The sun had risen and fallen over the jagged horizons of the outer rim, marking a full day of relentless marching, brief rests, and silent navigation. They had finally halted near a secluded basin. A massive, crystal-clear lake stretched out before them, reflecting the deep twilight sky, its waters completely undisturbed by the corruption of the city.
It looked like the perfect sanctuary. Yet, Kairo stood at the edge of the water, his arms tightly crossed, staring into the dark reflection with a look of pure, unadulterated dread.
Leonhart walked up beside him, the clanking of his armor unusually quiet in the heavy evening air. He looked at the hundreds of children currently resting under the temporary earthen shelters Kairo had sculpted. "Kairo, why are you so upset?" Leonhart asked, looking at his friend's tense posture. "You built a flawless subterranean tunnel for them. They're safe from the weather, and in case any wild animals attack, we have a clear defensive perimeter."
Kairo didn't look up from the water. "It's not about wild animals, Leonhart. Yeah, they're a pain in the ass, but... it may sound completely crazy to you, but I think we should go back again. Right now."
Leonhart stiffened, his jaw dropping. "Wait, what? You and I haven't slept in over thirty hours. How are you going to go back and attack an entire sovereign territory like this?"
"Because I am afraid," Kairo whispered, his voice cracking slightly, dropping the mask of the fearless, analytical survivor. "Lust... it is one of the most powerful, most fundamentally annoying things I have ever faced in my entire life."
Leonhart frowned, rubbing the back of his neck as he processed the concept. "I don't fully understand Lust... but I know about desire. I've read about it, and we saw the system data. They have high-tier magic built entirely around manipulating what a person wants."
"That's exactly the problem," Kairo said, his hands beginning to tremble slightly. "Now that I know the true mechanics of their [Desire Spark]... I know for a fact I can't handle it."
Leonhart let out a heavy sigh, trying to bring a sense of grounded reality back to his friend. "Don't you even want to give it a shot? I'm almost afraid to ask, but you've already sent your mud clones back into the city to pick up the remaining orphans, right? You literally disguised yourself as Julian, gathered all the operational intelligence on the facility, and synchronized the escape. And now you want to run straight back into the meat grinder to fight the guards? Dude, take some rest."
Kairo blinked, momentarily pulled out of his spiral. "Dude? Uh... where did you even learn that word?" He shook his head violently, pressing his palms against his temples. "Whatever. See, Leonhart, what I'm trying to tell you is that I am completely hopeless. I've failed so many times. I can't handle this specific parameter, Leonhart. I just can't."
Leonhart stepped closer, his fierce, golden eyes searching Kairo's pale face with deep concern. "What are you even saying, Kairo? Did something happen to you when you were trapped in that alternate world? Because as far as I know, you've never complained about facing down your own desires before."
"I don't know, Leonhart!" Kairo suddenly snapped, turning to face him, his eyes bloodshot and wide with existential exhaustion. "That old world... it's making me completely crazy! It is just so damn complicated. I don't even know what is true and what is wrong anymore. I am actively doubting my own existence! All I want to say is... Leonhart, please, just believe me."
He slumped against a nearby boulder, looking down at his small, twelve-year-old hands.
"I will fail. No matter what strategy I formulate, I will fail. I can conquer literal demons, Leonhart, but I completely fail when I'm put in front of my own desires and my own ego. I don't know why. If I were just an ordinary kid, I would just want to leave this place and live a completely normal life. But when I look at these kids..."
Kairo's voice dropped into a low, horrified whisper as he pointed toward the resting orphans.
"These guys are the only hope I have left. They can help me. But look at their mouths, Leonhart. Look closely."
Leonhart turned his gaze toward the shelters. In the dim lamplight, he noticed it. The children who had crossed the outer boundaries of the Land of Lust weren't laughing or talking. Their lips were fused by a faint, translucent magical scar tissue.
"Their mouths... they've been sealed away," Kairo growled, slamming his fist into the dirt. "I just figured out the underlying curse of this land. The moment an uninitiated child leaves the territory without permission, their mouths are permanently shut up. They will never speak again. Damn it... damn it, Leonhart!"
Leonhart's expression hardened into granite as he stared at the silent, mutilated children. The righteous, protective fury of his warrior bloodline surged, but he forced his voice to remain steady and grounding for Kairo's sake.
"Calm down, Kairo. Calm down," Leonhart said firmly, placing a heavy hand on Kairo's shoulder and squeezing it. "Just do exactly what you wanted to do from the beginning. Don't fight them up close. Use your mud clones. We can orchestrate the attack from far away from here, while we maintain and build our primary base right at this lake."
Kairo paused, his hyper-analytical mind instantly grabbing onto the tactical logic. The emotional panic began to recede, replaced by the cold, calculating arithmetic of earth magic.
"The mud clones..." Kairo muttered, his eyes narrowing as he ran the numbers. "Yeah. Individually, they are weak as a stick. Their structural integrity is brittle compared to real soldiers."
A dark, cynical smile slowly returned to Kairo's face under the twilight sky. He looked up at Leonhart, his confidence locking back into place.
"But a massive collection of sticks can be united, Leonhart. If we compress them, bind them together, and launch them in perfect synchronization... we can deliver a devastating, catastrophic attack to the enemy without ever exposing our true bodies to their [Desire Spark]."
Leonhart grinned, drawing his weapon and planting it into the dirt. "Now that sounds like a plan from my captain. Let's start building."
