Asher held his breath, his muscles trembling as he did everything in his power to remain silent and unmoving. He'd been hiding for what felt like an hour now, and as much as he wanted to relax, he knew the moment he let himself grow complacent his target would detect his presence.

Focusing on the Eternal Mark he'd left on the target ages ago, Asher closed his eyes and monitored his target's movements as they steadily grew closer. His timing had to be flawless, or the target might manage to get away. He waited until the last possible second before finally deciding it was now or never.

"Gotcha!" Asher screamed, leaping out of the empty water barrel and scaring the ever-living daylights out of Brian as he wrapped his arms around the twelve-year-old, hoisting him up with a grunt.

"No fair!" Brian squealed, laughing as he tried to wriggle free of Asher's clutches. "Hiding in the water barrel is cheating!"

"How is it cheating?! You didn't say I couldn't hide in it! Besides, Samantha can just refill it later with her new Water element," Asher argued, grinning as he tucked Brian under one arm and carried him none too easily into the cabin. "Oh Samanthaaa! I caught a pesky robber that was planning to make off with all our valuables!"

"Oh, did you now?" Samantha smirked, glancing up from her messy work at the table. She was in the middle of skinning a rather large-looking wolf that she'd killed that morning, and she looked positively beautiful with her arms covered in viscera up to her elbows. "Pray tell, exactly what valuables was the robber aiming to take?"

"I'll never tell!" Brian shouted, doing his best to glare at his older sister, despite the big smile he had on his face. "The Shadow Thief never talks!"

"Shadow Thief?" Samantha repeated, raising an eyebrow as she gave Asher a questioning look.

"Ah, we're playing thieves versus seekers," Asher explained, shaking Brian a bit and getting an excited laugh out of him. "If it wasn't obvious, Brian is the Shadow Thief, and I'm a truthseeker."

"Well, from the looks of things, I think the Shadow Thief may have lost this one," Samantha chuckled. "Brian, did you forget Asher has an Eternal Mark on you? He can literally sense exactly where you are whenever he wants."

It seemed Brian in fact had forgotten this small detail, as his exuberance quickly turned into shock, and he wriggled around to give Asher a look of betrayal.

"Sorry Brian, a good truthseeker uses every tool at their disposal," Asher said, shaking his head with mock sorrow.

"You can't use your elements! I don't have any!" Brian whined, pouting. "I want a rematch! This time, you be the Shadow Thief, and I'll be the truthseeker. And no elements!"

"You expect me to break into your cabin undetected without using my elements?" Asher asked, gently putting Brian down and glancing out the window. The cabin sat on the top of a small hill, giving them a beautiful view of the nearby town. Other than a few old trees nearby, there really wasn't anything to hide behind. "...I feel like you're setting the Shadow Thief up for failure here."

"Fine," Brian humphed, thinking quickly. "How about the truthseekers didn't show up until after you'd already broken in? So you have to grab something heavy and bring it to the edge of the forest before I can stop you?"

"I guess I can do that," Asher shrugged, smiling as Brian's excitement returned as he realized he had a good chance of actually winning this one.

"I'll give you a few minutes to get ready, and then you have to try and escape!" he said, turning and rushing out of the cabin so quickly he forgot to close the front door. Chuckling, Asher activated Distortion, creating a small tunnel of compressed space before reaching through it to close the door from nearly ten feet away.

"You're gonna get lazy if you keep using your elements to do such simple tasks like that," Samantha grinned, putting down her knife and conjuring a small stream of water to aid her in wiping her arms on a towel as she got up. Her long, brown hair was secured behind her head in a ponytail to ensure it didn't get dragged through wolf blood, and Asher's heart skipped a beat as her warm gaze met his own.

"Well, I certainly don't want to end up a fat truthseeker," Asher remarked, earning a laugh from his girlfriend as she walked around the table and wrapped her arms around him. After sharing a long, tender kiss, she finally pulled back, sighing as she leaned her head against his chest.

