Chương 30: Tears of love

Alex opened his eyes and the sky was ordinary. Pale, a little clouded, the light going long and orange at the edges. Evening. He'd been out for hours. He took inventory before he tried anything ambitious. The pain was still there, but it had changed its character entirely, no longer the total white noise that had been drowning him but a deep, awful ache that lived in his bones and his ribs and the meat of his side, remnants, echoes of injuries that were no longer trying to kill him. His mana had come back some.

His stamina was nonexistent. He tried to move a finger and it took the entire effort of his will to do it. And underneath all of it, the only thing his mind actually had in it, the same words on a loop, worn smooth from use. I must not die. He'd said that to himself in the dark until it stopped being language and became something closer to a heartbeat. He turned his head, which cost him, and found that they hadn't moved him. Same field.

Less blood on him than he expected, though the grass under him had gone dark and stiff with it. His armor was off, stacked in a ruined heap that no longer resembled armor. His glaive lay in the grass at his side, where somebody had put it deliberately, within reach. To his left, Ace lay unconscious in the dirt. That took a second to land. Then it landed hard.

"She's fine," Jeremy said. He was sitting a few feet away with Liam beside him, and Alex hadn't noticed either of them, which told him something about the state of his perception. Jeremy's face was a mess of half-healed bruises and there was a bad scrape down one forearm. He was not looking at Alex.

"She emptied herself into you," Jeremy said.

"Everything. Down to the floor. Then she kept casting after that, on fumes, until she just went over sideways." A pause.

"She's been out for two hours." Liam scooted closer, all nervous energy.

"Are you okay? Can you breathe? Does it hurt? It looks like it hurts. It looked like you died, Alex, I want you to understand that, from where I was standing you looked extremely dead-""Liam." Alex's own voice came out as a rasp.

"Quieter."

"Right. Sorry. Sorry." Liam dropped to a whisper that was somehow more intense.

"Are you okay though?"

"I feel like garbage." Alex managed it.

"Worst I've ever felt. But I'm not broken anywhere." That was the strange part. He could see the faint white lines on his forearm where the burns had been, the healed-over ridges, but the damage itself was gone. Ace had put him back together and then some, and then she had fallen over.

"Help me sit." Jeremy didn't move. Liam did, hauling ineffectually at his shoulders until Alex got himself upright, and the world swam and steadied. He looked around at the field, the crater, the wreck of twenty-five bodies, the ugly little fortress standing open with its platform inside.

"Did it work?" he said. That was when Jeremy finally looked at him.

"Did it work," Jeremy repeated. His voice was very calm. Alex had known him for eleven years and had never once heard him use that voice.

"That's the question. That's your first question." Jeremy stood up.

"Not is my sister alive. Not did anyone else get hurt. Did it work."

"Jeremy-""You lost it out there." He said it flatly, the way a man reads out a diagnosis.

"I don't know what's been happening in your head since your grandfather died and I'm not going to pretend I do. But you lost it today, and I need to say all of this before you get up and walk it off like you walk everything off." Alex said nothing.

"We never once talked about what to do if we found something we couldn't beat." Jeremy's hands were shaking, and he didn't seem to notice.

"Not once. Five people, walking into an enemy fortress, and it never came up, and that's on all of us. But then we found one, Alex. We found the exact thing we never planned for, and there was a plan available. It was sitting right there. We could have left."

"It would have followed us."

"Maybe! Maybe it would have, and we'd have fought it on ground we chose, at night, with Katelin and forty archers behind a wall. Or maybe we come back in three days with fifteen people and a real strategy. Or maybe we do a hundred other things, because we had already won, Alex. Twenty-five of them were dead. The mission was done. The one thing we absolutely did not have to do was fight a G rank with five people and no mana." Liam had gone very still.

"And you didn't ask." Jeremy's voice finally cracked out of its calm.

"You didn't ask any of us. You said 'go for the skull' and you ran into it. You made the decision for four other people and you didn't give us a second to have an opinion, and if that thing had killed you, which it almost did, which it coulld have, then Ace and Liam and Mia and I were standing in an open field with a G rank and no tank." The words landed and kept landing.

"You didn't just risk your life," Jeremy said.

"You spent everyone else's. And then my wife burned herself hollow dragging you back, and if she had failed, Alex, do you understand what that would have done to her? She would have carried that for the rest of her life. Not the monster. Her. She would have thought it was her fault."

"That's not-""I know it's not. She'd think it anyway. You know she would." Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. Alex's mouth was open. Nothing came out of it.

"We've buried two." Jeremy's voice dropped.

"Two, in weeks, and you are out here behaving like you're volunteering to be the third. And whatever this is, whatever you're chasing, get it out of your head, because I will not do this again. I won't come out here with you. I won't let Ace come out here with you. Not while you're like this." He picked up his spear.

"We survived today. Next time, the whole party dies, and it'll be for a dumb reason, and the dumb reason will be you." He walked away. Liam Liam sat in the grass and did not say anything for a long time, because he had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to say. Jeremy was right. That was the thing. Everything Jeremy said was correct, and Liam had thought most of it himself while watching the whole insane sequence unfold from a hundred meters back, and he still couldn't make himself agree out loud.

Because he'd watched Alex charge into that field. He kept replaying it. The bubbles going off across that huge frame in strings, the armor caving in a little more with each one, the big ones knocking him flat, twice, and both times, both times, that enormous shape hauling itself back upright out of the dirt and walking forward again into the thing that was killing him. Liam had never seen anything like it in his life. He didn't think he ever would again. He'd always assumed he was the talented one.

