"Revan...."

The sound came from deep within an impossibly far darkness.

Like a voice calling through deep water.

"...Revan."

With each call, the voice drew closer, the water thinning around it layer by layer until what bled through was unmistakably warm, unmistakably soft, unmistakably familiar.

"Revan. Hey. Revan."

A young girl’s voice, gentle in a way that made something inside his chest tighten without permission.

The kind of voice that spoke with a tenderness so natural it couldn’t have been practiced, the effortless warmth of someone who cared deeply and didn’t know how to hide it.

He knew this voice.

He was certain of it. The shape of it, the cadence, the way it wrapped around his name like it was something precious, all of it triggered a recognition that sat just below the surface of his consciousness, close enough to feel but too deep to reach.

For a moment, Revan let himself sink into it.

The pain was gone here.

Somewhere that didn’t matter, and this voice was the only thing that existed. He could stay. He could float in this warm, dark nothing and listen to her call his name forever and never have to open his eyes again.

But as the darkness began to swallow him whole, pulling him deeper into its bottomless embrace—

"WAKE UP! REVAN!"

The voice cracked into a scream so raw and so desperate that it tore through the void like a blade through cloth.

A little girl, howling his name with the kind of panic that only came from watching someone you loved slip away and being powerless to stop it.

Revan’s eyes snapped open.

"Revan von Alstaire, reporting for duty," he mumbled automatically, the words falling out of his mouth with the mechanical precision of a reflex that had been drilled into him over fifteen years of service.

His right hand twitched toward his chest in the start of a salute that died halfway through when his shoulder reminded him, violently, that it had a hole in it.

He blinked, and as his vision slowly focused, the ceiling above him came into view, rusted iron beams and raw stone stretching endlessly overhead.

"...Ah. Huh?"

He turned his head slowly, and the motion alone sent a wave of vertigo through his skull that made the world tilt sideways.

He was lying on a metal floor, corrugated iron that was rusted at every joint and cold enough against his back to feel like lying on a slab of ice.

The space around him stretched in every direction, impossibly vast, with iron beams arching overhead like the ribs of a dead giant and raw stone filling the gaps between them, natural rock fused so deeply with the industrial architecture that it was impossible to tell where the building ended and the mountain began.

Machines lined the far wall, their surfaces buried under decades of dust and mineral deposits, so still and lifeless that they looked like they’d been growing out of the concrete rather than bolted to it.

Pipes ran along the ceiling above them, some leaking a dark liquid that dripped steadily into shallow puddles on the floor, and through the fissures in the stone beyond, pale shafts of natural light bled in and fell across the corrugated iron like the last breath of a sky that had forgotten this place existed.

"...Eh? Am I still dreaming?"

His voice echoed through the cavernous space and came back to him thin and hollow.

And just as his body began to settle into the cold metal beneath him, the pain found him.

All of it. All at once.

Every injury he’d accumulated over the past several hours announced itself simultaneously, a full-body symphony of agony that started at his impaled shoulder and radiated outward through his broken ribs, his carved back, his cracked knuckles, his dead left ear, his shredded legs, his hemorrhaged brain, every single wound screaming at once as if they’d been waiting politely for him to regain consciousness before letting him know exactly how much trouble he was in.

"Ghhk—!"

His right hand shot to the back of his neck on reflex, gripping the muscle there so hard his fingers went white.

The pain settled into something manageable after a few seconds.

’Okay. I’m alive. That’s... something.’

He immediately tried to move his left arm, a surge of dread hitting him as he feared that he had finally reached the point of paralysis.

Well, lucky for him, his fingers responded.

"HUHHH... thank you, you beautiful piece of junk. You actually saved this pathetic, broken, good-for-nothing arm of mine. I take back every suspicious thought I had about you. Well, most of them. Like sixty percent of them."

The relief nearly made him shout.

He caught it in his throat just in time, swallowing the sound before it could echo through the empty facility and announce his position to whatever else might be living in this place.

He lifted his left hand, the gauntlet still caked in mud and dried blood.

".....?"

Revan frowned.

Nestled between his gauntleted fingers were three small glass vials, each one sealed with a wax stopper and filled with a liquid of a different color, blue, soft pink, and green, all of them shimmering with a faint luminescence that pulsed gently in the dim light like fireflies trapped in amber.

He stared at the three vials for a long moment, then let out a breath that was halfway between a laugh and a sigh.

’So this is what you get for killing an S-class guardian in a Dead Zone Territorial Phenomenon. A gauntlet that nearly stopped my heart six times and three tiny bottles of mystery juice. Really rolls out the red carpet, doesn’t it?’

He turned the vials over in his gauntleted fingers, watching the light shift inside each one.

