My eyes burst open.
And there she was. Standing before me as she held my hand, looking at me with fascination.
“Axure? Are you okay?” She spoke softer than usual.
I was frozen for a moment, realising what I had just gone through in my last life. Pathetic. Pathetic. How pathetic.
My racing heart slowly calmed its pace as I looked upon her face, realising the storm had left. But now something greater had invaded the stage. Another unknown variable.
Everything was stacking.
Problems were arising.
Just moments ago, I watched the princess of Vollaria get butchered in half with her powerful knight unable to even lift a finger. And the assailant was right behind me, killing me too. Someone else was here. Someone. No, that didn’t even feel like someone, it felt like something.
“Axure, Axure,” Nora let go of my hand and tapped my head, “seriously why did you suddenly just freeze? We were having a conversation a moment ago.”
I realised I had to keep all the equations in the back of my mind for now and act normal. In fact, that was the biggest issue I had right now because with the stacking of questions, I had just driven myself into a small hole of madness. I sure didn’t want to go back there again.
The feeling of helplessness, with nowhere to go. How foolish could I have been? I had just wasted a life away when I could have strategised with new findings on the table.
Let me just talk to Nora now.
“Oh, yeah thanks Nora,” I replied awkwardly.
“You’re welcome. I need to fulfill my duties now,” she said, turning back. But I grabbed her shoulders before she could do so, and decided it was worth a shot. But I couldn’t do it in a way where I would look suspicious.
Fuck it. It’s worth a shot. Better than running around like a headless chicken.
“Nora,” I looked at her intensely.
“I can’t tell whether you’re brave or just a moron sometimes,” she muttered looking at me with a blank expression.
“Can I go outside please?”
Seriously. It was like she was my mother.
“You’ve been doing that for the past few days, why are you asking now?” She asked.
“No, no. Like I mean, can I go out alone?”
“But why? What’s the difference?”
I had to be careful of my wording here, it just seemed like I was doing something suspicious. In all honesty, I wasn’t planning to just turn tail and run, but instead I thought it would be better if I just traversed Ballaad on my own and learnt directions, districts and just where things were.
That would definitely make it easier.
Escape was all about preparation and maybe I just hadn’t got the full frame yet.
If she was acting like my mother, then I would act like the child.
“Come on, I joined you and I’m helping you out. The least you can do is let me explore the city. You know I’ve never come here before.”
“It’s not safe-“
“You saw how I defended myself against those Aylanists. I’ll be fine.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she added so I held onto her shoulders even more, shaking her as I spoke.
“Listen, I’ll be back. I just want to go get my invention back from Lorenzo, and I’ll show you what it is too.”
“Why can you not go on a walk a little later? Zidane will be free in a few hours.”
Just how much do you not want me to leave Nora?
The more she spoke, the more it seemed like she may have been the reason I died by Zidane’s hands after my escape.
“We still have a few days left in Ballaad. You have time, it is not like anything will transpire.”
“Nora. I understand but-”
“Wait for Zidane’s return. I am now ordering you as the princess.”
Well fuck. Now her princess act decides to turn on when it’s me.
This woman was so fixated on keeping me close, and that desire may have increased when I showed her my usefulness back in the Aylanist attack.
“I’ll go stay in my room then.”I turned my back with no other reply and walked out. I needed to get out. But this time, I wasn’t going to do it to escape, I needed to investigate and go on a walk to clear all the new questions in my head. With the main one being, “What killed Sylvia?”
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Something was out there.
And it was targeting the royal family again.
I already knew the script, Nora for some reason today needed Laura’s personal assistance so she was out of the picture to even use. And Laura herself would not agree to leave either. Zidane.
Now he was my biggest issue. This man had caught onto all my theatrics. I had completely looked over his vision due to me categorising him so intently. He should have been training yes, but he now became a piece that worked on the opposite side with actual moves planned.
But what had triggered him to find me so quickly?
I thought for a moment, retracing my steps.
Two loops ago, I had pulled Laura out of the mansion, so Nora must have wondered where she had gone. Then that most likely led to her asking Zidane about it, with Zidane saying he saw the both of us leave. Okay then what?
Oh yes. How could I have been so foolish?
I had been so focused on escaping that I had disregarded that everything inside the walls were still moving. If I went by that framework, after Nora alerted Zidane, he must have gone to the shop knowing that’s where I went daily.
