One moment of weakness and it had stabbed me in the eye. Its hand had been in my eye socket, claws gouging. I experienced all of it. The pain. The injury. The feeling of wriggling fingers. Of losing an eye.

I wondered if this was how people missing limbs felt. I was probably the only person ever to experience this, having lost a part of me that I still had.

All of me was breathing hard. This was worse than dying—no, not really, because I’d done that too, hadn’t I? Down there in the cave.

Horace looked at me like was insane and I couldn’t even blame him. I was putting pressure on my face—my eye. Blinking to make sure it was still there. I must’ve looked crazy. Muscles in my eye were working strangely, intimately aware of how it felt to not have the eye, and so my face was twitching.

“Sorry,” I replied. It wasn’t much of assurance but I had no excuse nor did I owe him one.

This was the apocalypse and I’d fucked up and paid for it. I felt deflated, hollow. Spent and wrung out. Dying, and then getting your eye gouged out, apparently did that to you.

“Dude, are you okay? You’re not gonna kill me, right?” He said, slightly panicked. His voice cut through a fogged mind.

“No, man.” I looked at him, considering everything. “My name’s Evahn Wynst.” I took my wallet out, opened it, pulled out my student card and flung out onto the floor in front of him. “I’m a student here, like you. Or… I was.”

“Oh, what major?”

The question was so out of place, so jarringly normal, that cut straight through whatever I was experiencing. Second, above, laughed. Third followed, and then finally me. Like a ripple of slow emotion.

He looked at me in panic again. “Right, sorry.” Part of me was bloody, missing an eye, and still screaming and cursing at the world. “That was just about the most incredibly mundane thing you could ask. Given… all this.” I waved weakly.

“Ah shit, yeah.” He said quickly.

It took a minute for my fogged mind to catch up. Emotion and trauma and pain had taken a circuit around my head. He was scared of me, I realized.

I wasn’t—couldn’t take any more risks though. When my clones came back, that was when he’d be released. Not when I could be in danger from whatever power this apocalypse had given him.

There was a knock on the door. Enough that it sounded like something of a passcode. From the inside, I unlatched and opened the door. I found myself, half-staring at me, covered in blood. I knew I was there and still managed to be surprised.

This was me.

A man neither short nor tall. One pale green eye staring from behind a mask. His hood was down, he’d been trying to get fresh air. Impossible, given the gore that covered him, the blood that seeped into his hoodie. Tears and blood.

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My clones, apparently, could handle a little bit of damage. I say little, but the pain was debilitating, consuming. I didn’t know how to treat it if I even needed to.

I was holding the crowbar like a lifeline. Angry that I’d lost composure. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes. Not when my life was on the line.

That was the beauty of [Never Alone], I supposed. A cruel beauty.

“What the fuck?” Horace said softly as I let him in and closed the door.

Bloody me, Second, walked over. Then he sat heavily against the wall.

“I think it’s time you told us what you saw up there.” Second said. “And what powers you have.”

Horace looked at me, the clean, non-intimidating me, and I nodded. “We can’t let you go if there’s even a chance you turn around and kill us.” The words left my mouth cold. ‘Kill’ lingering on my tongue like bile.

He took one look at Second and complied, shifting in place. “It was an earthquake. I was at the plaza when it happened. An earthquake that had to max out whatever scale they measure those things on. Everything in view was shaking.”

He took a breath. “I think that’s when I saw the words. Felt them, heard them, whatever. It said I gained some stuff.”

“But I didn’t even have time to consider it. I looked up and realized the campus was gone. Then I turned around and found the science building was the only one left. I ran there. So did other students. And, uh, I saw them die. Right… right in front of me.” He choked.

“Parts of the building broke down and I think a lot of people were stuck. By the time I found people who at least knew what was going on, there were things hunting. Killing and eating. I don’t know what happened but I managed to kill one… after it killed four people.”

His breathing sped up, so did mine. I’d been unconscious in the rubble, along with, I assumed, most of the people attending lecture. I remembered that handful of survivors. Should I have stayed with them? Or… would that have condemned me? Or saved them all?

“They were gone when I woke up. I was bleeding and didn’t know anything but to go to the nurse’s office. That’s when you found me.” He said. “I didn’t see a single one of those creatures after.”

He looked at us—me. “Thank you, by the way. I never got around to saying that.”

It looked like he knew exactly as much as I did. That was to say, nothing. Apocalypse, strange messages, weird powers. Death and survival. But, perhaps I could get some context for it all.

“Were other people using abilities?” I asked. What was the scope, here? Could someone have the power to destroy the entire building? Summon lightning?

“Someone shot flames from his hand. I think I already told you that. There was a girl that could… uh, she tried to shield herself. Some kind of barrier. It didn’t work. Uh, another guy was stronger than normal, enough to stagger the thing with a punch to the side. The last guy died before doing anything.” He ended weakly.

Were they Classes like my [Solo]? Or just Skills? I wasn’t exactly sure what the difference was.

“And you?” I asked him. “What can you do?” This time, my voice was raw and it came from the me that sat covered in gore and blood.

“I—I can just shoot, like, a bolt of energy. Powerful enough to take a head off.”

“Just the Skill?” I asked, somewhat disappointed.

“Yeah.” He confirmed, eyeing the gore-covered Second. “And you guys?”

It was… straightforward, no doubt probably useful, but did it help with survival beyond its application for protection? Because that’s what this apocalypse was. Survival. You could starve just as well as be killed, that was the problem.

He still thought he was talking to two people. I wished I could have that spark of hope in his eyes. That feeling of protection that came in numbers. In reality, there were only two people here, stranded.

And, paranoid or not, I wasn’t planning on disclosing any details.

Then, how to proceed?