A man.

**Narrator viewpoint**

A village out in nowhere. It has nothing special about it other than its extreme suffering from poverty. Its population is that of elderly, children, and housewives only. Living in the village is practically impossible since there are no job options within its grounds all who live there get support from family members who work outside of it, and most of their resources are bought off traveling merchants. In that village lives a lonely girl called Lena. She gets support from her fellow villagers by getting one meal a day. She lives in a house that was left by her late parents, the house is an empty one with nothing but a bed, table, and chair within it.

Lena does nothing all day as there is nothing to do. she started practicing her talking and writing skills ever since her 13th birthday so it's been around a year since then. She's a 14-year-old young girl with brown hair going all the way to her elbows and hazel eyes. She gets up and decides to go for a walk outside. As she absorbs the usual depressing scene she notices someone that isn't from around here, but to her, it didn't matter who he is at first she just looked at him as a tall man and started wondering if she would ever get to be as tall as him. The man is walking around casually as she follows him thinking it's better than doing nothing. She starts to study his outfit, he's wearing casual adventuring cloth and has no gear on him other than a plain-looking sword. As she notices the sword the man starts to intrigue her for a year now she had been thinking about adventurers a lot wanting to know more about them but not many of them pass by this village.

She decides to go and ask him some questions but the moment she gets near him she notices his expression. It was quite the cold one without any hint of warmth it was as if he doesn't care for others, after seeing that Lena goes back to following him from behind while looking at the back of his head. After following him around for a while the man finally decides to sit down on the side of some house. they had circled the village for quite a bit without doing anything, Lena looks at the man from behind a wall then decides to call it a day after he sits down she goes back to her house and sits down on her bed as she slowly dozes off. An hour or 2 later she is woken up by someone's screaming she quickly gets up and runs out of her house just to notice there are dozens of monsters running rampant in the village they aren't much but to a village like this they are deadly. Lena starts panicking as she slowly remembers the man from this morning she quickly runs to the last place she saw him at. While running to him a monster notices her and starts following her, She doesn't look behind her and just runs straight but is met by nothing but despair the place where the man had been laying down is now nothing but a little puddle of mud he had already left the spot. she then slowly turns around to see 3 large green monsters with grins on their faces slowly approach her. as she panics she thinks to herself (is this is it? is this my end? after everything I promised her this is how I go? is there really no way out of this? can I really not live on? what's wrong with this village? why weren't we even alarmed about this? it's all the villager's fault. yeah, it's them. if they weren't so incompetent we wouldn't have to suffer like this every day fearing the next..... who am I kidding the only person at fault here is myself..... they are nice people who cared for me..... I hope they make it out of this.....) all that had crossed her mind in the split of a second while she slowly accepts the.... but then out of seemingly nowhere all 3 of the monster's heads fly off. Lena is flabbergasted by the surprising turn of events. she quickly looks around to notice the man from this morning is sheathing back his sword.

She stares blankly at him while he casually walks up to the monsters' corpses and stars fleshing them out for what's known as loot. This is Lena's first time seeing something getting skinned in front of her so she quickly turns away. He was good at what his doing is what Lena notices as she took a peek from time to time just to regret it more and more it took him no more than a minute. The man was fully done, he had left nothing of worth in that corpse collecting literally anything that can be sold. He's now holding quite the big bag on his back that is filled with monster spoils he collected himself. The bag was big a bit too big for just 3 monsters worth of loot. The man gets up and turns around to leave. Lena immediately follows him just like this morning as they walk through the town she absorbs the seen around her. the whole town is covered in monster corpses that have been fully looted and no one was harmed.

As she gazed more and more at the scene she couldn't stop herself from comparing this man to a certain man she read about. Which left her with a feeling of warmth. The villagers thanked the man one by one while he paid them no attention and kept moving undisturbed. Lena kept on following him while looking at the back of his head. She didn't know why herself but it made her feel at home. The man had left and village and started walking in an unknown direction while Lena followed him without thinking. She felt like wherever they are going is gonna be way better than this village.

after following him for what felt like moments to her he turns around and finally speaks to her "hey you why are you still following me we are now very far from the village your gonna get lost, go scram." he says in an annoyed voice. Lena doesn't know how to reply so she points at his bag, "what? what about this bag?" he says confused. She then gestures that he gives it to her, "really? you believe you can hold this?" the man asks sarcastically, Lena nods. "sure go ahead be my guest." he says as he takes it off and hands it to Lena. It was heavy she could barely hold it with her hands. The man is trying to hold in a laugh while Lena is struggling with the bag after a bit she finally finds her perfect center for gravity and is able to barely hold the bag. "wow you actually did it huh." he says surprised. Lena nods twice. you could tell from her face that she is still struggling. "so what now? your planning to carry my luggage?" he asks sarcastically again. Lena nods. the man is surprised by her response since he thought she would give up the second he handed her the bag. "... sure by me but don't expect any special treatment," he says almost coldly as he turns around and walks away. As he slowly walks away Lena follows him with a huge smile on her face, it was the first time she can ever remember having a sense of belonging. The huge bag on her back had almost completely left her mind at that point.