The sight of the slain bear shook even Dongwoo's steely nerves. It was a morbid sculpture of horror and brains accented by the lurid hue of scarlet and eerie shadows that ascended out of a not-to-be named oblivion. Its sculptor, the genius behind such a Cimmerian chef d'oeuvre was none other than one whose origin was of similar heresy: Myungsoo. Dongwoo's eyes were fixed to the macabre statue and his mind was a vague pool of darkness that failed to send rippling waves even when a wind blew against his face.

It was a tapping on his shoulder that caused the breakers of his watery mind to clash again: it was Myungsoo that delivered him from his seemingly perennial shock. His jaw was as though unhinged and incapable of ever being shut again. His glazed eyes finally met with Myungsoo's whose own eyes gleamed with a haunting beauty.

 "You are in the way. Move!" he declared as he brusquely pulled on Dongwoo's arm to remove him from his path.

Dongwoo, with his intelligence somewhat reclaimed, kept his vision affixed to the barbarian that was now face to face with the dead behemoth. Though its life was no longer a part of their world, the opened mouth of the bear that was littered with aged, yellowed fangs of gory inclinations inspired a living fear that moved and sought to claim Dongwoo's sanity. "Danger!" he cried out.

 A perplexed expression of brows bunched up together decorated Myungsoo's face. What danger was there to kill now? he wondered. He heard no ill whisper of demons, or footsteps of hidden tigers, or slithering of venomous cobras. Then as he traced Dongwoo's line of sight to the bear in front of him, he discovered the source of his scare. He smirked and for the first time laughed a gusty laugh. This idiot is afraid of the dead?

 "Watch!" His digits slowly coiled around the hilt of the golden broadsword in hypnotic movement. He preyed on Dongwoo's fear as he delicately began twisting and turning his sword until fwoosh! In a sudden and violent motion, the sword was liberated from the tree and bear it had impaled. A geyser of brain matter and blood spurted out alongside the freeing of the sword and the body of the bear slumped down besides Sungyeol who had fainted. It sat like a curdled mass of fat, thick fur, and sinews from which loosed a steady stream of scarlet.

Dongwoo gasped in alarm and Myungsoo relished in the sight of his limbs that shivered with a dark fright. With a cynical smirk, the beast slayer wrenched the bloody head off the bear with a deplorable ease; the wet and snapping sounds of splintering bones sounded like an eschatological ballad dedicated to evil. With a twisted sense of humor shuffling in his mind, he tossed it in Dongwoo's direction. The arc in which it was thrown created a fleeting rainbow of grisly crimson.

The jungle boy screamed in horror as the head landed between his legs, the high pitched shrill of his throat sounding like the shriek of a harpy.

Myungsoo laughed once more. With a devil's smile, he said, "It's dead, mind you. What worry ought you to have?"

 Dongwoo shook his head and reluctantly reached for the head to toss it into a nearby bush. His heart was in his throat and the rhythmic drumming of it drowned out all other voices. Myungsoo never moved his eyes off him, he was drawn to the scenario of mental deterioration that was unfurling before him. After several minutes passed, his patience was dried up. He slapped Dongwoo a total of three times until the light of his eyes finally returned.

 "It was a joke. Are you that weak to lose your mind over that? I've witnessed far greater atrocities."

 Dongwoo blinked time and time again and clapped his cheeks twice. Drawing in deep breaths, he was able to claim a decent semblance of civility. Still, he was like a newborn in his current state. 

Upon seeing him still helpless, only standing in place without moving, Myungsoo sighed and sheathed his sword. He shifted his attention to Sungyeol who had fainted with his body heaped up against the tree trunk. One of his legs had broken from his fall, half of his right tibia bone pointed outwards at an unnatural right angle. Most would cringe at the disturbing angle of Sungyeol's leg, but not Myungsoo. He kicked it a little in anticipation of the sleeper awakening from slumber. He failed to awaken.

With a lethargic shrug of his shoulders, Myungsoo decided to let him die there in his place. He had no reason to save him, no reason to care when he had refused to answer his queries. He found more amusement in letting him die than knowing his secrets.

The corpse of the bear was directly besides the sleeper so his eyes naturally floated to it. He traced over every one of Dongwoo's that branded the bear and was amused by his efforts. The bear would have most likely died had it not been this giant species. With his thumbs hooked onto the belt fastening his breeches, he took a step away from it but immediately whirled about again. Studying the behemoth's body for a second time, he decided it could still serve as a future meal.

