Chapter 4: The Gatefront Ruins Incident
Armed with Kale's equipment and a false sense of progress, Gara approached Gatefront Ruins as dawn painted the sky in shades of prophecy and warning. The leather armor felt solid against his back, the wooden shield comfortable in his grip. Fifty-two deaths had taught him caution, but they'd also taught him confidence—or at least its dangerous cousin, competence.
The ruins spread before him like a textbook example of medieval fortification—stone walls, wooden palisades, strategic chokepoints designed to funnel attackers into killing zones. But what stopped him cold weren't the defenses.
It was the defenders.
Three soldiers sat around a cook fire, sharing what looked like actual food from actual bowls. One of them laughed at something another had said—a genuine sound of amusement that carried no malice, no bloodlust, just the simple pleasure of company. They looked tired. Human. Like they'd rather be anywhere else but standing guard over ruins that held nothing worth protecting.
Gara's finger hovered over his sword hilt while his mind wrestled with a realization that shouldn't have surprised him but somehow did: these weren't just obstacles programmed to attack on sight. They were people doing a job they probably hated, following orders they might not understand, trying to survive in a world that seemed designed to kill everyone eventually.
"Do they have families?" he whispered to himself. "Kids waiting for them to come home? Parents who worry when they don't write?"
One of the soldiers looked up as if sensing his presence. Their eyes met across twenty meters of no-man's land—brown eyes, tired and alert and utterly human. The soldier's hand moved to his weapon, but there was no immediate aggression. Just caution. Professionalism.
A warning.
Gara tried sneaking. He lasted approximately four seconds before stepping on something that crunched with the enthusiasm of autumn leaves amplified by divine intervention. All three soldiers turned toward the sound, weapons drawn, moving with the coordinated precision of people who'd worked together long enough to trust each other with their lives.
"Tarnished!" one of them called. "Stand down! This area's under Lord Godrick's protection!"
Protection. Not conquest, not occupation. Protection. Like they genuinely believed they were doing something good.
"I don't want to fight you," Gara said, raising his hands to show empty palms. "I'm just passing through."
"Then pass through somewhere else," the lead soldier replied. His voice carried authority worn smooth by repetition—a sergeant, probably, used to giving orders that kept people alive. "This is a restricted area."
"What if I—"
The crossbow bolt sprouted from his shoulder before he finished the thought.
Pain exploded through him—real agony that drove him to his knees while his brain processed the fact that words weren't going to solve this problem. The soldiers were advancing, weapons ready, faces grim with the resignation of people doing an unpleasant but necessary job.
Gara rolled behind a broken wall as more bolts filled the air where his head had been. His shoulder screamed protest, but the wound was already closing—game logic made flesh, health regenerating because standing in combat for a few seconds apparently counted as 'resting.'
They're just doing their jobs, he thought as he drew his sword. They don't deserve to die for following orders.
A spear thrust through the gap he'd been hiding behind. The point missed his face by inches, close enough to part his hair and remind him that noble thoughts didn't stop sharp objects from making holes in people.
The fight was ugly, desperate, and entirely too real. These weren't programmed enemies with predictable attack patterns—they were soldiers with training, experience, and an annoying habit of working together to make his life difficult. They flanked him, covered each other's advances, and used the terrain like people who'd spent years learning how not to die in combat.
Gara died twice learning their tactics. The first death came from overextending—he'd committed to an attack that left him open to a spear thrust that punctured his lung and left him drowning in his own blood. The second death happened when he'd focused too hard on the sergeant and let one of the others get behind him with a dagger that found the gap between his ribs with surgical precision.
Death #55: Godrick Soldiers. Lung punctured. 3/10 - tactical error. Death #56: Godrick Soldiers. Backstabbed. 2/10 - tunnel vision kills.
Each time he respawned at the nearby Grace, closer to the ruins but further from innocence. Each time he returned, the soldiers reset to their positions as if the previous fights had never happened—but their eyes followed him with growing wariness.
"He keeps coming back," one of them muttered during his third approach. "How's he keep coming back?"
"Tarnished business," the sergeant replied. "Above our pay grade. Just do your job."
The third fight lasted longer. Gara had learned to use the ruins' layout against them, forcing them into single combat rather than coordinated assault. But learning tactics meant killing people—and when the sergeant finally fell to his sword, the man's last words hit like a physical blow.
"Grace... lost..."
The soldier's body dissolved into golden runes that flowed into Gara's skin like liquid sunlight. Power flooded through him—warm, intoxicating, addictive. His muscles strengthened, his reflexes sharpened, his mind cleared. The sensation was everything death was not—vital, energizing, triumphant.
And absolutely wrong.
Gara stumbled behind a wall and vomited until his stomach was empty, then kept retching until only bile came up. The runes still pulsed in his veins, still whispered promises of strength and capability, but they tasted like guilt and smelled like the moment someone stopped being a person and became a resource.
"Grace lost," he repeated, wiping his mouth with a shaking hand. "He said 'Grace lost.' Like he was disappointed. Like he knew he was failing something important."
