“What’s your favorite color?”

“Pass.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“Pass.”

“Have you ever been to space?”

“No.”

“What’s the biggest thing you ever killed?”

“Pass.”

“How long have you been a hero?”

“Not long.”

“Aha! So you are a hero!”

Jacob sighed. He made a point of not looking over at the boy walking next to him, and ignored his creepy, yellow-eyed gaze. Two more days had passed and no further transformation had taken place. Ibrahim hadn’t shown any signs of corruption at all. Maybe they were resistant to it in some way.

Jacob also hadn’t felt any ill effects, but he theorized that he had avoided the bulk of initial exposure to the corrupting influence by being in the RRH facility underground at the time of the apocalypse. Either that, or being a User provided him with some protection. He remembered Fenway talking at some point about Chaos energy, which sounded applicable.

Resistant or not, Jacob had little confidence that Tarim would pull through. He would have preferred for it to happen quickly, rather than being dragged out. He’d done his best to ignore the kid and avoid learning anything about him, but that was nearly impossible when he spent nearly every waking second talking about some nonsense or another.

So far he’d learned that Tarim was 15 years old, that his birthday was on the 13th of May, that his favorite subject was history, that he’d never had a girlfriend, that his mom and dad had divorced four years ago, that he had a scar on his stomach, that his favorite food was pizza, that his favorite movie was Space Cowboy Supernova, and, obviously, that he was into heroes.

It was exhausting.

Ibrahim, while not infected with corruption, was hampered by his advanced age. He’d been struggling to keep up from the start, and a few days into the trip he was shambling along like a corpse, leaning heavily on his cane. Jacob had relented on the second day and shared some of his food with them to help get the old man’s energy up, but if it had helped it was not enough to be noticeable.

They made detours around several major settlements crawling with gangly ones and tentacle blimps. Going over rough terrain was even harder on the old man.

It was barely into the afternoon when Tarim asked them to stop, seeing that his grandfather was struggling to even stay upright. Ibrahim insisted breathlessly that he could keep going, but both Jacob and Tarim knew that was a lie.

Jacob reluctantly agreed to make an early stop for the day, giving Ibrahim some time to rest. He impressed upon them that if the two of them weren’t ready in the morning, he would leave them behind.

Tarim tended to Ibrahim for the rest of the day, feeding him tea and a bit of canned soup thinned out with water to make it more like a broth. When they went to bed, Jacob assumed his customary duty of watching them while they slept. Just in case the boy flowered in the night. He fell asleep sometime later, in the middle of the night.

His nightmares were filled with grasping hands. Again.

He awoke to a scream at dawn. Scrambling to his feet, he looked around and found that neither Tarim or Ibrahim were in their sleeping bags. He spotted the boy a ways off through some trees, and jogged over to him.

“What’s wrong?”

Tarim stared at a body on the ground. It was Ibrahim. Jacob’s kitchen knife lay next to him, and two deep cuts in his wrists had soaked the surrounding ash a dirty brownish red.

“Oh.”

“How do we help him?” Tarim asked numbly. “Jacob, please help him.”

Jacob shook his head. “I can’t.” The man had been dead for hours. He’d likely snuck out just after Jacob fell asleep.

The old man was no fool. He had known that there was no way he could keep up any longer, and he had known that Tarim would never agree to leave him behind.

So he had taken himself out of the equation.

Tarim insisted on a burial. It was a frivolous waste of time, but Jacob set to work. He cleared away ash and dug a shallow pit in the hard soil with his bare hands, then lifted the body inside. Tarim pushed the dirt back over his grandfather and patted it flat. He piled up a few rocks at the head of the grave in a lopsided, makeshift monument.

They stood by the grave for a long while. Neither of them said anything. When they finally turned to leave, Tarim just whispered: “Goodbye.”

They carried on. They didn’t speak, just walked. It was like that for hours, then, suddenly:

“What does TV even stand for?”

“Television,” Jacob grunted in reply.

“Huh. Television.”

“You should probably have known that already.”

The questions started coming again—about every irrelevant topic imaginable—and Tarim resumed his carefree attitude. He smiled and laughed, and they didn’t speak a word of his dead grandfather.

Jacob understood it now.

This is how he copes.

