Barry sat up with a start as he took in the small room. There was not much to see besides sterile white walls and a bed. A plate of food and a bottle of water had been placed within easy reach on a small bedside table.

Right. He'd passed out.

He relaxed, until he heard footsteps approaching his door and realized the illusion over his arm and face had disappeared. Putting it back in a hurry, he then leaned back against the headrest as someone knocked gently on the door.

"Come in," he said in a gruff voice, deciding to take a drink of water to wet his dry throat.

A woman with short, blonde hair walked in. Her face was pale except for the dark bags under her eyes and she had a neutral, borderline unfriendly expression on her face. As she took him in, she narrowed her eyes at his arm.

"How do you do that?"

Barry blinked, taken aback by her directness. His first instinct was to play dumb, but then there was no doubt she would have seen the prosthetics while he was unconscious…

"I just…" he began, twirling his hand in the air as if that explained something, "change the light."

She nodded, looking thoughtful.

"Direct Manipulation, right?"

"Right."

"And you can just do it? Like, without drugs?"

"...What?"

As they were staring at each other in confusion, the dark-skinned man from before walked in through the open door.

"Hey, you're up! Great. My name's Kobe, by the way. It looks like you already got introduced to Tasha?"

"If asking me whether I use drugs counts as an introduction, then yes."

Kobe glanced at Tasha, who simply shrugged, then he cleared his throat.

"...Well, Tasha may not be the most, ah, socially gifted person, but she is probably our best fighter."

"What are you talking about? I don't even like to fight," she protested. Barry noted that she did not deny the comment about her social skills.

"Anyway, you seem…" Kobe paused a touch too long. "...Better."

"How long was I fighting for?"

"Almost three days," Kobe answered, "and you slept for about twelve hours. It's no exaggeration to say we would've been totally screwed without you. Where did you come from?"

Barry told them a bit of what he'd been through, leaving out a lot of important details so as to avoid further questions. Kobe seemed to pick up on the fact that he wanted to keep some things to himself, interrupting Tasha each time she was about to fire off another round of questions. He then offered a tour of the settlement, so after quickly washing up, Barry left the barracks to meet them outside.

"So, as I was saying, I really can't stay," he said, taking in the town. The inner area contained row after row of the black containers, the ground between pocked with holes that must have been dug by beasts. People were working everywhere he looked, dragging beast corpses out the gate and removing pieces of debris. Barry blinked at the corpse of a giant worm that seemed to have been nailed into the town wall by a giant metal shovel.

A middle-aged man nearby noticed him, walking up and asking to shake his hand.

"You're a real hero, sir. I can't thank you enough for what you did."

"Oh, right. Err... you're welcome?" Barry felt awkward as he shook the man's hand. It didn't feel like such a special thing - everyone had been fighting for their lives, after all. He was just a lot better at killing beasts than anyone else here.

But soon more people noticed him and came over. It didn't take long for a small queue to form, after the which the attention caught the eye of even more people and it spread like a wildfire through the town, people dropping what they were doing to walk over or shout their thanks. He looked on with wide eyes as they treated him like some saint, even calling him strange names.

"It's him! The dancer!"

"The white ghost! He's awake!"

The shouts slowly rose until they turned into cheers and applause, some people falling to their knees in front of him. Before long, what felt like the entire town was clapping and whooping.

Barry gaped, feeling tempted to turn on his Abilities and simply disappear.

"They watched you fight to save their lives for hours on end," Kobe said, clapping him on the back. "You've become something of a legend here."

What followed was a chaotic series of handshakes, claps on the back, people squeezing his shoulder. The applause only lessened by the time they reached the gates. A little girl ran up to him and handed him a drawing. It was clearly meant to be him: a man with white blades and… a white left arm.

"Mister, where did your super hand go? I saw it when you came in. Did you lose your powers?"

Barry's breath caught in his throat as a wave of emotions went through him. This was not going the way he'd expected. After that disaster with the destroyed settlement, he'd somehow forgotten that people could also be simply… nice. Decent. They didn't even seem bothered at all by his freakish prosthetics.

"Thank you," he whispered, fighting to hold back tears.

Things quieted down by the time they made their way up the walls and observed the destruction outside. Scattered beast corpses stretching all the way across the plains. To the west, where he'd made his last stand, a gigantic sinkhole had formed, the earth churned up in a wide swathe all around it.

