Chapter 103: A Streak of Green in the Fog

Hugo’s words left Eleonor squirming with something close to embarrassment. In her own heart, she’d genuinely had no idea anyone had been waiting on her at all.

"Forgive me, Cardinal Hugo. I had no idea it would be you, personally, waiting for me at Virelle’s border."

She bent at the waist, head dipping low in apology.

Hugo’s hands shot up at once, catching her gently by the shoulders before she could sink any deeper into the bow.

"There’s nothing to apologize for. Our invitation never actually specified that anyone would be stationed there to meet you."

"Though it isn’t written into procedure, it’s our custom to have a Guardian accompany a new candidate on her first journey to Virelle. Unfortunately, the nearest Guardian to your route, the one stationed here in Korven, isn’t currently available."

Luis and Arnold drifted closer, falling in beside Eleonor as the conversation continued, catching up on why she still hadn’t reached Virelle at all.

"I had no idea I was even meant to receive an escort from the Order," Eleonor admitted. She was still genuinely unfamiliar with how the Order’s own procedures worked.

Beside her, Luis nodded slowly, as if the detail had just resurfaced in his own memory, that someone from the Order should indeed have met them the moment they crossed out of Rippledale’s territory.

Hugo explained further. The Order had briefly considered mobilizing the Guardian stationed within Rippledale itself to escort her instead.

But Rippledale’s own territory sprawled across a scattered chain of islands, which would have put that Guardian far too distant from Eleonor’s actual route, one already running close to both Bravenheart’s border and Virelle itself.

Pulling a Guardian from so far inland to meet her there would have been wildly inefficient, leaving their actual post undefended for far too long, an unnecessary risk no one at the Order wanted to take.

Korven’s own Guardian, by contrast, sat in a far more sensible position, close enough to both Virelle’s territory and one of Rippledale’s own border cities to make the assignment practical.

"If I remember correctly, isn’t the Guardian assigned to Korven supposed to be Terectora, Cardinal Hugo?"

Luis posed the question directly, and Hugo nodded at once.

"That’s right. We’d planned to send him to meet you at the Rippledale border and escort you the rest of the way to Virelle. Unfortunately, our letter never reached him before he’d already left for somewhere else."

Hugo rubbed a hand across the back of his own neck as he said it, shaking his head, genuine frustration bleeding through at Terectora’s decision to vanish without a word to the Order.

"And of all the moments to leave, he chose to abandon Korven right as this was unfolding."

Cardinal Hugo went on to explain that if Terectora had simply stayed at his post, the damage done to Korven tonight might have been contained, minimized considerably, even though technically speaking, guarding the city had never fallen under the Order’s own obligations to begin with.

But the fact remained that Korven was home to a great many faithful followers of the goddess Lumielle, and that alone gave the Order every reason to treat their safety as a duty worth answering for.

"So how did the rest of you end up lost all the way out here, then? You should have had a clean path straight to Virelle’s border. What on earth pulled you toward Bravenheart’s territory instead?"

It was Hugo’s turn to press for an answer now, since by any reasonable measure, the distance they’d strayed made little sense at all, especially given that one of Rippledale’s own border cities should have sat closer to Virelle than this entire detour ever had.

Eleonor hesitated, something flickering uneasily across her face, as though she genuinely didn’t know how to answer honestly. She nudged Arnold’s elbow instead, a silent plea for him to field the question.

Arnold caught her eye, understanding immediately that she wanted some plausible cover story, and something more useful than the truth.

He said nothing at all. It was Luis who leaned forward first, filling the silence smoothly.

"About that. As you probably know, Cardinal Hugo, there was heavy rain and thick fog a few days back. We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere in it and ended up drifting toward Korven instead."

"Hmmph that would track. Virelle’s been sitting under a rainy season these past several days too. I heard from a few merchants passing through that they got turned around themselves, went missing for a stretch before finding their way back. Sounds like that storm hit harder than most."

