Hunter's Choice

by C E Keene

  "This is where you ask me to choose, right? To choose if I want to live in this world and watch my friends die, one by one."

  "I know you're hurting--"

  "No, you don't know. You're just doing your job. Meddling in my life, recruiting me into this world where I may have made everybody's life exponentially worse."

  Treyous' expression hardened and he regarded Arheis for a long moment before speaking. "If you truly believe that, then I suppose you've made your choice."

  "I don't know what I believe! You dropped this bombshell on me and somehow I was supposed to process it while fighting in a life or death situation. Death won, and now you're going to tell me I need to make a choice that will apparently affect my life and the lives of those around me."

  Arheis' anger was more than just a few stray bubbles rising to the surface. It was at a full, rolling boil now, steam billowing from the top.

  "And now I'm wondering what would have happened if I'd just logged out and never came back. Zindar might still be alive, right? Because my being there didn't seem to do him any damn good. My 'bond' with him didn't do him any. Damn. Good."

  There were tears in his eyes. When had that happened? He didn't remember crying since the funeral they'd held, and even then he'd only allowed a few tears before he'd pulled himself together.

  They were coming now, though, whether he wanted them to or not. And Treyous just stood there, a sense of pity in his eyes that made Arheis feel furious and helpless all at once.

  "Why didn't it work? I used my bond ability. I tried to save him. It worked with Mira, why didn't it…" He was close to hyperventilating, his lungs burning with the need to take a deeper breath. "Why couldn't I save him?"

  Was he not strong enough? Maybe if he'd been a higher level--if he'd taken on a few more bounties and showed as much hustle as Zindar had. Maybe if he'd invested his points into different abilities. A higher level of Lightning Reflexes might have made the difference between life and death--

  "Simon." Treyous gripped his shoulders and waited for Arheis to meet his gaze. "Don't do this to yourself. You need to stop looking at the game mechanics and start looking at what really matters."

  "Like what, Treyous? My friend is dead. An actual person in this actual world is dead because I failed him."

  "An actual person is dead because he was doing everything in his power to help others. Zindar died doing something he would be proud of--helping his friends live to see another day."

  The words hit Arheis like a lead weight, settling on his chest and making it almost impossible for him to breathe. He knew Treyous was right. Zindar might not have wanted to die, but if he'd been able to choose how to go out, Arheis knew it would've been in a situation exactly like this one.

  "His life and how he affected you, that’s what you need to take away from this. Not the game systems you could have exploited or the abilities you could have taken to shave a few seconds off your reaction time. None of that matters, Simon. The only thing that matters is what Zindar meant to you--what he still means to you. That’s why those bonds exist. They are your anchors to this world and they'll always be there, even when the person you've bonded with no longer is." His gaze softened and Arheis was unable to look away from the man. "You still carry your mother with you. It will be the same with Zindar."

  Arheis let out a shuddering breath and looked away. His heart hurt worse than it had in what felt like forever. Months ago in this world--what likely amounted to mere days in the "real" world--Arheis would have never imagined being so close to someone that their death would affect him as much as his mother's had.

  But it was happening right now.

  "Do you see now?" Treyous asked gently. He let go of Arheis' arms and took a step back, giving him some space. "This world is as real as the one you came from, Simon, and you can be a part of it. You'll feel the joy and the pain. You'll live with the failures and the triumphs. Or…"

  His breath caught in his throat as he met Treyous' eyes once more. He already knew what the man was going to say. He could feel it deep in his soul like a cold shroud settling over him.

  "You can walk away. I can reset your memories so you won't have to feel conflicted any longer. You won't remember Zindar or Mira. You'll wake up in your apartment none the wiser, ready to begin your job search."

  It was tempting. Especially right now when the pain of loss was so fresh. It would be one thing if he had to live with the guilt of leaving it all behind, but if it could be like he'd never put on that NeuroJak in the first place…

  "And my friends?"

  Treyous smiled sadly, telling Arheis everything he needed to know with one simple expression. "They will live on. Or they will not. But you cannot make this decision only for them. The choice must be yours, Simon."

  Arheis swiped at his eyes with the heels of his hands. His head pounded and he still felt like he was being slowly crushed to death. The path ahead wasn't any clearer now than it had been the last time he and Treyous had spoken.

  "I need time," he said, hoping that was still a possibility.

  For all he knew, his Ambassador wanted a choice right now, before he even left the room. If that was the case, Arheis knew he would likely pick the "safe" option. But he didn't like it, and he still hadn't unpacked what that meant.

  "Then take it," Treyous said. "I'll be waiting to help you when you decide, one way or the other. When you're ready, just think your choice and I'll take care of the rest."

  Arheis nodded, some of that numbness from earlier returning. He didn't even know how to begin, but he'd have to figure it out. Soon.

  Treyous clapped him on the shoulder, his massive paw of a hand still coming down hard enough to leave a slight sting. "Go on, then. You have a city to save."

  31

  Higrem had gone so far into exhaustion that he couldn’t sleep.

  His body ached, his mind wanted to shut off completely, and he didn’t think he had the emotional fortitude to survive minute to minute, let alone make it through the next battle. But he couldn’t sleep.

