The children in the stagecoach looked betwixt themselves, desperate to untangle this strained but charming mood brought about by Azriel’s rather sudden proposition. They weren’t sure if they had heard Azriel correctly or whether he meant something other than what they thought it sounded like he said.

Azriel had set a particular impression on the three kids, an outcome that he did not desire. He knew he had to cut it off at the root lest it festered into something worse down the road.

After a moment of awkward silence passed, Azriel opened his mouth to the bracing children, stating, “My name is Azriel.”

They winced as he spoke, but their dispositions quickly mellowed as he continued, with a friendly smile, explaining, “I am born a peasant from a little village called Hildenfreide. I hope we can all get along.”

Azriel could see by their reactions that his second attempt at forcing a smile was significantly better than the first—when he tried and failed to mollify Monika. He was on the fastest route to mastering anodyne expression, or so he hoped.

The first of the three to settle, the girl looked surprised, inquiring, “Y-You’re a peasant? But you’re so…—”

The girl got caught up in her words.

“Beautiful?” Azriel finished her statement.

The girl was unresponsive, but Azriel explained, “While I come from Hildenfreide, my parents come from the near-east. Most people are beautiful there, or so I heard.”

Azriel didn’t really find beauty any more or less attractive than ugliness. In a way, he preferred people who others deemed harder to look at as it was inherent in their visually distinct nature that made such people more interesting for him to look at and talk to.

Even so, Azriel had come to understand the base reasons for why people naturally preferred beauty, seemingly near, unilaterally. Ugliness, after all, was an indicator of bad health; bad health could be infectious. It was simply another case of an inborn survival mechanism thoroughly rung out of him through his time in the tutorial zone.

As Azriel had come to understand, it was because of such a survival mechanism that, in the Nubi desert, those scraping by at the lowest rungs of society were often considerably beautiful. Unafforded the luxury of safety from the constant bearing down of neighboring oppressors and massive monsters, only the strongest, smartest, healthiest, and often most beautiful could survive and reproduce.

That wasn’t the complete picture, however. A more significant factor at play—one Azriel’s parents were not forth-coming about, and therefore he was ignorant of and had no way of knowing—was that the culture of the Nubinese was one of conquest in barbarism. Monogamy, political marriage, and casus-belli would be laughed off as inane considerations, a trifle to the powerful warlords in the near-east.

Clans would take wives of their neighboring clans’ women and form harems of only the most beautiful among them while castrating and killing the men who lost in battle, enslaving their strongest to lives of debilitating servitude.

A great place, the near-east was not. All civilized society ended with the Persistine empire. All past it were peoples who could only move backward in the wake of Remae’s final days, digressing back to the times of the 2E stories of Olde, the times of Gilgamesh, the times of Uz and Alibaba.

Without a clear god or set of gods to keep the people in line, they devolved, degenerated, and became heathens with hedonistic tendencies. They had no foundational principles, no higher being to placate, none except the ancient gods of the 2nd Era, which they fell back on, gods who would seek virtue in pillaging and conquest, gods that resembled man and man’s worldly interests.

Azriel didn’t know of such things. He didn’t know of his people’s actual history past the surface level. He didn’t know, but he knew he didn’t know, and it irked him. Although it is a hard thing to look for knowledge in the unknown. A sudden urge came over him, the urge to go there and see it for himself. Only then could his need for knowing be satisfied.

Before him, the girl’s cheeks had flushed deep red as her heart started beating faster. Azriel was quickly reminded of the present circumstances.

The embarrassment on the girl’s face was evident, but Azriel couldn’t gleam to where it came from. He didn’t understand the nuance of her discomfort when she tried communicating her perception that Azriel was an attractive person.

The dynamic between men and women wasn’t so clear to Azriel. It was somewhat blurry, in fact. He couldn’t understand why talking about his beauty with the woman would elicit such a response from her, but somehow, he vaguely understood it concerned that special dynamic between men and women.

Azriel pushed the buck back to her, asking, “How about you? Tell me about yourself.”

The blonde-haired girl cleared her throat before, inelegantly spluttering, “M-My name is Anna of the Arnim family. I—” She cleared her throat again, her cheeks deep crimson. “I-I was raised on an estate outside of Bilberg. I learned swordsmanship from a young age from my master, who was a high-ranking soldier of unparalleled skill—”

“Oh boy, here comes the obnoxious boasting,” Azriel thought as he tuned out the conversation, only listening enough to learn that the blond boy’s name was Josef while the brown-haired one was Ben.

The three nobles opened up to one another, conversing freely, while Azriel turned his attention to the window. He’d grown weary of the braggadocious mannerisms the kids had.

Looking out the weathered window, Azriel spent the next hour staring into the abyss of trees, hoping to see or feel a few interesting creatures or plants he hadn’t seen before. He found such things infinitely captivating.

Over the hour, Azriel felt Anna’s eyes trained to the back of his head for at least a third of it. She was like a moth to a flame, and she didn’t even know. Azriel didn’t call her out on it; he wasn’t particularly bothered by it. He’s put up with quite a few voyeurists, after all.

“A-Azriel,” Anna chimed, pulling his attention from the woods. “I couldn’t help but notice your injured hand.”

Azriel looked down at his hand. He had forgotten the still searing pain coursing through it. “Oh, don’t worry about it’s just a little broken.”

