In the morning, as Anna and William opened their eyes, their noses were being greeted by a delicious aroma of food wafting through the air. The aroma awoke their hungry little stomachs, guiding their small legs to bring them to the source of it, which was right outside the house, where Yuu was stirring the inside of a medium-sized pot above an open fire. He was making chicken rice porridge for breakfast.

Yuu noticed their presence the moment he heard their rumbling stomachs coming near.

“Good. You kids are awake. Here, take it.” Yuu approached the children, pulled out a couple of clean children's clothes from his dimensional storage, and gave it to them each. He noticed last night that their clothes had been too ragged to wear.

“What’s this?” Anna asked, her eyes full of suspicion.

“Clean clothes, duh. Go wash up before we eat.”

“Can we eat first, Mister?” William asked, his mouth watering. The aroma of the food, combined with the extreme hunger from vomiting last night, entranced him.

“No, you stupid Will.” Anna slapped William’s back, bringing the boy back to his senses. “Can’t you see that he’s the old man who made us faint last night?”

“Ow! Yeah… You’re right!” William said, pointing at Yuu as realization struck. “He doesn’t look all that threatening to me now, though.”

“Hey, Will, don’t you have any sense of danger at all! I’ve already told you that you can’t trust strangers easily. He might be looking harmless right now, but he could’ve put poison in our food. Do you understand?”

Looking at the two of them, bickering full of life, brought a smile to Yuu’s face.

“And, you, Mister!” Anna shifted her attention to Yuu. “Why are you smiling alone like a creep! What are you going to do to us! Do you maybe want to kill us or—!”

“Look.” Yuu sighed and made his way back to the open fire, where the porridge was cooking. “If I wanted to kill you, I could’ve done it while you were asleep. Also, this is not poisoned.” He took a spoonful of the simmering porridge with the wooden ladle he had been using to stir it and ate it. “See?”

Anna didn’t argue back, because despite her resistance, she could feel the hunger in her own stomach.

“Go wash up, and don’t forget to change your clothes. The well is at the back of the house.”

“Come on, Anna. Let’s go,” William said, trying to make Anna go along with him by pulling her hand.

However, Anna didn’t budge from her place, and looked down on her body. “What’s the point? My body are going to get dirty again, anyway.”

“Yeah, true.” Yuu placed the wooden ladle back into the pot. “Also, what’s the point of eating if you’re going to get hungry again, right? Go.”

After hearing the reply from Yuu and couldn’t argue with the logic, Anna followed William in silence.

“Don’t try to run. I’ll know,” Yuu candidly warned them, stirring the porridge once again.

Hearing the warning, Anna turned her head, and mockingly stuck out her tongue at Yuu.

Yuu saw it, and just shook his head.

What a pesky kid…

***

“How is it? Good, right? It’s my signature recipe, perfected after years of attending late-night company drinking parties and waking up with heavy hangovers: the ultimate hangover chicken porridge. Turns out, it’s also good for your stomach. Would you like some more?”

It took Anna and William half an hour to get washed up, but less than a minute to devour a bowl of the ultimate hangover chicken porridge. When offered for a second helping, they only stared at their empty bowls, seemingly worrying about something.

“Don’t worry, I get it.” Yuu refilled the children’s bowls despite not being asked. “You kids must be thinking about your friends at the orphanage. You must be feeling guilty, too, since you came here to steal food but are getting fed instead.”

“H-How did you know, Mister?” William asked, looking baffled.

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“I’ve been in your position before.”

“You lost your parents too, Mis—ow!”

Anna pinched Will’s thigh under the table. “Stupid Will. You can’t just ask him that.”

“You can’t just pinch me either!” William said, rubbing his sore thigh with his hand. “Look at Mister, he’s okay with it.”

“Yeah, I don’t mind. We all know how it feels to have no parents, right?” Yuu let out an awkward laugh. He wasn’t exactly honest with them. He had parents back on Earth; they were just too busy with work to take care of him and his little siblings, making him learn how to be a parent for himself and his siblings from the earliest years of his life. He also couldn’t just tell them that he was eavesdropping on their conversation last night. “Just… eat.”

Yuu stopped talking, and Anna and William turned their focus back to eating.

In no time, the children made their way through their second helpings and burped in satisfaction after the third.