 He flaunted his strength and nonchalantly carried the bear on his back as though he were giving a small child a piggyback ride. The giant shadow he created appeared to Dongwoo as though animated with black tendrils constantly flailing about. These imagined appendages lashed at him, but their strikes never landed, spurring him to take a more focused look at Myungsoo. He was alone, he noted. With steady breaths, his cognizance of the moment ebbed away at the gossamer tapestries of unreality.

He finally saw through the hazy illusion of the abysm. His first real words, his first real sign of renewed reason, came in the form of a simple quandary: "What about Sungyeol?"

 Myungsoo stopped dead in his tracks and without turning, answered, "He left you for dead. He waxed opportunistic and sought to flee whilst the bear made mince meat out of you, you know."

Dongwoo, his face awash with an ashen color and damp with perspiration, spoke with words that sounded like a cryptic riddle to Myungsoo. "I can't let him die."

 "I told you," he said with a raised tone, "that he left you for dead. Claim your vengeance and leave him as feed for whatever meat-eater might stalk these hectic woods."

 "No! I can't!"

 Myungsoo scoffed and his words were clear as they were blunt, "Do as you wish. But I won't help." 

.....

In front of a newly kindled fire, Myungsoo sat cross-legged with his hands tucked into his arms. His fiery eyes scrutinized each and every move of Dongwoo who was tending to the injured Sungyeol. It pestered him to see Dongwoo aid him. 

 As Dongwoo finished tying a splint around Sungyeol's fractured leg, Myungsoo finally muttered a word, "Why do you want to save a person who meant evil for you?"

 "My heart called me to do it. If he were to die when I could've saved him, would that not be the same as me killing him? I won't kill. I can't kill. I don't want to follow in the footsteps of devils. I want to follow in the footsteps of Nesher."

With an uplifted brow, Myungsoo asked, "And who are these devils?" 

Dongwoo opened his mouth to answer but stopped. He didn't have to look hard for an answer, it was already at the forefront. It was obvious to him. With a grave voice and clouds of gloom hovering above his tussled hair, he replied, "Those like my father's murderer."

Small voices belonging to those slain by the golden sword hissed in Myungsoo's mind, and for a moment, he gave audience to those accusing whispers. He breathed in a deep breath as he recounted the first rebel he was ordered to kill. Then all of a sudden, the thought stepped on his nerves and he casted it aside with a grunt as he had done many times past. 

Dongwoo observed the barbarous man in front of him as he cogitated and the hairs of his nape crawled as though he was staring at a fiend. He felt a chill run down his spine. The fire with its flickering glow produced shadows that seemed to obscure the humanity in his otherwise natural appearance. A gasp escaped him as he glanced at the headless bear that was an egregious trespass to the beauty of the woods. He quickly shifted his vision upwards, at Myungsoo who was smirking.

 "Bear meat is not so bad. Are you hungry, or am I getting ahead of myself?" 

 "Why did you do that?" Dongwoo stammered in reply.

 With a grim smile, Myungsoo answered, "You mean the joke? Well, the sooner you get used to such sights, the less of an impact it'll have on you. Besides, if I didn't do it, when would you have come to? You should thank me."

Although the night wasn't entirely chilly, an unnatural, almost supernatural coldness attacked Dongwoo. The perpetrator was Myungsoo. And for a while, Dongwoo wondered if this man was the correct one that Nesher had chosen. Besides the macabre prank, he had left Sungyeol for dead without remorse. There was no way he could pretend he didn't.

Then he remembered. He remembered what Nesher had told him, how the man he was called to meet would be one who dwelt in hell, and is such a one not a demon? Dongwoo hung his head low as doubts plagued his mind. Trying to find some good in him, he asked, "Why did you save me?"

Myungsoo grunted. Although clear reasoning might point to him saving Dongwoo for his own selfish reasons, that was not the case. A small fire of compassion had flickered in his wayward heart. Seeing Dongwoo helpless moved him with a strange kind of compassion, one that was oddly similar to something he might've felt toward Myungeun. However, he hated to recognize it. So he closed off his heart and growled, "I need you alive. I need you to take me to Laroo."

 "Only for that?"

 "Yes."

With a knot in his throat and his mind engulfed by an obfuscating haze, Dongwoo experienced the symptoms of a heartbreak. "I thought- I thought you were my friend."

 Myungsoo snarled, "No. I thought I made myself clear before. I just need you to take me there so I can claim what is mines."

