After weeks of grueling travel through dense wilderness, the ruins of an ancient tower emerged through the undergrowth — a crumbling skeleton of stone that a colony of ogres had claimed as their den.
Lance exhaled with the relief of a man who had been running on empty for far too long. "Finally. A feast of souls. Enough to put myself back together completely."
Rakh glanced at him sideways. "Then brace yourself for an epic battle."
Lance turned to look at him with an expression that could have curdled fire.
"You absolute menace." His voice was flat. "I poured every last fragment of my spiritual and physical energy into resurrecting this Fire Lion I'm riding, and now you're suggesting I fight with my own hands?"
Rakh shrugged his wings with magnificent indifference. "What's stopping you?"
Lance dismounted, brushing the dust from his coat with deliberate calm. "Both of you go in and tear them apart. Leave me three. I'll handle those myself."
Rakh agreed with the enthusiasm of someone doing an enormous favor under protest. He and the Fire Lion descended on the ogre colony like a natural disaster given form. Lance meanwhile settled against the broad trunk of an old tree, pulling out his black bow with unhurried ease.
The slaughter was comprehensive.
When the dust settled and only three large ogres remained standing — confused, cornered, and desperate — Rakh deployed a single concentrated wind strike that sent all three tumbling directly toward Lance's position.
Lance didn't flinch. A volley of arrows and a burst of black chains later, all three hit the ground simultaneously, each with a hole through the center of their chest.
Rakh and the Fire Lion returned, both of them dripping.
Lance was already speaking. "Between Worlds."
He gestured toward the gateway. "Go in and eliminate their counterparts on the other side. I'll wait here."
Rakh crossed the threshold with the energy of someone deeply unimpressed. "Curse your exploitation, you shameless parasite. You've apparently become incapable of doing your own work."
Lance smiled pleasantly at his back. "Naturally. Why struggle personally when I've found such a capable volunteer?"
Hours of recuperation passed. Then the System panel materialized unbidden before Lance's eyes.
[ Soul Collection Update ]
Souls Collected: 20
Lance sat up slowly.
Twenty? I killed three ogres with my own hands.
He called Rakh back through the gateway, eyebrows drawn together. "What happened in there? Where did all these souls come from?"
Rakh shook out his dark feathers, looking quietly smug about something. "Every ogre we killed in the real world had a copy waiting for us inside. We found them all and finished the job."
Lance went still as the pieces locked into place. "So because you've merged with my black substance... your kills in the physical world automatically manifest in my personal dimension." He let out a slow breath. "That's extraordinary."
Rakh puffed up with visible pride. "You owe me your life, you ungrateful wretch."
"We'll settle the debt eventually," Lance said, and meant it.
He shattered six soul crystals at once.
The System updated:
[ Soul Sacrifice: 6 / 20 ]
Then he consumed one more — letting the healing energy course through him like warm water filling a cracked vessel, knitting bone and muscle and nerve back to their proper state until his body felt genuinely, completely his again.
He rolled his shoulders experimentally, then looked at Rakh. "Can you fly? Actually fly — not just glide?"
"For a limited distance, yes," Rakh admitted. "The old wounds are still complaining."
"That's sufficient. We fly until we reach the walls of the Northern Fortress."
Lance returned the Fire Lion to the Void to conserve its energy. In response, Rakh's body swelled — the transformation rolling through him in dark, sweeping waves — until he had become something that didn't belong in the category of ordinary birds. Something singular and ancient and vast.
Lance climbed onto his back.
Rakh spread his wings, and they split the sky.
The acceleration nearly stripped Lance clean off the saddle. Wind pressure hit him like a physical wall the moment Rakh reached full speed, and he barely kept his grip. In a sharp moment of improvisation, he launched his black chains in loops around Rakh's spine — fashioning himself a harness from shadow and instinct.
Rakh found this deeply entertaining. A low thunderous laugh rolled out of him like distant storm.
"Your speed is insane!" Lance shouted against the wind tearing past his face.
"Obviously," Rakh replied, radiating satisfaction. "And this is only a fraction of my true velocity. At full health, you'd be a smear on the horizon before you could blink."
Lance looked ahead at the open sky.
Below them, clouds drifted in slow, enormous formations. The sun was setting at the edge of the world — all gold and amber and deep violet, colors that had no right being that beautiful given everything that had happened in the past weeks.
For one unguarded moment, Lance let it in.
The battles. The blood. The weight of decisions made in darkness. All of it fell away — and what was left was just wind, and height, and something that felt dangerously close to peace.
