1% Lifesteal

"The outer edge," she whispered back.

"And what are you gonna do there?"

She didn\'t look back at him, but she did slow down a bit. "I\'m gonna bury myself in the ground."

"What?" he spewed, but—

"Shhh," she hushed him. It was still daytime, so they had a clear view of their surroundings, but she acted as if she was expecting danger to jump at them at any moment.

Anger bubbled in the depths of his gut. With each second that passed, he felt more and more ready to break off and stop following her, but through sheer stubbornness, he kept following her while thinking up ways to convince her to speak.

The outer edge was quite far, and combined with Sophia\'s sudden hypervigilance, it took them a while to reach her destination. They left the woods and entered a clearing void of all growth, right beside the massive, jagged cliffs surrounding the passage realm\'s outer perimeter. All that stood below their feet was dead, dry soil.

"All right," she said as she pulled a small knife from her Storage Ring. Then she knelt and dug into the ground, using the dagger as an improvised trowel.

He stood to the side, watching.

Eventually, she paused. She took a deep breath and aggressively rubbed her face. "You think I\'m insane, don\'t you?"

"I know you\'re insane," he corrected her. "I just want to know what you\'re hiding," he said, remaining upright as he squinted down at her.

"Are you gonna leave me alone if I tell you?"

"Gladly."

The day suddenly blinked out, and night descended on the realm. Both of them merely glanced at the sky, already used to dealing with this phenomenon, having seen it happen quite a few times.

She suddenly started chuckling. A mixture of laughter and disbelief rang through her body as she looked around. Then tears began streaming down her face. "Why?" she said, gulping and sniffling as she sobbed. "Why did they have to come here?"

Why did who have to come here?

He watched the woman sob her heart out in the darkness for a long few minutes. Then she picked up the dagger and continued digging. But it didn\'t take long for her to stop again. "You asked me about who I was." She turned to face him. "Do you really want to know?"

"Is it related to what\'s happening?"

She nodded.

"Is knowing going to help me?"

She paused at that. "At the very least… you\'ll know just how bad the situation really is."

The darkness around them suddenly felt stifling, and Freddy felt a chill move down his spine. He took a breath to calm himself. "Tell me. I want to know."

"I…" she started, swallowing heavily. "I grew up in a cult."

His eyebrows jumped. That was… not exactly what he was expecting to hear. It suddenly clicked. "They\'re the ones behind this attack."

She reluctantly nodded. "Yes. I recognize that barrier."

He felt a bit of anger bubble in the back of his mind. "Did you know that they would do this?"

She stared at the ground for a few seconds. "No," she said. "If I had known they would come here, I… I…"

A few long moments of silence passed. Then he sighed and walked over, kneeling beside her as he took out his own hunting knife and started digging.

"What are you doing?" she asked him.

"What does it look like?" he asked. "I\'m digging a hole to bury myself."

She stared at him, her mouth quivering slightly. "Do you—"

"Do I what!?" he spat angrily. "Do I trust you? No, I don\'t fucking trust you!" He angrily threw the dagger into the ground, where it bounced off and skittered across the dry soil. "Give me one goddamn reason to believe you aren\'t a part of whatever is happening."

"I don\'t want to be," she said, her expression hard to see in the dark. "I would rather be anywhere else right now, Liam." A shiver crawled into her voice. "I would rather be dead."

He froze at those words, and he felt his anger deflate slightly. He was scared. He was so damn scared.

But… so was she.

He could tell better than anyone just how dense the terror in those words was.

As he looked upon her, the weight of how foreign she was was like a wet blanket pressing against his back. This was a stranger. Someone he truly knew nothing about.

Why would he hear her out? Why would he give her a chance? He\'d done it once already, which might have very well been the exact reason he was in this situation to begin with.

Maybe if I had killed her back then… he thought, remembering the moment after she dragged him out of the ravine. Just adding a Flowing Strike to his punch would have been enough.

Darkness descended on him, and he found himself biting the inside of his cheek.

"If you don\'t want to hear me out," Sophia said, "I understand." She picked up her dagger again and continued digging.

