"Tea?"
Nox looked at the old lady offering him tea, then at the tray in her hand and back at her smile before picking the cup with tea and putting it by his side.
The old woman just smiled, pleased that he had accepted before she started, "I know you have questions, ask them, I’ll try to answer as best as I can."
The old woman spoke in a calm tone. She allowed Nox a moment to rearrange his thoughts before he started asking, "are you really humans?"
He knew that it was a bit too late to ask, but he still wanted to know, after all, their situation with Lorenne was still stuck in his head.
And he also just had another nightmare.
The old lady didn’t seem to mind the question at all, after all, that was the most logical thing to try and find out when meeting a human in any type of rift, so she answered.
"As far as I know," she nodded, "we’re humans, just as you are."
Nox nodded, he wasn’t some type of lie detector so he could only take her words at face value.
But that didn’t mean he was just going to drop his guard around them.
"Alright then, next question," he said, "how do you use Solar tech without me feeling an ounce of SE from you."
"Hmm," the old lady looked at him with a bit of confusion before asking, "aren’t you from the Academy’s stealth division?"
How she knew about the academy was easy to guess, after all, he still had on the pants when he came here, so he didn’t really question that.
"I’m from the combat division," Nox answered honestly, "first year."
"Ah, I see," the old lady nodded in understanding, "then it makes sense that you don’t know."
"You see," she continued, "the academy teaches stealth division students a pretty neat trick, it’s know as SE camouflage."
"It allows us to hide our SE and make us completely undetectable."
Nox frowned slightly. "That sounds vague."
She smiled. "It is. That’s why most combat division students never learn it. You’re taught to output, reinforce, and strike with SE. Stealth division students are taught restraint."
She tapped her chest lightly. "SE naturally leaks from the body, especially when it circulates through active pathways. Camouflage works by forcing the SE into closed loops, recycling it internally instead of letting it bleed outward."
"So you suppress it," Nox said.
"You could say that," she nodded with a smile and as if to prove her point, she let a bit of SE leak and Nox immediately caught it.
That... actually made sense, well, maybe not entirely, but he mostly understood what she meant.
Nox thought back to the woman who had snuck up on him in the trees. He hadn’t felt her SE spike at all, not even at the moment when she was right next to him.
"And everyone here can do that?" he asked.
"To varying degrees," the old woman nodded. "Our hunters and scouts know it pretty well. Those who can’t manage it don’t survive long in a place like this."
Silence settled between them for a moment.
Nox nodded, before moving to his next question, "the houses here don’t seem to have been built overnight, so how long have you been here."
"Hmm," she placed a hand on her chin as if thinking, "I don’t know the time in Aureum, but probably seven years."
"Seven years?" Nox asked in surprise, his eyes wide.
"Give or take," the old lady nodded, "we were the solar knights supposed to raid this newly formed rift in Solara Prime, but even though we seemed to have cleared it, no rift appeared to send us back, and thus we have been stuck here for years now."
"That doesn’t make sense," Nox muttered, "isn’t a rift supposed to allow the raiders out and collapse?"
"That’s what normally happens, but for some reason, it didn’t happen this time."
From her words, there was one of two things Nox concluded, either they hadn’t actually faced the boss Eclipsed or they were stuck in this rift forever.
"How are you so sure you took down the boss Eclipsed?" He asked.
"Because we could feel it from that monster," the old lady said, a bit of fear was visible in her eyes before she quickly concealed it, "absolute dread."
Then that meant they were stuck here forever, and that included him now. Though there was a question still in his head,
"If solar knights had disappeared into this rift, why did the academy still allow first years into it?"
"I wonder the same," she muttered in response.
Well, he’d have to wait to find out, that is, if he ever got out of here.
Nox took a sip of the tea by his side and his eyes widened again, but this time for a different reason.
From what he had observed, he was a sweet tooth, but this tea was making him reconsider.
It wasn’t too sweet, but there was something about it that made him want to drink more, plus there was also the fact that it helped calm his nerves.
"What’s in this?" He couldn’t help but ask, but the old woman just smiled and shook her head, "that’s a secret."
Nox didn’t press, as he went back to finishing the tea before gently setting the cup back on the tray.
"Is that all?" The old woman asked, seeing that he wasn’t asking any more questions.
"Actually, there’s one more."
"Go ahead."
"How much SE did it take to cover this entire part of the rift with a barrier?" He asked but was surprised at the look the old lady gave him.
She looked confused before asking, "what barrier?"
"The barrier I came through?" Nox was also confused, since he clearly remembered....coming through... a–,
"Huh?" His golden eyes went blank for a second before they gained their light again and he asked, "what was I asking again?"