María stared intently as the machine slowly filled the coffee cup, but there was no coffee in her mind, there was blood and suffering.
“Sarah!” she exclaimed when the surroundings changed from the disgusting, pulsating walls to the coolness of the evening on the rooftop of a building in the real world. At the same time, her thoughts of having failed her mission and dying in the darkness were replaced by joy at seeing her master in front of her.
Sarah turned her gaze away from Mica, drawn by her call, and her face clearly reflected emotions the opposite of what María had expected to see.
“María? What are you doing here!?” she exclaimed.
“I…” María hesitated. “I came to save you. To carry out the mission you gave me. I… I brought them together and…”
She stopped. The uncertainty in Sarah's expression only grew worse.
“María, I didn't give you any mission. In fact, I was certain I'd erased your…”
“Erased my…? My what?”
“Forget it,” Sarah said, turning her attention back to Mica. Hugo was already beside him, lifting him by the shoulders and calling his name increasingly loudly each time he failed to respond.
Now, standing in front of the coffee machine that had just caused the cup to overflow, María wondered what Sarah had meant. Could she really have believed that Sarah, her Master, her neighbor, her only friend, had been able to erase her memory? Why was that the first thing that came to mind? Maybe she simply meant that…
“Miss, your coffee,” a nurse said as she stopped the machine from spilling any more of the drink.
“S-Sorry,” María apologized, grabbed the cup, and hurried away, embarrassed.
“Thank you, kiddo,” said the police officer who took the cup inside the room where Mica, Tomás, and two other patients were staying. Of course, he wasn't her father; her father surely hadn't even realized that she hadn't spent the night at home. “I'll leave you alone for fifteen minutes while I go get a cigarette. Don't do anything crazy, okay?” the officer declared.
“How are you holding up, squire?” María asked Mica, who was still drowsy.
His only response was a nod. He looked exhausted, but he had been fighting to keep himself from falling asleep again, waiting for that brief moment of privacy. Now María felt guilty, as well as foolish, for taking longer than she should have to get the coffee the officer had asked for. That moment, while the officer watching over them smoked and Mica's mother went home to get more clothes and food, was the one they had been waiting for to talk. Mica's brother was still there, but he was fast asleep on the visitor's couch. The other two patients were there as well, but the trio hardly cared whether they overheard them. They were certain they would take the conversation as nothing more than a bunch of childish fantasies.
“Cat?” Mica whispered.
María shook her head and grew worried when Mica's eyes widened so much they looked as though they might pop out of their sockets.
“She isn't dead… We just… We just don't know where she is.”
“She didn't come back when we left the Dimension,” Tomás said from the bed beside them. He was covered in bandages and had a huge cast on his left leg, which rested elevated at a forty-five-degree angle. Unlike Mica, however, he looked as alive as he did any other day, despite Mica not having a single visible bandage.
“We have to… rescue her… Jacob…”
“Jacob didn't come out either. It's just you, me, Sarah, Hugo, and María,” Tomás revealed. “The three of us were attacked by an enormous monster. A warrior nearly five meters tall with armor as black as night. It knocked me out with one blow… That's why I don't know what happened to Jacob and Cat. But… But…”
María felt her stomach tighten when she heard Tomás's voice break. As Sarah's knight, she needed to do something to restore her squires' morale. Even though she herself felt devastated.
“Don't worry. I'll go with Sarah to the Dimension tonight and look for them.”
“No… We can't tru… Trust Sarah…” Mica protested as best his body allowed him.
“Do you dare doubt your Master?” María exclaimed, playing her role as a knight, even though she herself wasn't entirely sure whom to trust at that moment.
“Sarah is the… the culprit…”
“I don't think so, Mica,” Tomás interrupted before María could insult him. “Before the monster attacked us, Jacob said something about Rose. Well… We ran into James Howard and…”
“James?” María murmured. For some reason, she felt a kind of dizziness upon hearing his name.
“It turns out he was part of everything,” Tomás continued without paying attention to her reaction. “He was part of the Adventurers' Group along with me, Jacob, and… You,” he added, stopping before mentioning her, uncertainly.
Something inside María told her it was true, even though she couldn't remember it. Now it seemed true that her Master had…
“James mentioned that the traitor, that the Hunter, was a red-haired girl. It was…”
“Rose,” Mica said, his anger now overpowering his exhausted tone. “She made me fight Sarah… she… I'd forgotten… she…”
“You too?” María asked, unable to hide her interest. “You forgot things too?”
“Not just him. Me too. Jacob too. We only remembered when James told us. When… Oh, Mica,” Tomás interrupted himself.
“What?” Mica asked, worried by the boy's tone. “Hugo?”
