Chapter 15

They came in the fog.

At first, the mist was just strange, nothing more than an atmospheric oddity that made me uneasy without quite knowing why. It rolled in too thick, transforming the world into a watercolor painting where all the edges had been smudged. It arrived too sudden, as if someone had simply decided that visibility was no longer necessary and flipped a switch to make it so. And it was too quiet, the kind of silence that made you realize how much ambient noise you'd been unconsciously relying on for comfort. No insects chirping, no wind rustling through leaves, no distant conversations carrying on the night air. Just a suffocating blanket of white that seemed to swallow sound itself.Liora stirred beside me in the tower ruins where we'd been working through the night, her head lifting from the ancient texts she'd been studying. We'd taken shelter in what remained of the old watchtower, its broken walls offering at least some protection from the elements while we tried to decode the impossible glyph patterns. She rubbed her eyes and peered out through one of the gaps in the stonework, watching as the village below blurred into indistinct shadows, like a painting left in the rain.

The glyphlights that should have pierced through any natural fog began to dim one by one, their magical radiance struggling against something that was definitely not natural weather. Each light winked out in sequence, as if something was methodically extinguishing them. The wardstone in the village square hummed again, that wrong note we'd been trying to diagnose all day. But now it was worse, much worse, like the massive monument was choking on its own voice, trying to scream a warning but unable to form the words.

"I thought the array was stabilizing," she muttered, already reaching for her staff. Her voice carried a note of accusation, as if I'd personally betrayed her by not fixing the problem completely.

"So did I," I admitted, my own hand moving instinctively to the defensive sigils etched into my gloves. "This is something else. Something new."

Then came the screaming.

It started as a single voice, high and terrified, quickly joined by others until the night filled with a cacophony of human terror. We bolted down the crumbling stairway, taking the worn stone steps three at a time, our boots skidding on moss and accumulated debris. My heart hammered against my ribs as we descended, each cry from below spurring us to move faster despite the very real danger of falling in the darkness.

Below us, Avenridge had transformed from a quiet border village into absolute chaos. Villagers sprinted for cover, some carrying children, others supporting elderly relatives, all of them moving with the desperate energy of prey animals who've spotted a predator. Parents screamed names into the fog, trying to locate their families. Dogs barked frantically at shadows that shouldn't exist. One of the barrier glyphs at the village perimeter flickered wildly, its protective light strobing like a dying star as something slithered through the mist beyond it.

Something fast. Something deliberate. Something that moved with purpose rather than animal instinct.

I activated the sigil on my left glove without conscious thought, pure training taking over. The defense trigger flared to life, wrapping me in a shimmer of protective energy that would deflect at least the first few attacks. Beside me, Liora unslung her staff with practiced efficiency, the crystal at its tip already gathering power. She cast a light flare without waiting for my signal, knowing we needed visibility more than stealth.

The sky exploded in brilliant white light, banishing the fog for a precious few seconds and revealing the truth of what we faced.

Not monsters. Not demons. Not magical constructs.

People.

Hooded figures darted between buildings with military precision, their movements coordinated and purposeful. These weren't random raiders or desperate bandits. These were saboteurs, professionals wielding short-range glyph disruptors that crackled with hostile energy. I watched in horror as they dragged iron bars across the ward lines carved into the village streets, the metal screaming against stone as it severed the magical connections. Each broken line weakened the protective lattice that kept Avenridge safe from the wild magics beyond its borders.

As soon as the protective network showed gaps, other figures moved in with terrifying efficiency. They weren't destroying randomly; they were planting something specific at the base of the wardstone, working with the kind of speed that came from extensive practice.

"Get down!" I shouted, my voice barely cutting through the chaos. I grabbed Liora's arm and pulled her behind a overturned cart just as an explosive glyph burst through the fog with a sound like the world cracking in half. The blast was perfectly placed, perfectly timed. Half the wardstone shattered in an instant, ancient granite turned to deadly shrapnel that whistled through the air above our heads. The remaining glyphs blinked out like candles in a hurricane.

Magic died in Avenridge. I felt it go, a sudden absence that left me gasping like I'd been punched in the stomach. The village's protection, centuries of carefully maintained wards and barriers, was simply gone.

We sprang into motion before the dust had even settled. There was no time for shock, no time for planning. I launched a binding sigil toward the saboteur closest to the ruined monolith, the spell leaving my fingers in a stream of golden light. It caught his legs mid-stride, wrapping around them like luminous chains. He fell hard, his head hitting stone with a wet crunch that made my stomach turn. Blood pooled beneath him, black in the strange light.

Another attacker sprinted toward the cliffs, probably trying to escape into the wilderness beyond. But Liora was faster, her combat instincts honed by years of training. Her spell didn't attack directly; instead, it twisted gravity in a localized bubble, just enough to send him tumbling off course and directly into a bush of thorned vines that the villagers cultivated as a natural barrier. His screams as the thorns found gaps in his armor were terrible, but I couldn't afford sympathy. Not now.

The third attacker didn't run.

He just stood there in the middle of the chaos, watching me with an intensity that made my skin crawl. Not moving. Not fleeing. Not even defending himself as violence erupted around us. He simply observed, like a scientist watching an experiment reach its crucial phase.

Then he smiled.

It was a sharp, narrow expression that had nothing to do with joy or humor. Too knowing. Too familiar. Like he recognized something in me that I hadn't even realized was there.

I stepped toward him, slow and careful, my defensive sigils still shimmering. "You're not local. You're not even from the borderlands."

