There was a lot of grumbling, complaining, and even a little bit of cursing, but Rowan managed to drag Blake away from the scene of the slaughter and back to the main group.
Only for a little while, though.
Olivia was the first to notice them and walked up with a questioning glance pointed toward the trees that the two heroes had left.
“Can we make camp?” Rowan’s voice was caught between a growl and a plea.
She took one more glance at the treeline before turning her attention back to the now-bloody Rowan and Blake. “Fine. But you’re telling me everything once we get back to the city.”
The parting kiss Olivia gave Rowan loosened the final bit of ice and anger that had been gripping his heart.
When he dragged Blake away from the rest of the group for the second time, Rowan was far more gentle. He also didn’t forget to ask the scouts to fan out around them and keep any monsters from bothering them if they got loud again.
That may have limited their ability to monitor nearby threats and left the main camp with less forewarning, but be it the first signs of arrogance or perhaps even simple confidence in his party’s abilities, Rowan wasn’t worried about his army.
Some ten minutes of stomping and a short encounter with a monster that seriously overestimated itself, Blake and Rowan were once more alone.
This time, they weren’t in a clearing, and there wasn’t even a particularly notable landmark around. All that surrounded them were the trees, the gentle sound of leaves crinkling in the wind, and a nice little spot made of gnarled roots where they could sit.
Rowan collapsed on the spot first and threw his head back, letting it thud against the tree’s hard bark. Blake hesitated, but ultimately did the same.
“So… you leveled up, huh?” Rowan ventured, all of a sudden reluctant to delve straight into the subject he’d dragged him out to tackle.
“Yeah! Felt amazing, really. Level fifty-seven! I swear I can even feel some of my stats returning, if I really focus.” The grin threatened to sprain Blake’s cheek muscles if he kept it up much longer. Blake had hope.
At that admission, Rowan briefly brought up his own status. His eye twitched when he saw the erratic behavior of his stat screen. The pluses next to his stats would glitch and go up, then quickly revert back to normal.
Blake blabbered on. “And one of my cards! It’s not really back, yet, but if I push just right, I can get some of its effects.”
“Huh,” Rowan grunted. “What does it do?”
“Body reinforcement, but active. It gives way more of a boost than a passive card might, but it draws on your mana pool. So, you know, tradeoffs.”
“Huh, if it’s useful enough for you to use it, I’m guessing it’s pretty great. Epic tier, right?” Rowan asked.
“Nah. It’s just rare.” The look of pure shock Rowan shot him made Blake guffaw. “What? Did you think they’d just stuff me full of epic tier cards?”
Rowan scratched his cheek awkwardly and looked away. “Kind of, yeah.”
“I mean, they did help me upgrade all my class cards to epic, so there’s that. I even got another epic card on top of that myself. But yeah, apparently letting me get some cards myself was meant to ‘build character’ or whatever,” Blake snorted, and even Rowan smiled.
“Probably cheapened out at the last second.”
“Probably.”
A silence stretched, and this time, it felt a tiny bit more comfortable than before. Just talking and joking like they used to put Rowan at ease.
Of course, he knew better than most that just because Blake was willing to do all that didn’t mean the problem he was afraid of wasn’t lurking around the first corner.
“Hey Blake, remember when we met?” Rowan asked, nostalgia and a healthy dose of regret slipping into his voice.
Blake snorted, but Rowan could hear the smile in his voice. “Yeah. The pitiful introvert, lurking at the edge of the class after moving, too awkward to talk to anybody.”
“Oh please,” Rowan scoffed, unable to keep the annoyance entirely out of his voice. “Not my fault most of them were looking at me like I was about to beat them up and steal their lunch money. At their age, too!”
“Well, you were always kind of tall and blocky, weren’t you? Real miracle you managed to snag yourself a fiancée before I did.”
“Yeah, well, vision of beauty, why haven’t you proposed to your Treagon yet or whatever? Wait, stop changing the subject! Remember how we became friends?”
“I’m not just going to ask a girl who probably doesn’t even want to be around me to marry me, Rowan,” Blake said. “And yeah, I remember, what’s your point?”
“Blake… She doesn’t act like someone who doesn’t want to be around you. Anyway, I’ll never forget that day either, even if what you did was… most definitely not smart.”
Rowan could perfectly recall the day, as he just said. He was a horribly awkward transfer student. Blake was the plucky center of the class. And the idiots that cornered him in the bathroom? Well, they were idiots, convinced Rowan was some kind of standoffish rogue planning their downfall or whatever.
