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ArabicArknights: Soul Knights of Terra — Chapter 48
Chapter 48: The Distant Ideal Land
The biting wind of the Kazdel wasteland howled along the fringes of the encampment, carrying a harsh sting of coarse grit and ash. Vera and W walked in tandem through the desolate expanse. Unlike their usual marching formation, however, Vera found herself trailing a few paces behind the erratic mercenary.
“What is the matter with you?” Vera’s voice cut through the howling wind, flat and unamused. “Are you uncomfortable with someone following you?”
W’s footsteps faltered for a fraction of a second, a nearly imperceptible break in her rhythm, before she continued marching forward as if the wind had swallowed the question entirely.
Vera raised a delicate eyebrow. Given the red-haired Sarkaz’s volatile personality, she had fully expected an immediate, sharp-tongued retort. But since W refused to take the bait, Vera was more than happy to enjoy the rare peace.
She diverted a sliver of her focus inward, scanning the mental logs of the chat group. Gregor had been dead silent ever since he hastily retracted that ominous message: [Be careful.]
Vera kept her silence. Even the thick-skinned mercenaries back at the camp could tell she was radiating a foul mood. How could she not be aware of it herself?
Honestly, after Gregor had apologized, the sharp edge of her anger had dulled. They were just looking out for her safety, so what was there to genuinely hold a grudge over? The nameless fire still burning in the depths of her chest was not directed at Gregor or the others. It was directed entirely at herself.
“Are you quite done checking?” W’s voice abruptly shattered her introspection.
Vera shot her a displeased glare.
W let out a derisive scoff, turning around to cross her arms. “Checking the perimeter, I mean. Does the esteemed Employer want to take a good look at where we actually are?”
Vera blinked, her gaze sweeping the surroundings. Without realizing it, they had wandered a considerable distance into the barren wastes. Glancing back over her shoulder, the blazing campfire they had left behind was now nothing more than a blurry, flickering speck of orange against the distant horizon.
“…What exactly are you trying to do?” Vera’s expression frosted over. This lunatic had deliberately lured her out to the middle of nowhere; she absolutely harbored no good intentions.
“Nothing at all.” W spread her hands, plastering on a cloyingly innocent smile that did not reach her eyes. “It is just that there are some things… that aren’t exactly convenient to do back at the camp.”
“What kind of nonsense are you—”
Before Vera could finish her sentence—
Beep, beep, beep, beep—!!!
A shrill, rapid-fire electronic tone pierced the silent wilderness. It was a sound that made Vera’s scalp prickle with immediate danger.
[Time Stop Sound Effect]
The world froze. The swirling grit hung suspended in the dead air.
Vera moved with terrifying efficiency. She instantly summoned her little demon, her eyes sweeping every shadow and crevice of the frozen landscape.
‘Another bomb! This absolute lunatic! I knew nothing good would come of her dragging me out here!’
Finding nothing in the immediate environment, Vera’s confused gaze snapped back to W. Sure enough, strapped to the mercenary’s waist was a blasting device, its red light locked in a frozen flash, the digital countdown halted mid-tick.
Vera’s face darkened with sheer annoyance. Without a second thought, she reached out, ripped the device from W’s belt, and hurled it far into the desolate darkness.
Time resumed its relentless flow.
Beep—!
The moment the shrill warning vanished into the night, W instantly sensed the shift. She subconsciously slapped a hand to her waist, finding nothing but empty air.
“You had better…” Vera hissed, her voice dripping with lethal promise, “…give me a very reasonable explanation.”
“Explanation?” W tilted her head, acting as if she had just heard the punchline to a hilarious joke. She leisurely flicked her fingers, turning her back on Vera to stroll toward the distant darkness, the exact direction Vera had thrown the explosive.
Under Vera’s deeply suspicious glare, W crouched down and plucked the still-flashing device from the dirt.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk… I really didn’t expect this. The seemingly unfathomable Employer…” W sauntered back, waving the device in front of Vera’s face. Her expression twisted into a mask of undisguised mockery. “…turns out you are nothing but a coward?”
As she spoke, watching Vera’s expression shift into thunderous rage, W gripped the explosive with both hands. With a casual, fluid motion, she snapped the casing cleanly in half.
It was a dummy. Broken by bare hands. W faced Vera, her lips curling into an extremely malicious, silent sneer.
Vera stared at that infuriatingly smug face, her own expression turning utterly glacial.
