It was 5 am and Mark was shouldering a drunken Eliot into the apartment. Snow fell outside, under a sky of blue auroras. Breath fogged until Mark shut the door behind them, and everything was warm again.

  “Goblis ‘re ucking terrifing,” Eliot slurred.

  Mark smiled a little bit, getting Eliot across the living room and toward his own room, saying, “I know, buddy. You want a cleansing yet?”

  “Fuck no!” Eliot stated, quite clearly. And then he saw his bed. “My bed!”

  Eliot flopped onto the edge of the bed and almost fell onto the floor, but Mark helped him all the way in. Mark pulled Eliot’s shoes off and then rolled him under the covers, though he wanted to sprawl out in every direction, so Mark needed to maneuver him around more than expected. Eliot was already half-asleep, still wearing his clothes and half under the covers, and that’s just how it was going to be. His vector was already nodding inward, his breath already slowing down.

  Mark cleaned him up a little bit, making sure he wasn’t going to vomit in his sleep, or do other inconvenient things—

  Eliot mumbled something, his vector slamming outward again as he opened his eyes just a little, to look at Mark.

  Mark winced. “Er. Sorry. I cleaned you up a bit, but I left the alcohol alone.”

  Eliot didn’t seem to care about Mark’s words at all. He was focused on something far beyond this space, and also right on Mark. “You could have died. That cliffside could have hit you. And Isoko. But it didn’t.”

  Eliot locked eyes with Mark for a long moment.

  And that proved to be too much for him.

  Eliot passed out.

  … Mark tucked him in, making sure he had extra blankets because it was winter out there. And then Mark left the room and shut the door. For a while, Mark stood alone in the apartment, looking straight ahead at the darkened corners of the kitchen and then at the sliding glass porch door. The world was blue and shimmering with winter auroras in the dark of 5 am. The sun had yet to hint at its arrival.

  Mark shivered, even though he wasn’t cold.

  … Yeah.

  They could have died.

  And Mark had never felt more alive.

  A little while later, while Mark was sipping soda, scrolling through quest requests from the settlement, and waiting for Isoko and Sally to get back from the party at the Sacredcuts, Mark ended up just sitting there. Thinking. He needed a way to be alerted to large attacks that came from outside his ability to sense. Usually, those sorts of attacks were so large and pointed that they were impossible to mistake.

  But that mountain throw...

  That mountain throw might have had vectors of attack, but Mark didn’t feel them. He might have been too concentrated on killing goblins and the Stone Shaman goblin and his cohort could have been noise in the churn. Had Mark even sensed them at all?

  No.

  Or maybe yes?

  Maybe Mark was lying to himself that he had sensed them, and yeah, that felt closer to the truth. Because Mark had almost died there, and he hadn’t seen it coming at all.

  Mark was a capable spotter, and he could function on his own fine, but one set of eyes was never enough. Eliot had thousands of eyes, when he wanted them, but he wasn’t even on the battlefield… Which was probably why Eliot saw that attack coming at all. There were some harsh truths to be had regarding ‘no one fights alone’ and ‘to fight alone is to die’, but Mark needed to know when big things were happening around him, because the Shaman goblin had broken Mark’s electronics, and thus his communication with Eliot back in the settlement. If the goblins had done the two actions in reverse… if they had had any electronic Tinkerers at all…

  Then maybe even Isoko’s line of communication with the settlement would have been broken.

  At least Mark’s spellbreaker, which he had worn all during that goblin fight, had never gone off. Nothing had tried attacking him directly in that way… or if they did, then they didn’t get through Mark’s Power Level resistances, or his Union-buffing. That made him feel slightly better about… about a lot.

  But not good enough.

  Mark let his phone fall from his hands, onto the couch, between his legs, and then he leaned back on the arm rest and stared at the ceiling for a long moment. He breathed in the good, and exhaled the bad. Black miasma filtered into the world like smoke threading into the cracks in reality, and soon, Mark felt better.

  And then he picked his phone back up…

  Ah.

  Right.

  There was that solution.

  “You need a livium core, Quark, and then you won’t break.”

  Quark flickered silver, taking over his phone’s screen for a moment. And then he went away again. He had just heard his name, but he hadn’t been asked for, so he returned to the background. He wasn’t a real person, anyway. He was an ‘it’. Even with a livium core, which is what made an AI into a True AI, as long as Mark got a small core then Quark would still be soulless, and therefore not a real person.

  Mark didn’t want to bring a person into the world to conscript them into wars against monsters. He would not make an AI into a slave. No slavery concerns here! Because yeah. That would be bad. Repugnant, really. But an AI that couldn’t break during combat? That seemed like a great idea.