  They left De’shal in a hurry. Arheis seemed less detached than he had earlier, but still closed off. Mira noticed it before he did. She kept looking over at him with worry in her eyes and Higrem wanted to shake that damn idiot and tell him she had enough to worry about without expending so much energy on his moping ass.

  But for once, he didn’t say it. He couldn’t, because he knew exactly what Arheis was going through. The fact that he’d been able to feel pain and love and everything else under the sun in Estalia had only really convinced Higrem on a surface level. It took the death of someone he loved to make the stakes clear, to show him that everything that happened here was real.

  Arheis was learning that now and he needed time to sort his shit out. Higrem’s was already sorted, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t carrying around a whole carousel’s worth of baggage.

  Aurelia.

  He dreamed of her all the time. It didn’t matter if he was awake or asleep. The memory of her smiling face, her beautiful, adoring eyes, filled every spare moment. He held on to one specific image—the way she’d looked when she held their son in her arms for the very first time. The last thing he let himself remember in vivid detail before everything went to hell.

  Her face came to him again as they camped in the wooded mountains between De’shal and Iskaral, unable to physically make themselves go any further. He lay on the frosted ground, his whole body aching, begging him to rest. Mira slept nearby, her blanket pulled over her head, her chest rising and falling in blissful sleep Higrem envied.

  Arheis was tending to the fire, having volunteered to take first watch. He looked more run down than the rest of them. Dark circles under his eyes. Lines on his face that hadn’t been there before. A permanent, hard set to his jaw. It was what Higrem and his friends would’ve once called the Hot Topic Special—an angsty guy brooding over his own angst.

  But after spending over two decades as a part of Estalia, he couldn’t f
ault anyone for their feelings. Especially not those particular feelings.

  He could deflect with the best of them, though.

  “You look like shit,” he muttered, pushing himself into a sitting position. “Get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  Higrem gave the man a flat stare, but he didn’t argue. As far as Arheis was concerned, that statement probably wasn’t even a lie. Higrem wasn’t tired, after all. He was exhausted, but not tired enough to shut off his brain. Shame he didn’t have the choice to just log out.

  Sighing, he pushed himself to his feet and went to sit on a tree stump. Cold bit into his ass and thighs, but it was an almost welcome pain compared to his own thoughts. Now who’s the Hot Topic Special.

  He watched the steam curl from his mouth as he breathed, the fire crackling just beyond. It was too quiet. He’d never been able to stand the quiet. Even as a kid.

  “I’m sorry about Zindar,” he finally said, knowing he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it after Aurelia died. “People will probably tell you these things always happen for a reason, but that’s bullshit. Sometimes bad things happen to good people for no reason at all.”

  “You missed your calling,” Arheis deadpanned. “You should’ve been a grief counselor.”

  Higrem snorted, but his smirk fell away quickly. He rubbed at his arm, trying to get some warmth into his fingers.

  “I met my Ambassador,” Arheis said after a long stretch of silence. “You were right. It was someone I’d known the whole time.”

  It clicked in Higrem’s mind before Arheis even finished saying the words.

  “Treyous? Makes sense. I’m guessing he was part of your tutorial experience.”

  He could barely remember the details of his own tutorial. It seemed like a lifetime ago, and considering how long he’d spent in Estalia, he supposed it was.

  “Apparently it’s time for me to make my choice.”

  Those words pulled Higrem away from his own thoughts and he felt a pang of sympathy for the man who sat before him. Arheis looked lost. He could see it now, clear as day. He’d probably been set adrift well before Zindar’s death. That was just the storm that made the waves swell, buffeting him about so far from land that he had no idea how to get back.

  “Sounds about right,” Higrem muttered, grabbing a stick from the reserve pile and feeding it to the fire.

  “Why’d you choose to stay?”

  Arheis wasn’t looking at him at first. His gaze was settled on Mira and Higrem felt that familiar ache of loneliness. He thought he would’ve gotten used to it by now. He’d been without Aurelia for most of his time in Estalia. But every day he found a new way to remember she wasn’t in his life anymore—and would never be again.

  “I stayed because the most important person in my life was here and I knew if I left, I’d be walking out on a chance I’d never get again.”

  It was obvious Arheis hadn’t expected that answer. Higrem wasn’t sure if it was the content or just the fact that he’d spoken it without giving the man the run-around, but his head snapped up, his eyes wide in question.

  And since Higrem was feeling charitable, he decided to answer that question.

  “Her name was Aurelia. She was…” A fond smile touched his lips. “Beautiful, sure, but that’s not why I fell for her. She was a complete badass. Absolutely humiliated me in a hunting contest in Firal. I followed her around for months, telling myself I just wanted to learn everything she could teach me. Took me a long time to admit I was a lovesick idiot, and even longer to do something about it.”

  Arheis’ expression softened. Again he glanced at Mira. No surprise there. It may not have happened yet, but anybody could see she was going to be to Arheis what Aurelia had been to him.

  “She’s the mother of your son?” he asked.

  Higrem nodded, trying to ignore the sharp pain he felt in his chest.

