A light had warned him of his end that time as well. He had remained behind as a decoy, ensuring his squadmates could escape the Shadowbeast that hunted them within its deadzone.
The creature was a saber-toothed horror, capable of ionizing the very air around it until plasma ignited and scoured flesh and bone alike.
By bargaining away everything he had to offer, and everything he could imagine, he had gained burn tolerance enough to withstand the monster's relentless assaults. That sacrifice made him useful once more, diverting its wrath onto himself and sparing the others.
He had been useful when he aided the squad leader in taking them so deep into the deadzone, though doing so had been against his better judgment.
He had been useful when he relinquished his claim as the Captain's direct protégé, surrendering it to the one he had called his friend.
He had wished only that he might have been deemed useful before being forsaken by faces he no longer remembered.
And now he lay broken upon the desolate ground, while the beast gathered its strength, determined to obliterate him with the greatest pulse it could summon.
He was frustrated.
"Damn it… it's not fair."
Only with his last breath had he finally allowed himself to complain.
No one was there to ignore him. No one was there to shun him. No one was there to use him anymore.
"Damn it!" He had been screaming at nothing, at no one. Not even at the beast charging its final strike. "Why'd I have to be the one to die?!"
"This hurts so much! Why didn't one of you stay behind to get fried instead?!"
He had given in to a vindictive sin. The weight of his regrets was too much to bear.
"Screw all of you! Of all the stupid, asinine ways to die, this has to be the sh*ttiest kick in the nuts life could throw at me!"
For the first time, he had bared a mirror to his own heart through obscenity. The words tore from him without restraint as he slammed his head against the ground.
"What about this is equal, huh?! I gave and gave and gave, but screw me for hoping to get anything back, right?!"
He clawed furrows into the ground in blind rage.
"Well f*ck you!"
The Shadowbeast unleashed its concentrated flare, flooding his vision with blinding light.
"How 'bout you 'barter' with my expensi—"
In an instant, the light vanished, stunning both him and the beast.
"Damn, kid. You should put that on a t-shirt."
A figure crashed down atop the monster's skull, crushing it beneath the impact of their drop.
"I'd buy it."
Someone had been there. Someone had heard him. Most importantly, someone had come to his rescue. That was how they had first met.
His hair had flowed strangely, even without the aid of the wind. Long and unkempt, it trailed down to his knees like a ghostly curtain.
Beneath the caked dust and stains, Sauer had caught the glimmer of what must have been its true color, an immaculate white, soft as silk.
The stranger's attire was little more than a gray singlet, stretched and dirtied, and black trousers ripped open at the side.
"___ ___"
"Aauh?"
"I said quit bawling for a second. I've got a few questions."
"Aaaah-haaaahaaa!"
Whatever he had managed to babble in that moment remained uncertain. Sauer himself never remembered the words. Yet, in the haze of recollection, he chose to remember them as some profound expression of gratitude.
His benefactor had asked for nothing more than directions: the boundary's name, and a way back to Earth. As for the reason behind his presence, his appearance, or the strange aura about him, he gave none.
"So you're human?"
"Whoa, that's a strange question. It's not like humans are rare in most of Conmundia."
"I meant from Earth."
"Then yeah. And believe it or not, I'm also an officer."
"...right."
Sauer gave him the courtesy of listening, though his eyes kept straying, measuring the way his presence didn't match his words.
"I'm serious. I should be well known… assuming my estimate of the time passed on Earth is correct."
"Is that so? Famous in a good way, I take it?"
"..."
"Cosmo?"
"Why don't we talk about that authority of yours?"
They pressed on, their path weaving through the heart of the dead zone. One was responsible for guiding the way back toward a working portal, since they were buried so deep within the zone that the idea of finding civilization anywhere nearby was impossible, their best chance lay in tracking down a vacant, unmanned one.
The other cut down every threat that stirred, moving with the ease of someone long accustomed to such encounters. Between them, the balance held.
When at last a year had burned itself away, they emerged from the dead zone. The desolate march gave way to a slower journey, no longer ruled by danger, but by the tentative pace of recovery.
Being able to rest more often, they finally had the freedom to speak at length.
"You can't teach me what I'm lacking, but you can still tell me how to get stronger? That doesn't make sense."
"Of course. No one else can dictate the path of your authority. It can only evolve through your own choices. What I can do is guide you safely along the path you've chosen. But the conviction that fuels your authority is yours alone."
The path Sauer chose afterward was one that expanded his gallery. To gather more abilities he could barter with, rather than relying solely on his physical traits.
"Seriously? But you've already done so. It seems you just haven't noticed."
"I have?"
"The very first time we met, actually. How do you think you survived being struck at that level?"
Sauer hadn't regarded it as anything beyond his usual capabilities, and the thought left him puzzled.
"It might have been the first time I'd ever tried boosting my burn resistance. But it felt no different from when I harden my skin or organs to withstand ordinary attacks. I just didn't want to be incinerated."
