The cool thing about prison was dinner. The shitty thing about prison was...well, prison.

  I didn't think I'd be reconsidering my life in chains in a medieval stockade, but here we were. Was it life? I was already dead--I'd been dead for a long time, actually. A really, really long time.

  I ate my grey-brown gruel with questionably chewy lumps. It was somehow revolting and delicious--not having eaten in days would do that to a person. I pondered as I slurped. I had a lot of shit to consider, and a lot of competing thoughts. I leaned back against the cold, damp stone walls--this was literally, like, out of a fairytale. Unapologetically generic. If the System--which was...what, exactly? An AI itself? If the System was making this, you'd think it'd be a bit more creative.

  I licked my wooden bowl. The food helped a lot, even if my stomach cramped initially at the intrusion. The cell I was in was a little longer than the bed of straw on the floor, but not by much. A thick chain had been attached to my wrist, and there was the distinct, musty scent of mold.

  First things first, I'd probably handled this whole incident really poorly.

  Second things second, I didn't exactly regret it. That bitch had killed a man for the fuck of it--a real person, even if they were called “Non Playable Souls” like they weren't or hadn't once been human. My only regret was that my plan of attack was shit, and I'd have died uselessly. I should've challenged her to a duel or some shit later, when my shovel worked and I had more of a plan on how to take on a woman who could squish me with a sneeze.

  The anger was a hot coal in my gut. Unpleasant, but easy to stoke. I gritted my teeth, glaring into the bowl. C'mon, Teddy. It was funny, all that babbling to White-hair about being polite, and I'd dropped it the moment that giant Knight had killed someone.

  I didn't know how I felt about that, really, but for the moment, there were bigger fish to fry. I let out a low breath, deliberately fluttering my lips in an attempt to calm down.

  Pretty sure the fact I didn’t really regret my dumbass decision-making would cause White-hair to break out in hives. Or get that weird look on his face again. His pupils had been narrowing into that almost-slit back on the road before I'd talked to him. It'd been slow--slow enough that, if you weren't aware that was something Cato's eyes could do, you'd not notice it.

  It was only now, as I thought about that expression of his, and the other times I'd seen that exact same look, that I could finally put a word to it: hungry.

  What the fuck was an AI hungry for? Murder?

  It was a flippant thought, but I worried it wasn't an incorrect one. My brow furrowed. After all, I was called a Limiter. The first question was what I was limiting. Cato had described it--though he'd been lying at the time--as a curbing of the AI's excesses. What excess? Cato seemed entirely reserved. He had an air so dignified that it was like his nose was permanently taking up residence in the moon's grundle. He hated that I swore, he dressed in fine clothes, and he seemed to hate being touched--and anything to do with interacting with a human being.

  He didn't have excesses...if I wasn't counting the way he'd cracked that man's ribs open. That had been nothing but excess. If Cato was just gonna kill the guy, he could've probably just snapped the asshole's neck. Or maybe shoved one of those glitchy tentacles of his right through the dude's skull. Instead, he'd pried open his fucking rib cage, yanked out his heart, and split the heart in half. Entirely unnecessary.

  Curb the AI's excesses. Yeah. It probably was murder. Christ on a Christmas cracker.

  Didn't know how I was supposed to do that, so, for the moment, a pin in that little concern. Cato hadn't tried to kill anyone until he'd literally been shot in the heart twice, so maybe it wouldn't be a problem? Speaking of which, didn’t know how he'd just shrugged off death like that. A class skill, maybe? He'd called it a “fail-safe,” but I wasn’t sure how it worked, and if it could work again.

  As I carefully continued to lick the bowl, something pinged in my head. Cato not eating. Him saying he didn't need or consume energy in a way I would “understand.” The way he'd held that wriggling light in his hand after killing that man, cracking it until he could inhale its smoke. The look I'd described as “hungry.”

  That. Was not a fun little equation.

  Okay, had to make that a bigger pin. Was murder a problem because Cato ate people somehow? If that was the case, could I feed him literally anything else?

  Well, this all went in the “solve later” pile.

  Big third item--my family. They were out there. They had to be. Shit, I was here and I'd died...well. Hmm. Had I died before the Lightswallowing? I needed to ask Cato. Maybe I'd died a little before. I'd definitely died to fire. I was pretty confident about that.

  How did I find them? I didn't have a name. Or a face. Well, I mean, I had Smith, but that was only one of the most common English surnames to ever exist. It might’ve been the most common, actually.

  My dad, my grandma, my sister, my brother, and my youngest sister. Could you get older in the Raid? Could you die of old age? Cato had said that people went ahead and made new people, but, like...was that only the people who were adults when the Lightswallowing had happened?

  The System would know. But that was apparently what had killed my family in the first place, destroyed all that I knew. I was here because of it. Furthermore, it was actively working against me, for whatever reason, with the Quest Failures and the shit where it was telling me to go burn to death. And the fire skills for my Paladin class.

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  How did I make it tell me where my family was, and how did I kill it?

  Big questions. I'd solve them. I felt that determination settle in me, the same sort of resolve that had allowed me to raise my siblings, work a full-time job, and go to school, when life had gotten tough. It made me lift my chin. My shoulders squared, as if I was telling the world to piss off with its assumption that I was an idiot, that I was going to fail, that I couldn't handle it.

