At first it seemed like the maze walls just disappeared down the path.

What actually happened made just as much sense. They splintered to tiny little pieces, the shards so infinitesimally small that it looked like nothing more than a shimmer of air, like the haze in the distance on a hot humid day. The sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard. A combination of the roar of thunder and a million tiny pings. All in the matter of a millisecond.

Then the shockwave came. An explosion of displaced air carrying with it a cloud of crystal fragments. I had barely enough time to close my eyes as the thunder hit my body, throwing me off my feet. I crashed to the floor, wind leaving my lungs. The shards glanced across exposed skin, slicing through clothing. The crystalline glitter whooshed over us, biting into flesh, sending dozens of signals of papercut pain through me.

Death by a thousand cuts.

As breath re-entered my lungs with a sting, I activated [Channel] to borrow Axel’s [Thick Hide]. The warm layer slid effortlessly around me. At the back of my mind, the constant soft pip of my HP going down slowed. I was currently sitting at 15 HP. The initial blast had done the most damage so far. However, three of my party members didn’t have the advantage of Axel’s ability. And it didn’t seem like the aftereffects of the explosion were softening. But it couldn’t last forever…

Could it?

A surge of desire to protect my party came over me.

Worried about what the crystals could do to my eyes, I kept my lids squeezed tight. With the wind still whipping wildly around us, assumedly with accompanying glass shards, I reached behind me for my party, hoping I’d taken some of the brunt of the explosion. My hands touched the warmth of someone’s torso and I wriggled towards them, stretching my arms out, to pull them closer. If we all bunched together, it meant less surface area for damage. It also meant I could be a bit of a shield for them. To do as much as I could.

Through the howling wind, it was impossible to say anything, and I didn’t imagine opening my mouth right now was a wise move. As ASMR crunchy I imagined the glitter flakes to be, the taste of blood was not something I wanted to revisit. The party member huddled in next to me, pressing their form tightly against mine. I blindly patted their body down then I found an arm that led to a hand, and grabbed it. Then I army-crawled forward, dragging them with me. After a moment, I felt their presence again by my side. Judging by their physique, it seemed like Axel, which was weird because Tam should’ve been closer.

Speaking of that cutthroat, I’d definitely let Tam have a piece of my mind after this since this had been her idea.

Slowly, we pushed ahead, the hurricane of crystal shards still lashing over us, and we came to another body, shaking against the current of wind. By her distinct shape, I could tell it was Tam. Without speaking, Axel split off from me and I took to the other side of her. I assumed he’d also activated [Thick Hide]. Shielding her with our bodies, like a teepee of men, I grabbed her hand and dragged. She moved with us. Briefly, I considered my HP. I was now at 13.

Still the torrent continued. I was worried about Wren, so small that she was. I hoped she hadn’t been thrown beyond where we could find her. Shuffling forward, keeping Tam between us, we eventually came to another party member. As hands connected with flesh, it became obvious it was Jye on their knees, bent forward, rather than clinging to the floor like us. I tried to pull them down, but they wouldn’t budge.

Clenching my fists, I battered at Jye’s back, trying to make them move, but still nothing. Could they be protecting Wren? She’d been closest to them when the explosion had happened.

Risking it, I inched open an eye to check and realised it helped little. It was like a smog of sparkling white dust whipping about us. There was no sound. Just a constant bur of hissing wind. Even Jye, who was right before me, was absolutely sheathed in the clouds of shards. I clenched my eye shut almost immediately.

Jye wasn’t an idiot and they cared about the young girl. I weighed up my options. Technically, we’d still not found Wren. It was highly possible that she was what Jye was guarding. Unless she’d been blown back further from the shockwave, which was also somewhat likely.

If I left the party to go search for her, it’d mean Axel would bear the brunt of shielding duties, but it also meant everyone else would still take a fair bit of damage. Add to that, on my own, I’d be unlikely to last long either. I needed Axel to shoulder half. But if Wren was still out there, she would likely die if this crystal tornado continued any longer.