He never did get to the bottom of what kind of class hierarchy he’d threatened with his appearance.
All that mattered was that he had been cornered by four surprisingly buff guys, and he wasn’t skilled at or predisposed to violence. They’d tried to take advantage of that, and if Blake hadn’t intervened, Rowan would have limped away sporting more than a few bruises and fractures.
As it was, Blake was the one with the bruises, but the idiots were definitely the ones who ended up with fractures. Never before that day had Rowan seen someone so utterly enraged over what they perceived was blatant injustice.
It was only later that he learned that was Blake’s default response to that kind of situation: if possible, assist, then strongly discourage perpetrators from ever trying that kind of nonsense again.
It was more than a personal belief in justice or some such. It was a compulsion.
“I get that you’re trying to draw parallels here, but there aren’t any, Rowan. I beat up some bullies and got a little hurt, but I don’t regret it. Likewise, it’s not like I risked my life to kill that lizard either. Some pain and blood, sure, I risked those. But not death.”
“And how long before you start slipping again? How long before you try and pull shit like walking up to an actual, armed gang and trying to get them to leave the people they’re beating half to death alone, huh? Or, I don’t know, how long before you charge into the wastes again without a plan?” Rowan asked.
At that, finally, Blake froze and shut up, posture tense and lips pressed tightly together. “I was just trying to help.”
“That’s the problem!” Rowan shouted, then caught himself and bit his lip until he tasted blood. More calmly, he continued. “Blake, this is the stuff we forced you into therapy over. You’re not invincible, not even now. You can’t just run around trying to hero everyone’s lives into perfection.”
“Isn’t it our job? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? What we were summoned for?”
“No, we were summoned to kill the demon king when he shows up. And yes, we need to kill the legend tier demons before then, but not at the cost of your life.”
“And what if we’re too late? What if we take too long, and things get worse?” Blake was whispering again, and Rowan could easily recognize the way he’d turned in on himself, eyes slightly glossy.
“Tell me, did you do the exercise we came up with? Did you calm down, assess the pros and cons? Weigh what you want to do versus other potential solutions? Just, give yourself time to think, before doing something reckless?”
The silence was telling, as was the morose ‘no’ that broke it.
“And would you do the same thing now, what with everything that’s happened?” The question was at least somewhat cruel. Rowan just hoped it would drive the point home.
“So many people died because of me, Rowan,” Blake confessed, drawing his legs up to his chest and pressing his head against his knees. When his voice came out again, it was muffled. “So many. I knew them, you know? The officers, a lot of the soldiers, too. And they’re now dead. Because of me.”
The only reason Blake didn’t know them all by name, Rowan was betting, was because he didn’t get to spend much time with them. Blake was heroic like that.
Rowan was trying, and failing, to get to know most of his soldiers. Some deep part of him was yelling that he would be the one to lead them to deaths. He didn’t need their faces haunting him in his sleep alongside all the other night terrors that struck whenever Olivia wasn’t with him.
With a heavy heart, and feeling like a manipulative asshole, Rowan twisted the knife. “And what if you party members died? Actually, how would they feel if you died? You can’t pull off suicidal shit like that anymore, Blake. You just can’t.”
Rowan ignored the sobs that slowly picked up and hit his head against the tree again. The pain wasn’t much, but it kept his head clear, and it felt like a tiny bit of self-flagellation. He let go of the spear a little.
For the first time in a long while, he sincerely missed Kayla. Everything about her. The good, the bad, and the ugly. He’d probably welcome even her new self.
Their relationship was complicated, to say the least. Whereas Blake had adopted him relatively late, Kayla was with him from childhood. Both of them were messed up in their own ways. Somehow, they kept each other together.
Rowan really should have known that things would fall apart the second they were taken out of their familiar, comfy reality and thrust into a whole new world.
“Just do better, please?” Rowan asked quietly and threw his arm around Blake’s shoulders, ignoring the way they were shaking.
Blake wasn’t suicidal.
Blake didn’t reach for self-harm.
He wasn’t even stupid.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The problem with Blake, as his therapist eventually told Rowan and Kayla, was that he saw no inherent value in himself. His childhood, messed up as it was, had left him convinced that there was something he needed to constantly make up for. To atone for.
