Twenty meters. A chasm of mud, blood, and broken physics separated us.
My stamina bar wasn't just empty; it was a blinking red warning that my body was eating its own muscle fibers to keep moving. The blisters on my burned hand had popped, weeping clear fluid mixed with green Odic grime. The gash on my cheek throbbed with every heartbeat, the blood drying tight and itchy against my jaw. My temple was a faucet, the warm copper trickling into my left eye, painting half the world in a hazy red sheen.
And Raiden was about to die.
The Number Two of the first-year cohort. The prodigy who had dismantled me in fourteen seconds. The silver blizzard who had frozen half this clearing solid. Now, she was lying in the mud with a burned-out shoulder, her katana out of reach, about to have her skull cracked open by a seven-foot brass psychopath.
If she dies here, it's my fault.
She came into this forest because of me. Because the Commander's Aggro passive had painted a target on my back, and she had been assigned to protect me. She had spent the entire fight dismantling grunts, holding the flank, buying time for Freya and me.
And now she was going to die for it.
The journal was three meters behind me. The extraction ticket. The lore. The whole reason I had dragged myself into this nightmare at four in the morning. The objective. The promise.
Raiden was twenty meters ahead of me. Dying.
Choose.
The word carved itself into my frontal lobe with a rusted knife.
The journal or Raiden. You can't save both. You don't have the stamina. You don't have the weapons. You don't have the time.
The journal was the narrative key. The data I needed to understand the anomaly. Without it, I was flying blind. Without it, my promise to shadow was just an air.
Raiden was a major character. The kind of character whose death altered the entire trajectory of the story. The kind of character whose survival was mathematically essential for the endgame. The kind of character I had watched, in a hundred different playthroughs, carry the dps check on the final boss.
If she dies here, the future I'm counting on collapses. Everything I know about the plot becomes useless. Every alliance, every strategy, every contingency—gone.
But even if I stripped away the meta-narrative calculus, even if I ignored the strategic implications, even if I reduced the equation to its most basic, bleeding, human components—
She came into this forest to protect me.
I wasn't going to let her die for me.
I moved.
My legs screamed, the muscles tearing microscopic fissures with every stride. My burned hand throbbed in time with my racing heart. The blood from my temple ran thicker, blinding my left eye. I didn't care.
I ran.
Not elegantly. Not tactically. I ran like a man with nothing left to lose, because I had exactly nothing left. I burned the last five percent of my stamina bar on a dead sprint across the mud, my boots slipping in the gore, my arms pumping, my lungs shredding themselves with every ragged breath.
"HEY!"
The word tore out of my bruised windpipe like a shard of glass. Raw. Broken. Desperate.
Apostle Caliber's hydraulic clamp stopped three inches from Raiden's skull.
His human eyes flicked toward me. His optic lens whirred, adjusting focus, cataloguing the charging, bleeding, half-dead first-year who was running directly at a seven-foot brass sculpture with nothing but his bare hands and a face that had gone completely, utterly blank.
"BRASS BITCH!"
The words left my mouth before my brain could catch up. The toxic gamer. The rage bait. The nuclear option.
"You call that art?! That's the ugliest goddamn modification I've ever seen! Your proportions look like a trash can fucked a pipe organ! Your drill arm is compensating for something! And that hat makes you look like a steampunk fortune teller who got rejected from the Renaissance fair!"
The clearing went dead silent. Even the distant hum of the forest seemed to pause.
Apostle Caliber's human eyes blinked. Once. Twice. The modulator in his throat made a sound like a record scratch—a harsh, glitching burst of static. His brass jaw went slack, the refined, cultured posture shattering.
"You..." His voice crackled, the melodic modulation fracturing into raw, static-laced disbelief. "You dare..."
"I dare!" I was still running. Twenty meters became fifteen. Fifteen became ten. The mud splattered against my shins. "I dare call your 'composition' what it is—discount scrap metal bolted together by a guy who couldn't cut it as a real artist! You're not a practitioner! You're a hack with a wrench and a god complex!"
Apostle Caliber's face twisted. The veins in his human neck bulged. The glass pane in his skull pulsed a frantic, erratic red.
Rage.
Pure, incandescent, art-critic-who-just-been-told-his-life's-work-is-garbage rage.
His hydraulic clamp released Raiden's head. His brass body pivoted, the gears grinding so hard they shrieked, his full attention locking onto me with the specific, burning hatred of an artist whose masterpiece had just been called landfill fodder.
"I WILL UNSCREW YOUR SKULL AND USE IT AS A LAMP!" The modulated voice shattered into raw, unprocessed fury, the melodic quality completely gone, replaced by the screaming static of a man who had lost every shred of artistic composure.
His brass legs fired. The ground shook. He came at me like a locomotive made of gears and spite.
Hook. Line. Sinker.
The giant brass psychopath was charging at me with the intent to turn my skeleton into a wind chime. And Raiden was safe. For now. I had literally thrown away the objective, my safety, and my life to scream insults at a boss monster.
A breathless, hysterical laugh bubbled up in my chest, choking on the taste of copper and adrenaline.
Hah. I never thought my toxic gamer mouth would be the thing that makes me look like a hero in front of a dying princess.
What a joke. What an absolute, terrifying joke.