 "And what is that?" Dongwoo said with disgust, his heart racing from anger. "What is there in my home that could possibly be yours? Is it the treasures you are after?"

 "Bah! What need have I of vain jewellery? I will claim all those other weapons that might be hidden there!"

 "Weapons? What weapons? Like mines?"

 "Hopefully better than those. You see, I need that technology to avenge my sis-" Myungsoo checked himself before he shared everything. 

Dongwoo shook his head, he was confused and was uncertain where to go next. "I don't know, Nesher," he mumbled.

 "Nesher! Who are you that you keep mentioning him? The Adamah have either forsaken him by force or by their own volition."

 "And which one are you?" 

 Myungsoo narrowed his eyes at him. "What? He forsook me!"

 "Nesher never forsakes his children, he only tries them."

"Tries them? And how do you know that? Just how much do you know, eh? His name only survives because of the babbling of stupid elders that dunk their heads in delusional pools of nostalgia, of times long gone. But you seem to know more?"

 "I read it in the sacred scriptures."

 "Scriptures?" Myungsoo shook his head in disbelief. As far as he knew, no Adamah had access to the scrolls of their faith. It seemed to him that Laroo was a weird realm untouched by Oscuridaon if Dongwoo was telling the truth.

 "My father died, my mother died, and I alone am left. Yet I have told you that I am his faithful servant. I believe in him and all his promises of good."

 "Promises? Good? Well, what of the evil king, Oscuridaon, that conquered this planet a century ago? What good is there in that? And of all the families he killed? The genocide of billions? The cries of infants? The weeping of mothers? That bastard is a cold killer!" Myungsoo felt his airway constrict at the last words, as in that moment he recognized that his sin was not unlike Oscuridaon's. They were both killers. But Myungsoo had a pretext, Myungeun, and that justified everything for him.

Dongwoo stammered again. "I... I am not sure." He forced his eyes shut and searched his mind for a reason, asking himself if there was a need for his own parents to die. The answers, the reasons, were all beyond his ken, found in lofty heavens, and he hated that his arm was too short to reach for the answers he desperately needed.

Opaque clouds of smoke ascending from the censers of impotence and despair plunged him to a realm of doubt. This dark space gnawed at his bones and on his marrow until a divine hand threw down the rope of escape. When all things pointed to a bleak vision of life, Nesher's words, the mission entrusted to him, resounded in his mind like the loud ringing of a giant bell. "I think that's why he called me to look for you."

 "He? Who's He? Nesher? You're saying you heard this deity speak to you?" While Myungsoo laughed off the notion, a part of him was interested in what Dongwoo would say next.

 "Don't laugh! I have no reason to lie. He told me I would meet you, that the both of us would have a role to play."

 "A role to play? What role is that?"

 "I don't know... He only told me what I just told you, that I would be a voice of comfort, and you his sword."

 Myungsoo laughed, "His sword? And what need has god of a devil like I? Why didn't he save your family?" In the spur of the moment, in a wave of anger that suddenly swept over him, he shouted with his nostrils flaring and the veins on his head pulsing, "Why didn't he save my sister?! Damn him! Damn that god!"

 Dongwoo's head immediately lifted up to face Myungsoo. He spotted the glimmer of welled up tears in his eyes. The brutal sincerity with which he spoke touched his own heart. And it was then that he questioned if Myungsoo was not as diabolical as he made him up to be. Perhaps he was just a person in hurt. Perhaps it was a litany of untold sufferings that had scourged his heart so many times that it caused thick calloused layers to form over where tender flesh once existed...

It stung Dongwoo to view this paroxysm of rage and dolor. It was the candid study of a barbarian's soul that he never considered he would take. 

 He renewed his trust in Nesher and decided to give him another opportunity at proving himself to be more than a devil.

 Glued to the sight of Myungsoo who was rubbing his face with brusque motions, he said, "I'll take you there, to Laroo. I think we have to go there."

 "And is it your god that has whispered this to you from a secret heaven?"

 "No, just a gut feeling."

 "Really, now?" Myungsoo scoffed.

 "Yes, but first we have to do something about him," he said as he cocked his head at Sungyeol.

Myungsoo rolled his eyes and sighed. With the way Dongwoo appeared to devote himself fully to Nesher's moral imperatives, he reasoned that he would object to take him to Laroo if he refused to help Sungyeol. "Fine! But no detours! As soon as we get him back to wherever the hell he lives, then that's it!"

 "I can't promise we won't make detours."

