“Look, I ain’t asking for much. Just give me the jerky. It’s what Mumma wants.”

The edge of the blade was cool against my neck, the hand holding it calloused and rough. My gaze travelled up their arm to their face. A cleft chin, pointed nose, and perfectly manicured eyebrows, the left one with a slit, above dark brown eyes staring into my soul. Her long black hair was split into braids that cascaded down her back. Her build was square, shoulders wide. Most people would describe her features as handsome rather than beautiful.

“Tell us who you are,” Axel said, sword in hand, as he rose.

The manic behaviour was gone, replaced with a deadly serious glare. If looks could kill…

“Uh-uh, you stay right there, baby.” She tapped the blade against my neck. “Unless you wanna see lover-boy here take a trip to the land of the dead. Jerky at my feet. In under thirty seconds.”

It was crazy that we hadn’t noticed her sneak up on us, especially since she was wearing neon orange pants a la Naruto, and a crocheted black crop top beneath which her bra peaked out over. Overall it was giving very Halloween chic.

Axel laughed. “You think I’m going to give you our resources? There’s four of us and one of you. Do the maths.”

“Oh, honey, I have. And I’m more than sure you place a much higher value on bambi here. So if you even so much as step loudly and wake the others, say goodbye.” She slid in behind me, and it surprised me that we were of similar height. Her free arm reached around my torso, pulling me closer. I was now squarely between Axel’s sword and her. And she had some grip.

Axel’s eye twitched.

“Sword down. Twenty seconds now. Mumma ain’t playing.”

Murder in his eyes, Axel lowered his sword to the floor, and then he took a step towards our bags. Using her grip on me, she turned us to ensure that I was always a meat shield for her. I ran through the options in my head. [Ground Smash] would be a repeat of what happened in the cabin, if not worse since Wren and Jye wouldn’t be able to react in time. I couldn’t use Jye’s Load since I’d stupidly never asked for consent once they’d joined the party. Wren hadn’t given me permission to use any of her abilities either, but as a [Synergist] they wouldn’t be helpful right now. Was there anything else from Axel that I could use?

Axel was putting up a performance of rifling through each one of our bags. He had to be buying me time to act, to do something. But what? [Intimidation] only worked on lower level targets, and as a human our opponent was almost definitely another “player” and had to be a minimum of Level 1. I guess there was [Thick Hide]. It’d reduce damage she’d be able to do to me, but who knew what she was capable of? Reducing 50 damage to 40 would still mean I’d be dead in a slip of her blade.

“Ten seconds, babe. No more fucking around.”

Her grip on me tightened, and she pressed the blade further into my neck. Okay, even if it didn’t get me out of this mess, using [Thick Hide] was just a smart move. Activating [Channel], I felt the energy grow, and then thinking of Axel’s ability, a warmness bloomed over the full expanse of my skin. The vague exhaustion of having my mana permanently halved to maintain the ability settled into the vestiges of my mind. That said, I now couldn’t sense the weapon directly against my flesh. It was like a layer of clothing or a thin film of plastic was in between the cool metal and my skin. My assailant didn’t seem to notice.

I took a deep breath, and then cued Axel with, “Am I actually that predictable?”

Her gaze focused on me, brow wrinkling in confusion.

Taking the hint, in less than a blink, Axel was next to us, a knife from the bags in hand. Its pointy end seemed to be directly moving towards her face. Unlike Axel’s ability to move on his feet quickly, granted to him by his trait [Swift Footed], his attack speed was still normal.

This speed differential gave her time to react. She pushed her own knife into my neck, and I knew then that she would’ve killed me if I hadn’t borrowed Axel’s ability. Her blade slid down my neck upon the slick resistance of [Thick Hide], but still it cut through my skin, like slicing into soft butter. The sharp edge landed on my left clavicle and sliced straight through skin right through to bone. Unable to repress it, a howl of pain tore from my lungs. My HP plummeted to 5. Pissed her accuracy had been put off, she hissed. Axel’s blade point was still closing in on her, now just millimetres from her left eye. I saw her gaze harden.

“Fuck,” she said, and the knife tore into her eye socket.

But there was no blood. No scream. Just an explosion of smoke followed by the pitter patter of paws on the wooden floorboards. Through the haze, I saw for a second the shortened tail of a bobcat.

Her first words played in my mind. You don’t have anymore of that spam, do you?

