Eren looked back at Kalina one more time from the alley entrance.

She was standing under the tree with her cheeks still puffed and her hair messy from portal wind and her expensive heels sinking into the damp grass between the roots. Her mascara was slightly smudged and her dress was wrinkled and she looked nothing like the cold composed department manager who had terrorized his professional life for half a decade.

She was hiding behind a tree from her own mother.

She’s adorable.

It wasn’t the cat bloodline or the Charisma stat or the Magician of Love class. It was just him. Eren looking at this woman who had pinched him four times today, bit his arm twice, screamed at his concubines, murdered a slime with one eye closed and was now sneaking around her parents’ garden like a teenager after curfew.

When she wasn’t in boss mode she was genuinely the sweetest person he’d met outside of Evon.

He was falling in love with her. Actually falling. Not system-enhanced attraction or bloodline-driven urge or anything magical. He just wanted to be with this woman and build something real with her and that felt like the most honest thing he’d experienced since walking through that bathroom door for the first time.

But she was already mouthing "GO" at him with her eyes wide and her hands making shooing motions so he grinned like an idiot and turned the corner.

The grin lasted about thirty seconds before the practical thoughts took over.

Kalina’s family was wealthy and traditional in the way that Italian-Turkish families were. He’d seen enough of Rosa’s family dynamics to know the pattern and it didn’t matter if the roots were Mediterranean or Anatolian because the formula was the same everywhere. They would want stability from a man. A real job with a title, a house with an address, a car in the driveway, a five-year plan that included a wedding and grandchildren.

Not a half-elf with magic powers and half a million dollars in cash hidden across two universes who was already married to another woman.

Cash didn’t matter to families like hers anyway. You could have two million in the bank but without a visible career and a proper apartment and a German sedan in the parking spot you were nobody to them. They’d rather she married a man drowning in mortgage debt who had a respectable title on his business card and came home at six every evening.

I need to fix the Earth side before any of that can even start.

The Totem was dying. The orchards were burned. The village defense was failing. And somewhere in the middle of all of it he needed to build a life on Earth that looked normal enough to satisfy a family of Italian-Turkish professionals while secretly running an inter-dimensional operation with two hundred elves.

"..no pressure at all," he muttered to nobody.

He stopped at the end of the alley and checked both directions. Empty street, no pedestrians, no moving cars. The nearest streetlight buzzed overhead with that specific Istanbul frequency that he used to hate and now barely noticed.

He raised his hand and pushed the last of his mana into Door Master.

The portal tore open in front of him and through it he could see the stone paths and amber Koen vine glow of the elf village at night. Concrete on this side and magic on the other, two steps apart.

He stepped through without looking back.

The portal collapsed behind him and the empty Istanbul sidewalk went back to normal. Just an alley between garden walls with a buzzing streetlight and the faint sound of someone’s television from a nearby window.

What Eren didn’t know was that a night-vision security camera mounted on the corner of Kalina’s garden wall had recorded everything. The glowing blue door appearing from nothing, his silhouette stepping through it and the impossible doorway folding shut behind him until the sidewalk was empty again. All in crisp high-definition footage that the camera’s hard drive would store for thirty days.

Kalina’s family had installed those cameras two years ago after a break-in attempt at the neighbor’s house. The security company reviewed the footage every morning as part of their contract and anything unusual got flagged and sent directly to the family WhatsApp group.

A man opening a portal to another dimension in front of their garden wall at ten pm was definitely going to qualify as unusual.

That footage would reach the whole family by breakfast. And then Kalina would have to explain not just who the man was but what the glowing door was and why he had apparently teleported off their street.

She was going to kill him.

But Eren would’ve laughed if he knew. He was a half-elf now. The Clone’s thirty-one skills had merged into his body along with every instinct and reflex that came with them. Invisibility, extreme climbing that let him scale walls like a spider, a reaction speed that made fast things look slow, athletic abilities that could outrun vehicles and about twenty-five other skills that made the gap between him and normal humans wider than most people could imagine.

Modern weapons were a manageable concern, not a death sentence. A few upset in-laws with opinions about his career prospects? Even less than that.

