The voice belonged to a tall man standing just behind the border and donning a complete set of plate armour which hid his features. I complied with the request and stopped walking. Once the man saw I had followed his directives, he crossed the edge and ran towards us. He was holding a spear in his hands and once he had closed the distance between us, he pointed it towards me, with the tip pointed at my throat.

From the stiffness in his movements and the fact he wore such extensive body protection equipment, he seemed to be a newbie guard. Had he been more experienced, he would have probably avoided interacting like this with travellers, as this type of behaviour could come off as annoying or disrespectful and result in premature demise.

I saw his eyes studying us through the visor of the helmet. His wariness was completely directed towards me. He had clearly determined that between Faye and me, I was the greater menace. After all, my presence was “stronger” than hers. Had it been a few days before, though, he would have probably directed his attention towards Faye. Fortunately, due to the mana storm outbreak, it seemed Faye’s mana affinity and control had risen a step further and she had become able to better camouflage her true nature. It would have been safer if I had been given time to pour my aura into her, but it had been off my mind due to all that had happened and the guard had suddenly rushed at us while I had been distracted.

“Good morning. Please state your identity and purpose for coming here to the Alpha Perimeter”, he said in a polite but vigilant tone.

“I’m John Doe and my companion here is Faye Deveraux. I’m here to compete in the inter-perimetral tournament as the representative of the Gamma Perimeter”, I explained.

“Oh, sure”

The guard froze in place. His eyes had grown wide, before collapsing to two thin slits.

“Don’t lie to me”, he intimated.

I frowned.

“I do not understand. I’ve spoken the truth”, I insisted.

He raised his weapon once again and pointed it against me.

“I’ll give you another chance to tell the truth. If you lie once again, you will not be allowed access and I may find myself forced to employ force against you”

“I am not lying. Let me compete”, I spoke resolutely.

My last words seemed to tick him off, as he responded by waving the weapon in my direction. I grabbed the rod just under the spear tip before it could make contact with my body and I yanked it from his hands. He lost his balance and stumbled towards me. I put my free hand on his helmet and pushed him backwards, making him fall flat on the ground. He got up just in time to see his weapon get thrusted and embedded into the earth.

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“I do not wish to fight, but I will if forced to. First, explain why you assaulted me when unprovoked, second, bring here a superior or the person closest to that role. Let’s try to solve this peacefully”, I stated in a firm note.

The guard laughed and then addressed me in an angered voice.

“Unprovoked, you say? You repeatedly lied to me, is that not enough provocation?”

“There were no lies in my words”

The guard in front of me was starting to upset me. After a minute of silence, the guard’s tone changed dramatically.

“Wait, you really weren’t b*********g me, weren’t you? You really are convinced you weren’t lying”, he said surprised.

“What makes you think I’ve been trying to deceive you?”

“Have you perhaps been hit by a mana storm?”

“Why would that be relevant?”

I was at my wits end. I didn’t understand what was going on. Suddenly, I thought back to what had happened a few days before and felt that something had gone really wrong. The guard’s next words confirmed my suspicion.

“The Gamma Perimeter was hit by a beast’s stampede almost twenty years ago. It was completely annihilated”

I froze for a moment. I instinctively knew the guard was not lying. I turned towards Faye, just in time to see her face contorted in horror and shock. We had clearly reached the same conclusion. For the past days there had been numerous forebodings: the inability to keep track of the passage of time, the irregular succession of days and nights and the erratic movements of the stars. For some inexplicable reason, we had been left stranded in a place which had been disconnected from the world’s primary flow of time and had reemerged far off into the future.

I scrolled through my memory in search of an explanation, but came up with none. Temporal anomalies were not present in the world I knew of. This was alarming: although I had learned to expect changes of variable entities to the structure of reality that I knew of, divergences of this magnitude were completely out of my vision. The only thing I could hope for was that somewhere I could find some kind of clue or explanation, but I was not particularly optimistic.

If all of this was really true, and I was convinced it was, I had to evaluate my current condition. With me almost surely presumed dead or simply forgotten, the danger represented by the Sloan household was no more. Moreover, I hadn’t even a place to return to now that the Gamma Perimeter had been destroyed. But first, I needed to confirm something.

“Is the tournament still being held? These days?”, I asked, breaking the silence.

“Oh, yeah, sure”, the guard answered.

This was good news, as it meant I could continue with the original plan of finding a patron by distinguishing myself during the tournament. Anyway, the fact that the temporal anomaly had transposed us almost exactly twenty years into the future was definitely curious.

I opened my mouth once again.

“It appears we have come to an impasse. It’s now explained why you would assume I was purposefully being untruthful, but I assure you that was not my intention. As you speculated, we have indeed been exposed to a mana storm recently”.

I turned around to look at Faye. Although a slight grimace of displeasure covered her face, she supported my version with a nod. All things considered, it was safer to pretend to have been mentally damaged by a mana storm than trying to explain we had lost two decades.