Both practiced how to use their **evergía**. Diana created small spheres of energy. Saga, for his part, only launched bursts at the metal of the training field, but they weren't powerful enough to damage it; they were still very weak. Well, not as weak as the hundred or so novices.
The morning after receiving their wooden plates, the sun filtered through the room's dirty window like a timid visitor. Diana was already awake, devouring the leftovers from the night before with the intensity of someone who fears food will disappear if she blinks. Saga watched her from the bed, his dark eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable.
"What?" Diana asked with her mouth full.
"Nothing. Just thinking."
"Thinking is your thing. My job is eating."
Saga smiled, that small smile that only she knew. Then he sat up and pointed at the window.
"The mission is delayed. Lara said we have a few weeks. Free days, common city missions, whatever."
Diana set down the empty bowl and looked at him with bright eyes.
"Free days? Can we... see the city? Really, I mean. Not just the market and the sewers, missions finding thieves or something else."
Saga hesitated for a moment. His mind calculated risks, probabilities, potential threats. But then he saw the expression on Diana's face —a mix of childish hope and fear of being rejected— and nodded.
"Yes. We can."
The following weeks were strange for both of them.
Diana, for the first time since Saga rescued her from the mob, began to make friends. They were recruits like them —clay and wood plates, mostly Neos, weak and scared— and she shared part of her earnings with them. A few coins here, some food there. Never much, but enough so those children wouldn't go to sleep on empty stomachs.
Saga watched her do it with a mix of frustration and something he didn't want to acknowledge.
One night, after Diana returned from distributing her earnings, he confronted her.
"You're wasting your money on nonsense," he said, his voice flat, without emotion. "Weak people who will die sooner or later on some mission. You should save. For equipment. For food. To survive."
Diana looked at him, her violet eyes shining with a light he hadn't seen before. Determination.
"I'll help them," she said, simply. "Whether they die or not. As long as I can, I'll help them."
"Why?"
"Because someone helped me when I was lying on the ground, waiting to die. And that someone was you."
Saga didn't know what to respond. He just nodded and looked away.
They went out to see the city.
And the reality of the real world was a brutal blow for Diana.
Megar wasn't just the skyscrapers and floating rocks she had seen from the window, wasn't just the city built on an ancient colossal battle cruiser from the age of ancient technology. It was also its back streets, its dark alleys, its poor neighborhoods where people slept piled up like merchandise. It was the blatant corruption of officials who stole the little the poor had. It was the daily murders that no one investigated, the bodies that appeared in ditches at dawn, the orphaned children begging on corners.
Diana walked in silence, her violet eyes recording every horror, every injustice. Her luminous skin flickered faintly, as if they too were shocked.
"All this... has it always been like this?" she finally asked.
"Yes," Saga responded, bluntly. "And worse. Much worse."
"And people accept it?"
"People survive. Accepting is part of surviving."
"Isn't this supposed to be a powerful and rich empire?"
"It is one of the largest and most powerful empires, but it's also one of the poorest. But I think in other places it's much worse."
Diana clenched her fists. Something inside her twisted, protested, refused to accept.
That night, when they returned to the guild, she distributed more money than usual among the families of fallen soldiers. Saga watched her do it from a distance, saying nothing.
Days passed. Diana kept distributing her earnings from jobs catching common thieves. Saga kept accumulating his, accepting dirty work —collections, threats, surveillance— to earn more.
The tension between them grew like a poisonous plant.
"You're still giving away your money," he reproached her one night, when she returned empty-handed. "It's foolish. You don't see the world as it really is."
"And how is it really?" Diana asked, defiant.
"Shitty. People are weak, selfish, stupid. Those who help die. Those who survive are the ones who learn not to help."
"Maybe the world is shitty," Diana responded, her voice trembling slightly. "But I believe there's hope. Or at least that's what I want to think. Because if there's no hope, what's the point of living?"
Saga looked at her for a long time. Then he turned around and got into bed without saying anything.
Diana stayed awake for a long time, staring at the moisture-stained ceiling, wondering if he was right.
The day arrived.
Diana's friends —those weak children she had helped— had gone ahead. The guild needed confirmation of the sighting, and they had been the first to volunteer, wanting to please Lara.
Saga and Diana were taken in a war vehicle along with dozens of other novices. The transport was a metallic beast with treads, its internal walls stained with dried blood from previous trips. They were packed like sardines in a can, feeling every jolt of the terrain through the metal seats.
They were left out in the open thirty kilometers from the city, in the middle of a grayish plain where the wind blew with desolate constancy. The sky was overcast, and a diffuse, depressing light illuminated the landscape of cracked earth and dry bushes.
"Survey the area," ordered the officer in charge, an elf man with a silver plate and scars all over his face. "Report anything. And don't do anything stupid."
Saga and Diana walked in silence, still arguing, their stances clashing like two blades that couldn't stop rubbing against each other.
"You still don't understand," Saga was saying. "Hope doesn't feed you. Hope doesn't protect you from the **Vacíos**. Hope doesn't pay for food."
