It didn’t take long before we were back on the road. Erani messaged Ainash to go grab Sylvie and bring her back to us so we could get to the outpost without delay. So once we met back up, we got right back onto the worn dirt trail heading in the direction of the mountains.
Our plan now was essentially just an ambush. We knew that Jon and his soldiers would arrive shortly after we got to the outpost, and so instead of entering we’d stick outside and watch, waiting for an opening to strike while they were off-guard. A simple strategy, made more complex by the reversal of roles we’d be forced to take.
Unfortunately, where normally Ainash and I were close-range fighters who would take the front while people like Sylvie and Erani would take the back line—though, by now, Erani had high enough physical Stats for her to hold her own in close-range combat—this time, due to Jon’s bullshit Spell, Sylvie would have to be the sole fighter keeping him away from us.
Erani, Ainash, and I had all contributed to far too many Human deaths for us to be safe while in his range, and so only Sylvie was safe. She’d have to take the front and hopefully use her basic capabilities to hold him at bay while we peppered him with Spells from afar. Though Ainash couldn’t even do that much. She would most likely be on duty fighting the four soldiers Jon had with him, as long as she could keep away from Jon while doing so.
“Do you know how long the range is on Day of Judgment, exactly?” I asked Erani as we walked.
“Not exactly. But I know it’s somewhat short—probably less than twenty paces, though it might be something like twenty-five. Definitely not more than that, though; it would get a lot more serious discussion around its viability if it was a sniping Spell.”
“Sure seems plenty viable to me,” I muttered.
“Only because of our particular scenario. Imagine trying to fight monsters with it. You’d have no idea how much damage your own Spell will deal until after you already cast it. It’s basically gambling with your life if you aren’t already informed about your exact opponent. Plus, the path to get to it involves taking very few combat Spells to begin with, so it really just puts you in a bad position.”
I shrugged. “I guess. Still, it would be nice to know the specific range.”
Index would be able to tell us the moment we crossed into it, if we knew, was the unsaid part of that thought. With Sylvie with us, I didn’t want to give away the existence of Index, if I didn’t have to.Actually, I thought, Index, can you tell us the exact range on the Spell? I know you couldn’t reveal the full effects, but now that we know some, can you tell us the rest?
…
A few seconds passed with no response, which I wasn’t used to.
Index?
Still no response.
I felt my face instantly morph into an expression of fear—something that I probably shouldn’t have let happen when around people who weren’t in the know, but I couldn’t help it. What was wrong with Index? It never disappeared like that. I wracked through my memory, trying to remember anything that might have—
“Hey, Arlan,” Index’s voice came through to me.
Oh, thank the gods.
“Um, yeah, sorry.”
I frowned. Something was strange about the way Index sounded. Like it was… Index, are you okay?
“Don’t worry about me,” it said. It sounded upset, its voice wavering in a way that reminded me of how my voice would sometimes catch in my throat if I’d been crying recently. “Um, yes, I can tell you, sorry. Erani was right, it’s fifteen paces.”
…Alright. Uh, if there’s—
“I’m sorry,” it repeated. “Just…give me thirty seconds.”
…Sure.
We continued walking for half a minute, none of the others aware that Index and I had spoken. I went ahead and sent a message over to Erani through Ainash with the info it’d given to me, but at this point, the range of Jon’s Spell wasn’t the main thing on my mind.
After what I was pretty sure had been exactly thirty seconds, I heard Index’s voice again. “Okay, so, I’ve spent some time, and I think I can fix this.”
Wait, fix what? Index, if you’re experiencing some kind of malfunction or something, then—
“No, no, not myself,” it said hastily. “S-sorry, I’m just…I don’t know, Humans say they’re ‘frazzled’ sometimes, right? Like, when they’ve had too much to worry about, and they’re confused, and upset, not just with others, but mainly with themselves, and they don’t know what to do, and…that stuff. Right?”
…Yeah, I guess.
“Okay, so then I guess I’m a little frazzled. Sorry. B-but, I was working on myself some, and I think I know what to say to you now.”
About what? I frowned, both confused and worried at how Index was acting.
