I leap at them. Wide eyes meet me but before my claws can meet their arteries, a club-like staff meets with my face and I go tumbling.

Ah, a worthy opponent! Allow me to lick the blood from my nose in a sinister manne—

…Moleman?

As his brows furrow, Moleman’s grip on the staff loosens slightly. “...Kitty?”

In this moment, I have several thoughts running concurrently through my skull, one of these being ‘Why did Moleman hit me with a stick?’ An answer soon echoes in turn, ‘Maybe to help raise my concussion protection?’ But then another thought hits back, ‘But he doesn’t like seeing me hurt,’ so another thought returns with the screwball, ‘He clearly didn’t recognize me at first, so maybe—’

And by the time I reach that thought, the world around me has already started moving again and the people harassing him take defensive positions in front of him. Each one stands in a specific place, so it’s clear to me that they have a lot of experience working together.

So it’s a skirmish they want, eh? Well, in that case, they shall have it!

I crouch down further, like a cockroach, ready to strike once any one of them shows the slightest gap in their defenses.

“Stay behind me Mole, this thing is clearly out to kill…!” one of them, some archer dude, shouts out before hiding half his face behind his hand. “Kuh… I can feel its killing intent… It’s so strong… and sharp… Like a knife against my throat…!”

Uh. Okay?

Completely ignoring him, one of the others—a female warrior I somewhat recognize the hair of—steps forward, halberd drawn and ready. “Who are you?” she says in a familiarly accusatory voice. “Why did you attack us? Don’t you know PvP is prohibited outside the colosseum?”

Ah, trying to draw me into word games, is she? Unnecessary. I can already smell their fear, roiling off them in waves. So, to unnerve them further, I begin slowly circling, trying to find a gap in their defenses. Won’t be hard. Nervousness does that to people, even hardened warriors. If something that should speak doesn’t, that’s frightening. Useful. So, I circle. Watching closely. Until…

“—Wait!”

My whole body freezes up. The moment when Moleman now jumps out from within their barrier would be the best time for me to act but I can’t move. Heh, j—just one word and I’m the one trembling, huh?

“Mole, don’t get closer to that—”

Not heeding their words, Moleman strides up to me, grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me to my feet. I feel dizzy. He won’t let me look at anything save for his eyes. A—ah, uh, hello, Moleman. Um… let me guess, you didn’t need saving from a poor little level eighty-three like me, huh? Yeah, I should’ve guessed, I just—

“Kitty? Are you okay?”

Ah. I forgot to speak aloud. Uh, I, um… My eye slowly falls down to the cobblestone floor. High quality. Yup. Good stuff. “I am… fine. Thank you. And how, uh, are you?”

His face scrunches up a little, and then he fully commits to this whole thing by violently shaking me by the shoulders to the point where I might as well assume he was trying to jimmy loose coins out of me. Not that any fall out; I haven’t got any pockets. And with each powerful shake, he bites out, “Are,” a shake, “You,” one more shake, eyes burning, “Okay?!”

The shaking stops. But I’m still shaking. Trembling. “I, I’m,” I stammer, but then my throat gets all choked and nothing wants to come out anymore, it just goes all blurry and my arms and my legs are like soggy noodles and won’t move good anymore. My chest heaves, all on its own, and I gulp down big breaths that I can’t control, stammering breaths, I almost choke on them, warm tears and warm snot going down my face and I must look like such a mess but I… “I—I lost him, Moleman,” I say, my voice in a constant, fearful vibrato, “I messed up, oh, God, I messed up so badly I want to die, I just…”

But I don’t know what I just, because the story ends there, with Moleman jimmying his arms below my armpits, both hands on my back, and pushing my limp, bony little body into his arms. I can’t fight it. I don’t want to. But I don’t deserve it. “Why—” I sob into his back, into his soft, warm back, “why are you still…?”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Of course I’m still here,” he mumbles back. “I’d be an awful friend if I wasn’t.”

Only now can I properly hug him back. Tawny arms clutching at him like he might float away. But he won’t. He’s right here, and he’ll never leave. Because he’s my friend. And I’m his.

It takes a minute or so for me to calm down, at which point Moleman sends away his party members to sit me down on a little bench outside the colosseum, in the spring park. Even then, I still can’t really collect myself. I mean, I’m not wailing louder than the audience cheers anymore, but I don’t… I can’t.

A light blue handkerchief is nudged into my vision. I give Moleman a thankful nod before wiping my face with it.

…What do I do now? Do I keep this soggy thing? I don’t mind, but…

Before I have time to have a proper mental breakdown over it, Moleman gently takes it out of my hand, uses a little spell to clean it, and gives it back to me. For keeps. I sniffle. He sits next to me. There aren’t many people here. There were a bunch of people inside and outside the vomitoriums, and especially in the bazaars, but right here, in the little park of blooming trees and flowers surrounding the largest cathedral, there’s barely anyone around. The quiet is as comforting as a warm meal.

“I’ll assume…” Moleman says beside me, smiling gently, “that floor fifteen didn’t go exactly as you wanted?”

I chuckle. “Not exactly, no…” He turns to me, eyes eager, but not pushy. I don’t have to tell him. A while back, I would probably have kept it to myself. Most people don’t talk about their big mistakes, even to their closest friends. But, on the other hand… There’s no reason to keep it to myself either, is there? I smile at him. “It’s a bit of a long story.”

