“And what… questions do you have… Leon Raime?”

Valeria’s voice wavered, a pained smile on her face with Leon’s boot pressing her back into the floor and her wounds continuing to bleed. She didn’t feel at all bad about this situation, though. This confrontation had been a long time coming, and there was no getting out of it now. Better to roll with it, and as she admitted to Leon that she knew who he was, she felt a huge weight come off her shoulders.

Leon, however, only felt worse. He’d thought that hearing confirmation would make him feel better, maybe find some relief to the stress that had been slowly building the longer Valeria stayed with him, but all it meant to him was that the chances of him killing one of Elise’s best friends—one of his best friends, too, if he were to be honest with himself—had just gone substantially up, despite his personal feelings.

He didn’t want to kill Valeria. She’d done nothing to harm him, their short exchange a moment ago notwithstanding. More than that, she’d helped him out on numerous occasions and he quite liked her quiet and stoic attitude as well as her devotion to training. Staring down at her now had his heart madly beating in his chest. Excitement, reluctance, terror, and a whole host of other emotions were warring in his mind, and it was all he could do to maintain his demeanor.

But, regardless of his personal feelings, it was time for questions to be answered, and if they weren’t… well, he didn’t know. He doubted he’d be able to do anything more to her than what Anzu had done now that he could see her bleeding on the floor.

“Who are you, really?” he asked, deciding to start simple.

“Valeria Isynos,” she answered without hesitation, her smile twitching on her face as Leon unconsciously dug the ball of his foot deeper into her shoulder.

“Your real name,” Leon demanded.

“That is my real name,” Valeria unhesitatingly replied.

Leon was tempted to call her a liar, but he managed to hold his tongue.

‘Calm down you stupid **, calm the ** down!’ he thought to himself, recognizing that his emotions were clouding his judgment. There was nothing to gain and so much to lose by taking the pain of his recent losses out on Valeria. Besides, he’d already gone far enough to have Elise furious with him at the very least if she were to ever hear about this.

“Valeria Isynos is my name,” she insisted, not breaking eye contact with him. “It’s been my name since the day I was born! I would never lie about that! Not to y—I just wouldn’t!”

“You once told me that your name meant that you were ‘from Isynia’,” Leon pressed.

“And it’s true!” she insisted, her eyes momentarily flickering in pain as she pressed her hand to the bleeding wounds Anzu had left on her abdomen. “The place I was born was in the Nexus! A city called Isynia! It just so happened that there were a few cities on this plane that had the same name, so my father said we were from one of those and kept our names the same!”

“Why would he do that?” Leon inquired, his tone beginning to soften as he started to get himself back under control. “Why are you even here?!”

“I-I… I don’t even know where to start,” she admitted.

Leon could tell that she was starting to weaken as pain and blood loss took its toll. As much as he was tempted to continue in this fashion, though, he couldn’t just watch her bleed out. He didn’t hate her, and he’d never wanted her dead. He took his boot off her shoulder, but just as she started to look up at him in surprise and worry, he reached into his soul realm and retrieved a few healing spells—even wounds as serious as hers looked could be easily fixed with enough healing magic, and Leon’s stash of healing spells was relatively deep. He retrieved enough to fix just about all of the damage done to her.

“I’m… sorry about my handling of this… These should be enough to heal you.”

“… Thank you,” she responded, quickly pressing the paper to her wounds. Anzu hadn’t held back when he retaliated against her for attacking Leon, and she hadn’t been armored. As a result, even for her, a newly-ascended fifth-tier mage, her wounds were terrible enough that her robust natural ability to heal wasn’t helping too much.

She definitely regretted attacking Leon like that. She didn’t want to betray him or her father and panicked at the suddenly hopeless and profoundly shocking situation. Still, accidental injuries inflicted on each other weren’t entirely new, since they’d spent a great deal of time sparring, though these wounds were by far the worst—probably because they’d been deliberately inflicted by Anzu rather than Leon. At least things were calming down, though, giving the two a chance to talk things out rather than speaking through steel.

The runes on the spell paper glowed bright white, quickly burning themselves out. However, her wounds scabbed over, preventing her from further bleeding and fixing any internal damage that Anzu might’ve inflicted. From what Leon could tell, though, the wounds Anzu had inflicted bled a lot and probably terribly hurt, but none of her internal organs had been injured. Once the only mildly life-threatening injury she had sustained—that being her bleeding—had been treated, Valeria pushed herself up into a sitting position leaning against her bed. She spared a glance for Anzu, who was still glowering at her like he was waiting for just one antagonistic move from her to tear out her throat.

Despite herself, Valeria couldn’t help but quickly avert her gaze in the face of such mistrust and hostility.

