CHAPTER 39

  Leap Before You Look

  Their leader, a human mountain draped in matted pelts and old wounds, raised a hand.

  Bash wondered if this was the part where they talked, or the part where they finished what the skeletons started?

  Suddenly, the tension ripped apart, not by steel or bellow, but by a shadow zipping across the sky and a peal of giggling, high and bright. Black feathers shimmered as Lilly dove, wings slicing the smoky air. She landed with a flourish on the Beastmaster leader’s massive arm, preening. The tangle of fear in the crowd seemed to loosen at once.

  Lilly puffed herself up, eyes gleaming. “Hello, Pops! These are my new friends!” she cawed, voice ringing out over the battlefield like it belonged in a birthday party, not a graveyard.

  The leader’s entire frame sagged, years falling away from his battered face. All along the beastmaster line, weapons wavered, then slowly dipped as battle-rage shifted to battered relief.

  The system gave a chime, indicating the end of combat, and several notifications started blinking for his attention.

  Max Level. He’d finally done it. The number he'd been chasing since his first pathetic day in this nightmare.

  The stats flooded his system, and something like strength seeped back into his legs. He pushed himself to his feet, swaying. Bash looked at the field. At the bodies. At the blood still spreading across the stones. This didn't feel like a victory.

  The huddled women behind the Beastmasters, their faces streaked with soot and shock, bolted forward, falling to their knees by the wounded. Their hands flew, pressing cloth to gushing wounds and tying splints, desperate to save whoever they could.

  Nora walked straight into the chaos, blood running down her arm, but she didn’t flinch. “I’m a healer! Let me through!” Her voice was sharp, controlled, and loud enough to cut through the groans and shouting. She dropped beside a woman with a gash across her ribs, hands already glowing with soft light as she worked.

  The Beastmaster leader didn’t hesitate. He gave her a single nod, then turned to Bash, eyes narrowing.

  Something raw flickered in the man’s eyes; maybe gratitude, or perhaps just the shock that any of them were still alive. “Thank you,” the man said, before turning on his heel.

  Patrick was already moving. He crossed the field in long strides, crouching beside a fallen Beastmaster whose leg bent at an angle legs shouldn’t bend. Without a word, Patrick tore a strip from his own cloak, fashioned a tourniquet, and cinched it tight. The man bit off a scream and gave thanks through gritted teeth.

  Luis had found a boy, couldn’t have been older than fifteen, sitting in the mud and staring at a body that might have been his father. Luis knelt beside him, shield discarded, one hand on the boy’s shoulder. He was speaking softly in Spanish, words Bash couldn’t understand but somehow felt anyway.

  Everyone was doing something. Everyone was helping. Bash just stood there, arms hanging at his sides, and realized he had nothing to offer.

  He triggered his skills and overlays lit up, glowing grids crawling across the dying and wounded, numbers and color codes whispering in his mind. The data was cold. Clinical. It sorted people into categories: salvageable, critical, gone.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  Bash crouched down by a man gasping, gut sliced open, metadata flickering: Survival chance less than 1%. His words came out cold and empty, less than human. “Don’t waste your time. You can’t help him.”

  The woman tending the man jerked her head up, wild-eyed and shaking. “Shut up! Don’t you dare say that!” she snapped, voice raw.

  Bash recoiled, raising both hands like she’d fired a gun. “I... I’m sorry.” He staggered away.

  Sounds amplified. The wet slap of bandages against wounds. The hitch of breath from someone trying not to scream. A child crying somewhere, high and thin and endless.

  Everything smeared together. Screams, weeping, the slap of bloodied hands on torn flesh.

  Across the field, Nora moved to another patient, then another. Her hands never stopped. Patrick had organized a group of Beastmasters into a stretcher team, carrying the wounded toward shelter. Luis was still with the boy, had gotten him standing now, was walking him away from the body with an arm around his shoulders.

  Bash watched them work. Watched them help.

