Chapter 1288: Intertwined Fate
“Well, Mr. Roland — you’ll be responsible for the third defensive line.”
“Leave it to me.”
He said his farewell to Rock and walked out of the Defender’s office, exhaling slowly in the corridor.
It had not gone as he’d hoped. The Prism City’s network had failed to locate any Fallen Evils, and his own inquiries had produced nothing. The Defender’s response was pragmatic: if the Fallen Evils couldn’t be found, they would have to be drawn out. The Martialist Contest would serve as the trap.
The plan was careful, almost elegant in its layers. The first defensive line: government soldiers and disguised Association members stationed in the audience, charged with identifying and eliminating isolated Fallen Evils. The second: celebrity martialists, both onstage and off, covering the full perimeter. The third: licensed hunters like Roland, monitoring the hall and the competing martialists for signs of manipulation — because some Fallen Evils could compromise a martialist from within, turning them into a weapon without their knowledge. The fourth and final line: the Defenders themselves.
The structure made sense. The competition would continue to its natural conclusion while the real work ran beneath it, invisible. Every participant had been briefed privately; none showed anything but steady agreement. This was a critical moment, and everyone understood it.
Roland’s position was the third line — monitoring suspicious individuals in the hall, including the competitors themselves.
He was not satisfied, but he had no better idea.
The Association understood the Fallen Evils in ways he didn’t. The Fallen Evils were not simply predators targeting the Force of Nature for sustenance; they were governed by the Divine Will, pointed toward the destruction of the Dream World and the return of magic power to the Realm of Mind. A gathering of this many Awakened martialists, each carrying a concentration of Forces of Nature, was not something they would pass up. They would come.
Roland turned the corner into the corridor and nearly walked into someone.
Fei Yuhan.
His pulse made an involuntary adjustment. Of all the people in this building —
“Oh,” she said, looking up at him. “It’s you.”
They were the only two people in the corridor. Roland cleared his throat and produced what he hoped was a natural expression. “Hello.”
She studied him for a moment, and he had the feeling, as he always did with her, of being read by an instrument calibrated for finer gradations than his face was designed for.
“I owe you a thank-you,” she said, and extended her hand with the casual directness she brought to everything. “For the last joint mission — for killing that creature and getting all of us out. Thank you.”
“Er —” He shook her hand. “You’re welcome.”
Her expression shifted, almost imperceptibly. “The Association gave me the credit.”
“That’s — completely fine.” He waved it away. “I have reasons to keep a low profile. I’d rather not be noticed. Truly.”
“Alright,” Fei Yuhan said, and simply let the subject close. No probing. No skepticism in her voice that he could detect.
Roland turned this over quickly. She remembered the joint mission clearly enough to thank him for it, which meant she likely remembered everything up to the moment she’d lost consciousness. She would remember Ring’s voice. The fact that she was not pressing on it suggested she had chosen, quite deliberately, not to press.
This was not what he knew of her reputation. Fei Yuhan was described, in every account he’d encountered, as exacting, proud, penetrating — the kind of talent that asked hard questions until she had the answer she needed. The woman in front of him was composed and easy, volunteering nothing, demanding nothing. It didn’t fit.
Fei Yuhan appeared to remember something. “By the way — do you think someone who likes history would also enjoy science?”
Caution moved through him, slow and specific, before he could stop it. “Why do you ask?”
“That patient from the Cargarde Peninsula — Valkries.” She said it conversationally, as though sharing a small curiosity. “She’s on my team now, and she seemed like she might be bored in the sanatorium. But she reads constantly. In the past month she’s gotten through almost every history book in the library.”
Roland felt something sharpen along the back of his neck.
All of them?
“War history especially,” Fei Yuhan added. “Interesting hobby.”
The word coincidence surfaced and then dissolved. Valkries — the woman from the memory fragment who carried the shape and the presence of a Senior Demon, now sitting in a sanatorium library and reading human history from beginning to end, systematically, chronologically.
He reoriented mid-sentence.
“Yes,” he said, “I’d think she’s ready for social science and the humanities at this point. Sorry — the Defender gave me something urgent. I should go.”
He moved toward the stairs before she could respond.
Fei Yuhan said nothing. She nodded once. “Me too. See you, Mr. Roland.”
“See you.”
He went downstairs at a pace that was faster than walking without quite being running.
Behind him, at the corridor’s turning, Fei Yuhan stopped.
She listened to his footsteps recede.
This meeting had not been accidental. She had positioned herself. The thank-you was genuine, but it was also an instrument — and the test she had embedded in the conversation had produced results she had not fully predicted.
Roland was the most opaque person she had ever worked to read. Not because he performed opacity — if anything, he was almost embarrassingly transparent about ordinary things: he checked his phone too often, watched attractive strangers, had a preference for coke that she had noticed at three separate gatherings. He behaved like a man who had lived here his whole life. Had she not heard “Your Majesty” in that hospital room, she might never have doubted him.
That was what had made her question her own theory. If Roland and Valkries were from the same world, why did they behave so differently? Valkries was still orienting herself, still acquiring the basic knowledge of how this world worked. Roland moved through it like water through a familiar channel.
She had designed this test around that discrepancy.
What she had expected: that Roland, on hearing Valkries was reading history, would cover for her — smooth over the strangeness, offer a plausible explanation, protect whatever they were both concealing.
What actually happened: Roland heard the detail about war history and went somewhere very still inside himself, the way a careful person goes still when they realize the shape of a problem they hadn’t accounted for. The muscles at the corner of his eye tightened fractionally. He redirected the conversation and left at speed.
He was not covering for Valkries.
He was alarmed by her.
This was new information. The two of them were not partners or allies acting in coordination. They were something more complicated. Roland had not known where Valkries was, or what she was doing — and now that he did, he was frightened in a way that the joint mission, where an actual magic creature had killed people, had not quite frightened him.
Fei Yuhan decided to keep watching.
She knocked on the Defender’s door and went in.
Roland crossed the lobby and took the stairs to his floor three at a time.
In his apartment, he went directly to the back room.
“Phyllis. Dawnen.”
They were there almost before he called.
“I need you to watch a demon. She may have come through the memory fragment from this building. Don’t approach. Don’t engage — there are too many Awakened martialists at the sanatorium and any incident will draw attention. Just watch her, and call me every few hours.” He paused. “She’s in a sanatorium called Greenleaf. The patient’s name is Valkries.”
The two witches exchanged a look.
“Your Majesty — what if you are in danger while we are away?”
“This isn’t the real world.” Roland kept his voice even. “The Fallen Evils can’t harm me unless I seek them out. Stay safe. Go now.”
“As you command.”
They placed their hands on their chests in the old gesture, and then they were moving.
Roland stood alone in the room and thought about Valkries, reading war history in a sanatorium library — reading forward from the beginning, cover to cover, building a picture of a world she had arrived in without knowing it — and felt the particular cold that came not from immediate danger but from the slow recognition of something already in motion, already further along than he had calculated.