Just Friends has earned 50 XP.

Released and bleeding much more than I thought I would, Axel dismissed his knife to wrap his arms around my shoulders. He screamed, “Wren! Jye! We need you now!”

I looked down at my torn skin, at the blood seeping down my shirt. I could feel the pain, understood that it was my body, but at the same time it all seemed like it was happening to another person. This was not good. I was starting to dissociate. Axel’s eyes looked red. Did he get hurt somehow? Was he crying?

Static buzzed in my ears. I couldn’t tell if that was part of dying or abilities being used. Oh, bleeding was bad. It was not good. I felt my remaining HP begin to tick down. 4 HP now.

I was woozy, like the time I’d come back from a really bad date and had drunk myself into a stupour, like I was more alcohol than man. My limbs were heavy, but I felt light.

Jye and Wren were by my side, as if teleported. I think I was resting on Axel’s lap, but wasn’t sure. I could see his face hovering over me, concern furrowing his brows. Without hesitation, the ten-year-old laid her hand upon my wound, and the soft green light of [Healing Touch] emanated from her fingers. Everything felt so far away. Even the warmth of party members who huddled around me.

Beep. 3 HP.

Of course the cat I’d saved and then taken pity had nearly killed me. Could still be the death of me. Axel wrapped his hands around my head, cradling my face. I couldn’t tell what expression he had. I wondered if this is how it had felt to him when that piece of wood had nearly done him in. I hoped he didn’t feel guilty, like I had. He’d done everything he could have to save me.

Beep. That wasn’t good. Wren’s healing wasn’t keeping up with the bleeding.

The green glow slowly took over my vision, the forms of Wren, Jye, and Axel beginning to fade into shapeless blobs. Of course, this is how I’d die. Used as a hostage for food.

How fucking stupid.

Axel’s voice was the last thing I heard before blackness took over the green.

“You promised.”

Beep.

It’s seventh grade, just after second break. An announcement over the school PA system has called Axel and me from class to speak to the school admin. He informs us that my parents will be picking us up and they have some news to tell us. The admin’s face is blurry. What does he look like? I can’t see it clearly.

We wait there, on that bench that was too angular to be comfortable, the coldness of the metal seeping through the cheap polyester of our uniforms. I dully realise my sister hasn’t been called out of class with us. If mum and dad are pulling us out of school, she should be here too.

It must be a mistake, so I stand to mention it to the admins, and the other people in the office exchange looks and then say they’re not allowed to share anything else. Even as a thirteen-year-old, I can connect the dots, sense there’s something not quite right.

Something’s happened to my sister. I’d seen her this morning. We’d eaten breakfast together. I held her hand until the crossing at the corner store. We’d greeted Mark on the way. I’d left her at the gates talking with friends before the bell. But my stomach is clenching with worry.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Axel says, folding another paper wasp.

“Then where is she?”

He shrugs and pockets the prohibited item. “You want one?”

“No, I want to know where Chrissie is.”

She’s three years younger than me and I love her. Being an older brother has been some of the funnest times of my life. Teaching her to do things and watching her learn were some of my favourite things. To me it was amazing that I had witnessed a baby become a little girl. My parents had joked that I was more like her second father than a brother. I’d gone absolutely crazy about that and proudly referred to myself as Papa Lee. Chrissie also called me that.

“That’s gross.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I look down and realise I’m subconsciously picking at the skin about my fingernails. Immediately, I stop. “Sorry.”

Though he probably thinks I don’t notice, Axel shuffles a little further away from me. “You’re so weird sometimes.”

I sit there for what feels like forever, and the anxiety echoes through my body.

When my parents finally arrive, I am so tense that if I took one wrong step I’d have probably strained a muscle. As I see them, I rush into their embrace, and their arms clasp about me, hugging me so tightly it’s hard to breathe. They finally release me, pulling away to reveal unreadable faces. Their eyes are bloodshot, noses red.

It looks like they have really bad colds and are sick. Maybe Chrissie’s really sick too and that’s what they wanted to say. My heart is in my throat.

Axel and I get into the backseat of the car, and mum angles the rearview mirror so that she can look us in the eyes.

“Lee, baby, I have some bad news.” Mum pauses, and dad’s driving now, the engine humming in the silence. She continues, voice hoarse, “Axel, your parents want us to tell you as well. Do you want to hear it now, or do you want to wait until we get home?”