All I wanted to do was protect them. But I couldn’t protect them all.

God, this was fucked up. Someone’s life was literally in my hands. This wasn’t even the first time. Axel had nearly died by my hand. Jye had nearly killed Tam at my request. I’d nearly let myself accept oblivion. It was insane this responsibility kept falling onto my shoulders. But no one in my party had actually been lost yet.

Which meant I had to be doing something right.

[Thick Hide] dropped my standard [MANA] pool to just 10. I took a deep breath. Firmly, I told myself that Jye had reacted in time. That beneath them was Wren, safe and sound, and that she wasn’t being shredded to bits in the crystal hurricane. She was safe. I repeated it again and again in my head.

Now it was my job to keep everyone else alive. To protect them.

Swearing under my breath, I pulled myself closer to Jye, leaving half of Tam to the elements, and opening myself back up to the wind. It fought against my movements, buffeting me. The heavy pressure of its current was like hands pummeling me down again and again. Gritting my teeth, I struggled to prop myself up, sweat drenching me under my clothes. My muscles burned, and I managed to make it to my knees.

Reaching back, I grabbed for Tam. I pulled her up, and blindly positioned her over Jye’s bent form. In a detached thought, I realised this was like posing figurines. This limb goes here, that one there. Eventually it felt like Tam was huddled over Jye as much as she could. I moved to grab Axel but found my hand patting empty space. Where the fuck had he gone?

I hadn’t panicked yet. In fact, I’d been uncharacteristically calm.

But without Axel, this wouldn’t work. He needed to be the other half of this. I needed him. The familiar slippery slope of a panic attack began to wind its way through my limbs. My chest, beyond the crystal haze, was tightening, my lungs beginning to fail, body tightening. We’d fail. Everyone would die.

Tam shuddered next to me, clearly fighting back pain.

I froze.

No. Jye and Wren needed protection. Tam needed protection. I couldn’t break. Not now. I steeled my mind and gritted my teeth.

Axel was here, somewhere. Definitely.

Breathe in; one, two, three, four, five, six.

My happy place.

Axel was probably just outside my reach. He would be there. Together we could do this. We could keep them safe. Because as much as Axel pissed me off, he was just always there. Even when he didn’t want to be. Even after he’d stopped being my friend. He was still there. I could trust that, if there was nothing else.

I breathed out; one, two, three, four.

Then I moved.

I positioned myself adjacent to Tam and Jye, and I wrapped myself over them, trying to cover their bodies as much as I could with my own. I stretched my arms out around them and squeezed to ensure we’d remain together. The relief of having the front of my torso once again away from the stinging bites of the glittery gale coursed through me immediately, though I could still feel it spraying shards at my backside. As I pressed my head into the nook of Tam’s neck to protect my face, fingers threaded between my own.

Reassurance trickled through me. I didn’t see it, but I knew. Axel had taken the opposite position of me on the Tam-Jye-Wren huddle pile. The warmth emanating from the rest of my party’s bodies was oddly comforting. It allowed me to focus on something other than the painful lashing on my back.

I could keep shielding them for a while since my health was only at 11 HP right now and hadn’t dropped much since we’d formed our huddle. With the five of us against the storm, we’d last.

We’d survive.

We remained like that for what felt like days. The gusts eventually let up though by then my body had since cramped into the position I was holding, my muscles screaming in exhaustion. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have let go or moved. I was vaguely aware of my health sitting at 3 HP when Axel’s fingers finally untwined from mine.

Tam’s elbow found my face, smacking me right in the jaw. The pain exploded my mind into wakefulness.

“Get off me!”

Locked into position, I fell back, stiff like a statue. Tam sprung up, her brows furrowed in anger.

“I didn’t ask you to do that!” she huffed, brushing shards from her clothes. They made a soft jangle as they landed on the floor. Speak of ungrateful. My brain was still foggy from the [MANA] cap and exhausted from trying to stay awake so I was unable to make any sort of witty retort.

