Chapter 142: I NEVER FELL BEHIND

Isabela looked at the tear.

She looked at her hands.

She looked at the Tailor, who had returned to his work as if the most meaningful statement of the last few hours had simply been factual information.

"Because you’re ready."

Not praise. Not encouragement.

Just a conclusion.

She began the difficult stitch.

With a swordsman’s breathing.

With the attention of someone who knew precision had no shortcut.

With the new awareness that the two things had always been the same.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Without stopping, she sewed, fast, each stitch following the last without pausing to think, only rhythm.

"This is like practicing a sword thrust." She thought, her fingers guiding the needle. "Except with my fingers. And a tiny sword."

She threw the needle upward.

Valtherion flames wrapped around its tip, not burning the metal, dancing around it as if fire had learned to respect small shapes. The needle fell, her fingers guiding it from below, and pierced the fabric perfectly.

She inhaled.

Picked it up again.

Continued.

The Tailor was watching.

Not with his usual neutral attention. Something was different now, an expression of genuine astonishment, the kind that appeared when someone saw something for the first time after three hundred years of repetition.

"She’s treating the banner like a battlefield." He realized.

What he was seeing wasn’t sewing.

It was war.

He looked at the banner in her hands, the stitches, the pattern, the speed.

"So that was it."

"I volunteered for this work because I could no longer fight." He thought, the memory returning whole after so long in fragments. "I wanted to be there. I wanted everyone to see me. I wanted my enemies to see me before they died."

"I was always like this. Born to kill. And becoming a soldier of Eldrath was the best thing I ever did. He treated me like a real soldier."

"And when I could no longer continue... I still wanted to see blood... I wanted to be seen!"

"So I decided to sew banners. That way, I would see their blood spilled across the victorious banner, the imperfect cuts so I could feel the war... That way, they would see my art, standing like a sword, before they died. Before they burned the enemy, they would see the banner the way they saw me."

"But over time, I forgot... It became the burden I did best. Sewing irritated me because I forgot that this was how I was still fighting."

"...I was at war..."

"And I fought my war through the banners. The girl brought the war back to me."

"So I never fell behind. I was at the front, with Eldrath holding me. I became his banner. The soldier who represented everyone in victory and defeat."

He looked at Isabela one last time.

She was sewing quickly, surrounded by flames, struggling not to fall behind.

"I never fell behind." The Tailor said aloud to her.

Isabela heard him.

But she was too focused to turn her head.

"To finish this." She thought, throwing the banner into the air, the needle still held in her hand.

She inhaled.

"Ignition."

Isabela drew her sword. She struck the flaming needle, piercing through. Then she crossed over, striking from the other side, piercing it again. The needle flew upward from the impact, and Isabela jumped, acrobatically, over her own banner, which was still in the air.

She struck, sending the needle downward.

But she was already beneath it, striking before the needle arrived.

It was too fast to see clearly. She was sewing with her sword, every strike leaving only trails of flame, fabric, needle, and fire moving together at a speed that should not have worked but did.

Then she missed a stitch.

On purpose, the frustration accumulated over time finding an outlet through the precision that failed for a single instant, and the banner split down the middle.

It burned.

Fell to the ground.

"Fuck." Isabela said, breathing heavily, Valtherion flames still consuming too much oxygen from her lungs.

She placed both hands on her knees.

"I give up. I don’t know what else to do to..."

She looked toward where the Tailor had been.

He wasn’t there.

He had disappeared. He had been gone for some time, judging by the way the space around him had already returned to normal, without any trace of his presence.

He had only left an unfinished banner on the ground beside the one she had just burned.

"Huh?" Isabela exclaimed.

"Wait. He disappeared?"

She stared at the empty space.

"I did it? So all I had to do was tear the banner for him to have an epiphany and disappear?"

She wasn’t sure what exactly she had done that caused the spirit to exorcise itself.

She picked up the burned banner, the two pieces still connected by an uneven thread in the middle.

