Chapter 18

Duskhome shimmered under the weight of its own glyphs like a jewel carved from living light.

From a distance, the city looked as though veins of pure energy had been stitched through the mountain pass, the luminous lines pulsing faintly beneath architecture that seemed more grown than built. The structures rose from the stone like crystalline formations, their surfaces smooth as glass and twice as reflective. The city had once been a fortress during the brutal Northern Campaigns, a glyph-forged bulwark that had held against waves of enemy forces when conventional walls would have crumbled to dust. But time had been kinder than war, smoothing its jagged edges and softening its militant purpose. Now it thrived as both a trade city and a magical research hub, its streets filled with scholars and merchants instead of soldiers. It was supposed to be safe, a place where knowledge flourished under the protection of ancient wards.

But Riku didn't trust glyphs anymore. Not after what he'd seen beneath the capital. Not after learning how little any of them truly understood about the power they wielded so casually.

He and Liora crossed through the southern gate under an overcast sky that pressed down like a gray wool blanket. Both moved cloaked and silent, their faces hidden in shadow. Neither had said much since leaving the Royal Archives, the weight of stolen plans and forbidden knowledge settling between them like a third companion. The repurposed glyph networks, the whispers of something far older buried beneath their civilization's foundations, the growing certainty that they were racing against time itself. Everything felt fragile now, as if any wrong move might snap the world in half along fractures they were only beginning to understand.

"Don't expect a warm welcome," Liora murmured, her voice dry as autumn leaves. "Duskhome has always hated being tied to the capital. They consider themselves independent scholars, not subjects of the Crown."

Riku nodded absently, his attention already drawn to the subtle wrongness he could sense in the city's magical infrastructure. "I'm not here for their welcome."

They were here because of the pattern that had emerged from Liora's meticulous analysis. Sabotage clusters mapped across the kingdom like a constellation of malice, and Duskhome sat at the convergence point where all the lines of force intersected. If the saboteurs struck again, and Riku was certain they would, it would be here. Maybe within days. Maybe within hours.

They established their base of operations in a crumbling observatory tower on the city's eastern edge, a structure that had been abandoned when newer facilities were built closer to the academic quarter. Liora worked her particular brand of magic, weaving false credentials and forged documentation that would stand up to casual scrutiny. Meanwhile, Riku poured over the glyph grids that had been scrawled into every surface of the city's infrastructure like a second nervous system overlaying the first.

Something was fundamentally wrong with the design. Glyph channels that should have rerouted energy safely through redundant pathways were instead creating bottlenecks, pressure points where power would build and build until something gave way catastrophically. It wasn't accidental. The modifications were too precise, too deliberately placed to be anything but sabotage of the most sophisticated kind.

Someone wanted this place to break. Someone who understood the city's magical architecture better than the people who had built it.

For hours that stretched into days, he and Liora moved in careful synchronization. She scouted through civic records and municipal archives, her sharp mind cataloging inconsistencies and tracking the paper trail of recent modifications. He traced the layered glyph work that ran through the city like arteries, following each thread of power from its source to its destination. She had a mind for patterns almost as sharp as his own, and together they began to map the tension building beneath Duskhome's glittering surface.

But tension was growing between them as well, a friction that had nothing to do with their investigation and everything to do with choices made in fire and darkness.

"You skipped a checkpoint," she snapped late one night, throwing a folded glyph chart onto the desk hard enough to scatter their other papers. "We agreed to cross-reference all glyph variants, no matter how minor they seemed."

"I didn't skip it," Riku muttered, not bothering to look up from the diagram he was studying. The lines seemed to shift in the lamplight, revealing new connections with each passing moment. "It was irrelevant to our current analysis. The patterns diverge completely after junction 3B.""You didn't tell me that." Her voice carried an edge that made him finally raise his head."I didn't think I had to. The divergence was obvious once you traced the primary flow."

Liora's eyes narrowed, and he could see something dangerous building behind them. "You don't get to shut me out just because you think you're the only one who can see the complete puzzle."Riku exhaled sharply, setting down his pen with more force than necessary. "That's not what this is about."

"Then what is it about, Riku?" The words came out in a rush, as if she'd been holding them back for days and could no longer contain the pressure. "Ever since Riverhold, you've been different. Colder. Harder. You barely speak unless it's about the investigation. You don't even talk about what happened there, about the choices you made."