  The first death is doubt.

  My HUD materialized as I thought the words, and the FIRST CONVICTION in the top left corner pulsed at me. I grinned. I lay back in the straw, staring at the ceiling. My chain jingled with the movement.

  Wait. I was behind bars already, in this little narrow hallway, which was nothing but empty cells--kind of weird, for a city.

  But why chain me to the wall?

  Also, why hadn't I seen White-hair yet? I might've tossed myself at that woman, but he'd said it himself--I hadn't started squat.

  I chewed my lip and grimaced. I pulled up my HUD again. I had a new quest, or rather, a Questline granted. THE ABSOLUTION OF SIN. Yeah, that didn't sound ominous at all. Like all previous quests, it was remarkably sparse on the details. Actually, it was worse than the previous quests. At least I'd been told what to do explicitly, even if I hadn't gotten any direction other than three or four words. Go to an inn, talk to an innkeeper, spare the asshole trying to kill me...the absolution of sin, huh?

  What sin, exactly, was I helping the forgiveness of?

  Something in this city was supposed to help with the Inevitable debuff, though Cato had never told me how or why. The amount of information I needed to know sometimes felt overwhelming. I wondered if it was related to this questline, since it had popped up the moment I'd been taken through the city's gates.

  I clicked on the scroll. My stats page popped up, as well as the bar of ten skills.

  A new skill had shown up, the icon showing a wall of flame.

  I hovered over it.

  FIREWALL - Range dependent on CONVICTION. Length of wall dependent on CONVICTION. 1 Day recast time. Origin point, hand or Blessed Weapon. Lay down a wall of fire that absorbs 200 points of damage from all types across the whole wall. This wall is not passable. Points put into this skill will level damage absorbed and reduce skill recharge.

  Wait, I could put points into skills? I clicked the skill, and sure enough, the points of damage absorbed went up by fifty, and the recast time dropped to 23 Hours and 30 minutes.

  What if I just...dumped all my points into that?

  Should I put them anywhere else? I eyed my healing power and resistances. Experimentally, I clicked on my health. It went up by 2 points. Right, so, thirty health seemed reasonable. I clicked my health four more times, and was rewarded with 30/30 HP. Nifty. That left me four more points to spend.

  Y'know what? Fuck it.

  I dumped all of them into FIREWALL.

  It now read that FIREWALL stopped 450 points, and the recast time was 21.5 hours.

  Considering my health was a riveting 30, 450 points of damaged seemed pretty fuckin' good.

  Insane, actually. Wait. Was that a shield? Was I a Shield Healer?

  Before I could sort that out, the top of my stat page changed. The text rippled before settling. PALADIN - SPIRIT [LAST CHANCE] MELEE HEALER.

  Uh, Last Chance? What the fuck did that mean? I prodded it. Nothing came up. I squinted at my skills. None of them had changed, really? I had the one damage skill that did weird stuff, the healing based on CONVICTION, and the new big wall of fire shield skill. None of them seemed real “Last Chance”-y.

  Even as I had the thought, a little extra tag popped up beneath my new FIREWALL spell. This has the Last Chance requirement.

  "Cool," I said aloud, even if there was no one else to hear me. They were keeping the Slayer lady somewhere else, for the moment. "But, uh, is anyone gonna tell me what this means?" I mean, Last Chance probably had something to do with me only being able to cast it if shit was getting bad. What exactly “shit getting bad” entailed, I didn't know.

  Before I could mull over this new development any further, I heard the sound of heavy wooden doors creaking from down the hallway. I couldn't see them, but the thumps of footsteps worked their way towards me, getting louder by the second.

  I clasped my hands across my stomach and squinted into the torch-lit dark. A fresh torch rounded the corner. It was the Magistrate. He looked grim.

  "Theodora Smith," he said. There was something solemn in his voice that made me snap up.

  "Yessir," I said. "That's me. What's the verdict? White-hair come by to pick me up?"

  "He did, though he did not stay long enough to come talk to you, I am afraid. Would you like to send him a message?" the Magistrate asked. He was a nice dude. I liked him. Had that vibe of “grim but fair” that I'd always admired in the people who had that sort of air.

  "Maybe in a bit." I crossed my legs, criss-cross applesauce style, the chain groaning and clinking all the while. "Any chance I can get another bowl of gruel?"

  "We have lentils, if you would prefer, with some bread and gristle," the Magistrate said. "If you would like anything in particular, I can send for it. Some cacao, perhaps?"

  Uh. I really didn't like the sound of that. I mean, food sounded great. Him getting me anything I wanted, though, set a little alarm to ringing. Hadn't White-hair said their cocoa was only brought out on religious occasions? Me wanting a sip didn't seem like a religious occasion.

  "So, you seem like a nice guy, Magistrate, but not that nice. What's up? Can I not leave for a month, or something?" I asked.

  He grimaced. "The verdict, Paladin, though it brings me no joy to grant it, is simple enough. Tomorrow, when the dawn first touches you on the block, you will be executed."