Jerome and Rayi dashed towards the gate, desperate to get there ahead of the four gnolls that were sprinting to cut them off.

If it was just him, Jerome could have made it no problem.  Gnoll-form was incredibly fast when on all fours and he was closer to the gate than the other gnolls.  It was Rayi that was the issue.  He was running slow, like a human.  He was also eight.  He might get to the gate first, but the gnolls would run him down soon afterwards.

Three of the gnolls were loaded down with weapons, and the fourth — the one who had fought Jerome before — knew how to counteract Portal Hand.  This wasn’t a fight that Jerome could win, at least not in any traditional sense of the word.  Any two of them could take him down unless he had access to an awesome form like Krystyna, Rikan, or an ockdine.  The best he could hope for was to delay them long enough that Rayi could get away.

The obvious solution, if Jerome wanted to survive, was to ditch the kid and run.  Escort missions were hell.

But these days Jerome had, for some reason, stopped taking the obvious solution.  The obvious solution had been to keep cutting the girl.  The next obvious solution had been to run away when the ockdine attacked.  The obvious solution after that had been to pretend to be a gnoll and leave the humans to their fates, slipping out of the city with his original Quest complete.

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Jerome was a man of easy, obvious solutions.

Sure, he had risked his life the second he came into this world trying to save a girl, but back then he was drunk and he didn’t know he could die.  Now he made these decisions sober with full knowledge of the pain and death that could come his way.

He couldn’t even blame it on the Quest.  He might not get anything for the Quest, rescuing just one of the survivors.  He didn’t even care about the EXP anymore.  This was about rescuing one little speck of hope and innocence from the darkness of the world.  Giving it a chance to live on, grow, illuminate.

He didn’t do it because of propaganda.  The government on earth wanted him thinking about children and the future as little as possible.  He did it, instead, because he had some instinct in him, some spark of life that not even the most dreary and degenerate of lives could extinguish completely.

He did it because he knew it was right.

They met at the gate, the gnolls still thirty feet away.

“Run like hell and I’ll catch up,” he told Rayi.

“Which direction?”

“Away from here.”

Rayi looked almost like he wouldn’t do it.  Like he would stay and try to help.

“You’re level 2, kid, and hurt pretty badly.  Let me handle this.”

Rayi nodded and ran.

Now Jerome had to fight for their lives.