Ben laughed, “‘Just a little broken,’ you say? You sure are an odd one, Azriel.”

Listening with a blank expression, Azriel glared at the plump swollen mass while Ben teased, “If Josef had a wound like that, he would be whining like a baby for his mommy.”

Josef gave an offended look, shouting, “Nuh-uh. You would, though.”

“Oh yeah, we’ll see about that,” Ben threatened before punching Josef in the nose.

As the two boys started fighting and wrestling, Anna explained, “If you don’t fix up that wound soon, the swelling will get worse and worse, and you might even have to get your pinkie amputated.”

Azriel looked mildly concerned, asking, “Really? Is that true?”

Anna nodded, “Uh-huh. I can help you though. I have a skill called Healing Hands which would fix your wound right-up.”

“Could you please?”

“Of course, but…” she gave a sly smirk, “o-only if… you promise to go on a date with me.”

The boys immediately stopped their rough-housing and started crawling over each other while begging Anna to heal them too. Anna ignored them, keeping her full undivided attention on Azriel.

Azriel scratched the back of his neck with his broken hand. “What’s a date?”

She gave an incredulous look, responding, “Huh, what do you mean ‘what’s a date?’ Don’t play coy. Everybody knows what a date is.”

Ben clicked his tongue and shook his head as if he disapproved of Azriel’s conduct.

“I think I’ve heard that word before. What is it?” Azriel asked with genuine curiosity.

Anna’s face turned a deep shade of crimson once again as she struggled to find the words to explain, “A date i-is a thing that… when a boy and girl... um get together and… s-spend time with each other doing fun things… so that they can decide on whether they l-like each other.”

Azriel tilted his head like a confused puppy. Based on her awkward explanation, he hadn’t entirely understood what it meant to go on a date, so he automatically defaulted to the assumption that what she was explaining was something platonic.

“Sure, I don’t see the harm in that. You seem like a nice person,” Azriel said with such confidence that it caused young Josef to become teary-eyed.

Anna stuttered, “T-Thank you.”

Ben looked disappointed, “I’m pretty sure he still doesn’t get it.”

***

A glowing white aura emanated from Anna’s delicate hands as she massaged away the swelling in Azriel’s pinkie finger and set the broken bones back into place. She had spent a little less than an hour giving this sort of therapeutic hand massage to Azriel. It was far less effective as a treatment than living-water, but it worked, and to Azriel, that was all that mattered, considering that he may’ve otherwise lost his finger.

With budding interest, Azriel inquired, “Is your skill from a stigma?”

“No, no,” she dismissed him. “I was born with it, hence why the aura is white.”

Azriel furrowed his brow, a little confused. “What do you mean?”

Anna laughed, “You truly are quite a unique person, Azriel.”

“Hmm? Did I say something stupid?”

Anna shook her head, “No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s just surprising that somebody as capable as you didn’t know how to tell stigma skills and spirit skills apart by appearance.”

“There’s such a thing?” Azriel was surprised to hear this. He hadn’t thought about how to tell them apart until now. “What’s the difference?”

Raising her finger, Anna explained, “Skills that are physical in nature will be white or light-greyish if they come from a person’s own spirit, whereas they will be gold or orangish-yellow if they are a stigma skill.”

“Huh.” Azriel tilted his head back as he thought about her explanation.

It was consistent with what he had observed to be the case. Artifacts such as fire stones and his magic ring were etched in golden rune-markings. Even the color of the portals, both the one from his ring and the one in the tutorial zone, had been gold.

Anna smiled warmly at Azriel and continued, “And, if a monster uses a skill that is visible, the skill will glow black.”

“Is that so?” Azriel furrowed his brow. “Hmm… I guess that all makes sense as far as I’ve seen.”

A moment of silence passed as Anna continued to massage away the swelling in Azriel’s hand. He could even feel the bones beginning to heal somewhat.

Meanwhile, Ben was slouched over in his seat, passed out, while Josef quietly sketched in a journal. His drawings were exquisite.

Azriel turned to Josef to ask, “Do you like to—”

His words were cut short as he sensed something in the forest.

There behind the trees was something in a form that Azriel could not fully comprehend without first seeing. It was a hulking quadrupedal creature with six limbs and seemingly two heads in rapid approach.

Azriel shot up from his seat, quickly wiping the dust off the small dirty window, trying to give himself the best view of the incoming creature.

Josef dropped his sketchbook in shock as Anna gazed at Azriel, bafflement clearly written on her face.

The window was too small and at the wrong angle for Azriel to properly see the monster.

Azriel cursed under his breath before smashing the window, sending glass everywhere, then sticking his head outside just as a man screamed, “Monster!” at the top of his lungs.

A horn blared, and the line of stagecoaches skirted to a stop.

Emerging from behind a tree was a monster that Azriel did not recognize, one that looked like a long-armed horseman lacking skin or legs attached at the waist to a similarly skinless horse. Azriel could not tell whether it was two entities fused together or one with two heads, the horse and the humanoid.

Suddenly, the creature’s horse head and humanoid head snapped to Azriel, transfixed. Their skinless face, made of muscle, sinew, and bone, opened wide, maw gaping. The horse had but one glowing eye that peered into Azriel’s soul. The humanoid screeched inhumanly.

Azriel’s eye twitched; the creature was right outside Lucas’s cabin.