Knowing that, Jacob did his best to engage more with the boy. He told him about Cheat the Hangman, the fact that he’d been an independent hero, that he’d been an A-Rank, but that he hadn’t even gotten his official certification when the apocalypse hit. He left out everything regarding the Red Right Hand, his torture, and Starman.

He also told Tarim that if he died at some point in the future, he could try to track down Ibrahim in the Forgotten Green and pass along a message. Tarim said he’d think about what he wanted to say.

Jacob would have offered to contact his mother, too, but he didn’t know what the corruption did to a person’s soul, so he figured it was best not to promise anything.

In the afternoon they met with an unexpected obstacle. The road was cut off by a great ridge rising straight up for a dozen meters, one of the quakes having caused the earth to shift substantially. They were forced to walk around it, and the detour took the entire rest of the day to clear.

“Do you like girls or boys?” Tarim asked once they camped for the night.

“Uh, girls.”

“Me too. Do you have a girlfriend?”

Jacob shut his eyes briefly and fought back a wave of melancholy. “I do.”

“Awesome! Is she nice?”

“She is.”

“Is she hot?”

“That’s an inappropriate question.”

“But is she, though?”

Jacob chuckled. “Yeah, she is. Very much so.”

“Have you got any pictures?”

The System was still down, but he had access to the files stored locally in his node. He brought up a picture of Becca from a few years ago. She was baking a cake in a pink apron, grinning with cream on her nose.

Tarim whistled. “Daaamn. She is hot.”

“All right, that’s enough out of you.” Jacob swiped the picture away. “That cake tasted awful, by the way.”

They walked another five days, taking a detour around Hamburg. Jacob kept an eye out for the wolf, but he never saw any sign of it, so he decided to consider it a lost cause. They continued south until they met up with one of the superhighways that connected to Arcadia. They’d gone down that road in the opposite direction to get to Old Berlin for the aptitude tests, but now it was silent and crowded with unbroken rows of dead vehicles.

Jacob gradually got used to the boy’s startling appearance. His condition showed no signs of worsening, and Jacob had almost begun to believe what the boy’s grandfather had said. That he was special.

They saw a few monsters along the way, mostly at a distance, but luckily there were no close encounters. Tarim was not overly startled whenever they spotted one, which was good, at least. He didn’t know how he’d protect the boy if he started running away or froze up with fear.

Jacob bristled at that thought. When had he started thinking that way? How to protect the boy, how to keep him safe. It wasn’t his job. His job was to find Becca and nothing else. That was the priority. Getting involved in other people’s business had only ended badly for him.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

But if I don’t look out for him, no one will.

They were getting close. They camped out the night before he expected they would reach the city, and he allowed them to eat some of their best canned foods as a small celebration. Jacob’s had chili with a good helping of hot sauce they’d scavenged. Spicy foods appealed to him more after Snapping, since it overpowered his deadened palate. Tarim had meatballs in brown sauce. There was even a canned sponge cake, but it was too dry. Tarim ate most of it. They’d also found some sporks along the way, so they could eat without using their hands or pouring food into their mouths like savages.

Afterwards they lay on top of their sleeping bags in the sparse light of the camping stove before Jacob had to switch it off to conserve gas. The sky was still a raging inferno, but through a gap in the cloud cover right above him, Jacob could make out a scattering of winking stars.

“Do you think I’m going to die?” Tarim asked.

Jacob took a long time answering. “No.”

He meant it.

“Okay.”

Jacob felt that big yellow eye linger on him. He sighed. “What?”

“What happens once we get to Arcadia?”

“I don’t know, kid.”

“But you’re not going to leave me on my own, right? You’ll take me with you.”

“I guess so.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

Tarim didn’t look confident.

Jacob reached out his little finger. “Pinky promise.”

They pinky promised.

*****

They made good time on the highway. They would probably reach Arcadia by midday. Assuming he’d counted the days correctly, it was somewhere around the 6th of November, give or take a day depending on how long it had taken him to claw his way out of that facility.

At this point, he’d recovered a good portion of his strength and had put on a few kilos of muscle mass. Evidently, Vigor did give him his fitness back for free, at least in some capacity, as long as he took in enough calories.

Tarim was jumping from car to car as a way to amuse himself. Jacob had already told him to stop multiple times, but he was bad at listening. Jacob was used to that kind of behavior, having dealt with someone similar for a long time.