Silence filled the tower room, broken only by the distant hum of glyphs embedded in the city's walls.

"You let them die." Her voice was barely above a whisper now, but each word hit like a physical blow. "You chose to let them die."

Riku's hands slowly curled into fists. "I did what I had to do. If I hadn't made that choice, the capital itself would have fallen. Tens of thousands more would have died."

"I know the mathematics of it," she cut in, her own voice starting to crack under the strain. "I understand the logic, the cold calculation that says some lives are worth more than others. But this isn't just mathematics to me, Riku. Those were real people with real families, and you watched them burn."

Her voice broke entirely on that last word. The tower went completely silent, even the background hum of the glyphs seeming to fade into nothing. They stared at each other across a gulf that felt suddenly insurmountable, two people who had once moved as one mind now separated by choices that couldn't be unmade.

She left at dawn without ceremony.

No argument. No dramatic farewell. No final confrontation. Just her traveling cloak missing from its peg by the door, and a note folded once and left on the table where he couldn't miss it: "I hope you find your answers, Riku. But I won't follow you into fire for them. Not again."

He didn't blame her for leaving. Part of him was grateful she'd finally said what they'd both been thinking.

He almost wanted to thank her for making the choice he couldn't.

The explosion hit at dusk, painting the sky the color of fresh blood.

Riku had been deep in analysis, tracing an anomaly through the city's northern conduit line that pulsed erratically like a heartbeat under mortal strain. The pattern was wrong, fundamentally wrong, but he'd been so focused on understanding the technical aspects that he'd missed the larger picture. He should have seen it earlier, should have realized how deeply and completely the sabotage had spread through Duskhome's magical infrastructure.

But he hadn't. And people died because of his blindness.

When the explosion rippled through the north ward like a shockwave from some terrible god's fist, he was thrown off his feet by the force of it. The tower around him groaned and swayed, ancient stones grinding against each other in protest. Through the window, he watched flame and debris roar into the darkening sky like a pillar of destruction. People screamed in the streets below. Glyph channels throughout the city lit up in cascading failure, looking exactly like veins bursting under impossible pressure.

He ran toward the disaster instead of away from it.

Through smoke so thick it burned his lungs and made his eyes stream. Through streets littered with broken stone and twisted metal still hot from the blast. Through scenes of carnage that would haunt his dreams for years to come.

The epicenter had been a municipal energy hub, one of the primary nodes that distributed power throughout the northern quarter. Now it was nothing but molten rubble and the lingering taste of magic gone wrong. Rescue workers clawed through the debris with desperate efficiency, searching for any survivors who might have been trapped in the collapse. City guards shouted orders that no one seemed to hear over the ringing in their ears. Healers moved between the wounded like ghosts in bloodstained robes.

And in the chaos, Riku saw him.

A figure that moved wrong, too calm in the midst of catastrophe. Slender build, robed in fabric that looked like standard city-issue but cut with subtle differences that spoke of foreign tailoring. His glyph gloves weren't regulation equipment either. They were self-inscribed, amateur work that pulsed with barely contained volatile energy.

The saboteur.

Riku moved without conscious thought, muscle memory from another life taking over. His tackle sent them both crashing into a wall of scorched stone, and before the man could recover, Riku had him pinned with a grip that would leave bruises.

"You're not walking away from this," Riku hissed through clenched teeth. "Not after what you've done. Talk."

The saboteur coughed, wet and ragged, blood speckling his lips. Dust and worse things clung to his robes, but his eyes held an unnatural calm that was more unsettling than any panic would have been. He looked directly at Riku with an expression that seemed almost... familiar.

And then he spoke.

Not in Itherian, the common tongue of the kingdom. Not in any of the arcane dialects Riku had painstakingly studied since being summoned to this world. But in crisp, precise Japanese that cut through the chaos like a blade through silk.

Four quiet syllables, murmured like a benediction or a prayer:

"Omae wa omoidashita ne?"You've started to remember, haven't you?

Riku froze completely, every muscle in his body locking as if he'd been struck by lightning. The world seemed to tilt around him, all sound suddenly muffled by the thunderous pounding of his own heartbeat in his ears. He stared at the saboteur with growing horror, cataloging details he'd missed in his initial rage. That accent wasn't borrowed or learned from books. It was native, natural, carrying the particular cadence of someone who had grown up speaking the language in the streets of Tokyo.