My mouth tastes like choking. The flavour of air, but it doesn’t go down.

“It’s Chrissie, isn’t it?” I say. It barely comes out as a crumpled whisper.

“Yes,” Dad says. I look at him in the reflection. His mouth is a single thin flat line and his eyes are fighting to stay neutral. It looks like he’s been crying. But dad doesn’t cry. He’s never cried.

I ask, “Is she sick?”

“No, she’s not,” Mum replies, voice shaking.

The words should be relieving, but somehow they’re not. If she’s not sick… Does that mean it’s worse? In my peripheral vision, I see Axel roll his eyes and begin idly staring out the window. In a dull tone, he says, “Can you just tell us now?”

I take a deep breath to steady myself. “Yeah, I want to know now.”

My parents exchange a look. It’s silent and both of them are looking to each other. Sometimes my parents could talk without speaking. They said that if you knew someone for long enough you could do it. They could do it with Axel’s parents too.

“Chrissie…” Mum begins and her voice stops coming out.

Dad continues, “You know how sometimes people stop having energy to do things?”

“Like grandma?”

When I was eight, my grandmother passed away—simply due to old age. My parents had explained that when you ran out of energy completely, you pass away. That her passing had been peaceful. I asked why she didn’t just go to sleep to get more. But dad said sometimes sleep doesn’t help.

Mum nods, her hand on dad’s shoulder, and says, “Everyone runs out of energy someday, right? Chrissie–”

Everything shifts into place.

I don’t need to hear the rest.

I know.

I knew.

I didn’t see her enter the school gates.

Poison tendrils of pain throng through me. It is like someone tearing the heart from my chest, ripping it right through my lungs and out my ribcage. A scream shreds out of my mouth and within seconds, I am heaving with sobs.

Chrissie is dead. I’ll never see her again. I’ll never get to teach her to spell my favourite words. I’ll never read her my favourite books. She’s gone.

My parents are reaching for me through both sides of the car. I didn’t realise that we’d pulled over. Axel is… I can’t see him, I don’t know what he’s doing. The four of us sit in the backseat of that sedan, my parents holding me and rocking me as the three of us cry. We are probably only there for an hour. But it feels like forever as I come to terms with the loss of my little sister.

Tired and sore, my tears eventually run dry. The car chugs to life, and slowly we drive home in silence.

My body feels heavy. My limbs not my own. I am staring into nothing. Everything feels fake, unreal. My mind begins to float away from my physical self. Like I’m looking down on my tangible form. I sit there, but I’m not really there. I’m not there in the car in the world where my sister is dead. It’s pleasantly empty inside. It feels good to feel nothing.

A sharp sting on my thigh slaps me back to reality.

Incredulously, I shoot a glare at Axel as he pulls the paper wasp from my leg. My skin where he’d managed contact with the projectile is already turning red. The emptiness, the stagnancy, fades as anger takes control.

I can’t reign in the words. It’s a rush of energy, fueled by pure rage, of injustice, of unbridled loss.

“I hate you!”

Axel has the decency to look shocked by my yelled announcement, his eyes widening in hurt surprise. He doesn’t get a chance to react as I swing my arm around and sock him in the jaw. I’ve never hit anyone, never even felt like it.

But Axel had interrupted the one thing I could control. And now I was back in my body and I felt horrible. My fist had made solid contact with his face, and his head was thrown back from the impact.

It smacks loudly into the car window behind him. The sound is oddly satisfying.

He throws back at me and soon we’re just two boys in the backseat of the car pulling at hair and biting limbs. Scatching, clawing. Flailing. We’re even growling at each other. It’s an outlet for my emotions because I can't say anything.

Mum and dad react quickly, pulling us over and they separate us. They eventually decide to call Axel’s parents to pick him up. I don’t go to school for a while, and time passes both quickly and slowly. The week afterwards is an absolute blur.

The blurriness cleared.

I was floating in an endless darkness that started and ended nowhere. Was I dead? It was weird, but I’d always imagined dying to be more like sleeping. Awake and then nothing. Alive and then nothing. It’s what I hoped happened to Chrissie. But this… I guess this was okay. It was more like a waiting room, a space between spaces, than an afterlife.

Axel’s voice before here echoed in my head.

“You promised.”