Jye’s torso unfolded following her release to reveal an unconscious Wren’s body curled up into a ball before them.

Just like the wind had lifted, so too did the unease inside me. Wren was fine. I’d made the right decision. Control started to tendril back into my body. Everything had gone… well, worse than expected, but better than it could’ve.

That didn’t mean we’d come out unscathed. Everyone looked in pretty bad shape, with scrapes and cuts lining every inch of skin, most no longer bleeding, but in some you could clearly see where the crystal fragments had embedded themselves into the wounds. I probably didn’t look too crash hot either. The pip of a single HP returning made me sigh.

“How you doing, boss?” asked Axel.

His back was to me, looking at the remnants of the maze wall ahead. His shirt had been ripped to shreds and the beginnings of a mottled green-black bruise was starting to bloom beneath the dozens of cuts. I grimaced in secondhand pain.

“Better than you, apparently,” I said.

Jye laughed, “Yeah, think again on that, man.”

I frowned, and turned my head to check my back. It was an almost exact replica of the massacre on Axel’s, shreds and bruises and all, but somehow mine seemed redder and angrier, blood slicking down it. Well, duh, I’d obviously taken more damage given my lower health range.

“One of us is going to have to change,” Axel said.

As if seeing them made them real, the pain came back. Whatever had been keeping the ramifications of such injuries away from my cerebral system, adrenaline or else-wise, was long gone now, replaced with a weird contentedness and an indescribable pain that exploded from my back.

I blacked out.

“Are you feeling better?’ Wren asked, the warmth of her hand leaving the small of my back. The soft green glow lighting up the back of my eyelids faded.

Laying face down onto the cold crystal floor, I let out a non-committal groan. The pain had definitely faded, but unlike when Wren had healed me before I still felt an ache deep in my bones. I guess healing had its limits. Though maybe I was just getting old. Wren looked exhausted too, the bags under her eyes even worse than before. I’d told myself we’d stop relying so much on her abilities, but maybe that was impossible.

Still the guilt about choosing to sacrifice her for the good of the party gnarled talons into my gut. But at least this time I’d made a choice. This time I’d chosen this path. The blame truly was mine.

“Sorry,” I said, not meeting her eyes.

“About what?”

Axel scoffed from somewhere to my right. “He thought he left you to die.”

“Oh.”

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Sometimes I wanted to feel the tender flesh of Axel’s throat between my hands and to squeeze until he was forever silent. The man had literally zero tact. Though I guess that was part of his charm. Or at least that’s what others would have you believe.

“I didn’t know for sure Jye had you,” I admitted.

She was quiet for a moment. I looked up to check her expression which was in deep thought. Again, I was reminded of how mature she was for her age. Any other kid would’ve started crying knowing that I’d all but abandoned them. God, I had abandoned her. After all my bluster and posturing, after everything I’d promised myself, the second thing’s got hard, I’d tossed her aside for someone else to save. What a shit person I was.

“I understand,” she finally said with a small sad smile.

That was worse than her breaking down. No kid should feel like they were replaceable. The loss of Chrissie was something that had ruined me. Thinking on it, losing Wren would’ve destroyed me too. But that was a selfish thought. I should only be thinking about Wren right now. She must feel utterly distraught. I opened my mouth up to apologise further, to make things right.

“Well, I don’t understand,” Jye said to my left.

With their words, they slapped me over the top of my head. It was so sudden I barely had time to even comprehend what had happened. As the force snapped my head down, my jaw closed, causing me to bite my tongue. The metallic taste of iron filled my mouth. My HP dropped down by 1 accompanied by a ringing sounded in my ears. It was the same pain as hitting your head on a shelf as you stood up, stinging and knowing it’d leave a bump. Hissing in pain, I sat up.

“What the fuck?” I said, clutching at my new injury.

Jye’s thick red brows furrowed and they folded their arms. “Wren’s just a kid. She can’t stand up for herself. You should know better.”

