Ryen walked.
Not aimlessly—never aimlessly. He had no destination, but each step forward was deliberate, calculated. Moving was a habit, just like watching. A habit that had kept him separate, hidden in the folds of the world where he was neither seen nor remembered.
But this time, something was different.
He was thinking too much.
The Kingdom of Hymns had left a mark on him, though he hated to admit it. He had been seen. Not just looked at, not just noticed—recognized. That single glance from the warrior had been heavier than any conversation, any confrontation. It was as if, for the first time in his life, someone had understood something about him before he had understood it himself.
It was unsettling.
He should have let it go. Should have buried it like all the other meaningless things that people held onto. He had spent years perfecting the art of indifference, and yet—
The warriors in the Kingdom of Hymns didn't fight like the desperate men in the underground. They didn't claw and scrape, didn't force themselves into something unnatural. They moved as if their bodies had never been burdened by struggle in the first place. Their strength wasn't something they fought for—it was something they already had. Something they had always known how to use.
And Ryen had recognized it.
Worse—he had resonated with it.
That was the part he couldn't shake.
The underground had never made him feel this way. It had been a game, a brutal one, but a game nonetheless. People fought for power, for survival, for something that was always slipping through their fingers. He had watched them break themselves for it, twisting their minds and bodies until they were unrecognizable.
But the warriors outside that world? They simply were.
And that truth was clawing at him in a way he didn't understand.
He was still moving. That was another problem.
He should have gone back to what was familiar—back to the places where he could watch from a distance. But instead, he kept finding himself drawn to places where warriors gathered. Not the ones who boasted, not the ones who fought for coin or glory, but the quiet ones.
A retired soldier in a village, splitting firewood with the same ease one would turn a page of a book.
A traveling swordsman at an inn, his posture so perfectly still that it was as if he had mastered the art of balance itself.
A former mercenary in a dusty town, teaching children how to stand, how to breathe, how to move—not to fight, but to exist within their own strength.
It was everywhere. In the way they walked, in the way they sat, in the way they carried themselves.
And Ryen hated how familiar it felt.
Because if it resonated with him, if he was drawn to it, if something inside him understood it—
Then what had he been all this time?
He had spent his life watching, analyzing, learning. But never once had he considered that he might be part of what he observed.
It made him restless. He didn't like it.
The moment he had been seen in the Kingdom of Hymns, he had left. That should have been the end of it. But here he was, still thinking about it, still feeling that weight of recognition pressing against him.
Recognition of what?
The road stretched out ahead of him, another nameless path, another village he wouldn't stay in long enough to be remembered.
For the first time, he wasn't sure if he was walking toward something—
Or running from it.