in Hanamura at once, and there'd be no controlling what story grew out of it by morning.
Yumi, blissfully unconcerned with dignity, threw both arms up and hollered at the gathering crowd like she was announcing a festival act. "Everyone, relax! We got jumped by magic wolves on the mountain path — total near-death experience, ten out of ten do not recommend — but this guy showed up and turned them into paste! We're fine!"
This did not, in fact, make anyone relax.
An older man broke from the gathering crowd before the murmuring could build into anything worse — Hanamura's elder, spine straight despite his years, eyes moving from Rie's blood-soaked shoulder to the armored stranger carrying her with the sharp, unhurried assessment of a man who had outlived several wars.
"You're hurt," he said to Rie first, gently.
"I'm fine," she mumbled, more embarrassed now than injured. "He helped."
The elder's attention shifted fully onto Gamma, who set Rie down with the same careful precision he'd used to pick her up, then straightened to his full, unsettling height.
"Stranger. Who are you?"
A brief pause — not hesitation, Rie would realize later, but something closer to calculation.
"Gamma," he said. "Here on a temporary matter."
Vague. Deliberately so, though only Rie seemed to catch the deliberateness in it.
A boy near the front, maybe eight years old, tugged at his mother's sleeve and piped up before anyone could stop him. "Are you a knight? From the capital?"
"No."
"A sellsword, then?" someone else called.
"No."
The boy tried again, undeterred, eyes huge. "Are you a hero?"
Gamma's visor turned toward him, and for a moment nobody spoke.
"No," he said again — and something in his voice this time was almost gentle, almost apologetic, though Rie couldn't have said how a flat mechanical filter managed that.
A murmur of confusion rippled through the gathered villagers. "Then what are you?"
Another pause, longer this time.
"A traveler."
It wasn't a lie. It wasn't the truth either — not the whole of it, not the part where he'd fallen out of the sky in a burning pod with half his crew unaccounted for and a mothership that cared more about cargo than survivors. But it was close enough to hold, and the elder, watching him with the patience of someone used to reading people who didn't want to be read, seemed to decide that was answer enough.
"If you carry no ill intent toward this village," the old man said finally, "you are welcome here, traveler." He inclined his head, the faintest formal courtesy. "Join us for a meal, at least. It is little enough thanks for a life saved twice over tonight."
"Understood," Gamma said, and if he felt anything about the offer — relief, suspicion, simple hunger — none of it made it into his voice.
The feast that followed was smaller and quieter than the festival proper had been, but no less warm — low tables dragged into a loose circle, bowls passed hand to hand, someone's grandmother pressing an extra skewer on Gamma with the stubborn insistence of a woman who had decided he was too thin and would not be argued out of the opinion. He accepted it with the same flat courtesy he offered everything, and did not, as far as Rie could tell, actually eat any of it.
She watched him from across the fire for longer than she meant to. He sat slightly apart from the others — not rudely, just at a distance that felt deliberate, like a man leaving himself a clear line of sight to every exit in the clearing.
It was well past the point where most of the village had drifted home, the fire burned down to embers, when a faint blue light bloomed beneath the edge of Gamma's visor — soft, rhythmic, like a heartbeat rendered in circuitry. He rose without a word and stepped into the treeline's shadow, and Rie — too curious, or too something, to simply let him go — watched him from a distance she told herself was respectful.
[CHANNEL OPEN — LOW BANDWIDTH]
MOTHERSHIP: Evacuation unit dispatched. Extraction request approved.
GAMMA: Affirmative. Timeline?
MOTHERSHIP: Unconfirmed — pending resource logistics. New directive incoming: Emergency Priority Code 774-Echo, active immediately.
GAMMA: Define objective.
MOTHERSHIP: Access your PDA under the 774-Echo authorization. It will display last known locations for all scattered cargo units across planetary surface. Your mission is immediate containment and lockdown of every unit located.
GAMMA: Define "lockdown."
MOTHERSHIP: Apply standard encryption lock to each unit on contact. This ensures neither local populations nor unauthorized personnel can access or activate the technology inside, under any condition.
GAMMA: Understood. And extraction remains the priority?
MOTHERSHIP: Extraction remains approved. Containment takes precedence pending logistics. Per Codex Protocol 9: you are authorized to adopt a local identity and integrate as required to avoid disrupting planetary development during containment operations.
GAMMA: ...Affirmative.
[CHANNEL CLOSED]
Gamma stood alone in the dark for a long moment after the line went quiet, running the numbers the way he ran every problem — clean, sequential, no room left for anything that wasn't useful.
He had come down out of the sky with exactly one objective: get home. That objective hadn't changed. But it had just acquired a great deal of unwanted company. Cargo — his cargo, ship-grade technology from a civilization centuries past bows and spears — was scattered across an entire planet's surface, sitting in fields and forests and, for all he knew, the throne rooms of whatever kingdoms and empires this world had built for itself. If even one unit ended up in the wrong hands, "uncharted backwater" would stop being a polite fiction and start being a real and permanent problem — for this world, and eventually, inevitably, for his own.
There was only one way through it. Find the cargo. Lock it down. Stay invisible enough to do both without setting off every alarm this world's people had.
Which meant, for however long "temporary" turned out to actually mean, he wasn't leaving.
He turned back toward the dying fire, where Rie sat watching the last embers with the too-careful posture of someone pretending they hadn't been staring at the treeline the whole time he'd been gone.
A local contact, he thought, filing the observation away with the same clinical distance he filed everything. Someone who already trusts me, unprompted, for reasons I haven't had to manufacture. Useful.
He didn't examine, yet, why the thought sat slightly wrong in his chest — a small, unfiled discomfort, the first one he hadn't immediately known what to do with.
For now, it was simply useful.
That would have to be enough.