The front door opened into a wide reception room that had seen better days, floors scuffed, walls torn, ceiling scratched. He didn’t hold that against the place, though. Few buildings had come away from the apocalypse looking better off, in his experience.

  Ornate double doors on the left led to a living room that looked like it had been very fancy indeed before monsters or looters had ransacked it. There was a pile of shredded fabric and splintered wood that had probably once been posh furniture, prettily patterned wallpaper hung in tatters, and a stone fireplace at the end of the large space was in utter ruin. Even the carpet looked like it was once plush.

  Now, the room was covered in dust and debris, and its occupants sat on the floor.

  He recognised all of them, of course, since he’d been the one to escort every single one of them out of Watford. But some were more familiar than others. For example, he was quite horrified to realise that he hadn’t even learned the vast majority of their names.

  Eight people sat on the floor of the living room, and six of them were nameless to him. Remembering names had never been his forte, but neglecting to ask for them in the first place seemed like a social faux pas he should’ve known better than to step in at this point.

  The two he did know, he hadn’t even asked for himself. He’d been spying on them while they’d been debating what to do while hiding in a shopping centre’s storage basement to ride out the destruction he was wreaking on Watford, and their names had naturally come up in their own conversation.

  To be fair, he told himself he would have at least remembered Aisha, with her white face paint, black lips, and lacy black dress. The goth look had made an impression. She reacted to his arrival with a look of profound despair.

  Tomoyo Maeda, on the other hand, had made such a point of emphasising her name to her anime protagonist-acting ally that it had drilled itself into his skull, if only so he’d be sure to call her by her surname at all times. He couldn’t fathom how Vincent so blithely shrugged off her disdain when she expressed her displeasure at his use of her given name. She opened her fan to cover the lower half of her face and batter her eyelashes at him.

  The rest of the room went through a round of introductions, cheerfully chaperoned by Lily.

  An Asian man dressed in a dark kurta named Hamza leapt to his feet and thanked John profusely, projecting such overenthusiastic gratitude that John could only assume it was part of the man’s system to behave this way.

  A stoic bloke in a tanktop called Frank showed off enormous muscles as he shook John’s hand, squeezing with immense strength. John could only be thankful for his own Level 9 Strength, or he was sure he wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face.

  Clinging to his other arm was a grown woman named Karlie who spoke with a horrendous rendition of a ditzy cheerleader accent. He wouldn’t have understood what she was going for if not for the cheerleader outfit itself, which was terribly small on her, undoubtedly meant for a teenager, not a grown woman.

  Next came a young man with his head, face, and eyebrows shaved clean. He made sure to insist, in a monotone voice, that John forgive him for his utter incompetence and patheticness, and promised to kill himself at a moment of John’s choosing to make up for the inconvenience.

  After that was an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and laugh lines around his eyes who seemed the most normal of the bunch so far, dressed in a simple grey tracksuit, appearing for all the world like no more than an average guy who’d been out for a run when the world ended. John waited for the other shoe to drop throughout their entire interaction, but he just pleasantly gave his thanks for John’s help.

  The last was the female half of the arguing couple he’d saved from their attic. It turned out her name was Lisa. Cool. He still didn’t know whether their bickering had been spurred by the system or if they were just like that.

  Needless to say, John was horribly uncomfortable throughout the experience, and wanted it done as fast as possible without giving away that he was rushing through it. Luckily, Lily seemed to get the message, and rushed him out of there before he could feel too panicked by being the centre of attention among strangers.

  Unfortunately, his leap from the frying pan only carried him right into the fire.

  Lily led him back out into the reception room just as Vincent entered from the other direction, clearly heading towards Maeda and Aisha. Their eyes met. Vincent’s eyes widened. John was sure his did too, though they were at least hidden behind his sunglasses. The world seemed to freeze.

  "M-master!" Vincent eventually reared back, pointing. "You should have told me you were meeting your girlfriend! I wouldn’t have held you up so long if I’d known!"

