The rest of the car ride was done in silence. Melmarc heard Dorthna's words loud and clear. He committed them to memory. But there was just something about it. He had sensed no dissonance in them, but with Uncle Dorthna, it could've been anything.

An [August Intruder]… Protector of worlds.

It was funny how even though he believed the words, he doubted them at the same time.

Protector of worlds.

He had felt like a protector of worlds when he'd held Ariadne down and decided that killing her was the answer to the problem. She had sinned against him, but killing her was not the punishment for the sin. It had been accumulative. Anji had stood witness against her, declaring her a consistent bully with no desire for change.

That coupled with her recurring sin against him was proof that she showed no remorse. She saw no wrong in her actions.

Crippling her for life or killing her had been the only punishment befitting. It saved the rest of the world from her, regardless of how little of the rest of the world would be saved.

It had all made perfect sense. That was how he had chosen to protect the world. Even as they had driven in silence, it had still made sense to him.

What was funny was the reason he had ended up crushing her shoulder blade. He had been distracted, then bored. He'd been having… fun was not the word, but what had been happening had been interesting to him to some degree.

Then he'd lost the interest. What he had done to her in the end had been punishment for the sake of punishment.

Is that the kind of protector I want to be?

His mother had driven him all the way to a house he did not recognize. She stepped out of the car quietly, and he did the same.

Melmarc remembered the house as the one that they had arrived in. Inside, Fendor was waiting for them. He took one look at them and knew that discussions were not favored.

"Home?" he had asked.

Melmarc's mother had nodded.

Like before, while the portal Fendor summoned had simply torn his mother away from the world, Melmarc's interface had required him to walk in.

In the split fraction of time between the time it took him to move from Brooklyn back home, he wondered if his mother had caught David Lee Swanda.

The portal released them into the backyard of their home. The garden was well cared for. If Uncle Dorthna wasn't caring for it, Melmarc's mother was.

"Have you ever paid attention to the pattern of the flowers?" his mother asked, obviously trying to make conversations.

Melmarc wasn't in the mood for conversations, he would rather stew in a corner and ponder on how exactly he could become a proper protector of worlds. But people, by value of the position they held in your life, deserved the best of you, even on your worst day. It was not something he had been taught or told. It was something he had learnt from watching Ark and his dad give him their best every day.

So, Melmarc nodded. "Blue flowers on one side and red on the other, but they're still touches of other colors among them."

His mother nodded as if he had passed some kind of a test.

"If you look at it from the roof, or with a drone," she said. "You'll see that the pattern draws out a symbol."

"We know," Melmarc said, looking at the plants. His mother was probably trying to distract him. He wondered if she knew that his mind was quiet again. The chaos only came in tense moments, usually violent moments.

They stayed until they were resolved.

His mother was giving him a surprised look. "We?" she asked.

"Me and Ark," Melmarc explained. "When we were kids, we climbed the roof because we had an argument on what the pattern drew out. I did a sketch, and he did a sketch. Then we climbed the roof to confirm."

"And where was I when all this was happening?" she asked in a tone Melmarc assumed most mothers used when they wanted to be sure that they were not responsible for the crime so that they could shout at the responsible party.

Melmarc shrugged. "At work… I think."

"And where was your uncle?"

He was the one that made us start trying to figure out the pattern.

Melmarc did not say that, though. "Probably in the living room or somewhere, can't be sure."

His mother pursed her lips. "And Ninra?"

"Shouting at us to get down," he answered with a fond smile as he remembered how panicked she was.

"I see." His mother looked at the garden. "Who was right in the end?"

"None of us," Melmarc answered. "But my sketch was the closest."

Dissonant.

"It was closer than Ark's, though," he muttered, correcting himself.

His mom cocked a brow at that.

Dissonant.

Melmarc groaned in annoyance. "None of our sketches were correct but we all agreed that Ark's was the farthest from the pattern than mine."

His mother had waited patiently through the entire thing. When Melmarc didn't say more, she spoke.

"Do you know why it's a pattern?"

Melmarc wanted to say because it added to the aesthetic. What was the point in a colorful garden if there were no patterns? Recent experience made him think better of it.