  Mark might not be able to see everything out there himself, but Eliot could, and Eliot had saved the entire team today, but those moments after killing the Shaman had been kinda rough, looking back on it. Isoko had kept her coms working, but Mark’s had been destroyed. If more warnings had needed to go out, then Mark would have been… Well. It would have been bad.

  So Mark needed coms that didn’t break, and since he couldn’t Tactile Telekinesis, then he needed a livium core AI.

  Did the settlement point reward system have livium for sale?

  Mark opened up his phone, looking at the rewards again…

  And he couldn’t find ‘livium core’ under the alphabetical listing.

  “Livable Hut, Live Bait… live live live… living… Lixivium? What the heck is ‘lixivium’?” Mark added, “Quark.”

  Quark flickered silver on his phone. “Lixivium is a solution of potash and water, resulting in alkaline salts. Also known as lye. The lixivium for sale at the settlement is a traditional item, from traditional methods. Alchemists are the usual buyers.”

  Quark went away, revealing the list again.

  “Huh,” Mark said. And then he frowned, looking at the list. “No livium. Whelp! I guess I’ll ask around tomorrow…” He glanced toward the glass porch door, to the lake in the distance and the sky overhead. It was ice blue out there and snowing, but the sky was lightening up a little. A glance at the time showed 6:57. It was pretty much ‘tomorrow’ already. “…So where are Isoko and Sally?”

  Not two minutes later, Isoko and Sally’s voices drifted on the air from outside. Both of them were laughing about something, and then they came inside and saw Mark there.

  “You’re still awake!” Isoko said, grinning. “Let’s go out and kill something! Beetles are attacking and they need all hands on deck!”

  Sally snorted. “It’s not that bad!”

  “Bad enough,” Isoko countered, “And lots of points, too!”

  Sally agreed, “So let’s go, Mark!”

  Mark grinned. “Eliot is out cold and I’m headed that way too, now that you two are back.”

  Isoko groaned. “You can’t sleep either; I know you can’t!”

  Sally said, “But the winter beetles, Mark!”

  “Nope,” Mark said. “Sorry.”

  Sally turned to Isoko. “You and me. Girls day!”

  “Girls day!” Isoko said, headed to her room. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  Mark kinda wanted to go, too, but… “How about we all go out tomorrow?”

  Isoko groaned in her room. She was putting on her armor, as she said, “Nope! Tomorrow… Today? No; it’s still tomorrow. Tomorrow is magic with Elaria. Today is a beetle slaughter!”

  Mark hummed. “Well, have fun.”

  Sally and Isoko were both out the door within five minutes, each of them dressed for the hunt and eager to get out there.

  - - - -

  Sally snatched her blade out of the broken blue shell of the winter beetle, and she was just fast enough.

  The interior goop of the beetle flash-froze in the air, and the beetle itself, which was about two meters across, also flash-froze, its guts and the rest of its body trying to lock on to Sally’s blade before she could take it out. Not two seconds after it died, it was now an ice pop of splashed icicles and frozen, sticky innards. Other beetles came this way.

  The winter beetle survival strategy was not individual survival, but survival of the horde, and if one beetle died to take out one threat, then that was good enough for them. There were thousands of them out here, after all. Or at least there had been.

  Sally had made the mistake of not removing her blade fast enough the first two times, but by the fourth kill she had done what she needed to do, and fast enough, too.

  And now the battle was over.

  Frozen beetle corpses dotted the land like splashed ice dotted with blue beetle shell and spiky black legs.

  Sally breathed deep the winter air, the chill of it refreshing, and then she billowed out a small cloud of mist, the heat of her body making a spectacle of a simple breath. Sally liked that the most about winter. Or maybe she liked the hot chocolate? Hard to say.

  Isoko walked this way, grinning a bit in the morning light, shining platinum and looking good. Too bad she was straight. Still nice to look at, though.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Isoko grinned as she approached. “We need to get you a girl, girl!”

  Sally burst out laughing. “At least Mark doesn’t read my emotions out loud! Holy shit, Isoko.”

  “What? It’s just us on this side of the field!” Isoko grinned. And then she said, “Sorry you couldn’t come with us yesterday. It was terrifying.”

  Sally breathed in again, feeling some kinda way. Isoko got under her skin pretty easily sometimes, and in a way that Sally did not mind. There was no point in denying Isoko’s words. Sally did miss the fight, and it pissed her off.

  “I was watching from the command center. I about had a heart attack when that crater wall went sailing at you guys. Big things moving fast is scary.”

  “What was really scary was that I didn’t feel it coming. No vector.”

  Sally hummed, nodding. Being in the field without a proper scout was perhaps the scariest thing possible in the wilds. Monsters were killable, but only if you knew about them, as Barba and that doomed crew found out when they came up against those invisible goblins.