So, jumping off a bridge if it meant potentially saving someone from drowning? Sure, sign him up! It was an extremely messed up and dangerous attitude even in a relatively ‘safe’ world. Out in the demonic wastes? Rowan didn’t regret what he was doing for a second.
It hurt him. He wanted to stop. But he didn’t regret it.
It wasn’t like Kayla was conveniently around to fill in for him.
The thought of the individual in question sent his thoughts spiraling in a different direction.
Kayla. The ever perfect. Ever ready to jump down the throat of anyone who doubted her. A perfect mirror for Blake, with completely opposite needs and desires. If Blake wanted to help people, Kayla wanted attention and control.
All of it. So her life could never spiral into a nightmare again.
In a way, Rowan trusted her implicitly with Blake’s wellbeing exactly for that very reason. According to the drunk ramblings of the woman herself, she adored him. Wanted him all for herself. When she was at her lowest, he was always there to help.
No matter that he came to school with more bruises than she did.
“Fuck. When did it all go to hell, dammit?” Rowan hissed, thumping his head against the tree again.
He didn’t expect an answer. He got one anyway. “When we showed up here, I guess?” Blake’s voice trembled with both a sob and a laugh.
Rowan wasn’t quite so sure. Maybe it was the third or the thirteenth time Blake and Kayla broke up over his recklessness before inevitably getting back together? The queen bee and her loyal knight, stuck like glue throughout their education all the way up to college.
He wasn’t foolish enough to say that out loud.
“Well, it certainly seems to have helped bring out your bad side,” he said instead, fully expecting the shove he got in return for the comment.
“Oh really, mister perfect hero? What about you, then? What deeply messed up side of you did this place bring out?” Blake quipped.
Rowan decided to indulge Blake’s blatant attempt to direct attention away from his issues. “There were no ‘messed up’ parts of me for this world to bring out, Blake. I do, however, now have a myriad of traumas and mental scarring that’s unlikely to heal.”
He’d meant to say it jokingly. It came out more bitter than anything.
It took Blake another few moments before he asked his next question, and it wasn’t anything Rowan expected. “Are you planning to leave, if, I mean, when, we win? Are you going to return back home?”
“I thought we touched upon this discussion before? Well, to answer your question… no, I don’t think I will. I mean, I have a fiancée now. I’m actually starting to like this world, at least when it doesn’t suck as hard as it currently does. Besides, I was made a noble. Someone’s gotta take care of Rest’s Remorse.”
“That someone doesn’t have to be you.”
“Well, what about you smarty pants? When we kill the demon king and you get the choice, are you going back to the life we used to have?”
It said a lot that Blake didn’t answer for long, quiet minutes. When he finally did, he just sounded tired. “I don’t know. If you asked me just a couple weeks ago, I’d have said no. Now…”
“Now, everything sucks, and you just want it all to be over with?”
“More or less, yeah. My system is still messed up, but I guess we’re fixing that. My party members are all up in arms, I got my entire army killed, and I can’t even feel the presence of my goddess properly anymore. It’s so weak now. I can’t hear her voice, or feel her guidance. It’s just gone.”
Selfishly, Rowan considered hindering Blake’s attempts to recover his class if that meant his connection to the goddess of light would remain severed. He didn’t press the subject, though. “So, does that mean you’re leaning towards going back after all?”
We’ll see, I guess. Once everything’s done. Or at least, once this stretch of my journey’s done. Hells unholy, do I wish I’d just listened to my goddess and stayed in the capital longer. I could have actually done something useful, instead of ending up like this.”
“You mentioned that before. What does she actually want you to do that’s so important?” Rowan managed to ask the question casually, without any fidgeting. He was inordinately proud of that achievement.
“There are heretics in the capital. I don’t know how my goddess found out about them, but we intercepted a couple of their couriers and even busted some of their meetings. They’re always too quick for me to properly pin down, though. They have powerful classes on their side.”
Rowan shot him a disbelieving look. If there was someone capable of standing up to a near fully realized hero, then he imagined the king would be up in arms over it too, rather than sending one of his best trump cards away. “Really?”
Blake’s cheeks flushed, and Rowan could swear he spotted shame in his expression as his friend ducked his head, breaking their eye contact.
“Well, they’re either strong, or, um, I was weak? I mean, I know my heart card is good. And they guided me through the tiers to the class the king wanted me to have, so there’s no way my prep was inferior to the heathens. Still… seeing you, and your party, it kind of feels like I wasn’t doing all that well?”