My head smarted, but deep down I felt I deserved it. Punishment for being a weak person. I had to rely on someone else to protect the people I wanted to keep safe. That acknowledgement was worse than the pain from Jye’s hit.

“I trusted you had her.”

They stared at me, green eyes narrowed in thought. Then they let out a sigh, long and tired. I didn’t think anything could disappoint Jye. They seemed like the type of person that held no expectations in others. But plain as day what I saw in their gaze was the same look a parent might give a child who’d broken a glass, but brushed the fragments beneath a nearby bed frame. Guilt rippled in me, a vile black inkiness.

“It won’t happen again,” I said.

And I meant it. There was no point in wanting to protect others if one didn’t have the strength to back it up. I’d have to get stronger, have to get smarter. It should be possible. It probably wouldn’t have been a week ago. But now… Everything was different. Hell, I was different. Or at least I was trying to be. I needed to think more. To consider other things. There was probably something I had missed that would’ve assured me of Wren’s safety.

Fuck. Of course. The system. If Jye hadn’t been protecting her, we would’ve been alerted when her health reached critical condition. It might not have been enough time to save her, but she also had [Healing Hand], so long as she was conscious, she would’ve been able to hold out while we had searched for her.

“That’s what they always say,” Jye rolled their eyes.

Axel reached a hand out to me while replying to them, “Come on, as much as I enjoy Lee squirming, I think that’s enough. He already feels like shit. Look at him.”

Jye’s gaze flicked over to me.

“Oh, yeah, I see it. He looks like shit too.”

I sighed. “You guys are really mean, you know.”

“If it’s any consolation, you don’t always look like shit,” Axel said with a grin.

Tam, who’d been silent since her upset, cackled to herself. Great, I was the joke of the party. Even Wren seemed to be smiling. At least the mood had lifted.

“I’ll take that, I guess,” I replied, standing up and brushing myself off.

My body groaned in disapproval. God, I needed another rest, but with our delay because of the trap we’d lost half a day, if not more. It was difficult to tell when the sun didn’t move. The watch on my wrist confirmed that at least five hours had passed. We’d sat in the shard storm for far too long. Filling my lungs with a deep breath, I began to walk towards the now obliterated segment of the labyrinth. The trap was dealt with, so we might as well go forward. Perhaps we’d leave this behind us as well.

“I’m fine, you know,” Wren said to my back.

I turned to gauge her expression. Shockingly, she did seem okay. I hoped she wasn’t disassociating. That was a slippery slope to apathy and depression. Kneeling to her eye level, I replied, “You don’t have to be. You’re allowed to be angry.”

She shrugged. “Life’s too short to be angry at mistakes. Especially since it’s the end of the world as we know it.”

“From the mouth of babes,” Axel commented.

“Either way, I am sorry. I’ll do better next time.”

Tam scoffed. “Men. Can’t live with them, can’t live with them.”

“Preach it, sister,” Jye said, snapping their finger in a Z formation.

I repressed a groan. Maybe dying would be better than this.

While the labyrinth wall had been blown through, with the new edges of the crystalline structure buffed to a beautiful shine from the participle flurry, on the other side still lay more walls, simply just another path. It did not fill me with any reassurance. Because all that meant was this place could be endless, even with any number of traps triggered and walls obliterated.

As a safety precaution, we’d placed Tam in frontline again so her eyes could catch any more errant crystals, and we could avoid another similar trap. Unfortunately, that meant she was standing before me and every now and again would glance back with such pure hatred that I could feel it boring a hole into my skull.

Honestly, I was a little afraid to meet her eyes. The animosity in them was feral. I had no idea what I’d done to afford this antagonism, but I was not about to ask either. If anything, it made me thankful I’d added the no-hurting–the-party clause to that collar. Point to me on that.

After continuing walking for a few more hours, mostly in silence, our injuries slowly ticking up in regeneration, it became apparent this was not working. Or rather that this was working far too slowly. This labyrinth wasn’t just a maze. It was a war of attrition. Whoever or whatever was in charge of it had cut off our access to resources, and had us locked in fundamentally the same location.