And he knew exactly where that was. And what do you know? Laura was probably sitting there, most likely telling him about what had transpired over the last few days. And she had definitely mentioned how we left the walls through a backdoor.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I had made a huge blunder.
I almost wanted to punch myself in the face, how could I have missed that? If my hypothesis was true, then I had been completely tunnel visioned for it wasn’t only I that moved on the board, but Zidane simultaneously moving with me.
There was a hole in my plan.
And that enraged me.
But that was fine, because this time if I left the mansion, I could easily convince Zidane if he found me again, because now I knew he was watching and worse case scenario, he would follow me.
I walked down the hallway, down the stairs and did in fact, not go to my room.
I went to look for Rumena, who usually trained in the garden but the only issue with her was that it was randomised so getting a time on that would help me a lot more.
I searched around the mansion, occasionally greeting the guards as I went by and finally found Rumena, laid back on a chair with her feet up on another, doing something I did not expect her to be doing.
“Rumena?”
“Oh, Axure. How ya been?”
“I saw you only an hour ago.”
“Well… yeah.”
“What are you reading?” I asked.
“This? This is called Mylan Techniques.”
“I didn’t think you’d be the reader type.”
“How rude of you,” she jested, “Well, training isn’t only about swinging your sword around like that one out there. Sometimes you have to sit and read. Understand a bit about what you can do with all this power.”
“So is this your training?”
“Kinda,” she said, still immersed in the book, “I’ll probably be goin out to the garden a bit to try out some of these techniques.”
That was all I needed. If I asked for specifics, I looked dodgy.
You see, with this plan of escape, it was fairly simple because I was in fact, not escaping. I was just leaving this darned place and it was also a test to see the scope of Zidane’s surveillance. How quickly would he notice I had gone missing? What would he do upon finding I had gone missing?
And if he found me in the end, I could just tell him I did tell Nora I wanted to leave. And because I would just be in the city anyway, I’m sure there’s no basis for him to actually do anything to me. It’s not like I actually escaped or fled the city walls.
You see, last time he killed me because I was outside of the public eye and moreover, I actually wanted to leave and accomplished that. This time, I was just in the city, doing nothing suspicious at all.
So, two birds with one stone. I would survey the city myself, and I would test Zidane’s observation and see how he thought. It was time for me to leave this place and I would do it in ridiculous fashion. I was going to climb the garden gates.
Rumena wasn’t around, however, there were maids watering the plants. But they were not guards. They didn’t have a duty to look in the corners for anything going on.
You see, over the past few days, I noticed that the guards had rotations.
Every hour, throughout the day, guards would patrol the mansion, switching over to different positions. Say one was guarding the front doors, after an hour, they would travel over to the hallway, and so the guard at the hallway would travel to another location and so on. So in a sense, they circulated. There would however, be one guard walking up and down occasionally outside the garden gates, which was my main issue.
However, that was an easy bypass because of the garden's fatal flaw. It was too big.
And not just that.
Guards were humans. Not robots. I had spoken to the main guard that patrolled the gates of the garden, and he had slyly told me while drunk, that he sometimes slacked off because Rumena was there a lot. And due to the garden being so big, he took time to walk around the whole perimeter. So using just my eye, I could watch him from afar and time my escape.
The mansion was also built like this: One huge rectangular block with gates surrounding the whole perimeter, including the lawn and the garden. The front gate was always open and the sides of the mansion were my best route. Why?
Because the width between the mansion wall and the gate was so small. But big enough for me to fit through. And due to it being the area with no bushes and plants, no maid would ever go there.
That was perfect for me.
All I had to do was slip into the side, and climb my way out.
And here I was, doing exactly just that. I spotted the guard, slowly walking all the way at the other side of the garden which would mean that it would take him a while to even get here. I had time. Using my human strength, I jumped as high as I could, grabbing onto the railing and pulled myself up. I had to be careful though, because the gates were designed like the Victorian era. There were spikes sitting at the top, so weaving my feet through the gaps, I took one leap down to the floor, making my escape.
I slowly crept by, walking away from the garden and reaching the road. I felt a chill, thinking that Zidane was nearby, so I walked far to the left side, going in front of another mansion eventually connecting with the canal. I kept my head low and waved for a boat to come by and luckily because of Nora, I had some coins to spare.
Jumping onto the boat, I sailed forth into the slums, hoping to find more within the walls of this giant prison.