"Hold on" Rakh's voice sharpened with sudden caution. "What is that?"
Lance snapped back. "What did you see?"
Rakh's eyes were fixed on a distant cluster of clouds.
"Someone on a large falcon. But they disappeared into the fog — too fast to be coincidence."
Lance studied the horizon for a moment, then let it go.
"As long as they don't cross our path, they're not our concern. Stay focused on the destination."
Days of sky travel later, the walls of the Northern Kingdom resolved through the clouds — massive, ancient, built with the kind of permanence that said we have endured and we will continue to endure. Rakh descended silently, landing behind a boulder large enough to block them from the watch-guards' sightlines.
He exhaled.
"We made it."
Lance looked at him with quiet accusation. "Why didn't you suggest flying from the beginning? You would have saved us weeks of walking through the wilderness."
Rakh adopted an expression of earnest innocence. "First — I was injured. Second — you never asked."
Lance paused. Considered that. Then shook his head with a reluctant smile.
"Fair enough."
They made their way toward the main gates, and immediately understood why the journey hadn't been the hard part. The crowd stretched in every direction — thousands of people, desperate travelers and migrants and wanderers, all waiting in stagnant lines for permission to enter.
Rakh surveyed the situation with wry detachment. "And how exactly do we get past those walls with no gold, no documents, and no identification?"
"You," Lance said, already scanning the crowd, "can use your compact form and slip over the wall from above. I've just found my own key to get inside."
Rakh became a shadow and vanished upward.
Lance moved through the trees lining the waiting crowd — quiet, deliberate — until he found what his instincts had already told him was there.
She was standing among guards dressed as common travelers. Dark hair, straight posture, the particular tension of someone who absolutely did not want to be recognized.
Lance walked up behind her with the footsteps of a wolf that had already decided.
He placed his hand on her shoulder.
She whirled — and the fury in her eyes was instant and total.
"Who is this lowborn creature who dares to"
The words died.
Her eyes met his, and everything in her face went from rage to something colder and considerably less comfortable.
Lance smiled. It was not a warm smile.
"It's been a while," he said quietly. "Should I call you 'Princess,' or would 'the Princess Who Runs at the Sound of Swords' be more accurate?"
She straightened, fighting for composure. "I am not a coward."
"We'll revisit that conversation later," Lance said, the warmth evaporating entirely. "Right now — you're going to find a way to bring me through those gates without drawing attention. Both of us walk in clean."
She had no room to negotiate, and she knew it.
They passed through the gates without incident. The moment they were through and moving into the city's inner streets, Rakh dropped from above and landed on Lance's shoulder.
"What an unpleasant surprise," he said toward the princess with theatrical disappointment. "Seeing you again."
She turned on them both — and this time, the fear was gone, replaced with something harder and more dangerous.
"If either of you threaten me or lay a hand on me," she said, her voice controlled and cold as iron, "I will have the lord of this kingdom mount your severed heads on the gate-spears as a warning to common street trash. Do I make myself clear?"
Rakh's energy surged.
"You arrogant, insufferable"
Lance's hand clamped over his beak.
Sealed it shut.
"She's right," Lance said — quiet, measured, and somehow more frightening for it. "We can't touch her here. Let's go."
He walked away, towing Rakh's contained fury behind him.
Once they were out of sight, Rakh wrenched himself free.
"Why did you stop me?" His voice was hot with indignation. "I could have crushed every ounce of that arrogance right out of her!"
Lance was quiet for a moment. When he answered, his voice carried the weight of someone who had learned certain lessons the hard way — and hadn't forgotten them.
"Because arguing with her on her ground, in a city where she holds every advantage, is pure stupidity. In this world, right and wrong don't follow truth. They follow rank and bloodline."
He kept walking.
"Put an honest commoner and a lying noble before a king and ask him to judge between them. He won't look at the commoner's honesty. To the king, the commoner is an insect — useless to his throne. But the dishonest noble? That's the pillar that keeps his crown steady. Power purchases truth, always." He glanced sideways at nothing in particular. "And in this game, we are the commoners. She is the noble."
Rakh was quiet for a long moment.
"This world," he said finally, his voice stripped of its usual sharpness, "has no justice in it. None at all."
Lance looked up at the high walls of the kingdom rising around them, and something old and tired moved through his expression.
"In a world without morality," he said, "the ones who try to apply justice don't become heroes."
He paused.
"They become the criminals."