As if triggered by my scream, the silent world around me burst into a cacophony of sound. The confused shouts of the convoy men and the screams and stamps of startled horses filled the air as I stared into Medric’s dead eyes.
Ryuji stared at me like a confused dog, tilting his head to one side.
“What’s wrong, Lena?” he asked.
I still hadn’t stopped screaming, so I couldn’t answer him.
“Are you alright?” he asked, dropping Medric unceremoniously on the floor. As Medric’s body tumbled awkwardly against the cart, eventually settling down face first on a sack of vegetables. With my eye contact broken, I noticed Ryuji walking slowly towards me. My first instinct was to scramble away, to try and run away from the murderer, but I remained frozen.
It wouldn’t have been any use anyways.
As Ryuji leaned over, my eyes watched his hand getting closer and closer to me. The same hands that had just killed a man seconds ago. I closed my eyes, too afraid to stare at my death so openly.
I kept my eyes closed, even as I felt a hand lightly touching my shoulder.
I stayed still, not wanting to give him any reason to kill me. My tears of relief had run dry, and like I originally expected, I was just too tired to cry anymore.
“Lena?” Ryuji asked, sounding way too close for me to be comfortable. “Are you okay?”
He sounded uncomfortable too, and I almost laughed at the idea.
“No,” I croaked. I was surprised at how flat my voice sounded, and I wondered how I’d managed to keep my emotions from bubbling to the surface until I realized that I didn’t need to hide them. I’d already accepted that I was going to die.
“Why?” Ryuji asked, sounding shocked. “What happened?”
This time, I did laugh or at least I made a noise that sounded like something close to laughing. It was an odd sound that I’d never made before, devoid of any humour.
“What happened?!” I said, punctuating the words with another bark of a laugh. I could sense the hysteria creeping into my voice and my mind. “You killed someone. That’s what happened. I don’t know how people from your world feel about that, but over here, that’s generally considered to be a pretty rude thing to do.”
I laughed again. It was probably a bad idea to scold an Otherworlder, but I simply didn’t care anymore. If I was going to die, I might as well be a little petty about it.
I had my head down, staring at my lap as I curled up into a tight of a ball as possible. My eyes were still closed, but I could imagine Ryuji’s confused look as he struggled to fathom why that was a bad thing.
“What?” he asked instead, his hand retreating quickly from my shoulder as if he’d been shocked. “What are you talking about, I’m not a murderer.”
I looked up at Ryuji. He was standing a few steps away from me. The genuine offence he seemed to take at my suggestion was enough for me to doubt what I’d seen. I glanced at the place where Medric had been discarded and half expected him to get up and stretch, confused as to why he’d been knocked out for a few minutes.
Nope. He was still dead. I let out a heavy sigh, Ryuji, who had noticed where I was looking, turned around to examine his handiwork. His eyes widened in surprise and… fear?
“No. No. I can’t be,” he said, backing away from the body slowly.
As if responding to what he said, a voice shouted out from somewhere I couldn’t see.
“Come out with your weapons dropped and your hands up, murderer!”
I had been too focused on Medric’s corpse to remember that we weren’t alone. I couldn’t see them, with the walls of the cart being too high to see over the edge while sitting down, but it sounded like a few men had surrounded the cart.
“I’m not a murderer,” Ryuji said weakly, too quiet for anyone besides me to possibly hear him.
It seemed like he hadn’t actually meant to kill Medric, but that didn’t change anything. I didn’t know if he thought Medric was stronger than he was, or if Otherworlders had an anatomy that allowed them to snap each others’ necks and still live, but that didn’t change the fact that Medric was still dead.
“You are,” I said bitterly. “You killed him.”
I assumed my sudden boldness was less due to bravery and more due to the fact that I couldn’t be bothered anymore. A moment ago, I’d stopped caring about what I said because I thought Ryuji would kill me anyways. Now I couldn’t help but think he was just clueless. Every time I thought I understood him well enough to expect his next move, he just did something entirely unexpected. Trying to figure out Ryuji was exhausting.
“No! I’m not!” Ryuji said, turning around to shout at me. He’d backed up far enough from Medric’s body that he was close to me, almost shouting into my face, but I was surprised by how little I reacted to it. I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was tired, or because it was hard to be scared of someone who looked so scared themselves. “He’s not dead yet! I can fix this!”
It took a few seconds for me to process what he’d just said, but when I did, my eyes widened in realisation. That was right. I wasn’t just dealing with a random kid who’d accidentally killed someone in a freak accident. It was absurd to think that anyone could bring someone back from the dead, but if anyone could do it, it was an Otherworlder.
“You can?” I asked.
“Well…” Ryuji said, suddenly hesitant.
No. He wasn’t backing out of this now. I’d gained and lost so much hope in the past few minutes that I refused to let go of the little faith I still had in him. In a moment of madness, I stood up and grabbed Ryuji’s face.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I had meant to pull him down towards me, but he was so stable on his feet that I just ended up lunging forward until our noses almost touched. He looked uncomfortable. I could imagine why.
Though I hadn’t seen my reflection in days, I could only guess how I looked. Wide-eyed and dishevelled, bloodshot eyes from crying, manic desperate eyes. I must have looked like death. If anything, it made me glad to feel even a fraction of the discomfort I’d felt while travelling with him. I was finally able to exact at least a small level of petty revenge against him.
“Fix this,” I said. “Heal him.”
Ryuji gulped and stepped back. I followed him, keeping my eyes locked onto his, the entire time.
“Heal him,” I repeated.
“I’ll try,” he said, hesitantly.
