The caravan resumed its slow crawl through the mountain pass an hour later, the wounded tended, the dead cultists left for the forest to reclaim, and Caius rode in tense silence beside Isolde and Kaelan, the abandoned pendant now tucked carefully into his saddlebag despite every reservation he still carried about accepting anything from a self-professed centuries-old Heretic.
He’d picked it up eventually.
Leaving useful intelligence lying in the dirt out of stubborn pride felt like exactly the kind of decision that got protagonists killed in the stories he used to read.
“I’m waiting,” Isolde said, breaking the silence as the canyon widened into a more forgiving stretch of forest road.
“You promised an explanation before we reach the capital. I’d prefer not to spend three days wondering whether I’m escorting a genuine Heretical asset.”
Caius exhaled slowly, weighing exactly how much truth he could afford to share without unraveling everything he’d carefully constructed over the past two weeks.
Isolde wasn’t stupid.
She was, if the game’s lore held any consistency at all, one of the sharpest strategic minds among the continent’s young nobility, and half-truths that satisfied a rural border legion instructor wouldn’t survive her scrutiny.
“What I’m about to tell you sounds insane,” Caius said finally.
“I need you to actually hear it before deciding I’ve lost my mind.”
“Try me,” Isolde said.
“Seven days before the Heretic first approached me outside my father’s estate, I wasn’t Caius Draxos,” he said carefully.
“Not really. The soul that occupied this body died. Something replaced it. Me. From somewhere else entirely.”
Kaelan’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing, apparently having already suspected something along these lines given everything he’d witnessed over the past two weeks.
Isolde’s expression remained carefully neutral, though her eyes sharpened considerably.
“Soul displacement is not unheard of in Ur’s history. Certain forgotten rituals, certain ancient artifacts, have been known to accomplish something similar. What makes your circumstance relevant to a centuries-old Heretic’s personal interest?”
“Because,” Caius said, choosing his next words with extreme care, “wherever I came from, I possessed knowledge of events that haven’t happened yet on this continent. Things that are going to happen, unless something changes them.” He paused.
“The Heretic claims he arrived the same way, centuries ago, and has watched this exact sequence of events unfold multiple times already.”
“What events,” Isolde pressed, her voice tight.
Caius hesitated.
This was the dangerous part, the part where honesty risked painting an enormous target directly onto Isolde’s back the moment she understood exactly what role she was destined to play. Visit novelping dot com for the full chapter.
“There’s a bloodline currently dormant somewhere on this continent,” he said carefully, avoiding the Protagonist’s name entirely.
“When it awakens fully, it’s going to seek out the most powerful Blessed heroines of Ur, gather them under a banner of apparent righteousness, and eventually turn on them entirely. Sacrifice them, to accelerate an ascension beyond anything the Thirteen Gods currently permit.”
Isolde’s horse shifted uneasily beneath her, the frost along her gauntlets flickering with sudden, involuntary tension.
“That is an extraordinarily specific and extraordinarily convenient piece of foreknowledge for a boy who claims to have arrived in this body only two weeks ago.”
“I know how it sounds,” Caius said.
“I know exactly how convenient and exactly how insane it sounds. But the Heretic knew things about me he had no rational way of knowing unless he actually shares whatever origin I have. And the Council’s Enforcers couldn’t classify whatever framework attached itself to my soul because it doesn’t match anything native to this world at all.”
Isolde rode in silence for several long moments, her sharp mind visibly working through the implications, weighing his admittedly insane claims against everything she’d personally witnessed over the past several hours, a goddess manifesting a binding oath before Saint-rank Enforcers, a centuries-old Heretic addressing him with unsettling familiarity, fifty cultists organizing an ambush specifically to capture him alive.
“If what you’re claiming is true,” she said finally, slowly, “then you’re suggesting one of these heroines you mentioned might be standing directly in the path of a bloodline destined to seduce, betray, and ultimately sacrifice her.”
“Yes,” Caius said quietly.
“Am I one of them,” Isolde asked, her voice carrying a dangerous, controlled edge that made Caius’s stomach twist painfully.