Rowan thought back to watching Blake fight. His assumption was that Blake’s stats and cards, not to mention class, let him perform more than a little better in combat. Still, if that was the extent of his skill, then the Stalwart Hero really couldn’t say much to make his friend feel better.
“Well, when we get you all fixed up, we can have some practice bouts? Just, who taught you to just stand there and take all the punishment? Because let me tell you, they need to be fired. It’s like they gave you basic combat training on how to swing a sword and then shipped you off to level.”
Blake once again ducked his face out of view, making Rowan’s eyes narrow dangerously. “Um, well, they kind of did do that. I mean, it’s on me. Isn’t it? That I couldn’t figure things out on my own from there?”
With gritted teeth, Rowan spoke. “No, Blake, it’s not on you. I’ve had what certainly felt like months of training. I know it wasn’t, but Kayden almost literally hammered the basics into me. How to move. How to breathe. Handling all the spear stances. That’s not something you can just pick up on your own!”
Maybe Rowan was wrong, and all of that was something people expected heroes to just know. Still, the baron’s attitude and approach to his training suggested otherwise. And if that was the case, then why was Blake’s training so badly fumbled?
Even Rowan was treated better!
“Maybe they were in a hurry,” Blake supplied, even if his voice was plaintive and clearly dubious of his own suggestion.
It was a minor miracle, really. Still, to know that Rowan’s constant complaints about the king were finally starting to chip away at Blake’s natural predisposition to trust people no matter what the circumstances.
“There’s something there, Blake. I mean, and I do hate to bring this up, but Kayla left you with a warning, didn’t she? What exactly did she tell you when you last saw her?”
“I’m not sure. I-I wasn’t really listening properly. She said something about some kind of scheme. About how I needed to be more careful, and that I shouldn’t trust Harold, the king. Maybe I should have listened to her a bit better, but she was acting off since our arrival. I could barely recognize her.”
Rowan did his best to rack his brains, thinking back to before their arrival to their new world. Were Blake and Kayla going steady, or were they in one of their off periods? He wanted to curse when he realized they’d broken up again just a couple of days before it all went down.
Typically, they would have been back together by the end of the week, and then Rowan wouldn’t have to worry about them for months. Clearly, the timing of their abduction was highly inconvenient.
“You can’t remember anything else? Nothing at all?”
“No, sorry. My goddess wanted me to continue leveling up and hunting for the heretics, so I didn’t really pay attention to much else.”
The admission was another strike against Sarina’s agenda, whatever it was. Really, the more Rowan learned about the goddess, the more he became convinced she needed to be replaced yesterday. Her spot in the pantheon was better off in someone else’s hands.
“Dammit, Blake, when the hero chosen by the goddess of secrets tried to tell you something, no matter how you feel on the subject, you listen. You can overanalyze whether it’s a trap or whatever later, but first, you listen.”
“I get it, I get it! I’ll do better.”
“I sure hope so.” Rowan filled those words with as much grouchiness and sarcasm as he could fit.
Overall, though, Rowan was satisfied with how the conversation had gone. If he could just keep Blake from doing stupidly reckless things in the future, he’d count himself a winner. Even if his fried was chronically incapable of distrusting suspicious individuals.
As such, Rowan forced himself back to his feet, twinging a little when the stiffness brought on by their awkward sitting position made itself known to his muscles. To his relief, it didn’t even take a full second for his regeneration card to kick in, and then the pain melted away.
“Want to head back? The others are probably waiting for us, and it is getting pretty late, all told,” Rowan offered, signaling that he was willing to drop all the uncomfortable subjects for the time being.
He expected his friend to jump on the opportunity. Blake always hated when Rowan or Kayla pulled one of their interventions, but this time, he actually shook his head no.
“Actually, I was hoping you’d help me test something,” Blake admitted as he stood up. “It’s true that I haven’t been using my heart card all that well. I always kept to the basics of conjuring weapons and armor with it, but it occurred to me that I don’t have to strictly use it only for that today.”
Rowan scoffed. Of course, he wasn’t saying no because he wanted to talk more. At least he couldn’t fault his fellow hero for what he was trying to do. Frankly, anything that would help him stay safer was a win in Rowan’s book.
“What did you have in mind? Want to test some kind of a new shield or something?” One could hope, and Rowan certainly was doing that.
“No. I actually want you to block a couple of my strikes, then I’ll tell you before I test out my theory, and you can tell me if it worked?”
