Chapter 255: The Lost Survivor

In the dim glow of the street, the ninja woman stood before him. The dark fabric of her clothes seemed to drink in the light of the distant torches. In one hand, she flicked a fan open and shut with lazy precision, as if bored by the tension weighing down the air.

“Evangeline?” Luke’s voice was low, wary. He had heard that name before, from Angelica herself. The memory struck sharp now, like an echo from the past.

She stepped forward. Her eyes were half-lidded, playful sparks glinting in them, an odd contrast to the knife-edge atmosphere. Instinct tightened his muscles. Luke pulled the bowstring back farther, the arrow aimed steady at her chest.

“Isn’t it obvious by now, idiot? I’m not with Bartholomew. You lived inside the Safe Zone for almost three weeks, your identity was discovered by me. If I were on his side, you’d have been exposed, or dead, a long time ago.”

His eyes narrowed.

“You still haven’t explained how you tracked me here,” he said flatly. “Not then, not at the market, even after I stripped off the tracker.”

Evangeline’s lips curved in a sly smile, as though she had been waiting for that exact question. A shadow cut across the night sky. A black crow descended with a smooth glide, perching neatly on her shoulder as if it had done so a thousand times.

“This is Jerry. My familiar.”

“Jerry!” the crow croaked, head cocking as its beady eyes fixed curiously on Luke.

A familiar. Of course.

“You didn’t need a tracker. That damned thing can follow me from the air,” he muttered.

“Exactly. I’ve known where you were since the first time we crossed paths. Jerry’s been tailing you ever since.”

Luke lowered the bow slightly, eyes locked on the bird. Jerry tilted its head back at him, unblinking. Then Luke’s grip shifted. He raised the bow again, this time, the arrow pointed straight at the crow.

“In that case, I just have to kill Jerry.”

“K-Kill Jerry?” the bird squawked, wings flaring in alarm before it clumsily fluttered off into the night.

Evangeline let out a long sigh, the sound of someone all too used to this kind of nonsense. “Fine, Jerry’s a coward. But he’ll come back eventually. And if you kill him, it’s a pain bringing him back to life.”

Luke studied her in silence for a long moment before lowering his bow once more, this time for real. Her presence was strange, layered with contradictions, but pieces of the puzzle he had been chasing were beginning to click into place.

“You’re from the first generation of this place?”

“Yes. I was eighteen when I got pulled into this tutorial. That was eight years ago. I was one of Bastion’s founders. When we entered the first fortress, there were fifty of us. We triggered a special event, fought hordes of Dead Watchmen led by a Midnight Warden. It was brutal. A massacre. In the end, only four of us survived. I was one of them, obviously.”

Her gaze hardened slightly, though her tone stayed light. “Noticed the parallel? Back then it was Wardens. Now, in the second fortress, we face another swarm, plus a Warden Captain. The difficulty’s scaled up. Like this world is adapting to us, or maybe to our stubbornness.”

Her eyes slid back to his, a playful spark returning. “So? You going to keep staring at a beautiful woman on your doorstep, or are you going to invite me in?”

Luke raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a house. And we’re standing in the middle of the street.”

“You still don’t trust me, do you?” she said, folding her arms.

“Can you blame me?” Luke’s voice was sharp. “We barely know each other.”

Evangeline closed her fan with deliberate calm. “Fair enough.”

She stepped closer. “But I know you well, Luke of Maine.”

In an instant, the bow was up again, the string tight, the arrow aimed straight at her chest. “How the hell do you know where I’m from?”

“Because a few months ago, Angelica came to me,” Evangeline replied smoothly. “She said someone named Luke from Maine had gone missing, and she asked for my help finding him. You vanished for a month and then showed up claiming you’d gotten lost in the orc forest. Ring any bells?”

The pieces fell quickly into place in his mind. That had been during the time he had tracked the renegades and ended up stranded deep in orc territory.

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“I owed Angelica a huge favor,” Evangeline went on. “One I could never repay in full. She helped me fake my death when I needed to disappear. So when she asked, I did as she wished. I started digging. To do that, I needed to know everything about you. Everything she could tell me. That way, I could trace your way of thinking. Angelica had a knack for reading people. She said you were an idiot, but not a bad one.”

She moved another step forward. “Then you came back from the dead out of that orc forest. I kept investigating, trying to figure out what had happened there. And somehow, that territory had… quieted. I had traveled through those lands before, and trust me, they were never peaceful.”

The fan flicked open again in her hand. “So I pushed further. I even went into the Orc Lord’s territory. First time in all these years I dared to do that. And then? I return, and I find out the ants invaded… and Angelica died.”

She closed the fan and took another slow step toward him. Luke shifted back, refusing to let her get too close.

“And I learn that Angelica’s killer was you. And that Paul had gone missing. Do you know what happened to him?”