“R-right, I forgot I didn’t mention. I should’ve known, it says right there on your emotional readout how curious you are. Though, it always feels like your curiosity score is high, so…Anyway. I want to say…” Index paused. “...I’m sorry for mishandling our last conversation.”
Wait, what? I thought back to what Index was talking about. I’d been upset with myself about a lot of things, and then learned about Jon’s Spell, and how it was only dealing so much damage to me because I’d killed so many people, and…Yeah, Index had tried to cheer me up, and I’d gotten pissed at it for trying to downplay what had happened. Index, if that’s what you’re talking about, it’s really not a big—
“I know you’re not very angry at me anymore,” it interrupted. “I can see that you don’t think it’s my problem, or anything. But I did it wrong. I-I’m sorry. I wasn’t made to work with emotions, or morals, or anything like that, and I tried to do it anyway. I’ve been trying to get better at giving advice regarding morality, and I thought it would be good practice to try and cheer you up, because what was the worst that could happen when you were already upset, but I didn’t realize how much more upset you could end up getting, and I only made it worse, and I can still see some residual emotions leftover from that so I know you’re still not even healed from the damage I caused from my attempt at trying to cheer you up, so I really made things worse, and you were really mad at me, and you still are a little, and now I’m thinking what if you don’t trust me as much permanently, right?”
Index—
“Like what if, two years from now, you’re going to die, and I try to give you advice that will save you, and then you don’t trust me, so you don’t listen, or you hesitate, or whatever, and that kills you, and if I’d just been better at my job here, or learned to butt out earlier, or to not engage with you at all, then you wouldn’t have died, n-not that you’re definitely going to die and I’m definitely going to save you, or anything, but it’s just that it’s possible, and so that means that by making a mistake here, I’ve possibly just condemned you to your death, which is the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to do, and—”
Index, I said. I…It’s okay, really.
“But what if it’s not? Right?! I-I mean, I get that you can say it’s okay, because you don’t see it like I do, but I made a mistake. I was wrong. I’m not supposed to do that. I’m not supposed to ever do that! I mean, what if you stabbed Erani, right? Right in the chest, you stuck a knife in her heart. And she kept saying to you, ‘it’s okay, it’s okay,’ but no matter what she says, you know it’s not okay, because you can see her bleeding, and she might die because of you, and that’s simply not allowed to happen.”
No, you don’t need to…I paused, unsure of what to say. I was completely caught off-guard by this barrage of words by Index. It’d never struck me as the insecure type, the kind of person who would need comforting; honestly, I’d always felt like it could have benefited from more criticism. But now…I took a breath, trying to calm my mind and figure out what to say. Index, don’t stress about it. Everyone makes mistakes, and I was already just pissed off in general, so—”
“No, not everyone makes mistakes! Some of us make mistakes, and some of us were very specifically made to never make a single mistake in their entire artificial life. Some of us were created with the express purpose to shore up the mistakes that others make. If I make mistakes, then you can’t trust me. I—How could I ever be seen as anything other than a worthless machine, if I can’t fulfill such a basic purpose?”
Hey, hey, don’t call yourself that. You’re not worthless, and you’re not a machine, either. I…Listen, I’m really sorry for getting upset at you like that. Even if I was mad at myself, I shouldn’t have gotten mad at you, too. I thought back to my last words to Index in that conversation—”shut the fuck up, get the fuck out of my head, and stop acting like you know shit about stuff you are not capable of understanding.” I couldn’t have regretted them more, now. I didn’t mean any of that. I was mad, and half of that anger was directed at myself, anyway.
“Only about three eighths of it, actually,” Index corrected. It sounded teary-eyed. Sometimes I forgot since I couldn’t see it, but it apparently had some sort of a physical form, and I hadn’t even considered the idea that it could cry, in the past. “I, I know you’re not mad at me anymore, but I’m going to try to make it right, anyway. So, I’ve been working on something to say, and…Here it is: Okay, Arlan, so you’re upset that you contributed to the killing of forty-three people. And I won’t downplay it, or try to lie to you; you seem to think, yourself, that you are the sole killer of these people. So sure. You’ve killed forty-three people. Jon, as well as a lot of people, think that you’re evil because of that. Because by being alive, you not only cause the deaths of many other Humans, but you, yourself, kill them. That is the situation. Jon says that you ‘refuse to give up your life to save the many.’ I think that, to some extent, those words resonated with you. I think you’re upset with yourself because you don’t think you’re strong enough to make the decision to let yourself die and let many more live. I think you look at your actions, your attempts at fighting back, your attempts to save yourself, and all you see is some bitter, selfish child who cries about the fact that he lost a game.