"It's not the same. To stop its strike, I shut down the ionization process and killed the discharge. But to survive plasma itself by simply switching your physical traits, you would have had to reconfigure your anatomy at its base structure."
"What?"
"Your skin would have had to become a conductive and ablative layer. Your tissues, blood, and DNA would have needed to become resistant to radiation and rebuild themselves continuously, and your body would still have had to bend that plasma around itself. Mind you, we're still talking about temperatures more dangerous than the surface of our sun."
"I wasn't thinking about all that. How did I survive? I only traded every sense but sight. I gave up muscle control, nerve response, everything… just so they could run."
He ground his teeth and clenched his fist without thinking. It was an expression anyone would have noticed, but his benefactor chose to ignore it.
"I don't know how you feel about it now, but what you traded back then was your ability to flee. Your greatest instinct and desire at that moment."
"You're saying that was enough to do all that?" His voice had carried disbelief. For as long as he could remember, his authority had only ever been useful for sacrificing something broad in exchange for a narrow trait. It had never once bloomed outside those narrow expectations.
"You've been asking me how I'm so… effective, despite the limitations of my authority?"
"You'll tell me? Are you sure?"
His benefactor's authority had been of a different nature, limited control of the world's inanimate building blocks at its very foundation. But its restrictions were severe. Whatever he tried to manipulate required precise knowledge of composition and structure: bonds, alignments, configurations. Insufficient understanding either produced no effect or caused unstable alterations that collapsed under physical laws.
"You mentioned that even you couldn't hope to memorize or instantly identify the sheer amount of quantum and subatomic possibilities in the world it'd take to make use of that ability to its fullest," Sauer had reminded him. "I don't think anybody can."
"That's the case, yes," he had answered. Then he tapped the side of his head with two fingers. "But something I do have… is my gift to process present information."
"I think that makes sense, but what does that have to do with my authority screwing me over?"
"The thing is, something I found wasn't common, was the belief that, despite the limitations, your authority always works in your favor."
"In… my favor?"
"It might look like it never gives you what you want, but it evolves and constrains you to optimize your strength."
"That's what you think everyone needs? Faith in their authority? I'd expect most Eminents would embrace that if it were true."
"You'd think so, but it wasn't a common mentality. I realized, over time, that even without perfect knowledge of whatever I touched, I began to perceive a pattern underlying all matter of creation. Something I never would have seen relying only on raw knowledge. Once I trusted that pattern, it became easier to alter even unfamiliar elements."
Later, Sauer stood alone, his blade angled to the starry canopy, as if searching for an answer in its cold light. He wondered if his Own Market might one day grant him the same favor it gave others.
Whether his heart would learn to cherish him as much as it so easily bartered him away.
Their nights by the campfire, under a world engulfed in stars, went on like that for two more years, broken only by Sauer's occasional training sessions.
The firelight would flicker against stone and shadow, their small circle of warmth surrounded by a sky that seemed endless, sharp with constellations.
Though his benefactor never once revealed why he lingered in such a boundary, alone and detached from all else, Sauer never asked. Neither did he care. Their silence was not heavy; it was simply the way of things.
When at last they reached the vacant portal, they found it dark and lifeless, its frame towering like a relic. There was no terminal, no mechanism to command it.
Only then did it become clear that the portal could only be activated from the far side, designed to guard against intrusion from the unknown.
It was decided they would rest before attempting to unravel the problem. The fire crackled weakly at their feet, the stars looking on with cold indifference.
Hours later, half-asleep, Sauer stirred to voices. They bled faintly into his drifting awareness, hazy and indistinct, yet enough to anchor him in that threshold between waking and dreaming.
He caught fragments of sentences, one voice fractured and unstable, breaking with static.
"<...expecting you to… so long… portal?>"
"Oliver? Who knew this chip could reach so far away? I can barely hear you though."
"<...made… afterall… location. I can… it remotel...>"
"If you're gonna do that anyway, try not to get caught."
"<...did you find… for?>"
"...I didn't."
That was all he heard, before his mind sank again into sleep's weight.
When he woke once more, the portal stood alive, its frame pulsing with a soft hum, and his benefactor was gone, as if he had never been there at all.
All Sauer could sense in that moment was the weight of his blade; it had grown heavier, yet somehow it still felt like an extension of him, natural and inevitable.
Returning through the portal, he discovered a cruel truth.
Everything he had endured on the other side, the pain, those rests under alien stars, the strange companionship he had cherished, had lasted no more than a heartbeat on Earth.
Worse still, after reporting most of his experience back in Stellavore, every trial, and his journey with the stranger who had become a quiet anchor for him, he learned that the squadmates he had tried to save at the cost of his own life had never returned.
They were gone, confirmed missing after exhaustive investigation.
He wanted to be angry at them. To hate them. To curse the injustice of his abandonment.
Instead, what remained was an ineffable emptiness, a quiet, heavy void that spoke of him and all his efforts as vain.
