Chapter Twenty Three

  The forest fell ominously silent as Derrick stared down at Miranda. She tried to meet his gaze—hard, accusing, and colder than the ice her hand was trapped in—but after a few seconds she had to bow her head so he wouldn’t see the look of shame on her face.

  “Derrick, I…” she tentatively began.

  The sound of stretching rubber reached her ears, and she looked up in alarm to see the Mandrake aiming his slingshot at her.

  “Derrick!” she said again, eyes widening as he drew the band back. She instinctively tried to dodge, but her arm was still encased in Isaac’s ice, and Eagle Feather was somewhere at the bottom of the creek.

  He released the band with a sharp thwap, and a panicked gasp hissed between Miranda’s teeth as the metal ball it had held flew past her face in a blur.

  There was a crack, and the pillar of ice holding her in place shattered.

  With her heart pounding in her throat, it took a couple seconds for Miranda to realize her frontal lobe hadn’t been replaced with an iron slug. Her hand felt the way it always had when she’d spent the day playing gloveless in the snow with Jeremy, and she winced as she forced her frigid fingers to clench and unclench.

  As she did that, she furtively glanced at Derrick again. He hadn’t moved or spoken, but his rigid posture told her that he hadn't relaxed yet. That meant neither could she. She didn't think Derrick was going to try to hurt her, but she had been wrong about so many other things today…

  She quickly dropped to her knees to fish Midnight Frost out of the creek—and by the time she stood back up, Derrick was gone.

  “Derrick?” she asked, looking around. She spotted him a few yards away, walking stiffly into the woods. “Derrick, wait!”

  “This changes nothing,” he said, his voice carefully measured so as to not reveal any emotion. That by itself told Miranda everything she needed to know.

  “I just saved your life!” she protested. “Doesn’t that earn me at least a little forgiveness?”

  “And I saved yours, so we’re even.”

  Anger flashed through Miranda’s veins, and before she could stop herself, she raised one hoof and stomped it down in the creek like a child throwing a tantrum. Her face burned with embarrassment, but she forced it to the back of her mind. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—make this about herself. Not when everything that had happened was her fault.

  She needed to make things right. No matter what else happened, she had to fix this.

  “At least tell me that Aaron’s alive!” she yelled.

  Only half visible in the darkness, Derrick finally paused.

  “I know you hate me,” Miranda pressed him, wilting with shame. “And I don’t blame you. But Aaron is…was my friend. Can’t you at least tell me if he’s okay?”

  Derrick didn’t answer. The night made it difficult to differentiate him from the rest of the forest, and for a moment, Miranda began to wonder if he had already left, and if she was begging for information from a common tree like a madwoman.

  “Hate you?” Derrick finally asked, his voice heavy with exhaustion. “That’s the problem, Miranda. I don’t hate you. I wish I could. Things would be so much easier if I could just put a shuriken in your skull and feel nothing but satisfaction for it. But that’s not how people work.”

  “I’m…” Miranda began, only to swallow her words and look guiltily away.

  Had she really been about to say I’m sorry? What did it matter if she was sorry? Being sorry wouldn’t bring Elise back, or keep Aaron alive—assuming he even was still alive. But until she knew that her friends were safe and sound back in their own territory, sorry was all she had.

  “I’m sorry, Derrick! For everything! But if you only ever believe one thing I say to you from now on, believe that I love you and Aaron like brothers—”

  “But not as much as you love Jeremy, right?”

  Miranda blinked, taken aback by the pure, unbridled venom in his voice. She had never expected him to like Jeremy. Under the circumstances, that would have been like expecting him to adopt the dog who had just mauled his wife and children.

  But what she'd just heard wasn’t dislike—it was outright hatred. In nearly a decade of adventuring together, she couldn’t think of a single other time when he'd spoken like that, especially not about a human being.

  To her relief, it seemed to surprise Derrick just as much as it had her, and he looked away with shame reflecting in his eyes. Whatever he might feel for Jeremy, at least he wasn’t so far gone that it had completely overridden who he really was.

  Still, the fact that it was inside him at all…

  “I hit Miles with a Knockback Round,” Derrick finally answered. “It threw him far enough away to get us clear of his nullification field. I only had one Orb of Retreat left, and I used it on Aaron.”

  Miranda let out a sigh of relief.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “As for whether or not he’s still alive,” he said, turning to look at her again. The anger was back, so hot that it almost made his eyes glow. “I wouldn’t really know, seeing as how I’ve been petrified for—”

  “It’s been less than a day!” Miranda exclaimed. She took a step forward, her heart leaping with excitement. “He can’t have gotten far! We can—”

  “You still don’t get it!”

  Miranda’s mouth snapped shut, and Derrick gave her a long, hard look before closing his eyes and shaking his head.

  “I gave you a choice back in the dungeon: him or us. I told you that if you chose him, whatever you did after that, you would be doing it alone. And I meant that.”

  “Derrick…”

  “Everything that happened today happened because of you!” He pointed an accusing finger at her. “I can’t forgive that, Miranda. Not now. Not ever.”

  Miranda clenched her fists. “I understand that! I can’t change what happened, but we still have a chance to make it out of this alive! There’s going to be danger no matter what we do, but you’ll be in more danger if the three of us don’t work together. Do you really think that’s the better option just because it keeps you away from me?”

  She forced herself to meet Derrick’s gaze. It made her innards writhe as if Visantii’s entire brood were crawling around inside her, but she didn’t let herself look away.