"What did you just say?" Riku's voice cracked like breaking glass. "Say it again. Who are you?"But the saboteur only smiled, a crooked and exhausted expression that somehow managed to look both sad and triumphant at the same time. It was the smile of someone who had found what they were looking for, even if it meant their own destruction.

"You were meant to help us," he whispered in Japanese, each word carefully articulated despite the blood running from the corner of his mouth. "You were never supposed to side with them. You were supposed to remember."

And then his jaw clenched with sudden determination. His throat moved, swallowing something that had been hidden beneath his tongue. Riku's eyes widened in recognition and horror. Too late to stop what was already in motion.

A glyph flared to life inside the saboteur's mouth, searing through his flesh like molten wire. The light was wrong, alien, nothing like the gentle blue radiance of properly crafted magic. This was raw power turned inward, destructive and final.

"No!" Riku reached out instinctively, but there was nothing he could do.

Light exploded from the saboteur's chest in a nova of collapsing magic. The blast scorched the stonework around them and split the air with a sound like thunder breaking. Riku threw up his arms, shielding his face as waves of heat and pressure slammed into him with physical force. The world went white, then red, then black at the edges.

When his vision finally cleared and the ringing in his ears subsided enough to think, there was nothing left.

No body. No blood. No evidence that a human being had ever existed in that space. Only the blackened silhouette of a man's form scorched permanently into the earth, like a shadow burned into stone by atomic fire.

Riku stumbled backward, his legs unsteady and bile rising in his throat. What kind of glyph could do that? Suicide triggers were extraordinarily rare, banned across all royal disciplines and considered abominations by every magical tradition he'd studied. The power required, the precise control necessary to turn destructive magic inward like that... it spoke of training that went far beyond anything available in this world.

And yet someone had taught this man to burn himself completely out of existence rather than be captured.

Among the scattered debris, one item had somehow survived the blast. A leather satchel, scorched black at the edges with its metal clasp fused shut from the heat. Riku pried it open with fingers that refused to stop trembling, not sure what he expected to find inside.

The contents made his world shift on its axis once again.

Folded sheets of arcane design covered in symbols he was only beginning to recognize. Not just glyph maps but complete rewrites, circuit overlays that would fundamentally alter how magical energy flowed through the city's infrastructure. Modified sequences and recursive triggers that would turn Duskhome's own defenses against it. Most of the technical details were still foreign to him, written in a hybrid notation that blended magical theory with something else entirely.But not all of it was unfamiliar.

Tucked in the middle of the magical diagrams, incongruous as a flower growing through concrete, was something that belonged to another world entirely.

A spiral-bound notebook. The kind you could buy in any convenience store in Tokyo for a couple hundred yen. Cheap paper, mass-produced binding, utterly mundane.

Charcoal grey cover. Slightly warped from age and handling. A coffee stain on the top left corner that looked like it had been there for years.

Riku stared at it as if it had grown fangs and started speaking his name. His hands felt numb as he reached for it, afraid of what he might find inside.

The first page was covered in dense Japanese text, notes and bullet points written in careful columns. But the handwriting that formed those familiar characters made his breath catch in his throat.

It was his own.

Clear and unmistakable, every loop and angled stroke exactly as he remembered from countless hours spent filling notebooks in university lecture halls. He could even see the telltale smudge where he'd always dragged his pinky across fresh ink, a habit he'd never been able to break.The pages were filled with flow diagrams that weren't quite magical glyphs but weren't entirely technological either. They resembled the predictive systems and behavioral modeling algorithms he'd once designed in sterile Tokyo laboratories, but interwoven with arcane annotations that spoke of magical theory and mystical principles. Someone had been trying to build a bridge between two entirely different ways of understanding reality.

He flipped to a page near the back, where a line of writing curved along the inner margin in his own careful script:

"Systemic Failure: Notes for a Parallel Logic."

He didn't remember writing those words. But he knew with absolute certainty that he had, in another life, in another world, before everything had changed.

Not here in this realm of magic and ancient mysteries.

Back then. Before the summoning. Before he'd forgotten who he used to be.

His breath caught as the implications crashed over him like a cold wave.

This wasn't just sabotage targeting a random city.

This was personal. Someone knew exactly who he had been, and they were using that knowledge against him.