Yet even when his memories of the boundary were distilled into fragile, fleeting dreams to preserve his sanity and his semblance of humanity, the brightest flames remained unextinguished: his fear, his wonder, his gratitude, and all the lessons he had carved into himself. Nothing could take those from him.
"
Where Sauer had stood, there was now only devastation: a gash of molten earth that carved deep into the city, glowing rivers of stone bubbling upward as though the ground itself had been wounded.
The instant the blast had been unleashed, the evacuation zone convulsed. Reinforced walls buckled under a muffled thunder that clawed up from the depths, shaking the foundations. Compared to this, the earlier earthquakes felt trivial. Kenya staggered, gripping her earpiece, her pulse racing.
"
Silence.
"
"I'm fine. Stay in your position."
Relief broke over her, though unease lingered.
Meanwhile, Sauer clung to a red-hot length of rebar jutting from the fractured husk of a building. His hand smoked against the metal, but he held fast. His escape had not been clean, yet he had survive, through his Own Market.
In that infinitesimal breath between survival and erasure, his authority evolved and bent the rules.
He was able to wager everything.
Every instinctive option that could have led him elsewhere, every accidental stroke of fortune that might have intervened, and his very sovereignty over his body and mind. In their place, the execution of a single command.
Eight o'clock. As fast and far as possible.
He remembered nothing afterward, a consequence of bartering away his consciousness. Yet the result was undeniable: he now dangled from the metal beam, breath heavy but alive.
'So, you decided to save me this time. Though I can't be too relieved when there's nobody else here in danger.'
But the trade was not fully complete. Though Sauer's mind had returned, his body still refused him beyond the arm that kept him hanging. And the timing couldn't have been worse, the shadowbeast still had him in sight.
Adapting, as always, the crystals along its back pulsed with violent light.
Sauer released his grip, freefalling while waiting for his body to return.
The behemoth didn't relent. Its spines flared, blinking with a storm of concentrated energy that crystallized into countless needle-like projectiles. They tore forward, filling the air with a lattice of death.
'Not leaving me any room for the same trick again. I'll regain control before I hit the ground, but those spears will reach me first. My best option is to weave through them the moment I recover.'
Each needle maintained its form, piercing and burning anything in its path, their structure unyielding even as contact dimmed their glow.
'They have stable physical constructs. Meaning… I don't need color. I don't need brightness.'
Once again, Sauer bartered. He surrendered the luxuries of sight, brightness, contrast, color, detail, in exchange for something keener: omnidirectional awareness, widened peripheral vision, and motion sensitivity sharp enough to read trajectories like threads of fate.
It was all it took for the world to decelerate around him. Every tremor in space was registered in an instant, his mind mapping the trajectory of every fragment, every spear, with uncanny anticipation.
When a cluster of spears rushed to riddle him with holes, his muscles answered before thought could intervene. He twisted into the precise angle that spared him from even a graze.
The instant his feet met the ground, he surged forward. Blade gripped tight, wind tearing through his hair, and fragments of debris spiraling past in his wake.
The air screamed with streaks of light, merciless and unending. They lanced across every avenue toward the beast, yet his eyes held fast on the beast, and with motions bordering on effortless, he slipped between the fury of their assault.
In response, the behemoth charged to meet him, forsaking all semblance of tact for the primal violence of a headlong ram.
Sauer regarded it with the faintest trace of a smile.
With one of its legs destroyed, its movements lagged hopelessly behind, its reckless assault dripping with desperation.
"I'll respect your final gambit with my own. No tricks. I'm trading everything else to meet you head-on."
He surged forward, their trajectories locked.
The beast's maw gaped wide, snapping shut with a speed that promised annihilating force.
Sauer answered by driving his blade forward, the cut splitting the very air.
The impact warped the atmosphere, their clash detonating into a shockwave that thundered across the city.
Neither yielded. Dust, rubble, and wind were hurled outward, riding the gleaming wave of destruction radiating from their collision.
But then, without warning, Sauer's blade slipped through with no resistance.
He braced for a cunning counter, yet when his gaze locked on the beast's dimming eyes, disappointment whispered through him, an emotion he was ashamed of himself for feeling.
The fire in its gaze had gone out. The crystals upon its back dulled.
Its movements ceased entirely, and with a final collapsing step, its own weight crushed it. The fall shattered stone and rattled steel, the tremor rippling through the city.
Dust erupted in a choking tide, shrouding nearly a quarter of the skyline.
"<…Commander?>"
"It's dead."
"
"The shadowbeast has been neutralized."
"<...copy that.>"
Kenya felt she'd joked about something she shouldn't have. Though her words had too accurate for her to know exactly why. But his strange tone made her relent.
Sauer sank down before the beast's fallen snout, chest convulsing, each ragged breath spilling as steam into the air.
Blood clung to his skin, streaked and dried, the residue of driving himself past every conceivable limit.
As the tremors faded and the ruins stilled, the city fell beneath a silence as heavy as stone.