I approached the wyvern with quiet steps, careful not to disturb its resting pose. It didn’t feel like a corpse. More like a relic. A monument. Nestled near the colrbone, just beneath a cracked pte of frost-blue scale, was something glowing faintly. I reached out, brushing aside a few broken shards to reveal it fully, a core, smooth and cold, like crystalized breath.

  It shimmered with swirling veins of pale lightning trapped within ice. I didn’t know its name, but it felt alive in a strange, solemn way. I picked it up carefully. It was cool against my skin, but comforting, like snow melting in a cupped hand.

  “Thank you,” I whispered again, low and reverent.

  “Starving…”

  The voice slithered back into my thoughts, the same one that had whispered draw… you need to draw, Mashiro, haunting and strangely familiar, like the echo of a forgotten dream that never quite left. Only this time, it wasn’t urging me to act. It was hungry.

  I turned my gaze to the wyvern’s body. Still, peaceful, dignified in death. A fallen titan resting beneath a cathedral of trees. But the voice’s hunger pressed against my skull, throbbing like a second heartbeat. Something inside me stirred. My fingers tingled with the sensation of magic that didn’t belong entirely to me.

  Hesitantly, I stepped forward and knelt beside the carcass. My hand hovered over the wyvern’s cold scales for a moment, caught between reverence and dread. Then I made contact, skin to hide.

  The reaction was immediate.

  A searing pulse shot up my arm, and in the same instant, something tore free from my back with a sound like splitting silk. A wing, bck as void and shaped like a dragon’s unfurled from my shoulder bde, slick with shadow and speckled with shimmering motes of amethyst. My breath caught in my throat. It didn’t hurt. Not exactly. But it felt wrong and right all at once, like waking up in someone else’s body and realizing it fits better than your own.

  Before I could even process the change, the wyvern’s body began to dissolve.

  No, colpse. Piece by piece, fke by fke, scale and sinew and bone unraveling into strands of shadow and light, being sucked into my palm. The strange, scaly dragon-mouth that had once appeared before reemerged no rger than my hand, but impossibly deep. It opened with a hissless snarl and swallowed the great beast without sound or struggle. One moment there was a wyvern. The next, only silence and a faint shimmer in the air.

  “Thanks for the food…” the voice murmured, satisfied, distant and then it vanished, fading into the back of my mind like it had never been there.

  I knelt there for a while, stunned, the single bck wing twitching gently behind me before retracting, curling into itself and slipping back under my skin like it had never existed.

  The adventurers said nothing. They hadn’t moved. I didn’t need to turn around to know they’d seen everything.

  And honestly… I wasn’t sure if that made things better or worse.

  I turned to face the adventurers, holding the core up like a badge of honor. “So... anyone wanna walk me back to town, or are you all just gonna stand there like I sprouted wings?”

  There was a beat of hesitation, and then they slowly gathered around, murmuring among themselves. They fell into step beside me like an honor guard, none of them daring to walk ahead. Maybe they were still trying to figure me out. Or maybe, for just a moment, I wasn’t a level five mystery girl. I was something else.

  Behind us, the clearing remained still. The wind didn’t pick up. The birds didn’t return to singing.

  And I didn’t look back.

  The wyvern had already flown its st.

  ? ? ?

  “She’s definitely not level five,” one of them muttered under their breath, just loud enough for the forest air to carry the words. I didn’t turn around, but my ears, concealed as they were beneath my hood, twitched instinctively. It was the tall one with the twin daggers on his belt, the one who hadn’t spoken much before.

  His voice had a sharpened edge to it, not exactly suspicious but definitely skeptical. Like someone who had seen too many oddities in his life and wasn’t ready to let another slide by without a second thought. There was a short pause before someone else chimed in.

  “Yeah,” another added, a little more cautiously, “she probably used a skill to hide her own ability. There’s no way a level five could’ve pulled that off, not even with divine favor.” The tone was ced with doubt, but also something else. Admiration? Fear? I couldn’t tell. But the conversation was happening in that familiar whisper-shout way, where people talk just quietly enough to technically cim it’s private, but loudly enough that the person in question will hear it. Which, of course, I did.

  “I tried to use my level four Identification skill,” someone else said, a little winded like he was trying to keep up and argue at the same time. “And it did say she’s level five. The system isn’t lying, unless…” He stopped short, as if afraid to finish that sentence.

  “She probably used a skill to hide her own ability,” the first voice repeated, almost as if reaffirming it for his own benefit more than anyone else’s. “Something to spoof the level readout. A perception veil or a stat cloak. Something high-level. That makes the most sense.”

  “To defeat a wyvern like that,” the girl with the massive axe added slowly, “you reckon she’s… an A- or B+ rank Adventurer?” Her voice wasn’t full of suspicion, but something closer to awe, like a child trying to expin away a magic trick, knowing full well it had to be an illusion, but still secretly hoping it wasn’t. She adjusted her grip on the axe strapped to her back, her heavy boots crunching on the forest path with each step beside mine.

  “She didn’t introduce herself as an adventurer,” the dagger guy countered. “So she might not even be one. That’s the strangest part. I’ve never seen someone that calm in front of a dying wyvern. She wasn’t fighting for glory, or coin, or even survival. It was like… she was granting it peace.” His voice had softened toward the end, as though the memory of the wyvern’s final moment had sobered him more than he cared to admit.

  “Also,” said the quietest member of the group, a hooded figure with long, wavy brown hair tied back and a faint glow still lingering around her fingers. “I noticed something strange…”

  There was a rustle of fabric as the others turned slightly toward her. “What is it?” asked Sandwich Guy, trying to act casual but clearly hanging on every word.

  “According to my Identification skill,” the mage murmured, “She’s… a fox girl.”

  Silence.

  Then a chorus of half-suppressed protests.

  “No, no, no,” the leader said quickly, shaking his head, “There’s no way. That race doesn’t even exist in this region. If it did, it’d be in the bestiaries, the records, the guild logs. A daylight-walking fox beastkin? Impossible.”

  “That’s probably part of her skill,” someone else added quickly. “A side effect of whatever ability she used to mask her stats. It’s an illusion, nothing more. No way someone like that would just show up out of nowhere and oh gods, did you see the way that cloak shimmered when she fired the arrow?”

  The conversation trailed off into murmurs again, a tangled web of half-truths and wild theories. But every step I took through the forest trail, I could feel the weight of their words pressing against my back. The tension between awe and suspicion. Respect and unease. I was a puzzle, and they were turning the pieces over in their hands, trying to make them fit into a picture they understood. But they wouldn’t. Not all of it. Not yet.

  I sighed and slowed my pace just enough to let the silence stretch, then gnced back over my shoulder. My voice was light, almost pyful, but ced with a firm edge.

  “I can hear you all… you know.”

  They froze mid-step.

  The mage went rigid. Sandwich Guy let out an awkward cough. The dagger guy gnced away, suddenly fascinated with the dirt beneath his boots.

  “Not that I mind,” I added, tilting my head with the smallest smirk tugging at my lips. “It’s just… if you’re going to gossip about someone, you might want to wait until you’re out of earshot. Just a tip. Adventurer etiquette.”

  The axe-girl cleared her throat, clearly trying not to smile. “R-Right. Sorry.”

  I turned back around and kept walking, letting my cloak sway behind me like the closing curtain of a py. I didn’t need to correct them. Not about my level, my race, or whether I was some mysterious S-rank hidden under a disguise. Let them wonder.

  Mystery was more useful than truth anyway!