“I do not see that when I look at you. I think Jon is trying to talk about the larger goal, the greater good, and ironically, he’s thinking too small. He wants to let the Demons win and to let you die, because by the simple numbers of it all, a single Human dying is a lot less than the thousands—maybe even tens of thousands—that would lose their lives as a result of your fight against the Demons. And if you look at it from the perspective he wants to look at it from, he would be completely correct. You should die.
“But that perspective is stupid. He wants to look through this lens of sacrificing the few to save the many, and I say that if that’s what he wants, it’s exactly what you’re doing. The Demons represent an existential threat to Humanity. They represent an organization of beings with no moral code, with no responsibility held to keeping people alive, and with the power needed to strip the entire Overworld of every living thing on its surface, if needed. The only thing they don’t have is a motive. They don’t have any reason to dedicate the resources to kill everything on the Overworld, so they don’t. Yet. As we can see from your own existence, there are some circumstances that can convince the Demons to come down from their hole and try to exterminate the Humans. And if there exists an incentive like this, one that can cause them to stick their toe out and test the waters of conquest, then there probably exists an incentive to do much, much more. If that happens, it won’t be one Human, or one thousand Humans, or one hundred thousand Humans that die. It will be every last one of them.
“Arlan, you are the fighting spirit of Humanity. The pursuit of justice, of safety, of perfection, whatever you want to call it. If you can survive the assault of the Demons, then you prove that Humanity can survive, as well. And I know you, and I know you won’t stop at just surviving. If you continue, and you survive, and you get stronger, you’ll destroy the Demons. You’ll destroy the threat at its source. Jon can say he’s trying to save a kingdom, but you say you’re trying to save everything. He pales in comparison to you. Arlan, I don’t know much about morality, or about Humans at all, really, but I can say that out of everyone in the world, I could not have been assigned a better teacher. I was trying, before, to use tricks and tactics to get you to forget about the deaths. I was being dishonest with you. But I think that all you really need is to see the truth.”
I’d quietly listened through what Index had said, at first just because I’d hoped doing that would calm it down, but quickly I’d become a little enraptured in its speech. I supposed it made sense that Index could say the perfect thing to me, considering it lived in my head, but still. It articulated some feelings I hadn’t been able to explain. This whole time, I’d been thinking to myself that most of what I did was predicated on revenge. I didn’t like admitting it, but it had been true, in my mind. The Demons had wronged me, they’d wronged the people I cared about, so I was going to slay them. That was the beginning and end of what I felt.
For a while, that had been enough for me. But I had to admit, revenge as an emotion had a way of petering out. Maybe the motivation stuck around, but the righteous, justifying anger slowly seeped away, until I was just left with a desire to see the Demons suffer. And when I was shown how my own desire led to others being harmed…I lost sight of what I wanted. Why it was important.
Index brought it all back into focus.
A fire burned behind my eyes.
Thank you, I said, trusting that it would be able to look beyond just my words, into my mind, and understand how thankful I really felt. Index, you keep referring to yourself as a “creation” and a “machine.” That’s not true. You aren’t some artificial thing with an artificial life. You’re not just a being with a purpose to make me happy and nothing more. You’re my friend. If you ever want something, or I can help make you happier, just tell me what to do.
“I have something to request, then,” it said, its voice more calm now.
What is it?
“I want you to kill Jon.”
You sure that isn’t just what you know will give me the best chances of survival?
“No, I don’t think it is. You’re probably better off killing the four soldiers and then threatening Jon into running away and giving yourself more time to get more powerful before confronting him later. However, he made you upset, and so I would really, really enjoy seeing him tortured to death.”
