Wren: “It’s Roy. He’s not here.”

Leaning in through the doorway with a few dark locs hanging over her worried expression, Wren delivered this message to the others inside the ruin.

Hearing this, Alistair and Roche immediately abandoned their banter, the former striding to the door while the latter hurried to a nearby pillar where a patchwork battleaxe was propped up. She’d gotten the other three’s attention as well—Jacqueline handed her child over to Arianne, instructing Loid to guard the two as he made for a spear.

Wren ducked back outside, swiftly followed by Alistair; just as she’d said, Roy was nowhere to be seen. Alistair cast careful glances around their surroundings; no sign of any struggle or a large monster.

Alistair: “Oi, Roy!” He raised his voice, calling out into the wasteland. “Roy!?”

His voice echoed off the trees, but no response came. The next moment they were joined by Jacqueline, who shot glances around their surroudnings in much the same motion as Alistair.

Jacqueline: “A monster..?”

Wren ground her teeth. “We were right by the door. We would’ve heard it. We should’ve heard it.”

Roche: “He can’t be far.” Stepping outside with his axe slung over one shoulder, Roche spoke. “He may be… irritating, at times, but he wouldn’t leave his post without reason.”

Stepping off the cobbled stones in front of the ruin and onto the muddy earth, he continued, “Fan out. Stay within sight of each other and the base.”

With a collective nod, Alistair, Jacqueline, and Wren all took off from the cobbled porch. Keeping a closer watch on the others than on the forest, Alistair moved parallel to the old ruin, stepping past its furthest wall after only a few moments.

This particular ruin was a short ways off of one of the many well-trodden dirt roads that wound through the wasteland. In this region, where the crimson willows grew in great numbers, the foliage typical to the wasteland grew much sparser, seeming to avoid the roots of the bloodred trees. While this made it possible for Humans to walk off the main paths, it still wasn’t something Alistair did lightly; one slip on the uneven ground could get him a face full of poison grass, after all.

Fortunately, he didn’t need to search very long or far at all.

Movement ahead caught his eye, and there he was—Roy was standing out among the trees, fixated on something unseen. After a moment he took a few slow, cautious steps backwards, keeping his eyes forward, and then he swiftly turned around, hurriedly jogging over the shelved roots with another glance behind him.

Alistair: “Oi! Found him!” He shouted back to the others, alerting Roy to his presence as well, who nearly jumped.

Roy shifted a quick glance to Alistair and the direction he’d come from, then began to slowly pick his way towards the old man, scratching his neck with one hand.

Alistair: “What is it?”

Roy: “Nothing, just—“

Alistair: “Ya think I’m dumb, Roy? The fuck were ya looking at out there?”

Roy stopped, hesitating for a second before pushing past Alistair as he spoke, “Just a lone Kritta. I scared it off. Nothing to bother the others over.”

On cue, said others rounded the corner of the ruin just as Roy was approaching it. Seeing Wren’s determined face, Alistair preemptively answered with a “False alarm.”

Wren: “False alarm..? Roy, the hell were you doing!?”

Roy grumbled, his face tightening before he cast his gaze to the side with a smack of his lips. “The lot of you are so uptight. Can’t I take a piss in peace?”

Roche: “Damn it, Roy! You were meant to be on watch! What if a monster showed up at the door!?” Roche’s fiery eyebrows competed with his voice to see which could shout Roy down the hardest.

Roy: “I don’t wanna hear it from the sentimental drunkard! I was only gone a minute.”

Wren: “Weren’t you the one worrying the most about the Carrion?”

Under her disattisfied glare, Roy could only huff in frustration. “Ugh, just drop it! Nothing… nothing showed up, so it doesn’t matter.”

With that he shoved past the others, returning to his post. Wren and Roche both went in pursuit, levying more complaints at him, leaving Jacqueline behind to eye their backs carefully.

Alistair: “Botherin’ ya too, eh?” The old man asked as he walked up to her.

Jacqueline: “He’s acting strange. I don’t buy it.”

Alistair: “He told me he scared off a Kritta.”

Jacqueline: “I don’t buy that, either.”

With a nod, Alistair stepped past her, holding his hands behind his neck. “Well, he won’t be our problem for much longer. We’ll just have to keep an eye on him in the meantime.”

Jacqueline sighed. “Guess so. I’ll go let Loid and Arianne know what happened—and check in on my darling Jackie.” Her irritated voice took on a singsong tone as she shifted the subject to her child, walking briskly with a skip in her step.

She passed Roche and Wren, who had stopped before the doorway to continue berating Roy, the haggard man brushing them off indignantly. Finally giving up with an exasperated sigh, Wren turned to the apporaching Alistair.

Wren: “Are you sure you have to leave? I… I know it’s against the taboo, but… Well, you saw what just happened. I don’t know how we’re gonna manage without you.”

Alistair nodded grimly, taking a short pause to choose his words carefully. “Much as I wish it wasn’t necessary, that’s just the ways things are. This is the fourth split for me—ya get used to it eventually.”