The sound of her blade scraping the ground in the darkness was like a fork scratching a plate in his ears. "Are you trying to spite me?"

"I\'m not doing anything," she said, whimpering. "You won\'t believe anything I say. And if I\'m being honest, I don\'t want to end up being one of your \'mistakes.\'"

Those words were like a stab to his stomach. He gritted his jaw so hard that he heard a tooth crack, sending a wild pang of pain down his jaw. His fingers twitched as he felt the urge to pull his hand back and swing at her. He felt the urge to get violent. "Go on then," he said, burying his fingers into the earth instead. "I\'m listening."

She stopped digging. For a long minute, the two of them did nothing but stay as they were, both simmering. But the darkness of the false night swallowed it all up. The danger encroaching upon them took precedence.

"I have lived as a pawn for my whole life," she said. "I don\'t even know who my parents are."

"Me neither; you aren\'t special."

She shot him a stern glare he could feel even through the darkness.

"What?" he spat. "I never said I\'d keep quiet."

She met his gaze for a long moment, then shook her head and continued. "Remember when I said I\'ve been training in martial arts for fifteen years?" she asked. "That was a lie. But you probably wouldn\'t have believed me if I told you I started thirty years ago."

"Thirty years ago, wow," he commented snarkily. "Must have been one hell of a rich kid."

"There is no wealth in the cult," she said.

"Ah, so everyone is equal then? What, you grew up in a communist utopia?"

"Not at all," she said, a hint of trepidation and anger playing in her voice. "But at the very least, everyone has the same starting point."

He wanted to make another snide comment, but he could tell that if he opened his mouth again, she probably wouldn\'t continue her explanation. Snorting, he looked away.

After a few tense moments of silence, she continued, "My life started as that of a child soldier. The cult simply referred to us as \'Children,\' even though some of us were in our forties. They trained us to the bone from the moment we could walk, and once a Child became skilled enough, they were sent to fight monsters. None of us were archhumans. All we had was a single weapon of choice. The monsters were on the weaker side, but that didn\'t make the occasional deviant any less lethal.

"Only once a year would the strongest member of the Children be allowed to accept a prime and ascend into an archhuman, and then they would be allowed to join the cult as an elite member. Anyone who failed to make it by forty years of age became a Servant. If anyone manifested a prime or acquired one by killing a deviant, they weren\'t allowed to take it and had to surrender it to the cult.

"I manifested a prime vestige four times during my life as a Child, and I got one from killing a deviant fifteen times. And every single time, I had to give it away."

Freddy simply stared at her. For a long moment, he wanted to call bullshit. It sounded too sappy, too tragic. It was just too much. Yet, as he stared into her eyes, he spotted zero hesitation. And he saw a hint. A small hole deep inside her soul, the same he saw whenever he looked in the mirror—a wound that would never fully heal.

Unable to bring himself to acknowledge it, he looked away.

She smirked, grim amusement at his reaction dancing through her eyes. "If you want me to be entirely honest, I threw you off that cliff because you pissed me off," she confessed. "You patronized me and acted like I was nothing but a naive kid. Meanwhile, you were acting like a total coward, and honestly, I was beyond shocked at your lack of skill."

He snorted. "Ah, I see, so it isn\'t your fault for trying to kill me; it\'s mine for being so weak?"

"I know you can\'t see things through my eyes, but I still lived a life very different from yours. I\'m not used to dealing with people outside the cult," she said, sighing. "You seemed so much more powerful than me that I thought you would be completely invincible against those dumb beasts. All I wanted to do was prove that I didn\'t need to be babysat."

"There are other ways to prove that," he said. "Like by not being an idiot."

She groaned.

"Okay, sure," he said. "We\'re putting that aside." He turned to face her properly, his eyes squinting. "So let\'s talk about something else; you say that you grew up in a cult as a child slave forced to fight from birth, but I\'m not sure I buy that. From what I\'ve seen of you, you give off the impression of someone with a pretty spoiled upbringing."