  “She got pregnant pretty early on.” He wore a sheepish smile, his hand coming up to rub at his face. “Just an FYI, there’s no real birth control options for guys here, so uh… yeah, be careful with that.”

  At least Arheis blushed. That made him feel a little better about his life.

  “It was a few months after we got serious. I didn’t really know what to do. Part of me wanted to just fuck off back to the real world, but I couldn’t do that to her. So I offered to marry her instead and she laughed in my face.”

  He grinned, but the expression faded as he realized he couldn’t remember what her laugh sounded like. How many other things had he forgotten?

  “My Ambassador told me who he was right around the time Aurelia was six months in. He said I’d need to make a choice soon. Didn’t know what the hell he was talking about until…” Higrem looked away and cleared his throat. “Until the complications started.”

  He could still remember the look of raw fear in Aurelia’s eyes when she stopped feeling their son’s movement. A fear that had only grown into full-blown panic when she’d started to bleed.

  “He was born two and a half months premature, and it’s not like Estalia has a state-of-the-art NICU, you know? Every day was torture, waiting to see if he was going to make it through the night. Then Aurelia started to run a fever, and I…”

  He could feel the weight of Arheis’ eyes on him, but he couldn’t meet the other man’s gaze. Reaching for another stick, he fed it to the fire, only belatedly realizing his hand was shaking.

  “My Ambassador gave me an out. Said I could go back home and I wouldn’t remember any of this; wouldn’t have to have my heart ripped out of my chest every time the healers told me my son wasn’t breathing.”

  “But you chose to stay,” Arheis said softly.

  Higrem sniffed, his jaw clenching as he tried to hold back tears. All of that emotion welled in his throat and his voice became thick with it.

  “What else could I do? They were my life. I knew I might lose them both, but I just… I couldn’t just walk away. So… I stayed. My son started doing better. Every day he got stronger, and Aurelia, too. We were able to care for him without the healers, and I thought all of it was behind us.”

  His fingers drew into his palm, his knuckles starting to hurt with how hard he clenched his fist.

  “One night she um…” He swallowed hard. “She started running a fever again. She was burning up and when I looked at her, her lips were… they were just blue. I ran for help, but…” Higrem sniffed, dragging his arm over his face. “Well, it didn’t matter in the end.”

  “I’m…” Arheis faltered and Higrem braced himself for the pity. “I’m so sorry.”

  Part of him wanted to lash out, but what good would that do? Arheis had lost someone, too. He might lose more people before this was all over.

  “The healers told me she died from complications that had happened during the birth. They said there wasn’t anything I could have done.”

  Arheis was quiet for a long moment. When he did finally speak, his voice was barely above a whisper. “That’s why you—”

  “Yeah,” Higrem said tersely, cutting him off. “Yeah, that’s why I’m not in Lacerda right now. Why I had a hell of a time raising my son. It’s not right, but… it is what it is.”

  Aurelia would be so disappointed in him. But he thought she might understand, too. He loved their child, but it was impossible not to see her when Higrem looked at him.

  “Do you regret it?”

  The question caught him off guard and he finally looked up at Arheis. The fire cast shadows across the man’s features, masking his expression and giving Higrem no clue as to what he meant.

  “Do you regret staying here?” he clarified.

  Higrem sat back, the weight of everything he’d said, everything that had happened pressing down on him. He’d asked himself that question so many times over the years that he’d eventually lost count.

  But it was always the same answer.

  “No,” he said into the darkness. “Even if I knew how it
was going to play out, I’d still make the same choice.”

  That was one of the only truths that had granted him peace over the years, and when Arheis nodded, he knew the man understood. He’d have to make his own choice soon, and it would have to be one he could live with.

  No matter what happened.

  “You should get some sleep. I’ll take over your watch,” he said, turning to face away from Arheis as tears began to race down his cheeks.

  32

  They made it back to Iskaral late the next morning.

  Everyone was quiet, the three of them exchanging only a handful of words throughout their journey. The events of the past twenty-four hours weighed down on them--Arheis could still feel it right there, crushing his lungs and heart. And for him, it wasn't just the past. It was the future, too.

  Higrem's words had given him perspective, but he wasn't any closer to making a decision. Some desperate part of him hoped he'd be able to hold off until after the Petravor was dead, but in the back of his mind he knew that wasn't going to be a possibility.

  For now, though, he focused on the things he could handle. They had a Naturalist to find and a plan to rework, then they'd need to head back into the caves below Iskaral and track down the Petravor once and for all.

  Arheis, Mira, and Higrem had barely made it past the gates when they were set upon by Galen--and the royal guard. The elf looked mildly perturbed, several armored men and women acting as his shadows.

  "His Royal Highness Prince Eadric requests your presence immediately," a tall, thin man said, his fist resting over the emblem that covered his heart.

  "Tell the prince we'll meet him in an hour."

  The words came out before Arheis even realized he was saying them, and for once he didn't feel any need to apologize for being curt. He was so, so tired, in every way imaginable. And considering everything they'd done--and were about to do--for the city, he just wasn't in the mood to be ordered around by a royal.