"I'm not yours," he said, and his dialect made my blood run cold. It didn't match any region I knew, yet something about the accent, the way he shaped certain vowels, was almost familiar. Too familiar. It tickled at the edges of my memory like a half-forgotten dream.

"Who sent you?" I demanded, though I was already beginning to suspect this went beyond simple orders.

He just chuckled, a sound devoid of actual mirth. "You still don't see it, do you? Still playing with your little glyphs, your borrowed magic, pretending you belong here. But you don't. You never did. And neither do we."

Before I could respond, before I could demand clarification for his cryptic words, he muttered something under his breath. The words were too quiet to catch, but I recognized the cadence of a trigger phrase. The glyph embedded in his chest, hidden beneath his cloak until that moment, lit up with violent purpose. A self-destruction rune, but unlike any I'd seen before. The geometry was all wrong, the power signature alien.

Liora shouted a warning, her reflexes faster than mine. She flung a shield toward us, the protective barrier snapping into place just as the explosion lit the night. The force of it still knocked us backward, sent us sprawling in the dirt as superheated air rushed over the shield's surface.When the light faded and the ringing in my ears subsided, ash and blood painted the ruins around us. Where the saboteur had stood, only a crater remained, its edges still glowing with residual heat.

We found the notebook in the debris an hour later.

The surviving villagers were still in shock, huddled in the town hall while we searched through what remained of the attackers' equipment. Most of it was standard saboteur gear: glyph disruptors, climbing equipment, explosive charges. But the notebook was different.

It was scorched around the edges where the explosion had kissed it, but somehow mostly intact, tucked inside the lead saboteur's cloak beneath a layer of waxed protection cloth. Someone had wanted this to survive. Someone had planned for it to be found.

Most pages were ruined, turned to carbon or fused together by heat. Some weren't.Liora stared at the strange symbols covering the surviving pages, her forehead creased with confusion. "What language is this? It's not Imperial, not Old Kingdom, not even the desert scripts."I took one look at the neat rows of characters, and my stomach dropped through the floor."Japanese," I whispered, the word feeling strange in my mouth after so many months.

Her brow furrowed deeper. "From where you're from? From your original world?"

I nodded slowly, my fingers trembling as I flipped through the pages. The handwriting was tight, methodical, almost clinical in its precision. Each character was formed with the careful attention of someone who had learned to write properly, formally. I recognized the style immediately. I didn't remember learning it, not exactly, but my muscles did. The pen strokes followed the same form we were taught in high school, the same patterns drilled into us during endless calligraphy lessons.This wasn't just a relic from my world. It wasn't some cosmic coincidence.

It was mine. Or it belonged to someone exactly like me. Someone who had made the same impossible journey between worlds.

Most of the content was formulaic, almost academic. Glyph variations annotated with emotional responses, like someone was cataloging how magic responded to different states of mind. Some lines read like direct transcriptions of dream logic, the kind of observations you might make while half-asleep. Others looked like unstable code, programming language mixed with magical theory in ways that shouldn't work but somehow did.

But one page stuck out, even amidst the madness. The writing here was different, more personal, more urgent:

"June 9th. Test 67. The lattice responds to thought-frequency if tuned correctly. Glyphs can remember, but memory isn't enough. They need consciousness, or at least the illusion of it. The boy from Shinjuku will figure it out eventually. He always does. He has to. That's why we brought him here."

My fingers clenched the page hard enough to crumple it. Shinjuku. They knew about Shinjuku. They knew where I was from, not just that I was from another world, but the specific district of Tokyo where I'd lived.

Liora read over my shoulder, her breath warm against my neck. "That's you. They're writing about you specifically."

I said nothing. I couldn't. My throat had closed up, my mind racing through implications each more terrifying than the last.

Then I saw it. A name scrawled on the inside cover in different handwriting: Aoyama Riku.But not in my handwriting. Someone else had written my name, my real name, the one I hadn't used since coming to this world.

This wasn't a diary. It was a dossier. A file on me, compiled by someone who knew far too much.We burned the bodies before dawn.

It was necessary, both for hygiene and respect. Avenridge's surviving villagers gathered around the still-smoking ruins of their wardstone, muttering prayers in a dozen dialects. They were in shock, most of them, unable to process how quickly their protected home had become vulnerable. A healer from a nearby settlement arrived late, drawn by Liora's light flare. She worked in efficient silence while Liora and I stood apart from the others, both of us lost in our own thoughts.Neither of us spoke for a long time.

Until she did.

"How many more times do we have to watch them die before we ask what's really hunting you?"The question hung between us like a blade.

I didn't answer right away because she was right, and we both knew it.

Because I was starting to suspect the same thing that she was.

The saboteurs weren't just destabilizing the kingdom for political gain or territorial advantage. They were circling me specifically. Drawing me out like hunters flushing prey. Testing me with broken glyphs and corrupted logic that only someone with my particular background could fully understand. And now they were using my own language, my own name, leaving breadcrumbs that only I would recognize.

They weren't just enemies of the state. They were familiar in ways that terrified me.Liora tucked the scorched notebook into her satchel with careful hands. "We need to find out who else knows your real name. Who else came from your world."

I looked past the village, out toward the horizon where glyphlight cracked faintly in the distance. Another border town, another thread in a fraying net of protection that seemed to be unraveling by design.

"Agreed," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "But first, we find out who wrote that book. And why they want me to know they're here."

She nodded, understanding that our mission had just become something far more personal and dangerous than investigating ward failures.

Then we started walking east, toward answers that I wasn't sure I wanted to find.