“Let’s start over, then,” Leon said, as he leaned against the door and recalled his sword into his soul realm. With Valeria disarmed, he didn’t think there was much need for it and having it out now that he didn’t think his life was in danger would send the wrong message. So, too, did he wave at Anzu, silently telling the griffin to calm down a bit, easing some of his hostility toward Valeria. “You came from the Nexus?”

“Yes,” Valeria confirmed.

“Why did you come here? As far as I know, this place is seen as something of a backwater to the people in the Nexus, so what was your purpose?”

“I can’t speak to how this place is perceived, I didn’t grow up in the Nexus,” Valeria admitted. “But the story I told you before about my mother being taken from us after my birth was true.”

Leon nodded, remembering her story. “You also told me that you were entrusted with a ‘truly vile’ task. What did that mean?” The last time he’d asked this question, he’d allowed her to get by without providing any explanations, but this time was different.

“We were sent here to kill the son of a prominent member of a Clan that is opposed to our Lord,” Valeria explained. “We were sent here to kill you.”

Leon nodded. It had always seemed obvious to him that his mother was the reason why these assassins were after him, but it was good to have some confirmation.

“Upon our arrival—years before we made that arrival public by requesting asylum from the Bull King—we searched high and low for you and discovered your identity and the family you belong to. My father and his retainers visited your grandfather looking for you. Archduke Kyros refused to cooperate, and a fight ensued, which my father won. During that fight, we discovered that your family was descended from the Thunderbird from the power they wielded, which made your family our enemy as well, forcing us to target your father as well.”

“Who is your Lord?” Leon asked, interrupting her.

“A man named Kamran,” she answered patiently, fully understanding that Leon wanted to know everything and that it might take a while for her to explain what she knew. “He’s a prominent Anax in the Nexus…” She noticed Leon’s confused expression. “… An Anax is a powerful Lord, someone who rules over a great amount of territory. Their rank is second only to the Elemental Kings. Do you know who those people are?”

Leon calmly nodded, but his heart smashed against his ribs, his instincts demanding that he take whatever revenge he was capable of, but his rationality knowing that there was nothing he could do right now other than attacking Valeria, and that wasn’t something that he was keen on doing. “What makes this ‘Kamran’ so powerful? What—”

“Sir Leon, I’m going to have to stop you right there,” Valeria said, eliciting a reproachful glare from Leon, who nonetheless paused. “I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but I do want to stress that I don’t know that much about the Nexus. I never lived there, and my father only ever gave me a cursory education in how it operates, politically speaking. He also took pains to separate me from his duties as Kamran’s vassal. As a result, I don’t know much about Kamran, not even what he looks like. I can’t help you very much in this regard.”

Leon kept his gaze locked on her, looking for any sign of deceit. When he saw none, he reluctantly set that topic aside for the time being. Besides, if Kamran was as powerful as she claimed, then Leon was confident that he’d be able to find other sources of information on the man in time.

“Then tell me more details about what you were assigned to do and why,” he demanded.

“As I said, killing not just you but your father, too, became our mission following the battle at Argent Palace,” Valeria continued, taking a more circuitous route in her story than Leon appreciated, though he let her tell her story. “However, we were completely unable to find either one of you, and with all of your family members dead, we had no leads. My father deemed it best that we present ourselves to the Bull King and seek employment in an attempt to gather more resources within the Kingdom to continue the search.”

“How old were you at the time?”

“I was about…” Valeria paused to think. “… Maybe five?”

“And your family was just accepted?”

“Yes,” Valeria replied. “My father is quite strong, stronger than just about anyone else in this Kingdom, I’d wager… Most Kings would jump at the chance to so easily recruit someone of my father’s relative power.”

Leon stifled a grin. He didn’t share that confidence in her father’s strength; he’d seen Justin’s fight with Naiad and how he’d run from it, but he wasn’t going to tell Valeria that.

“The Bull King, having lost his best friend and the strongest mage in the Kingdom when Archduke Kyros di—was killed by my father… was quite accepting of my father, though if the King knew that my father killed Kyros, I doubt that would’ve been the case. But thanks to my father’s power, he was assigned to govern Calabria, and there he remained for more than a decade expanding his influence and network of spies. It wasn’t until a few months before we joined the Knight Academy that we heard anything about you…”

“Adrianos Isynos,” Leon spat. Adrianos had been the man that had led the team of assassins to Leon’s home, leading them to kill his father.

“Yes,” Valeria quietly said. “He contacted us when Sir Roland returned to Teira and told us that he thought he found you two. My father sent him reinforcements, and that was the last we heard of them.”

“They’re dead,” Leon replied, taking some small satisfaction in seeing her momentary look of shock, then understanding.

