Chapter 61: Why Do I Care?: Culmination Arc [22]

The ceiling was white.

Arthur knew this ceiling. He’d stared at it twice already in this body, which was two times more than he’d like. The healing wing had a specific smell: something medicinal cut with the faint sweetness of residual healing magic that settled into the air and stayed there.

He moved his right hand.

It moved a half-second after he told it to. Slow and imprecise, like something woken from too deep a sleep. He looked at it. The skin was intact where the rock spikes had gone in. The knuckles were fine. The healers had done their job.

He still couldn’t feel any of it properly. Both hands numb from the wrist down.

He sat up. His head protested immediately — a deep throb behind both eyes that pulsed once and settled into a steady, dull pressure. His chest felt occupied. Not painful. Just full of something that didn’t have room to be there yet. The aetheric blood was still thin. He could feel the specific hollow of it, the absence where the reserve should be sitting.

Welya was in the chair beside the bed. She looked at him when he sat up, registered that he was conscious and upright, and said nothing. Which was its own version of relief.

Velja was leaning against the wall with his wine. He tilted his head. "Good morning."

"What time is it."

"Late afternoon. A few hours." He pushed off the wall. "Short version or full?"

"Full."

Velja told him everything. His voice was easy, unhurried, the same register he used for everything — and underneath it Arthur caught the specific care of a person choosing words to minimize how bad things sounded without actually lying about them.

Elias going on Elven Tears mid-format. The blue flames. The temperature climbing until Auros was blistering on his feet and Kreasial couldn’t hold her ground. Xavier ending it with something involving light that cleared the entire coliseum and brought Elias down in one hit, body intact but bleeding from both eyes when he fell.

Class B eliminated.

Class A and Class F advancing to the third category.

Arthur listened to all of it and filed it in sequence.

The Eyes hadn’t lied. That was the first thing he registered. He’d seen Elias take something red, Elias had taken something red, and people had been hurt by what it turned him into. The difference was when. Whatever version of this story had existed before Arthur arrived, the Elven Tears hadn’t appeared in the second format. His interference had shifted the chain of events enough to pull it forward. Earlier and less controlled was worse, not better.

He looked at Welya. At Velja.

Undamaged. Here.

At least this version hadn’t touched the people it was always supposed to touch.

The healing wing door opened.

Theodore walked in first. Clean bandage on his left shoulder, the right side of his jaw slightly bruised, his bellus very still on his collar. He saw Arthur sitting upright and a small, specific smile arrived on his face. Not wide. Just real.

Kreasial came in behind him with a grin wide enough to read from across the room. She crossed directly to the bed, planted both fists on the mattress, and leaned forward.

"Third category," she said. "You’re welcome."

Arthur looked at her. At the split lip she hadn’t had before the format and the way she was still slightly favouring her left side. "You’re hurt."

"Everyone’s hurt. Third category." She held one thumb up.

Velja laughed from the wall. "The final format runs in two days. They’ve given everyone time to rest. Or train, if that’s how you prefer to rest." He looked at Arthur for a moment. "I want to say something." His voice stayed casual. That was just how Velja delivered things that mattered. "I’m proud of what you showed out there today. Genuinely."

Arthur held that for a second and didn’t know what to do with it, so he moved past it.

"Elias," he said. "What happened after."

Kreasial straightened. "Family’s being questioned. He’s in intensive recovery. Apparently the drug tore through him pretty badly from the inside." She crossed her arms. "I overheard someone saying it was some kind of substance. Enhancement thing."

Arthur said nothing.

He was thinking about Elias’s inner jacket pocket. The vial he’d lifted during the break. He’d held it, felt the weight of it, crushed it in his palm before the second format started, and thought that was the end of the problem.

He hadn’t considered that a person who sourced one vial might have sourced two.

He hadn’t thought about it at all. He’d found the visible thing and treated it as the whole thing and moved on. And because of that, Elias had gone into a format with a second vial in his system, destroyed his body in the process for power.

He breathed in through his nose.

Roz was sitting beside the bed on the mattress edge, bow tie straight, red eyes forward. Not speaking. Just present.

Arthur looked at the ceiling.

This wasn’t his problem to begin with. He’d been telling himself some version of that since the first week. He was a reader. He’d landed in a body that didn’t belong to him, in a story that wasn’t his, in a world he’d only ever experienced through a screen. He died. Technically. He had no debts here, no obligations, no history with anyone in this room that went back further than a few weeks.

He looked at Vexis.

Vexis was hovering near the window, not saying anything. Just there, the way he’d been there since the platform, quiet in the way that meant something was registering but he hadn’t decided what to do with it yet.

Why do I care this much.

Arthur thought about it the way he thought about all problems he couldn’t immediately solve. Just laid it flat and looked at it.

I’m a reader. I came from somewhere else. I died in that somewhere else. This isn’t my body. I didn’t choose these people. I didn’t ask to be here. The story was already broken before I showed up and I don’t owe it anything. Elias Ignion is not my responsibility. The Elven Tears supply chain is not my responsibility.

Welya had been sitting in vexis’s room for five days the last time. She hadn’t said a word about it after except don’t do something stupid again. He hadn’t asked her to do that.

Theodore had gotten back up after he already knew the wind wasn’t going to break the stone wall, because getting back up was the only thing he had left. He hadn’t asked Theodore to do that either.

Kreasial had sprinted across the platform to help me. Grinned the whole time, because that was who she was.

He hadn’t asked any of them to be who they were.

His eyes moved from Welya to Theodore to Kreasial to Velja to Roz.

To Vexis by the window, still watching him, still not saying anything.

Why do I want a happy ending for these people.

Why did I say that?

He didn’t have a clean answer. He’d been in this world for weeks. He’d bled in it, learned to aim in it, learned the specific weight of its dark. He’d sat in a bathtub and said something true and meant it. He still meant it. He just hadn’t realised until now that it had stretched wider somewhere along the way, past the one person it started with, out to a room full of people he’d known for less than a semester and couldn’t seem to stop giving a damn about.

In his original world he had a desk and cold coffee and an internet connection, a job he never really liked. And three hundred comments on a story that was never going to be finished. He had been very sure, in that world, that he wasn’t particularly interested in people.

He looked at Vexis.

Vexis was still watching him. Still quiet.

Arthur looked away.

He guessed, without being able to make it sound any cleaner than this, that somewhere between the first death flag and the floor of the coliseum he had taken a liking to this world and the people it had put in front of him. He didn’t know what that meant yet in terms of what he was supposed to do with it.

He looked at Kreasial.

"Did you actually win us that spot," he said, "or did the green-haired woman just get tired?"

Kreasial’s expression went flat immediately. "Excuse me—"

Theodore made a sound that was almost a laugh. First one Arthur had heard from him all day.

"Third category," Arthur said. "Good."

He lay back down. Stared at the ceiling. The hollow in his chest was still there, the thin reserve still recovering. His hands were still mostly numb. His eye still had a faint throb at the corner where it had closed.

He had two days.

He closed his eyes.