He smiles back at me. “All the more reason to hear it.”

So, I tell him. I say my little jokes here and there, and he laughs along with me sometimes, not purely out of pity. I even tell him about the brand on my chest. It’s easy to see. I’m only wearing a small hide around my hips right now, so it’s very visible.

“Does it still hurt?”

I shrug. “It aches a little, but for the most part? Not really. Hurt a whole lot more when I got it, that’s for sure.” He laughs along with me, if only to be polite. I don’t mind. “Compared to everything else that happened, this is the last thing on my mind.”

Where he sits, Moleman gently leans forward, folding his arms across his knees. “So you plead guilty to killing the king of Acheron, and then you killed the Sun Emperor…”

A million justifications and accusations and excuses bubble up to the top of my mind, but in the end, all that’s released when I open the lid is a tiny, honest, “Yeah.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment. Then, he sits up straight and angles his chest and face towards me, his face set in a mask of determination. “You’ve been honest to me, and I appreciate that. So, in turn, I’ll be honest with you. Even if you might not like what I have to say.”

I almost chuckle, but the atmosphere is wrong. He’s serious. “Well, um…” I smile bravely. “All the more reason to hear it, right?” To that, he mirrors my smile, just a little.

He takes a deep breath. “This tournament… This is the first time all four servers have met. Completely. The leaderships of all four servers are here. Our dictatorship—although Bach calls it a republic; Africa’s representative democracy; Asia’s democratic confederacy; America’s non-appointed triarchy… Yesterday, all of these leaderships came together in a grand meeting. It’s a shame you weren’t there; your translation abilities would’ve been a great help. Nonetheless…”

He pauses, eyes hardening as he looks down at his lap, and then back up at me. “You were mentioned.” My mouth flounders open but he speaks before I have time to puzzle together a coherent string of words. “...A fair bit, actually. You weren’t the first thing or anything—we had a lot of things to discuss—but you did eventually come up.”

My eyes fall to the ground, to the cobblestone beneath my bare feet. Absently, I push a little rock into a gap between two cobblestones. “So, um,” I say after a pause, “what did you talk about?...”

“A lot,” he says, his voice shifting subtly, like he’s suddenly giving a report instead of simply talking. “Firstly, Bach ascertained how much the other server leaderships knew. It didn’t take long for them to admit that they had—with the exception of the Africa server—formed intelligence groups specifically to investigate the reason behind the residents of Purgatory’s ire towards humans. Not that they needed to do much research.”

“So…” I butt in. “They know?”

“Everything,” Moleman sighs. “They know everything.”

For a few seconds, I don’t say anything, and neither does he. Only once the shock has worn off do I ask, in a voice tinier than a mosquito’s buzz, “And you told them…?”

“I told them nothing they didn’t already know,” Moleman says frankly. I release a breath. “They wanted to have you executed the second you showed up.” I stop breathing.

“Th—they did?”

He nods. “The Americans were very adamant. Said if we let you live, the goblins would resent us forever for letting a king-killer run free.” …Which is, in my opinion, not entirely incorrect. Actually, scratch that, I’m pretty sure that’s completely correct. “Bach was on their side, but Flagship, the current president of the Africa server, refused. Tried to pull a VETO on the whole deal, which Bach obviously shot down. Almost threatened to personally join the tutorial tournament, against the agreement made earlier for server rulers to refrain from participating.”

I blink. “Wait, you’re not going to fight in the tutournament?”

His brows furrow. “What did you just call…?” A shake of the head. “Nevermind. See, that’s the thing. Since our server is technically a dictatorship, our only ruler is Bach. The rest of us are free to play as we please.”

“Oh, good,” I say. Then I smirk. “I was starting to fear we might not get to have our long-awaited rematch after all.”

He smiles back at me. “If you get that far in the tutorial tournament, I’ll be sure to face you with everything I’ve got.” We grin at each other for a few seconds before he continues. “Anyhow, Asia stood on the fence for a little while before deciding to support Africa and myself. Though, in the end, we didn’t exactly get through that you wouldn’t be executed. Instead…”

“...Instead?”

“—Instead, we’ll hold a trial. A proper one, with a judge and jury and lawyers. That’s the least we can do, right? The Americans weren’t too happy to hear it, but Flagship talked them into it, and with three to one, Bach had no choice but to capitulate.”

“I’m going on trial?” I ask incredulously. “Again?”

Not responding to my words, Moleman continues, “However, with your reputation being as it is, the leaders weren’t certain that you could be… captured… without any unintended casualties. So, they…”

I look at him. He doesn’t look at me. But I know what he’s saying. “...They asked you to get me, didn’t they?”

“Not forcefully,” Moleman quickly adds, “nothing like that. They simply asked me to try to get you to come peacefully, instead of making this into a huge deal.” He turns to me, eyes drilling into mine. Earnest. “So, I’m asking you. Will you allow yourself to be put on trial? Again?”

I blink at him and look down at my feet. My jaw works itself. Mouth opening, then closing again, lips slowly, almost reluctantly forming a little smile as I turn my eyes from the cobblestones up to him.

“Well,” I say. “If it’s for a friend, then…”

I chuckle. “Why not?"