"Wow. Sorry for messing up your lawn," Barry said.

Kobe laughed.

"No worries. I think it looks kind of cool, actually. Fits the whole post-apocalyptic vibe we have going on here," he said. "Are you sure we can't convince you to stick around a bit longer?"

"No, I've been delayed too long already. But maybe I'll come by again later, if I can, just to check in."

"Please do! We'll have a few somber days ahead with clean-up and... well, burials," Kobe said, his expression dropping as he paused and swallowed. "But then I expect things will get exciting again with the election."

Barry wasn't sure what he was talking about, but shifted focus to his goal.

"Do you know anything about the MAFT to the north? Is it a settlement like this?"

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"North? I don't know about another MAFT, but... Didn't Russo say he was heading there?" Kobe said, looking at Tasha.

"Yeah," Tasha confirmed, lips thinning with disapproval. "That guy's a fucking lunatic. It would be best not to get involved with him."

With no more information to be gained, Barry said his goodbyes and then he was running off again. People gathered on the walls for a final bout of cheering and applause as he left.

He paused once before entering the forest, looking back at the walled settlement and the kind people that lived there. It felt like some of his faith in humanity had returned, and perhaps some of his own humanity along with it.

***

Tasha let out a long breath as she walked slowly out the gates toward the funeral pyre. Despite a good rest, she felt only a bit better than one of many the beast corpses that were still laying around. Her joints and muscles continued to ache despite having been hooked up to a Fixer Upper multiple times. A persistent headache throbbed inside her skull and she hadn't felt hungry for days. Space drug withdrawal symptoms were no joke.

The temptation to take more was always there. If she took only a small drop, she wouldn't even have to walk, because then she could fly instead.

Barry had given her some hope that she'd be able to use her Abilities without drug support in the future, but the way he told it, it would take quite some time and effort to be able to reach the right state of mind.

There were plenty of other things to experiment with. Right before the whole mess leading up to the Challenge, one of the R&D people had discovered the basic steps for inscribing. It was a way of imbuing PE into items, with a set of instructions that worked roughly like an IF-THEN string of events to determine the effect of the item. As a first project, they were working towards a shield that would trigger a pane of [Reflect Momentum] when it detected a projectile moving towards it at a certain speed.

The System had given them a four week break before the Quest Quotas would start up again, so they did have some time to rebuild and train as well. Just over half their population had been fighting throughout the Challenge, so they all had Abilities and increased Stats to get used to.

She noticed there was already a crowd forming in front of the towering pile of stacked wood. Dmitriy's body is in there, she thought with a wave of sadness and bitter regret. If only they'd paid more attention. They could have helped him. But they'd just been too busy dealing with the other worm.

Wiping at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, Tasha scanned the crowd for Kobe, but her eyes landed on Dericka instead. The woman was standing a bit to the side, apart from the crowd, eyes to the ground with her hands clasped in front of her. In a stark shift from her usual presence, Dericka had been like a ghost in the last days. Tasha hadn't even spoken to her since the few words they exchanged during the Challenge.

Letting out another sigh, Tasha reluctantly walked up to her. Continuing to ignore her just wasn't right. Not today, not at the funeral.

"Hey," she said quietly, drawing her attention.

Dericka's eyes widened a fraction.

"Hi," she began, looking Tasha over, "are you okay? You look… Well, you've looked better."

"Took too much of the Extract," Tasha said with a grimace. "But I'll get over it. You don't look too great yourself."

Dericka's red eyes dropped to the ground again.

"I…" she began, swallowing heavily. "He died because of me, you know? I fell and he…" her voice cracked and she swallowed again. "He wanted to protect me. Despite all of my fuck ups."

Tasha shook her head.

"Not just you. He wanted to protect everyone, I think. I saw him running around, taking wounds to save countless people. If that worm had been left unchecked… It could have easily taken out hundreds. He went out like a hero."

"Maybe," Dericka said. "Doesn't change the fact that he's gone."

Tasha nodded and a sad silence stretched between them.

"Listen," Dericka broke the silence, looking up to meet Tasha's eyes again. "I need to apologize to you. To Kobe and the rest, too. I thought I was doing the right thing, protecting you, but I fucked up. I'm so sorry, I-"

Tasha held up her hand.