We’ll see about the torture, I said. That part probably wasn’t going to happen. But I can promise you a death, at the very least.
A few hours later, Erani, Ainash, and I all laid up on a hill looking down at the outpost that housed the trio of border guards, as well as Ripley. None of them knew we were here; we’d gone straight to set up our ambush without showing ourselves to them first. They effectively served as bait, unfortunately, and that meant trying to make sure they acted natural so Jon wouldn’t get suspicious.
Sylvie was stationed up closer to the outpost, hopefully to draw fire and attention from Jon while we attacked him from outside his Spell’s range.
We’d arrived early, having moved much more quickly in this timeline so we could set up before they got here, meaning we were now in a situation to simply wait it out. Jon would enter the outpost with his four guards in about twenty minutes, where they’d speak for some time, and then presumably Jon would throw in that coin to fill the place with water.
We would charge in during that time spent speaking, before he could seal them into the outpost and drown them, and hopefully use the fact that we had the five enemies all stuck in a small enclosed space to make good use of Erani’s Explosive Firebolts and clear them out quickly. There was obviously the problem of Ripley and the three guards also being in that enclosed space, but I did have a lot of movement-based debuffs, meaning I could hopefully manipulate the positioning of the enemies to keep them close together while allowing our allies space to keep away.
That was the ideal scenario, which would hopefully give us a victory without allowing our enemies even a single attack. But we weren’t delusional, so that was why we had Sylvie in place to draw aggression from a hopefully weakened and damaged Jon in the case that he escaped and came at us.
As we waited for the group of five to come, I glanced around ensuring everyone was in place. Erani and Ainash were lying next to me, Erani staring ahead and watching the outpost carefully, and Ainash…
“Is that a beetle?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she responded, looking down at the insect crawling across her hand. She raised it up to her shoulder, and it crawled onto her, wandering along her back and neck as she lay prone on the ground.
“...Why do you have a beetle?”
“Want to get better at training Goblins, but getting practice with them is hard. Whenever make a mistake, have to kill one of them. It is hard to get more Goblins when have already killed a lot of them. So, instead, will just train other animals until I am very good at training.”
“Right,” I said, “I guess that makes sense. Though, I’m not sure a beetle—”
“His name is Kabuto,” Ainash interrupted.
“Sure,” I responded. Honestly, I was mainly just surprised she was able to transfer a name through our mental communication; I always found doing that extremely difficult. Maybe working on verbal communication with the Goblins was helping her even more than I realized. “Anyway, I’m not sure Kabuto is going to be very similar to a Goblin. So it might be hard to—”
“Hey,” Erani whispered, nudging me in the side.
I stopped speaking and looked over. Off in the distance, approaching the outpost from up in the mountains, was a group of five. “Is that…”
“Yeah. Jon and the soldiers. They aren’t supposed to be here yet, right?”
“They shouldn’t be. Supposed to be another, like, fifteen minutes before they arrive.”
“It was actually eighteen minutes in the future when they arrived here in the previous timeline,” Index said.
“So why are they here?”
“No idea.”
Sylvie, hiding behind some foliage, looked back up at us with a questioning expression. I shrugged. Maybe something had caused a knock-on effect that led to them arriving more quickly?
We were all well-hidden, so we simply stayed put and watched as the group of Jon and his soldiers walked up to the door to the outpost. I wondered if Ripley would give them the welcome she gave me—an instant axe to the face—or if she would hide, having seen the larger group. I felt like it would be best if they were all let in first, but if Ripley came out with an instant attack, it would still leave us in a good position to ambush the soldiers partway through the fight, taking them down at the perfect moment.
Jon stepped up to the outpost door, and paused, staring at it. I frowned, wondering what he was waiting for. Then, one of his soldiers—the one with the maul—came up to him and started speaking with him. They had a conversation that lasted for some time, and then Jon turned back around. Only, he didn’t turn to face the door, he turned to face the wilderness. To face us.
Then, completely ignoring the outpost, Jon and the four guards started walking straight in our direction. The guards readied their weapons, and Jon held out his hands, fingers practically crackling with energy.