He'd said it a hundred times, mostly joking, and Alex had always agreed cheerfully, sure, you're the genius, I just hit things. But Liam had been watching him for three weeks now, and Alex was lying, and Liam was starting to suspect Alex didn't even know he was lying. The man built a skill out of nothing on purpose. He evolved a fireball into something the shop didn't sell. He walked into a minefield and came out the other side and killed a G rank with a stick.

There was something around Alex, something Liam had felt building since the day his grandfather died, a kind of gravity. When Alex decided a thing was going to happen, it developed the alarming habit of happening. It made you want to follow him. It also, Liam thought, watching his cousin sit hunched in the bloody grass, made him look exactly like a man who was going to get himself killed young. Both of those things were true. Liam hated that both of them were true.

He stayed where he was and kept fidgeting with a handful of sand, because sitting next to him seemed like the only useful thing left to do. Ace Ace came up out of the black with her hands already moving. She had been mid-cast when she blacked out and her body remembered it, so she woke up casting nothing at a patch of grass, and then she remembered everything, and terror hit her so hard she nearly went straight back under. She had felt him going. That was the part nobody would ever fully understand.

She'd had her hands on his chest and she had felt the damage under them and known, with total clinical certainty, that it was more than she had. She had watched heart rhythms fail in hospitals with a full crash team around her. She knew what it felt like when a body was leaving, and Alex's had been leaving, and she had poured everything she had into him anyway, knowing it wasn't going to be enough, screaming his name into a face that had gone gray. And then it had been enough. Somehow.

She still could not explain the somehow. He should have died on that grass and instead he had just kept breathing, refusing, one terrible breath at a time, long past when a body should have quit. She scrambled up and found him sitting there, and he turned his head, and he was awake.

"You're not dead." Alex opened his mouth.

"You're not dead," Ace said again, and heard her own voice break in half.

"You're not dead, you're not dead, oh my God, Alex." She was on her knees in front of him and her hands were on his face, and she was crying so hard she could barely see him, which was maddening, because looking at him was the only thing she wanted to do. She ran her hands down his shoulders, his ribs, his side, checking, and tried to cast, and nothing came. Nothing at all. She was empty.

"Ace." Jeremy was there, arms around her from behind.

"Ace, he's fine. You did it. He's fine."

"I need to check-""You already checked. Four times. He's fine." She let him hold her, and she did not stop looking at her brother, and her brother sat there with a face she had never seen him wear before, and said absolutely nothing at all. A notification flickered at the edge of her vision, informing her that Heal had upgraded to Greater heal (uncommon). She ignored it without a second thought. There was no time to care about skills or rewards. Right now, only one thing mattered. Alex wanted her to yell at him.

That was the thing that surprised him. He sat there while his sister sobbed into her husband's arm and he found himself waiting for it, waiting for the sharp voice, you reckless idiot, you absolute fool, hold still, all the familiar words that meant everything was fine because Ace was Ace and Ace was angry with him. She didn't get angry. She just cried. He would have preferred almost anything else. They walked back into the outpost as the light died, and nobody said much. They found the platform.

Alex made himself look at it properly, at the rows, and made himself understand that the thing on it was the reason a man he loved had spent his last breath telling him he was losing his mind, and that both of those facts had to live in him at the same time from now on. They buried them. All of them. It took hours, and every one of them worked, and Alex worked with a body that screamed at him with every shovelful, and he did not stop and he did not speak. [Outpost claimed.] The notification arrived hours ago.

That was all. He waited for more. There was no more. No points, no reward, no title, no acknowledgment of any kind that five people had walked into a fortress and killed a G rank and buried fifty strangers. Just the flat, bureaucratic fact of ownership, logged and filed. The first outpost conquest in the tutorial, as far as any of them knew, and the system handed them two words. Alex looked at it for a moment and felt nothing whatsoever, and let it go. Nobody else mentioned it either. Liam didn't even make a joke.

Jeremy came to him as they were leaving.

"Go home," he said.

"Sleep. You're dead on your feet and you'll be worse tomorrow. I'll report to Chris." Alex started to argue. He was the one who had led this, he should be the one to stand in front of his father and explain it, that was how it worked. Then he thought about standing in front of Chris and explaining that he had run into a minefield.

"Okay," he said. Jeremy nodded once and walked back to his wife. The walk back took a long time. Alex spent most of it with Jeremy's voice in his head, the whole thing, start to finish, on repeat. And the awful part, the part he kept circling, was the word retreat. It had never occurred to him. Not for a second.

It had not been in his head as an option to reject, it simply had not existed, and the moment he tried to imagine having thought it out there on that field, some part of him that lived under his sternum recoiled at the idea, because retreating meant coming back later, and later meant being weaker than the thing for longer, and there was a small white-haired man in the ground who had run out of later. Everything since Grandpa had been do or die. He hadn't chosen that.

He'd just looked up one day and found himself living there. You spent everyone else's. That one was true. He turned it over and could not find a single angle from which it wasn't true. He owed them an apology. He knew that with perfect clarity, could see the exact shape of it, could hear himself saying it. He would have to gather them, all four, and say I was wrong, and I made a call that wasn't mine to make, and I'm sorry. He would do it. Tomorrow.

Something old and stubborn and deeply, unhelpfully proud sat in his chest with its arms folded and would not let the words out today, and Alex was too tired to fight it, and he hated himself a little for that, and he let it win anyway. He would apologize tomorrow. He meant it. He was almost certain he meant it. He got to his tent as full dark came down, and remembered, dimly, that there was a notification waiting for him. [Level 10.] Level ten. The threshold.

Affinities and professions and the whole rest of it, sitting there, the thing he had been grinding toward since the day he learned it existed. He looked at it for about two seconds. Then the exhaustion came up over him like a wave over a seawall, and Alex was unconscious before his shoulder finished hitting the bedroll.