Springer didn’t have much. His building was spacious but mostly empty. Some old scavenged pieces of furniture which he pulled clothes and drawing materials out of. He seemed to agonize mostly over which books from his somewhat meager collection he was going to bring along.

  They were pretty rudimentary scientific stuff, the kind of things made for little kids to get them ‘into’ science. Stuff like, 1000 fun facts about the earth! Or What’s the scientific method? Easy little things that made up the basis of his early learning. Still, it was genuinely all he had, the only way to further his understanding and education given where he grew up.

  And hell, he may have been basing it off of a kids guide, but the journals and journals filled with different experiments was pretty impressive. He had figured quite a lot out on his own that I wouldn’t have at all if I had grown up the way he had. The life cycle of frogs, butterflies. How plants grew. It was hard, based on how separated he was from the group of people, if he had been told these things then confirmed it all with research, or genuinely just got curious and went and studied, but this was a lot of information. We might’ve been taking a much more important part of this community than was communicated. Or at least, someone who would’ve been very essential once the old figures, those who grew up before the separation from most civilization, passed on.

  One things was for sure though, he was going to flip the fuck out when he finally got connected to the internet.

  Once he finally picked his essential belongings, with my encouragement that there was much more to see in the inland cities, we started making our rounds to meet with the people he needed to talk to.

  There weren’t too many, I got the sense that he generally wasn’t the most social kind of guy, and one who didn’t have too many relationships. He was more than happy to allow people to spread the information to each other than he was looking to see each and every individual person in the little civilization, though he no doubt knew each of them. We went with the story that he just wanted to go inland, maybe find his parents. It lessened the glares I was going to be getting, and the attempts to rescue or kill him, so I appreciated it.

  We visited an old woman with a heavily wrinkled face and smile lines who cupped his cheek and kissed him on his forehead, telling him to be proud of himself. She had been inside the ruins of a public library, shelves and shelves of torn and broken books no doubt agonizingly picked up and sorted properly after the place had been first knocked over.

  Our next stop was at a sort of orphanage, an old school taken over by a similarly old woman, much younger one alongside her. There didn’t seem to be enough material or the ability to get another traditional looking habit for the younger one, so she wore a somewhat makeshift version, sewn together from skirts and hoodie materials. It looked pretty comfortable if not very visually appealing. They both wished him well, with the nun telling him to track down his parents and give them “a taste of whats to come when they burn.” A little intense.

  During which, the younger nun came up to speak to me, bowing her head slightly. “Um, sir, is it alright for Springger to go with you? You inland folk don’t much like us do you?”

  “The aggression is pretty one way. I mean, we aren't going to roll out carpets and throw flowers over him when he comes, but it's more that no one will care. The city is big, and people in it don’t care about you unless you give them reason to.”

  “That…sounds awful.”

  “There’s a lot of people. You can’t care about all of them. The worst thing he’ll get is some weird looks if he’s acting weird by our standards, but I’ll be with him most of the way.”

  “Ah, thank you sir. Springer is a bit strange but he’s a good guy. I hope he’ll come back someday.”

  I don’t respond, looking up at the man as he says his goodbyes and returns to me, rubbing a little bit of mist out of his eyes. “Alright, ready to go.” He said a brief goodbye to the young nun as well, the two of us walking out.

  “Not interested in saying goodbye to the preacher?”

  “Father O’Conner and I have a uh, sorted past. I…had some sinful desires when I was younger, and he saw fit to ensure I didn’t keep them. Suppose he was in the right for it but, I…don’t feel too comfortable around him.”

  I nodded, brushing past the curiosity about what sinful desires someone like him specifically had. “Alright, let's wait for Eleanor to find us, and we’ll head out.”

  It didn’t take her too long, finding us back at Springer's home. She placed a hand on both of our shoulders, and in an instant, the town was far in the distance.

  It only took the one jump for her to be a little woozy though, so I took her arm over my shoulder and we decided the walk for the rest of the day. It had already gotten pretty late into the afternoon, the sun starting to set over the horizon.

  For some context as to why Eleanor and I were treated as rather high ranking members of the military, and classified as A rank Plumes despite neither of us holding that rank, the time it took for us to do our rank evaluation, receive orders, execute the butterflies, and start heading back, was only one day.

  It would’ve taken a non-teleporting team at least a week, even if they had some kind of automobile. With how rural and disconnected the specific area was, the roads had mostly become overgrown and mostly un-usable, save for the large ones that were kept clear as a matter of security.

  The two of us were quite literally the best methods of quickly ending a problem that our government had. Granted, we were slowed way down thanks to Springers addition, the man extra strain on Eleanor.

