A few days had passed since we had arrived at Faye's home. She had given me a free room, with only a bed and a wardrobe. She immediately tried to go and request some pieces of furniture from the warehouse, but I stopped her as I really didn’t need any.

Even the bed wasn’t really necessary, as I had no need to sleep, but I still took advantage of it and spent my free time laying down on top of it, except what was needed for eating and washing myself. After all the predicaments I had gone through, I thought I needed to relax my body and nerves.

Not even two days had passed before I realised how wrong I was. Boredom quickly settled in and I started to become unstable, or better more unstable than how I already was.

It was the first time in this life I actually felt without a purpose. The time spent at the Gamma could be considered similar, as back then I had been safe and without a specific objective, but in reality it was a time in which I was being beat up by Marnie almost every day. Moreover, that was before the surgery.

I wanted to dedicate this period of time to decompress from all the accumulated stress, but I was obtaining the opposite effect. The process of aimlessly doing nothing was weighing down strangely on my psyche.

Finally, Jonah’s envoy arrived. We had a brief greeting, then I let Faye take the wheel and lead the conversation. At the end of the meeting, the hunting area in which we could operate had been outlined.

It was not different from others in terms of terrain or landscape, but it was inside of a larger area apparently known to have a higher than normal frequency of appearance of beasts. Moreover, it was a location reasonably near to a Path, meaning transportation would be easier.

“Good. Let’s depart,” I said immediately after the door closed behind the guest.

Faye turned to me with a worried look.

“Are you sure? You went through a lot. It would be best for you to rest a little…”

“No. Let’s go,” I cut her off.

Faye seemed to ponder various thoughts in her head, before coming to a conclusion.

“All right. Let me ask Reuben to get everything we need then. But as this is the first time we’ll only do a simple hunt, okay?”

I accepted the compromise and we started moving. Soon after being requested, Reuben returned with various paraphernalia, from clothes and weapons to strange folded bags. I donned the new set of clothing and hung my mace from a newly acquired belt, then we left the building and walked the roads of the Delta.

We reached the exit and found ourselves in the wildlands. Faye rummaged through her backpack and took out a map. After checking it and determining our position relative to our target, she folded it and put it in her pocket.

“There. We need to go there,” she said, stretching her arm outwards and pointing with her finger.

“Let’s get walking then, shall we?”

It didn’t take long for me to realise our pace was too slow to reach our destination before sunset. Although it was clear she had not neglected her physical training as she was marching at a brisk pace without showing signs of fatigue, her physique was ultimately much more similar to that of a normal human than to that of an arch such as Reuben or myself.

Reuben himself didn’t seem to mind us taking our sweet time, but I needed to reach our destination as soon as possible and start swinging my mace around.

I decided to take things into my own hands and took Faye up in my arms. She let out a small cry of surprise and looked at me as if she wanted an explanation.

“We are gonna start running,” I said.

Reuben seemed to get the message and prepared himself for the sprint. The next instant, we raced through the wildlands, travelling at motorised vehicle speed. It didn’t take long to reach the Path and once we reached it our pace increased further, as we were running on levelled terrain.

We stopped at times to give Faye the opportunity to check the map and determine our position and how far we still had to go, before resuming our run. This made us lose some time, but there was no alternative as it would have been impossible for Faye to do it while moving.

We left the Path and after a while we finally reached our destination, in a fraction of the time it would have been required had we continued to travel at the original pace. I let Faye down and after she had stretched a little bit, she confirmed our position.

“It’s the right place,” she said while nodding with a satisfied expression. The trip had been a fun experience for her.

I sharpened my sight, in search of a suitable target. As expected the area was populated by a reasonable amount of beasts, but most of them were of small size. I knew they wouldn’t be able to satisfy my need for entertainment.

After a little bit of looking around I was able to locate a reptile resembling a gecko; only with the size of a car. I hoped it was a specimen who had been alive for quite some time, as only older beasts were suitable for ether-extraction.

Younglings, when killed, immediately dissipated in form of a cerulean dust made mostly of dust and debris and a low ether content, while elders carcasses maintained their physical cohesiveness for longer and could be processed to produce bigger crystals. Moreover, the ether itself was of higher “quality”.

I took a step into the beast’s direction, but I was immediately stopped by Faye.

“There’s no need to trouble yourself. Watch this,” she said proudly, walking towards the overgrown gecko.

After a couple of steps she came to a stop and raised both her hands. A low wind rose and a pale halo surrounded her body. A streak of winding light travelled through the air from her to the beast.

The light twinkled in front of its eyes and attracted its attention. The gecko started to slowly approach us.

Faye jumped into place and clapped her hands while giggling cheerfully.

“Did you see it? I did good, didn’t I?” she added, looking for praise.

I smiled at her, gave her a small nod and patted her on the shoulder. She seemed to appreciate my gesture, but she was still a little bit disappointed by my relative coldness.

It was true she had successfully attracted the gecko and gotten it to move away from other beasts, but in the rush to prove herself she had forgotten a simple detail.

The gecko was now less than a hundred metres from us. It started to emit its strange chirp the moment he laid his eyes on me and it rushed at me at maximum speed.

“Next time, make sure to get to safety before attracting the enemy,” I told Faye.

I released the mace from the belt and took it in hand. Reuben prepared himself to fight, but I signalled him to stand with a wave of my hand. The moment the gecko was in front of me, its mouth open and ready to bite me, my mace fell down on his head, crashing it into the ground and breaking its skull open.

A black halo remained on him, preventing its brain from reforming. Even when my aura dissipated, the damage had already become permanent and the beast remained limp on the ground, with his body slowly starting to fall apart.

A grin crept up on my face and satisfaction washed all over me.