"I love seeing how well you get along with Brian," she murmured, giving him another tight squeeze. "It's crazy to think that if you hadn't shown up when you did to rescue us from that demon-filled wizard tower, we'd probably both be dead by now. And if you hadn't dealt with Trellis, we'd have lost my parents' home. Some days I wonder if any of this is actually real. If I'm actually still trapped in that wizard tower, and this is all just some sort of pleasant fever dream I'm having before I finally die."

"It's real," Asher said, leaning down to kiss her head as he returned her squeeze. "Trust me, this is all far crazier for me than it is for you. I told you, the world I come from didn't have anything like magic or demons. No origin elements or evil liches. My biggest concerns were trying to figure out how I was going to survive pulling so many all-nighters in a row, and watching the previous generation destroy the economy while I tried to finish my apprenticeship."

"I think my parents would probably have a heart attack if they knew I was seeing a realm wanderer," Samantha giggled, looking up at him. Her dark brown eyes that reminded him so much of the forest she loved stared into his own. "I still don't quite understand why you want to keep it a secret. I get that you think your elements are weird, but the High Prince himself would probably be willing to meet with you if you made your existence public."

"They're not just weird… From what I gathered in Whikoga's library, my spatial Element is only seen once every few decades, and the Eternity element I stole from that lich is brand new. Or at the very least, there weren't any records of it anywhere."

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Despite being told his questions would be kept confidential, Asher hadn't been willing to risk asking any of the librarians about his strange element. Thankfully, the passive of his Spatial element allowed him to earn new classes and swap out his existing class seemingly whenever he wanted. He'd spent enough time in the library to unlock the librarian class, which gave him an almost sixth sense when it came to hunting for books containing knowledge he wanted to find.

In fact, he'd completely forgotten to change his class before getting wrapped up in saving Rosh from Loratta and taking down the gang leader with Draken's help, and now he was pretty sure there might be rumors floating around the city of the librarian-turned-assassin.

He had no way of knowing of course, but Rulfar the bloodhound that had been sent to grab him had seemed pretty entertained at the time by his odd class.

"There's no such thing as a new element," Samantha said, rolling her eyes. "It must just be super top secret. Like, even more so than the six forbidden elements."

"I don't know, there were plenty of references to the forbidden elements in the library," Asher muttered. "Total side note, but I think the High Prince or whoever decides these things needs to reevaluate the process for dealing with people who hold these forbidden elements. They're definitely scary at times, but I met a few different people with forbidden elements in Whikoga, and two of them were totally fine!"

"Rosh and Draken, right?" Samantha asked, clearly remembering what he'd told her. After he'd narrowly escaped death by Recalling to the Eternal Mark he'd left on Brian, he'd told Samantha everything that had happened to him during his time in Whikoga while she nursed him back to health. Granted, thanks to Eternal Regeneration, nursing him back from the brink of death only actually took a couple of days.

It took more than severe poisoning, internal acid burns, and being stabbed through the gut to keep him down, after all. It had been nearly a week since he'd survived the compound collapsing on him, and other than sending a letter to Whikoga to let Rosh know he was okay, Asher had been more than happy to simply take some time for himself and relax with Brian and Samantha in their cabin. He'd been concerned about Trellis' death and the truthseeker investigation, but apparently, the entire thing had blown over far quicker than any of them had expected.

From what Samantha told him, it seemed whatever Trellis had done to his wagon had in fact thrown the truthseeker who'd come out to investigate Trellis' death off the trail entirely, as the truthseeker had only stayed for a few hours before rushing off to try and track down Trellis' personal guard who had been standing watch that night. According to Samanatha, some of the villagers had watched the man run from the burning wagon almost immediately, before they'd even uncovered Trellis' charred remains. When they'd informed the truthseeker of that fact, they had hopped right back on their griffin and taken off in search of the missing guard, no doubt assuming they'd found their culprit.