The transition didn't happen with a flash of light this time. It began as a sharp, agonizing pressure behind Kairo's eyes—a localized migration of his consciousness that tore him away from the lake, away from Leonhart, and plunged him straight back into the suffocating matrix of 2012.
He was twelve. He was standing in the crowded corridor of his school, the ambient chatter of his classmates bouncing off the concrete walls.
"Kairo's definitely getting a ninety-nine on this one," one of his old friends said, slapping him on the back with casual certainty.
"A ninety-nine?" another friend snorted, crossing his arms. "This guy takes a hundred easy. Why are you even doubting him? He's a genius."
Kairo wanted to smile, to play the part of the effortless prodigy, but the scenery warped violently. Suddenly, he was sitting at a cramped wooden desk inside the examination hall. The white paper of his previous test script lay before him, the red ink burning into his retinas.
14 / 30.
A cold, heavy panic dropped into his stomach. No way, Kairo thought, his eyes scanning the failed corrections. I didn't study at all. I... wait. My mind. I completely forgot what I read. In his original trajectory, his routine was flawless—he would study deliberately for three hours, internalize the curriculum, and write the exam with absolute precision. But looking at the blank lines beneath the questions now, his mind was an unyielding void.
He couldn't write a single word.
He glanced to his left. The academic elites were writing flawlessly, their pens scratching against the paper in a steady, mocking rhythm. Then his gaze drifted to the back rows—the kids who never studied, the ones who usually filled the bottom of the grading curve. They were looking directly at Kairo, small, knowing smirks breaking across their faces. One of them tapped his own blank paper, gesturing toward Kairo as if to ask: Why aren't you writing, genius?
Kairo forced his face into a hollow mask, simply nodding and smiling back as if he had consciously chosen not to prepare. The rowdy kids fell silent, satisfied by his fall from grace.
He tried to force his hand to move, to scrape together enough half-remembered fragments to pass, but a sudden, violent spike of frustration and self-loathing paralyzed his fingers. The teacher stood up at the front of the room, her voice droning over the scratching of pens. "Those who have finished their papers may hand them in and leave early."
Usually, only the dropouts left at this mark. But out of sheer, unadulterated anger at his own incompetence, Kairo shoved his chair back, grabbed his half-blank script, slammed it onto the teacher's desk, and walked out of the classroom.
The scene shifted to the edge of the school courtyard. The afternoon sun was brutal, baking the asphalt. Kairo sat alone on a concrete bench, his knees pulled to his chest, watching his classmates sprint across the basketball court. He didn't join them. He couldn't.
The ball bounced out of bounds, rolling toward his feet. One of his friends jogged over to retrieve it, wiping sweat from his forehead. He paused, looking down at Kairo's dejected posture. "Aren't you playing today, Kairo?"
Kairo didn't lift his head from his knees. "No. I'm not."
"Why are you so upset?"
"I didn't write anything on the test," Kairo replied, his voice thin and hollow.
His friend froze, his eyes widening in genuine disbelief. "Wait... what? That was literally the easiest unit of the term. You didn't study?"
Kairo nodded slowly, staring at the scuffed leather of the basketball. "Yeah. I didn't. But I didn't know I would fail like that."
As his friend jogged back to the game, the internal monologue of a twelve-year-old child turned viciously inward. The only one to blame for this failure is myself, Kairo thought, a bitter, resentful spike of reality piercing his ego. I followed the shallow desires of my heart. I chose the immediate comfort of the screen. Because of that, I'm just a loser. I'm just a normal, pathetic guy who is completely addicted to his TV.
"Kairo! Open your eyes!"
The concrete bench dissolved into thin air. The suffocating weight of the classroom evaporated, replaced instantly by the cool, damp atmosphere of a subterranean cave.
Kairo's eyes snapped open. He was lying flat on his back on a bed of soft moss. Looming over him was Leonhart, his fierce face pale with worry under the dim, flickering light of a single, low-burning torch.
"It seems like your exhaustion finally caught up to you," Leonhart exhaled, leaning back and wiping his own brow. "Don't worry. The moment you dropped, I completely sealed the tunnel entrance. It's just us sleeping here in the dark now."
Kairo rubbed his throbbing temples, the temporal vertigo making his stomach churn. "How long... how long was I out?"
"You were gone for a full day," Leonhart said, his voice dropping into a solemn, respectful register. "But somehow... even while your mind was drifting, your subconscious managed to maintain the connection. Your mud clones successfully infiltrated the lower sectors, gathered the remaining orphans, and brought them all safely back to this basin. But the moment the last kid crossed the perimeter, while you and I were still talking... you just collapsed into the dirt."
Kairo sat up slowly, looking at his small hands. They were still the hands of a twelve-year-old, devoid of his prime warrior strength, but the memory of his failure in the exam hall remained freshly burned into his soul. The parallel was too precise. In both worlds, his ego and his undisciplined desires had stripped away his capabilities, leaving him fragile.
"Now I know," Kairo whispered, his voice completely devoid of emotion as he stared into the shadows of the cave. "I am incredibly weak, Leonhart. My physical frame, my natural reserves—they are nothing. My only viable strategic option left is mud magic. I have to rely entirely on constructs."
Leonhart frowned, tilting his head in complete confusion. "What are you talking about, Kairo? You just saved hundreds of lives by yourself. How does that make you weak?"