Chapter Sixteen

  It took almost an hour, but eventually Jeremy stopped crying and fell asleep.

  The moment he did, Miranda’s eyes snapped open.

  Gently, so as not to disturb him, she laced her fingers around his and squeezed his hand. Letting him lay there and suffer had been one of the most heartrending things she’d ever done. If it had taken him five more minutes to fall asleep, she may not have been able to stop herself from rolling over and hugging him until the pain went away. Even now, it took more effort than she’d expected just to get out of bed.

  But she couldn’t afford to be distracted. Not tonight.

  Moving carefully, she was able to slip free of his grasp without waking him. She wanted to say that it was the combination of her natural balance as a Faun and her skills as a Cat Burglar that did it, but after the day he’d had, poor Jeremy was so deep asleep that she could probably have jumped on the bed without waking him. Even so, she moved as cautiously and quietly as she could. The last thing she needed was for him to wake up in the middle of the night and think she’d abandoned him.

  As she stood up, though, Jeremy’s hand slid down the side of her waist, his fingers unconsciously caressing her hip and thigh before falling down onto the mattress. She paused.

  What the flame are you doing? she asked herself in disbelief.

  For thirteen years, all she had wanted was to look into Jeremy’s eyes and know that he was the one looking back at her. She had missed literally everything about him so much, from the adorably dorky way he obsessed over anything that caught his interest, to the way he blushed so easily whenever she said anything remotely suggestive. How many nights had she spent lying awake, wishing with every fiber of her being that she could talk to him, hug him, kiss him?

  Tonight her prayers had finally been answered, and she was already trying to ditch him?

  Miranda found herself reaching toward him, wanting to trace her fingers across his face just to prove to herself that he was really there. The urge to stay here with him was almost more than she could resist. All she had to do was lie back down and pretend everything was all right. Maybe if she pretended hard enough, she would even start to believe it.

  She stopped, her fingers less than an inch away from his cheek, and slowly drew it back.

  She could still see the look on his face when she’d told him the world had ended. Everything and everyone he had ever known was gone. Not dead, not destroyed, simply gone. All he had left was her—and she didn’t want to think about the look he would give her when he found out that she had changed most of all.

  The horns on her head and the hooves on her feet were the least of it. If he could see inside her, down into her soul, she doubted he would even recognize her.

  Slowly, she rose to her hooves. All she could do was continue down the road she had unwittingly put herself on, and hope that the toll wasn’t too high. Maybe, just maybe, when they reached the end, there would still be enough left of the Miranda he had known that he could still love her.

  And that she would deserve that love.

  Not giving herself any more time to think about it, Miranda silently made for the door, easing it open and slipping into the hallway. There, with no more risk of waking Jeremy up, she summoned her hat and cloak and swiftly made her way downstairs.

  The fire was still roaring as she swept into the common room, her cloak flapping behind her with every step. A few NPCs sat at the tables despite the late hour, filling the air with their mindless conversations as she passed, sparing her even less attention than she did to them.

  “We have food for—” Duncan began to say, only to cut himself off when she threw the door open and stepped outside. “Thank you kindly!”

  It was a warm night, but Miranda still tugged her cloak tight around herself as she retraced her steps back to Trell’s main gate. The streets were nearly empty by now, most of the NPC villagers sleeping dreamlessly in their beds, waiting for sunrise so they could repeat the same routines they had been cycling through every day for the past thirteen years.

  And yet, she couldn’t help but feel like she was being watched.

  She glanced up toward the moon, a gleaming white crescent hanging in the night sky, and then hurriedly lowered her gaze again. There was almost certainly going to be trouble before the sun rose tomorrow. No need to go looking for more.

  When she was halfway to the gate, a dark figure stepped out of an alleyway to block her path. A dagger glinted wickedly in the dim light.

  “This is a robbery!” he said in a low, gravelly voice. “Turn out your pockets or I’ll—”

  “Binding Blade!”

  Miranda spun with Eagle Feather held out at arm’s length, and the thief froze with the telltale ring of light appearing around him.

  Plucking the dagger from his stiff fingers, Miranda continued on her way. It was a cheap, low quality weapon, but she had learned years ago not to turn down free loot when it was offered.

