A Light Like Starlight
Wolfgar was crumpled into the corner of the bed. The sight of him pulled a sigh from my lips.
I'd already heard how he'd ended up this way. The ones who'd gone searching for me back then had been Wolfgar and Maria. The two of them had been circling the Jefran barony when they crossed paths with a mage.
A mage is a monster that even Dreygan can't touch.
At first they answered the mage's questions without resistance. Then everything changed. The mage decided he was going to drag Maria away by force.
Wolfgar and Maria fought back. Anyone would have. There was no telling what would happen once a mage took you. But a mage is not a being you can defy just because you want to.
The mage barely laid a hand on Maria. Instead, he thoroughly, methodically destroyed the boy standing beside her. He broke Wolfgar, and broke him again, and kept breaking him until Maria screamed that she would do anything if he would only stop.
Even then, Wolfgar had howled at her not to go. But his voice had been so terribly small. He himself had been too terrified of the mage to shout any louder. He knew that if he took any more of that punishment, there would be no coming back from it — and that knowledge had filled him with fear.
And that fear was what had shattered him.
The voice he hadn't been able to force out — the one that chose pain and self-preservation over saving Maria — had made him feel so wretched, so contemptible, that everything inside him had broken beyond repair. Guilt. Self-loathing. The sickening sense of his own patheticness. Those things cut far deeper than defeat. They take the legs out from under you.
I knew. I had lived through something like that myself. There had been a stretch of my life so frail and so pitiful that I couldn't even open my mouth to the likes of Trenba, who picked a fight with me every single day.
My eyes settled quietly on Wolfgar. Even with me standing there, his gaze had only flickered for a moment. After that, he held to his silence.
"Wolfgar. Are you afraid of the mage?"
"..."
No answer came. But his body flinched, just once. He'd suffered enough that a single word — mage — was enough to make him react. The mind can forget. The body never does.
But I knew better.
"No. That's not what you're afraid of."
It was the ugliness that had shown itself in him while Maria was being taken. The craving to live. The groveling. He'd come face to face with all of it, and he couldn't overcome the disgust he felt for himself.
"What you ought to be afraid of right now is yourself — lying on that bed all day like a pathetic wreck. Isn't that right?"
Wolfgar had collapsed. And yes, encouragement is what you give a person who's fallen. But encouragement is still someone else's help. To stand up on your own, you need a truth that cuts to the bone.
"What the hell do you think you're doing? Where did the Wolfgar go who charged at me so bravely, swearing he'd take on the Golden Coral?"
I hadn't built that deep a bond with Wolfgar. The time we'd spent together was barely two months, and most of that had been training side by side. But to me, he was a fellow disciple. He'd felt the same — that was why he'd gone looking for me with Maria without a second thought.
No answer came from him.
There was still time. I needed to find out where Maria had been taken, and where Dreygan had gone — there was no shortage of things I had to learn. Before I went hunting for any of that, I decided to catch my breath here, at Wolfgar's side.
I sank down on the edge of the bed and said nothing.
Why is the world so incapable of sitting still? Why do the people around me keep walking into one trial after another?
"...Haren."
I must have waited a long time. The sun was beginning to sink in the distance when Wolfgar's mouth finally opened.
"I'm not brave."
That was the first thing he'd said in who knew how long. He wrapped both arms around his face and curled in on himself.
"After they took Maria, I ran. I didn't go for help. I tucked my tail and ran."
His body trembled. You could see it on his face — the memory of himself, smashed to pieces, clawing through the dark as he fled.
"I'm no warrior. I was just a beast that doesn't know how to do anything but run when it's scared."
A thick, choking self-loathing sat in the air between us. I pulled a chair over slowly and sat down in front of it.
"Then don't run next time."
A simple solution. Maybe he hadn't expected it. Wolfgar froze, caught mid-motion.
"You ran this time. So next time, you make sure you don't. That's all."
"...I can't. I'll run again. I know I will."
Mages are terrifying. I'd gained that power myself, and even so, mages were still beings who stood in the high heavens.
"No. You won't."
I told him that next time, Wolfgar would not run.
"Wolfgar. You know now how much it hurts to run."
Running is an important way to stay alive. But there are moments in a person's life when you absolutely cannot run — moments when you have to stand and face what's coming, even if it costs you everything. Those trials arrive without warning, without mercy.
But Wolfgar had already been through that trial. And he'd already learned how much it hurt.
"Wolfgar. People aren't as weak as you think."
