Alira pulled at the hood of her cloak, hiding within its warm shadow. She kept her ears down as flat as she could to disguise their silhouette. The attempt to keep their identities hidden came with the price of standing out and looking shady.

  { Between two noble children, you couldn’t buy a single scroll of Illusion Magic? }

  “Do the nobles on your side of the world sponsor their children to go cultist hunting for fun?” Alira mumbled. She was glad for the chaos and clatter of the street, drowning her talking to ‘herself’ among the sea of noises.

  { Well, if you have a record of successful hunts, yes. }

  Ah, yes, of course. Why am I even replying to him, honestly?

  The shadows on the ground were getting shorter as the sun climbed up, approaching to highest point in the sky above colorful heads. It was an hour or two away from noon. The air was heavy with all sorts of food as far as Alira’s nose, under the influence of her empty stomach, was concerned. Every few seconds, she would catch Lillian’s gaze drifting toward the stationed hawkers along the cobblestone road. Clearly, the girl had skipped her breakfast as well.

  Astrail was an isolated town with nothing to its name.

  The only thing it had going was the fact that it was the only town near the Academy, attracting aspiring students with rumors of the professors and even the Academy’s headmaster visiting it from time to time. Such rumors were as old as the Academy itself—the town had to find a way to promote itself somehow—but it had exploded in the past days when the headmaster, who was casually passing by, stopped before a bar to personally recruit a young man who emerged as its victor against a gang of loan-shark thugs.

  The young man in question was, of course, none other than Raine.

  Other than the appeal of being the second chosen one, Astrail had little to offer to its visitors. Alira had nothing to see on the way to the town, and beyond the town were mountains, rocks, and yet more of nothing. Trees were around, but scattered and few. It all pointed to a lack of culinary delights inside the town. There were options, still.

  Alira’s steps faltered in front of a stand that consisted of a small, portal brazier—a metal box on legs, its body heated slightly red—with a simple metal grate placed over it. The hawker, a stubby older man with a clean bald head, flipped the meat skewers over a low charcoal fire. The fire sizzled as fat dripped from the meat onto the hot charcoal, stirring up earthy smoke that blended with the greasy, savory perfume of perfectly grilled meat.

  “Puppers! Only 1 foen per skewer—you wouldn’t find anything as good as this at this price, young lady!” The hawker declared, knocking on his chest with his fist.

  Lillain scorned. “Don’t tell me you’re actually planning to eat that. Madam Trisa would be disappointed to hear about her student’s antics.”

  At Lillain’s disdain, Alira was suddenly even more eager about the foreign meat than she had been a moment before. Each bite-sized piece of skewered meat on the stick was a crisp red with a tinge of pink, resembling shrimps with their half-moon shapes.

  “What’s a pupper?” Alira asked.

  The shopkeeper laughed once in understanding. “Aha! Must be your first day ‘round here, I see. It’s a baby gerbil! Us Astrailars’ most favorite! That’s those little rodents from the dry land outside the town. Caught fresh, just this morning!”

  Alira knew what gerbils were without him explaining. Rodents. They were basically just smaller rats. She glanced around. There were similar hawker stalls as far as her eyes went. The one on the nearest left sold hard, dry bread that was quickly disappearing into the savaging hands of buyers. Another hawker yelled out ‘pea-soup hot!’ from the right as she served a long line of shuffling customers.

  The gerbil skewer stall only had Alira for its customer with Lillian standing further away to not get associated with it. Out of all of the other bustling options, she just had to stop before one that sold baby mice.

  { You have the same taste as one-eye. }

  Alira turned to walk away. She wasn’t expecting to have an experience that caused her to doubt her own humanity during a stroll.

  { One-eye is an old-man cat who has an excellent job at keeping my place rat-free. }

  I didn’t ask...

  “W-Wait! Young lady, try one out at least. How else would you know whether you’d like it or not? You’re my first customer of the day... How about I give you three for 2 Foen!” The shopper shouted after her, holding up three long skewers with five fat mice—let’s call it puppers instead, as the locals did.

  Alira hated how her mouth watered at a gush of the meaty scent oozing in her direction, but she wasn’t one to deny herself food so long as she had the money, and she did have the money. She turned one-eighty degrees, snatched the skewers out of the hawker’s hand, slammed a transparent diamond-shaped Lia crystal on his coal-stained palm, and bolted before Lillian could blink.

  “Young lady! Your change!” Alira left behind the hawker’s yells as she joined the moving crowd on the street once again.

  “You actually bought it,” Lillian said, catching up. “Did you feel bad for him or something?”

  Alira shrugged. “Not eating?”

  Lillian gave a firm shake of her head.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Why? Not hungry?”

  “Nothing here is decent enough for a meal—that is, of course, without needing to sacrifice my dignity as someone did. Good thing I can go a full day without eating.”

  Alira thought it was better not to prob at the noble girl’s eating habits. She stared at the skewers in her hand for a while before taking a determined chomp at them. Despite the fact that the food was far too exotic for her liking and she would rather not try it ever again, it actually tasted almost as good as it smelled.

  The meat was lean and tender with an initial punch of piquancy to it, turning into a nutty aftertaste. The taste was rather similar to duck meat. It was pretty good, save for the gum-like texture that made her hyperaware of what she was eating.

  “You’re actually eating it,” Lillian sighed. So, you really came from the streets, Alira added mentally on her behalf.

  She finished it up quickly to get rid of the evidence of her unusual meal. Until she could deal with the duke, she was still his daughter in name and had an image to keep. Lillian certainly wouldn’t go around throwing dirt on her anyway—regardless of them crossing eyes, Lillian was smart enough not to offend the duke, whom his father served for her little crush.

  At least, she believed so.

