Jane sat at the table and sighed. Bella walked into the room with a freshly brewed pot of tea. “Leon, how many sugars do you-” she paused upon seeing only Jane at the table.

“Um… where are they?” Jane looked up with a tired face and shook her head. “They’re just being boys.”

---

I followed Conrad out ten minutes into the forest, where we finally stopped in a large clearing. Conrad was the one who first broke the silence. “So where was Brago? I had heard that he was living in the mansion, but he was nowhere to be found today.”

I shrugged. Not like I had seen him either. I had just woken up this morning after all. Conrad sighed at my response - or lack thereof, and pointed to one side of the clearing. “Stand over there. We’ll begin shortly.”

I complied with his request and made my way almost 30 meters across to the other side of the field. I watched in surprise as Conrad pulled a longsword from seemingly out of nowhere. I thought I was far enough away from him to see my expressions, but I apparently underestimated the range of his vision.

“What? Did you think that even though our world has this much experience with space and time manipulation, that we wouldn’t take it upon ourselves to experiment and research?” I stayed silent and eyed him down. This was going to be more difficult than I originally thought.

“Come on Leon, or do you want me to start?” I started to answer but he was already gone. I looked around and dove forward when I felt a familiar tug in my gut from the directly behind me. I got up and turned to see Conrad standing where I had been a moment before.

“Oh? I’m surprised I didn’t have to stop short with my swing there. I guess that being exposed to the flow of space makes you sensitive to its shifts. Come on boy, show me what you’ve got!”

I instantly regretted leaving my scythe back at the mansion. I stood up and stalked closer with my hands in a peek-a-boo style position. Conrad just stood still, eyeing me. “Interesting. Is that a style from your home world? No matter. As leader of the Coat of Arms, the Azure Continent’s elite soldiers, I will do my utmost to test you.”

He disappeared once more, and I exhaled deeply. Once more I felt a tug from behind me, however, this time I stood my ground and spun on my heels to face him. A look of shock popped onto his face and I took my first swing at him, which he dodged easily.

I followed up with a flurry of punches which he continued to duck and avoid at an accelerating rate. He tried to swing his sword at me a few times, but I either used my hands to knock away the swing using the flat side of the blade, or shifted my body to dodge it entirely.

“You’re an interesting kid, and much better than I gave you credit for.” Conrad’s smile only grew wider as the fight progressed, and finally he fought back with all his strength. As I watched him wind up his latest swing, I felt a cold sweat start to form on the back of my neck.

Instead of parrying this swing, I hit the ground and ducked as the blade went over my head. A loud boom resounded behind me and I turned to see a decimated forest, which cleared a view all the way up to the base of the plateau that Brago and I had climbed only days before.

I tried to back away and create distance, but Conrad had his foot firmly planted on mine, and kept me in place. My eyes widened as Conrad raised his sword, a frown forming on his face for the first time since we left the mansion.

“I had hoped I was wrong, but it doesn’t seem that way. How could I entrust Bella to you at this stage? It turns out that you can’t protect her, can you?” My eyes widened at his words and the world went black.

---

I dropped to my knees in the darkness, and hung my head. Had Conrad killed me, or merely sealed me away in the space which he commands? I sighed and resigned myself to my fate when a low hum started in my ears.

“Have you finally remembered?” A voice resounded in the darkness. I tried looking around but the speaker was nowhere to be found. It was a familiar voice, yet not one I instantly recognized.

“It sickens me to see you playing house with complete strangers like this. You have so much pain, so much hatred inside of you that you just threw away.”

The voice echoed around me, and resonated with how I truly felt. Underneath all the bonding and warm experiences, there was an underlying feeling that it was all playing pretend.

“Have you remembered why you came here? Have you remembered who you are?”

To… to protect her. To find a way to heal her. I want to make sure she never suffers ever again.

“And what do you need to do when that’s done?”

Kill… kill General Armando.

“So you do remember.” The voice came from directly in front of me, and I turned my head up to see-

“Dantae.”

---

Conrad thought about swinging his sword down at Leon, intending to end it all. He had a suspicion from the get go that Leon was not truly who the Azure King or Jane desired. Never in the history of their world had a summoned person arrived ahead of schedule, and even then Leon was far too weak to be one of those who were brought here and were expected to hold great power from their first breath in this world.

He sighed, hoping that the gods would be kind to Leon in his next cycle. The sword started to move down when Conrad heard Leon whisper.

“Dantae.”

Conrad felt his spine tingle and jumped backwards as a black hole opened up at his feet. However, the phenomenon stopped as soon as it had started, leaving only a crater in the ground between the two men.

Conrad’s smile returned to his face. It seems he had underestimated the boy after all. Conrad put his steel sword into the ground, where it was soon reclaimed by his personal pocket dimension. He then called upon his electrum armor, which was transported directly onto his body before calling on his true electrum blade.

“Well, looks like you’ve got new life boy. Ready for round two?” Conrad smiled gently at Leon, and continued to smile even when Leon transported behind him, and opened up a hole in his chest with his freshly summoned scythe.