“What. The. Hell. Are. You. Doing.”
Vera felt the fraying edges of her self-control snapping. She had an overwhelming urge to pin this red-haired cockroach to the dirt and grind her face into the wasteland gravel a hundred times over. The last time she had experienced this specific brand of homicidal exasperation, it had been directed at a certain Vampire roommate.
“Nothing~” W drew out the syllable, her tone dripping with that same playful, maddening cadence. “I just wanted to confirm a little theory of mine~”
As she spoke, her hand dipped to her waist again, producing a second, identical-looking bomb. She tossed it up and down in her palm like a toy.
“A good, bleeding-heart person like the Employer surely wouldn’t refuse a tiny request from her little employee, right?”
Veins throbbed visibly at Vera’s temple. Her fingers clamped down hard on the hilt of her sword.
“It seems my previous tolerance has given you a severe misconception about what I will put up with…”
[Time Stop Sound Effect]
The world halted. Vera bypassed the physical space between them in an instant. When time resumed, she was already standing flush against W’s side, the cold, razor-sharp edge of her longsword pressed intimately against the mercenary’s fragile neck.
“Do you really think,” Vera whispered, the steel biting just enough to threaten, “that I wouldn’t dare to kill you?”
“Ah, ah~ there it is. That is the feeling~”
Unexpectedly, W’s voice held absolutely zero fear. Instead, the blade at her throat seemed to elicit a deep sense of sheer boredom.
“Yes, that is exactly it… that overwhelming sense of incongruity.”
“What?” Vera frowned, the sword unwavering.
“The incongruity. The stench of it on you is far too strong…” W scoffed, her eyes half-lidded in disdain. “You are just like that woman, Ines. Pretending to be a Sarkaz, hiding among our ranks.”
W leaned slightly into the blade, uncaring. “But you have absolutely no idea how ridiculous your little disguise looks in the eyes of us real Sarkaz.”
“Is that so?” Vera’s voice dropped an octave, smooth and dangerous like a viper flicking its tongue. “Then should I praise your keen eyes? Perhaps after I sever your head from your shoulders, I can carve ‘W died from her own cleverness’ onto your tombstone?”
“Hahahahaha—!”
W suddenly erupted into a fit of exaggerated, breathless laughter, bending over so violently that Vera had to hastily adjust the angle of her blade to prevent the lunatic from accidentally slitting her own throat.
“What are you laughing at!?” Vera snapped.
“That!” W gasped, wiping a tear from her eye as she looked up. “That is exactly why I said your disguise is pathetic!”
The laughter died instantly, replaced by a hollow, chilling stare. “Where in Terra would a dead Sarkaz ever get a tombstone?”
Before Vera could fully process the heavy, bleeding truth behind those words, W’s expression shifted again. The manic amusement evaporated entirely.
“Ah, ah… Employer, just talking is so incredibly boring.”
W caught the explosive she had been tossing, her thumb resting deliberately over a mechanism on the casing. “Let’s… play a little game.”
With a soft click, the digital screen on the bomb illuminated. Bright red numbers flared to life, immediately beginning their rapid descent.
“This bomb… is, for, real.” W whispered, her eyes locking onto Vera’s. She tossed the armed explosive gently into the air, letting gravity take it. “Let’s test our courage~”
“Heh…” Vera sneered. “I could just leave. Even if this toy is real, the only one getting blown to pieces is you!”
“Is wasting time really okay?” W tilted her head, her smile a sickening blend of sweetness and malice. “The bomb… is going to explode~”
[Time Stop Sound Effect]
The red numbers froze a fraction of a second before zero. Vera stared at the suspended explosive, her mind making a split-second calculation.
‘It is probably another fake… She just wants to see me panic and look disheveled!’
W’s frozen posture was entirely relaxed. She held no detonator, no secondary trigger.
“Boring…” Vera muttered. She drove a brutal, unhesitating punch straight into W’s abdomen, then turned on her heel to walk back toward the camp.
The second time stop triggered.
Vera paused, her face an unreadable mask. She calmly walked back to the frozen mercenary, delivered a second, punishing blow to her gut, and then casually plucked the bomb from the air, hurling it as far into the wasteland as her enhanced strength allowed.
Time resumed its flow.
“Ugh!” W violently doubled over, a pained groan tearing from her throat as she clutched her abdomen, stumbling several steps backward.
Far in the distance, the thrown bomb hit zero.
Boom—!!!
