The bar sat crooked beside a dusty roadside, not far from the outer trade routes leading toward Ashfall.

  Its walls were patched with mismatched sheets of metal. The sign above the door had lost half its letters years ago. Inside, the smell of alcohol, burnt oil, and overcooked meat clung to the air like permanent smoke.

  Raiden pushed through the door first.

  Two years had changed him.

  He was taller now, broader through the shoulders, and the bandage wrapped around his right arm no longer looked like a temporary wound dressing. It looked ritualistic, almost deliberate. Tsukito followed quietly behind him, older too, carrying himself with a calmer, quieter kind of strength.

  The world after the apocalypse had not killed them.

  It had sharpened them.

  Not enough.

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  But more than they had once been.

  They took seats at the counter.

  Tsukito sat on the right.

  Raiden dropped onto the stool beside him and immediately looked left.

  A middle-aged man was already there, eating stew in complete silence. He wore a worn traveler’s coat, and his face had the tired kindness of someone who had spent too many years surviving and not enough living.

  Raiden glanced at the bowl in front of him, then at the one he had already ordered.

  “Hey,” he asked casually, “the food here any good?”

  The man looked at him, then laughed softly.

  “If you’re hungry enough, anything tastes good.”

  Tsukito smiled faintly.

  Raiden nodded as if that were the wisdom of a king.

  “Good. Already ordered.”

  That was enough to start the conversation.

  The man’s name was Elias Routh.

  He was traveling east.

  He had a wife and daughter in a settlement near Ashfall.

  He was carrying an item to another city—some rare artifact, he said. The job had paid better than anything he had ever been offered. Enough to change his family’s life.

  He was nervous about the road.

  Raiden and Tsukito, who were looking for work and a direction forward anyway, looked capable enough to be useful.

  “Escort job,” Elias said. “Simple one, hopefully.”

  “Hopefully,” Tsukito repeated.

  Elias gave him an apologetic smile.

  “I know how that sounds.”

  Raiden leaned on the counter.

  “How much?”

  Tsukito let out a quiet sigh.

  “You could at least pretend to care if he lives.”

  “I do care,” Raiden said. “I care if he can pay us.”

  Elias laughed hard enough that he had to set his bowl down.

  And just like that, the deal began.

  None of them knew the artifact wrapped in cloth near Elias’s feet was humming faintly inside its wooden case.

  None of them knew the man who had hired him was a disguised Syndicate agent.

  None of them knew that by accepting the job, they had just stepped into the first shadow of something far larger than monsters.