“What?” His mother shouted, staring at him with exaggerated shock.

“Oh my god!” His father said, his eyes widening. “I- I can’t believe it. Are you okay?”

Dante shook his head, tears streaming down his face. “I’ve been looking into it all day to reassure myself, but it says there’s a forty percent chance that I’m going to die.”

His parents froze, looking off into space as their jaw hung open. He felt bad about lying to them, but he justified it in his mind since he didn’t have any evil intentions. They were his parents, and he wanted them to be safe with him when the world ended.

“I-It’s okay,” His mother choked out. “Those statistics include the entire population. You’re fit and young, so your chances are much higher. And if they are looking into surgery options, that means things must be better than they sound.”

“You’re a strong boy, Dante, and this will only make you stronger. You’ll get through this.”

Dante shook his head as real tears streamed down his face. “It’s inside me, eating away at my flesh like a parasite. Changing me. I can feel it in my chest as we speak, but it doesn’t feel like something foreign, and that makes it ten times worse.”

“It’s okay. There’s no need to obsess so much. Cancer isn’t a disease so much as it is a rebellion of your own cells, so just think of it as something broken that needs to be removed, kind of like an appendix or infected tonsils.”

“How?” Dante muttered, his face scrunching up. “How could this thing be a part of me. It’s spreading through my body, changing me as we speak to be the perfect host. It can’t be removed anymore, and I don’t think it can be killed. I just have to minimise its hold over me as best I can, or else it really might overwhelm me.”

Dante’s parents just stared at him through the computer, obviously confused at his ramblings. He had stopped talking about the made-up cancer as his faked emotions became real, pushing their way to the forefront of his mind as he remembered the egg.

“Why did this have to happen to me?” Dante continued, lowering his head. “I wanted to be special, but not like this. I wanted to be someone you could be proud of. Is this divine punishment for my greed?”

“We are proud of you, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.”

“We’re very proud of you, Dante,” His mother said. “Video call us whenever you can. We will come home as soon as we can, so keep us updated in the meantime.”

“What? You’re not coming home?”

Dante raised his head, baffled at what his mother had said. He had to get them home, or else someone in his family would die apart from one another, if not all five of them. And if they were going to die, he would rather die in their arms. Together.

“We’re on contract, Dante. We can’t just break it and leave. Besides, it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, and the island itself is in a terrible location. It’s too dangerous to sail back now. Besides, our work here is important. We will be back in two or three months.”

Dante wanted to get angry. To shout and scream, to tell them how they had to come home. He said nothing. The words danced across his tongue, but he felt too empty inside to say anything. He knew they wouldn’t listen anyway. Their minds were made up, and they would stay on the island no matter what to continue unearthing their clay pots and ruined buildings.

“Dante?”

He blinked. “Yes?”

“Just because you’re going to be having chemo and surgery soon doesn’t mean you can slack off. Your end of semester exams are coming up, so ask to have the surgery on a Friday afternoon or else you’ll miss school while you recover.”

Dante opened his mouth, but the words refused to come out. He reached up and began to close the lid of his computer.

“Dante? Dante! You listen here, young-.”

His mother’s shouting ended, leaving Dante to stew in his own emotions with a blank expression. He could see Michael staring at him in the corner of his eye. He looked shocked, but Dante barely paid him any mind. He just didn’t have the energy right now.

Forcing himself up off the ground, Dante began to walk up the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Michael asked, his voice quivering. “Do you want me to come with, or would you rather be alone right now?”

Dante turned to face his friend, but he found that his eyes were more comfortable looking at the wall. “Nah, I’m okay. Just going to the bathroom. Will be back in a second.”

Leaving him standing at the bottom of the stairs, Dante went up to the bathroom and leaned over his basin. Turning on the tap, he caught a handful of cold water as it poured out of the faucet, then splashed the icy liquid onto his face. It was cool and refreshing, almost like his mind was being rinsed away along with the dried-up tears.

The cold also helped to douse the fire in his chest. For some reason, he only felt numb and empty inside. He knew that he should be furious, but it seemed that the egg was getting angry for him.

Dante stepped back from the sink as his tail writhed behind him. It thrashed around as though it was having a tantrum, eventually connecting with the porcelain basin. The front half shattered into white shards that sprayed through the air before covering the tiled floor.

Seeing the destruction it had wreaked, his tail relaxed, and the boiling rage in his chest was reduced to a simmer. It was still there, feeling humiliated by the injustice its host had been subjected to, but the egg was sated for the moment.

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Taking a deep breath, Dante sat on the toilet and pulled out his phone. His finger hovered over Emilio’s contact, hesitant to face a third possible rejection. His heart might just break if he did, but he took a deep breath and started the video call.

Dante had to do something to save his family, even if it cost him his sanity.

“Hey, what’s up, Big D?” Emilio shouted, smiling as he waved. “You calling me on the shitter? Am I not worthy of your-.”

Emilio bit his tongue, his expression changing as he realised something was off.

“Are you okay? You look like you’ve been crying? Did mom and dad say something to you again?”

Dante took another deep breath, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Emilio was a star athlete in high school, which wasn’t exactly what his academic parents wanted for their children, but since he maintained a good GPA, they were okay with his ‘hobby’. That was until he became a pro and began to make more than both of them combined.

“Do you trust me with your life?”

Dante had tried to convince Andrea with logic and reasoning since she was the most logical of them all, then he had tried to persuade his parents by appealing to their instincts and feelings. After all, what kind of parent would choose to stay apart from their dying child? And now, he discarded the lies for straightforward honesty.

“What?” Emilio said, sitting up. He had been lying in the bed of his hotel room, half asleep until now. “Is everything okay? Why are you saying this?”

