The group of men rushing at the house were not prone to reason or discussion. That left me with no choice but to incapacitate them through force. It was ten against one, so the odds were already stacked against me. 

"Listen to me, dammit!"

I was shouting at a brick wall. I swerved out of the way just as a falchion swept wildly for my arm, being wielded by one of the men surrounding me.

"[ Freeze ]," I chanted, directing my hand towards the feet of the man with the falchion, creating blocks of icicles that formed around the man's feet, disabling his movements.

"Watch out, he's a mage!" One of the men shouted at the others.

"Rush him, don't give him a chance to cast!" Another said.

I ducked into the gardens around Kaito's house, narrowly avoiding arrows that were being shot at me from two archers at the back of their group.

"Chase him down!" The remaining men pursued me into the bushes, refusing to even let me have a few seconds to catch my breath.

"Are these guys for real..." I cursed underneath my breath, scurrying through the garden as the thorns from nearby vines scratched into my skin.

I still had a lot of mana stored inside me to use. The problem was I wasn't actually wanting to kill or seriously hurt any of them, which severely limited the number of spells I could cast.

But the biggest problem was really that I was starting to run out of breath. 

In my life before isekai, I was seriously unfit from a life spent playing strategy games at home. Being born with asthma certainly didn’t help either. It seemed that in this life I was also cursed with the physicality of an old man. And I have asthma here too.

"He's here!" 

I turned around, just in time to feel a sword driving itself straight through my right shoulder.

The pain was unlike anything I've ever felt before in both my lives. Flashes of white and red streaked across my vision, melting everything in my sight.

"Get away from me--!" I screamed, and mana exploded out of my body in a reaction to the scorching pain.

~x~

When I could see again, I saw four men lying across the gardens, unconscious and badly wounded from the mana blast that I had reactively unleashed. 

The four remaining men stood at a distance from me, watching in gaped horror at the destruction around me. It looked as though a grenade or a small bomb had gone off where I stood. 

"How does he still have so much mana?!"

"Isn't he supposed to be an Iron-ranked adventurer?"

The men were talking to one another in rapid voices, trying to determine their next plan of attack. Meanwhile I was barely staying conscious, gripping tightly onto my right shoulder with the sword still stuck in there. 

I was reaching my limit here. I could barely focus my mind amidst the intense pain, making it damn near impossible to cast a spell even if I still had some mana left within me. Physically, I was also completely exhausted. 

Glancing at the men before me, I realized that only four of them remained from the original group of ten who had attacked me. It was impressive enough that I had managed to take down six of them all by myself. But ten against one was just too unfair. I wasn't Shizu.

As I looked to my side, I noticed Kaito and the children emerging from the house, their eyes widening in surprise at the sight of the defeated men before them. Kaito approached me, a grim expression etched onto his face.

"That's enough," he told the men firmly, his hand reaching for a sword that was hidden under his cloak. "Go and take care of the other adventurer that was with him. He's a tall big fella with an eyepatch and a mace so he will be hard to miss. I'll take care of this one."

The men nodded obediently before running off from the area to follow Kaito's orders. I watched as Kaito walked towards me, ready to finish the job.

I could already tell that this was going to be a difficult fight.

"Sorry, kids," I glanced at the children. "Looks like I'm going to have to hurt Kaito a bit, after all."

"Ryuji..." Takeshi said, staring at me with the other children who all had an uneasy look on their faces. 

"Don't worry though," I told them, returning my focus on Kaito with a grimace. "I promise I won't kill him."

After a moment of hesitation and understanding that Kaito was heading for me with his sword, the children spoke, "Okay, Ryuji... we trust you. Please bring our big brother Kaito back to his senses!"

~x~

"So this is how you do things, Kaito? You steal from the marketplace, then murder any adventurers that look to capture you?"

Kaito didn't answer me right away, instead, he stared at me with an unwavering gaze, his expression unreadable. Finally, he spoke.

"You think I'm proud of what I've done?" he said, his voice low and measured. "You think I want to be living like this?"

"Live another way then," I replied. "This isn't your only option. There's other ways to make money, Kaito. I promise I will help you, the people here and the children."

"Hah," Kaito scoffed. "You stand there, acting all self-righteous in front of the children, but in reality, you're just as naive as the kids."

I remained silent, watching him carefully.

"I have no choice," Kaito continued bitterly. "I grew up in these filthy streets, surrounded by poverty and desperation. I went to bed hungry every night, wondering who I would find dead next in the morning from the starvation and cold. The Empire did nothing but laugh in our faces, and the Lord of Lunaris sits in his castle at the centre of city, enjoying his luxurious life whilst the rest of us died like cattle."

I could feel the weight of his words pressing down on me, making me doubt what I was doing.

"This world is a cold, cruel place, Ryuji," Kaito continued, his eyes fixed on the ground. "People would do anything to survive. I had to learn how to steal and fight at a child, just to make it through each day. And even then, it was never enough."

"Let me help you, Kaito," I said empathetically. "You and your friends can become adventurers with me. You can earn your money legitimately and buy enough food to feed everyone here."

Kaito stopped in front of me, his sword glinting in the dimming light as the sun began to set in the horizon of the city. He paused for a moment, and I thought I had finally gotten through to him, then he sighed, "I knew you wouldn't understand. For people like us... this is the only way we know how to live--!"

He thrust his sword forward, aiming for my head, and I narrowly evaded, feeling his blade slice at the skin of my cheek. One second later and I would had been dead. 

"K-Kaito...!" I grunted my teeth, and slammed my hand onto the ground, causing the floor beneath him to break.