I wasn’t too happy with the lack of confidence in his voice, but I would take what I could get. I let go of him and stumbled backwards, unsteady on my feet. When Ryuji tried to step forward to help me, I fixed him with a glare and pointed to Medric’s body.
Someone on the ground yelled at me or Ryuji. I wasn’t sure. Now that I was standing, I could look around to see who it was, but before I could identify the shouter, I noticed the driver. He was standing a few feet away from the ring of guards that had surrounded us. He was raising his hand, as if he wanted to tap one of the guards on the shoulder to tell him something, but didn’t seem to have the courage to try.
I could empathize with him, but I was too annoyed at him to care. If he had believed me from the start, none of this would have happened. I could admit that if I’d been in his shoes, I probably wouldn’t have believed some random girl’s claims that her travel companion was an Otherworlder either, but that didn’t stop the petty spite I felt.
“Don’t make us climb up th-“
A flash of bright light interrupted the guard, forcing him to cover his eyes in reaction. I turned around, to see Ryuji standing over Medric’s body.
There was only a brief moment of silence before the guards started to yell at us again. I ignored them as I examined Medric. Though his neck looked much less crooked than it had been a moment ago, he was still unmoving. Despite not wanting to get my hopes up, I watched the body with my breath held.
When Medric opened his eyes, I let out a sigh of relief, but with my lungs empty, all that came out was a coughing fit.
“Ferra!” Medric screamed, sitting up and grabbing at the air. When he managed to grab nothing, he blinked slowly and looked at his hands, his mouth gaping open at the sight.
The rest of the guards suddenly quieted down at the voice of their leader. The air was silent, save for Medric’s heavy breathing.
“I’m alive?” Medric asked no one. His voice was barely a whisper, but in the relative silence I could just barely hear him. “But, I saw her. I was-”
“Never dead in the first place,” Ryuji said with a nervous laugh. “Just a little injured after our spar. No harm done?”
Medric looked up at Ryuji with fear and awe in his eyes. Ryuji’s hands were still glowing with the residue of Mana that he’d gathered to cast the spell. Though it was fading quickly, I had no doubt that Medric understood how powerful Ryuji must have been to summon that much mana without dying. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like he’d come to any conclusions yet and was just trying to recover from having been brought back from death.
I supposed I could have been sympathetic to his situation, but I was just too irritated to care. I was throwing him into the deep end whether he liked it or not.
“Ryuji just wants to make sure you had FUN,” I said, emphasising the last word. “Shouldn’t a friendly spar be FUN, after all?”
Though Medric barely seemed to register my voice at first, the mention of the word FUN made him turn towards me so fast that I thought he would break his neck again. I fixed him with a flat stare, narrowing my eyes as if daring him to not understand what I was trying to say.
When his eyes widened, I knew that he finally understood.
“O-oh,” he said, still staring at me, and not at the Otherworlder standing over him. “I suppose accidents can happen. It was a pleasure to be humbled by you, my friend. My uninteresting tactics left me naive over the years.”
I somehow managed to resist the urge to slap my face in frustration.
“Huh?” Ryuji asked, clearly confused.
All around me, I could hear the confused mumbling of the guards and drivers who were gathered around our cart, with their weapons still brandished. After hearing the voice of their supposedly dead captain, it seemed like they had no idea what to do.
“Medric,” I barked. “Call your men off before they try and get someone killed for a simple friendly spar.” I thought it was obvious enough without specifying who exactly would be killed if they tried.
Medric seemed confused, but more because he didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about rather than being confused about why a girl half his size was ordering him around. Looking around, he finally seemed to notice what was going on around him.
“Uh, it’s okay guys,” he said, his voice shaky as he waved them down. “I’m fine. Go back to your stations and let’s get a move on, shall we? No reason to delay our journey to Redstone just because of a little fun accident, right?”
The rest of the convoy men, aside from the driver of my cart, seemed to be confused about what had just happened, but with their leader clearly still alive, the small mob quickly dispersed. Medric looked back at me, as if silently asking for my approval.
“Good,” I said begrudgingly. “Now get out of here and do your job.”
Not needing any more encouragement than that, Medric launched himself out of the cart, leaping as far as he could and taking guard at the furthest cart he could possibly go to. Our cart didn’t move for a while, since our driver refused to come back, but after he’d traded placed with a younger and more confused driver, we started on our journey back to Redstone.
Ryuji was still standing in the cart with me, and he looked at me nervously. He opened his mouth multiple times, but said nothing. I was content with letting him stew in his own discomfort, and was willing to let the rest of the journey play out in silence until it showed up.
Secret Objective: Safe Travels [COMPLETE]
An adventurer’s journey is never truly safe, with danger being a constant companion to any adventurer worth their salt. But despite any accidents, you managed to keep everyone safe. All's well that ends well, right?
+100 exp
“Get out,” I said.
Ryuji opened his mouth one more time, as if to protest, but quickly thought better of it and hopped off the cart, bringing the blue panel with him.
A few seconds after he left, I knelt on the floor and started rummaging through my travel sack, cursing and grumbling the entire time. I shoved my hand into my bag until I finally found what I was looking for.
Any embarrassment I felt about stripping underneath the open sky was overshadowed by the humiliation of having wet myself in fear. At the very least, the cart walls were high enough that I was hidden from view from everyone on the ground.
Clad in fresh underwear and pants, I felt a little better about myself but marginally so. I was still angry beyond belief and generally too annoyed to properly function. I felt tempted to burn my discarded clothes, but I refrained, not wanting to draw any more attention to myself. I felt I would snap at anyone who even looked at me right now.
Throwing my pants to the furthest corner of the cart, I sat down against the wall, thinking of strategies to abandon Ryuji once I managed to hand him off to some Crown official in Redstone.