Like he had earlier, Hirrus closed his eyes. He turned his head back slowly, absorbing every sound he could.

Someone was here.

This courtyard held a threat hiding just beyond his capacity to perceive.

The man Hirrus had just fought had been filled with conviction - however misplaced it may have been. Hirrus couldn’t jump to the conclusion that any other of his fellows who were freed of their decision tree would be the same, but he couldn’t help but believe that anyone who would watch that fight unfold without stepping up to participate could only have been an adventurer.

Frustration bubbled in Hirrus' throat, manifesting as a low growl. He couldn’t make out anything over the sound of Alric’s rough breathing and hammering heartbeat. Even just the shuffling of the man’s armor drowned out whatever sound a potential observer was making.

“You better hope whoever is watching us isn’t this Rumi person,” Hirrus snapped, whirling on Alric. “Because if he slips through my fingers…”

“What?” Alric said, obviously struggling to stifle a chuckle. “Are you gonna kill me?”

Hirrus was about to say “maybe” but bit the word back. Alric had proven himself a friend, and honorable besides, but it was unfair to expect him to behave in any way other than like an adventurer.

Instead of responding, he moved to what Alric had called the “crater con carne” - whatever that meant - to investigate closer.

The man had been all but obliterated, but that wasn’t what Hirrus was looking for. He looked instead at the ashen ground, finding the displaced debris from the dead man’s steps during the fight. It took a moment for his guard training to kick in, allowing him to turn the stomped marks in the ash into tracks in his mind’s eye. It was easy to trace the starting point, having been physically present for the fight where these most recent marks were made, and it only became slightly more difficult to track him chasing Alric around the courtyard. He held up one hand to frame the tracks as they went, making it easier to separate the tracks of the man from those of Hirrus and Alric when they overlapped.

There was a little splash of drying blood in the ash on the ground in one spot, and then the tracks widened out. Hirrus could easily deduce that this was where the man had charged and struck Alric.

“This way,” Hirrus said, following the tracks.

“Can you not hold your hands up when you do that?” Alric asked. “You’re giving me a Sherlock vibe, and if I see a moodboard with my face in between a police box and a Chevy Impala, I am going to scream.”

Hirrus didn’t know what any of that meant, but now that the trail was headed towards a part of the town they hadn’t ventured - much less had a fight in - his hand blocking out the distractions of the other marks on the ground was no longer necessary.

About a dozen feet from the far end of the courtyard, he pulled up short. There were more tracks here. An unknown third party. The tracks ran perpendicular to the obvious passage of the man they’d encountered, so Hirrus ignored them for now. He couldn’t easily tell if the tracks were old, or if this was someone else sneaking through these ruins who had avoided the assailant. If the trail didn’t reveal anything else, he would double back, but he wanted to exhaust the trail he had first.

The assailant had taken a surprisingly direct route. He could see that the footprints in the ash led him straight to the south edge of town, even when they stomped through the debris of a building. At the south edge of town, a few of the buildings that marked the edge of the settlement were still mostly intact. The backtrail beelined for the stables, where Hirrus also saw a few other sets of prints moving around.

Sword at the ready, he stomped towards the building. If the man had an accomplice - or savior - lurking anywhere, it was going to be here.

Whirling around the corner, Hirrus was disappointed, but not surprised, to find just empty space and a dirt road descending into the forested valley below the town. Distantly, he could see what looked like a logging camp that likely represented the far end of this trail.

Returning his attention to the tracks, Hirrus saw where they vanished.

It didn’t take a genius to see wheel tracks, accompanied by the hoofprints of two oxen pulling it. The man had come off this cart and beelined right for Alric.

But not alone. The other sets of tracks came to and from this same cart.

He counted the tracks going to and from the cart. Nine sets. An odd number. Subtracting the one path from the man they’d encountered left an even number. Assuming there was only one other person who had driven the cart in and then driven it out, that meant nobody had been left behind.

It was a dangerous assumption.

If there was a third person, their tracks leaving could have meant two more remained behind. The worst case was that a driver had pulled up, unloaded nine people who split up into the town ruins, and then left with the empty cart.