There was open wasteland to the left and right of the road, stretching out far before the rolling features of the landscape obscured the horizon. It had probably been beautiful before. Now it was just sad, all that unbroken gray aside from the occasional corrupted tree.

“Ever thought about getting a sidekick?” Tarim asked before doing a running leap onto the next car. The roof buckled when he landed, sending up a cloud of soot particles from the burned exterior.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Tarim, I wasn’t even technically a hero before all this happened. I was like… an advanced intern. Thinking about getting a sidekick at that stage would have been getting a little ahead of myself.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I sense this is leading up to you nominating yourself. You’re not a User, so it’s a complete non-issue.”

“What’s a non-issue?”

“It’s like… a conversation that doesn’t have any merit.”

“I could become a User.”

“Not with the System down, you’re not. Listen, don’t argue about this. Even if you were a User, you’re too young. You’re only fifteen.”

“That’s not too young. I’m basically old enough to join the navy.”

“Get a girlfriend first, then ask me about being a sidekick.”

“That’s not fair!” Tarim said, punctuating it by landing on a car hood with a loud thunk. “All the girls are dead!”

Jacob laughed unreasonably hard at that. “Tough luck, kid. You’ll have to settle for a nice alien somewhere.”

“I don’t wanna kiss aliens. They’re gross.” He was sulking now.

“That’s racist, young man. I won’t have a racist sidekick working for me, how would that play with the public?”

Tarim opened his mouth to reply when one of the corpses inside the car he stood on sprang to life. The woman clawed out through the shattered windshield and wrapped around Tarim’s legs, dragging them both to the ground.

Tarim yelled and screamed, flailing ineffectually at the woman. She kept his legs pinned together and was chewing at his thighs.

Jacob was over to them in two long steps, grasped the woman’s head in both hands, and pulled her off the boy. He lifted her high into the air and dropped her down on his knee. The spine made a satisfying crunch. The woman continued struggling weakly until he kicked her a few times for good measure.

The woman was both mutated and burned, which was how they’d missed her.

Jacob offered Tarim a hand and helped him to his feet. He sat the boy down on the back of a pickup truck and inspected his injured leg. Nothing serious, just a few bitemarks. He cleaned the wounds with water and tied a spare shirt around the leg as a makeshift bandage.

Tarim sat in stubborn silence while he was being worked on.

“So, what did we learn?” Jacob prodded.

Tarim sighed and rolled his eyes. “Don’t—”

“That’s right, don’t jump on cars. It’s like you’re ten, I swear. Come on, let’s go.”

*****

Arcadia was a wreck.

The city still smoldered, fire smoke rising above the skyline and joining the blackness in the sky. Watching from outside its limits, Jacob could make out at least two gangly ones tramping around.

“What are the rules?” Jacob asked.

“Stay behind you. Don’t make any noise. Don’t ask any questions. Pay attention to my surroundings. Listen to directions. Don’t use my initiative.”

“And?”

“And don’t be a smartass.”

“That last one’s especially important.”

“You can be really mean sometimes.”

“I hear that a lot.”

They moved into the city and made their way off the highway. Following the same strategy Jacob had utilized in Oslo, they used buildings for cover and dashed through the streets when they were clear.

“Do you know where they were housing the Arcadian escape ship?” Jacob asked.

“I think next to the hero place. So they could protect it and everything. I only saw it on the news, though.”

“The Lodge, good. That’s where I was going anyway.”

Arcadia had been delivered a step above the usual level of devastation he’d seen everywhere else. There were signs of a great battle here—buildings exploded or sheared cleanly into pieces, corpses on the ground that had been blasted apart or otherwise dismembered. One of the crashed urgek ships had been cut in half, and Jacob thought there had to be some sort of irony in that, but couldn’t put his finger on it.

For a pleasant change, he was surprised to see far less gangly ones than he’d expected. Live ones, anyway. He counted twelve in the first few hours they spent in the city, and maybe three times as many dead ones. They still moved cautiously, but he was fairly confident that they wouldn’t be discovered.

I don’t think they could have done that to each other. Someone’s been killing them. Which means that there is—or was—a hero presence in the city.

