The town was bright.
Too bright.
Voices overlapped, carts rattled over stone, merchants called out prices, children laughed as they ran between crowds. Life moved everywhere at once — loud, careless, alive.
And through it walked two figures, wrapped in a pocket of quiet that did not belong to the street.
One was a middle-aged man with silver hair, most of it hidden beneath the shadow of a dark hood. His posture was straight, his steps even, controlled — the walk of someone who had spent a lifetime prepared for danger.
Beside him walked a young man whose presence felt strangely out of place in such a lively scene.
His hair, though cleaner now, still carried that faint bluish tint. His clothes were proper, his body healed, yet his eyes… his eyes still moved like those of someone who had once lived where movement meant survival. Every sound reached him. Every shadow registered. Every sudden laugh made his focus shift for half a heartbeat.
This was Ether.
Two months ago, he had walked through lands where the sky burned red and the earth was a grave of monsters. He had gone years without hearing ordinary voices, without seeing people who were not afraid or dying.
Now he walked through a marketplace.
And it felt unreal.
It had not been easy for him to step outside his home.
Getting permission had taken days, and the one he had to convince was Maria — his younger sister, and now the head of the household. Her authority was absolute, but it was not power that made her refuse him again and again.
It was memory.
Maria was not easily swayed. Years ago, the world beyond their gates had swallowed her brother and given nothing back but silence. She had grown up believing he was gone — buried somewhere beyond reach, beyond hope. When he returned, thin, scarred, and wordless, it had felt less like a reunion and more like a miracle she was afraid to question.
Now that he was finally home — alive, breathing, within sight — she guarded him with quiet desperation.
Not out of control.
Out of fear of losing him to that world a second time.
To her, the outside was not a place.
It was the thing that had taken Ether once.
To Ether, however, it was not destiny or freedom calling him.
He simply wanted to walk.
During the years he had been gone, every step had been toward survival. Toward an objective. Toward something he could not even name anymore. He had crossed dead lands and silent forests without ever once stopping to look around.
Now he wanted something he had almost forgotten existed.
To hear people arguing over nothing.To see shop signs he didn't understand.To walk without needing to look for where death might come from.
Something normal.
Maria had agreed to let him go out under one condition.
He would not be alone.
That was why the man beside him carried the weight of quiet authority.
Josh — captain of the Righeart family. A warrior whose name held respect across the region. People shifted aside for him without knowing why. His gaze moved across rooftops and alleyways in a constant, practiced rhythm.
He walked casually.
But he missed nothing.
He was not a companion.
He was a safeguard.
As they moved deeper into town, the noise softened into open space. The streets widened into a large square, and at its center stood a towering statue.
Ether slowed.
The statue showed a man raising a hammer over an anvil.
But the anvil was empty.
Around it, blades had been driven into the stone — swords, spears, broken weapons — forming a wide ring of steel. Sunlight struck the metal, and for a moment the reflection looked like scattered fire.
Ether's chest tightened.
A memory rose — not of home, but of stories told in quiet voices.
"The Child of Liberation… Arther."
Arther, the noble who destroyed the empire that birthed him. The saint. The tyrant. The angel. The devil. History could not decide.
But every tale agreed on one truth.
Blades surrounded him.
Not as trophies.
As consequences.
The empty anvil was said to mean the world was never finished — always waiting to be shaped, reforged, broken again.
Ether stood still, staring at the statue.
At the circle of steel.
At the symbol of a man who had walked through blood to change the world.
A strange feeling stirred in his chest.
Not admiration.
Not fear.
Recognition.
A moment later, he dismissed the thought.
Stories had a way of exaggerating the past. Heroes grew larger in memory, their shadows stretched by time. In the end, Arther was just a man who had lived too violently in history's eyes.
Ether turned away from the statue and began walking again.
He had not come to the town for reflection.
Today's task was simple: buy supplies for his academic life.
In Maria's records, Ether was twenty-one years old. By normal standards, he should have been in the final year of the Imperial Academy of Leon — preparing for graduation, status, and position.
Instead, he would be entering as a first-year student.
Years of absence left him with no formal education, no certifications, no history that the Academy could acknowledge.
Maria had told him he could skip it.
"You're past the age," she had said. "No one would question it. With your… condition, no one expects you to follow a normal path."
But Ether had insisted.
He did not want privilege.He did not want special treatment.
He wanted to learn how to live in this world properly — from the beginning, like everyone else.
Maria, on the other hand, was already a student there.
The Academy operated under a flexible system for exceptional cases — especially for those carrying noble responsibility. After the disappearance of their parents and Ether's loss, Maria had become the acting head of the family far too young. Because of that, she had been granted a privileged student status: access to warp gates for rapid travel and scheduled leave periods to manage household affairs.
A system designed for heirs forced to grow up too soon.
She was currently in her third year.
Which meant—
Maria, his younger sister, was now his senior.
The thought should have embarrassed him.
But Ether only adjusted the strap of the supply bag on his shoulder and continued down the street, quietly observing the world he was trying to belong to.
For him, this was not about rank.
It was about starting over.