Why would I care what a few humans think about me?

The answer should have been "because you’re human too" but that response didn’t come. Not anymore.

The Clone’s survival pride - built over thirty-eight days of killing things that should have killed him first in a forest where everything was stronger and faster - had merged with Eren’s own growing confidence somewhere in the inheritance process.

The feline bloodline’s territorial ego layered on top of that like a third skin. And underneath all of it the Magician of Love class had been quietly inflating his sense of self for months through a Charisma stat that was over a hundred and twenty-nine points.

Somewhere between inheriting those skills and carrying a woman across dimensions Eren had started dividing the world into "humans" and "him" without noticing. The word "humans" was starting to mean something separate from what he was. Something below.

He walked through the dark village toward Emily’s house and the combined pride purred in his chest like a cat settling into a warm spot it had no intention of leaving.

He didn’t question it and didn’t even notice a camera was there.

..

The first week was the worst.

Not because anything terrible happened but because Kalina’s brain wouldn’t shut up. She was running two lives at the same time and her internal monologue had turned into a constant stream of logistics that made her old job at Anaton look like kindergarten math.

Monday: office meetings until four, portal to Evon at six, kill seven slimes and two magical rabbits with Eren spotting her from three meters away like a bored gym instructor, back to Earth before midnight. Tuesday: conference call with a shipping company in Izmir about a "specialty fruit import license" that didn’t actually exist yet because the fruit came from another planet, then Evon again in the afternoon because Eren was bringing a group of elves back and she could hitch a ride.

By Thursday her feet hurt from walking the stone paths barefoot because her heels were genuinely useless on alien terrain and she’d started leaving a pair of flat sandals at Emily’s house. Eren found this hilarious for reasons she refused to acknowledge.

The funny thing was that half her time in Evon wasn’t spent being productive at all. Every time she crossed over with Eren they’d end up at Emily’s empty house and the first two hours would disappear into something that had nothing to do with business strategy or monster hunting.

She kept telling herself it was because the portal trips were exhausting and they needed to "decompress" but the truth was that Eren’s body against hers on that stone floor or against that rough wall or on that too-small elf bed had become the part of her day she thought about during every boring meeting on Earth. Her thighs ached in places she didn’t know had muscles and she’d started wearing scarves to work to cover the marks on her neck.

The other half of her Evon time she spent doing what she actually came for. Hunting small creatures near the burned perimeter for experience, walking the village paths and making mental notes about everything from the water supply to the crumbling outer walls to the way certain Koen vines grew thicker on south-facing stone.

She started writing things down on the third day. A small leather-bound notebook she’d bought from a stationery shop in Nisantasi that cost way too much for what it was but felt right in her hand. The entries read like field reports from a nature documentary mixed with a restaurant review blog.

"Day 3 - The Pao Tea from mutated trees has a shelf life of approximately 8 hours before the warming effect fades. Selena brews it twice daily. Export potential: extreme if preservation method can be found.

Side note: walked into Lyra’s bakery without knocking and she screamed so loud three elves came running with knives. She was kneading dough topless which apparently is normal here. I need to stop applying Earth etiquette to a civilization that treats fabric as decorative."

"Day 5 - The Totem’s barrier has retreated approximately twelve meters since my first visit. Eren measured it by pacing from the central tree to the nearest point where he could open an incoming portal. Two weeks ago that distance was a hundred meters. Today it was eighty-eight. The math isn’t complicated. If the barrier shrinks at this rate the village has maybe six to eight months before it offers no meaningful protection at all."

By the second week; she had seventeen pages of notes and the thought crossed her mind that she could write a book about this place. A travel journal of sorts, like those Victorian-era explorers who catalogued new territories with sketches and observations. "A Businesswoman’s Guide to the Elven Realm" or something equally pretentious.

She entertained the idea for about forty-five minutes during a particularly boring slime hunt before the obvious reality set in. She was a woman who couldn’t sit still long enough to finish a Netflix series. The idea of spending months sitting at a desk organizing notes into Chapters made her want to throw the notebook into the forest.

She shelved off the project permanently and went back to killing slimes.

I will find something else, a real broken path at some point..