"And your cynicism doesn't either," Diana responded. "At least I try to do something. You just criticize."
They separated to survey the area, each taking a different direction. Before leaving, Diana handed him the shield.
"Take it. For your protection."
"And you?"
"I'm a Strayder, remember? My skin is worth more than that piece of metal."
Saga hesitated, but accepted. Then they disappeared from sight among the low hills.
The village was called "Rock Flower."
When Diana arrived, the silence chilled her blood.
It wasn't a natural silence. It was the silence of death, that absolute emptiness left by massacres. The stone and wood houses were intact, but their doors hung open, swaying in the wind. In the central square, she found the bodies.
Three bronze plates torn apart, their armor broken as if it were paper, their bodies dismembered with a violence that took your breath away. And in front of them, the beast.
Ten meters of nightmare. An armored **Vacíos**, with plates of black matter covering its body like living armor. Its mouth was a perfect circle of rotating teeth that never stopped, and from its jaws emanated a dying, violet glow that promised annihilation.
Diana stood paralyzed.
It wasn't dog-sized. It wasn't even man-sized. It was a monster. A killer. Something that shouldn't be there.
The screams came then.
Her friends. The weak children she had helped. They came running from the other side of the village, their trembling weapons in their hands, their faces pale with terror. They hadn't seen the beast. They didn't know.
The **Vacíos** moved.
It was fast. Faster than a creature that size should be. Its tentacles scythed through the children like sickles, its rotating teeth tearing them apart before they could scream. Small bodies flew through the air. Young blood soaked the earth.
"NO!" Diana screamed.
But it was too late.
The beast turned toward her. Its multiple eyes —all black, all empty— found her. It charged at her, like a bull.
Diana tried to move, but her body wouldn't respond. Terror had paralyzed her, pinned her to the ground like a butterfly in a display case. The **Vacíos** slammed into her with the force of a train, throwing her through the facade of a stone church.
The world shattered into a thousand pieces.
Wood. Stone. Dust. Pain.
Diana fell among the rubble, her body screaming with every fiber. Broken ribs. Dislocated arm. Violet blood streaming from her forehead. Her luminous skin flickered faintly, like dying stars.
Through the cloud of dust, she saw the **Vacíos** approaching. Its jaws opened, and inside, a beam of deadly energy began to charge, a violet glow that grew and grew, promising the end.
Diana closed her eyes.
And felt relief.
Finally. Finally it would end. A shitty life in a shitty world. Saga was somewhat right. The world was shit. There was no hope. There was nothing.
*Let it end already.*
The beam never came.
A blue shield interposed itself between her and death.
Saga was there.
Standing, trembling, the metal shield raised before him. Blood streamed from his nose, a red thread falling onto his chin. His eyes were bloodshot, the veins in his neck marked like ropes under his skin. A blue, electric energy enveloped the shield, creating a trembling barrier that barely contained the **Vacíos**'s beam.
"GET UP, IDIOT!" he shouted, his voice torn with effort. "I know you think life is shit! And it is! But you can try to change it, like you say! Little by little! But you have to LIVE, Diana!"
The **Vacíos**'s beam impacted against the shield with implacable fury. Saga poured his **evergía** into the metal, strengthening it, making it more resistant. But it wasn't enough. The shield was beginning to heat up, to glow red-hot at the edges. It wouldn't last much longer.
"DIANA!" he shouted again, his voice breaking. "HELP ME! OR RUN! BUT DO SOMETHING, DAMN IT!"
His scream.
That heart-wrenching, desperate scream, that contained all the fear Saga never showed, all the pain he always hid, all the truth he never spoke.
It broke something in Diana.
Something that had been broken for months, dead for months, waiting for months.
She stood up.
The pain was immense —broken ribs, useless arm, blood flowing— but the rage was greater. A pure, clean rage that burned hotter than any fire. Rage at the **Vacíos**. Rage at the world. Rage at herself, for having given up.
Her luminous skin exploded with light. A faint light, her body healing for a few seconds.
Violet. An intense, deep violet that illuminated the entire destroyed church. Her **evergía** flowed like an unleashed river, meeting Saga's, mixing, merging.
Electric blue and organic violet.
Together.
They created a magenta field on the shield, a new, impossible color that not only blocked the **Vacíos**'s beam, but absorbed it, transformed it, made it their own.
"NOW!" Saga shouted.
"NOW!" Diana responded.
They ran.
The shield in front, the magenta energy protecting them, their bodies moving as one. They pierced through the **Vacíos** like a red-hot blade, the combined energy destroying it from within, disintegrating every cell of its being, every particle of its corrupt existence.
The beast roared —a sound that wasn't agony, a thousand voices screaming at once— and fell dead, its body almost completely destroyed.
Silence.
Only the wind. Only the ragged breathing of two children covered in black viscera, black blood, green viscous slime, and dust.
Saga fell to his knees. Then he let himself fall backward, staring at the gray sky, and began to laugh. A hysterical, broken laugh that was half crying, half liberation.
