A/N: Hey! Before the chapter, I just wanted to thank all of you so much for getting the Five Kings over 1000 reads, and 49 votes! It makes me so happy to see my story gaining more readers, and I hope you all will stay with me on this journey! Also, you guys may be wondering why the chapters are now called Hopian. I decided to change this so that the Chapters cooreleate with where the characters are in the story, which as of now is in the Hopian Territory.

Last chapter, after some bickering
Seric and Karia received the rewards of the trial being the pure white boat that disappeared, and the blue cube which Seric had beforehand which he absorbed. With nothing left to do they head to the exit of the trial, however it turns out to be a trap with the ceilings slamming shut behind them. Karia being tired out and injured from falling in the well can't afford to carry Seric anymore, and so she drops him, leaving him helpless as his body is too injured to move.

Seric's P.O.V.

"Damn it... She promised that she could carry me, and then she does this!"

I think angrily to myself as I try to crawl on the floor achieving some movement, but not nearly enough to escape.

I light up for a second, thinking that I could use the boat to escape again, however the more I look around me I see that the room is far too small for the boat to fit in, and even if it wasn't I had no clue how to summon it.

Now I return to despair, with absolutely no way to get out of this.

At this point, Karia only has about a quarter left to go to the open exit door from where we started off, while I'm about to be flattened in a few seconds.

"A bit down under life I see."

Once again, I hear yet another undeniable distinct voice in my mind. This one sounds much different though, but for some reason I can't even describe it.

I'm about to respond to it, but before I have time to think I suddenly get hit by an unknown force of what felt like high pressure air, which launched me only a few metres from the exit.

The ungraceful landing and blast that launched me injured me even further, and I can now barely move an inch.

"Seric!"

I hear Karia yell from behind me. Now she FINALLY starts to help me, slowly dragging me by my right arm towards the exit.

With only 3 seconds left on the last closing ceiling, me and Karia both barely make it out of the trial and finally return to the sand of the tiny island, with the sun shining over us.

We both lay on the ground for a bit, until Karia breaks the silence.

"Oh *pant* my *pant* God that was *pant* close." She laughs between her breathes.

"Yeah, for one of us."

I respond, gritting my teeth with tears still coming out of my eyes.

"Hahahaha, how the hell did you get out anyways?" Karia asks like nothing happened.

"Karia! You promised to protect me, didn't you! Then what the hell was that back there huh!?" I yell shakily.

Karia's looks over at me, "There was nothing I could do, you know. If I carried you both of us would've been dead." Karia gets up using her knees as support and walks over to me.

"Although I guess this is probably your first near death experience, so I don't blame you for being like this. It is kinda my fault for not being more prepared, so sorry about that." Karia smiles, but for some reason it doesn't seem real.

I couldn't believe her. Was she really just brushing this aside? After she left her "friend" for dead?

"Ugh, I just wanna get some sleep now. I'm going back to the boat."

She reaches her hand down towards me to help me up.

The second she does I slap her hand away.

"Fuck off." I reply coldly.

Karia gasps, and kicks me in the square in the face.

"Fine then, be a dick! If you're not back in the boat in five minutes, I'm leaving without you. Have fun, no legs." She says.

Karia then starts to walk around the trial cave, which now had reverted back to how it looked before, being a black rock with a wooden door.

I curse under my breath, but nonetheless slowly start crawling on the hot sand to reach the other side of the small island.

"Damn it... It burns..." I say to myself as I drag myself across the sand.

🦀🦀🦀

Five minutes later, I arrive at the boat in the nick of time and using my arms climb aboard.

"Took you long enough." Karia says while standing up from her seat by the pull out table.

"..."

As much as I want to I don't reply, not wanting to get kicked off the boat with nowhere to go.

"Hey I did it last time, so this time you watch... watch..."

At that moment Karia collapses to the ground and passes out. Even though I'm furious at her, I can't just let her sleep on the hard floor so I reluctantly move her into my own sleeping bag, which is not the easiest task, considering she was definitely a bit taller than most women.

"I'm too nice for my own good." I think proudly to myself as I stand back up, looking around the ship.

I can walk now, but it's still painful and I have to limp to do so. I have nothing to do, so I walk over to the front of the boat where the control panel is to see how it works.

From the looks of it, it seems fairly simple. It's a touch screen that is about the height of my hand lengthwise and the width of two of my hands. The screen displays a simple message.

"Distance to Magthera: 3 hours and 5 minutes."

"Well, at least it's not as long as the trip to the Sailors Bazaar took us. Magthera... I wonder what that place is anyways?"