I stared forward, my left hand still against the cool gem wall. Up ahead the path split into a T. It was as good a place as any to do this. Tam stopped a few metres down the track at the junction, eyeing the walls with slitted brown eyes.

I said with a clap of my hands, “All right. New plan.”

The others paused to hear my next words.

“We cheat.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s going to go down well. Let’s cheat at the game that can teleport us to random third locations and give us superpowers.”

I ignored Axel.

“Well, it’s not really cheating.” I paused. Was it? There hadn’t been any rules we’d been given. “There’s no knowing how big this maze is. I just want us to get our bearings and check the scope. And just you and Jye alone would clear the wall’s height if you stood on each other’s shoulders.”

Jye held their hands up in rejection. “Not gonna happen.”

“Come on, you’re both easily the tallest in our party.”

With a shrug, Axel said, “I’m game.”

The giant’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Jye…” I said, in a hopefully guilt-inducing tone. “Do it for the party.”

An extended groan left their mouth, and then they took a knee. Getting this party to work together was like pulling teeth. Axel grinned in a way that probably more suited a villain, then he clambered intentionally roughly over Jye’s legs, stomping his boots into the giant’s thigh. The flat dead look in Jye’s eyes told me all I needed to know about how much they were regretting this.

Without warning, the redhead stood with a “hyup,” knocking Axel off balance. They didn’t even bother to lift their arms to support him. Was everyone in this party petty? Now half bent over Jye’s head, he clung desperately to the giant’s clothes, almost definitely swearing under his breath. Teetering slightly, he straightened, and grasping at Jye’s head, climbed onto their shoulders.

Looking out over the wall’s tops, he whistled.

“You want the good news or the bad news?”

“Surprise me.”

“I can see the cabin. And I think I see other people.”

I frowned. “Which of those is the good news?”

He shrugged.

Well, other people was a huge question mark. If they were like Tam had been, they might be given requests to attack us. They could be like us and simply trying to figure everything out. A big old “fuck you” to our plan of simply looking for the exit.

“We done?” Jye asked.

Axel’s gaze met mine and I stared at him, irritation beginning to grow. As if reading my thoughts, he rolled his eyes, and placed one of his hands across his brows, cutting the sun out of his sight. The rest of us waited for more information.

“They’re travelling in a group of three. I can’t tell any details. They’re headed that way,” he said, pointing to the right of the T-junction.

In a bit too much of a calculated manner, Tam inquired, “Far away?”

She almost certainly did not want to know the answer to wish them well. Axel shook his hand in that middling yes-no gesture. “Not close enough to hear us, I don’t think.” Axel paused, and then cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, fuckheads! Can you hear me?”

My heart jumped into my throat and I shouted, “Axel!”

One day, he’d be the death of us, I swore.

He shook his head in extreme disappointment.

“They didn’t even flinch.”

I breathed in deep and then exhaled.

“Can you see the exit?”

He swivelled at the waist, looking this way and that. Then, using his heels like stirrups, he nudged Jye to rotate as well. The redhead obliged, albeit with a look in their eyes that spoke of promised future vengeance. I wondered if in a past life maybe they’d been enemies. It was really the only way I could explain the inherent distaste they had for each other. Sans their first meeting.

“I can’t see one. The walls stretch on into the horizon. But there’s another building over there,” he said, pointing behind us a fair distance rightwards. “Looks like a small shrine?”

It was unusual for a labyrinth not to have an exit. But then again, this place was pretty much magic and sci-fi in one. Still, it begged the question why we were still in range of the cabin. We’d been walking for the better part of a day now. Even with all the twists and turns, we had to have made distance.

“How close is the cabin?” I asked.

“Maybe like a football field away?”