Anytime they wanted to go to the training hall, Uncle Dorthna brought them here. If his mother was asking questions like this, then there had to be something important about the garden. Something magical.

He threw his mind to the memory of the pattern and found it difficult to remember correctly. It had been one of those things that had been interesting until they had found the answer to it, then they had ignored it.

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"Because it's an enchantment of some kind?" he answered, not entirely sure. "Maybe a spell?"

His mother smiled. "You took your time to think on that one, didn't you?"

"It seemed important."

"Come have a look with me," his mother told him. Then she walked over to the back door and stood on the raised platform leading to it.

Melmarc joined her. He stood on the platform and looked out at the garden. It had been remade, like the rest of the house, to its original form after the attack from the [Player]s.

"Do you see anything?" his mother asked.

Aside from the patterns, he saw nothing.

He shook his head. "I don't."

"Would you like to know what the patterns are? Why they are there?"

"I would."

His mother nodded, still she said nothing. Instead, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and tapped around on it for a while. After a moment, there was a white canvas on the screen. With her finger, she drew on it. Black lines trailed after her finger as she drew.

When she was done, she looked down at it and nodded. She tilted the phone so that he could see it.

Melmarc looked. His memory sharpened when he saw the pattern. Looping curves and straight lines. It was the pattern he and Ark had seen as children.

"What does it mean?" he asked.

She chuckled, then shrugged, shaking her head. "No idea."

That was enough to get a reaction out of him. Melmarc looked at his mother, confused. "I don't get it. It's a pattern that you can draw from memory. A pattern that you made the garden into."

She nodded, smiling. "Do you know that there's a spot upstairs, from my and your father's room where we can see the whole garden from?"

Melmarc guessed it was possible. Now that he thought about it, it was. But he and Ark had never looked down at the garden for all the times they'd gone to their parent's room.

"Ninra spotted it before she was ten," his mother continued. "Saw it and just couldn't stop talking about it." She looked to the sky. "One of the few times I've seen your father really smile, like really smile. He'd even laughed."

Melmarc had seen his father smile a few times but not a lot. He'd never seen him actually laugh.

"Whatever the pattern is," his mother continued, "your father's probably the only person that knows it."

"You people always said that he had no hand in the garden," Melmarc said.

"He didn't," his mother confirmed. "The garden's all me. Planting it in the form of the pattern is also all me. The thing is, when I met your father, he was nerdy, and all his books had that pattern scribbled on it."

Melmarc's phone vibrated inside his pocket. He ignored it.

"And you never asked?" he said.

"Growing up the way I did, you learn that you don't have to ask about everything. There are some things that you simply accept, especially when you know that it's very important to the person. Your father used to read a lot and do a lot. Whenever he got… overwhelmed, he'd draw that pattern over and over and over again. Tore some of his books doing it, too." Her smile widened a little. "It was cute. Then he became an Oath."

"It became obsessive?" Melmarc could see the pattern becoming obsessive if his father went through the same thing that he went through when the trait took him.

"The opposite, actually," she said. Her smile weakened. "He stopped doing it. Stopped bothering. Then he grew silent, and silent. He spoke less, and less." Her smile disappeared. "He laughed not at all. Your father was never very expressive, but he was expressive."

Melmarc nodded slowly. He could see the trait doing that to a person.

"Do you know why your father's words are so few and so precise?" she asked.

"Control," Melmarc answered.

His mother smiled sadly. "Yes. As it was explained to me, if he lets his control slip for even a moment, things could go terribly wrong. So, he picks and chooses and filters every single thing before he does or says them. On the outside he feels collected, but in there," she tapped her temple, "there's chaos."

They fell into another moment of silence.

"But this," his mother gestured at the garden, breaking the silence. "This is one of my gifts to him. The day the garden was done, he just stood at the window for the entire day staring at it. We got called into work and he didn't even budge." She smiled again. "He just stood there, staring, drawing the exact pattern on the window with his finger."

"He likes it," Melmarc said.

His mother nodded. "He does. It calms him, too." She placed a hand on his back. "When it gets too much—whatever goes on in his head—he looks at it. He just stands there, looks down at it, and draws a pattern with his finger. I don't know what it means to be mad, Mel, but I know what it means to have a desire so compulsive that it consumes you. Find your center, that one thing that keeps you grounded."