But that didn’t feel right. He couldn’t source his certainty at all, but at some point while following the trail, the feeling of being watched had faded. Even now, closing his eyes and focusing on his ears, he didn’t sense anything or anyone. Not a sound of breath or rustling cloth or clicking stones.

Of course, that was a problem.

“Alric?” Hirrus called. He looked around and confirmed that the adventurer was missing. He tried not to jump to conclusions, but he imagined the man dead somewhere, under the claws of eight scaled monsters. “Alric!”

Hirrus retraced his steps quickly. It was easy to see that his tracks had gone alone for a while, so he just had to wait until he saw a third set beside his own and the man he had been tracking. That would be his starting spot to find his charge.

Hirrus found the spot where the mysterious second set of tracks crossed the first, and pursed his lips in irritation at what he saw there now.

A set of tracks turned from the path Hirrus had taken, and followed these other tracks.

Grumbling in irritation at his moment of concern, Hirrus turned and stomped after the two pairs of tracks.

A few moments later, he closed in on a familiar-looking figure staring dumbfounded at a solid brick wall.

“Alric!” Hirrus snapped. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I was helping,” Alric said, running his hands along the bricks, either oblivious or willfully ignorant of Hirrus' roused temper. “But whoever this was, they’ve got tricks I wish I knew.”

Hirrus looked down at the tracks, and saw that the person walked up to the wall, and then the tracks simply vanished. Some manner of Arcana had let this person climb or pass through the wall, or else leave this spot without leaving tracks behind.

“Nevermind that,” Hirrus said, shaking his head to clear his own mind of curiosity. “It’s not important. Whoever was here is gone now.” He gestured northwest. “We have to continue on our path.”

“What changed your mind?” Alric asked, looking around. “Did you waste someone else while I was looking for the batcave over here?”

“No,” Hirrus said, turning and leading them back towards the Hari Path through the center of town. “I’ve gained some perspective. Whoever was, is, or might have been here, they’ve accomplished their goal.”

“What do you mean?” Alric asked, falling in beside Hirrus.

“We’re wasting time,” he said, gesturing up at the sun. “Every minute we search these ruins, Rumi could be making another one of them. This one was nothing special - a poor drunkard, nothing more - and he could have forced me to use my own Merciless form if he had approached the fight with only slightly more skill.”

“You’re afraid,” Alric said with a guffaw. “You? You’re afraid? Shit, man, you’re the scariest thing on the goddamn server. Even if they make another one of you out of another guard, you’ve got Last of the Strong’s raid gear and Arcana behind you. What are they gonna have that matches up to that?”

“Numbers.” He declined to elaborate.

To his credit, Alric’s face paled when he came to the same conclusion Hirrus had. If one commoner in Merciless form could force him to use his own, he would be without it for two hours. The next commoner who could get him into a similarly compromised position could outright kill him.

And if one of them was another guard?

Or worse, a soldier?

And if Rumi took the time to load one of them up with even a fraction of the Arcana Hirrus had?

There was a real chance he was marching towards a foe he couldn’t fight.

But as they marched northwest out of the ruins of the town and onto the open road once more, that fatalistic thought wasn’t what lingered in Hirrus' mind. It was the man’s story.

Before this moment, he hadn’t considered what the Decision Tree meant for others. The only consideration he’d given to Decision Trees not his own was how they affected him, not the person saddled with them.

Deep down, he’d thought that thieves, drunkards, adulterers, and other ne’er-do-wells had chosen their path. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought that. They had no more chosen to be lowlifes than Hirrus had chosen to be a mercenary all those years ago.

He was suddenly haunted by an image of another version of himself who might have been.

What if his Decision Tree had forced him to spurn Julissa? What if his wish to see her face one more time hadn’t been reflected in his Decision Tree that fateful night? What if he had stayed with his Company and continued to march south?

And what if he was haunted to this day by that choice being denied to him? Forever dreaming of a love that might have been?

Wouldn’t he, too, hail Rumi as a savior, and decry Hirrus' actions as those of a villain?

The possibility alone haunted his thoughts as they walked.