The shadows of the Goa Kingdom lengthened over the broken rooftops and cobblestone streets, where the heat was not only physical, but social, political, structural. Amid the stench of abandonment and the arrogance of towers still inhabited by haughty nobles, something was moving. It wasn't the wind. It was faster, more precise, conscious. A figure ran through the alleys and rooftops with inhuman agility, almost invisible except for the faint creaking of the tiles and the flapping of his cape.
He ran as if he knew every corner, as if moving through any territory was a matter of course. His legs, thin but firm, propelled him into leaps of almost three meters without losing his balance. Sometimes he landed on a chimney, other times on a clothesline, using the tarps as leverage to cross the chasms between buildings. Each step was calculated, each movement precise, as if she'd had years of training for this kind of thing, refining her body to move unseen.
In the streets and houses, no one could say they'd seen anything for sure. They'd be surprised how often people looked up, making this elevated environment a good place for their mission. They never saw her up close, and that was part of the plan. They weren't supposed to recognize her.
From atop a rooftop on the outskirts of the Noble City, the figure stopped. She crouched, her breath barely stirring in her chest, despite the distance she'd traveled. Her eyes fixed on a square below, where a group of criminals were heatedly arguing over the distribution of stolen goods. But that wasn't what had brought her there. That wasn't the purpose of her surveillance.
It was him.
Standing in the middle of the commotion, as if the bustle didn't affect him, a tall man with golden hair and a straight bearing watched them as he walked. He didn't intervene, didn't speak, didn't show any threat... and yet, the center of gravity of the scene revolved around him. No one dared to raise their voice to him as he passed, much less so. When he finally spoke, it took only a few measured sentences for the group to disperse as if they'd received an order from above. No violence. No shouting. They just left as if the man were something that saw them deeper than anything else.
The figure on the roof frowned. His keen eyesight allowed him to pick up details others would miss: the way he looked at everyone else before speaking, how his sentences seemed to choose just the right word for each one. The tone of his voice wasn't threatening, but its echo resonated like a judgment. It was somehow terrifying, as if he had a guide to achieving his goals... it gave her the creeps.
"So that's him..." he murmured, barely audible.
His voice was young, but laden with gravity. From that height, the hood covering his face couldn't prevent a lock of light brown hair from escaping to one side. His gloved hands rested firmly on the cracked tiles, like human claws ready to spring.
She remembered fragmentary information, rumors gathered in clandestine taverns and networks of revolutionary messengers. A man with no apparent past had appeared in Goa a few years ago, saving many people, which had won him the favor of some important figures, but she noticed other things. No ship. No history. No name. A ghost, but with a body. A judge, but without a court. Some had seen him settle disputes between traffickers with his voice alone. Others said he had made several crime bosses disappear, leaving no trace. He was an enigma to the Navy; they didn't know about him. The Revolutionary Army... either.
But she wasn't just any spy. And she didn't believe in coincidences.
She was Koala. And she hadn't run for hours among ruins, rooftops, and courtyards only to be intimidated by a serene face. Her mission was to understand who this man was. And if he represented a threat, neutralize it. Although something inside her, a knot she couldn't untie, told her that this time information wouldn't be enough. That he wasn't just an enemy or an ally like before. That this man blurred that line.
"He's manipulating those guys." As if he knew exactly where to push and where to let go in the conversation.
Koala looked again. The man was walking away with a measured stride, toward the rubble of what had once been the seat of a local court—a building that burned that night so many years ago and was never rebuilt, as if a curse fell upon anyone who tried to rebuild that building. The symbol carved in stone, now split in two, seemed even more ironic as it reflected off her silhouette. And as she disappeared around a corner, Koala felt that image would stay with her. Like an omen.
Jugram Haschwalth walked calmly, like someone in absolute control of everything, and lately that was the case. Everything followed his plans. It could have been, but now he was focused on a small creature that wouldn't leave him alone. The woman following him. He knew she was there. He knew her when he'd arrived several days ago, when he'd first recognized her.
He didn't need to look up to feel her presence: he'd seen it all. All the routes. All the threads. From the moment his boots touched the Goan soil, The Almighty had unfolded like a map of infinite possibilities.
He'd seen versions of that future where Koala attacked him out of fear. Where she ignored him out of loyalty. Where she tried to recruit him for the Revolution. But there was something there. For some reason, there was a light that prevented him from seeing everything, as if his omniscience were obscured by a ray of sunlight. He knew he wasn't very competent with this ability, despite all the years that had passed since he'd been with him. The All Mighty refused to fully integrate, as if rejecting him, just as it had when his king awoke.