The last thing she remembered from him was only his voice: "I never fell behind."

That was what she should tell herself.

She placed the banner over her shoulders.

"Looks like sewing taught you a new technique." Someone said from the bushes, a student who had been watching...

Isabela didn’t answer.

She looked at her own hands, fingers marked by the needle, the heat of Ignition still rising from her skin in thin streams of steam.

She left.

...

She and Blandina had decided to split up, cover more ground, and clear only that section of the test.

Seline was alone when she felt it.

A gaze.

Crushing.

Her spear immediately lit up, a reflex, not a conscious decision. She stepped backward, moving into an offensive stance before fully processing what was happening.

"What the hell is this presence?" She thought, looking across the courtyard.

It wasn’t the lesser spirits still remaining in the background. They had felt it too, all of them looking toward the same point: upward, toward the building ahead.

Seline followed their gaze.

Moon. The test dome flickered, signaling that it was about to end.

A silhouette against the moon.

A flaming helmet. A longsword. The center of his chest glowing faintly, carrying the same dark-blue frequency the cup used.

"The pressure is coming from him."

It was Haru.

Only his breathing could be heard inside the helmet, heavy, doubled, as if two lungs were breathing in the same rhythm without being completely synchronized.

He descended.

The remaining spirits stared at him, not with hostility, but the opposite. He carried the presence of the Forgotten General, but he wasn’t the General.

Presences did not lie.

They prepared themselves to receive orders.

They knelt.

"For Eldrath!" They said in unison.

Haru stared at Seline.

He walked past the kneeling spirits, cutting through them as if they were nothing, without even looking down. He didn’t care about the reverence he was receiving.

"Elf." He said, approaching, while his body naturally absorbed the spirits’ cores...

Maybe it was the mask. But his voice was different, more authoritative, doubled, deeper than the one they knew.

Seline maintained her stance.

"I’ve seen this man before." She thought. "And that sword. Somewhere. I just don’t know where yet."

The presence he radiated was strange. He wasn’t one. He was many, layered over one another, and around him, the air itself seemed to distort slightly, like visible heat on a hot day.

Haru pointed his sword.

"I want your will."

Seline spun her spear.

She smiled.

"I give it to you."

She charged.

Haru’s body charged as well.

...

Haru woke up.

"Huh!?"

Where was he?

A desert. Sand stretched to the horizon in every direction. He was naked, his penis swinging in the wind. There wasn’t a single building, nor anything that suggested life had ever existed there.

The sky was reddish, not the color of sunset, but permanent, as if the sky had decided to remain in that shade indefinitely.

The sun was there, but its light resembled an eclipse, a visible corona surrounding a dark disk, illuminating without warming the way a sun should.

The wind was strong and constant, lifting sand into spirals that formed and dissolved without any apparent pattern.

The last thing he remembered was putting on the Forgotten General’s helmet.

"Shit! Am I dead?"

"Where did my consciousness end up this time?" He asked, to himself, to the wind, to the red sky that didn’t answer.

He looked around.

Nothing.

Only sand, wind, and that sun that was light without being day.

Haru walked.

At first, there was no reason to choose a direction. Every side of the desert looked identical. Sand. Red sky. The black sun hanging above him like an eye that had forgotten how to close.

Then he noticed the footprints.

Hundreds.

No.

Thousands.

They crossed the desert from every direction, some deep, some almost erased by the wind, all converging toward the same point beyond the horizon.

Haru followed them.

The footprints were different.

Some belonged to armored soldiers. Some were bare. Some were enormous, deep enough to suggest creatures heavier than anything human.

And some...

Some were his. He stopped, looked down.

A set of footprints continued ahead with the same length, the same spacing, the same slight inward turn of the left foot.

His footprints, but they had been there before he arrived.

"That’s not disturbing at all."

He kept walking.

The structure appeared slowly.

First, a dark line against the red horizon.

Then walls.