  I in theory could reverse my own time until I was back in the city, since it hadn’t been too long, but I was skeptical about leaving Springer alone with Eleanor. It was probably Paranoia, and it wasn’t like I didn’t trust Eleanor. In a fair situation she would slit his throat before he could blink, but I didn’t know if I could trust it to be a fair situation.

  We set up camp in an abandoned and looted gas station along an overgrown weed covered road. It wasn’t comfortable and smelled either like expired chemicals or mint depending on where you were, but it was shelter.

  We all said our goodnights, and went to sleep.

  That’s what Springer thought anyways, as he slowly and somewhat uncomfortably found rest in the foreign place. But there was no way in hell I was actually going to sleep with him right next to us.

  I think it may have taken him a few hours to actually fall asleep, and late into the night I got up off of the ground, wanting to pace around more than I wanted to lie down with my eyes open.

  It was hard for me to remember once again that less than 24 hours ago, the world had ended.

  I sat up on an old cash register desk, the register itself long broken apart for electronic parts by some unknown looter who had been the first to get to this place when it was abandoned.

  Looking down at both of my sleeping companions, I ran a hand through my hair. The end of the world.

  All the major civilizations fell one by one. The little ones like the place I had just been were wiped out in their entirety by monsters, nothing strange about that. But what had happened next had occurred with intelligence, with plans. I had been moving from task to task, but given this long to finally think, I had some time to get a gameplan going. My counter strategy.

  There were a few key events which led to the end. The first was the death of Adam. It happened as the vast majority of people learned about the Inverse, and the way that our powers worked or didn’t work. Someone with an inverse power managed to kill Adam, and live streamed it, displaying their power and speaking the knowledge of how it worked out for almost the entire world to hear. At the same time, he explained Adam’s power, severely weakening him and giving him the advantage needed to kill him. How he learned that immense secret, I didn’t know.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  My biggest claim to fame in the past was being the one to have killed him, and to have avenged Adam.

  I mean, I obviously didn’t do it myself, the government had put together a specialized task force

  That was sorta the secret of our unit. Elenor and I were anti-personnel specialists. Modern weapons just stop working on monsters once they grow big enough, and neither of us can do anything besides be annoying to them at that point. But against people? Two teleporting figures, both capable of almost instantly killing a person, myself able to effectively negate most non-fatal wounds, there weren’t many things that stood on two legs that could last more than a few seconds against us.

  I never really liked that. It’s not like military in its original kind disappeared with the advent of the monsters. No one was under the misconception that complete unity had somehow happened just because an external threat finally matched that of our fellow man.

  We were still ready and willing to do what every civilization before us had done, and war.

  But, what Eleanor and I were, it was dishonest. Plumes were signals of hope, icons that the monsters had died, that the world just became a little safer. What the hell were killers like us doing with that title? The iconography itself felt wrong.

  There was much more nobility in fighting the monsters. Nothing gray about it, it wanted us dead, we needed to kill it first.

  But in all honesty, the world right now needed men dead more than it needed monsters dead. Our biggest issues were people. The monsters on their own we could fend off fine, but every major step in our complete overtaking happened because of people. People whose lives I had to end.

  There is, I think, neither any ethical or moral excuse to end a life, and yet equivalent, often no choice. I was a soldier, though the name was different. Though my generals were not men, but the forces of earth, of the heavens. My weapons and appointed might the knowledge they had given me. I was still a soldier. Still just a killer, a dog trained to bite.

  But what else could I be? What else could I do? The other options were crueler. Doing nothing, not doing what I had to do. Allowing the death of everything, seeing the end and welcoming it. Isn't it more moral to rage against an untimely end? More human to fight your demise so long as you have feet to stand on, and arms to guard yourself with. Or maybe, I was just making excuses for myself.

  My eyes flicked to the sight of movement, and I saw Elanor stand up, rubbing at her hair, displacing strands of pink and blue as she stared at me. She moved her hands sleepily right after. “Can’t sleep?”

  I pressed my pointer and middle against my thumb, pointing towards her.

  She nodded, before looking down at Springer. “You sure about this? I know you’re a soft guy but, he’s an Inverse. We should kill him shouldn’t we?”

  An advantage of both of us speaking in sign language was that he had no chance to hear us and wake up, and even if he was fake sleeping, he wouldn’t make out our conversation. “Probably. But I think he might be more valuable alive.”

  She walked up next to me, gesturing for me to scoot over, which I did, and hopping up next to me on the cashier desk. “You’re just saying that. You’re soft.”

  “I killed you, you remember I said that right?”

  “Yeah but you did it for a soft, sappy reason didn’t you?”

  “I did have a reason, but I don’t think that makes me soft. I didn’t feel…soft, when…I killed you.”