Ignoring the last bit, Myungsoo kicked the ground in Sungyeol's direction. "He fell asleep from the pain, right? Wake him up."

 Dongwoo gently tugged on Sungyeol's shoulder but his slumber was too deep. A glance at Myungsoo who had his hands on his hips, foot impatiently tapping on the ground, led him to shake Sungyeol with a timid force but he still wouldn't wake. After rolling his eyes, Myungsoo decided to wake him up himself with a couple of slaps. Dongwoo stared blankly at him and all Myungsoo did was smirk, "It worked, didn't it?"

 With eyes heavy from drowsiness, Sungyeol looked about his surroundings. When he looked up, he came eye to eye with Myungsoo who loomed over him like a dark omen. He was fully awake once his hand grasped the collar of his sleeveless shirt. He squirmed but could not escape his grip which clung like an eagle to its prey. His frantic stares searched for Dongwoo, knowing he was the only guarantor of survival. There he was, standing at a space away from Myungsoo and observing the two of them wrapped up in solid tension. His anxiety was mysteriously allayed as though touched by an angel and he felt safe.

Dongwoo reached out his hand for Sungyeol and his lips parted to pour forth speech but was abruptly cut off by Myungsoo who spoke first.

 "Where are you from? I know for certain you are no Adamah slave. No thrall or exiled person would carry around bow and arrow wantonly. Of which of the kingdoms are you?"

 Dongwoo shook his head. "What do you mean he is not an Adamah?"

 "You are too trusting! This mongrel, I am sure you failed to notice, but he swore to pagan gods foreign to the Adamah. He most likely worships the gods indigenous to his people..."

 Dongwoo aimed his eyes at Sungyeol who shrugged his shoulders. He tried to unfurl the digits that grasped his collar but was too weak to pry off even one finger. Myungsoo dropped him and asked for his purpose.

Sungyeol convulsed, cried from landing on his broken leg and grasped at it. When the pain became bearable he stared at Myungsoo, "Did you tend to my leg?"

 "No! Why would I?"

 By process of elimination, then, Sungyeol shifted his head to ask Dongwoo, "It was you?"

 A simple nod was Dongwoo's answer. Sungyeol searched his face and failed to recognize any ill intention behind the warm smile on the boy's face. "Why? I was going to run away while the bear attacked you and had my bones not shattered, I surely would've..."

 Dongwoo increased the breadth of his smile so that his cheekbones protruded like small hills on his tanned face. 

Before he could speak, Myungsoo cut in and inquired again, "Where are you from? From which of the kingdoms? This one right here wants to take you home. Diciar is closest but Threnoa is not far off either."

 "Hold on! The bear? Where is it? Who killed it?!" Sungyeol darted his eyes all over the camp site but failed to find the dead behemoth.

 "I killed it."

 He casted a dubious look at Myungsoo and chuckled. "You alone? You lie."

 Myungsoo grinned and stepped aside so that the bear corpse came into view, its terrifying presence magnified by the dancing glow of the fire.

 "Who are you?" Sungyeol questioned.

 "Enough of that! I asked first, so you ought to answer me."

 Sungyeol glanced at Dongwoo and apologized for deceiving him before revealing his identity. "I am a scout belonging to the kingdom of Diciar and I stalk the woods for any passing Sanritem from whom I may steal armor or other weapons."

 Myungsoo rubbed his chin, wondering why no accounts of Sanritem soldiers coming back armorless ever reached him. Then he shrugged his shoulders as he settled on a rather obvious answer: those who had their armor stolen most likely were too afraid to approach him.

 "Diciar is where?" Dongwoo asked with a curious look.

 Sungyeol's forehead wrinkles manifested as he looked at him in suspicion. "It's where it always has been, about a four day trek west of the woods." Pointing his finger at the golden cuirass strapped around Dongwoo, he continued, "But where did you get that armor from? I heard jungle and Laroo earlier, you don't mean the jungle of Vitah by any chance, do you? The jungle that lies at the hinterlands of the planet, behind the veil of death?"

 Myungsoo cut in, "No, you heard wrong. And besides, that realm- no one dares to pass through."

 "But, still some do... Or else, how would we know about such dangers the jungle hosts?"

 "Nonsense! Now stop your jabbering and get ready to leave, look!" Myungsoo cocked his head at the sky. The darkness of night was now fading, giving way to the ethereal colors of a new morning, hues of mystic blues and ghastly whites. "I hoped to smoke some bear meat, but I'd rather get moving now."