  The world had already been still. Now, it got even stiller, slowing down as if he’d activated Accelerate. He quickly had to check to make sure he hadn’t.

  Right then, John thought, rolling his shoulders, guess I have to kill Vincent and then myself. Shame, but it’s got to be done. I had a good run, and I guess so did he.

  But then Lily chuckled to herself, and it, to his eternal relief, it wasn’t a sound of derision or disgust. She said simply, "As if I’d be worthy enough to have someone as badass and amazing as John as my boyfriend."

  +1000 Aura

  And then she strode past Vincent, the conversation dismissed.

  John lingered a moment longer, exchanged a look with Vincent. The younger man winced.

  As you should, John thought indignantly. Vincent would never know how close he had come to death at that moment.

  When John rushed to follow after Lily, he activated Clairvoyance out of a simple desire to make sure he wasn’t caught off guard again. Ironically, he was immediately caught off guard again by what he immediately found in one of the attic rooms almost directly above him.

  The women sat next to each other, almost identical, save for their hairstyles. Blue eyes, sharp-jawed, thin-nosed, but one wore a bob while the other’s hair cascaded down her shoulders. Both were impossibly lustrous, skin clear, and John assumed that was part of whatever their system was.

  These two, he knew their names. Knew more about them, he reckoned, than most of the other people in this building.

  Like, for example, the fact that they usually wore golden armour in battle. He found he didn’t care much for their names at all. In fact, their presence reminded him of a matter he hadn’t realised he’d need to consider until that very moment, and he found himself on autopilot as Lily introduced the occupants of the open plan kitchen and dining area. There were three guys and two women, all armoured or costumed up, and Lily gave him their names, and they said some words to him that were probably thanks, and John nodded along, and all the while his mind was a thousand miles away, churning in a stormy cloud of dread.

  The rest of Lily’s tour proceeded in much of the same way. There were just under fifty people in their little resistance, plus a handful of animals he’d picked up, and any detail about them went in one ear and right out of the other.

  Even the details of the building didn’t register deeply, beyond a vague acknowledgement that the manor house was two floors, had about twenty rooms, and there were adjoining buildings and a barn in a U-shape that contained a further forty or so rooms, meaning there was more than enough space for this to be a pretty decent temporary base while they organised things.

  His expression must have been showing something by the time they made it to Doug about ten minutes into the tour, because the old man took one look at John and dragged him out to a private garden. There, Doug led him to a bench overlooking a green pond, sat him down, and… said nothing.

  Silence rested between them for a long time.

  "I told you before," John eventually said, "that I have three human corpses in my Inventory, didn’t I? Back at the community centre, when we first met back up."

  Doug sighed. The big man was still wearing only a pair of swimming shorts. John had never thought to ask why that was, since he assumed it was a demand from Doug’s system. "That you did, kid."

  "I told you the circumstances of how I… acquired them."

  "The little girl, her father, and the killer."

  It was John’s turn to sigh. "Yeah. Claire, Curtis, and Marian."

  He didn’t know how to continue. He could see Doug’s eyes on the side of his face in his peripheral vision, but John stared determinedly out over the algae-filled water.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  "You’re thinking about whether to bring them back, now.”

  "That’s the dilemma."

  "Problem is," Doug said slowly, "there’s a decent chance some folk back inside would have some problems with the father, hmm?"

  John thought of the golden twins. "That’s putting it mildly."

  "And you don’t want to bring back the girl without her father."

  "That would be pretty unfair, wouldn’t it? Just thrust her back into the world, powerless and sick, with no one familiar around." He swallowed hard. "Especially with how she went out. Like she wanted to go. Only way I see it as not being cruel is if she’d got her dad with her."

  "Which, again, is a pretty significant interpersonal issue." Doug hummed softly. "And the killer woman?"

  John grimaced. "If I’m giving out second chances to people who’ve been dicks in the past, in the spirit of humanity coming together to fight off the monsters and all that…"

  Doug was quiet for a long moment. "There’s being dicks, and there’s what that woman did. I think you know that, John."