She snorted at that. "What, you think we were kept in cages in a dungeon?" she asked mockingly. "For the record, I only learned that I had been living in a cult after I escaped. From what I can tell, we lived pretty ordinary lives there. We only spent around two to three hours a day fighting in the passage, then maybe another two to three training. I\'m not sure you understand what kind of place I grew up in. It\'s an entire community the size of a large town."

He snorted at that. "Seems pretty cozy for a cult of terrorists."

"Because it is," she admitted. "I didn\'t hate living there. We were given a purpose and every comfort we could imagine. It wasn\'t like the leader had any use in forcing us to live in misery. That would have defeated their entire message."

"That being?"

"That the outside world is full of degenerates, and those who rise to the top are nothing but greedy, selfish tyrants who use their power for their personal benefit while trampling over those below them as they please."

The whiplash of hearing those words coming out of her mouth physically knocked him back. "And how does terrorism fit into that!?"

She snorted. "That\'s a very good question. One I wish more of my friends had asked themselves." She continued her story. "Although what we were allowed to view was heavily regulated, there was a movie theater we could go to. There were also cafes, restaurants, boutiques… and there was even a club. The entire cult thrived on being a community."

"I\'m assuming you left because of the, uh… the terrorism?"

"No, actually. I left because of the price we had to pay for that life. I never got over the deaths of my childhood friends. We were told to believe we were living with a purpose, but I never saw the point in all the bloodshed," she said. "They claimed that those who died for the cult\'s prosperity were reborn as guardian spirits looking over us." She snorted. "I never believed that for a second. So I ran away."

"How?"

"Jumped a barbed fence," she answered. "The guards attacked me, but I was slightly faster and just a bit more suicidal than they expected. The fence cut me up, three stone bullets hit my back, and a shard of blood nearly cut into my spine. Frankly, I barely remember how I made it out of the forest, but by the time I reached civilization, I was nearly dead already. A police patrol spotted me and brought me over to a hospital. When they realized that I had no real identity and no way to pay them, the clinic only did the bare minimum to stop me from dying and sent me to be interrogated.

"I told them everything, and after around two days, I was released with a new identity. But my injuries weren\'t healing," she said, clutching her stomach. "I still vividly remember the night I spent in the rain, hiding under a bridge, my back so inflamed I could barely think straight. Back home, as long as we survived, we were given free treatment. Finding myself without that luxury, I just wanted to go back.

"Then I saw a flash of purple light envelop me as a small ball dropped on my lap. I had seen that happen a few times already, and without hesitation, I accepted the prime into my body before I even knew what it did.

"The natural-quality healing of ascending to a single star saved my life, but my back wasn\'t healed enough to stabilize. Then I saw it. My eyes had changed from my ascension, going from a dull brown to a vivid purple, and it wasn\'t just a cosmetic change. I could see life force. I could smell it. Taste it. And I instinctively knew that I could tear it out of the bodies of living things. I killed a stray cat and used its spark to heal myself. That was also when I learned that there were consequences to doing so.

"I realized I needed a spark with stronger vitality to fix my mistake, and I knew only one way to get my hands on one. So I hitchhiked for days and eventually made it here. Ever since, I\'ve been living inside this passage, sleeping and hunting every day in my search for a deviant with enough vitality to help me fix my wounds. And that was when I ran into you," she said, staring at him. "There you go. Happy?" she asked, trying to smirk, but it looked strained.

"Just one more thing—where did you get your Storage Ring?"

"Oh, that?" she asked, raising her hand to admire the piece of magical jewelry. "I found it on a corpse buried under a pile of rubble."

He smirked at that. "It\'s not finders keepers around here, Sophia," he teased. "You\'re supposed to report that."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Well, where did you get yours?" she asked.

"Hey, I earned mine fair and square!"

She snorted and shook her head.

Honestly, he didn\'t know what to say.

At some point, he had started actually listening to her explanation, and… What reason would she have to spout such convoluted lies?

In many ways, she had gone through something surprisingly similar to what he had. He couldn\'t bring himself to cast any more doubt on her story, even if his pride made it impossible to admit it.