The violent shockwave of the explosion ripped across the wasteland, a deafening roar that shook the earth. A blazing sphere of hellfire erupted, instantly illuminating the oppressive Kazdel night sky in a wash of blinding crimson.
“What!?”
Vera stared at the dazzling, expanding fireball, her face painted with absolute disbelief. She whipped her head around to stare at W.
W slowly lowered the hand clutching her bruised stomach. There was no shock on her face, no lingering fear of death. Instead, she wore a deeply morbid, satisfied smile.
“See…” W breathed out, her voice raspy. “I told you… you are nothing like us.”
“Are you sick in the head!?” Vera exploded, gesturing frantically at the distant inferno, her fingertips trembling with residual adrenaline. “Why would you gamble with your own life?! Even if you confirmed I am not a real Sarkaz, so what?! What possible good does this do for you!?”
W did not answer immediately. She simply let her legs give out, collapsing onto her back in the dirt. She stared up at the night sky of Kazdel, a sky forever choked by a suffocating layer of Originium haze.
After a long, heavy silence, she spoke. Her tone was stripped of its usual mocking lilt, replaced by an eerie, fragile calm.
“Tell me… why did you give that guy a name?”
“A name?” Vera was momentarily stunned, the whiplash of the conversation fueling her rising anger. “Is this why you are acting like a suicidal maniac? Over a simple name!?”
W chewed on the word, rolling it around in her mouth. “The ‘simple’ thing you speak of… is something the vast majority of Sarkaz will never obtain in their entire, miserable lives.”
Vera fell utterly silent.
A sudden realization washed over her. She thought back to the mercenaries in the camp, brutal men and women who only ever referred to one another by crude codenames, weapon types, or vulgar slurs. Now that she thought about it… she had rarely, if ever, heard a proper, genuine name that belonged to a person out here.
“Tell me…” Vera’s expression shifted into something incredibly strange. An absurd, almost laughable thought bubbled up in her mind, refusing to be suppressed. “You went through all this trouble, even risking your own life… could it be because… you are jealous?”
W’s body went rigidly stiff against the dirt.
The very next second, she shot up into a sitting position, her voice shrill and defensive. “Huh?! Jealous?! Me!? What kind of stupid, brain-dead nonsense are you spouting!?”
She scrambled to her feet, pointing a finger at her own chest. “I am not like that pathetic loser who doesn’t even have a name! My ‘W’! It was inherited from a very famous, dead mercenary! It is a codename, and a trophy! It is absolute proof of my power!”
Watching W’s desperate, frantic eagerness to defend herself, the deep sense of absurdity in Vera’s heart only grew heavier. Without thinking, she voiced the fatal flaw in the argument.
“Isn’t that still just a codename?”
W froze again. Her mouth hung slightly open, but the frantic words died in her throat.
She glared at Vera, a tempest of complex, agonizing emotions swirling in her eyes. But slowly, the storm died down. The manic energy drained away, settling into a hollow, nihilistic calm that carried an imperceptible, crushing weight of loss.
She slumped back down into the dirt, her voice muffled and small.
“What a pity…”
“What?” Vera stepped closer. She hadn’t heard clearly, or rather, she couldn’t decipher the sudden shift into nonsense.
W tilted her head back, turning her face to look up at Vera. The pale moonlight broke through the haze, illuminating half of her face. The madness, the mockery, the lethal edge, it was all gone. All that remained was a quiet, devastating self-mockery.
“I was still wondering…” W murmured softly, “…what kind of place could possibly raise a Sarkaz like you.”
Her gaze traced the lines of Vera’s face, as if searching for a mirage. ‘Able to smile so… beautifully.’
“In the end…” W turned her head away, staring back into the endless, suffocating darkness of the wasteland. When she spoke again, her voice was hollow, stripped of all hope. “That kind of place… doesn’t exist at all.”
That kind of soil, which could nurture someone like her.
Someone who would unconditionally hand out the supreme luxury of a name.
Someone who would so easily offer kindness and trust to strangers.
Someone who valued life, who refused to turn a blind eye to suffering.
The distant ideal land she had so desperately hoped for.
It didn’t exist.
“It exists.”
Under W’s wide, puzzled gaze, Vera closed the distance between them. She looked down at the broken mercenary, her voice ringing out with absolute, unwavering earnestness.
“That kind of place exists.”
The wind howled around them, but Vera’s words cut through the dark.
“That place… is my home.”