The blue caught the dim glow from the ceiling fissures and refracted it into something almost beautiful. The pink was softer, warmer, pulsing at a slower rhythm than the other two. The green was the brightest of the three, its luminescence sharp and aggressive against the dark metal of the gauntlet.

’Then again, I shouldn’t complain. I got an artifact that let me punch a seven-foot fire knight across a battlefield without touching it. Getting anything on top of that is more generosity than the Vespera household has shown me in fifteen years of service. The bar was underground and this place still cleared it.’

But right now, none of that matters. What matters is whether one of these can fix what’s broken.

’If one of these is a healing potion, I need to find it right now. Because honestly, I’d rather die than endure this pain for another second.’

In Legends of Valtheris, restorative potions followed a consistent color logic that the developers had never bothered to change across six major updates.

Healing compounds were always muted in tone, soft greens, pale golds, diluted blues, because the alchemical base used for tissue regeneration was derived from low-reactivity mana extracts that produced gentle, non-aggressive hues.

Anything with a vivid, saturated color indicated a high-reactivity compound, buffing agents, stimulants, poisons, things that hit the body hard and fast rather than mending it.

’The green was immediately out, its color far too vivid and aggressive for anything meant to heal. But the blue was different, calm and stable, the kind of muted hue that suggested a slow-acting compound designed to work with the body rather than against it. That one. Probably.’

Revan popped the wax stopper off the blue vial with his thumb.

The liquid inside released a scent that was cool and faintly sweet, like crushed herbs left overnight in cold water.

Without a shred of hesitation, Revan tipped the vial back and drank, the aroma’s clean, harmless sweetness giving him just enough confidence to swallow it all in one go.

The liquid hit the back of his throat cold and kept going, spreading through his chest like ice water poured into an overheating engine.

When it reached his core the cold evaporated outward in a warm wave that crawled through every damaged channel in his body, and wherever it touched, the pain dimmed.

’Interesting. So that’s how it works. The compound seals every cracked channel like a layer of adhesive bandage from the inside, and the adhesive itself bonds with the tissue over time, doing the actual healing while it holds everything together. Which means I don’t need to sit around waiting to recover before I can move again. That’s actually brilliant.’

He planted his right hand against the corrugated floor and pushed himself to his feet, standing firm without a single waver. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

A dull ache still lingered in his ribs, but compared to what he’d been enduring five minutes ago, it was practically a massage.

He stretched the way he always did before a fight, rolling every joint and testing every muscle group in a quick, practiced sequence that had been drilled into his body since he was five years old.

"This is... incredible. It genuinely feels like I’ve already recovered."

He glanced at the two remaining vials in his gauntleted hand, then tucked them carefully into the remnants of his waistband.

"I’ll figure out what you two do later. I’ve been away from my master for far too long already."

The Territorial Phenomenon operated on its own spatial logic.

You entered at one point, the labyrinth folded you through its internal geometry, and when it released you, the exit was never where the entrance had been.

That was the fundamental nature of a Phenomenon’s mechanism, a system that moved things through space without regard for the convenience of the things being moved.

Which meant wherever Revan was standing right now, it was nowhere near where his group had been when the fog separated them.

’I could be kilometers away. There’s no way to know without a reference point.’

Knowing all of that, he forced himself to focus on what came next. The first order of business was finding his other half, the one companion that had been with him through every miserable second of this night.

Volkar’s blade was nowhere to be seen, and Revan didn’t bother searching harder.

Even if he found it, the sword had most likely shattered in that final collision. No ordinary carbon steel could survive the kind of forces that had torn through that crater.

’Rest in peace, you stubborn piece of carbon steel. You lasted longer than you had any right to.’

He turned his attention back to the facility around him.

This time, he looked at it properly.

"Hmm... let me see," he murmured.

The scale was wrong for a simple outpost or shelter. The ceiling was too high. The machines were too large.

The corridor stretching out ahead of him was too wide, built for transporting heavy equipment or large quantities of something, not for people walking from room to room.

"It looks like this place used to be a factory. Or a refinery. Something built to process materials at an industrial scale."

He ran his thumb along the edge of a pipe running at waist height.

The residue that came off on his skin was dark, oily, and carried a chemical sharpness that he’d smelled exactly once before, in Mirael’s portable lab on the train, when she’d opened a sealed container of preservation fluid used to stabilize raw CT crystals during transport.

Revan brought his thumb to his nose, taking a deep breath as he tried to catch the scent.

His eyes widened slightly.

"Eumm..." He tilted his head, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, feeling the texture of the residue as the pieces rearranged themselves in his mind. "Eummm..."

Then it clicked.

His face brightened and he tapped his palm lightly with his fist.

"Oh. Right. Of course."

A grin spread across his face.

"So this is where all the trouble started. You bastard."