  She wrapped an arm around my shoulder, and dragged me closer to her, her other hand reaching up and threading around in my hair, finding a solid grip and holding it for a second, before letting go.

  Despite being on the thinner side, Eleanor was solid to lean against, and a weak scent of a floral perfume met my nose.

  I let her do whatever she wanted to me, both a little confused but soothed by the feeling, even if something like 6 combined inches of kevlar were separating us. She had a talent for things like this, as ironic as it was. Knowing when to talk, and when to just let the moment and mood sing out its own truth.

  She held me against her for a long moment, before the tension in her arm released, and she freed me to sit back up, reclaiming her hand to speak with. “You’re ridiculous. You know, the hardest part of your story to believe, is that you didn’t end up sacrificing yourself for someone else somewhere along the way, and actually made it all the way to the end.”

  A small, somewhat pathetic laugh broke free from my lips. “I uh, I think I’m probably a bit more selfish than you think. I…had my opportunities to do something like that. I didn't take them.”

  She paused, thinking about that. “Did you really?”

  My thoughts turned to a wave of blond hair, blood splatters tainting it red, and two emotionless blue eyes. “Yeah. Yeah I did, but I didn’t. I…could say a lot of things in my own defense…but the truth is that I…just wasn’t willing to die. I’m not as good of a person as you think I am. I don’t even know If I’m at all the person you remember. So much of me has changed in what was a single a day for you, and years for me.”

  “You’re still Vidar though. Still you.”

  A single though pierced my mind, a response to her question I refused to speak aloud, too afraid of her reaction and the implication of my own words. ‘Am I?’

  There aren’t quite moments of silence when discussing things with her, after all, there is always silence. However, no matter what kind of communication you use, certain social ailments manage to pierce in no matter what. And the uncomfortable feeling of a proposition challenged only internally by another person presents itself here as the stark stillness of my hands, and the lack of any motion.

  Her mouth twitched into a small frown, and she sighed, one of few external noises she would ever make. “Did the two of us really make it all the way to the end? A little bit baller if we did.” The sign the two of us had for baller was her making the motion of shooting a basketball.

  “We did. Jo?lle too. It got close a couple of times, and we were both kinda wrecks at the end. Guess I…still am.” I let out a deep sigh. “I mean, don’t I already seem different to you? Wrong somehow?”

  “How?”

  “Just…Wrong. Not who I am.”

  She thought for a long moment. “You’re definitely different. A lot more jaded, sorta erratic too. I mean, at the examiners room, we apparently fight so civilians won’t have to. But recruiting Springer, there are no civilians. You contradicted yourself.”

  I blinked at her, slowly taking in that statement. “I…I’m just…”

  “I think you need to take a second to breathe. And consider what is and what isn’t important to you. Why are you actually doing all of this?”

  There were noble reasons. Of course there were, I was saving the world. I had changed the course of history for the better just by giving us a second chance, if I could actually save the world, it would mean that I had saved not just the population of the world now, but every single human being after my passing. Every child born after this period should I succeed, would be a product of my own efforts.

  But that wasn’t what was driving me. That wasn’t why I was doing what I was doing. Not to save people. Not to change the world, not to keep humanity going. My reason was as base and simplistic as it could be. The same as any animal, predator or prey. “I just don’t want to die.”

  “You want to live.”

  I nodded. That was it. At the base of everything. I didn’t join the military out of a desire to fight for people, it was because they offered me the food I needed to survive. The reason I had killed other people, the reason I had turned time backwards. “I want to live.”

  “Then there it is. That’s who you are. Someone who wants to live.”

  My lips twitched down, a little bit of frustration at the inherent selfishness of thinking like that. “I think I’d like to be more than just that.”

  “Well, I think you’ve got time to be something more. What good story about saving the world doesn’t include finding yourself along the way?”

  I let out a small breath. “Worrying about something stupid like how I feel, seems dismissive of the hard work and awful things we have ahead of us.”

  “Probably. But what can you do?”

  “Not worry about it?”

  “Clearly hasn’t worked for you.”

  I couldn’t refute that.

  She gave me another pat on the shoulder, before jumping off the counter. “We’ve got a hard time ahead of us saving the world, right? We should sleep while we can.”

  I didn’t respond, just turning to look at Springer, who was sleeping soundly. It was ironic, if I wanted to guarantee I’d wake up for tomorrow, I had to stay awake. I spoke since her back was turned to me. “You do that, I’m just…I need to think a little longer.”

  She raised a hand up to her head and gestured it in a circle. “Going crazy.”

  I let out an annoyed huff as I leaned back, lying down on the counter. “Feels like an understatement.”