“Just give me a yes or no answer. If it came down to it, would you entrust me with your life? Am I someone you would trust to save you?”

Emilio opened his mouth to answer, but he closed it soon after, his brows furrowing. Instead of answering without thought, he looked to be deeply considering the question. He chewed on his lip for a moment before he spoke.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Emilio began, pulling his long hair behind his ear, “but if it comes down to it, I trust you with my life.”

Dante felt the weight disappear on his shoulders. “When are you coming home?”

“I’m supposed to come back in three months. Why are you asking? What’s going on?”

“I meant when’s the earliest you can come back? It’s an emergency. You need to come back as soon as you can.”

“Hmm, I can probably return in two weeks at the earliest or a month at the latest. Is that okay?”

“Yeah, that’s perfect. Please just come back as early as possible, and I’ll tell you what’s going on. It’s hard to explain when we aren’t together in person.”

After saying their goodbyes, Dante carefully stepped out of the bathroom and went downstairs to the kitchen. Michael followed closely behind, but he distanced himself when Dante’s tail slapped the door of the fridge, leaving a dent the size of a thigh in the stainless steel.

“Is your tail in a bad mood… or something? It’s usually flicking around like a curious child that found something interesting.”

Dante clicked his tongue and opened the fridge, grabbing a bottle of lemonade. “It has feelings, I guess. And it really didn’t like the way my parents and sister spoke to me.”

“Well, how do you feel?”

Dante pulled out two glasses, but he didn’t pour the lemonade. He stood there, thinking about how he did feel. His family wouldn’t believe in a story about an apocalypse, but he expected them to come running when he needed them. He could shrug off his sister’s indifference as nothing more than stress, and he could understand the position his parents were in, but that didn’t mean he was okay with it.

“I feel empty and… frustrated. Like I’m shouting into the void and not getting a response. I knew that Emilio would be the easiest to convince while my sister and parents would be hard, but this was something else. I expected it, I think. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.”

“So, what are we going to do now?” Michael sat down across from Dante, glancing at the empty cups. “Just go to school and wait until something changes?”

Dante crouched down and grabbed an amber coloured bottle out of a cupboard. Holding it up, he uncorked the bottle and inhaled the spicy aroma. “I’m a bit nervous. I’ve never done this before.”

“I think we need to get some ladies around if you want to do that, bro. I can’t help you there.”

Dante rolled his eyes and chuckled. “I’m talking about drinking alcohol, fool.”

Pouring a dash of his dad’s rum into each of the glasses, Dante followed it up by filling the rest with lemonade. Handing it to Michael, they sat down on the couch in the lounge and switched on the news for background noise.

“So, what’s the deal with the tail? You explained that it was a reward for the first phase of your tutorial and that it’s been locked into your chest using a ritual, but… why?”

Taking a sip of the drink, Dante smacked his lips at the odd flavour before answering. “Laurelai thinks that it’s useful for my specific situation. I have a lot of soul force, and that’s about it. Her logic is that I can use that massive amount of soul force to tame whatever creature comes out of the egg, and then that’s that. No complicated techniques or skills. All I need to do is raise my pet well and they will do the hard work for me.”

Michael drank a bit of his drink. “Then why do you have the tail?”

“That’s actually a good question,” Dante said, taking another sip. “I don’t know.”

Michael frowned. “You don’t know? What do you mean?”

“We believed the egg was put inside me so that it could… incubate, I guess? Many creatures are parasitic in nature, so this means I’m basically a living incubator for it. At least, we thought that at first, but my quest isn’t done yet.”

“Quest? The system grants quests?”

Dante had forgotten that Michael wasn’t with him in the tutorial. It felt like an eternity had passed since then, and yet it was only a few days.

“Yeah, the system can grant quests. One of mine is to discover the purpose of the ritual, but it hasn’t been completed yet, so we were obviously wrong.”

“The purpose of the ritual? What do you mean exactly?”

“Well, there was a bunch of magic runes carved into the place where the egg was kept. They contained it or kept it alive, but now the ritual seems to be on the egg itself, keeping it trapped. While it’s inside my chest, it slowly consumes me, but the ritual squeezes out some nourishing energy in payment, I guess.”

“That’s interesting. So, you believe that the egg is there for you to use and that the ritual contains it?”

Dante nodded.

“Well, have you considered that the ritual isn’t containing the egg at all? It sounds like the egg wants to eat you, so why would the ritual be trapping it?”

“That… does make an awful lot of sense.”

“What if that,” Michael said, pointing at the tail, “is what it’s supposed to do. You said it also feeds on you and then converts it into some special energy that nourishes you? What if that’s the purpose? It’s not trapping a dangerous beast inside you or incubating something. It’s trying to sacrifice you so that you transform into the beast itself, almost like an alternate form of hatching.”

Dante felt his stomach sink at the idea and then froze when he heard a bell inside his head.

Congratulations! You have completed the quest, Truthseeker!

Unlike the previous quest, something appeared in the corner of Dante’s eyes without accepting any prompt. There was a small square map in the top right corner of his view, and it showed an aerial view of his street. He moved it to different corners of his vision, zoomed out of the street to its limit and zoomed in as far as he could go, changed the view from the version that looked like a picture to a simplified view, and even created a marker over his house labelled ‘Home’.

It had only taken him seconds to do all of that, so Michael was still just sitting there, sipping his alcoholic beverage with relish as he waited for a response.

“It sounds terrifying that the creature inside your chest is trying to make you into some kind of host body, but it is possible. My point is just to spur on conversation and get you thinking so that you can finish the quest. So, do you have any ideas?”

Dante grimaced. “Why would I? You solved it already.”