  His overlays kept counting. Kept categorizing. Kept telling him exactly how many people were dying while he stood there with his fists clenched and his skills useless.

  What good is seeing the future if you can’t change it? A woman collapsed ten feet from him, the Beastmaster she’d been tending going still beneath her hands. She let out a sound that wasn’t quite a scream, wasn’t quite a sob, just raw and animal and broken. Bash watched her rock back and forth over the body.

  He tried to help. God, he tried. A Beastmaster was bleeding out from a gash on his thigh, the wound too deep for pressure alone. Bash grabbed a knife and cut away the man's trousers, channeling just a whisper of psionic energy to heat the blade for cauterization. The metal glowed cherry-red. He pressed it to the wound.

  The man's scream tore through the air as the smell of burning flesh filled Bash's nostrils. But instead of sealing, the skin bubbled and split, charring black at the edges while fresh blood welled up from beneath. Too hot. He'd made it worse. The man thrashed, and two Beastmasters shoved Bash aside, cursing as they packed the wound with cloth.

  He found another wounded fighter, a woman with a gash across her stomach, trying to hold her own intestines in place. Bash grabbed her arm, meaning to lift her, to carry her to Nora. “I've got you, just hold on.”

  She screamed the moment he moved her. Something shifted inside, something wet and wrong, and the blood that had been seeping became a flood. Her eyes went wide, then glassy, and by the time he lowered her back down, she wasn't breathing anymore.

  Bash stared at his hands, slick and red, and felt something crack inside his chest. He stumbled toward Patrick, desperate now, grasping for any task he could do that wouldn't end in more death. “Patrick. Tell me what you need.”

  Patrick didn't look up from the tourniquet he was cinching. “Stay out of the way.”

  Five simple words, not harsh, just matter of fact. Patrick probably didn't even realize he'd said them. Bash felt them land like a blade between his ribs. After everything they'd fought through together, after the victory they'd just won, after all the promises he'd made to himself and everyone else. Stay out of the way.

  He wasn't a healer. He wasn't even useful enough to carry the wounded. Bash stumbled backward. The battlefield swam around him, faces blurring into a smear of blood and grief and accusation.

  Bash’s vision tunneled, and he dropped to his knees beside a corpse frozen in surprise, blue eyes still staring at the dawn. The man looked young. Too young. With trembling hands, Bash reached out and closed the man’s eyes. “Rest easy,” he whispered, voice cracking. “You’re out of this game now.”

  He stayed where he collapsed. The sounds kept coming, more screaming, more weeping. Someone calling for water and someone else calling for their mother.

  Tears streaked down his cheeks at the devastation and his own helplessness. He clawed them away, hard enough that his skin stung. His breath came in hitches, ragged and wrong. This is my fault. The thought surfaced unbidden, ugly and true. Everywhere I go, quests trigger and death follows.

  The overlays flickered. Confirmation of death. And another. The count climbed. I can’t do this. I can’t just watch them die. There has to be something I can do!

  A memory from the cave sparked. There were backups. There was a way out. The discovery he’d made, the truth about what the Shard really was, the copies of everyone stored somewhere in the system.

  “I can save them,” he muttered. “I can save them all.” He needed to break this game. He needed to tear it down, root and branch, until he could bring them back, until nobody else had to die ever again. Not here, not anywhere.

  But he wasn’t strong enough. Not yet, not even close. He pulled open his menu, the overlay flared, system messages cascading past. He looked until he found it, an option that had previously been grayed, was now glowing.

  The one thing he’d been working towards, and planning for. Remort would give him the power he needed to save them. All of them.

  Looking over the battlefield, at the bodies and the blood and the people still dying while he knelt in the dirt doing nothing, he made up his mind. He didn’t think about what he might lose. Didn’t consider the risks or the consequences or what it actually meant. Didn’t say goodbye to Patrick or Luis or Nora. Didn’t even stand up.

  Clicking Yes, Bash turned to dust.