Chapter : 737

It was the question he had been dreading. The real answer was a complex calculus of instinct, mission parameters, and a deeply buried, residual chivalry from a life he could barely remember. The persona of Zayn, however, required a simpler, nobler answer.

“You are under my protection,” he said, the words feeling foreign and theatrical on his tongue. “As my companion on this journey, your safety is my responsibility. It is a doctor’s duty to preserve life.”

He expected her to see through the hollow, sanctimonious words. He expected her to call him a liar again.

Instead, she was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was thick with an emotion he couldn’t quite identify. “A doctor’s duty,” she repeated softly. “I have known many doctors and healers in my life, Zayn. None of them would have done what you just did. They would have run. They would have let the beast take me and used the distraction to save themselves. That is what a sensible person would do.”

She finished applying the salve and began to wrap his shoulder with a clean linen bandage, her movements now practiced and efficient. “You are not a sensible person,” she concluded, her voice a mixture of awe and exasperation. “You are either the bravest man I have ever met, or the most profound fool.”

“The line between the two is often thinner than we think,” he quipped, a flash of his own dry, sarcastic humor bleeding through the Zayn persona.

She finished tying off the bandage, her work neat and secure. She sat back on her heels, looking at him, her dark eyes searching his face. The intimidating mystery was gone, replaced by a genuine, open curiosity. The walls were down.

“I still don’t know who you are,” she said quietly. “But I know what you are. You are a good man, Zayn. A truly good man.”

The words struck him with more force than the Sabercat’s claws had. A good man. It was a label he had never applied to himself. He was a soldier, a killer, a strategist, a lord, a deceiver. He was a thousand things, but ‘good’ was not one of them. Yet, hearing it from her, spoken with such raw, unvarnished sincerity, it… it felt real. The mask he wore was so convincing that it had fooled not only the world, but for a fleeting moment, it had almost fooled him too.

A dangerous, fragile intimacy was blooming between them in the heart of the Green Hell, born from shared peril and a selfless act that was, in itself, a calculated lie. The seeds of admiration had been sown, and Lloyd had the terrifying feeling that they were growing into something far more complex and uncontrollable than he had ever intended. He had come to the jungle to save a child’s life, but he was beginning to suspect he might lose a part of himself in the process.

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The aftermath of the battle left a strange, profound stillness in its wake. The immediate, life-or-death tension that had crackled in the air like lightning had vanished, replaced by a quiet, shared vulnerability that was almost more intimate. Lloyd, propped against the ancient, gnarled root of the banyan tree, felt the steady, soothing coolness of the healing salve working its slow magic on his savaged shoulder. The pain was still a deep, resonant ache, a brutal reminder of the beast’s power, but the sharp, fiery edges of the wound had been dulled, leaving a throbbing exhaustion in their place.

Sumaiya remained kneeling before him, the task of bandaging him complete. She didn't move away. Her hands, which had been so steady and so professional as she had cleaned and dressed his wounds, now rested awkwardly in her lap. The intense, confident, and almost predatory woman who had confronted him at his clinic, demanding his help, was gone. In her place was someone softer, more uncertain, her entire perception of him—and perhaps of the world itself—having been fundamentally recalibrated by the brutal reality of the fight.

“The spirit you summoned,” she began, her voice hesitant, the words a soft whisper as if she were afraid the question itself was a transgression against some sacred law. “That… being of fire. I have never seen or heard of anything like it. It felt… ancient. Primordial. Not like the spirits of the knights or maces I have seen at court. Theirs are beasts of the field—griffins, bears, great wolves. Or they are elemental sprites, smaller things of air and water. That,” she shook her head, her dark eyes wide with the memory, “was a king.”

Chapter : 738

Lloyd’s internal alarms, which were never truly silent, chimed a quiet note of caution. Her question was broader and less specific than the continuity error I had previously written, but it was no less dangerous. She was right. Iffrit was an anomaly. He did not fit the common taxonomy of spirits known in this part of the world. He was too powerful, too intelligent, and too… demonic. It was a loose thread, and she was intelligently, if gently, pulling on it. He needed to control the narrative, and quickly.

“There are many paths to power, Sumaiya,” he said, his voice a low, weary murmur that he hoped conveyed both wisdom and a deep, battle-born exhaustion. “And many secrets buried in the old bloodlines of the world. My mother’s line was… different. From a distant, forgotten corner of the northern mountains. Their bonds were not with the common spirits of the fields and streams, but with older, wilder things that sleep deep within the earth. The power is not always of a kind that can be easily named or categorized by the scholars in the academies.”

It was a vague, half-true answer, a beautiful piece of misdirection woven from the threads of plausible mythology. He was not Lloyd Ferrum of the Northern Reaches; he was Zayn, the last scion of a forgotten, shamanistic mountain clan. It was a lie that was grand, romantic, and almost impossible to disprove. He was banking on the universal truth that the oldest, most obscure families often had the strangest, and most potent, secrets.

Sumaiya seemed to accept the explanation, her mind grappling with the concept of ‘older, wilder things.’ It fit the awesome, terrifying power she had witnessed far better than any simple explanation of elemental affinity. “A different spark,” she repeated thoughtfully, the words a hushed whisper of awe. “That is one word for it. It felt like standing next to a living volcano.” She shook her head again, a physical attempt to clear the overwhelming memory. “And you… you controlled it perfectly. It was a part of you. An extension of your own will.”

“A spirit and its master are two halves of a single will,” he said, quoting a line directly from an Academy textbook on spirit theory he’d read in his first life. It sounded profound, wise, and had the added, and very useful, benefit of being an utterly meaningless platitude.

“And your own strength…” she continued, her gaze dropping to his bandaged shoulder, her voice filled with a new, and even more pressing, curiosity. “To take blows from a creature like that… you are no mere doctor, Zayn. You are a warrior. I saw you. You moved… you fought… why hide it? Why the pretense of being a simple healer?”

This was the more dangerous question. His physical resilience, his combat instincts, the sheer, ingrained muscle memory of a lifetime of war—those were things that could not be so easily explained away by a mystical bloodline.

“Not all battles are fought on an open field, Sumaiya,” he said, his voice taking on a new, somber, and deeply world-weary tone. He was crafting a new, tragic layer for his legend, a backstory that would not just answer her question, but would bind her to him with the powerful, unbreakable chains of sympathy. “Sometimes, a warrior must put down his sword and pick up a different tool. I have… seen enough of the world’s endless cycle of violence. I grew tired of it.”

He looked away, his gaze distant, as if seeing a ghost from a past she could not imagine. “I found that healing a single life, mending a single broken thing, brought me more peace than taking a hundred lives ever did. The life of a simple doctor is not a pretense. It is a penance. It is the life I chose.”

He let the words hang in the air between them, a perfect, poignant, and utterly fabricated lie. He was not Zayn, the humble doctor. He was Achilles, retired to his tent, a great warrior who had turned his back on the glorious, pointless butchery of the world. It was a classic, romantic trope, and he hoped, with all his strategic soul, that it was enough to satisfy her relentless curiosity.

To his profound relief, it seemed to work. A wave of deep, genuine empathy washed over her face. She saw not a deceiver, but a man haunted by a violent past, a man seeking redemption in the quiet, thankless, and noble work of healing. His lie, in its tragic beauty, had inadvertently resonated with the secret, unspoken tragedies of her own life that she had hinted at. They were both survivors of a past war, fighting for a measure of peace in their own, desperate ways.