My sister kept wielding the small knife, fighting hand-to-hand and simultaneously against two lethal members of the group. The remaining mercenaries hung back; they just watched, as if evaluating her or simply amusing themselves with her audacity.

I didn't think twice. My compassion had made the decision for me, and now my body had to act accordingly. I immediately grabbed the first weapon I spotted on the ground. It was an impossibly heavy greatsword, leaning against one of the nearby wooden walls of the inn, tossed in the grass. It must have belonged to one of the dead village guards.

I gripped the hilt with both hands and sprinted as fast as I could toward one of the figures in black attacking Yae's blind spot. My sister moved swiftly, with her usual grace, dodging and countering with a flexibility and acrobatic skill I didn't even suspect she still possessed. But the mercenaries weren't amateur street thugs. They attacked with terrifying synchronization, moving like true predators and cornering Yae. Their curved daggers sliced the air mere millimeters from her face, and the divine exhaustion we carried quickly began to collect its physical toll.

The dense atmosphere and heavy gravity of Primitia drained Yae's energy with every dodge on the dirt. Her fighting movements, once fluid, agile, and flawless, became noticeably slow and dragged out. One of the enemies' poisoned blades swung too close, tearing the left sleeve of her shirt. Yae gasped in pain and surprise, stumbling backward, off-balance and struggling.

It was the right moment to intervene. Approaching the mercenary pressuring her from behind, I hoisted the weapon. The greatsword was stupidly long and heavy, forged from a dense block of iron my Hyperion body wasn't used to. But I refused to stop. I used the weapon's own monumental weight to my advantage. I raised the broad blade above my head with two trembling hands and delivered a lethal vertical strike, backed by all the strength in my muscles.

The mercenary, however, heard the air tear. He caught the shadow of the blade in the very last millisecond and leaped nimbly backward.

My greatsword missed flesh and slammed violently into the dirt floor of the square, echoing with a dull, deep thud and kicking up a curtain of dust and rocks around us. The impact of the iron against the earth was so severe that the bones in my arms rattled and went completely numb. Before I could even regain my footing, pull the weapon from the dirt, and raise it again, the fight took a disastrous turn.

The second mercenary used the dust to his advantage, stepping forward and disarming Yae with a vicious, lightning-fast strike to her wrist. Immediately after, he kicked the back of her knees, sending my sister dropping to the ground, defeated and breathless.

The man I had just tried to cleave in half took advantage of my imbalance and my struggle to recover the greatsword. He lunged, grabbed me ruthlessly by the collar of my corset, hoisted me off the ground, and threw me flat on my back into the dirt, tossing me right next to my sister's body.

We were defeated. The arrogance of our compassion, our lack of familiarity with mortal combat, the brutal exhaustion, the oppressive gravity of that world, and above all, our critical lack of Essence had betrayed us against trained human warriors. Panting, humiliated, and lying in the filthy dirt, we looked up, staring down the blades, bracing ourselves to receive the final executioner's strike.

But death didn't descend upon us.

The group's leader, that taller man with the deep voice and terrifying presence, simply raised a closed right hand. On a purely tactical signal, the two mercenaries halted their attack and obediently backed off at once, sheathing their stained weapons like well-tamed hunting dogs responding to their master's whistle. The other guild members, who had just watched from the edges of the square, remained in absolute, disciplined silence.

The man in the crimson cloak walked slowly toward us. His heavy black leather boots stopped mere inches from our defeated faces in the dirt.

"The two of you have a lot of untapped potential. You held up surprisingly well in combat for people who clearly possess zero martial technique," the leader said, his tone calculating, cold, and genuinely impressed by our physical resilience. "And that is exactly why I am going to offer you a recruitment proposal. It is a one-time offer, and I will only hear the answer once."

The leader glanced over my shoulder toward the inn, where the frightened civilians hid behind closed doors, and then locked his eyes back onto mine.

"Come with us to the sanctuary. Join us. Work for our brotherhood. If you accept this gift of blood and life, we will forever forget the ridiculous debt this miserable village owes us, and we will leave these country folk in absolute peace. But... if you refuse this invitation," his voice dropped, turning the echo in the square lethal and icy, "we will slaughter every man and woman, burn the entire village to the ground, take the children, and torch the inn with your other 'little friends' inside. Friends who, I might remind you, are currently far too asleep, weak, and hungover from the party to defend themselves against a single arrow."

My heart skipped a violent beat against my ribs. How was it possible? How did he know about Gigroth, Flora, and Ahria being in the room? How did he know the other Primordials were vulnerable, defenseless, and sleeping off their hangovers and exhaustion? Unless... unless the Tears of Hollows had already been silently watching us from the shadows since last night...

Out of the corner of my eye, I looked at the faces of the human villagers, watching the scene paralyzed with terror in the background. I remembered the smile of the sweet, curious little girl who had asked about our hair color, the abundance of food, and the music from that feast. Those people had emptied their meager winter pantries to give us that lavish banquet, giving up the little sustenance they had just to pay off a protection debt to these leather-clad monsters. Guilt crushed my chest, a thousand times more suffocating and heavier than the greatsword I had failed to lift minutes ago. We could not, out of sheer ego, allow those peasants to pay the price of our weakness with their own lives.

"I... I accept," I muttered instantly, my voice trembling and defeated, yet incredibly resolute in my soul.

"Neiva, no! Are you craz—" Yae tried to yell, pushing herself up.

My twin sister's rebellious words were cut off abruptly and sickeningly. One of the mercenaries stepped forward and delivered a dry, stiff, and brutal kick directly to the side of Yae's face and head. The horrendous crack of the impact echoed painfully inside my own skull. Yae collapsed on her side, perfectly inert in the dirt, knocked completely unconscious and wiped from reality in a millisecond.

"Yae!" I screamed in blind despair, trying to drag my aching body toward her.

The tall man crouched gracefully in front of me, blocking my line of sight with his bulk and keeping me from reaching her. The gleaming skull symbol with the red tear on his leather chest seemed to mock me, searing into my eyes and crowning my absolute failure as a savior.

"You are indeed a smart woman, Neiva," he whispered, his face inches from mine, flashing a terribly twisted, dark, and victorious smile.

Before I could even blink or spit back at the humiliation, I felt a massive, precise, dry strike at the base of the back of my head. The whole world spun violently. A sharp pain radiated through my skull and veins, and my muscles' resistance finally gave out. The warm morning sunlight in the square began to fade as my eyes fell shut, unbearably heavy.

In the final second, moments before the darkness swallowed me completely, my blurry, clouded vision focused on a detail in a dark corner near the forest tree line. Amidst a gloomy, camouflaged, and silent mist, a pair of sharp, cold purple eyes watched everything that had just happened.

And then... I saw absolutely nothing else.