Wren clearly wasn’t satisfied with this answer, but before she could retort Alistair raised a finger and continued, “For all his faults, Roy was right about one thing: a Carrion’s bad news, and it ain’t the only monster on that tier. The taboo goes unbroken for a reason: most groups that break it end up dead.

“There’s no number of Humans ya can throw at a Carrion and win. It just ain’t possible. They tend not to bother with small groups, so that’s just how we live. I wish I could change it, but I can’t, and I’d much rather say goodbye than have any of ya die.”

Wren cast her gaze downward, clenching her fists. “I know. I know that, but…”

It was times like these that Alistair couldn’t help but see Wren as a little kid, forced to grow up too fast. He saw the same in Loid and Jacqueline as well. Childhood was a luxury not afforded to anyone in this wasteland; even someone as capable as Wren was bound to stumble under decades of pressure.

Beyond that, her worries were well-founded; what she’d said earlier was correct on all counts. Roche was getting old, and Arianne and Roy weren’t far behind; before long, she would have to take over as the group’s main fighter, and perhaps even its leader.

Alistair reached out to lightly jab at her shoulder. “Hey, howsabout we get in that spar we were just talkin’ about?”

Wren: “Eh, seriously..? Is it… really the time for that?”

Alistair: “’Course it is. Ya were all fired up for it before. Oi, Roche—“

Before he could even finish calling out the other man’s name, Roche tossed a wooden sword at Alistair’s head, which he swiftly caught in one hand. With an unimpressed huff, Roche patted his daughter on the shoulder.

Roche: “I agree, you oughta teach that hag bastard a lesson before he leaves.”

Conflicted, Wren glanced between the two men before finally giving in with a sigh. “Fine. But don’t think I’ll go easy on you, old man.”

Alistair merely chuckled at her words. “Gettin’ cocky already, are ya?”

Wren was strong, skilled, smart—she was more than capable of protecting her group.

But all that would mean little if she lacked confidence in her own abilities.

As his final action before he was forced to leave them behind, Alistair felt that granting Wren this confidence was the very best thing he could do.

That was why,

Alistair: “I ain’t going easy on ya, either, kid.” Now standing across from her in the small clearing just in front of the ruin, he assumed a lazy stance with the wooden sword held forward at his hips.

Wren smirked, sliding into a proper stance as she took the spear slung over her back, flipping it around in her hands so she was holding it backwards, the blunt end aimed forward.

The next moment, her eyes narrowing fiercely, Wren dug her heels into the mud, launching forward with a mighty lunge.

Keeping a calm composure even as she charged at him, Alistair watched on as—she was suddenly frozen in time.

It wasn’t just Wren—the whole world around them and even Alistair himself had paused, time itself coming to a complete stop.

For someone to live as long as Alistair had in the wasteland was a rare and impressive feat. In that regard, Alistair understood he’d only made it this far because he alone possessed the means to “cheat”.

To put it another way, Alistair possessed a unique power.

Though it’d been decades, he could still clearly remember the day he first called on this power. Just as it had done this time, the world around came to a stop, granting him the edge required to come out victorious.

To say that this was “the ability to stop time”, that wouldn’t be entirely accurate—or, depending on how you looked at it, it was a far more accurate description than one would expect. Alistair’s body was not exempt from the freezing of time, even though he was the one that initiated it.

The only thing left free was his mind.

As time around him stopped, Alistair alone could still think. His mind could wander in much the same way his body could, allowing him to step away and look back at himself. In this state, his mind could borrow the senses of his body—he could still see and smell and feel, and while the concept of sound couldn’t quite exist outside of time, his “ears” were aware of all the sounds that had been playing the moment he stopped time.

As his mind stepped to the side, a slice of white void came into view behind Wren, where his body’s senses were unable to reach. Were he to look inside the ruin or behind any of the nearby trees, he would find more such slices of nothing; if he were to wander out further, he would come to a seemingly infinite white void where his body’s senses found their limit, the world at the void’s edge a blurry mess of flowing, fading colors, as if the world itself were a dripping watercolor painting.

This ability was the sole advantage Alistair held over the rest of the world. In this state he could not move his body, but his mind could study, could think, could ponder; with this, he could reduce even the most dire situation to a calm thought experiment, allowing his mind to determine the optimal way to move his body before time resumed.

With a touch of humor, Alistair thought of this power as the ability to simply “take a break” from reality. It was his Recess.

Though he had an admittedly small sample size to pull from, Alistair had never met another Human with this same power, nor had he observed a monster that acted similar to him. Conversely, he’d been careful to conceal the existence of this power throughout his subtle questioning; only Jacqueline knew of it, and even then only the basic concept.

It was only thanks to this power that he’d lived as long as he had.

Pushing those thoughts aside, Alistair focused his “eyes” on Wren. He’d promised to go all-out, and he had no intention of breaking that promise to the younger warrior. To prove just how capable Wren was, he needed to lose to her while truly giving it his all, and Recess was no exception to that.

And so, time resumed.