  The seconds passed slowly. Miranda had never wanted to cast Eclipse Walk more than she did right then. Anything to stop those eyes from drilling through all the walls she had painstakingly erected around her heart, exposing the miserable little girl she so desperately wanted to pretend she wasn’t.

  “Don’t you have your own responsibilities to take care of now?” Derrick asked at last.

  Miranda stiffened. Jeremy. She had just been thinking about him, and yet somehow she had managed to forget him at the same time.

  It had been less than a day since he’d awoken in this horrible, beautiful world, and he still had so far to go before he reached anything remotely resembling safety. Was she really offering to drag him along behind her while they faced off against three of the deadliest fighters she had ever faced? One of them had come within a hairsbreadth of killing her just a few minutes ago—and she had helped take down a goddess earlier that day.

  She lowered her eyes. In front of her, Derrick sighed, as if part of him had actually hoped she would abandon Jeremy to become an NPC again.

  “We’re through, Miranda,” he said, clearly having to force his voice not to shake. “The Grave Mistakes are finished, and you’re on your own.”

  He stepped fully into the woods, vanishing completely.

  “I hope your boyfriend is worth it.”

  SIDEQUEST:

  SAVE YOUR FORMER PARTY MEMBERS FROM THE SHIELD WARDEN GUILD.

  OBJECTIVE COMPLETE:

  DEFEAT ISAAC CAIN AND RESCUE DERRICK VELSTADT.

  For a brief moment, Miranda’s body glowed with a faint green light as the System gave her her reward. With no enemies to draw the XP from, it simply spawned it inside of her. Normally, it felt no less invigorating than getting it from a slain monster.

  For the first time she could remember, though, Miranda barely noticed it.

  Directly above the sidequest, written in urgent red text and framed by exclamation points, was…

  PRIMARY QUEST:

  ESCORT JEREMY FAULKNER SAFELY TO FAEN’S HAND.

  There had to be something she could do! If she had learned one thing over the past thirteen years of adventuring, it was that there was always a way out. The System didn’t go easy on anyone, and it wouldn’t hesitate to punish you for taking on challenges that were out of your depth. But whether you were dropped into those predicaments, or if you stupidly walked into them on your own, there was always a solution.

  That didn't mean you were always capable of reaching that solution, but it was there nonetheless.

  It had to be the same here, right? There had to be some way she could save Jeremy and fix the damage she had caused to her, Aaron, and Derrick’s friendship. She just had to work her ash off until she found it.

  Right?

  She sighed. Whatever the case, she wasn’t going to solve it by standing in a creek in the middle of the night. She was more exhausted than she had been in years, both physically and emotionally. Maybe once she’d gotten…she glanced up at the moon, estimating the time until sunrise…three hours of sleep, she would be refreshed and able to look at her conundrum with new, more optimistic eyes.

  More importantly, she had someone waiting for her.

  That thought lifted her spirits just a bit, and she opened her inventory as she stepped out of the water and onto the white pebble beach. Her first order of business was to down a health potion, bringing her HP back up to maximum. She sighed in relief as he felt the magic ripple through her, washing away the cuts and bruises Isaac had given her.

  Next, she withdrew the Orb of Retreat, bathing the clearing in its soft blue-white light.

  It was the same item Isaac had used to escape just a few minutes ago. Once you broke it open, it was enchanted to teleport you back to the last place you had rested. For Aaron, that would have been the campsite they’d all spent the night at. For Miranda, it would take her back to the room in the inn she and Jeremy had rented even though she hadn’t slept a wink since she’d gotten there.

  It hadn’t worked when she, Derrick, and Aaron had tried it earlier because of Miles’ nullification field. Now that the Magebreaker was nowhere in sight, though, all she had to do was shatter it on the ground and this whole miserable misadventure would be over.

  Instead, she just stared at the glowing ball for a few seconds. Now that she’d been kicked out of Derrick and Aaron’s party, she no longer had access to their shared storage, and everything in their inventories had been split up randomly. It was only because of sheer dumb luck that she had wound up with this and not either of the others.

  If you hadn’t kept this, she thought, regret squeezing her heart like a bear trap made of solid ice, both Aaron and Derrick could have escaped.

  No, she forced herself to think. It wasn't her fault. There was literally nothing she could have done to make it go to Aaron instead of her.

  Nothing except not breaking the party up in the first place, she thought bitterly.

  She raised the orb and threw it to the ground. The glass shattered, releasing the cloud of luminescent smoke. For a few seconds, all she could see was the soft blue-white light.

  When it finally dissipated, Miranda found herself standing next to the bed she had been in just a couple hours ago. Jeremy lay there, right where she had left him, breathing deep and slow in peaceful slumber.

  Despite everything she had just been through, a comforting warmth lit up her chest when she saw him, spreading until it filled her whole body. It was like absorbing XP, except instead of driving her to push her limits and risk her life in a neverending quest to become stronger, it felt as though it were urging her to slow down and appreciate what was right in front of her.

  To appreciate who was right in front of her.

  Moving as quickly and quietly as she could, Miranda sent her dripping wet cloak into her inventory and crawled back into bed, where she lay there facing Jeremy for a minute before giving him a gentle kiss on the lips so as not to wake him up. Then she rolled over into the position she had been in earlier, with her back pressed against his chest, and snuggled in as close as she could without disturbing him.

  Jeremy didn’t wake up, but his arms unconsciously wrapped themselves around her.

  Miranda let out a soft, happy sigh, and drifted off to sleep, wondering if maybe—despite the storm of conflicting emotions raging inside her—she had made the right choice after all.