Chương 70: Liz

He said yes. Cassandra stood there with her rune kit and her offer and her steady, unafraid face, and Alex looked at her and gave a small nod, but it was more than he'd given anyone, and Cassandra took it the way she took most things, without making it into anything. She just nodded back and said, "Good," then turned toward the gate like it was already decided. Alex followed her, and that was how it started. They didn't talk on the walk to the dungeon.

That was the first kindness of the day, and it was deliberate, he understood that later. She'd said he didn't have to say a word, and she'd meant it, and she filled the silence with nothing, made no attempt to draw him out, asked him nothing. She just walked beside him at an easy pace, her bow, her body loose and unhurried, and let the quiet be quiet, and Alex found that a silence someone chose to share with you was a different thing entirely from a silence everyone else was leaving around you like a moat.

The dungeon took them in, and they hunted, and the hunting loosened him the way Ace had known it would. They were a strange pair to fight together, and it worked better than it had any right to. Cassandra was pure range and control, and Alex was everything else, and once they found the shape of it, t they stopped needing to talk about it.

She'd seed the ground ahead of them with her crystals, small floating shards of pink diamond, each one carrying a different enchantment, one that burst into flame, one that cracked with force, one that flushed cold and slow, and she'd hang them in the air like a field of quiet threats and set them off as the monsters crossed through, and whatever survived the crossing came to Alex already staggered. He'd take it from there.

It was clean, complementary work, her setting the table and him clearing it, and somewhere in the second hour of it Alex noticed he'd stopped hearing the fog. His body had something to do, and his head had gone quiet inside the doing, and for stretches at a time he was just a man in a fight, which was the closest thing to peace he'd had in days. They talked, eventually, in the lulls. She started it, and she started it small.

"You know what I miss most?" She was reclaiming crystals from a cleared room, calling them back to her belt one at a time.

"Closing time. When you can work hard and then go home, but now it seems every day is work. I hated it for the six years I worked, and now I would go back to that in a heartbeat." Alex looked at her. He didn't say anything, but he looked at her, and she took the look as the question it was.

"Bartender," she said.

"Six years. Started at sixteen with a fake ID, but lucky for me, nobody was looking, they needed hands, and I needed money, so." She shrugged, spinning a crystal back into its place.

"Worked all through high school. And still during college. Was still doing it the day the system visited, on my way home when this all became a thing. That's a strange thing to think about. Whatever I was on my way to being, the last thing I can really remember in the old world was me pulling a beer for a guy who didn't tip."

"What were you on your way to being?" It came out of him before he'd decided to speak, rough and quiet, the first full sentence he'd said aloud since the night, and it surprised them both. Cassandra didn't make it a big deal. That was a kindness he didn't know he needed. She just answered, as his voice had never gone anywhere.

"Lawyer. Aspiring, anyway. I was working my way through, one shift at a time. It was going to take me about nine years at the rate I was going, but I was going to get there." She almost smiled.

"Everybody thought I was crazy. This girl who mixes drinks for frat boys is going to be a lawyer. But I'm stubborn, and I'm good at reading people, which is pretty important, but I haven't received an internship yet, so what do I know." She let a beat pass.

"And then none of it mattered, because the whole world went and got a system, and now I do this," as she detonated one of her crystals.

"You were good at it," Alex said.

"The reading people""It's the only thing bartending teaches you that's worth anything. You learn to see when someone's hit their limit before they know it themselves. When to cut them off. When to just listen. When somebody's sitting at your bar because they've got nowhere else to put a burden they are carrying, and all they need is for one person to not walk away from them." She said it lightly, and then she looked at him, just for a second, then a slight smirk was on her face.

"Maybe I should have started a side gig as a therapist" And Alex understood exactly what she was doing, and why she'd come to him when everyone else was giving him a moat. She hadn't asked him a single question about the night. She wasn't going to. She'd just pulled up a stool next to a man carrying something and made it clear she wasn't going anywhere, and left the rest up to him. So he told her. Not about Carl. He couldn't touch Carl, not yet, maybe not for a long time.

But there was an older thing underneath Carl, the thing that had made him lose control, and he found that with the fighting behind them and the quiet around them. He could reach it.

"There was a girl," he said.

"Back home. Liz. We grew up together, she lived three houses down, and we were the kind of friends for as long as I could remember." He turned his glaive over in his hands, watching the metal instead of her, because it was easier.

"We stayed close all the way up. And then junior year I got serious about school, the SATs, getting into a good program, I had this whole plan, and I buried myself in it. Months. I stopped picking up when she called as much. Told myself I'd have time after the test. She was always going to be there, that's the thing about a friend like that, you never think you have to make time because they're just part of the furniture of your life. Permanent."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Cassandra said nothing. She'd gone still, and she listened like every word was divine.

"Something happened to her." He said it carefully, and he paused, calculating the best way to postulate is words.

"Something bad. Somebody did something to her. And she carried it by herself, because the person she'd have carried it to was me, and I wasn't available. I was doing practice tests for God's sake." His hands were steady on the glaive. He made himself keep his voice even, and he even smiled, a small wrong smile, because the smile was the only way to get the next sentence out.

