They walked the western trade road for two days before Fresha finally worked up the nerve to ask him anything at all.
It wasn’t for lack of wanting to.
She’d spent most of the first day stealing glances at him when she thought he wasn’t looking, cataloguing the ways he’d changed against the fading, unreliable memories she’d carried of him as a child, the set of his shoulders, the quiet, watchful way he scanned the treeline even mid conversation, the sword at his hip that he’d finally allowed himself to carry openly once Teria’s rooftops had disappeared behind them.
“Where are we going,” she finally asked, on the morning of the third day, when the trade road forked and Hoju took the wider branch without hesitation.
“Dall,” he said.
“The capital of the whole continent, more or less.
Biggest city there is.
Biggest opportunities too, if what I’ve heard over the years is even half true.”
“You’ve never been anywhere bigger than Briaton in your life,” Fresha said, not unkindly, more out of genuine curiosity than doubt.
“No,” Hoju admitted.
“But I figure a place that size has room for two people nobody in Teria ever bothered to notice properly.”
She was quiet after that, turning the words over, and did not push further that day.
The road tested him properly on the fourth day, a pack of level thirty forest wolves breaking from the treeline with the coordinated aggression of a pack that had learned, through hard experience, that most travelers on this stretch of road made easy meals.
Fresha froze the instant they emerged, hand flying to the small utility knife she carried for camp chores rather than combat, and Hoju simply stepped in front of her without breaking stride.
Horizontal Slash caught the lead wolf mid leap, the trailing arc of the blade opening its throat before it ever landed.
**Level 2 → Level 2.
Max Level Cap already reached.
Experience converted to Input Points: 45,000.**
He pivoted immediately into Hurricane Slash for the second, the compressed gust behind the strike catching two more wolves at once as they tried to flank him from either side.
**Experience converted to Input Points: 45,000.**
**Experience converted to Input Points: 45,000.**
He finished the last straggler with a single measured punch that folded it before it got within striking range of Fresha at all.
**Experience converted to Input Points: 45,000.**
**Total Input Points: 180,000.**
The whole exchange took less time than it had taken her to draw her own knife properly.
She lowered the blade slowly, staring at her brother with an expression caught somewhere between awe and something harder to name, something closer to grief for every year she’d spent believing the village’s version of him instead of trusting whatever quiet instinct had once told her otherwise.
“How,” she finally asked, once they were walking again, her voice smaller than she meant it to be.
So he told her.
Not everything, not the ring’s hidden domain or the fortune sealed inside its vault, some careful instinct keeping those two details folded away even from her, but everything else, the dungeon that had genuinely led somewhere impossible, the battle between beings whose levels dwarfed anything the continent’s own rankers had ever reached, a dying star named Gogohut who had given a stranger’s kindness to a boy who’d never once received it from his own village, and a promise made over that star’s final breath that Hoju intended to keep no matter how long it took or how far it carried him from everything familiar.
Fresha listened without interrupting, the same careful, patient silence their mother used to keep whenever either of them had something difficult to say, and by the time he finished, tears had gathered at the corners of her eyes that she made no effort to hide. New chapters come out on novelping dot com first.
“I believed them,” she said quietly.
“For years.
I believed every word they told me about you.”
“You were seven,” Hoju said.
“They had years to shape what you remembered.
I don’t blame you for any of it.”
“I blame myself for it,” she said.
“That has to count for something too.”
He didn’t have an answer for that, not one that felt honest enough to offer, so he simply reached over and set a hand briefly on her shoulder, the same gesture their father used to make, and let the silence between them settle into something warmer than it had been in ten long years.
That evening, once Fresha had settled into an uneasy sleep beside their small campfire, Hoju walked a short distance off the road and pulled up the panel he still hadn’t fully emptied.
**Input Points available: 180,000.**
The wolves had died too close together for his liking, too close to Fresha for comfort, and it had left him turning over a problem he hadn’t properly faced yet.
Every skill he carried so far demanded he be within arm’s reach of whatever he was fighting.
Gogohut had fought across an entire battlefield without ever needing to close that kind of distance, weapons and pressure alike reaching targets that were nowhere near close enough to touch.
He picked a target, a lone boulder some thirty paces off the road, and swung Horizontal Slash at it anyway, fully aware nothing would happen at that range, chasing the same principle that had built every skill before this one.
Understanding first.
Attempt after.
He tried to hold the shape of the strike in his mind as he swung, not the blade cutting flesh in front of him, but the edge of the motion itself, the compressed line of force Hurricane Slash already proved a blade could throw outward if aimed correctly.
He swung again, and again, adjusting the angle of his wrist, the snap of his follow through, chasing a feeling more than a technique, something that told him, faintly, he was closer with each attempt than the one before it.
