Chapter 116 Childhood Sweethearts

It was a game they played in their childhood—or more accurately, a game Marika played when she was little.

She would pounce at lightning speed, tackling her target and sending them flying. Normally, the target would be killed by such a blow, but Marika had discovered a little loophole. As long as her own hands bore the brunt of the impact, the person she tackled would only suffer a sudden scare.

Blaze was Marika’s experimental subject and her only designated target for this move. Whenever Marika was angry, she would use this move. Depending on how furious she was, she would unleash varying degrees of Power. From Blaze’s firsthand experience, her current level of anger was probably severe enough to keep her tossing and turning all night, only to fall asleep and dream about how to execute this very move.

"Why didn’t you come home at night?" Marika asked loudly, her tone stern and serious.

To the chicken, this was undoubtedly a harsh interrogation. But Blaze knew this was just the result of Marika trying to artificially soften her voice. However, that didn’t mean Marika wasn’t taking this seriously. If he couldn’t give her a satisfactory answer, she would take his lying self on a wild, earth-shattering ride.

Blaze thought seriously for a moment. Looking into Marika’s agate-yellow eyes, he replied, "I... went for a very, very long walk, but I didn’t get lost."

The chicken stared at Blaze in sheer disbelief. How could anyone use such a perfunctory excuse?

"That must have been hard. You’ve gotten heavier." Marika’s volume remained high, but she set Blaze down, which meant she had accepted his answer.

The chicken was dumbfounded. Someone actually accepted that kind of answer!

Blaze waved his hand, dispersing the chicken’s smoke-like Soul Body.

Marika was incredibly perceptive. Those eyes of hers might not be able to see through lies, but they could distinguish absolute sincerity.

He thought about his departure from Balkan City, and the month he had been missing from Marika’s perspective. He had encountered many dangers and fallen into inescapable Chaos, yet he had never deviated from the path his heart had decided upon. This walk of his had just gone a little too far. He had taken a massive detour, but he hadn’t gotten lost.

"You seem to have grown taller again," Blaze said, raising his hand to gesture. He himself had grown a bit taller because of the Blessing, but the height gap between him and Marika hadn’t shrunk at all.

"I’m way too tall compared to you." Marika lowered her head, a hint of dejection creeping into her bright, high-pitched voice.

"Why does that matter?" Blaze smiled helplessly. She was already the Knight Order Leader of the Royal Knight Order, and she commanded immense prestige among many Foreigners. Yet, in front of him, she was still the same silly girl. She actually thought that a growing height gap would cause them to drift apart.

"Hold out your hand."

Marika obediently extended her hand, and Blaze reached out to press his palm flat against hers.

Marika was very tall with long fingers, but her palms weren’t large. Although Blaze wasn’t as tall as her, his hands were big enough to easily envelop hers.

"Look, my hand is still much bigger than yours. Neither of us has changed," he said. "It’s the same as always."

Marika smiled. It wasn’t the heroic, valiant smile of the Knight Order Leader that the Knight Order or the Foreigners usually saw. It was simply the smile of two children.

"Let’s go. You must have had a reason to walk all the way here." Marika raised her hand and knocked on Blaze’s helmet as if knocking on a door. "Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come to see me wearing this helmet."

"Yeah. I originally thought about at least taking the helmet off," Blaze said, shrugging helplessly as he walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Marika toward the Royal Knight Order’s camp.

The chicken stared blankly at the two of them, who seemed to have completely resolved the issue just like that. She had thought there would be a massive dramatic spectacle!

The opening had been terrifyingly exaggerated. At the very least, it should have led to a classic trope of, "I’ve forgiven you in my heart, but my lips will never admit it," where true feelings would only be confessed during a life-or-death crisis! And what about the girl’s feelings of dejection and insecurity? A simple touch of their palms and it was all gone?!

Was she not even going to ask about Blaze’s current condition? Was she not surprised by Blaze’s Werewolf appearance? When the chicken first saw it, she had been startled out of her wits, even though she knew about it beforehand! Were the romances of youngsters these days all this mild and bland?

The chicken couldn’t help but recall her time living on the Tree of Life. The Elf Race would bring stories in exchange for the right to reside there. Among them, the romantic tales between men and women were the most scandalous and intense.

But...

The chicken looked at the two figures walking ahead.

The girl was tall, but her strides were short. Compared to the girl, the boy was short, but his strides were long. The two were able to walk perfectly side by side, neither falling half a step behind the other.

Perhaps mild wasn’t so bad after all.

"Oh my~ Audrey, you’re in danger," the chicken muttered with an ambiguous smile, deciding to embrace her role as a spectator until the very end.

"It’s very quiet here. There are no Foreigners."

Blaze walked into the defensive garrison of the Royal Knight Order for the first time. Because guarding this place was considered a never-ending chore, permanent houses had been built here. Strangely, there were very few Foreigners here. Logically, an entrance meant to challenge Monsters should be bustling with Foreigners. Even if it wasn’t open for challenges at the moment, they should still be here shopping. After all, the Royal Knight Order sold the materials harvested from the hunted Titan Hybrids as merchandise, albeit a bit expensively.

"We only open the entrance on Mondays and Sundays. If they sneak in on their own, they won’t have the single-use escape item we provide," Marika said, pausing as a trace of helplessness laced her voice. "Crafting these devices is very expensive. Distributing them twice a week is already the absolute limit of our calculations, but Foreigners still sneak in anyway. I really wish they would cherish their own lives more."

"What happens if they sneak in?" Blaze asked.

"Because they don’t have the safeguard of an escape item, there’s a chance that upon death, their equipment will be looted by a Monster called the Chaos Emei Monkey. Our Knight Order has already encountered an army of monkeys wielding the weapons of Foreigners several times."

"That’s..." The first thing that came to Blaze’s mind was those Foreigners possessing Legendary equipment. He sincerely hoped they would never die in that forest.

"Wait, don’t they have their own escape items? Like Space Transmission Artifacts, or Flying Dragon Whistles?" As soon as Blaze said it, he answered his own question. How could every Foreigner possibly afford exorbitant Space Transmission Artifacts? And biological escape items like the Flying Dragon Whistle carried the risk of being intercepted and killed.

"Using Space Transmission Artifacts wouldn’t work anyway. To prevent Foreigners from establishing a Teleport Point inside, we specifically built an interference tower."

"Then why do you even need to guard against Foreigners?" Blaze quipped. However, thinking about the bizarrely creative minds of the Foreigners, if the knights didn’t take precautions, the Foreigners might just stir up some massive disaster in the forest.

"But for some reason, some Foreigners claim the escape item and don’t use it, while others clearly use the escape item during times when no items are distributed." Marika stroked her chin, wearing a puzzled expression. "Why on earth is that?"

"Maybe the Foreigners who don’t need to go inside are transferring their items to those who do," Blaze speculated.

"How is that possible? This custom escape item from Hermes’ Travel Hat comes with an embedded registration marker. It can only be used by the person who claims it."

"..."

When the name Hermes’ Travel Hat was mentioned, the image of a certain little fox with a black mosaic over its eyes popped into Blaze’s mind.

They could do it. If it was that person, they were absolutely capable of doing something like that.

They would first take the Knight Order’s money to create an item with a binding marker, and then turn around to take the Foreigners’ money to remove that very same marker.