Daren was annoyingly handsome.

For Kai, the physical details hadn’t really made much of an impression while he played the game—while the characters in Shattered Vows Online were highly detailed, they all had that uncanny "it’s not real" quality of a game character. It was very different when he was standing across a crowded street from the handsome bastard, grinning like an idiot at him and waving like he was excited to see him, with that easygoing charm in his smile.

Daren was tall. Built. His hair hung carelessly across his brow, dark and sleek and obviously not effortless. The kind of looks that made women trust him on sight.

Kai almost felt sorry for him for about three seconds.

And then he remembered how much he hated betraying the man in the first place—the sixty-eight percent complete betrayal file, the cracked heart icon on Lyra’s Corruption Meter and the way he had been sitting in his room trying to avoid the scene where the man’s life would be ruined by a traitor for exactly twenty minutes—and the pity was replaced by a strange sort of shame.

"Kai!" Daren jogged over, smacking him in the back of the shoulder in what he supposed was the world’s equivalent of a hug. "What are you doing sitting on the ground? You look like you’ve been hit by a cart."

"I did," Kai muttered.

The sound of the market buzzed around him—hustle and shouts and noise that somehow still had clarity, the clang of metal somewhere in the distance, smells of cooking meat and horses, and that soft hint of flowers that he noticed after waking up. He was aware of how much detail everything had, and how it made his chest feel oddly tight when he thought about it, so he didn’t.

He didn’t think about it anymore.

There was an almost imperceptible blue outline of Daren’s shape, a little bit hard to see and only obvious because he knew it was there. Over his head:

> **DAREN** — Main Protagonist

> Relationship Status: LYRA ❤️ 847/1000

> Mood: Cheerful

> Active Flags: 3 / Pending: 2

Kai stared at the floating text for a second.

Right. Of course he saw the game UI layered over the real world. That went with having an NPC quest log. And of course that relationship meter floating over a living human’s head had him calculating all the ways the numbers could get lower. Eight-hundred and forty-seven over a thousand, and not even particularly high looking. It was like watching the end credits roll.

"You zoned out on me again?" Daren said, looking at him like he expected it. The sort of familiar frustration he only got after knowing a certain type of person for a long time. "Lyra is waiting for us in the cloth market. You’re supposed to take her there in twenty minutes."

There it was. First flag out of three required for the quest. Dialogue prompt: Confirm meetup with Lyra.

Kai’s quest log glowed softly in the corner of his vision.

> Main Objective: Escort DAREN to LYRA’s meeting point

> Progress: 0/3 dialogue triggers achieved

> Time Remaining: 4:31:07

"Right," Kai said. "Lyra. Right."

"You’ve been eating?"

Kai could hear the warning in the question even before Daren started walking, moving like he already expected Kai to catch up. "Got that look."

"What look?"

"The one you get when you’ve forgotten to do normal things."

And somehow he found himself falling in beside Daren anyway, the marketplace unfolding around them as they walked — spices and clothes and jewelry and people yelling over the price of some item wrapped in brown paper, children dodging between the legs of the produce stall. Background NPCs. Non-player characters filling space and airtime. He knew this intellectually, but they were still here, breathing and talking, too specific for him to ignore anymore.

"So," Kai said carefully. "How are things. With Lyra."

His expression did something soft. The way he looked when everything in life was solid and simple. "Great. Actually really great. I think she’s been stressed by the work for the guild recently. She’s been more herself this week."

Kai kept his expression blank.

More herself. Corruption at ninety-one percent. Vorn having been at work on dismantling everything Daren thought he knew for the last three weeks now. And Daren stood there, interpreting her return as a sign she was finally herself again.

The quest log flashed again. Flag number 1 of 3 was activated: Lyra’s status checked off.

"That’s good," Kai murmured. "Glad she’s doing better."

He hated how easily the words came out.

As they turned another corner, they found themselves in the district of clothes and crowds thickened accordingly. Stalls offered fabrics in colors only possible in a setting of pure fantasy: deep magenta, impossible gold, blue that almost seemed alive and made Kai want to stare into it even more than usual. Daren was saying something about his commission but Kai paid half his attention to what he was being told and watched the other half of the world with bored interest.

And then he saw him.

Vorn.

There was no mistaking him. As always, the in-game character model was understated in its depiction of this man — no exaggeration whatsoever in any respect. Vorn stood on the opposite side of the street in front of him, resting against a stone pillar and radiating that same aura that marked him as someone watching rather than looking around aimlessly. Eyes of dark color flicked from one person to another with predatory calmness. Hands resting on chest, chin raised. There was no doubt about where his presence stopped and the empty spaces began.

At least, not at first.

Vorn had not spotted Kai yet. But his attention lingered on Daren for just two seconds before passing on to other people.

Kai felt ice creeping inside his stomach. Vorn had been an interesting antagonist in the game, worth praising from the safe distance of his computer. To have him in front of you twenty meters away, in a form that could feel things, to see those dark eyes take inventory of his unaware friend with a dispassionate efficiency—

"—Kai?"

Blinking, Kai looked up. Daren was watching him.

"You alright?"

"Yeah," Kai replied. "Sorry, thought I knew somebody."

Daren looked to where Kai had been looking. Vorn was nowhere to be found — easily slipping back into the crowd like he didn’t want to be seen.

"Hm." He shrugged. "C’mon, Lyra’s stall is just ahead there."

He led the way ahead as Kai paused for just one more second to stare at the empty pillar.

> Quest Log Updated

> Flag 2/3 Activated: VORN nearby.

> ⚠️ Reminder: VORN present in current zone.

Kai took a slow breath out. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

He had been working on jumping ahead to the part where Daren had lost everything for three weeks.

But standing there now, watching as the eyes moved over his friend’s face like it was all figured out already —

Kai couldn’t quite decide what he thought about that.

The timer continued counting down.