For three hours, Leo laid down in his bed and focused on nothing but regaining as much of his strength as he could. And while his desperation to do so had little to no effect… the nanites that somehow remained within his system kept working hard to make it happen.

And once the late evening turned into early night, Leo took a deeper breath and opened his eyes.

‘It’s time.’

The perspective of leaving his fate in someone else’s hands…

As enticing as Anlay’s offer of help and, at least temporary, save heaven could be, it wasn’t something Leo would ever agree to accept.

‘There’s simply too much risk.’

Leo stabilized his breath as he slowly pushed his body to fully and thoroughly awake.

‘Listen…’

Leo closed his eyes back as he attuned all of his attention to his sense of hearing, looking for even the tiniest noises that would indicate a possible obstruction to the plan he hatched while resting.

‘Okay, let’s go!’

Leo threw his legs over the edge of the bed while pulling the warm sheets aside.

A wave of cold air struck against his flesh and sent a shiver down his spine.

‘The outside isn’t all that welcoming, is it?’ Leo thought, raising up and cautiously moving to the room’s door. Each of his steps was perfectly planned and calculated well in advance in hopes of avoiding any tripping wires of all sorts.

‘The fight back at the hill proved this world goes well beyond my ability to understand. But certain, underlying principles, should still be the same.’

It was this reasoning that allowed the young man to judge where he himself would install wires for an alarm or a trap.

Still, he had no better assurance than mere hope his calculations would prove correct. After all, the different ways in which alarms and tripwires could operate in this world were more than enough to overwrite the entire reasoning someone like Leo could come up with.

‘Now, carefully,’ cheering himself up, Leo moved step after step, steadily treading between all the suspicious areas he could notice. And, to both his surprise and his relief, the young man arrived at the room’s door with no unforeseen events.

‘So far so good,’ Leo thought, breathing a small sigh of relief before nearing his ear to the wood of the door.

And again, no worrying sounds came to alert him.

‘Now, it’s all or nothing.’

If there was one place where Leo personally would locate some sort of alarm, it would be at the doors.

With not a single window lighting up the room’s insides, this was the only way out. And judging by those men from before who failed to even notice it, it was hidden with some sort of power.

All things considered, it was absolutely the best place to keep watch over Leo.

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Leo looked at the handle and took a long, shallow breath.

Even now, after hours of considering all his options, he hesitated.

“No matter what, keep the initiative.”

Leo’s hushed voice hardly even reached the doors. And yet, it still served as the anchor that effectively forced him to follow through.

He could no longer pretend to be resting, as such, silent escape was his best bet.

‘Here it goes!’

Leo reached out and twisted at the knob…

Only to find out it refused to move.

‘Shit…’

Pulling his hand back, Leo failed to relax his fingers soon enough and brushed them against the handle’s thickest part…

And the door slowly swung open.

‘So it wasn’t locked, to begin with…’

Keeping a watch over not making even the tiniest nose, Leo allowed the doors to open just wide enough to let him pass before he gently blocked their path with the tip of his shoe. He then swung around the door’s edge, moving into the same corridor where Anlay faced her sister just a few hours prior.

‘Don’t fall into a false belief that you understand shit of what’s going on here,’ Leo repeated one of the two founding principles behind his decision to escape in his thoughts. ‘You are a mere extra. The protagonists died at the hill.’

By now, the mental burden of that bloody scene started to fade away. But the lesson Leo learned back then was as fresh as never before, given all the time Leo finally had to thoroughly analyze it.

‘Keep going!’

Cutting the chatter in his head, Leo closed his eyes and lowered his chin.

‘That bitch came from… the right,’ he recalled before turning his body and tracing the corridor’s wall with his hand as he stepped ahead.

For the next few moments, Leo walked with his heart in his mouth, listening to it for even the faintest hints of a noise.

The last sound he heard came from over an hour ago. And with the sun already long gone back when Leo talked with Anlay, the night was likely reaching its darkest period, when one’s sleep would be deepest.

Step by step, Leo moved further and further down the corridor, making it harder and harder to rush back if anything would indicate he would be about to be found. Soon, Leo crossed the line of what he considered to be of no return, given the distance he would have to cover to move back to that hidden room.

‘And that’s assuming I could find it in the first place.’

Leo rolled his eyes.

This world operated in ways that differed from what he was used to. The slightest change to the physical rules caused by the probability well made it impossible for him to even predict what sorts of forces were at play here. And with that, any sort of confidence in him finding what enforcers of that bloody monster failed to see would be a display of naive arrogance.

‘Keep going,’ Leo cheered on himself in his thought, pushing through the pitch-black darkness of the corridor. The darkness that his eyes could not…

Leo squinted his eyes when he detected a faint hint of light.

A light that worryingly resembled a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel…

Leo’s throat moved as he gulped down a solid bit of saliva.

‘Keep going! You need to keep the initiative!’

This was the other principle, the rule ingrained so deep into Leo’s soul that it allowed him to refuse the help of this worryingly charming girl from before.

To keep the initiative. For giving up on it, meant leaving it to the enemy or even worse, fate, to decide what would come next.

‘If I’m going to go down, I will go down fighting!’

Leo’s steps hastened, only to slow down as the light grew brighter and closer and his cold, calculative reason returned.

‘Hurry will do me no good.’

Slowing down even further as he approached a lone torch burning by the simple but solid doors at the end of the corridor, Leo calmed down his breath and spent further few moments just listening in.

‘Now, then, once again, it’s all or nothing.’

Leo gently grabbed the handle… and pushed the doors open. They were much heavier than the ones back in his room, and yet, they opened up just as easily.

Leo’s heartbeat hastened when he noticed the same torch as the one nearby hanging right on the other side of the doors. Still, he leaned over the door’s edge and cast a quick glance outside.

Yes, outside.

Leo finally reached the end of this straightforward maze of darkness and successfully concluded his first step towards freedom, and hopefully, his first step on his way back home.

Unable to quell his excitement, Leo took a step outside, feeling like the very first man who got to step on the moon…

Only to notice what he failed to with his glance from before.

A person sitting on a small, stone fence and staring right at the doors.