Kaito leaped forward, continuing with a fury of sword strikes that I blocked with physical barriers I cast at the same time as his attacks. He wasn't giving me a break to cast any offensive spells and my movements were still heavily impeded by the sword stabbed in my shoulder. 

One of his swings slipped past my barrier, slashing at my leg, and gave me a decent gash. I winced, trying my best to withstand the pain. It was clear that Kaito was much more skilled than any of the other men I faced previously. 

"It's over, Ryuji--!" He shouted and flung his sword at my waist, preparing to slice me in half. 

Left with no choice, I grabbed the handle of the sword in my shoulder and ripped it out of my flesh, throwing the sword at him at full force to change the motion of his swing.

"What the--?!" He gasped, surprised and parried the sword away.

Not letting the opportunity slip away, I materialised a cone of ice and shot it at his abdomen, cutting him and inflicting a wound that would be severe enough to stop the fight but not fatal. 

"Stop this, Kaito!" I shouted, materialising several more cones of ice in the air in front of me. "This fight is over, can't you see that? It's meaningless to continue!"

"Meaningless?" Kaito scoffed, then jumped at me, slashing at the cones of ice and shattering them into pieces. "Only the victor gets to say something like that."

The children on the sidelines screamed for Kaito to stop.

"You're going to die if you keep this up!" I shouted, shooting a ball of compressed wind that sent me flying backwards to create distance, whilst the ball of wind slammed into Kaito’s shoulder, dislocating one of his arms. "Is that what you want?!"

Kaito charged forward without hesitation or caring for his wounds, ducking under a second ball of wind that I shot at him, and pursued me relentlessly. 

“I knew exactly what I was doing when I stole from the marketplace," Kaito said in between throwing sword strikes at me. "I knew it was wrong. But I didn’t care. All I saw were the smiles of the people back here, the elderly and sick that were starved and might not live another day, the children that went to bed with empty stomachs every night. I was ready to throw away my life for all that! What do you live for, Ryuji?!”

“I... I...”

“If the point of your existence is simply to survive in this world, then let me end that pointless existence you call life for you!!”

Kaito ran forward at me at full speed despite the balls of flame that I was shooting around him, searing at the sides of his flesh and warning him to stop, “Don't do it, Kaito!!”

“A man that has nothing he’s willing to die for has no purpose! And that is why you will lose to me, Ryuji! Now prepare to die--!!

Kaito aimed his sword straight for my heart, and I cast a physical barrier around myself and channelled a ball of flame at the same time, having less than a second to think. Then I watched in dismay and shock as the shield broke itself upon Kaito’s sword, leaving nothing between me and the tip of the blade.

This was it. I was dead.

The ball of my flame in my hand was still channelling. I didn't have enough time to cast it in this position. Maybe if I didn't promise the children not to kill Kaito, I could had fought at full strength and won this fight.

...

No, the problem was that he was right. Kaito fought with the willpower of someone that was willing to die for what he truly believed in. On the contrary, I had nothing like that. I was just someone that was simply trying to survive in this isekai world that I was thrown in. 

In the end, that was the difference between him and me. 

“Then let me grant your wish.”

A soft feminine voice came from above and suddenly Shizu dropped down like a comet, crashing atop Kaito and stabbed her knife straight through the crest of Kaito’s skull, the gleaming blade breaking all the way through and exiting to the bottom of his chin, exploding blood everywhere, gushing out from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears like a squashed watermelon.

~x~

Kaito’s body collapsed into the ground under the impact of Shizu's drop, going instantly limp as his bones cracked and crumbled into the hard dirt ground.

Nonchalantly, Shizu picked herself up from on top of Kaito's corpse, sliding her knife out from the top of his skull, and flung aside lumps of his brain that had stuck to her knife.

“Are you okay, Ryuji?” Shizu turned to ask me, half her travelling cloak covered in blood of varying degrees of dark maroon. She pursed her lips in worry, “Sorry I got here late, I was held up by some of the townsfolk that took me the wrong way on purpose.”

“S-Shizu...” I said, shocked.

Shizu stared at me for a second, then her face fell, “Y-your arm, Ryuji...!”

Just as Shizu was about to run up to check on me, the sound of the children's screams pierced our ears from the side.

"Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh--!!"

"Y-You killed Kaito...!"

The other boy next to Takeshi pushed aside the girl in their group and turned around to throw up all the little contents in his stomach in the garden.

I grabbed Shizu's wrist, stopping her before she could reach for her knife.

"Don't, Shizu," I told her. "They're just children..."

"They're witnesses, Ryuji," Shizu replied, her eyes flicking at the children panicky. "You told me to be discreet. I have to kill them, or they'll--"

I pulled Shizu towards me hard, hugging her tightly to restrict her from moving, "P-please, Shizu... no more..." my voice shook, trying to control the unsteady emotions boiling up inside of me. 

"Okay, Ryuji..." Shizu said softly.

In front of me, I could see the children glaring at me with looks of contempt, anger and betrayal all intertwined in their eyes that were wet with tears, splashes of blood painting their faces.

"You promised you wouldn't kill big brother Kaito, Ryuji..." Takeshi told me. "You promised...!"

"I... I didn't..." I mouthed, but my words were so soft they weren't even audible. 

Was it Shizu's fault? But she was just trying to save me. I would had died if Shizu didn't come into the fight like that.

Was it my fault? Maybe if I had only ended the fight earlier, things wouldn't have had to end this way. Maybe if I didn't get caught by Kaito at that last moment, Shizu wouldn't have had to come in and save me. Or maybe I shouldn't had even taken on this stupid quest in the first place. What was I even trying to do by interfering in Kaito's affairs and trying to get him to stop? I should had just left him alone. I...

My face paled, the world spun and I felt horribly sick to my stomach.