Chapter 29: Pleasant

On the penultimate day, Rauõr came to see her, his face stern. He stayed on the threshold, refusing to enter, and invited her to his hut. He served her roasted game, a savory stew, and returned her backpack, sword, and axe.

Then he announced that the orcs had attacked the Viking village below.

Never in the history of their clan had such a thing happened.

There were no fatalities, but several were injured. He would have to leave to help his people.

Before departing, he showed her how to care for the chickens and asked her to warn the boys—especially Argy. His white mage abilities would be indispensable.

Blanche returned to the barracks with a dull tension in her chest, like an invisible vise tightening with each step. The air felt heavier than usual, filled with an unusual silence, almost oppressive.

The familiar sounds—boots on the floor, muffled voices behind doors—reached her as if muted, distant, unreal.

The last day weighed on her more than expected. She had thought she was ready, that she had prepared herself, but nothing helped. Time itself seemed to stretch, each minute dragging behind it a thick exhaustion. The silence, initially soothing, became too vast, too wide, like an empty room from which one can no longer find the way out.

She missed her best friend with an almost painful intensity. It wasn’t just her laughter or her words, but her entire presence, the way she filled space and made it lighter. The absence left a precise hollow, impossible to ignore.

She missed that friend’s father even more. Kiyan…

Even her mother, though so often absent, was somewhat missed. That surprised her. It wasn’t a clear or tender kind of longing, but a diffuse emptiness, as if absence still called for some form of attachment, however fragile it might be.

So Blanche wandered through the corridors, without any real purpose, her hands sometimes clenched, sometimes limp. She moved mechanically, as if guided more by habit than by any true will. She felt as though she had become transparent, alien to everything around her.

She was no longer quite there.

Just a moving silhouette, a lost soul drifting through a place that was nevertheless familiar, struck head-on by a brutal, sharp, unambiguous loneliness—a loneliness that did not leave her, even when she closed her eyes.

She sighed, continued to drain, to fly, to cut the tip of her finger.

Every point gained was another barrier between her and certain death.

Fenrir did not appear. Not even a shadow, a breath, a vibration.

When the stats window finally appeared, she felt an almost painful relief.

Stats Acquired:

Strength +167

Agility +173

Speed +164

Wisdom +158

Intelligence +159

Drainage — Level 4

Flight — Level 4

Carnage — Level 3

Rest — Level 4

Swimming — Level 2

Objective Achieved!

Reward selection…

Aura — Level 1

Deception — Level 1

Fear — Level 1

She disturbed her familiar for a few explanations. Phoenix opened one eye, as if to say he had just been interrupted during a sacred nap.

Aura lets you see people’s colors, their intentions, their nature. The higher it is, the more masks you pierce. It’s more reliable than Deception—that one depends on the person’s rank. A king? You’d need level ten. Aura has no such problem.

“And how do I raise it?” she asked, already focused.

Aura? You look at someone. That’s it. Easy.

Deception only works if someone lies to you. So Aura first.

“And… Fear?”

He gave a predatory smile.

Ah. That one is magnificent. Terrifying. You can break someone from the inside. And at maximum level… kill them. Feed on their terror. Like Drainage.

But you need thinking beings. Orcs, for example. And time.

She stared at him, uncertain.

As if reading her thoughts, he said:

It’s normal for a demon. Hell exists to punish. And you… you are a black mage with a pure heart. Light only shines because it relies on shadow. Not like white mages: they seek the light to smother the darkness inside them.

She stayed silent for a moment. It was beautiful. Raw. Intense.

She had feared her demonic side at first, especially after Fenrir’s warnings.

But Phoenix had earned an ever-growing place in her trust. In a week, they had bonded as if it had been months.

Her sarcastic demon had just reassured her better than anyone else ever could. No doubt because he was the first to speak the truth without filters, without trying to soften it or steer it away from what it really was. With him, there were no pretenses, no excessive caution—only a raw kind of lucidity, sometimes biting, but strangely steady, like a cold hand pressed against a fever.

And above all, he was the first to laugh at her fears instead of ignoring them or tiptoeing around them with empty words. Where others fell silent, awkward and hesitant, or tried clumsily to protect her, he would dismantle them with a brief, almost insolent laugh, as if refusing to grant them more power than they deserved. He would catch them mid-air, turn them inside out, reduce them to what they truly were: shadows swollen by the mind.

That laughter, paradoxically, was not mocking her. It could be harsh, sometimes unsettling, but it carried something deeply grounded in it—a quiet certainty that none of it could truly break her. And in the way he stripped fear of its weight without ever denying it, Blanche found a strange form of stability, as if through him her anxieties lost a little of their substance.

With him, even chaos felt less threatening—not because it disappeared, but because it stopped being sacred.

She chose Aura. The most useful. The simplest. The least dangerous.

Deception would wait. Fear… too. Even if the prospect of a second deadly skill was delightfully tempting.

Tired but calm, she slid under the covers.

Phénix settled against her neck with a silent ease, as if he had always known the exact place where he could anchor the world around her.

He purred.

The sound, low and steady, vibrated against her skin like a living presence slipping directly beneath her thoughts. Each pulse seemed to dissolve a little of the weight she was carrying, as if her body was quietly relearning how to breathe. Everything grew more distant, more blurred, without truly vanishing—just enough to stop crushing her.

She closed her eyes briefly.

Phénix did not move. He remained there, steady, unchanging, like a fixed point in something that was beginning to waver. And within that strange stability, almost comforting despite its absurdity, she felt the decision form without resistance, like an obvious truth finally ceasing to struggle.

She validated her choice.

Then the world responded.

Then the warmth came—soft, enveloping, almost tender. It did not burn: it erased. An internal, diffuse light spreading beneath her skin, between her bones, into the very edges of her presence.

Phénix stayed against her until the very last moment.

Then Blanche dematerialized in a burst of gentle warmth.

It was not a violent disappearance, but a slow unraveling of matter, as if she were undoing herself without pain. Her outline dissolved into luminous particles, then into pure sensation, then into nothing more than a lingering trace of warmth in the air.

And when everything faded, only a dense silence remained, along with the fleeting impression that she had simply shifted into another plane of existence—without truly leaving this world, but no longer entirely within it.

Finally, something that felt like a mission’s end… and a pleasant one at that.