“Typical that you’re already planning out new attacks. I told you that you need to stop being so reckless in battle. I did tell you that, didn’t I? That constant charging in won’t cut it?”
“Yes, Rowan, you told me. Now, are you going to help me or not?”
Instead of a verbal reply, Rowan took up his position opposite Blake, making the best of the space they had between the thickly clustered trees.
The other hero took a deep, centering breath, drew his sword, and attacked. Just like before, it wasn’t anything to write home about.
With Blake’s level up, the attacks came more quickly and carried more power behind every swing, but that was it. Rowan was still easily keeping ahead of the assault, each strike blocked in almost lazy motions thanks to his dexterity and strength.
Blake gave up after about a minute of relentless strikes, jumped lightly on the balls of his feet, then nodded. Rowan took that as the signal and squared up a bit more tightly, actually paying attention.
If Blake did somehow pull off some ludicrously powerful attack, then Rowan wasn’t going to let himself get run through just because he was getting cocky.
As it turned out, that was a good thing.
Blake’s entire body light up as his mana wound around his limbs and torso. The only part of him that wasn’t covered was his head, a fact that Rowan immediately took note of. If this were a real battle, that’s where he’d aim first.
Then Blake was moving, and it was unlike anything the hero had done before.
Rowan’s eyes widened a fraction when he realized that the speed of the attack now almost approached something that could threaten him when he wasn’t fully committed.
Thanks to his previous caution, he didn’t let the strike slip past his guard. Likewise, that was the only reason his spear wasn’t launched out of his grip.
The strike was powerful in a way none of Blake’s previous attacks were. It carried far more strength than the hero was supposed to be capable of bringing to bear, to the point where the entire length of Rowan’s spear quivered with a sonorous sound of echoing metal.
Blake’s face was lit up in pure glee, and then the hero’s limbs blurred again, striking again and again. Slowly, Rowan’s own lips turned up in a smile, then he broke out into laughter.
They were sparring. Actually sparring, rather than Rowan taking time out of his day to indulge or look after his recovering friend. His happiness was such that he tapped into his stats more fully, pushing back at Blake’s progress to see how well whatever his new trick was would hold up.
Thankfully, the trick held up wonderfully. Blake even managed to push himself a tiny bit more, speeding up his strikes and upping their ferocity.
Of course, that’s when weapons clashed, rang out, and Blake’s elbow snapped.
Rowan had to quickly abort his own retaliatory strike, and only managed due to his recently bump in perception and dexterity thanks to all of the recruits leveling up some and investing their stats.
“What was that? How did you manage to break your own arm?” Rowan demanded immediately, stabbing his spear into the ground and reaching out to inspect the limb.
Blake, meanwhile, was staring at it like it had betrayed him. “It’s nothing. Really. I promise. I kind of twisted it too far? I guess I should admit that I wasn’t exactly using my body stats to manage all of that.”
Rowan wasn’t sure what to make of the admission. So, his answer was simple. “Explain.”
“It’s my heart card. I mean, if I can manipulate light, and create all this armor, then why can I sort of force my body to move the way I want? It’s a bit like I was piloting myself inside a robot suit. I mean, my heart card feels like a perfect extension of myself, you know? It’s so easy to use it.”
Rowan did not, in fact, know what that was like. His heart card was passive in nature, but that was neither here nor there.
“Then how did you get hurt?”
“I twisted my arm awkward, as I said. It couldn’t quite stretch the way I wanted it to, but my light armor didn’t care, and…” Blake motioned awkwardly at the hand Rowan was already helping him secure in a fixed position.
He didn’t have a sling handy, but he could find plenty of dried-up looking vines around, even if most of them were covered in thorns.
Rowan’s feelings were dancing somewhere between fondness and exasperation. In spite of that, he couldn’t quite stop himself from smiling in tandem with his friend. His happiness was practically radiating off of him in waves.
“Just be more careful, okay? Still, I have to say I’m proud of you. That’s amazing! I wonder what it will let you do in tandem with your stats once they’re recovered.”
“I know, right? Still! This means I’m no longer useless. You can let me fight rare tier enemies without hovering, and maybe we can even go after an epic!”
Rowan’s heart twinged at the way Blake once again discarded his own value so casually, and he wasn’t quite sure he’d be willing to let him tag along on an epic hunt just yet, but the outlook of Blake’s recovery was looking brighter and brighter by the day.
And that, at least, was a good thing.