It took him the better part of that night, sweat soaking through his shirt despite the cool air, before a thin, near invisible line finally tore free of the blade’s edge on a strike and crossed the full thirty paces to the boulder, biting a shallow groove into the stone.
**Condition met.
Skill created: Air Blade.**
**Input Points required for full proficiency: 500,000.**
He allowed himself a tired, satisfied breath, then pushed what he could spare into it immediately, unwilling to let the momentum of finally cracking it go cold.
**Air Blade Proficiency 0 → 3.
Cost: 150,000 IP.**
**Input Points remaining: 30,000.**
The range and cut of the strike sharpened noticeably even at that partial level, the groove his next few practice swings tore into the boulder deepening with each attempt.
He left the remaining thirty thousand untouched, some old, careful instinct telling him to keep a little in reserve rather than spend himself completely dry twice in one journey, and made his way back to the fire to finally get some rest of his own.
He had no way of knowing, settling down beside his sleeping sister under a clear, quiet sky, that the distance he’d just taught himself to reach across would matter far sooner than he expected, and against something considerably more dangerous than a pack of hungry wolves. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Roy received the message from Teria three days after Hoju and Fresha had already left the village behind.
He read it twice in his private study at the knight’s garrison outside Briaton, a level one hundred and seventy spear user whose loyalty to the chief ran deeper than his official duties technically required, a friendship built over years of hunting trips and shared drink long before either of their sons had grown old enough to carry the same casual cruelty their fathers had modeled for them without ever meaning to.
The letter’s version of events, unsurprisingly, painted Hoju as a thief and a danger, a boy who had emerged from a stolen treasure dungeon with power no one could properly account for and a temperament the chief’s own household now considered a threat to Teria’s safety should he ever decide to return.
Roy had no particular love for Hoju, having heard Fragg’s version of the boy’s entire history secondhand over the years, filtered through exactly the kind of bias that made a story like this one easy to believe without much scrutiny.
He also understood, reading between the letter’s more careful lines, that his old friend the chief wanted this problem handled quietly, permanently, and far enough from Teria’s own borders that no formal inquiry would ever trace it back to a village that technically had no jurisdiction to order a young man’s death in the first place.
Roy did not have the authority to dispatch actual royal knights on a matter this unofficial.
What he did have was a standing arrangement with five men who operated under the loose, deniable title of independent rankers, mercenaries technically licensed to hunt monsters and clear dungeons for coin, who supplemented that income handling exactly the kind of work no formal authority wanted their own name attached to.
He sent for them that same evening.
They arrived at the garrison’s rear gate under cover of dusk, five figures who could not have looked less alike if they’d been assembled deliberately for variety.
A broad shouldered warrior named Kell, level one hundred and ten, who fought with a two handed war axe and a reputation for finishing arguments before they finished starting.
A wiry, quiet woman named Ferrin, level one hundred and five, an archer whose arrows had a well documented habit of finding throats rather than shoulders.
A pair of twin brothers, Doss and Renn, level one hundred each, battle mages who fought in tandem, one weaving fire while the other layered ice through the gaps, a combination that had ended more than one bounty faster than either brother could manage alone.
And leading them, a scarred, unreadable man named Ashgrove, level one hundred and thirty, a former royal knight himself before some quiet scandal had ended that career and left him working jobs exactly like this one for men exactly like Roy.
“The target,” Roy said, sliding a rough description across the table, everything the chief’s letter had provided along with a rougher sketch drawn from secondhand description.
“Boy, sixteen, traveling with a younger sister.
Last confirmed heading west toward Dall, three days ahead of you now.”
Ashgrove studied the description without much visible interest.
“What’s the threat level.”
“Unconfirmed,” Roy admitted.
“Officially he awakened at level one, cap of two.
Unofficially, he apparently walked out of a supposedly empty dungeon carrying enough strength to end two separate duels in Teria’s square without drawing his own blade, one of them against a swordsman six levels above his own recorded number.”
That got a flicker of real attention from Ashgrove, a slight narrowing of his eyes.
“That’s not a level two boy’s fight,” he said.
“No,” Roy agreed.
“Which is exactly why I’m sending five of you instead of one.”
Ashgrove was quiet for a moment, weighing the job the way a professional weighed any contract with more uncertainty in it than the pay usually justified.
Then he nodded once, sharp and final, and gathered the description back off the table.
“We’ll find him,” he said.
“Whatever he actually is.”
They left the garrison before midnight, five figures moving west along the trade road under a sky just beginning to clear of clouds, three days behind a boy who had no idea, walking beside his sister with a warmth in his chest he hadn’t felt in a decade, that Teria’s cruelty had followed him further than either of them had thought to check for.