He walked firmly among the debris of the aristocratic court, now turned into ruins of corrupted memories. "This world is sick," he thought. "He had seen everything here when he arrived all those years ago, but it wasn't his duty to dictate what would happen here—no, it was that man's duty."
That's why he didn't step forward. That's why he didn't confront that woman. He let her look. From time to time, she turned her face slightly, as if feeling a breath of wind that only grazed her conscience. It was enough to sow doubt. And where there is doubt, there is a gap. And where there is a breach, there is judgment.
Time skip dusk
The shadows were long in the alleys of the lower city. Between the peeling walls, the sound of fleeting footsteps barely disturbed the stillness of the evening. At those hours, when the nobles of the high kingdom dined under crystal chandeliers, the poor were learning to walk silently.
Jugram Haschwalth advanced with the same calm as always, passing judgment on the world. His gait was straight, almost solemn, as if the ground were settling beneath his feet out of respect. There was no hurry. There was no hesitation. He knew exactly how many steps separated him from each future possibility, a bad habit he had begun to acquire every time that skill responded to him.
On the other hand, she was still following him. With stealth learned in the worst version of the world, the kind learned out of fear: fear of being discovered, fear of punishment, fear of dying. She had learned not to act until she was sure. And he, with his elegant bearing and impregnable silence, set off all her alarm bells.
But it wasn't fear. Not yet.
Koala moved between rooftops, shadows, and clotheslines with the grace of someone trained not only to survive, but to be invisible. She was dressed in civilian clothes, but every thread of her clothing was chosen so as not to betray her; fine, aristocratic, it was like a second skin that somehow made her uncomfortable. On her back, a small backpack. In his gaze, the cold fire of prolonged surveillance.
The man didn't speak to anyone. He walked. He observed. Occasionally, he exchanged words with a beggar or street child. His words were gentle, but his eyes didn't smile. It wasn't cruelty. It was cold and impersonal. An impersonal, implacable judgment, like a scale that admits no exceptions.
Koala frowned. Her ear picked up loose phrases. Questions. Almost always the same ones: "Why are you still here?" "What are you looking for?" He responded with parables. With statements that seemed like universal truths, not opinions. No one fully understood, but they nodded.
Finally, she saw him stop in a clearing between abandoned buildings. A destroyed park, with rusty swings and benches eaten away by salt. Jugram raised his head. Not at her. At the sky.
Koala felt an impulse she couldn't explain. She slowly descended from her hiding place. Not as a threat. Like an apparition. She touched the ground with her toes, and for the first time since she began observing him, she spoke.
"You're not from here."
The sentence wasn't an accusation. It was a fact.
Jugram turned his face, with exaggerated slowness, not as if surprised that someone had suddenly spoken to him, but as if he accepted her statement. Their eyes met, and for a moment she thought she saw what were multiple pupils in his eyes. Then she rubbed her eyes and saw that they were normal eyes. There was no hostility at first. Nor affection. Only a prolonged pause, as if each were sizing the other up, not with their eyes, but with their essence.
"Nor you," he replied calmly.
Koala didn't flinch. He took a step forward.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?" I really mean.
Jugram looked down at the destroyed bench and sat down, defenseless, as if he saw no threat posed by it.
"Watching. Like you." That's not true, Miss stalker.
The silence dragged on, not uncomfortably. It was thick. Koala felt it in her chest, as if that single word had opened an echo inside her.
"I don't play with others. If you're here to manipulate, or to move pieces on this board, you'll be in trouble."
Jugram looked up slowly. Manipulate, deceive, pieces on a board...
"That... it just seems very familiar to me. Like an omen, although... I don't know what it is."
Her gaze faded slightly as memories that weren't hers flooded her mind: a motionless man, a chair, a crack in space itself, like a shattering mirror, and
a phrase she couldn't hear.
#welcome to my soul society#
It was like a thorn from a long time ago that she didn't know she had stuck in her and was just beginning to bother her.
He shook her mind of that thought. which unknowingly was an omen
"I'm not here to play. I'm here to change everything, especially this corrupt and disgusting world. into something different."
That surprised her. Not because of the phrase, but because he seemed to believe it.
"And you think you are that 'something different.'"
"No. But I know when someone else might be."
Koala took a step back, as if those words touched her without permission. Her face hardened.
"I'm not interested in your cause."
Jugram nodded.
"Not yet."
There was no threat in his tone. Only certainty.
She looked at him for a few more seconds. Then she turned, her cloak fluttering in the night wind. She didn't run away. She didn't disappear. She walked away.
And he let her go. Because he knew she would come back.
