The world was ending, and I couldn’t care less. Now, Inu is hurt. Suddenly, it matters.

  I look at the arrow, and select it. I want to know everything about it. Energy tears out of me, my vessel emptying, yet I pull more. It hurts. My heart aches, but I need to know more.

  The whistling sound replays in my mind, time playing in reverse, and then I see it - my tether, streaking through the air, along an almost-straight, invisible path, coming into the shop through one of the shattered windows. Then it swerves. Down to where the archer is.

  Without hesitation, I break off the obsidian from my knife, cutting open my hand, then throw it with all my might. I can't risk hitting him with the handle. The cut hurts and bleeds. I’m in pain, but that’s okay.

  It wasn’t a very skilled archer. They’d been close, only moved after shooting, and hidden behind a bush. As I throw the obsidian shard, it tears through the air, then impacts. There’s a very human scream, and I arrive at the bush only a little later, seeing the bloodstains and a cowering old man.

  His fingers shake. A piece of obsidian juts out of his elbow. “Oh. Oh no, please, I-”

  My axe finds his skull. He falls over, dead.

  [You have killed a lv. 1 Human]

  There was no justification. No reasoning, no excuse. I had selected him as someone to die, and so he died. I had selected Inu as someone to care about, and so I cared.

  Simple decision making.

  With the old archer dead, I take a deep breath and stalk back towards the ranger outpost. Inu kneels on the ground, crying, gritting her teeth. “Use [Empathy]. Share some pain with me,” I tell her. She turns to me, seeing the blood covering my clothes, and grits her teeth harder.

  I don’t know if the skill works that way, but it seemed to matter more whether she believed it could be used that way, rather than if it actually could. Inu hesitates. She wants to speak, but her jaw doesn’t move, all her muscles clenched.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her, patting her head softly. “I can take it.”

  The pain is exquisite.

  It burns, searing its way through my shoulder. I almost gasp, but don’t permit myself to. I [Suppress] the pain, even as I scrape the bottom of my vessel. There’s little left to give, but that was fine. It hurts, and yet I stand.

  I breathe. Slowly, but surely, then give Inu a smile. “Better?” I ask.

  She looks at me, teary-eyed, and nods. “Better,” she says. Her eyes shake. I’m glad the corpse is in a bush so she doesn’t have to see it. She’d recognize the tragedy in it. Maybe even shed a tear for him. I don’t want her to cry more than needed.

  “Okay. We should get that arrow out.”

  “I’ll bleed out,” she says.

  I smile, just a little. “[Resist] the bleeding, then.”

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  Her eyes widen, just a bit. In truth, I was rather sure that Inu is the tougher one among us. She had always been. Faster than me, stronger than me… And I was her stability. The deep, uncaring anchor. Even as her make-up smudges from the tears, I see her turn determined.

  “Right,” she whispers. “Right.”

  The arrow has only barely pierced through her, thanks to that same skill, I imagine. So there’s plenty for me to grab at the back. It was made from wood, tough wood, too, but with so much leverage, I can snap it. “This might hurt,” I warn her, then break the wood.

  Inu gives a gasp of pain, and I’m tempted to go stomp on the old man’s head. Then, I draw more on my fading vessel stat, and suppress the pain. I put the handle of one of the daggers in Inu’s mouth. “Bite down on that. This’ll hurt worse.”

  She nods bravely. I take a deep breath. [Empathy] still links us together, so it might hurt me just as bad as her. Well, I’ve always had a good pain tolerance. Time to put it to the test.

  I shove the arrow all the way through her shoulder, pulling it out in one fell swoop.

  It’s liquid fire, pouring into my veins. My shoulder screams in agony, and Inu roars into the leather-wrapped wood. The world goes blurry for a bit, spinning, as my body reels to catch up. I knock into and then lean on a counter, but remain standing, barely. Inu sinks forward, her head touching down on the wooden floor. The glass shards don’t even mar her skin.

  A long few moments pass, as the pain slowly fades. She resists it, as I told her. The hole is smaller than the arrow was, but still passes all the way through her. Another few moments pass by. Inu spits out the dagger, then screams in pain. “Fuuuuck!!!”

  I nod. “Sounds about right,” I say, same monotone as always, though a little strained, then hand her a bottle of water. She rips it open and downs it in one, like an animal. I brush white strands of hair out of my face as I watch her drink.

  At the end, she throws the bottle aside, discarding it haphazardly. “What happened to not littering?” I ask her.

  A low, rumbling laugh tears itself from her sore throat. “I find myself a lot more apathetic at my responsibility towards the world all of a sudden,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Same. You okay?”

  She pushes herself off the floor with her good arm, shakily standing. “I’ll survive. So long as [Resistance] works on infections.”

  “I’m sure it does.” Feeding her confidence likely makes it true, so that’s what I do. “Especially if you level up heart.”

  “Right,” she says after a pause. “Right. Because that’s a thing now.”

  I nod, then grab both of us a backpack each, replacing the one I brought from home, stuffing them with water, beef jerky, cereal bars, dried berries, and all the other food items around the shop, as well as the stuff I brought, like my headphones. The backpacks are big, meant for hiking, and can fit an awful lot. I also put multiple maps in each one. Knowing where to find a river could be life or death.

  Inu watches me throughout it all, leaning against a counter. The link of [Empathy] is still active. I feel her borrowing some of my calm, and I share it easily, having plenty to spare. In return, she gives me some of her pain, which I handle without complaint.

  Eventually, we’re ready to head off. Her wound has scabbed over already, dried blood sticking to her cardigan. It’s late spring, and not too cold, but she still looks at the stain mournfully. “I loved that cardigan,” she says.

  I smile. “Yeah. I liked my hoodie, too.” It was long and black, the kind that went down to my mid thighs.

  “Rectangle,” Inu teases.

  My smile brightens. “Wonderful, right?”

  She shakes her head. “You’re impossible.”

  “And you sound ready to walk,” I say, holding out the backpack to her. She reaches out, then flinches back, having stretched her hurt arm. Instead, she slings it around her left, and I help her get the strap around her other shoulder.

  It’s finicky, and takes some time, but we get it done in the end. Then, we head off. “Your home, right?” I ask. We could go to my flat, but… no. I have everything I need with me.

  Inu nods slowly. “Yeah,” she says. “My parents…”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know. Your family. Then Thatch, Opal, Sylves.”

  She nods again. “Okay. I’m fine with that.”