Meanwhile, Yuu had been tidying up the dishes, putting them into dimensional storage. and putting out the fire to leave as few traces as possible.

“You guys had your fill, yet? We need to go,” Yuu said after the cleaning up was done.

“Where are we going?” William said, sounding a bit willy-nilly.

Anna, on the other hand, remembered the first reason why she and William had to come to the empty town, and said, "Wait, we still haven’t found food for our—"

“Already took care of it. Look.”

Yuu opened his dimensional storage to pull out three dining tables and filled the tops of them with fresh farm produce. Early in the morning, before he started cooking, Yuu took the time to go around the town and looted any valuables he could find, including, but not limited to: a small storehouse’s worth of farm produce, caskets of money, dried medicinal herbs from the local clinic, dozens of wooden furniture pieces, countless clothes, various adventuring toolsets, and whatever metals and tools he could find in the local blacksmith’s shop. He also hunted all domesticated livestocks nearby and put them in his dimensional storage.

Looking at the farm produce up close, William opened his own dimensional storage and began putting the items inside. He stopped when about half of the produce on top of the tables had been stored. “My storage is full. Let’s use yours, Anna!”

Ahh… no wonder they didn’t get amazed or even wondered when I used my dimensional storage. They already had their own. Dimensional storage must be a quite common skill in this world.

Anna, who was hesitating looking at the produce, asked Yuu, “Mister, why are you doing this? Why are you feeding us, and helping us…”

Yuu, gently putting his hands on top of Anna’s and William’s heads at the same time, said, “You’re kids, that’s why.” He rustled their blonde hair for a moment before letting go. “Also, a couple of hours ago, I heard that an army was marching in this direction. I assume it’s the soldiers sent by the town you kids are coming from, right?”

Hearing the explanations, William went into thinking mode, and realized: “I see now! You were eavesdropping on us last night, didn’t you, Mister… Mister, what’s your name?”

“Yuu.”

Confused, William pointed at himself. “Me?”

“No. It’s Yuu.”

Even more confused, William pointed to Anna. “Anna?”

“The name. My name is Yuu. Hoshino Yuu.”

Chuckling, Anna said, “What a weird name.”

“Okay, Kid, just shut up and put the damn groceries into your storage, will you? We don’t have that much time before those soldiers come near us.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Anna begrudgingly said while putting the rest of the farm produce into her dimensional storage. “There. Done. Yuu happy?”

“Let’s go.”

Yuu stored the tables away before promptly leaving the town with Anna and William.

***

It had been a couple of hours since the trio left the emptied frontier-town. They took an unbeaten path just beside the main path to avoid directly encountering the occasional waves of heavy armored cavalry or soldiers that came from the opposite direction. Guided by Anna and William, they crossed a river, scaled a mountain, and traversed vast grassy plains before arriving at the Great Border Wall.

“Here we are, Mister. The Great Border Wall,” Anna said, welcoming Yuu to the spectacle.

From far away, the Great Border Wall appeared to stretch across the horizon, connecting two heavily mountainous areas by cutting across a vast grassy plain in the middle.

From up close, its stone wall seemed to soar into the sky, easily tripling the height of any demons that Yuu had encountered so far.

“I suppose we part ways here,” said Yuu to Anna and William.

On the way, the two children said they had to go separate ways from Yuu once they arrived at the Great Border Wall. Apparently, they had sneaked across the border using a path that only they knew about, and that for safety reasons, they couldn’t take Yuu with them, even if they wanted to.

When asked, Anna said, “The path is too small for adults to get in. Yuu could get stuck.” But Yuu didn’t buy it. The reason why he didn’t push the questions any further was that he was confident he could get across the border using his own means, and the children seemed to be veterans of sneaking across the border, judging by how expertly they had guided him up to this point.

“Yeah,” Anna said while taking a deep breath. “Yuu, remember where we told yuu our orphanage is, right?”

“Don’t forget to visit, okay, Mister!” William added before taking Anna's hand and walking away from Yuu.

“Yeah, of course. Just go. Shoo-shoo—!”

Getting jerked around by Yuu, Anna turned her head, and mockingly stuck out her tongue at him.

Yuu saw it, and just shook his head.

Yeah… they’d be alright. Now, let’s figure out a way to get across the border…

***

[ Starting Quest: Get Across The Great Border Wall! ]