Walking through the forest on bare feet had been difficult enough, with the twigs and stones and the occasional slope hidden under vegetation that seemed intent on making him stumble, but continuing on with his hands tied together and a sword at his back definitely made the experience a lot more unpleasant.

The man who later declared himself as Gilbert when asked for a name seemed to wear a permanent grin; Alfred could feel it boring into the back of his head.

"Hey," he said after quite a long while of silence, hoping the nervous edge in his voice wasn't obvious, "so, um, where are we going?"

"Shouldn't that be obvious?" Gilbert said in his overconfident tone, though he grumbled slightly when it became clear that if it was obvious then it wasn't obvious to Alfred. "Okay, look here." He stopped and pulled the sword away slightly so that Alfred could turn, and he gestured to the crest on his dark armour. It seemed to show two wolves throwing flowers into the night sky, or something to that effect.

"This is the symbol the knights of Altsap wear with pride," Gilbert said. "What do you think that makes me?"

"A knight?"

"That's right! And I'm a very important knight. Okay, well, I'm not formally part of the army, but... Anyway, it is a knight's duty to lock away any suspicious characters who might be threatening the safety of the kingdom, understand?"

Alfred blinked. "So, I'm under arrest? But wait, no, that's a bad idea! I've got a quest and if I don't complete it then the world will be in danger! I've got to find the crystal pieces and stop the evil sorcerer—that's what the goddess told me!"

"Yeesh. I'm always stuck with the crazy ones," Gilbert muttered. "It's nothing personal; we'e just been on high alert lately. You never know when a spy from one of our rival kingdoms might sneak in, and with your weird clothes and the fact that you don't even recognise the crest, you're definitely not from around here."

"But I'm not a spy!"

Gilbert's eyes seemed to glitter. "And if that's true then you'll probably be let out by morning. You're not a spy, so they won't have any reason to keep you in longer than that, right?"

Alfred didn't know how to answer without making himself seem more guilty, and his instead attempted sigh was stabbed back before it could make itself heard with the point of the sword returning to his back, followed by a command to keep moving. He wondered if he could 'accidentally' step on Gilbert's toes as a form of defiance, but he also knew that armoured feet would win over bare feet in a battle between the two, and that injuring himself further wouldn't be a good idea. He settled for walking forward glumly.

"Alfred-san?" Kiku's voice resonated around him, returning after what felt like a prolonged absence. "How, ah... how are you doing?"

Alfred wanted to reply with such a cutting remark that it almost physically harmed him, but instead he scowled, knowing somewhere at the back of his mind that this was probably pointless since he was just a bunch of pixels on Kiku's end.

Actually talking to Kiku was out of the question since appearing to talk to air would definitely label someone as suspicious. Though realisation had only dawned a few moments later, when Alfred yelled for Kiku to start saying some creepy things to scare Gilbert away the knight paid no heed to the misfortune promising voice from nowhere. It was as if he couldn't hear Kiku at all—no, not 'as if'—he and probably everyone else were completely deaf to Kiku's voice. Trying to find a sane explanation for this had taken some time, although, thinking about it, his entire situation broke a lot of laws that sanity and reality clung to, and eventually Alfred decided that he could still communicate with Kiku because they were both from the same world. Simple, but it at least made some sense.

It crossed his mind that the goddess had been able to talk to Kiku just fine; Alfred tried to justify this with the fact that the goddess was magical or whatever, and she was the one who had brought him to the Forgotten Shadows world in the first place, so it probably wasn't impossible for her to communicate with his friend.

"I tried looking up Forgotten Shadows' story," Kiku continued, "and, for some reason, nothing is said about being captured by a knight. After talking to the goddess the main character is supposed to head to the nearest village." His voice was uncertain when he next spoke."Going with the storyline would probably be the best course of action for this situation, but could we have done something wrong already?"

Alfred frowned. 'Done something wrong'? So far he had only been walking aimlessly through a forest, something he was fairly sure you were supposed to do especially so early in an RPG game. Getting captured by the strange knight was probably the only thing he had done wrong at this point, and that was a little out of his control.

"So, um... Aren't you supposed to have a horse or something to take us the rest of the way?" Alfred asked, figuring he could try and escape the moment the knight's attention was on something other than him. Maybe then he would be able to get back on track with his quest. Besides, his feet were really hurting now.

Gilbert tilted his head, grinning. "You'd like that, huh? I already told you—I'm a very important knight. Horses are for the unimportant and lazy."

"Isn't that kind of... well, I know certain people are going to find this weird coming from me, but isn't that kind of risky? I mean, what if someone runs away and you can't catch up to them?"

"Let's just say I have total confidence in my abilities," the sword jabbed into Alfred's back again, thankfully not drawing blood, "so don't get any ideas. What would you do if you actually managed to escape? You have no weapons or armour; the monsters would finish you off in a matter of seconds." Gilbert chuckled and pointed to the tops of the trees. A towering stone wall could just be seen, ivy climbing upwards. "See that? That's the castle's wall. We're practically there already."

Perhaps he could sense Alfred's crestfallen expression, leading him to give a wide smile and say, "Don't worry. The castle dungeons are kept much more clean than they used to be—there're barely any skeletons left."

—Chapter end.

Another late chapter from this very lazy fanfic author :D Not much happened this time, but I can safely say that things should start to pick up by the next chapter, even having the introduction of a certain someone who Alfred will be interacting with a lot...

My A Levels are finished and though school is continuing for a few more weeks I should now have more free time! Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to get the next chapter done a little quicker :)

(I'm sorry if Gilbert seems a little mean here. Hopefully I'll have a chance to give him more moments were he's just plain egotistical rather than cruel XD Also, people in the Forgotten Shadows world speak remarkably similar to the ones in Alfred and Kiku's world, huh? You would expect the language to be a tiny bit more archaic. Well, there is a mostly Hand Waved and partly genuine explanation for this, but it will come later XD)

Well, please review and tell me what you think ^_^