  “Alira,” Lillian called, her voice lacking the usual zest. She sounded less like a typical love-stricken female character in a romance novel. “What are you two planning to do with the Fellsworns?”

  Alira glanced sideways at her. “You’re asking that now?”

  Lillian huffed, turning her head away to instead look straight down the street ahead. “You two aren’t planning to tell me anyway,” she said, her voice lacking the usual high-pitched edge. “But this’s Astrail. My father’s. My family’s. At least let me know if you planned to burn everything down...like last time.”

  Bitterness rose at the back of Alira’s throat. She stopped herself from remembering too much, afraid the recently eaten meal might find its way back out. A wave of heat stroked down along her back—she couldn’t tell if it was a product of her imagination or whether she was getting too heated up under the cloak.

  The most effective method for dealing with bad memories was not to think about them at all. Open up that one old box, shove them all in, and throw them all away. Out of sight, out of mind. So she hadn’t been letting her thoughts stray there. Until now.

  “Don’t worry, we aren’t getting directly involved this time,” Alira replied. “I made Raine promise not to act either. We sneak in, check out their natural habitat, and once our dear Raine’s seen enough, we bail. Get our asses out of the sewer and go tip off the guards. Sound good?”

  “Don’t use that word.” Lillian practically barked. She was ready to scold Alira’s fluffy ears off when another part of the sentence hit her. “Wait. I must have misheard. Get our as—ourselves out of where?”

  Alira snickered. “Did you expect cultists to hold their meeting in the town square or something?”

  Lillian went quiet since she learnt where they’d be spending their early hours the next morning. Alira wouldn’t complain. More surprisingly, it was quiet from Xia’s side as well. That was a double win.

  Before her feet began to sore, the two finally stood before a red brick building that made itself known as the Mycorrhiza guild’s firm. She spotted a pair of crows—no, they were bigger and had glossier coats, so more likely ravens—on the building’s tilted red roof. How suiting. There were two Ravons heading to the guild as well, Raine and herself, the real daughter and the fake daughter.

  Looking downward, the stained glass windows of the structure depicted a young plant above ground with a spreading, twisting root network underneath, mingling with pale-colored patches of fungus. The guild aimed to grow and expand under Staywes’s ground for the sake of the living above. At least that was what Raine’s guild master friend had said.

  The flow of people around the building was relatively slow. Most commoners wouldn’t step into well-maintained places with freshly painted doors and roofs that lacked holes for decorations—unless it happened to be a church or cathedral.

  Alira took half a step before she caught a whiff of a strong smell that made her conjure up a mental image of a stream hidden in the heart of a forest. It was Raine. He was approaching her and would soon emerge from the door.

  Lillian nudged from behind, questioning why Alira had suddenly stopped. Alira ignored her to flatten her cloak and fix up her appearance. She got herself ready to put on her best surprised face. The plan was to make it seem like she could, in fact, see the future, only in fragments as ‘fiend’ had theorized. She saw a reason to go to the guild, but didn’t know what exactly to expect.

  And surprise! She reunited with Raine, who was off to do his secret mission.

  The dark-wood door swung open as a tall male stepped out—only he was a head taller than Raine. A genuine look of surprise splashed onto Alira’s face. The man with cotton candy pink hair and pastel blue eyes stared down at her. Everything about him was soft except for the expression he wore. One that was more than familiar to Alira—identical to the one on the first man, not counting Square-head, she’d met on this world, wore like a uniform down to the small creases.

  “Calix?!” Alira blurted out, successfully recalling the name despite its limited amount of appearance in the novel.

  The pink-haired man tilted his head slightly, resemblance a confused Great Pyrenees with his eyes cast low in thought. Then, he repositioned his head to ninety degrees, reverting back to the default setting. “It’s ‘Older brother Calix’ to you.”

  Duke Ravon’s firstborn son and heir to the duchy. Raine’s older half-brother.

  “That aside, we finally meet,” Calix said, leaving the building to stand in front of the front door. “Really, what took you so long? I’ve been waiting for a long time.”

  What? Had he been expecting her? Did the duke already know about her outing? If so, it seemed Maria wasn’t his only pair of eyes on her. Still, she would have never expected to meet Calix of all people here. How did he even know she would show up here? Alira knew very well that she had actually decided to come here on a whim.

  This wasn’t good at all—Raine wouldn’t be so happy seeing his half-brother when he came out. It also meant her good chance to strut for a prophet show would be missed.

  “Nice to meet you, Calix. Father said you were away on an important mission...” Alira said. The duke, in fact, didn’t say that, but Calix was supposed to be away at this time of the novel. “I won’t delay you any further.”

  The number of Calix’s appearances in the novel could be counted on one hand. The reason was that he was mostly indifferent and uncaring toward Raine. From a flashback after the magic class test tragedy that should have happened next week, it was revealed that Calix had been allegedly trailing the cultists since the week before. Allegedly.

  Wait... Don’t tell me. Is he also here for the cultist meetup? With the duke’s rumored dealings with the Mother Cult, there was a chance that he was attending it rather than crushing it.

  The cultist’s den in the town was found after the Academy turned it upside down after it lost an entire class of students, more importantly, a few noble children, including Lillian.

  “Older brother Calix,” he corrected. “His Grace has told me about you. More specifically, about your encounter with the Retrievers,” he continued, and that was all he said. But Alira wasn’t dense enough not to know he had caught on to her reason for being here. There was just something in his eyes that screamed ‘I know what you are’.

  Well, shit.

  Alira considered bluffing for half a second. Then she quickly gave up when she met Calix’s calm blue eyes that seemed to see something she couldn’t see in herself. Like father, like son.

  “We...I will explain to you and Father later,” Alira sighed. “Do you think you can let us off for now?”

  Calix’s face was a blank canvas. “What do you think?”

  Alira thought not.