“Wait,” the woman called as he stepped around the fire.

Lokus looked at her with a hint of anxiousness. Was she going to demand payment for the meat?

“They won’t let you in for free,” she told him, giving him an amused look. “That’s not how things work here.”

“…Oh.” Lokus sighed. Where was he supposed to get the money to enter the city? All of the jobs were likely inside of said city, which meant he was effectively forever locked out of it.

The amused light in the woman’s red eyes only grew as she saw his reaction, as if she was looking at a moping puppy that had gotten in trouble for eating its master’s food. “I didn’t mention it for nothing. I can give you the claws, if you give me something in return.”

Lokus scratched his chin. He didn’t have anything he could offer her, besides his pants, and he’d rather not walk around naked. The tattered remains of his pants didn’t hide much, but he still had his dignity, dammit.

“You’re new to this place,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question, but a statement.

“You got me,” Lokus shrugged. “But why are you bringing it up?”

“You have nothing on you of interest to me,” she continued. “But perhaps you can give me some information on the world you left behind.”

“Like what?” Lokus frowned. He didn’t know what use something like that would be when they were all stuck in here, but he wasn’t about to turn down a chance at sleeping within the safety of a city’s walls.

“Any major events, or anything else you find to be of note.”

“All right,” Lokus nodded.

The request was a tad vague, but the information cost him nothing, and he didn’t have any better alternatives. So, without further ado, he began to impart his very limited knowledge of the current affairs of that world.

“For starters, the Oldlight Kingdom – that’s where I came from – has been readying itself for a war. It was little more than idle gossip when I left, but I did have to sign up for a draft.”

“A war with who?”

“I don’t know. The thing is, the Oldlight Kingdom is well-protected from and well-respected by the surrounding nations. They’ve got the strongest navy on the continent, and mountains surround most of their dry sides.”

“Anything else?”

Lokus told her everything else he knew, which admittedly wasn’t much, mostly rumors he had heard while cleaning up the small shop he worked at. When he finished, the woman turned back to the fire and skewered one of the slabs of meat with her fire poker before taking a bite out of it.

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Setting the meat back down on the fire, she reached into her cloak and tossed something from within at Lokus.

He caught it with minimal effort and looked at it. It was a small leather bag closed by a string. Something inside clicked and clacked as he shifted it in his palm, and he opened it to find what appeared to be claws inside.

“What are these?” he asked her.

“Demon claws. That’s what we use here. You’ve learned how to use your Domain, right? You’ll need it to tell their value.”

Lokus gave her a weird look.

“It’s what you use to sense Majesty.”

Lokus blinked at her. That “system” of his had mentioned Majesty, as had the instructor that helped him awaken his Mantle, but he still hadn’t been given an explanation of what that even was.

[The Majesty statistic is a measure of the strength of your Majesty.]

‘Really helpful,’ he thought sarcastically. ‘And what is Majesty?’

[The Majesty statistic is a measure of the strength of your Majesty.]

Lokus groaned, earning an odd glance from the cloaked woman before she turned back to the fire.

“Majesty is… a sort of energy,” she explained. “Take this fire, for example. When properly fed with fuel, it can do things you normally can’t do, like providing heat and light. Your affinities are the fire, and Majesty is the fuel. You know what affinities are, I hope.”

“I do,” Lokus said, his eyes narrowing as he stared into the fire. “Is that what that energy is called? Majesty?”

If that was the case, then he had used it twice already. Once when he was trying to escape his chains in the prison cell, and again when he was trying not to die after being eaten alive.

“Yes. If you know what affinities are, and you’ve used yours before, then you should have already used your Domain. It’s how you should have found the Sovereign Gateway in your spine.”

‘Sovereign Gateway?’ Lokus thought. Almost as if on instinct, he closed his eyes and felt for that world of energy within himself. ‘So that’s what you’re called.’

“That right there,” the woman said. “That lens you’re seeing through, that is your Domain. Try to bring it out.”

[Tutorial quest received!

Name: Expanded Domain.

Description: Release your Domain from the confines of your body.]

Lokus breathed deeply, his brow furrowing with strain as he willed this feeling to extend. His arms tensed, a headache quickly forming.

No matter what tricks he tried, he couldn’t get it to do as he wished. It was like trying to make his eyes bulge out of their sockets. He knew it was possible, and had seen people that could do it on demand, but his mind just didn’t know how to translate the vague understanding of “it’s possible” into a usable method.

“Relax,” the woman told him. “It’s not something to be forced. Think of it like opening your eyes, but the eyelids are your body.”

Lokus willed himself to relax, attempting to imagine such a thing. But despite his efforts, the suggestion was still not enough. It was akin to trying to control the beating of his own heart off of a single suggestion, there was just no way he could do it.

He didn’t know how long he stood there, trying to unleash his Domain. He only knew that when he was beginning to get frustrated at his utter lack of progress, a roar pierced through the night air.

His eyes flew open. It sounded like it was coming from the direction of the forest.

The direction he had come from.

‘It followed me?’

Whoosh!

Lokus turned to the woman, or where she had been sitting, but she had vanished. The only signs that she had ever been here were the smoldering embers of her fire, and the fire poker she had used to skewer and flip the meat.

Clenching the bag of claws she had given him, he snatched up the metal fire poker to use as a weapon if need be, only to curse and drop it. It was still hot from the fire it had just been in.

If he had the time, he would have wondered how the woman had been holding it, but as it was, he simply cooled it down with his frost and tentatively picked it up.

As another roar echoed out over the plains, he broke into a sprint, running in the direction of the city.