  "Yeah." John let out a small laugh. "Yeah, I really do not want to bring that woman back."

  Another pause. "But you feel like you should, eh?"

  "If nothing else, I don’t want dead bodies in my fucking Inventory anymore."

  A sudden burst of nervous energy forced John to his feet, and he paced back and forth in front of the stone bench a few times while Dog watched in silence. There were little movements in the water. Tadpoles, maybe. That was nice to see; perhaps the monsters hadn’t murdered absolutely everything in the countryside.

  After a moment’s thought, he activated Shadow Steam then let the oily darkness billow out until it formed a hollow dome around the two of them. He looked at Doug. "It makes me sick every time I have to scroll past them, man. I struggle to even bring myself to open the fucking thing, giving me a reminder of all the bullshit that happened back there. Fucking… killing someone by accident. A little girl asking to let her die rather than suffer any longer. God, I never really got the chance to tell you about it properly, but that whole thing was fucked."

  John felt like he should have been raising his voice until he was shouting, but instead it just got quieter. By the time he was done talking, it was barely more than a whisper. His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, and his jaw felt far too stiff.

  "And Curtis… Fucking guy killed half a thousand people. There’s a decent chance someone back in the house lost a loved one to his selfishness, right? Bringing him back would probably cause a bunch of trouble, even if he’s powerless now. I shouldn’t even need to think about this. I should just… discard him and Marian’s bodies in a ditch somewhere and wash my hands of it. I’d bring Claire back when everything’s done and safe, and we’ve found people who can look after her."

  "But you don’t want to do that, either. Discarding them, I mean."

  John’s shoulders slumped. The motion felt awkward, with his hands held up to keep Shadow Stream going. "They’re still human, aren’t they? Utter pieces of shit, but still human. Can’t be taking those for granted. What was the population of Watford before the apocalypse?"

  "It was something like 90,000 a decade or so ago. I’ve not seen more recent numbers."

  John gestured towards the manor house with his chin. "And we have about fifty left. Let’s be generous and say about that same number escaped beforehand, so we’ll call it 100 survivors overall. That’s… what? Just over 0.1% survival rate, right? Apply that to all of humanity, and we have about seven million people still alive on Earth. Sounds like a lot, but in absolute terms…" He shook his head. "Can we afford to chuck people away, when you look at it like that?"

  "You’re rationalising, John. If that was your real problem here, wouldn’t it apply to the pyschos who tortured Sam? I think you need to be honest with yourself if you want to come to a conclusion you can live with."

  John wanted to run his fingers through his hair. Maybe pull at it. He considered it a good thing that he had to keep his hands up to maintain Shadow Stream’s shroud over their conversation.

  He released a sigh so deep it seemed to come from the depths of his soul. "I want to bring Claire back so I don’t have to keep feeling like I failed her. If I bring Claire back, I feel like I have to bring Curtis back for her. If I bring Curtis back, it would feel unfair not to bring Marian back, since he committed objectively worse crimes than her."

  "Objectively?" Doug arched an eyebrow. "Torturing a kid for the sins of her father takes some beating, John."

  "Five-hundred murders. A hundred of which came before he even knew bringing back his daughter was a possibility. I never did ask him who he killed, but the kind of rage that inspires a group of people to be willing to torture a kid to get back at him… That doesn’t come from nowhere, does it? What would need to happen to you to make you want to kill someone’s kid to get back at them?"

  Doug’s expression darkened. "I see your point. Chances are, this Curtis did some horrible things, too."

  "Of the three of them, Claire’s the only innocent. The only one who really deserves to come back."

  "And you think bringing her back into this world alone and vulnerable would be cruel."

  "Yeah."

  "But you can’t stand seeing her corpse in your Inventory, now that we’ve got a big enough group together to start putting together ways to look after individuals who’re weaker, or don’t have a system at all anymore."

  John chuckled as he slumped back down onto the bench, keeping Shadow Stream aloft. "Yeah."