That either meant one of two things. We’d basically walked ourselves in a circle, or the cabin moved. Either were technically possible. It wasn’t that much of a stretch to think the starting point might move. If the purpose of this was entertainment, placing all the entertainers in the same starting spot wouldn’t have enough building tension. Watching us slowly getting closer, fighting to get the same goal was much more interesting.

The goal had to be the shrine. With no exit, and the only two points of interest being the cabin and shrine… Well, it didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

Though the chance of running into the other group was high if not impossible to avoid if we decided to head towards the shrine. But there were five of us and three of them. If worse came to worse, by numbers we’d be able to hold them off… So long as they weren’t stronger than us. With Tam, our composition was a little better balanced.

“Time’s up,” Jye said, and shrugged Axel’s feet from his shoulders. Static popped.

Axel dropped like a dead weight to the ground, and the air expelled from his lungs from the impact. He just laid there for a moment, not moving, stunned. The rest of us didn’t comment. For once, Axel hadn’t really deserved this. That wasn’t to say that Jye probably had their reasons behind hating him (hopefully just beyond the initial bad “first” impression). But the dude had been giving us pretty useful intel. Feeling a little sorry for him, I reached down to help him up.

He stared at my hand blankly and for just a moment I thought I saw his eyes redden, as if beginning to cry. Then he took my hand. He used it as leverage to pull himself up. By the time he was standing, his expression had returned to normal. At this point, I couldn’t even figure out if his reaction had been because of what I’d said at the cabin, or if it was a continuation of whatever was messed up with him.

Regardless, since our failed heart to heart, I’d sensed Axel had been keeping an emotional distance from me. Which was fair. I’d fumbled hard with my approach. All I had wanted to do was get him to confide in me. But it had come out of me as fear. I wondered if I’d ever find the right time to apologise. To explain that what I had hated then wasn’t him, but myself.

“Still trying to hold hands?” he asked.

I realised I hadn’t let go and snatched my own back, irritated by my train of thought.

“It takes two to tango.”

He snorted in response, a bemused expression now resting on his face. I’d forgotten how soft he could look when he wasn’t being an arrogant jerk. Probably because it’d been years and years since he wasn’t one. At least when he was around other people. Like a gong struck, a realisation hit me. The changes that Axel had been displaying weren’t that he’d become an entirely new person. They were Axel. But like the thin veneer of the mask he wore had been melted away, revealing who Axel truly was, but only every now and again. That was why I liked him more. He was the Axel I’d… well, the one I’d lost.

Whatever had happened to him, that he wouldn’t share, had done this. My words came back to me: “You’ve become someone I don’t know and I hate it.” Fuck. Fuck. I was so stupid. It was always Axel. I’d just forgotten what he was actually like, under all the shit-eating grins and the cocky facade. This hidden Axel was why I’d never truly given up on our friendship, even after Chrissie. It was the reason part of me had allowed the fear of failure, of never measuring up to everything he’d become, to control me. Because I’d hoped through it all the Axel I… the Axel that I had been so close to was still there somewhere.

And he was.

And I’d fucked it up.

God, I was an idiot.

“I love watching baby queers’ first steps as much as the next raging dyke, but there’s a time and place, boys,” Tam said, crossing her arms. “And it’s not here or now.”

Wren, who’d been silent throughout the entire shoulder-scaling escapade, giggled.

I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with her words, nor how Wren apparently understood them and found them funny. But Tam wasn’t wrong. Whatever apology I owed Axel, now wasn’t the appropriate time. We’d ignore the whole “queers’ first steps” thing. Mostly because A: Axel had long since been out of the closet, and did not think about me like that, as was evidenced by the twenty-eight years we knew each other, and B: sometimes it felt like being ace didn’t even count as being part of the community.

“Point taken,” I said.

Axel’s mouth opened to say something, but I knew it wouldn’t be good, so I cut him off.

“Who’s up for a little more semi-cheating?”

Jye crossed their buff arms over their chest, taking a rather stalwart stance.

“He’s not standing on my shoulders again.”

“No, trust me, I think you’re gonna like this,” I said with a grin.