Yeah, that’s right. I had promised him that we’d finish this thing together. What a stupid promise. There was no way I could. I was useless to my team, to everyone. I’d even hurt my party. I’d gotten taken hostage. I was more of a weight on the party than Wren. Wren who was a ten-year-old child. God, I was why Chrissie was dead.

Maybe it was better to let it all go and just stay here. My parents would miss me, probably. But maybe they were dead already. I hoped not.

But was that all I was really living for? The fact that my parents would be sad?

…

What had I been living for?

The past fifteen years of my life seemed to have passed me by. I’d done nothing of note during them. After Chrissie, I had completed tasks and achieved output like I was on autopilot. Blankly, without thought. Finish school, get a degree, get a job. That’s what you were meant to do. That’s what healthy well-adjusted people did. That’s what I did. But I looking back at it, I wasn’t really living.

I was just existing.

Until the Gates.

Despite the panic attacks, despite the pain, the misunderstandings, when the black holes appeared that’s when life had started again. When I started making choices. Even if they were shit. I’d made a new friend, something I’d barely done in the past decade. I’d made decisions, even if they ended poorly, even if they made things worse, it was me who had made them. I’d chosen. I’d chosen to be there confronting Axel before we'd been attacked.

Before the Gates, I’d have done none of that.

I’d changed. God, maybe I’d changed just as much as Axel had, but in different ways. Had Jye changed? Had Wren? Would my… would my death hurt them?

I thought about them, my party members who no doubt were still sitting around my body.

Wren would feel guilty if she was unable to heal me. Especially given her history with her prior party members. She was strong, but if it happened again, it could traumatise her for the rest of her life. That wasn’t a change I wanted for her.

I’d never apologised to Jye for blowing up at them when Axel was injured. Despite our short time with each other, I knew intuitively they considered me something like a comrade in arms, something who they identified with. I couldn’t make them lose something like that, not when they had so little.

And Axel… I guess just him. The new Axel, the old Axel. I owed him something, just like Jye and Wren, but I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the hurt I wanted to spare them. It was something else.

Either way, it was an odd feeling being here. Since the first video of the Gates had appeared, I’d felt this sense of dread, tied to the compulsion to enter the Dungeons. A fear of dying to something outside of my control. But here I was, on the precipice between life and death, and it was gone.

Dying really has a way of changing your perspective.

In the corner of my peripheral vision, a dim green glow began to form. Wren. Her ability was working. A sense of pride rushed through me. I think her and Chrissie would’ve been good friends. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. I’d protect Wren, protect her like I hadn’t been able to protect Chrissie. Do as much as I could until I could no longer breathe.

I’d protect them all.

Something in my mind finally snapped into place, and the idea crystallised.

This. Them.

That is what I would live for. That was my answer. The thought echoed inside me. Protect them. Protect. It filled the darkness, coalesced with the green glow, and rippled about me.

Soon a cool soothing trickle began to seep through my body, washing over my soul, overflowing until the void was me and the energy and I was nothing but a green liminal space.

The roof of the cabin deck was an aged grey, painted over wooden rafting.

“I’ve never been more happy to see those boring brown eyes,” said a voice I owed.

“You scared us shitless, dude,” said another voice I owed.

“I’m glad you woke up,” said the other voice I owed.

Stiff, and with residual pain, I turned to look at them and I smiled. “You would not believe the fucking dream I just had.”

The three of them laughed, and then Wren collapsed onto my lap, her mana supply dried to the bone. Gently, I laid my hand on top of her head and ran it over her hair. She was such a trooper.

After a moment, Axel gingerly lifted her from me and laid her to rest on her sleeping roll. God, it felt like all we did these days was drain her dry of energy, the poor thing. It was like she spent more time sleeping than being awake. I would stop that as much as I could.

Jye’s thin lips stretched into an evil smile. “You’ll never guess what I did.”

With a flourish, and not without effort, they lifted a bundle of blanket in front of me, their arm muscles bulging from the strain.

“A present for the boss.”

I looked to Axel for explanation, but he just gestured vaguely. Yeah, that was very Axel of him. I don’t know what I expected. The same annoyance that generally washed over me didn’t happen. Instead, unusually, I felt a brief wave of fondness. Well, that was weird.

Ignoring the new reaction to Axel’s antics, I unfolded the layers of the blanket, and I discovered at the centre a certain bobtail cat.

Well, well, well.