  … Sally regarded the battlefield.

  The battlefield was empty, the quest to kill the winter beetles was done. Or at least their part was done. They were about four kilometers from the city, and so were a bunch of other people. Sally noted teams to the far left and right, either walking in or still killing their beetles. There were a lot of these fuckers. Apparently they came out with the winter auroras.

  Normal creatures turned to monsters based on stuff that Sally didn’t quite understand, but which she knew how it worked. Theoretically. When the souls of living things had not yet experienced a mana baptism strong enough to awaken their astral soul, like humans and goblins and artificial intelligences, and if they were old enough, then they got the Tutorial. Otherwise, things just got baptized by mana out there all willy nilly, and they turned monstrous. They got Powers based on the mana that touched them, that awakened their own mana inside. The System categorized it all, though, but Malaqua wasn’t talking about how it all worked, for real.

  All Sally knew was that monsters were empowered by magic just as much as people.

  Goblins were clearly a people, but humanity was their desired breeding ground, so humans and goblins could never be friends. It was kinda sad, really. Kinda infuriating, nay, enraging, if you knew something closer to the truth. The Warlords of Drakarok, the Chosen of his Executioners, held many secrets about the true nature of the War For Life, and Sally had learned a few of them after being Chosen, after taking in Drakarok and… ‘removing’ the demon Leash from Arana’s body.

  Goblins were a product of demonic influence, meant to kill anything and everything they could, to wipe the slate of Earth and Daihoon clean, but the goblins had slipped their leash long ago and lost the favor of the demons, and now they were a pest species. But some of them… some of them still had some of that old true power inside of them.

  Sometimes, a goblin —or more likely, goblins— turned out to be a real problem for everyone.

  There were no goblins on this battlefield, though. Mark and Isoko and the others had killed them all.

  And Sally had been with Eliot, watching from afar, unable to do anything at all.

  Sally blinked away a deep emotion that was both raging and sorrowful, and said, “There are a lot of scary things out there.”

  Isoko nodded. “Yup. What scares you?”

  Demons, Sally wanted to say. But she didn’t. That would result in Sally needing to explain, and that was the exact opposite of what she wanted to do right now, or ever—

  Isoko turned around and looked at the world. “Winter is really different here, and I think I love it.”

  It almost looked like winter in Memphi, but more fantastical, with snow on the ground and the trees. But the trees also had ice growing on the edges where the wind curled, and on the tree tops where knives of leaves sliced the freezing air. It was probably negative 15 out here right now, and it would get colder.

  The winter auroras overhead were like long snakes in the sky, and there were 5 of them. That number could change as the auroras slid around in the heavens. Apparently ‘one aurora winters’ were the stuff of nightmares. Apocalyptic winters. 9-15 auroras was normal. 5 was a deep winter. Historically, there had been 2-aurora winters, and those were really bad. Weakly-Skilled people would die in those sorts of winters, without taking proper precautions.

  One Aurora Winters were spoken about like Magefalls, causing catastrophic freezing everywhere they touched. During those winters, kaijus were almost nothing compared to the winter itself.

  Sally barely felt the cold. It was a pretty fine day, really. No kaiju today, probably.

  Besides that, General Aurora could change the sky if she wanted to prevent a bad winter. Weather Witches from the Empire could do the same, and they would, if the Winter Auroras joined together at all. The bands of light in the sky would reach the Empire of Aluatha in a few months.

  But for now, the Winter Auroras were here, and Sally kinda loved the soft blue glow everywhere. Even with the sun shining through the blue, it was all still mostly blue. Softly.

  “It’s nice, yeah,” Sally said.

  … But Sally wanted to talk about something more serious.

  It was something she had been putting off for a while.

  But it was just Isoko and her, and so…

  Sally looked down at Isoko, and Isoko whipped her head toward Sally, and Sally knew Isoko knew some of what was coming, but not all of it.

  Sally asked, “When the time comes, when Mark talks to demons, will you be there to keep him on the right path?”

  “… What do you mean by that?”

  Of course she was offended. Sally would have been offended, too, if anyone had come at her like this.

  Sally explained, “I worry that he’s going into magic and something dangerous will happen. But you’re there with him and he’s not actually attached to any god at all, so he’s not protected from the worst magics like you are, so he’s in danger, Isoko. Pure and simple. Magic is dangerous, and Mark is in danger.” She had been working on that line for a few days now and she was glad Isoko directly asked her what she meant by that. Sally hadn’t been too sure what she would have done or said if Isoko went off the rails too early in the conversation. Sally relaxed a little, as she saw Isoko relax, too. “I worry about him, and he’s too battle-focused to worry about all the shit he’s getting into. I know Mark. If he finds something in magic that will allow him to kill better, or guard or remove a weakness, Mark is going to go for it. He’s already talking to Archmage Blackthorn, and… And I’ll leave it at that.”

