The Extra of The Lunerra

The trip on the bus was... faster than I thought.

No, it wasn't that the travel time was reduced. It was just quite fast.

There were no problems crossing the border. No one had even checked inside. We just stopped for a short time and then started moving again.

Then we had been moving through Piarlin territory for about ten hours.

And now...

"We are sure this is the road, right?"

We were on the side of a road in a mountainous area, through trees that seemed tall and large compared to those in Cevilian. The bus had stopped on the side of this road, which, according to our plan, was not easily traversed by vehicles.

So, for the first time in a long time, Alex and I stepped outside together.

His brown eyes were studying the surroundings, probably comparing the similarity with the documents in the plan.

"Yes. We're only about half a kilometer away."

He had largely shaken off the uneasiness of the first moments of the bus ride.

Not completely, though...

~psshh!

We both paused, our eyes darting to the bus next to us, the doors closing.

~grrroooom!

Then its engine started, and we looked at its slowly moving body.

Alex stretched and sighed deeply before the bus was out of sight.

He raised his arm. On one side, he opened the current time and map, and on the other, he took out the notes he had taken himself.

"A day or two... Seems enough time to get ready."

Without turning to face me, he looked back to where the bus had gone and started walking slowly, never taking his eyes off the screens in front of him.

I just watched his back without moving from my seat.

Despite the worries and uneasiness he had felt before, he quickly got down to business without causing any more trouble...

Bringing him with me was really the best decision I could have made.

*******

Everything we needed for our plan was in a lot of dimensional inventory that we had brought with us, which was so valuable that it was impossible for normal people to afford it.

That's why we didn't unload any luggage when we got off the bus.

We didn't even have a bodyguard, let alone suitcases and so on. There were only two of us, that's it.

Anyways.

It took us only half a day to finish the first stage of preparations.

So far, everything was perfect.

Our location was excellent.

We had made our preparations without any problems.

All the systems we were going to use were working.

The only thing left was to wait.

And that's exactly what we were doing, sitting on the ground, some distance from the road, in the space of a device that deliberately concealed our presence.

Waiting.

Patiently, doing nothing, until the time was right.

"Aiden."

I was leaning against a tree, watching the stars, which I could just barely see through the leaves, when I... paused.

I slowly turned my eyes to my right diagonal.

"Yes?"

Alex was doing the same thing as me, actually, until now. But he continued without taking his eyes off the stars like me.

"There's something you left unsaid."

He narrowed his eyes slightly and turned them toward me.

"What are you hiding?"

...

"What makes you think that?"

It was the cheapest thing to do, to answer a question with a question. But he didn't care, my answer came quickly.

"Instinct."

He raised his hand and several holographic screens opened in front of him.

His eyes traveled over the screens. He didn't dwell on anything for more than two seconds.

"The plan is... perfect. It is detailed, every step of it thought out from many angles, with multiple safeguards for potential problems. Too perfect, in short. I don't see anything that could be a problem, but there's one tiny little thing that keeps nagging at me."

He continued to look at the screens.

"This plan... is so perfect that it can continue to function without you. In fact, I feel as if you're going to disappear after the final stages, and that you've made everything especially detailed as if you want to make sure that nothing goes wrong in the process."

He paused, sighing slightly.

"No, more than feeling... I'm sure."

He finally took his eyes off the screens and turned them to me.

"So, what are you planning exactly?"

He was quite serious. Not upset by the existence of things I hadn't told him, just... serious.

He was really curious, he wanted to understand.

I tore my eyes away from him and turned them to the sky just like a few minutes ago.

"You're really smart, Alex. I'm sure now that I won't ever regret bringing you with me. But there's something you need to understand."

Alex, unlike me, did not move his eyes.

"If I've broken your trust in any way, I'm sorry. But if I didn't include something in that plan..."

He was completely focused on me.

"Then it's something no one else should know, that thing I didn't put in there."

A deep silence fell.

Literally zero sound. Not even the wind was blowing.

"Alright... I understand."

Then, he turned away.

As if we hadn't said anything.

Not a word.

Normally, what would usually happen in a situation like this would be... mistrust, maybe.

An employee with whom the boss was quite close, who found out that something was being hidden from them, would feel that the boss didn't trust them, and the communication between them would suffer.

In movies, in novels.

In real life.

It was always like this.

But...

"Don't worry, Aiden."

Alex turned off each of the screens in front of him.

"I decided the day I avenged my mother's death."

His expression didn't change a bit. He leaned back and looked up at the sky, just like me.

"No, rather... I realized a truth."

Even his tone was the same.

"That I had no purpose in life, that I had no reason to live. But my mother would never like it if I were to commit suicide."

As if he had already thought about it many times.

"That I have to go on living, somehow."

As if he was... used to it.

"So I made a promise to myself."

But, at this moment, he paused slightly, squinted slightly, and corrected himself.

"I swore, even signing a mana contract with myself."

He slowly lowered his eyes from the sky.

"To make sure that no matter what happens, I will never break it."

And he raised his hand.

"That as the only person who has ever tried to help me in my life..."

And pointed it at me.

"I will put the rest of my life in your hands."

There was not a single hesitation, not a single lie.

"That I will make it my purpose in life to serve you, no better than a dog."

He lowered his finger, but his eyes remained on me.

"Because... no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't find anything else I could do, no other person I could trust. Knowing how you think and act, even if only a little, I thought that working for you wouldn't be so bad. That it might even give me a new purpose in life."

He took a deep breath in before continuing, then let it out in the same way.

"So... don't worry. I know you trust me, otherwise you wouldn't have brought me here in the first place. And I trust you, too, or I wouldn't have agreed to come all the way here, or check this 'plan' from start to finish more times than I can count just to be safe."

"…"

He didn't say anything else.

I wasn't sure if he needed to, to be honest.

He had told me something that showed me that he had a loyalty and devotion that I would never expect from anyone in my life.

And I was aware that this was not in any way a deception, an attempt to gain trust.

He meant everything he said.

I would have been sure of that even without the ring on my finger.

Even though I hadn't used it much until now, I always had it with me, the lie-detecting ring I got in Holar.

That's why I couldn't respond in any way to what he said.

And he, realizing this, simply remained silent.

The hours continued to pass as we waited where we were, leaning against two trees.

But then...

~beep!

A sound came from the device on the floor in the space between the two of us.

Both of our eyes quickly focused on the device, and as soon as this happened, a screen appeared on the device.

A... map.

A map of the area we were in.

And a red dot appeared on one of the roads on the map.

Immediately followed by another one.

And then another one.

"How fast are they?"

It was Alex who spoke.

And his question was not to me, but to the screen between us.

He was answered by the AI with a tiny notification window that appeared on the screen.

I read the text out loud.

"One hundred and twenty kilometers per hour... it will take them a little over an hour to get to where we are."

He stood up from the tree he had been leaning against for a long time. He stretched as much as he could, as if all his muscles were numb, then sighed and bent down to pick up the device on the ground.

I stood up as well, both of us with our eyes on the map that had shrunk after Alex had picked up the device.

We had been silent for hours, not saying a word to each other after the conversation we had.

But all the awkwardness was gone now.

We had a job ahead of us that we couldn't screw up in any way.

"Here we go."