Ike felt he had made excellent time for leaving in the absolute darkness, and dawn was clearly beginning to show itself to the world in front of him. This would be his first dawn alone, his first dawn without Oscar's cooking, sparring with Mia, Rhys' fearful eyes as he watched the morning combat, Mist's admonitions that he had been too hard on Mia, Mia's angry voice that he had been holding off on her, Soren's inventory reports, everything.

He was leaving, for good he didn't know.

All he knew was a feeling of restlessness, a feeling that demanded that he start heading east. He didn't know why, he didn't know for what reason. He just knew that his place was not to remain in Tellius. He didn't know how dangerous it would be, and he was determined not to lead any more of the mercenaries that had become his family, (or in Mist's case, actually were his family) to their deaths in another of Commander Ike's foolish adventures.

So he had waited for the first new moon to cover his departure after he started having his feelings, and now, almost exactly a year after the defeat of the Goddess Ashera; he was leaving the continent.

As he crested a hill on the road, he saw the first gleams of morning sunlight shining into his face and welcomed the sudden warmth.

He decided to take a quick brake and warm up his cold body, so he took off his knapsack and dropped it to the ground so that he could stretch in the sun a little bit.

He began by stretching his arms out, and drew each arm to its fullest extent above his head, and then bent down at the waist to touch his toes.

It was probably a good thing that he did, or his head might have been severed off by the blade that swung through the air where his neck had been only a moment previously.

Ike gasped and rolled forward, drawing out Ragnell as he came back to his feet and swung his blade around as he turned to counter his sudden opponent's quick attack. He didn't have time to pay attention to any of the person's features that were only barely revealed by the dawn light, and only was able to determine that whoever this person was, they were a fair bit shorter than him (not that that was unusually, as Ike topped almost everyone he met), and that they had a much shorter reach than him, but had a ridiculous amount of skill and speed. He had to focus entirely on the shining blade that kept darting for body to keep the fighter from cutting him to ribbons of flesh.

Whoever he was fighting was good, and that was coming from someone who had personally killed an immortal goddess. His blade barely had time to keep up with the ridiculously fast motions of his opponent's sword. There was no way that this was a common bandit or cutter, this person had to be a professional.

Quickly deciding that winning with his life and losing with his honor was overrated, he swung his blade forward, sending a shock wave of magical power from his blessed sword.

'I'll bet he didn't expect that,' he thought confidently as he rushed forward to press his attack, only to find that the person had simply ducked the magical wave, and rushed forward to get under his much longer reach.

'Who is the guy?' he thought violently to himself as he parried another slash. How could they possibly know that Ike's sword was magical? Unless they had been hired by someone specifically to hunt him down! 'Now why would someone do that? I was a rather large part of that whole business with killing our own beloved, more than slightly maniacal goddess that had turned everyone to stone, wasn't I?' he thought.

'Oh no, if they are targeting me, then maybe they are targeting the rest of the Greil mercenaries! I need to find out from this assassin if there are more of them. Drat, that means I have to capture this guy alive,'.

As the assassin's blade circled around for another slice at his chest, Ike grabbed his sword arm just above the blade hilt with his left hand and halted the attack of his opponent's sword. Ike then threw his weight forward and toppled on top of his opponent, driving his their sword into the ground behind their head, and held Ragnell up to his neck.

"Now", he panted, "just who do you think you are?"

"Wait a minute, Boss! Wait a minute, it's just me Mia!" said his opponent in a very quick and frightened voice.

Then he looked at her head and saw Mia's distinctive violet hair and headband, her emerald eyes, and her trademark orange leather jerkin and padded armor.

Then he realized that his head was less than a hands breadth from her quickly panting face, and that their bodies was pressed together in many places that they most certainly should not be.

"Mia!" he shouted as he sat up quickly on her waist, "what was with the attack? Wait. How did you even know I was here in the first place?"

Mia's emerald eyes, which had been bright from combat, suddenly dimmed, and she glanced away from Ike's blue ones, as if to focus on the intricacies of the grass growing next to her head. She bit her lip a little before responding.