Hugo accepted the explanation easily enough, having weathered the same rain himself for days, and it was entirely plausible that anyone could lose their bearings in weather that blinding.

Behind her back, Eleonor flashed Arnold a quick thumbs up, mouthing her approval, one eye closing in a quick, pleased wink.

"Nice save, Luis."

"Phew. Good thing Hugo didn’t say we got lost chasing something strange in the sky and just kept following it until we wandered all the way here."

"Miss Eleonor. Lower your voice. They’re all still standing right here."

Arnold hissed the correction under his breath, and the two of them fell quiet, careful now.

What Luis had told Hugo wasn’t entirely false. There had been fog. There had been rain, thick enough to blind them for stretches at a time. But that wasn’t the real reason they’d drifted this far off course, and Eleonor still found herself replaying the memory even now, unable to quite let it go.

A few nights before she’d ever crossed paths with Lucian and Jeanne, somewhere deep inside that fog, she’d glanced up through the carriage window and seen it.

A single point of green light, tearing silently across the sky above them, trailing a faint, luminous wake through the mist like something had torn a seam open in the dark itself and let a sliver of another world bleed through.

It moved with a grace that didn’t belong to any bird or beast, fast and sure, carving a path through the fog that seemed, for one impossible heartbeat, close enough to touch.

She hadn’t been able to make out its true shape, not clearly. All she’d caught was that color, an impossible, burning green, bright enough to throw faint shadows across the inside of the carriage as it passed overhead.

She hadn’t been the only one who’d seen it. More than a few of their own soldiers had caught sight of it too, Arnold and Hugo among them, every one of them drawn by the same sharp, electric pull of curiosity, the kind that made grown soldiers forget their orders entirely.

They’d followed it. Of course they had.

But the moment their column slowed to a halt, the light had surged away from them again, faster this time, veering off toward some new direction entirely, and the dense fog that had swallowed their carriage for hours simply lifted all at once, vanishing as though it had never been there, leaving them standing, disoriented, well inside Bravenheart’s own borders.

There was no way Eleonor could stand here and explain something that uncertain to this entire tent full of commanders. So she, Arnold, and Luis had quietly agreed, without ever needing to say it aloud, to bury that story and hand everyone a reason that actually made sense instead.

Before the conversation could drift any further, Flemming stepped directly in front of Eleonor, cutting Hugo off mid-sentence without so much as an apology.

His enormous hands rose, settling against both sides of her head, his expression shifting into something far more serious than it had been a moment before.

The whole tent seemed to hold its breath, more than one person silently wondering exactly what the Supreme Commander thought he was doing, especially once a faint thread of mana became visible, curling from his fingertips.

Eleonor held his gaze without flinching, her own expression settling into something equally serious.

Then Flemming’s hand twitched, sharp and sudden, as though something had just answered him back.

"So you really are carrying Sacred Mana, Princess Barbosa."

"That explains it. The first time I touched your head, I felt some other element clinging to your blood that had no business being there."

He turned his own palm over, studying it, a faint wisp of Light-aligned energy still clinging visibly to his skin.

"Tch. Here I thought your family line stopped at Spirit Masters. Didn’t expect that monster-taming gift had evolved into something sharper still, buried in Barbosa blood."

Eleonor allowed herself a smile, and for once, she let the comment land exactly the way it was meant, as genuine, grudging respect for her own strength.

Something in her chest eased at that, a quiet relief settling in now that she no longer had to keep working so hard to hide exactly what she was.

Flemming, as it turned out, hadn’t actually sensed her Sacred Mana the first time they’d met at all, only suspected something was off about her, which was exactly why he’d reached for her head to check in the first place.

Eleonor, well aware of what he was doing, had been deliberately suppressing it, keeping that part of herself buried before it could slip out too soon. But with Cardinal Hugo already here, already announcing it openly in front of everyone, there was little point left in hiding it any further.

"But are you really content choosing the Lumen element over what your family already carries? Doesn’t your line already hold the Spirit King’s own gift? Is even that still not enough to satisfy you?"