Each step across the cleared ground felt like a mile. The earth was hard-packed and bare, scoured of the life that choked the forest just behind him. Ali felt excruciatingly visible. The setting sun cast his long, thin shadow ahead of him, pointing like an accusing finger at the palisade gate.
He was close enough now to see details: the iron bands on the heavy timber gate, the blackened tips of the sharpened logs, a faded symbol carved into the lintel—a stylized mountain peak over a wavy line. Riverhold? Stone Creek? His mind supplied useless, generic fantasy names.
His focus, however, was dragged downward to his own chest. The bold, blood-red graphic of Commander Igris from Solo Leveling glared up from his hoodie, the demonic knight's stylized armor and fierce eyes a blast of pure, otherworldly anime aesthetic. In this world of rough wool, leather, and timber, it looked alien. Not just strange. Heretical. It was a symbol with no context, a silent shout in a language no one here could parse. Would they see a monster? A demon? A noble crest from a land of madness? He resisted the urge to pull his hood up and hide it—that would look even more suspicious.
He was fifty feet from the gate when movement flickered atop the palisade. A head appeared between two logs, topped with a simple iron helmet. Then another. They were watching him. No challenge was called. No arrows were nocked. The silence was more unnerving than a shout.
Twenty feet. He could smell woodsmoke and something richer—stew, maybe. His stomach clenched painfully.
He stopped ten feet from the gate, his heart hammering against Igris's crimson image. He raised his empty hands, palms out, the universal and probably futile gesture of I mean no harm.
"Hello?" he called out, his voice cracking on the single word. It sounded pathetic in the vast quiet.
For a long moment, nothing. Then, with a groan of wood and iron, a narrow view-port slit in the gate slid open. A single eye, pale and surrounded by weathered skin, peered out. It scanned him from head to toe—lingering on the bizarre hoodie graphic, the black pants, the crumbling bark shoes, the purple berry stains around his mouth and on his sleeves.
A voice grunted from behind the gate, speaking in a language that was guttural yet melodic, completely unfamiliar. It wasn't the common tongue of any game or anime he knew.
The System chimed in instantly.
[Language Detected: Unknown. Phonetic pattern suggests Low Nordenic or Alpine-derived root. Initiating baseline analysis. Full comprehension impossible without immersion.]
Before Ali could even process that, the voice spoke again, slower, as if to a simpleton. The speaker then switched to heavily accented, rough-edged words Ali could almost understand. It was like listening to English through thick fog.
"You. Boy. Speak. Where from? Why… here?" The words were separated, forced out.
Ali's mind blanked. Where from? My bedroom? Earth? The 21st century?
"I'm… lost," he said, speaking slowly and clearly, hoping the concept translated. "I was in the forest. I need… help. Food. Shelter." He gestured weakly to his mouth, then hugged his own shoulders, miming cold.
The eye blinked. There was a muttered conversation behind the gate, two voices now. He caught snippets: "…no tribe mark…", "…skin too pale, sick?", "…that sigil… ill omen…"
The word 'sigil' made his blood run cold. They were talking about Igris.
The view-port slid shut with a final clack.
Ali stood there, abandoned. This was it. They would leave him to die on their doorstep. The 22% chance was about to become 100%.
But then, a new sound—the heavy thunk of a bar being lifted. The right side of the large gate swung inward, just enough for a single person to pass.
A man stood in the gap, blocking the warm, fire-lit interior from view. He was broad and thickly built, clad in a worn leather jerkin over a woolen tunic. His hair and beard were a grizzled mix of brown and gray. His eyes, the same pale ones from the view-port, held no warmth, only a deep, calculating weariness. In his hand, not raised in threat but held clearly ready, was a heavy woodcutter's axe.
He looked Ali up and down once more, his gaze a physical weight. "Come," he grunted in that broken dialect. "Slow. Hands where I see."
This was no welcome. It was an arrest.
Ali nodded, not trusting his voice. He stepped forward, crossing the threshold from the dying light of the wild into the torch-lit yard of the homestead.
The gate thudded shut behind him, the bar dropping back into place with a sound of finality.
He was inside. He had traded the vast, monster-filled wilderness for a small, walled world of unknown rules and a man with an axe. The man's eyes flicked again to the glaring red sigil on Ali's chest, his expression unreadable.
"I am Kaelen," the man said, the name solid and earthy, fitting the stones and logs around them. "You are in the Blackridge Steading. Now. You will speak. And you will explain that." He pointed the axe head, not at Ali's face, but directly at the eyes of Commander Igris.
The journey through the forest was over. The interrogation had begun.