“Thank you, if you hadn’t agreed to protect me, I don’t know what would become of me.” Spoke Seraphina.

“It’s no problem, we happened to be going in the same direction.” I respond, “By the way, I am currently in an unstable mental state, and unable to fight back when I’m attacked.”

“Huh? How did you survive that cave? What will we do if we are attacked?” She asked.

Maybe I should have told her about this before agreeing to guard her.

“Don’t worry, I’ve gotten pretty good at running away,” I replied. Olivia chuckled a bit after hearing this.

“Well, I can’t really complain… anyways, I don’t believe we have formally introduced ourselves yet.” She gestured toward Olivia.

“Oh, yes. It is an honor to meet you, Ms. Seraphina, I am Olivia, I don’t have a last name.”

She seems to be behaving very cautiously around her. Well it makes sense, she is from a background of poor peasants, and she is speaking to someone that is borderline royalty. If anything, my casual behavior is out of the ordinary.

“Please don’t be so formal, as long as we are journeying together, we are friends. What is the relationship between you two?”

With this invite to act normal, she let out a loud sigh of relief and let her shoulders loosen.

“Thank God, I’m not sure I could keep up that act any longer.” She shared her thoughts out loud. “I am kind of his friend and servant?”

“More like an assistant.” I chime in. It is true that she helps me with a lot of the tasks a servant would normally help a lord with. But, calling her a servant would be demeaning.

“I see, well, it’s nice to meet you, Olivia.”

“Nice to meet you too!”

Before we leave town, I send Olivia to talk to some of the people she met in this city. We made sure this talk was done loudly in a public place for others to overhear. Due to my attracting attention in this village, people became keen to listen to our public conversations, which would work out for me.

“We are going to be leaving the village in a few hours. Traveling to the port city of Corbuda to the north. We plan to take a boat all the way around the continent to Grekia.”

“Oh really! Well, we will miss having you around, kid. You and that short friend of yours.”

“I will miss talking to you too ma’am.”

After spreading this information around a bit, we depart.

Obviously, we weren’t planning such a grand sea adventure, but if anyone came to this village looking for us, this might throw them off our trail. With both Seraphina and I being hunted, it doesn’t hurt to leave behind red herrings.

I have been doing this so far, but still, someone found me. It may have been dumb luck, but next time it could turn deadly.

We spent the day walking to the west. Olivia and Seraphina, both extroverts at heart, found themselves lost in conversations. I walked just behind them, carrying the baggage, lost in thought. How could I further prevent ourselves from being spotted?

“Should I shave my head?” I thought out loud.

Upon hearing this, the girls turned around simultaneously with a look of disgust on their faces.

“Please don’t. You could use a trim, but going bald is taking it way too far…”

“If anything you should grow your hair out more so I can give you pigtails!”

While they gave conflicting advice about what to do with my hair, it seems that shaving my head isn’t worth it. My hair has reached shoulder length and sometimes gets in my eyes. I’ll probably find a barber in a city we are passing soon.

With this argument over my head finished, we get back to walking. Seraphina is able to keep up with my and Olivia’s pace. We walk for eight hours before we decide to stop and rest. Since it is our first day adventuring together, we will cook a nice slice of fresh meat the butcher left with us. I kept it from spoiling by leaving a slab of cold rock on it in my sack. While re-cooling that slab every 30 minutes was a bit of a pain, it would all be worth it momentarily.

I cut it into three equal pieces, if I let Olivia cut it herself, she would give herself a smaller portion. After that, however, I left it all to her. Neither Seraphina nor I are skilled in cooking.

The process was simple. Minimal amount of salt and pepper as seasoning, Cooked by dangling over a campfire, with potatoes cooked using the same method.

Despite the simplicity, the meal was wonderful. The meat came from a cow-like creature, it is much like cows in my old world, but bigger and stronger. Thus, the meat was a bit tougher, and it also had a slightly sweet aftertaste.

Those two were starting a new chapter in their lives, and thus quite joyful. Creating a sense of festivity in this wilderness. With the welcoming atmosphere, I even joined the conversation a bit. The meal continued for an hour after the sun fell, and the conversation turned serious afterward.

“The next major city we will run into is the capital city of Tharros, which lies on Aric’s River. The journey will take a month on foot, two and a half weeks if we can find horses. We will spend as little time in the city as we can. After that will be Harold’s Ravine, which is the border between Assyricum and Wyrmsau.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I don’t intend to let anyone get separated, but if it happens, we will meet at the ‘Toe of The Enchanted Mountains.’

We will have to ditch our horses before entering the mountain range. There isn’t enough food for horses in those mountains. Trading outposts are just enough to feed humans, but that’s it.”

The girls nod in acknowledgment. I would be much more comfortable taking the sea route to Enkantia, but records kept for sea travel are apparently fairly meticulous, if I left a written account of where our destination was, then we would be quite literally inviting trouble.

I have toyed around with the idea of leaving behind a fake record of our sea travel, but decided it was too much effort and risk for the reward.

We discuss logistics for a few more hours, then Seraphina goes to bed. She must have been tired because I can tell she fell asleep right after entering her tent. Olivia holds off, there seems to be something she wants to ask me. It takes her a few minutes to build up the courage to ask.

“Is it true you killed the King of Aenes?”

Ah, she overheard this in the conversation yesterday, didn’t she?