There was a very good chance Trellis' former guard would throw Asher under the bus if he was ever actually found in the hopes of distracting the truthseeker from all the illegal activity he himself must have been a part of, but there was nothing Asher could do about that at the moment. All he could do was hope that the swordsman was good at laying low and evading the truthseekers.

"Didn't you also tell me about a guy with a Blood element?" Samantha continued, raising an eyebrow as she looked up at him. "He didn't sound all that nice."

"Okay, no, but that's only one out of three forbidden element users!" Asher argued, before remembering there had actually been a second Blood element user he'd briefly encountered. He and Rosh had only attracted Loratta's attention because he'd gone on a killing spree, hunting down her elites that reveled in causing others suffering. One of the first ones he had killed was Slicer, a woman with Blood, Pain, and Blade elements that was a real monster from what he'd been told. "...okay there were actually two Blood element users… Fifty percent still isn't bad!"

"It really isn't," she nodded, looking curious. "Growing up, kids are taught that the forbidden elements are horrifying, and that anyone who gets their hands on one becomes a menace to society. The fact that you met two different people who were just dealing with the hands they were dealt is honestly kinda wild. I mean, I can't even imagine what I would do if I was gifted a forbidden element as my origin element, and Death on top of that. Poor Draken… Imagine what he must have had to suffer through growing up for that to happen."

"Yeah…" Asher agreed, squeezing her more tightly. The two of them stood like that for a moment, simply enjoying the feeling of the other pressed against them as they thought about how messed up the world could be at times.

"I'm glad you're back, Asher," Samantha said quietly, sounding strangely vulnerable for a change. Usually, the hunter was brimming with confidence and spoke her mind quite freely, so hearing her voice filled with so much uncertainty just felt wrong. "I hate to admit it, because you promised you'd come back. But when you left for Whikoga…" She sighed, shaking her head at her own admittance. "...a part of me worried you wouldn't come back. That you'd find someone else in the big city and decide you were better off with them. We haven't exactly been together for very long, and I thought maybe you just felt guilty after the whole Trellis situation, and-"

Asher didn't know what to say to try and put Samantha's mind at ease, so he decided to silence her with a kiss. After a few seconds, he pulled back, smiling at her as he brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

"If it weren't for you and Brian, I'd probably still be wandering around the forest. Or more likely, I would have been eaten by that awakened beast when I finally collapsed from exhaustion," he chuckled, remembering the terrifying eyes of the awakened panther watching him from the edge of the campfire. "The two of you saved me just as much as I saved you. We're a team, Samantha, I'm not just going to walk out on you guys like that. And now that I know I can teleport such long distances, I'm literally always just a single Recall away."

"I do like the sound of that," Samantha purred, wrapping her arms around his neck and leaning up for another kiss. "I know you're playing with Brian, but maybe later-"

"Come out with your hands up, Shadow Thief!" Brian's voice called from outside. "You can't escape the truthseekers!"

"Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be robbing the place right now," Asher remarked, glancing around the small cabin for something that met Brian's criteria. "I need something heavy and valuable, but nothing fragile I might accidentally break..."

Asher was struck by a sudden thought, and he gave Samantha a wicked grin. The hunter realized what he was thinking just a moment too late, and she let out a shrill shriek of surprise as he bent down and tossed her over his shoulders with a laugh. Thankfully, she was a good bit shorter than him and didn't actually weigh that much, because despite all the incredible abilities his elements had given him, his strength was still that of a regular person.

"Heavy, huh?" he heard Samantha ask dangerously from over his shoulder, her voice teasing. "That's not what you said last night…"

"Silence, woman! The truthseekers have found me and the Shadow Thief must make his great escape!" Asher called out loudly enough for Brian to hear from outside. Careful not to accidentally bang Samantha into anything, Asher ran over to the front door and threw it open, rushing outside to Samantha's laughter and Brian's screams to drop the woman and surrender. As he desperately tried to outrun Brian to the edge of the forest with Samantha thrown over his shoulder, he couldn't help but laugh as well.

This new world beat Earth by a long shot.

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