“We thought so,” she said. “They wouldn’t have been gone for so long if they were still alive.”

Leon went quiet for a short time as he stared at Valeria. Some energy had returned to her after Leon’s healing spells fixed much of the damage that he and Anzu had caused, her natural healing abilities now rapidly going to work on what was left. He felt more than a little guilty about that, but as much as he wanted to apologize further, he couldn’t get too friendly with her right now, not when he still had questions he wanted to be answered.

“You’re telling me quite a bit, but you’ve been frustratingly vague about the ‘why’,” Leon quietly said.

“Your mother,” she matter-of-factly replied. “We heard reports that the daughter of one of Kamran’s enemies had been found here. She managed to escape from Lord Kamran’s strike team, but you were left behind. It was our duty to find you and kill you. That you’re descended from the Thunderbird made things even worse, since the Thunderbird Clan was another of Lord Kamran’s enemies. With that knowledge, we couldn’t leave you or your father be, no matter how much we wanted to. Lord Kamran would’ve used shadow magic upon us and discovered the truth if we ever returned, and then we would’ve been tortured to death along with my mother.”

Leon scowled. After his encounter with the vampire Bran during the war with Talfar, he hated darkness magic. That much he could understand, though. The rest of what she said didn’t make much sense to him, but he had so little context for all this that he managed to reserve judgment. Of course, he had so many questions that he barely knew how to continue. After a few moments of silence, though, he went with what was most personal to him rather than what was most practical.

“Who was she? Or ‘is’, maybe? I don’t even know if she’s still alive… Why was her Clan this ‘Kamran’s’ enemy? What was the Thunderbird Clan his enemy?”

“I… can’t answer that,” Valeria hesitantly replied. “My father hasn’t told me much about the conflicts back in the Nexus or the reasons behind those conflicts. All I know for sure is that your mother is an important part of a powerful clan descended from a Divine Beast and that her father is the Patriarch of one of the clan’s strongest families, making him essentially an Anax in all but name.”

‘I **ing knew it!’ Leon thought as his scowl grew deeper despite his herculean attempts to keep his face as neutral as possible. Much of what Valeria had just said was wrong according to what he’d been told by people he thought he could trust, but it felt so right and aligned so well with old suspicions that he couldn’t disregard this information. It actually infuriated him, since he’d specifically asked the Thunderbird if he’d inherited anything from his mother, and she’d told him that he didn’t.

He tried to keep it in perspective, keeping in mind that just because his mother was descended from a Divine Beast—or so Valeria claimed—that didn’t mean he inherited anything from her. But the Thunderbird hadn’t even mentioned this, and that had his excitement and anger mixing in uncomfortable ways, with a profound sense of betrayal eventually settling into his gut.

“And… because…” Leon sputtered, desperately trying to maintain a calm attitude, “because of that, this… ‘Kamran’ wants me dead? Just because I’m connected to his enemies?”

“Yes,” Valeria answered, her gaze unwaveringly fixed on Leon.

“Was there… any discussions of my coming in alive?” Leon asked. He had no intention of surrendering, but it did seem strange to him that the practical considerations for taking a hostage hadn’t seemed to have been considered.

“Not that I was aware of,” Valeria replied. “I’m not all-knowing, Leon. I’ll answer what I can, but all I’ve known is this place, this plane. My father has tried to keep me in the loop regarding some of the larger picture things, but he keeps me from many of the more dangerous and unsavory details.”

“What could possibly be considered unsavory when he was sent to murder a newborn?” Leon sarcastically wondered.

“I can’t say, all I know is that my father feels tremendous guilt, and he adamantly refused to allow me to take an active role in this mission. Now that I know the truth about you, I’m more than grateful for that.”

“So you’re saying that it would’ve been different if I were someone else? If you didn’t know or like your target?”

“Absolutely,” Valeria said, shamelessly smiling as she did. “I’ve never met my mother before, but I would do anything to keep her alive and well. I want to see her with every fiber of my being, and the only thing that will prevent me from doing so is if my actions cause harm to someone who means as much to me as she does.”

Leon’s expression quickly reverted to his scowl as she reminded him of her crush. That was a line of questioning he didn’t want to go down, for he already didn’t want to kill her and regretted causing her pain, and if they got into a discussion about her feelings for him, he didn’t think he’d be capable of it even if he had to.

Instead, he averted his gaze for a moment and asked, “What about your father? Tell me about him, how strong is he for real and what kind of subordinates does he have? If he’s set on being my enemy, what should I expect if or when he puts everything together and comes for me?”