"Um... well... um, I kind of, sort of, um, followed you from the fort when I saw you leaving," she said shamefully, and she continued looking at the grass, with an occasional glance at Ike's face; which was growing steadily more mottled by rage by the second.

"You followed me! Mia, I left at night specifically so that neither you nor anyone else would follow me! Why did you follow me? For that matter, how did you see me? he groaned as all of his plan's for departure came crashing down around him. Now he would have to drag Mia back to the base, where everyone would have been incensed by his letter of departure that he had left for all of them. Then of course, they would all keep him from going, and forcibly restrain him if they had to.

"To answer the second question first, it wasn't difficult. You're kind of um, gigantic, you see," she said, allowing a small trace of humor to crawl into her voice to try to ease Ike's mood. "For the first question, well, I don't entirely know. There were a few reason's like sparring. By the way, if you had left me as only the second best sword fighter in Tellius, I would never have forgiven you!" her voice suddenly grew somewhat angry about him leaving her as only the second best, but quickly returned to her normal voice, though somewhat still subdued.

"But honestly, I really don't know why I followed you; I just got a feeling I suppose, that I needed to follow you for some reason. Oh, and I heard you leave when you made the floorboard in front of my room creak a little if you were wondering why I was up in the middle of the night," she said with a sudden grin.

Ike sighed and stood up, holding out a hand for her to pull herself upright. She grasped it and Ike pulled her up again so that she was standing.

"Okay then, that explains why you were following me, but that doesn't explain the sudden slash at my throat!" Ike growled.

"What? You can't say you don't know why I did that! Come on Ike! Dawn! Don't you see it? DAWN! We always have spars at dawn! Well, that and I was starting to get a little bored following you, and I needed something to do. Besides, I was using my training sword, unlike you," she paused taking a minute to glare at Ragnell, which Ike had slung back over his shoulder again. "Besides, I knew that you would dodge," she said primly and immediately started trotting down the path again.

"Hold on a minute! Mia! Where do you think you are going?" Ike yelled after her.

Mia quickly spun around, her hair shimmering in the newborn rays of light from the sun, and answered like she was talking to a particularly slow witted person.

"Where do you think I'm going, Boss? I'm going where you were going, where ever that going to, happened to be going to," she said with her customary smile attached to her face.

"And what makes you think that you can come? Come on Mia, head back to the base, I really need to go alone,"

"Okay, Boss! Whatever you say!" she said as she spun around again and started jogging down the path that she had just started going down.

Ike sighed and ran his hand down his face. 'Oh well,' he thought, 'that part at least was to be expected,' he thought to himself as he looked to the morning's sky. The orange and red colors of the morning sun reflecting off of the numerous clouds were quite stunning, but held no answer for him. Sighing again, he started running after the ridiculous Trueblade that had somehow finagled herself into his journey.

Author's Note I honestly have no idea where I'm going with this story, so seriously, anything can happen at this point. (I might even kill them both MWAHHAHAHA! Probably not though).

If anyone has anything they would like clarified in the story (i.e. the sword fighting scene, setting details, more characterization, et cetera), please feel free to respond to it and say so. You can't possibly be a harsher critic than I can be.

Also, I'm working on so many different things right now, I honestly have no idea when I'll be able to update this and my other story(ies) but rest assured that I will (eventually).
And If nobody likes it, then too bad! I'll update it anyway!

Also, also, I know the ending is stupid. If there is anything that I'm even worse at writing than beginnings to papers, its writing the blasted endings. Again, I'm working on it.

Thank you to the first few people who reviewed. I really hate to not take all of the blame for the issues here, but my writing tools on this computer are less than stellar, so I fixed most of the quotation marks and combined words. I should have reviewed it again after I finally was able to actual post it, and for that I apologise.

As for the lines with the name and date thing, your guess is as good as mine to what those are and how they got there. Deleted them though.

Continue to critique!