  "That’s quite the conundrum." Doug paused for a long time. "What brought this on in the first place? You’ve barely been back ten minutes."

  "You know those twins with the golden armour?"

  "Natalya and Anastasia? They seem pleasant enough kids to me."

  "They were among the five who came for Curtis. Who wanted to torture Claire to death in front of him to make him pay for… whatever he did to them."

  "Ah. Okay. I’m going to be honest with you, kid, I didn’t really understand why this was tearing you up so much, but I think I understand now." He sucked in a breath through his teeth. "Forgiving those two and bringing them here, in light of all this, was an… interesting decision, on your part."

  John could only chuckle again, but there was no humour in it.

  "You want to forgive people so you can go all us vs them, humanity vs monsters. I get it. You forgave Daniel, Marius, and Farah, too. It’s an admirable direction to go."

  "Why did admirable sound like an insult there?"

  "I’m completely sincere. Young me would have laughed at the fuckin’ concept of forgiving those little shits, sure, and that Marian girl you’re talking about wouldn’t even be on the table. But I’m not that person anymore, and I understand what’s tying your brain into knots here, at least on an emotional level." He paused. "Marian was the first person you killed. Worse, it wasn’t on purpose."

  "Thought I’d just knocked her out at first," John whispered.

  "I told you that killing people does something to you. Plants a chip of ice in your soul you can never quite completely ignore. Part of you wants to see if you can ease that burden a bit." His hand came down on John’s shoulder, and gently squeezed through the leather of his Shadow Coat. "It’s the bargaining stage of grief. Insidious bastard of a thing, it is."

  "I’m not grieving for Marian."

  "No. You’re grieving for yourself, kid. Killing that Marian woman killed the old you, in a way. Taking a human life, on purpose or not, fundamentally changed who John Woods is, altered his destiny to point in a new direction."

  John frowned. "I’ve killed twice since then. On purpose, too."

  "Exactly," Doug said. He leaned closer. "Could you imagine the you of two weeks ago doing that?"

  John slowly shook his head.

  "You couldn’t imagine yourself doing half the things you’ve done since this whole nonsense kicked off, could you? That’s the thing about people, we’re constantly growing, moving forward, adapting to the new circumstances in our lives. Fighting monsters in the way you have been altered your course and forced you to change the path you were on, but that was a new path you could accept. It was all about survival, wasn’t it?"

  He squeezed John’s shoulder a little harder. Not hard enough to hurt, exactly, but the pressure tugged at John’s focus, making him reflexively turn his head towards the old man.

  He found Doug looking back at him with eyes that were fathomlessly deep with understanding.

  "Killing another human was different. Now you’re on an entirely new path, and you feel like you can never get back off it, even if you want to. No matter how you tell yourself it was necessary and she deserved it, some part of you believes that this new path is just going to lead to more. More people who deserved it. More necessary kills." He paused. "More conflict with other humans, more confrontations with bullies."

  John actually flinched at that. His lips pressed into a thin line.

  When Doug continued, there was a hoarse undertone to his rumbling voice. "I’ve been there, kiddo. Believe me, I’ve been there. It feels like your future is going to be filled with fighting, that you’re going to be constantly running into bastards who leave you no choice, and fuck it’s a grim road to see stretching ahead of you, isn’t it?"

  John could only nod.

  Doug gave his shoulder a little shake. "I promise you, as someone who was in your position, once upon a time: it can get better. The road doesn’t have to be an endlessly bloody one. The paths will keep branching and branching, you’ll keep making decisions, and even if it’s shrouded in darkness and you miss it the first few times, there will be an escape from all this shit tormenting you. The chip of ice will stay in your soul. It’ll never shrink. But you can grow around it until there comes a day where you barely think about it at all anymore."

  The world was blurring slightly. "And what do I do about Claire? Even if… Even if this is all some self-serving bullshit in the end and I’m trying to fucking salvage myself or whatever, surely she deserves better than what she got, right?"

  "For that," Doug said, "I think we’ll need to have a little chat with those twins."