My first instinct is to dismiss the question, as I have many times before, but… it’s not right. She is completely open with me, I on the other hand am closed off and secretive. When I really think about it, she knows nothing about me.

I am committed to building relationships, and I know that true friendship can’t be built upon lies and secrets, but… I’m scared. What if she abandons me? Is it not natural, that once the fog is lifted, and she sees me for what I am, she will run away?

I know that isn’t the kind of person she is, but the scars from the past still linger in my mind. I have ended up alone before, in my old world, and this one. I know how fast it happens, and I fear that at any moment I will experience crippling solitude once more.

So, even in the face of this fear, I will open myself up to Olivia. I know that the longer I wait, the harder it will be, so I will do it now. I will put my trust in Olivia. She has put her trust in me after all.

“I did, I killed the top general of the Aenes kingdom too.”

“...will you tell me the reason?”

“They… they conspired together, to kill my family…”

Fuck, it’s hard to talk about. The words feel like they are fighting back in my throat.

“I’m… I’m so sorry… I didn’t know…”

“It’s ok,”

The conversation ended there. She lost her family too, but that doesn’t mean she knows what to say at a time like this.

Instead of talking, she approaches me and sits on my right side. Moving cautiously, she places her hand on my shoulder. A simple gesture, but it communicates something special, ‘I’m here for you’.

I accept her sincerity, and we sit like that for a while, staring into the campfire as the flames dance to nature's symphony.

…

We reached Tharros 3 weeks after departing from the village. We had to detour 2 days to get the horses, but it ended up saving time in the end. With the addition of horses, Olivia and Seraphina were able to follow my pace.

We followed the main roads to the capital without incident. We are currently resting on a hill just outside of the city walls.

On both sides of the city was a massive river. It looked about 2 kilometers wide, and deep enough that large ships could pass through it. In the middle of the city, one could see an extremely tall bridge over the walls.

We all put on cloaks and pull the hoods over our faces before we enter the city. Due to the density of people, this was the most dangerous place in Assyricum. We have to take every precaution not to be recognized.

We wait about 15 minutes to reach the gate to the city. Our entry is fairly smooth, both Seraphina and I have sufficient documentation.

The architecture in this country has been different from what I was used to, but it was nothing compared to the capital. The roofs were all slanted with a steep slope, and there wasn’t a building in sight under two stories tall.

The roads were wide and made of brick, there even appeared to be a drainage system on the side of them. A shop for everything one could imagine needed could be found on each side of the road.

Hundreds of people all around us moved with purpose. Based on the individual words I could pick out from the crowd, the accent in this city was entirely unique from the one typically heard in rural Assyricum.

When buying our next set of rations for the road, financial planner Olivia was audibly shocked by the upcharge in this city's butcher shops. Still, we made her purchase everything anyway. With both mine and the princess's money, we could definitely spare some for this upcharged food. Though I imagine other districts have more fairly priced food, this could very well be a tourist upcharge for the convenient location.

We don’t need many other supplies but stop by a few other shops anyway. At one of the stores, Seraphina buys scissors. They were very different from the scissors in my world, but I still recognized it from afar by its shape. She also got a razor-looking object while there. I can imagine what will happen in the near future.

We follow the main street in the city all the way to the bridge. It’s extremely tall compared to any other bridge I’ve seen in this world. It’s probably 5-6 stories tall, it has support beams every 80 meters or so, and it is 50 meters wide.

Triangle-shaped supports come off the main support beams and connect to various parts of the deck. In some ways, it looks like it could have been designed in a more modern period of my old world. Yet, it also looks imprecise enough to have an ancient feeling.

The ramp to get to the top was steep enough to give our horses slight trouble, but they ended up getting to the top. It doesn’t help that the other two gave up on walking up the ramp halfway through and hopped on the horses. Honestly, I was considering doing that too.

The top of the bridge gave a view that left all of us staring in silence. The planes extended far in each direction, cut off by mountains in the distance, mountains we would soon enter ourselves.

In the other half of the city across the river, you could make out hundreds of buildings, all packed together. The apex of this was a massive palace on the top of a hill at the edge of the city. The home of this Assyricum’s king.

Once we have sufficiently enjoyed the view, we get back to walking. I decide to start up a conversation while we continue.

“Hey Seraphina, that’s Aric’s river isn’t it?”

“Yep, the longest river on the continent. It’s pretty cool to see right? Even though it technically reaches the Carthigus border in one spot, I didn’t get to see it very often as a child. Now, it’s my third time seeing it.”

“It really is amazing.”

Olivia and I crossed over a tributary of the river, but that was a relatively shallow portion. Seeing the main river like this is astonishing.

Once over the bridge, we find a small inn that’s relatively unpopulated and get two rooms for the night. I would have preferred to camp outside of the city, but it took longer to cross the bridge than I expected.

Another dinner in high spirits is what we ended the night with. We ate fresh fish from the river in my room and talked about all the interesting things we saw on the roads.

Once Olivia had returned the plates we each retired to our beds.

With my head on the pillow, the room completely dark, I found myself wondering whether I really deserved this. For someone like me to travel with nice companions, see beautiful sights, and travel to new places filled with opportunity.

Is it not an insult to those I’ve killed… and their families?

Perhaps it’s this thought lingering in the back of my mind that is causing this. Even in such good conditions… I still don’t feel happy.

Even if I’m told I should pursue happiness, even if I find a way to become happy, part of me doesn’t want it.