Her breathing was heavy, with her eyes slowly sliding into tunnel vision when Allen put a hand on her shoulder causing her to raise her head.

He looked at her with his eyes facing hers. He could see she was blaming herself, it was quite obvious. Or at least he thought so.

He didn't really get it though. The threat was gone. The mission was still on. Blame was a waste of time.

If there had been someone to tell him, or if a system had a quirky personality like in some other novels he had read, it would have told him that he was doing just the same a few seconds ago.

But there was nothing of sorts to tell him that, hence his thoughts remained unchanged.

"It's fine," he said with his voice mostly flat. "You reacted. That's all that matters. I didn't see or hear them at all."

She looked at him with a little vulnerability in her eyes. It was slight, and really really ambiguous, the type of vulnerability people shows you when they do not want to show any vulnerability. It was rather paradoxical, but it was true.

"But we wouldn't have been in any risk if I had detected them sooner. They were just normal guards not even a highlander and yet I failed to detect them. How am I supposed to fight against a highlander if I'm like this?" she said, looking at Allen even though she was mostly mumbling to herself.

"You know, as I've said I don't really get the thing with highlanders and all and I'm still trying to kind of process all that information.

"But what I do know is that if you hadn't reacted in time we wouldn't have been able to dispose of them without having them make a scene and alert the others. Which would have caused our mission to fail.

"So no, do not feel like you did anything bad. It is quite the contrary actually, it is because of your quick reaction that we are still able to carry out this mission," Allen responded, looking at her directly while he spoke.

Well, I guess this is what I'm supposed to say. I hope I'm not making some kind of mistake here. Allen thought to himself.

The words he said to her were of course not genuine, and just fabricated to stop her from sulking as soon as possible and get back to the thing they are here to do.

It wasn't as if he was "evil" or trying to undermine Luna's feelings. It wasn't indifference either. He just did not care about it unless he had a reason to.

And currently the best course of action would be for Luna to get back in a bright mood, hence he said all that needed to be said to her.

Of course, this knowledge was also the culmination of hundreds of games and dozens of novels.

Still, it was a little strange. As he said those words, even though they were completely fabricated and bits and pieces that were taken out from countless pages of fiction.

He felt a sense of…melancholy as those words left his mouth. It was a weird sense of loneliness, yet comfort at the same time.

He didn't know what was causing it. He couldn't possibly know.

Maybe because they were the words that perhaps at some point in his life, he wanted someone to say to him?

Who knows. A lot of time had passed, and his memories were a cloudy mess. All that was left was a slight little unknown feeling, that he didn't recognize himself, despite it being something which arose from his own heart.

What an absolutely cruel thing it was, to be a foreigner to your own feelings.

But who knows, perhaps that all was just a wrong assumption. A weird sense of placebo effect. And that was really happening was just the freezing wind of the night hitting him and sending a chill up his spine.

Still, aside from that his words seemed to have worked on Luna. As after thinking about it for a minute or so she had stopped clenching her hands, and her breathing was stabilized.

"Thank you. I'm sorry I acted that way. It was unbecoming and unprofessional of me to do," she said, noting her mistake.

"It's fine. Things like that happen sometimes," Allen replied.

After Allen saw that she had finally stabilized he took a steadying breath and decided to get back to the main thing.

"Okay, so I've found it," he whispered. "The command tent. I still don't know the pinpoint location but it has to be in that clustered area, the one straight ahead of us."

"How do you know?" Luna asked. "There are three gates. Three possible areas as I said before."

"My familiar checked all three," Allen explained with now his eyes now turned toward darkness. "The other two gates were either connected to empty fields or tents that had long been abandoned. This is the only remaining area so it must be the one."

Luna looked at him with her eyes a little wide. "You saw all that? From just... looking?" She shook her head in the dark. "That familiar of yours is incredible. I've only read stories about magic like that."

There was a sense of happiness on her face. For just a moment, she looked like a little girl who had just found out her favourite fairy from the books was real.

Allen just nodded in response. "Finding it was the easy part," he muttered. "Getting to it will be hard though. There are a lots of patrol guards inside the walls and the soldiers are still awake around the fires. Walking through there unseen... yeah that's the real problem."

He went quiet, with his mind clearly working on a solution.

Luna was quiet too. Her gaze drifted from the distant campfires and around their surroundings as she tried to think up of something.

Then it moved back to the four bodies lying at their feet. The dark shapes were a grim reminder of their close call and how close they had gotten to failed mission.

Then something lit up in her mind.

"Allen," she whispered with her voice carrying a sense of urgency. She pointed at the dead soldiers. "I think I have an idea."

Allen frowned. "What do you mean?" He looked from her face down to the bodies and saw their dark, nondescript armor.

He saw their helmets and he saw the tabards that marked them as Randolf's men.

It took him a second but when his eyes widened a little as realization struck him.

"Oh. That's... that's not a bad idea at all."

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