"Look, the thing is, we never needed that protection. We certainly never needed you to be making decisions for us. But listen, just… don't worry about me or Kobe. We'll be fine. Really. We're strong. Instead of worrying about our… forgiveness, or whatever, I think you should focus on yourself. We've all been through a lot, and maybe you need to, like, work on yourself, to get better?" she said, shaking her head. "I don't know, I'm no good with this stuff."

"No, I think you're right. I honestly don't know what I'll be doing yet, but I'll definitely be staying away from any leadership responsibilities. No more hard decisions for a while. I think I'll just help people out and take some time to reflect on everything that happened."

Gabriel, standing in front of the pyre to face the growing audience, cleared his throat and began to speak.

"We are here to honor and remember the fallen heroes of New Haven…"

***

Now that Kobe had finally achieved something like celebrity status, he found himself unable to enjoy it. He'd lost more friends in the last few weeks than he had in all the years before. Some of them he hadn't been very close with, but losing Dmitriy really stung.

"This might sound weird, but he felt like a father figure somehow. He was just so strong and… dependable, you know? With how high his Durability was, I thought he was pretty much invincible."

"I know," Tasha said, squeezing his hand. They were sitting on the branch of a tall tree, looking out over the forest. It was the only place where they could get away from people without being surrounded by decomposing beast corpses. "It just confirms how dangerous this world is. It could have been any one of us, really."

"Yeah," Kobe sighed. "That fight keeps playing in my head, over and over again. If I hadn't gotten knocked out by that Pterodactyl like an idiot, we might have been able to save him. Or if we had distracted our worm for a while. Or killed it faster."

"I know." She sighed. "But we can't think like that. We were half unconscious by then and had no idea where he was. I mean, I could barely see anything."

Kobe let out another breath, then fell silent for a while as he gazed at the forest.

"People keep congratulating me. Saying I'm a hero. It's strange for me to say, but it actually feels like shit. Because that's the fight they saw, right? It's like they want to celebrate us killing the worm as some huge success, when to me it's just a terrible memory. Feels like a damn failure."

"Yeah. I hate the attention I'm getting. Really hoping it'll blow over soon."

"Yeah, I wouldn't bet on it. You're like the most famous person in the settlement, with the exception of Barry."

"Famous? They're calling me Carrie, for Christ's sake."

Kobe chuckled, then decided to change the subject.

"I saw you were talking to Dericka, earlier?"

"Oh, yeah. She apologized, but I told her to forget about us and just focus on herself. It just kind of came out in that moment. Now I feel like I was regurgitating one of those basic Insta quotes. Ugh."

"It's not bad advice, though. It's definitely a good idea to take some time. I need some distance from her for sure. It's not like I hate her, I realize she also didn't have all the information. But I do feel like she went a bit crazy there for a while."

"Yeah. She said she's going to kind of fade into the background for a while."

Kobe nodded, looking pensive.

"I guess that means she won't be playing a role in the elections."

"Oh, right. When was the vote?"

"Should be about forty-eight hours from now. I think Jakob's been doing a great job, though. Maybe I'll do some campaigning for him."

"Sure," Tasha nodded.

There was another silence, this one feeling more awkward than the last. Kobe cleared his throat.

"So, uhh… should we talk about… us?"

"Us?" Tasha repeated, giving him a sideways glance. He felt there was a cactus churning in his stomach, but he smiled as he spotted a faint red blush on her cheeks. "There's an us, now?"

His eyes flicked down to their hands. He hadn't let go after that squeeze. He cleared his throat again.

"Well… there could be. If you want there to be. I mean, I'm not sure how dating works in a post-apocalyptic world, but…"

She smiled, licking her lips as she tucked a bit of hair behind her ear.

"I guess it's not much different than before. This could be a date. I mean, it is kind of romantic, I guess," she said, gesturing out at the sky, which was colored shades of pink and orange from the setting sun.

He could feel his heart pounding in his throat, but he knew he'd regret it if he didn't follow his instinct here.

"Well, in that case…" he said, leaning in for a kiss. Tasha accepted the embrace.

They sat there for a while, Tasha's head resting on his shoulder, just enjoying each other's company until the sun went down.

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