I also see that there is a small map on the bottom right side of the screen which seems to be showing the boats location and a small area around it. I realize that I probably could see a full map of the Hopian territory if I fool around with the map a bit, but I don't want to risk screwing anything up.

"Well, what now? I can't sleep and I can't go anywhere for three hours."

I look back at Karia, who is sleeping peacefully and doesn't seem to have a care in the world. I smile at this for a moment but I become sad a second later,

"Now that I have a cooler head, I really feel selfish about what I did to Karia. She's the only reason why I got out of prison in the first place, and plus I only met her a day ago and I expect her to completely risk her own life to save mine?"

I shake my head side to side, "Although, it's not even close to entirely my fault. She didn't plan anything whatsoever about how to go through the trial which almost killed me. Twice!"

I then nod in agreement with myself after I come to a conclusion. "In the end, I guess we both messed up in different ways. I'll apologize to her when she wakes up, since she already did to me before she passed out."

I sigh and walk over to the table where we ate at beforehand, and I start to look off the side of the boat in hope that I could see some aquatic wildlife in the vast deep blue ocean around us.

The sun is shining directly over us since there are no clouds as far as the eye could see, which made for quite the calming experience along with a calm breeze.

☀️☀️☀️

Two hours and a half later, I'm zoned out looking off into nowhere until I hear noises from where Karia is sleeping.

"Mmm..."

She groans as she slowly moves her upper half out of the sleeping bag and starts to stretch her arms.

She looks at me and her relaxed expression soon turns into a cold one.

"Karia... about what I said..."

I scratch my head awkwardly.

"I'm sorry. I wasn't myself back there and talked without thinking. I know that if you carried me that we both probably wouldn't have made it."

She smiles back at me, her cold expression melting away.

"Don't worry about it, we both messed up."

She stands up and walks to the control panel, looking at the time remaining.

"Wow, we've been on the boat for a long time. What did you even do the whole time?"

"Just enjoyed the view." I reply.

Karia then gasps with hand to her mouth, "Seric! How dare you take advantage of a sleeping woman!"

"Huh? Wha- nonono I meant the ocean the ocean!!" I reply at her accusation.

She then starts to laugh her head off which confuses me. "Pfft. That reaction was priceless."

My face is scrunched up in confusion, but I shrug it off not caring anymore. "How old are you anyways, Karia? You keep on calling me "kid" so I'm guessing you're pretty old."

"I'm 20."

"Seriously?! I thought you were way older! Erm... I mean, you're that strong at 20 years old?!"

"Try saying that to your girlfriend in the future, Seric. Anyways, I know right? It's because I've been training ever since I was a kid."

"Why? It's not like you had to is it?" I ask.

"No, I did. I was raised in Vegahold after all..."

"Really? That must mean you were pretty close with all of the soldiers there then right?"

To my surprise, Karia now had tears swelling up in her eyes.

"Karia wh-whats wrong is it something I-"

"I'm a horrible person. First Sariel, and then I beat everyone who raised me half to death."

I pause for a moment, shocked to see this side of her, and I really don't know what to say.

"Karia..."

"Uh... I know this may not mean much, but I don't think you're a bad person Karia."

I may not entirely mean that, but Karia needs someone on her side right now.

It's the least I could do.

She looks up at me, smiling through her tears, "Thanks, Seric. I know you probably don't mean that, but it helps."

I cringe when she says that, realizing that she probably noticed.

"Heh, besides I'm pretty sure I'm a bit more horrible than you are. I was locked up for life after all." I say.

This got a little laugh out of Karia, but I can see that she's still sad.

There is awkward silence for a few minutes, and I was trying to think of a way to break it. Even though I wasn't the greatest at small talk.

"Um... the weather's great out here, eh?"

Karia then starts to laugh again, which made me happy to know it wasn't for nothing.

"Pfft. Where'd you get that from, "How to start a conversation 101"?"

"Well it got a laugh out of you, so say what you want."

I say as I mentally huff and look away.

For the rest of the 35 minutes, Karia remained mostly silent and after I try to talk with her multiple times to no avail, I simply give up and we sit in silence.

I asked her about the place that we're going to, "Magthera" but she said that she would let me see for myself to make it more interesting.

I understand why as the island came into sight.

I'm in shock. The whole island is a flowing volcano, which somehow had civilisation on top of the currents of lava.

They're some sort of buildings made of some blue steel type material all around, mainly in the form of cubes.

"Why the hell would anyone want to live there?!" I yell as Karia laughs at my reaction once again.

A/N: Why could Karia ever want to go somewhere so extreme?

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