"You look alright, I think we should get moving then," a voice spoke before it changed directions.
"No, stop, wait!" another voice replied in turn. Higher pitched, indicating a female species. "I think… he looks familiar."
The young demon hunter still lay on the ground as his own body wrestled between a wave of dopamine that was prepared to reward his hyperactive behavior and a rivaling tsunami of adrenaline rushing up to punish him for it.
"Huh?" he spoke next as he got back up to his feet, outside the forsaken cell he was trapped in. His wrists were still chained up by the magnetic shackles, but after looking back at the remnants of the cell behind him, he was grateful that he had them on, atleast for absorbing all the incoming force from the ceiling before it kissed the floor and turned him into a squished bug. "Where is this place? Who are you people?"
His eyes observed the two figures in front of him, and felt relieved to meet the human duo in front of him. One of them had already turned his back on him. Based on the apparel worn by the two, he could identify them as battlemages, wearing matching dark blue robes lined with cyan-white fur edges complemented with glass vials and pocket-sized items dangling down from belts and pouches. The male one carried a large axe tipped with a sparkly gemstone while his sidekick held a staff missing the axe blade. Both their heads were colored in a stark opposite to his black hair – shaded in platinum blonde.
From these first impressions alone, it didn't bring regular inhabitants of the kingdom much difficulty in identifying these two wanderers as belonging to the Hon family, renowned for their natural resilience to cold environments, hence granting them beautiful fair skin and hair that reminded of the snowy ancestral homeland they hailed from.
The girl called out to her companion, with a significant visible age gap between them.
"Father, please wait," she called out to the middle-aged man sporting a stylish mustache and beard combination more suitable for younger men. "This survivor is different. I think I know him."
Really? You know me before I know myself?
Stepping closer, the girl's face transformed into her surprised expression.
"By the Divine above! Aren't you… Jinju? Jinju Wan?"
Huh?
His own name seemed very foreign to him now.
The Hon girl caught sight of the magnetic rings around his wrists and the runes on them. She was able to read them:
[ "Human, Wan Jinju, A-rank, High risk" ]
"Yes! You really are Jinju. You are him!" the female ice mage exclaimed. Jinju was too busy observing his own tiny reflection from the icy blue irises of her eyes, still too drunk on his bizarre combination of multiple emotions battling for supremacy inside his head. "Father, look. We found one of the Failed Heroes."
"The what? Failed Heroes?" Jinju the demon hunter didn't like the sound of that. He saw the Hon man approach his daughter, turning to him for more detailed answers. "Excuse me, but… Are you just going to walk away like that? I atleast owe you guys some thanks. And sorry to bother you with my questions, but I really need to assess the situation out here."
"What has happened?" the man took a glance at his daughter on account of calling him, and then to Jinju standing awkwardly with his wrists bound by the magnetic discs in front of him. "So you must be Jinju Wan, eh? Not that you look like the hero we remember, but hey… these Gargonian handtags say so," he pointed to the magnetic rings. "Nasty contraptions them, are. Sadly I don't have the necessary items to unlock it. If I did, you'd already be a free man, young lad."
"Uh-huh," Jinju nodded, borrowing a small moment of time to glance back at the cell he was stuck in, now turned into a pitch-black void that offered no scientific reasons. "Please guide me. Tell me what has happened so far. I'm lost. I've lost all my gear and I think I've lost my memories from my past, too," he lifted his arms a bit to show off the strange plain grey clothes he had found himself in since his awakening. "I know it's inconvenient for you two to have a new traveling partner, but for the least, please give me some answers about what is going on with the world. What brings you ice mages from the Hon dynasty out here in… whatever kind of dungeon this—."
The man held out a hand to tap on Jinju's shoulder, making him pause his lips from moving. Jinju's grey irises of his eyes now reflected off the calm, wise face of the Hon battlemage.
"Son, take a break. The world hasn't ended, so you need not worry. My name's Eolum Hon, and I was on a journey across the Gargonian Mountain Pass with my daughter Takira here. We usually travel to and from the Ichin Serko area and try to roam around any places of interest. It's a good thing that the Gargonians are no longer active," Eolum's eyes focused onto the magnetic rings around Jinju's wrists. "Or so we thought. Now, there are some things which even I don't have the answer to, young man. But all I can offer as a fact is this… we don't want to have any business with you, nor do we care about any survivors in this cave. The Gargonians were supposed to be extinct, but maybe the Council was wrong."
Gargonians? Mountains? A council?
Every new sentence pinned up a new mental note for Jinju Wan to think about.
"So we're inside a cave? Not a dungeon?"
"Wrong, my boy," Eolum removed his hand off the demon hunter's shoulder. "Like I said, I myself am struggling to bother with too many questions on my plate. It's better for you to find them yourself. Good luck on your path, and we'll continue on ours. Come, Takira, we are already running late behind schedule."
"But, father…" Takira spun around to keep up with Eolum's sudden unapologetic brisk walk away from Jinju. "He might be able to help us. He's that hero! That demon hunter fighting against…" She was now too far away to be audible correctly. Jinju began tailing them, as natural for someone with nowhere else to go and no one else to trust. At a closer distance, his ears picked up on the words again. "…all the other prisoners were in horrible condition. He can still fight. We just need to find a way to unlock his handcuffs."
"No, Taki, no!" her father replied with a tone of a scolding. "Can't you see? There's no way it can be him." His next words were certainly not what Jinju had expected but he felt that the Hon ice mage was not lying, "Jinju Wan and all of his party members died last month."
ns216.73.216.169da2
and then Add to home screen.