“Hugo is fine. He came back with us safe and sound,” María clarified. “Right now he's with the police, along with Sarah. They arrested them after we brought them here. I hid when Sarah ordered me to. She asked me to watch over them.”
“Mica,” Tomás began once more. “Mica, your father… Your father is dead.”
At that precise moment, two police officers other than the one who had gone out to smoke entered in an obvious state of urgency.
“Affirmative,” one of them said, a short blonde woman with braided hair. “The girl matches Corvo's description.”
“This is Jeffrey,” the other one continued, a tall, thin man with an unfriendly face, speaking on a cell phone. “Chief, we found the girl. We can also confirm that the other two are alive and conscious.”
“Girl, we need you to come with us,” the officer said, approaching María, who easily dodged her and ran down the hallway.
“You two,” said the officer identified as Jeffrey, stepping aside to give his partner room to pursue María. “Stay here. Your escort will be back soon, and an officer will be here shortly to question you.”
“What is this mess!?” exclaimed Mica's mother, who had just reached the doorway of the room. “What kind of disrespect is this!? This is a hospital! My son needs to rest! Get out of here! Good-for-nothings! You're only good for harassing innocent children! You…”
And in the middle of his mother's tirade, Mica gave in to exhaustion and stress and fell asleep.
Mica's sleep was restless, filled with disconnected images and terrifying memories of recent events. But when his mind finally reached the perfect state of calm for rest, he dreamed of something he would later fail to remember completely, something that would remain hidden somewhere in his mind, just like the thousands of stories he constantly invented.
Mica dreamed of Karo, the legendary swordsman who had been the protagonist of his stories ever since he first wrote in that school writing contest, the one that made him want to pursue writing and for which his father had given him the pen that now held the spirit of his entire destiny. The swordsman who had lived through many different lives while Mica continued refining the details of his story. The swordsman who had once been gentle, who had once been savage, who had often been heroic, and who had rarely managed to find his happy ending. The swordsman who, for some reason rooted in Mica's subconscious, had his own face in the dream.
He dreamed of how young Karo lived naively and foolishly in his village, isolated from the reality that the world was ruled by Ryoko, the embodiment of darkness and evil, unaware of all the threats lurking over human life, humans who were seen as nothing more than livestock by creatures of darkness. Until his village was razed by one of those demons. The demon who would later reveal his name to him as Tolmoch, when Karo grew up with the sword in which his father had sealed the demon's soul to save him, at the cost of his own life and that of the village. The demon who made him swear to become a warrior and eradicate every trace of evil from the world.
Mica's mind didn't dwell on every detail of Karo's training, nor on how he defeated the four Alpha Demonius to destroy the four Atem crystals and banish the four plagues that tormented his planet. But it did focus on how Karo met his traveling companions. In Kawa, a young militiaman who took nothing seriously until it was time to fight for the lives of his loved ones and who died in battle much later while trying to save Karo without him ever knowing. In Tenodecia, the priestess Karo had to save from her own people, who exploited her magical blessings for their own benefit while ignoring how they were slowly killing her. The girl Karo later discovered was his sister. His two most cherished friends, whom he had to abandon when he decided to embrace his curse, join his soul with Tolmoch's, and abandon his humanity in order to confront the absolute evil represented by Ryoko face-to-face.
The dream became a nightmare once again when Karo had to enter the Inverted Castle as the force of nature he had now become, only to encounter his nemesis and discover that he was using his father's body as a vessel through which to manifest in the world. His final challenge was to fight evil itself while it looked and sounded like the person he had loved most, the person for whom he had begun his journey of revenge, while at the same time using Tenodecia as bait, leaving her bleeding throughout the entire encounter.
Although the dream depicted the confrontation in detail, it did so at an accelerated pace, as if it wanted to hurry toward the part that mattered, the part it wanted Mica to remember, the one that would make him feel happy at some moments and melancholic at others. On Septondra, the planet of this imaginary world, no one had enjoyed rain, sunlight, or even clean air for hundreds of years. That day, after the four plagues had been eliminated and Ryoko exiled from the material plane, Tenodecia left the ruins of the Inverted Castle and found herself in an almost endless field of grass as green as she had ever seen, covered in fresh morning dew and nourished by the rays of a brilliant sun. On the horizon, an almost unreal display of colors adorned the sky in the shape of an arc. There, in that moment, a spring breeze shook Tenodecia's hair and took the opportunity to dry the tears on her cheeks, caused by knowing that she would never be able to enjoy that scene with her friends.
That wind was Karo—or rather, what little remained of his human soul, returning to nature after his cursed body ceased to exist so that he could free his world from darkness, just as he had always intended.