  Isoko was judging Sally, blatantly. She had a lot of thoughts behind those blank platinum eyes, and Sally appreciated that. Isoko was good people, even if she was a villain.

  And then Isoko did something Sally never expected.

  Isoko said, “Mark is going to be tempted a thousand different times, all of them worse than the last. But you don’t have to worry about Mark going to the demons. You have to worry about the demons giving him an impossible choice, and then him killing people to avoid that choice. That’s what is going to happen when the demons come for him, Sally. He won’t fall. He’ll murder everything around him instead.”

  Sally found, surprisingly, that she was perfectly fine with that option.

  And yet…

  “Why do you say that?” Sally asked.

  “Mark is a good person, at his core. He’s been roughed up some, but he’s still a good person, and he has a firm position in society that will keep him that way. So how do you break a good person, so that they go to the demons?”

  “… Oh,” Sally said, knowing the real danger Isoko was worried about. It was a danger she had personally experienced, though she was pretty sure Isoko didn’t know that.

  Isoko nodded. “The danger is the demons turning the world against him, and stripping away all his support structures.”

  Sally went, “… Yeah.”

  “They tried going after him once and it failed, but not completely. I’m sure that people, and the demon Leash, viewed the talk Mark had with Leash at the bottom of the Light Box as a success, for a demon getting a talk at all is a success for the demon, if you squint real hard, but it really wasn’t a success at all. People like Tartu don’t know that, but Mark and the demon know that Leash failed. Mark is still Mark, and now the demons know that they have to kill everyone around him first to get to him, or they have to turn the world against him in other ways.” Isoko stood solid.

  She was right, but she was also so very wrong.

  Mark and Sally were the same in some ways. One of those ways was the need for power. Both of them had been short shits in a world full of big people, and both of them had done what they needed to do to get ahead. Sally had gone to Drakarok even before her Tutorial, and Mark had gone to Addashield.

  Mark would do whatever he needed to do to get more power, because his goal was never to just explore the world like he said.

  Mark wanted to kill all monsters, and that required so much more than what he had right now.

  Too much more.

  So much, that to have that much power would make him a god or the devil, and there was no in-between.

  Isoko had the right of it, in some ways, but in other ways she was lacking...

  But now Isoko Looked Sally in the eyes, asking her, “So do you want to tell me what happened to you and your previous team, for real? Or do you want to keep dancing around that important background information? Because, if you ask me, you’re the one who is prodding Mark into going sideways by asking me to ‘look out for him’, as if it is something that needs to be done because he can’t be trusted with himself.”

  Sally stood still, feeling more seen than she had ever felt seen before.

  Isoko continued, “I don’t have to look out for Mark, Sally. I have to look out for all the outside threats coming after him, through me, through Eliot, and also through you.”

  Sally exhaled mist as she stared down at Isoko, her thoughts scattered on the fog.

  Isoko was perfectly still, like a metal statue, as she looked up at Sally, waiting for her to say something.

  Sally breathed again, then she looked out across the winter world. She did not meet Isoko’s platinum gaze as she said, “Maybe we can hunt some more beetles and I’ll tell you… what happened… later.”

  Isoko nodded. And then, like it was nothing at all, she pulled out her phone and started tapping out words, saying, “Looks like… No more beetles on this side. Western side could use some backup.” She put away her phone. “Let’s go!”

  Isoko started jogging that way...

  Sally caught up soon, feeling a bunch of different ways, and then she was running and a minor horde of winter beetles were prowling south, following the winter auroras, and they were too close to the town, though they’d still miss the city walls by 50-ish meters. It wasn’t enough of a margin to leave them alone.

  Sally and Isoko got to killing.

  Twenty minutes later the beetles were done and Sally and Isoko walked, silently, to the west-north gate, north of the river outlet. They got inside the settlement, still silent, and then they got on the warm tram. It was just them on the tram, riding inward, and now that Sally wasn’t moving she was cold again, even though the tram was warm.

  The farmlands were to the north, most of them located under temporary winter greenhouses...

  Sally stood up and pulled the tram stop cord.

  She got off of the tram, silently, and Isoko followed.

  There, by the side of the river, far away from most cameras and most people and feeling terribly cold, Sally told Isoko about what happened to Arana, her girlfriend of a few months, and her old team, and the demon-conspiring noble that ruined everything. She spoke about how she had needed to kill Arana, because Arana had accepted Leash inside so that Sally, trapped in an iron maiden of a suit of armor, didn’t say ‘yes’ first.

  Sally barely remembered how Isoko reacted, only that it was with kindness.