Sure, there would always be those who looked away and ran when the next trial came. But if that were all people were, this world would have fallen apart a long time ago.
Someone stands to protect their family. Someone stands for a friend. Someone stands for a lover — or for something even larger than that. There have always been people who found the courage to face what was coming.
And that was my goal, too. An age where anyone, strong or weak, could cry out for justice without shame. An age where that justice would not be ignored.
"People are strong. They bend under hardship, and bend again — but sooner or later, they turn around and face themselves."
Wolfgar regretted running. He was in pain over it. Anyone who has suffered that kind of pain grows stronger. They claw their way up so they never have to live through that day again.
"You're the same."
I gave his leg a couple of light pats.
"These days hurt so much that eventually, you'll get up on your own — just so you never have to go through them again."
And the Wolfgar of that day would be stronger than anyone.
"Wolfgar. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're not a brave warrior. Maybe you really are as weak as you say."
I stood up from my seat.
"But effort is something you can only give fully once you've understood how lacking, how weak you are. That's natural. That's how it works."
The rest was Wolfgar's to decide. All I could give him was words.
"The view you see when someone else stands you up is nothing like the view from your own two feet. So think it through."
Don't surrender to despair and throw the future away.
That was as far as I went. I left him with those words and walked out.
In the room, Wolfgar remained silent. But in those eyes that had held not even a flicker of life, a faint light now stirred — like a tiny star pinned against the night sky.
The Laoren Monster Hunter Guild. I looked up at the building I hadn't seen in so long and pressed a hand to the back of my neck.
I'd spent years of my life here. But after two years away, something about it felt strangely different. Still, there was no place where information gathered the way it did inside these walls.
Dreygan had left one day without warning, saying he'd become a mage's disciple. Thanks to that, nobody at the training center knew a thing about where he'd gone. He hadn't even said which direction he was headed.
If the training center had nothing, this was the only place left. Hoping there would be something useful waiting for me, I pushed the door open.
The usual racket filled the air. Then, one by one, the people who spotted me fell quiet.
"It's really him."
"The rookie who went missing."
"That's Haren. Haren. After everything that's happened, you can hardly call him a rookie anymore."
"He wasn't a rookie to begin with. He just came out of nowhere and made a name for himself."
"He used to be a cleaner."
Two years on, and plenty of them still remembered me. Part of that was the impression I'd left. Part of it was that the people connected to me had gone around asking after me.
I doubted any of them had information I could actually use. The person I'd come to find was someone else entirely.
"Haren! You're alive!"
Meryl, the guild's star receptionist, lit up with a bright smile and came forward to greet me. This was a woman who processed the deaths of monster hunters day after day. You'd think she'd be used to it by now — but people who vanished and then walked back through that door were rare enough that she looked genuinely overjoyed.
"It's been a while."
"Where have you been all this time? Everyone was so worried about you."
There was nothing but sincerity on her face. After all the trouble I'd caused, it made me feel guilty.
"I was training for a while."
"Training?"
"Yes. It was something I needed to do."
If I wanted to deal with my Mana Stone Sclerosis at the root, it had been necessary.
"Does that mean you'll be hunting again? Monsters have been turning up a lot more often lately."
Going back to taking down mid-sized beasts the way I used to — that was something I'd need eventually. It just wasn't the priority.
"Before that, could you call the Guildmaster for me?"
"There's no need to call."
A voice came from behind me. A man with a distinctly gentlemanly appearance was walking over, and the hunters around us quietly made themselves smaller. Cross the Guildmaster and guild life got hard. Of course they kept their heads down.
The Guildmaster, Laorio. A man I had bad blood with, if you could call it that.
"Have you come to repay your debt?"
Because of me, the Laoren branch had been forced to pay a mage in coin instead of a mana stone. I still owed the guild for that.
"Yes. I fully intend to pay that money back."
In practical terms, I had stolen the mana stone. That much was true.
"It's a relief you've come to pay, even if it is two years late. We never did recover the mana stone, after all."
"Regrettably, dying of Mana Stone Sclerosis is no longer in the cards."
"Is that so?"
Laorio didn't seem particularly concerned. The guild's money had been spent, and he was still this unbothered. Was it because he was certain I'd pay it all back someday? I couldn't tell. He'd always been a hard man to read.
"More importantly, the reason I came today—"
"You've come about Dreygan, I take it."
And then as now, he was a man who caught on fast.
"Follow me."
He turned his back and headed for the Guildmaster's office. That reaction. He definitely knew something.