Three days passed since that first contact. Koala didn't leave. Not out of curiosity or fascination, but because of something harder to name: the uneasy feeling that she couldn't afford to ignore him. Not for herself, but for what he represented. Because if this man was a threat, a crack in the wall of order—whatever that might be—then it was her responsibility to intervene. Her role in the Revolutionary Army didn't allow her to leave loose ends, especially if they walked with silent steps through the gardens of the Goa Kingdom.
During those days, she followed him from above and through the alleys, with the skill and discretion that only years of training could provide. She observed how he spoke to few people, how he stood still in front of ancient statues, how he wandered for hours in the markets without buying anything. His movements were clean, without obvious patterns. This unsettled her more than if he had been unpredictable: the apparent neutrality of his actions was itself a pattern.
The structure of the Goa Kingdom contrasted with everything he seemed to be. Immaculate, ornate, with its well-laid-out streets and fountains that still functioned, at least in the higher elevations. A place where beauty wasn't an expression of justice, but of accumulated power. A perfect setting for a prolonged farce, she thought, but also a mirror of everything the Army was fighting to tear down or transform.
Koala had told herself that one more week of observation would suffice. But something inside her was pushing her to speed up the process. Not out of impatience, but out of growing pressure: she had to report back. Her responsibilities called, and continuing to play cat and mouse with a stranger who seemed to read the cracks in one's soul with just a glance... wasn't something she could justify much longer.
So she decided to confront him again. Not as a soldier on a mission, nor as an inquisitive shadow. This time, she would do it as a woman with questions too human to ignore any longer.
In an ornate park in that city, the sunset tinged the sky with reddish hues while the marble benches were empty due to the absence of people.
Jugram was already there. Sitting on the same stone bench, as if time had stood still. He held a leaf between his fingers. He turned it precisely, as if reading something on it, but there was something else, as if his mind was elsewhere while his body acted automatically.
Koala didn't approach immediately. She walked slowly, circling the fountain, as if inspecting the perimeter. But he saw her. And he didn't get up. He didn't make any inviting gesture. He only said:
"Yesterday I saw a woman run across the rooftops as if the world were about to break apart," Jugram commented, without changing his tone or revealing his purpose. "Sometimes you run when you can't choose to stay."
Koala pressed her lips together. Silence.
"And what are you doing here?" she asked, crossing her arms. Are you passing through? Waiting for something?
Jugram tilted his head slightly.
"Listening. This kingdom has such a polished structure that it makes more noise when someone whispers than when someone shouts. Ironic, right?
"Don't tell me you're a poet," she retorted sarcastically. One thing that irritated her was when someone tried to evade a question by using philosophy as a method.
"No. You could say I'm just a judge, and sometimes, when I can, an observer."
I commented, thinking about his abilities.
"Of what?"
"Of the forms that prison takes when it disguises itself as freedom."
Koala lowered her gaze for only a second. Then she faced him, firm.
"What are you insinuating?"
Jugram didn't change his position.
"Nothing you don't know. You're part of a cause. One that seeks to break chains. But tell me... are there invisible chains in revolutions?" Miss Revolutionary
She frowned. Her identity wasn't a secret as such, but it wasn't something widely known, either, and for someone in this world to know it felt too out of place. Even so, those kinds of questions felt... pointed.
"Not all systems are the same. The Revolutionary Army fights to liberate people."
That man's words were starting to bother her. Her past was something that would always be there, and the thought of billions or even more suffering what she suffered...
"And I saw it. I saw what the government does. The slavery, the silence. We're not like them."
His tone grew more avid as the words left his mouth.
"I didn't say they were," he replied calmly. "But even a noble cause can be bound by its methods. Its limits. Its words. And you, Koala... are you allowed to question your cause?"
She tensed. She knew him too little to know his name, and yet she didn't confront him about it. It was as if she'd always known. She didn't understand how, and that bothered her more than anything else.
"Who are you?"
"Someone who saw many wars begin with the best of motives," Jugram said, scenes flashing through his mind: a man covered in flames like the sun, a white-haired boy dying while being used as a walking corpse, his own death burned to death, an orange-haired boy facing a god—it all happened in a moment. Yet he continued without flinching. "I've even seen many revolutionaries consumed by their own dogma."
She stood up.
"I don't need sermons."
"I know," he said, not moving. "Just questions."
She took a step back, but stopped. Something in his words touched the most uncomfortable part of her memory. The one that wouldn't be soothed by slogans.
"What do you know about freedom?"
Jugram looked at her for a long time before answering.
"I know there were those who tried to purify the world without dominating it. Without controlling it. Without violence." People who didn't kill, but rather absorbed what was corrupt. Who offered themselves as a filter… until their existence became a threat.
She sensed something wasn't right.
"What are you talking about? A sect? An order?"
"A people. Extinct. Or so those who benefited from their silence believed."
Koala narrowed her eyes.