The moments of silence stretched on.

She waited anxiously, rubbing her shoulder as she looked away, looking so frail and vulnerable in the darkness. He could see her regret like a sticky ooze slathered over her skin. What could she be feeling at that moment? Waiting beside him, hiding from her brethren she had so selfishly betrayed?

At that moment, he felt burdened by her conflict. Would she go back to them if she encountered them? He remembered what she said about the cult\'s message. Even if it didn\'t justify their actions, that message couldn\'t possibly be more correct.

If anything…

He wanted to be an exception to that rule.

"My real name is Freddy," he said suddenly, surprising himself. His throat tightened.

Sophia looked at him in surprise.

A voice in the back of his mind screamed at him to keep his mouth shut, but he couldn\'t resist the compulsion to speak.

Then, starting from his childhood, he told her his story. Granted, he kept many details private. He didn\'t share his real surname, he didn\'t share where he had lived, he didn\'t specify Madame\'s identity or why she took him under her wing, he didn\'t tell her about Bloodshed, he didn\'t tell why the Kraven Clan had been after him, and he said nothing about the fight between him and the patriarch. But he shared everything else.

By the end, he felt… good—a lot better than he had for a while—as if a massive boulder had rolled off his back. He didn\'t trust her enough to say everything—hell, he didn\'t trust her enough to say as much as he had—but he had told her anyway. He had shared his tale with another person.

And he felt… warmer. Just a bit less alone in this cold, uncaring world. As he stared into her eyes, seeing that same hole again, the same pain that resonated with his own, he felt the shell of distrust crack ever so slightly.

Was she keeping some details of her tale hidden, just as he was? Maybe. But he knew. At least in broad strokes, her story was genuine. Because within her eyes, he could see not sympathy—but empathy. She understood.

"Wow," she said. "When did this turn into a tragic backstory dick-measuring championship?"

He laughed at that. "I don\'t know… but I think I win."

She chuckled at that, shaking her head. "Nah. Mine\'s sadder."

"Nuh-uh," he responded childishly.

He rubbed the back of his neck as he looked away. "Sorry," he said, feeling his pride tearing apart in the wake of that word coming out of his mouth. So he backtracked a little bit. "I still think you\'re a fucking dumbass, and I\'ll never forget the fact that you nearly killed me, but—"

She aggressively rolled her eyes and laughed. "You\'ll never let go of that, will you?"

He chuckled. "Save my life once or twice, and I\'ll think about it." He smiled broadly at her.

She shook her head and breathed out, relaxing slightly.

"Anyway." He clapped. "What do you want to do now?"

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean is—are we sticking to this zombie cosplay plan, or…?"

She looked at the ground. "I don\'t know…" she said, sighing deeply. "To be honest, the odds of it working are… not as high as I\'d like. We\'ll have to get pretty damn lucky."

"Are our chances better if we confront them?"

"Hell no," she said, shaking her head and staring at him seriously. "Don\'t take this the wrong way, but you\'re not qualified to face these people."

"Are you saying that because you really think we can\'t do it or because you are afraid to face them?" he asked. "And I don\'t mean afraid to fight them, but—"

"I get it," Sophia said, hesitating. "And I don\'t know." Her shoulders slumped a bit.

"Would you go back to them if you could?" he asked without even a hint of judgment in his voice. "Honestly… I kind of agree with their message. Maybe if we beg on our knees, they\'d take us in?" he suggested with a sly grin, but—

"No," she said. "They aren\'t big on forgiveness and second chances. They wouldn\'t be doing this if that were the case."

"Yeah. I guess that tracks." He paused momentarily, then his eyes slid down to the ground. "What if I were to tell you that I might have a way to fight them anyway?" he suggested cautiously.

She glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. "I don\'t know what you\'re aiming at, but it will have to be something huge." She shifted a bit as if recollecting a painful memory. "They don\'t hesitate to utilize illegal talents, and they have no qualms about using them in fucked-up ways. What do you have?"

He couldn\'t stop a small smile from appearing on his face.

It was time to introduce her to his favorite little skeleton.