"And by the time I found out anything was wrong, it was because she wasn't there anymore. She didn't, she didn't make it through it. She decided she was done. And I found out days later" He turned the glaive over again. Looking at his own reflection in the glimmer of the metal.

"So I never got to be there. I had one job, be there for the person who'd always been there for me, and I failed to protect her, nor was I there to comfort her." He breathed out.

"I started lifting after that. Right after. I don't even fully know why. At first, it was just the only thing that made the days move, going to the gym and putting everything I had into the bar until I couldn't think. Now it's a core part of me. All of it started as a way to not think about Liz.

I built myself into this out of the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I never told anybody that except my family, and I don't know why I'm telling you except that you asked what I was before, and the honest answer is that I was a kid who wasn't there when it counted, and I've spent every day since trying to be there to protect people so it never happens to any one again." The dungeon was quiet around them. Cassandra didn't rush to fill it.

She didn't tell him it wasn't his fault, which he'd have hated, because everyone always told him that and it never once helped. She didn't offer to fix it. She just sat with him. A few seconds passed before she spoke.

"I know why you smile when you say it," she said." The worst things always come out with a smile, because the smile is the only thing holding the face together long enough to say the words." She wasn't accusing him. She was just showing him she saw it, and that seeing it didn't make her back away.

"You don't have to do that. But I understand why you do." Alex looked at her, and something in his chest that had been clenched since the scream let go by a degree.

"What, do you want me to start crying now?"

"If you did, there would be nothing wrong with that; we all need to cry sometimes" Alex threw that option straight out of his mind; he didn't even remember how to cry, nor did he think that was the best thing for him to do, Silence rested for a few seconds before Cassandra continued.

"Thank you for telling me," she said.

"I know what it costs, saying a thing like that out loud." She reclaimed the last of her crystals, stood, and offered him a hand up he didn't need and took anyway.

"Come on. There's supposed to be a boss down here, and I have a theory you fight better when your head's empty. Let's go find out." The boss was down in the dungeon's deeper dark, and it was the hardest thing Alex had fought since the alliance leaders. Not their equal, not a level-twenty horror with a war behind it, but real, a solo dungeon boss well above the trash they'd been clearing, big and armored and fast in a way that made his low perception a problem all over again.

It came at them hard, and for the first stretch it had the better of the exchanges, too quick for Alex to pin, shrugging off the crystal bursts Cassandra hung in its path, and the two of them had to actually work. They found it together.

Cassandra stopped trying to hurt it and started trying to hold it, her crystals reshaping in the air, chains of linked pink diamond snaking out to catch a limb, a leg, dragging at the thing's speed, and it wasn't enough to stop it, but it was enough to slow it, enough to steal the half-second Alex's slow eyes needed to track it. The chains bought him the read. And once he could see it coming, the rest was his. [Level 17 reached.] [Taunt has evolved into Planetary Lock (Rare).] That notification was from the last mob he and Cassandra had killed, but he had not paid it much attention at the time He felt it take hold the instant it landed, a gravitational tether snapping into place between him and the boss, an invisible pull that would not let the thing move too far from him no matter how it fought to. It stopped being a fight he had to chase.

The boss lunged to escape his range, and the tether hauled at it, held it in his orbit, and Alex felt he could tighten it, feed it man, and reel the thing closer, and he did, dragging the boss in against its will onto the point of his glaive while Cassandra's chains held its limbs and her crystals cracked against its flanks.

Between the pull that wouldn't let it leave and the chains that wouldn't let it move, the boss had nowhere to go, and Alex ended it with a Cleaving Strike through a thing that could no longer run, and it came apart, and the deep dark went quiet. They stood in it, both breathing hard, and Alex looked at the new skill sitting on his sheet and understood what he'd just solved. Not his speed, exactly, and not his sight. But if a fast thing couldn't leave, he didn't have to be fast enough to chase it.

He just had to make the world hold it still long enough for him to reach it.

"That was good work," Cassandra said, reclaiming her chains." You should keep me around."

"I'm considering it" They walked back up out of the dungeon as the light was failing, and at the gate, before they went their separate ways to their separate tents, Alex stopped her.

"Cassandra." He meant to keep it simple and mostly managed.

"Thank you. For today. I needed today more than I knew. So. Thank you." She looked at him for a moment, and then she shook her head, and there was something in her face that was almost gentle and almost amused and entirely without weight.

"Alex. You've helped me more times than I could count. The rune profession, every hour you've spent teaching me things you could have kept to yourself." She hitched her kit higher on her shoulder and started to turn toward her tent.

"This was nothing… we should do this again, if you don't mind," she ad aslightlyt embarrassed look when she asked.

"Yeah… of course" And she left him there at the gate in the last of the light, and Alex stood a moment with the word nothing in his ears, knowing it hadn't been nothing at all, and went to his tent lighter than he'd been in a while, and slept.