"I don't believe you."
"I don't expect you to," she replied gently. "But tell me one thing… if you were born without a name, without a country, without anything, would you still believe in the labels the saviors give you?"
That blow was direct. Koala clenched her fists. She didn't respond.
"Do you think I don't know what it's like for someone to teach you to smile while you bleed?" he continued. "To applaud the one who gave you tools while you still bear the mark of the shackle."
She felt a pang of rage. I didn't know if it was because she felt exposed, or because of what she was saying.
"And what are you offering? Another redemption? Another symbol?"
Jugram shook his head slowly.
"Nothing. Just the question that duty sometimes doesn't let you ask."
Koala sat back down. Not because she trusted him, but because something in her body refused to leave.
"If that village you're talking about existed," she said in a tense voice, "why doesn't anyone talk about them?"
"Are you really asking that? That it isn't obvious to you is something... disappointing, if I may say so."
She just looked at him with emotions between shame and anger, waiting for his answer.
"Because when you purify too well, you make monsters look small. And monsters hate mirrors."
She didn't answer. But she didn't leave.
And that, Jugram thought, was his first victory.
time skip some days after
Koala walked through the Goa kingdom with firm steps, unhurriedly, but not because she was sure where to go. Her body moved forward by inertia, as if the orders she'd burned into her mind kept pushing her while her mind wandered elsewhere. Or elsewhere, while her mind wandered over that man's words.
The encounter with that man, Haschwalth, had left her with a knot impossible to ignore.
He didn't say much. He didn't reveal anything. And yet, he had spoken of things no one else knew. Things that, until now, she herself avoided thinking about, because as such, she couldn't afford that luxury.
"Do you have permission to question your cause?"
That phrase repeated itself like an undying echo. Not because she doubted Dragon, or the Revolutionary Army. But because... she had thought it before. Many times. But never out loud.
She pressed her lips together. She walked through a market, mingling with well-dressed citizens who had no idea what slavery was beyond the rumors, no knowledge of the suffering beyond not being recognized as nobles. No one looked at her. She was invisible again. Like when she was a child.
She remembered one of her first missions as a field agent. A small country, forgotten by the Navy, where they liberated an entire village from a slave trader. Koala, then a teenager, was welcomed like a hero. Children crying. Women giving them bread. Men asking for weapons to defend themselves.
Two weeks later, the trader returned. With reinforcements. With the Navy. With "official papers."
Those who weren't captured… were killed.
She wasn't there to see it. But she saw the photos. She heard the testimonies of an elderly survivor. And Dragon said something that stuck in her mind like a knife:
"We can't stay. Liberation doesn't always mean protection."
Koala understood what he meant. The Revolutionary Army didn't have the resources to install governments. They couldn't accompany all the liberated peoples. Their role was to inspire, destabilize, light fires in the right places... and move before the repression arrived.
But... what about those who stayed?
"Applauding the one who gave you tools while you still bear the mark of the shackle."
Haschwalth's words weren't judgment. They were observation. And that made it worse. Now her mind wasn't trying to convince her. Just... show her a mirror.
And that mirror returned an image Koala didn't want to see.
She crossed an alley and arrived at the small hideout they used in Goa as a temporary base. An abandoned warehouse converted into a communication point for undercover agents. No one else was there, but there were messages. Coded reports. Mentions of new missions.
Koala read them without blinking. Her body was functioning as it should. Processing information. Analyzing routes. Preparing responses. But in her chest, something remained tight.
What happens when you free someone who has nowhere else to go?
Could the revolutionary army really do anything?
A part of her thought, "That's better than slavery." And it was true. But another part—a very small one, but growing increasingly persistent—muttered, "What if you just dropped them in another cage?"
Haschwalth offered no other option. He didn't talk about replacing the Army, or about righteous rebellions. He only mentioned a people... extinct, forgotten, hidden. One that purified. What did he mean by that? Was it a metaphor?
Or was he serious?
Koala wasn't naive. She knew how to read between the lines. She knew when someone was trying to plant an idea without overwatering it.
And that was exactly what he was doing. What she would do in his place, if she were recruiting someone for the revolution.
But he didn't sound like a revolutionary. He didn't speak with anger or urgency. He spoke with certainty. As if she already knew what was going to happen.
That was what disconcerted her most. The feeling that he wasn't waiting to convince her... but simply to let her arrive on her own at the place he had already planned.
She closed her eyes for a moment.
The revolution was her home. Her refuge. Her only path.
But that night, for the first time, Koala didn't know if the path was truly lit... or if she had just learned to walk in the dark without asking questions. She decided she would leave tomorrow because there was a new mission for her, grateful for something that could take her mind off everything that was happening there at that moment.