She looked to the garden. "For your father, it's this gift I gave him. For you, it could be anything at all. You just have to find it."

Melmarc nodded, knowing that there was nothing like that for him. It didn't mean that he could not make one.

"What happened to Swanda?" he asked, finally giving voice to the question. It had been on his mind for a long time.

His mother took her hand from his back. "We found him. He had safe houses scattered all over the place, actual residential areas with mothers and their children living inside. Naymond helped, though."

"Is he still alive?"

His mother nodded. "Yes."

"Are you going to kill him?"

She hesitated. "If you had asked me that a few hours ago, I would've had an answer. Now, I don't know. I told them to hand him over to your detective mentor after questioning him about the man he tried to sell you out to."

Melmarc returned his attention to the garden. Something about Swanda's end felt anti-climactic. There should've been more. Maybe it was because he hadn't been there.

"I'll leave you to think," his mother said, turning and walking towards the house. "I'm sure you have a lot on your mind."

Melmarc did, but he had one more question.

"When you're done," his mother continued, opening the back door with her key, "and your mind is settled, we can talk about making me an Oath again."

"Mom," he said, stopping her halfway into the door.

She looked back. "Yes, dear?"

"This," he gestured at the garden, "was dad's center. It helped him focus, calmed him down."

She nodded. "It was and it does."

"What's yours?"

"You know," she said with a fond smile. "I always assume that everyone can tell. You, your brother, your sister. I always assume that they take one look and just know."

Melmarc knew. "Dad?"

"Yes, dear," she confirmed. "It's your father."

She walked into the house and left Melmarc with his thoughts.

…

Alfa stared at the body in front of her. David wasn't quite dead, but he was definitely hanging by a thread. Battered and bruised, his body wasn't even bleeding. His lips were pale like someone who'd been out in the cold for too long. His hair stood on end as if he'd been electrocuted.

"You didn't even let him bleed," she muttered.

The lady sitting on one of the only couches still left standing in the entire house didn't look the least bit bothered.

As for Dantani, he stood in the corner with a hand on his belt buckle. Alfa knew that he was a swordsman but still had no idea where he kept his sword or swords.

Dantani had a frown on his face. "Didn't your records have him as a [Crafter]?"

Alfa nodded.

"And wasn't he an E-rank?" Dantani added.

Again, Alfa nodded.

"And wasn't his name David Swan?"

Alfa bit down on her lips before she snapped. She knew where he was going with all the questions. It was staring her right in the face, staring all of them right in their faces.

[David Lee Swanda (Wild Basher)(S)]

S-class. [Wild Basher].

A double-named class was unheard of. This was the first.

"Never seen a class with two names before," Dantani said. "Who's willing to bet that it's the first of its kind."

"I would take that bet," the woman on the couch said. "Sadly, I already know that a double name class isn't unheard of, it's just very rare. In Africa that class is referred to as a berserker class."

Alfa and Dantani looked at her.

The woman shrugged. "You're both a part of this now, so I don't mind telling you a few things you normally wouldn't know."

"A part of what?" Alfa said a little harshly. She still remembered what the woman had done to her and her team when Melmarc had still been in the portal. "I didn't sign up to be a part of anything."

The woman scoffed. "You were in charge of Melmarc when he ended up in a portal and you're still alive and well. Unharmed. Believe me, you answer to his mother now. Whether you like it or not."

"So she's the kind of person that abuses her power?"

"Nope," the lady sounded nonchalant. "It's just how things work. When you end up within the orbit of the powerful, you're just drawn to it. They don't do any drawing, it just happens."

Alfa wanted to disagree, to fight back, but she could feel it. Her life was going to change. the half-dead man with a changed class and rank and different name from what she knew was proof of that.

"What about me?" Dantani asked.

"Oh, you have the [Sage] to blame for your predicament," the lady answered. "Just pray you don't end up getting yourself killed. He's pulled you into something of a dangerous world."

A dangerous world.

Alfa had been in portals and had hunted down bad guys with classes.

But she'd never seen a person change rank by such a large gap, talk less of changing classes. This was supposed to be impossible.

Dangerous world it is.

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