"Do you want to live?"
"Y-yes...I...ahem!" He tried to speak but instantly coughed out a mouthful of blood. The wound on his neck was deeper than he had thought.
"I didn't get a clear answer..." the voice nonchalantly stated.
Mino didn't know what to do, he was at his wit's end. His life blood was flowing out of him and he would pass out soon. So he painfully nodded while saying,
"I...w-want...t-t-to...LIVE."
"That's the spirit." The figure's neutral voice changed into one that of a girl's.
"Here you go." At the same time as he heard those words, something was poured on his neck and the pain started to die away, replaced by a warm feeling. Mino knew that sensation, it was Healing.
"Drink this."
A vial was forcefully shoved into his mouth, he had not choice but to drink that. As the sharp taste resembling that of cough syrup spread across his tongue, the liquid flowed down his throat. After a few seconds, his throat was patched up completely.
"Stand Up."
Following the order, he tried to stand up, but fell to his knees. His legs were wobbly and his head was reeling like anything. He had lost much blood. The figure sat down beside him, sighing. He focused his eyes on the figure. The figure had a high pitched voice, but it was still too early to call them a girl.
They were wearing a copper coloured cowl, hiding their body completely. Random, thin black lines served to decorate the cowl. They lifted the hood off their face and it turned out that the person was actually a woman.
"You owe me a favour. You need to repay me, or I will kill you.
Mino caught his breath upon hearing that murderous tone. He said "What favour?"
"Okay. I will tell what you need to do, but you first need to know the backstory. You may think I have killed that person there, but that's not the case." The woman pointed towards Mira's corpse.
[Like hell I would believe you, and I am not interested in your backstory either! I just want to get away from this fucking place...] He whimpered inwardly. Sadly, he had no routes of escape.
"I am... no need to know who I am. Call me Wanderer1. Ten years ago, I and my friend, say Wanderer2 came in this planet called earth. We were transported here from another planet due to an accident with spatial Ervass. Those accidents rarely happened, but we were unlucky enough to get caught in one. Our third friend who lost control of the spatial spell hasn't managed to find us in these 10 years."
Mino listened to her words with rapt attention, his mouth agape.
[Another world? What the fuck is she talking about!]
"Now... I called myself and my friend wanderers because we are spending our times wandering about in an unknown planet."
She paused, took a deep breath in and started again.
"But about seven or five years before, a group of ten had come, shortly followed by a group of three, significantly more powerful than the former. And the thing is... they are all people of my planet. So I thought I could communicate with them and get a way to go back home."
The situation was getting crazier by the second, and Mino was having trouble keeping up.
"So did they help you...and your friend?"
"The second group, the group of three, who call themselves hunters, outright refused to help us. They didn't believe any of our words and put us in their kill list. And you seem to be curious about my friend. Hell, she just died this morning, at the hands of one of those three, the most obnoxious of them."
"T-then t-the other c-c-corpse was..."
"Yes. It was my friend's..."
Wanderer1's eyes teared up as she looked down.
However, instantly she wiped her eyes which regained their sharp glint.
"The other group of ten. They also refused to trust us and got wary of us. We slowly learnt that both groups had the same objective... to finish the other. For why, we didn't know. Just recently we have learnt it's related to... that thing. Something about which we wanted to know more... but failed..."
"W-what thing?" Mino gulped, half of her words were going over his head. Nonetheless, he asked the question.
"You don't need to know, it doesn't exist in your world. Anyways, those two groups have played a game of cat and mouse for a long amount of time. Now, they are finally starting to get serious. Soon, this place will turn into a battlefield. The one who holds the power to travel from one world to another may die or escape in this battle. There's no way I could allow that, now that I have waited so long. So this is where your role comes."
"M-my role? In this serious a situation?" was the reply delivered with a trembling voice. He couldn't help though, he had heard that the peaceful atmosphere would soon be replaced by that of a battlefield.
"From the moment you came in contact with one of them... I have been tracking you. You have come into contact with their entire squad, if only for a small amount of time. You must have seen a girl with inky blue hair, she's the spatial Ervass expert."
He indeed remembered her. He had encountered her the evening before too, running away with a blonde girl.
"What do I need to do?" Mino gulped dryly, his voice laced with fear.
"She has a scroll with her. It connects to our planet. I'm sure she has kept it as a lifebuoy. On the event they are going to die, she would use it to teleport her and her team to our planet. And the scroll would teleport the subjects to a random place in the planet, making it difficult to track the destination. That will buy them time."
"And why exactly are you bothering to tell me about this?" Sweat was flowing down his back. He was having a bad feeling about this. [I'm sure it won't end well.]
"Of course it's related to your mission."
[Fuck, I'm so dead...]