“My father is an eighth-tier mage,” Valeria replied. She’d been quite unhesitatingly candid this entire time, but Leon was still surprised at how easily she provided that information, especially given how he’d so aggressively started this conversation. “As far as Nexus mages go, it’s a respectable power level, but one that only led to him having a scant few subordinates. To make an analog to the Bull Kingdom, he’d be at about the level of a hereditary knight with a small retinue.

“To put it even more plainly, my father wasn’t anyone of importance, so even if he never came back Lord Kamran wouldn’t care.”

“Give me more specific numbers.”

“I don’t know the extent of his infiltration of this Kingdom, but I do know that he had four seventh-tier mages with him when he arrived, but two have died so far.”

Leon nodded, not needing any more explanation on that front—he already knew of those two deaths—even as he contemplated how hopeless it would be to fight Justin at this stage. He’d need much more power than he currently had to confront Justin, and it was both terrifying and reassuring to know how much further he’d have to go before feeling safe enough to do so. Even if he still had Naiad on his side it wouldn’t guarantee him victory right now.

“Do you know—” Leon began, but as he began his question, he heard a commotion out in the hallway. He quickly projected his magic senses and saw Gaius standing outside of his door down the hall and several other young knights hammering on the other doors of the occupied rooms, including one just outside Valeria’s door.

“Sir Leon!” Gaius called out, his voice muffled through Valeria’s door, “Sir Roland has arrived! Your presence is required up top!”

Leon didn’t respond. Instead, he glared at Valeria as if daring her to make a move. But she just sat there on the floor, her back leaning against her bed, an amused smile on her pale face as Leon wrestled with this interruption.

Then, she sat forward, looked him dead in the eye, and said without a shred of duplicity, “I will not harm you, Leon. I know that trusting me right now would be one of the hardest things to do, but I assure you, if you take a chance with me, you won’t regret it.”

She kept it simple despite having so much more she could say. She didn’t want to talk and talk until Leon gave in, she wanted him to either choose to trust her or just get it over with and kill her. However, she greatly hoped Leon would choose the former. Her heart beat in her chest faster than Leon’s did in his, and for all the calm serenity that her facial expression exuded, her subtle shivering and chaotic aura were enough to tell volumes about how terrified she was.

Leon stared at her for a long time, even as the knocking on her door intensified and the knight outside started calling her name; even as Alix, Marcus, and Alcander all exited their rooms and got ready to head topside.

Unfortunately, Leon’s ability to kill Valeria without being asked awkward questions—already quite dubious even before Gaius’ summons—had been essentially taken away, and he forced himself to accept that. But even if it hadn’t, Leon didn’t think he’d have even been able to follow through on that possibility, not at this stage. Maybe if they were still at the Knight Academy and he didn’t know her that well, but it had been years since then, and they’d fought alongside each other multiple times since.

No, he couldn’t kill her, and he already deeply regretted the harm he’d already brought to her. But that still left the issue about whether or not to trust her, and it was a decision that couldn’t be put off; Gaius and his knights were just outside the door, impatiently demanding his attention.

He had to make a choice—was he willing to place his trust in her again? Was she willing to trust him after this debacle?

“I… will choose to trust you for a while,” he growled, Anzu making a few hostile clicks with his beak at the same time. “And… I’m sorry for before… for how Anzu and I hurt you, I’ll make sure he doesn’t go so overboard again. I should’ve handled this better, but it was almost a spur of the moment decision and I didn’t know what to do once I came in here. Ancestors know I’ve had the time to think of a better way to approach this.”

“That burden of confrontation didn’t lie solely with you, I sat on my information for too long, too, and I did attack you… I can’t honestly blame you or Anzu given everything that’s happened these past few years, though I might not be so forgiving if it happens again,” Valeria said with a look of deadly intent, which quickly faded into a radiant smile, her conscience no longer burdened by a deadly and dangerous secret. “I can promise you this, though: I’m not your enemy. You won’t regret putting your trust in me, just as I hope I won’t regret putting my trust in you!”

“I hope I won’t,” Leon said as he took a few steps forward and held out his hand, wishing he could’ve had the same confidence in her not to stab him in the back that she had in him not to do the same despite everything that had just happened. She was far more idealistic than he was, despite their similar demeanors, but if anything, that made him like her more despite the history between their families. They’d both made mistakes—though Leon felt his were much worse—and it seemed they were both willing to forgive and forget this time. Valeria gently took his hand and he pulled her to her feet. “This conversation isn’t even close to being over. At the very least, though, I suppose I can work on how to approach these things in the future.”

Valeria snickered and said with an amused smile, “That would be to both our benefit. I look forward to our next chance to sit down and resolve these issues to the best of our abilities.”

Now, with their cards revealed, some blood shed, and a tenuous peace struck, they began preparing to face the knights outside.