Jacob’s speculations were answered while they waited inside a Yellow District clothing store for a gangly one to leave a street they wanted to cross. Its legs suddenly went out from under it, the creature going out of view, and it gave a panicked scream that was suddenly clipped off.

Jacob instructed Tarim to stay behind and ventured into the street through a broken glass door to get a better look. The gangly one’s had had been caved in at the top, and its eye stared sightlessly into the sky. An enormous muscled woman stood by the dead monster’s head, and a not-quite-as-enormous man was over by its feet.

Jacob recognized the man. Haden Trodvis, one of the prospects at the aptitude tests. One of the three to be given A-Rank besides Jacob himself. And if that was Haden, that meant the woman had to be Titaness, his grandmother. She was a famous S-Rank, one of the most seasoned in the whole Heroes’ Guild. She was beaten out by her own grandfather, White Wolf, who was over a hundred years old and had been active more or less since the System was created. He was technically still listed as active before the apocalypse, but only rarely participated in assignments, leaving his main responsibilities to Titaness.

“Hello there!” Jacob called to get their attention. “I’m friendly. Don’t punch me or anything.”

“Oh my!” Titaness turned to face him with a start, a big hand over her mouth. “It’s a person!”

She was a hulking monster, at least twice Jacob’s height, every inch of her body bristling with dense layers of hypertrophied muscle. Even her jaw quivered with striated muscle fibers, and her forehead was webbed with veins. Despite that, her voice was surprisingly feminine, that of a kindly grandmother, and her gray tied-up hair reinforced that impression. She wore armor made up of thick metal plates, with a form-fitted breast-plate and articulated greaves. Her upper arms and shoulders were left bare, and she wore a pair of heavy gauntlets. She had to weigh as much as a small tank.

Haden went over to his grandmother and squinted at Jacob as though he suspected him of being an illusion. He blinked. “That is a person.”

Normally Haden would be considered a mountain of a man, but next to Titaness he looked positively dainty. He’d definitely packed on more mass since Jacob saw him at the aptitude tests, but it made no difference. He wore a similar armor to his grandmother, except smaller and with thinner plate.

“You can come out, kid!” Jacob called over his shoulder.

Tarim came running out, tripping over himself. “That’s Titaness! She’s the—”

“Shut up. We don’t need the commentary.”

“Two people!” Titaness exclaimed, eyes gone wide. “Where did you come from?”

“Up north. I’m looking for someone, and he’s… well, he’s tagging along. We need to get to the Lodge.”

“Of course!” Titaness agreed, nodding vigorously. “We’ll get you two safe right away. Once you’re back at the Lodge, you can sit back and tell us everything.”

“The Lodge is still operational, then?”

“Oh, yeah. The remains of a few branches came together in Arcadia when the whole thing happened. You know, the thing.” She did air-quotes when she said the word ‘thing’ both times. “There’s not very many of us left, but we’re still going strong.”

Tarim opened his mouth again. “Can I just—”

Jacob cut him off by pointing to him and snapping his fingers. “Zip it, kid. You can gush later.”

When the heroes’ attention shifted to Tarim, Jacob saw worry cross their faces. They glanced at each other.

“Don’t worry. He’s not like the other ones. He’s all right.”

“Of course,” Titaness said in a sweet voice, nodding along like a nurse patiently listening to the babbling of a senile old fool. She leaned down towards the boy, her shadow entirely swallowing him up. “We’ll get you seen to, sweetie, okay? You’ll be all better soon.”

Jacob knew there was nothing he could say to convince them. They’d have to see for themselves.

“I’m actually a hero, too,” Jacob said. He nodded towards Haden. “I don’t know if you remember, but we’ve met before. Aptitude tests.”

Haden gave a vague nod, then shook his head. He didn’t remember.

Titaness clapped her hands. “A hero, that’s great! We could really use the backup.”

That wasn’t what he was there for, but he could get into that once he was at the Lodge. He imagined that telling them he wouldn’t help avert the apocalypse would have some people making a stink.

Titaness took their names, and Jacob explained that he’d been a probational A-Rank, as well as his power set. Then they were led through the streets towards the Lodge. The heroes showed little caution for the monsters, and the way was already littered with their corpses.

“This is awesome,” Tarim whispered, fixated on the heroine.

“Shut up.”