He could lie.
He could deflect, claim ignorance, buy himself more time to figure out exactly how much he was willing to reveal about the game’s specific cast of heroines.
But something about the raw, unflinching directness of her question made lying feel like exactly the kind of cowardice that had defined his first seven days in this body, and he’d promised himself he was done being that person.
“Yes,” Caius said.
“You’re one of them.”
Isolde’s expression didn’t crack, didn’t waver, though her hands tightened visibly around her reins, frost spreading unconsciously along the leather where her gauntlets pressed against it.
“And your solution,” she said, “is what, precisely. Warn every potential target individually? Somehow prevent an entire bloodline from awakening at all?”
“My solution,” Caius said, “is to reach every one of you before this bloodline does. To offer an alternative before the manipulation even begins.” He met her sharp blue eyes directly.
“I’m not asking you to trust me blindly, Isolde. I’m telling you the truth because you deserve to know exactly what’s coming, and because I’d rather have you as an ally who understands the stakes than a stranger who stumbles into them unprepared.”
Isolde studied him for a long, silent moment, the forest road stretching quietly ahead of the resuming caravan, and something in her carefully guarded expression shifted, incrementally, into something that wasn’t quite trust yet, but had at least stopped being open hostility.
“I will require considerably more proof than a Heretic’s cryptic testimony and a dying goddess’s dramatic oath before I extend anything resembling genuine trust,” she said finally.
“But I am not foolish enough to dismiss a warning this specific, delivered under these particular circumstances, purely out of wounded pride.” She paused.
“Consider this a provisional truce, Caius Draxos. Prove your claims hold weight, and we will discuss what an actual alliance might look like.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
It wasn’t the wholehearted partnership he’d hoped for, but given everything he’d just dumped on her in the middle of a forest road three days from the capital, it was considerably more than he’d realistically expected.
“That’s fair,” Caius said.
Kaelan, who had remained conspicuously silent through the entire exchange, finally spoke, his voice carrying an unusual weight of consideration.
“You said this bloodline hasn’t fully awakened yet. How long do we actually have before it does?”
Caius’s mind raced back through everything he remembered of the game’s early chapters, the Protagonist’s slow, patient introduction at the Academy, the gradual accumulation of heroines across the story’s opening arc.
“I don’t know exactly,” Caius admitted.
“The timeline’s already shifted from what I remember, given how early the Heretic and the Council both got involved. But if the Academy enrollment still happens roughly on schedule, we’re looking at months, not years, before things start accelerating in earnest.”
“Months,” Isolde repeated grimly.
“To prevent a slow-motion catastrophe you claim has already played out multiple times across centuries, with a Heretic circling you offering an alliance neither of us fully trusts, and a Council observer waiting at the Academy who happens to be personally betrothed to this bloodline’s eventual vessel.”
“When you put it like that,” Caius said, “it sounds considerably worse than it did in my head.”
Despite everything, despite the exhaustion and the lingering burn of his corroded wound and the sheer overwhelming weight of everything he’d just confessed, something in Isolde’s expression flickered, briefly, into the faintest ghost of dry amusement.
“Welcome to noble politics, Caius Draxos,” she said.
“Everything sounds worse once you say it aloud.”
The caravan pressed onward through the remaining forest road as afternoon light gave way to evening, and Caius found himself, for the first time since arriving in this body, not entirely alone in carrying the weight of what he knew.
It wasn’t trust, not yet, not fully.
But it was a start, a fragile foundation he desperately needed if he had any real hope of rewriting a script that had already claimed three previous cycles of failure before his own had even properly begun.
Three days later, as the caravan finally crested the last ridge overlooking the sprawling capital city and the distant, towering spires of the Divine Academy beyond it, a fresh notification chimed softly behind Caius’s eyes, and the words hovering there made his stomach twist with fresh, unavoidable dread.
[Notification: Divine Academy Enrollment Confirmed.]
[Notification: Assigned Council Observer Detected Within Proximity.]
[Warning: Signature Match – Seraphina val Lumen.]
She was already waiting for him.