The other two soldiers were calling for their sergeant, voices tight with worry that would soon become grief. They'd been friends, probably. Comrades who'd shared jokes and meals and the quiet terror of standing guard in a world full of things that wanted them dead.
And he'd killed one of them for runes.
"Site of Grace ahead," he muttered, spotting the golden light filtering through the ruins' central structure. "Time to... to find..."
The words died as he reached the crumbling courtyard where Grace burned like a beacon in a storm. But the light wasn't alone.
She stood beside the monument as if she'd been waiting for centuries—tall, ethereal, wrapped in shadows and starlight. Her face was pale as winter mornings, beautiful in the way that made poets weep and warriors question their purpose. One eye was closed, sealed by some ancient grief, but the other burned gold as molten metal.
Melina. The Kindling Maiden. The woman who would offer him partnership and power and probably a dozen other complications he wasn't ready to handle.
"Tarnished," she said, her voice carrying harmonics that made his bones vibrate. "I've been waiting for you."
Gara tried to speak and managed only a strangled sound that might have been greeting or apology. His social skills had never been great under normal circumstances. Standing in front of a supernatural entity while covered in someone else's blood wasn't exactly improving them.
"Is this like..." he started, then stopped. "Are we... I mean yes! To the deal! The horse deal! Not marriage!"
Melina's eye narrowed—a subtle shift that somehow conveyed volumes about his intelligence, his prospects, and his chances of surviving the next five minutes.
"You are... peculiar," she said after a pause that lasted approximately three geological epochs. "Most Tarnished show more composure when meeting their destined maiden."
"Sorry. It's been a rough day. Week. Lifetime."
She studied him with the intensity of someone reading a book written in a language she didn't quite recognize. Her gaze lingered on his clothes—still impossibly out of place—before moving to his hands, which were probably still shaking from the fight.
"You carry death heavily for one so early in his journey," she observed. "And you speak in riddles wrapped in apologies. But Grace has guided you here, and Grace is rarely wrong about such things."
She extended her hand, and power radiated from her touch like heat from a forge. "I offer you an accord. My guidance for your strength. My wisdom for your determination. And..."
Light erupted around them, golden and warm and alive. Through the radiance, Gara saw something that made his heart skip—a spectral horse with the head of a goat and eyes like distant stars.
"Torrent," he whispered, then louder: "Torrent!"
The spirit steed approached with cautious curiosity, nuzzling his outstretched hand with a snout that felt solid despite being made of moonlight and magic. This was real. The horse was real, the bond was real, everything was—
The vision hit like a sledgehammer to the skull.
He saw himself dying—not just the deaths he'd already experienced, but hundreds more. Thousands. Each one connected by golden threads that stretched across time and space, weaving a web of pain and persistence that defied understanding. And watching it all, from beyond the Erdtree's golden light, an eye the size of a mountain that saw everything and judged nothing.
But there was more. Details that weren't supposed to be there, visions that went beyond the standard maiden-greeting package. He saw the threads connecting not just his deaths but his resurrections, saw the way each return drained something from the world's foundation, saw—
"You saw something else."
Melina's voice cut through the vision like a blade through silk. She was staring at him with an intensity that made his skin crawl, her single eye burning with questions he couldn't answer without revealing everything.
"It wasn't a question," she added.
"I..." Gara swallowed hard, tasting copper and lies. "Just... afraid of horses. Bad experience as a kid. Fell off one at a county fair."
The silence stretched between them like a tightrope over an abyss. Melina's eye never left his face, reading every micro-expression, cataloging every tell.
"You lie," she said finally. "But you lie to protect something, not to harm. I can work with that. For now."
She stepped back, and Torrent solidified fully—no longer spectral, no longer questionable, but absolutely real and absolutely his. The horse whinnied softly, a sound like wind through summer grass, and Gara felt something in his chest crack open with relief.
"Thank you," he breathed, meaning it more than he'd meant anything since arriving in this impossible world.
"Don't thank me yet," Melina replied. "The road ahead will test everything you think you know about strength, about purpose, about the price of power. The Grace has marked you for something significant, Tarnished. I only pray you survive it."
She faded like smoke on the wind, leaving him alone with Torrent and the weight of secrets he couldn't share. But as he climbed onto the spirit steed's back and felt the familiar rush of movement and freedom, her voice drifted back from somewhere beyond sight.
"You will tell me the truth eventually. All Tarnished hide secrets. Yours... troubles the Grace itself."
Gara didn't respond. How could he? The truth was impossible—that he was a man from another world playing a game that had become real, armed with foreknowledge that felt more like curse than blessing. Instead, he focused on the simple joy of riding a magical horse through fields of golden grass, pretending for a moment that everything was normal.
But normal was a luxury he couldn't afford. Not when Grace itself found his existence troubling. Not when every death taught him something new about the cost of power. Not when the next challenge was already visible on the horizon—a lake that would soon erupt in dragon fire and teach him what real pain felt like.
Torrent's hooves drummed against earth that sparkled with residual magic, carrying them toward whatever fresh horror awaited in this beautiful, terrible world.
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