"I almost... almost lost you," he panted between laughs. "And I realized... I realized that I don't want to be in this world... without my naive assistant."
Diana looked at him. Her face was covered in her violet blood and black matter, her arm hanging useless, her broken ribs screaming with every breath. But for the first time in months, for the first time since her parents banished her, for the first time since she decided to die...
She smiled.
An authentic smile. A living smile.
She let herself fall next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, and cried. She cried all she hadn't cried. All the pain, all the rage, all the hope she had been refusing to feel.
"From today..." she whispered between sobs. "From today, I'll live. Not just exist. And I won't be so naive."
Saga put an arm over her shoulders, trembling, weak, but firm.
"Welcome to the world of the living, Diana. It sucks. But there's food."
She laughed through her tears.
The silver plates arrived an hour later.
Their armored vehicles surrounded the destroyed village, their headlights piercing the twilight gloom. In their transports, they carried dog-sized **Vacíos** —the ones initially reported, the ones that no longer mattered— and cleared more space around the **Vacíos** the children had killed.
The officer in charge, a gold plate, a lizard woman with impeccable armor and an icy gaze, observed the remains of the ten-meter **Vacíos** with an expression that could be surprise or simple professional curiosity.
"You two killed this?" she asked, her voice flat.
"Yes," Saga responded, still sitting on the ground, too exhausted to stand up.
The woman whistled. Low. Admiring.
"You're some lucky bastards. This is a real **Vacíos**. Medium level. It would have killed you both in seconds."
"It almost did," Diana murmured.
"But it didn't. It's good to have a Strayder as a companion, isn't it, boy?" the woman smiled, a cold, professional smile. "And for this pile of black meat, they'll pay you."
"Get up," she ordered. "And load that thing and collect your companions. The dead also deserve to go home."
Saga and Diana looked at each other. Then, with superhuman effort, they stood up. They loaded the bodies of the children who had died —Diana's friends, the ones she had tried to help— and put them in the vehicles.
At the guild, they weighed the remains of the **Vacíos**. They were paid an amount of money that surpassed everything they had earned in the previous two months combined. And they were promoted.
Saga took Diana to the guild infirmary. A dwarf doctor attended to them, introducing her to a strange chamber where they were scanned, just as the doctor with his **evergía** created a kind of scanner with his hands.
"Your Trityun root is fine, it didn't suffer much damage. Your **evergía** will recover slowly, as will your regeneration. It will take time, or you can buy medicine, but it's expensive. Or you can go on missions injured."
Saga bought her medicine to speed up the regeneration. The doctor handed him a box with everything needed inside.
"It'll take a few weeks, but remember, even though we're Neros and we regenerate, you're still children and need to be more careful. Until you become stronger and one day manage to regenerate in hours."
Back at the reception with Lara.
Bronze.
Now they were bronze plates.
They were given weapons, the most common assault rifle in the world, but with modifications.
"They're imperial rifles. They work as both common ammunition and plasma at the same time. They're only given to those who reach bronze, because giving these to low ranks is a waste of time. You can also imbue them with your own **evergía**, of course, if you have enough."
"Do they do anything against the **Vacíos**?" Saga asked with a look of uncertainty.
"Uh, depends on the **Vacíos**. For dogs, no. But they help a bit."
They took their weapons and went to the dining hall, then to sleep.
That night, in their room, Diana counted the few coins over and over. Not out of greed, but because she had something with which to help her companions. After all, Saga had paid for her medicine.
"It's not much money," she said. "We can't buy real equipment. Armor. Weapons. Food."
"Yes," Saga responded, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
Diana put the coins in her bag. Then she took a part —a generous part— and stood up.
"I'm going to..."
"I know," Saga interrupted. "To distribute."
She looked at him, defiant, expecting the reproach.
It didn't come.
"At least you don't want to die anymore," Saga said, without looking at her. "But if you keep giving away money, you won't eat much. I guess I'll have to give you some."
Diana blinked, surprised.
"What?"
"Better I buy cooking supplies and something to cook with. That way we cook here and don't spend so much in the dining hall, which charges a lot for the shit they call food. Gluttonous Strayder."
Diana felt something warm in her chest. Something she hadn't felt in a long time.
Affection.
She approached Saga's bed and sat on the edge.
"Saga."
"What?"
"I'm hungry."
He looked at her. Then he smiled. That small, genuine smile that only she knew.
"You're always hungry."
"It's my thing."
Saga sat up and grabbed his coin pouch.
"Let's go. There's a street food stall that's open all night. It's not great, but it's better than the dining hall."
They went out together into the Megar night, the city lights flickering above them, the floating rocks shining in the distance like impossible promises.
Two children. Covered in new and old scars. With the weight of recent death on their shoulders.
But alive.
Alive and walking.
Somewhere in the sky, among the floating rocks, a star flickered.
Or maybe it was just a ship.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was the universe acknowledging that, sometimes, two broken souls can hold each other up.