  It was no exaggeration to say that the System had thousands of monsters at its disposal, and it was usually happy to use them whenever it felt like making her life difficult. Occasionally, though, it would wake up on the wrong side of the bed and start roping NPCs into its twisted fantasies.

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  Some were more common—and more dangerous—than others. You could find guards at virtually every city with more than a few hundred residents. They would usually leave you alone so long as you didn’t break any laws—which, Miranda admitted to herself, wasn’t exactly a common occurrence for her.

  But then there were the ones the System forced to play more antagonistic roles, like the poor sap who still stood frozen behind her. Thieves, bandits, and marauders plagued the roads between cities. Wanted posters could be found at virtually every street corner, accusing innocent NPCs of every petty crime under the sun simply so that Bounty Hunters like Zara could earn some easy XP. Miranda could even remember a few quests that had ended with boss fights against NPCs claiming to be the Dark Lord Robert Smith or the Great Witch Bethany Hancock.

  When it came down to it, the likelihood of a Hero finding themselves facing off a real flesh-and-blood human was disturbingly high.

  Her face turned red with anger as she skulked through the night. A lot of Heroes, contrary to their title, would cut an innocent NPC down without a second thought merely for getting in their way. And why shouldn’t they? It wasn’t like they were real people. You might as well feel guilty for cutting the head off a scarecrow.

  Just thinking about it made her want to stab someone in the eye—in no small part because there was a side of her that agreed with them. She knew better than anyone just how hard it was to remember that NPCs were people.

  The System had designed them to be tools. They were walking, talking pinatas that dropped money and XP if you hit them hard enough, and it was so hard…so flaming hard…to remember that there were real people behind those glassy stares.

  And when you forgot that, anything could be justified.

  Anything.

  Hey, Jackdaw! Want to hear a joke?

  She paused, shivering. Try as she might to bury it deep in her subconscious, she knew that voice would haunt her for the rest of her life. And the worst part was, she deserved every second of it.

  “There are no heroes in Nyr,” she whispered.

  The familiar sting of self-loathing rose up inside her. As hard as she tried to be better, she was no different from all the others. After all, she was probably going to rob half the NPCs here in Trell before noon tomorrow, and she would do it with a smile on her face.

  She had been forced to come to terms with a lot of unpleasant truths about herself over the past thirteen years, and one of the very first was that she was a complete and utter hypocrite.

  Her thoughts flicked back to Jeremy, still asleep back at the inn, and felt an ice-cold hand squeeze her heart. Before the Remaking, Miranda would never have believed that she was capable of half the things she’d done over the past decade—both good and bad. Nyr could bring out the best in people, but more often it did the opposite. For every little thing you did to make the light shine a little bit brighter, the shadows only grew darker.

  Was that going to happen to Jeremy?

  The thought made her pause in the middle of the road, and she shuddered. Just a few minutes ago, she had been terrified of what Jeremy would think when he found out who Nyr had forced her to become.

  The thought of him becoming like her was even worse.

  Shoving those thoughts into the back of her mind, where the darker memories that refused to be forgotten lurked, she forced herself to start walking again. Enough was going to happen tonight without her having to worry about the past and the future on top of it.

  A flick of her finger brought up her menu, and she eyed the incessantly blinking red exclamation point just beneath her Quests tab. She jabbed at it, even though she had already read it enough times to burn it into her memory.

  NEW SIDEQUEST:

  SAVE YOUR FORMER PARTY MEMBERS FROM THE SHIELD WARDEN GUILD.

  OBJECTIVE UPDATED:

  LOCATE DERRICK VELSTADT.

  The quest had appeared about half an hour after she had escaped with Jeremy, confirming her worst fears: Derrick, and possibly Aaron, had been captured by Miles, Zara, and Isaac.

  They weren’t dead. The System would sometimes hide key details to set up so-called “plot twists,” but it never lied. If it was telling Miranda to rescue them, that meant they were alive. Whether or not they would stay that way was another matter entirely, but for now she could rest easy knowing that Miles hadn’t just killed the two of them at the mouth of that awful cave.

  Keeping Jeremy safe was her priority. Her only priority. But now that he wasn’t in any immediate danger, there was no reason she couldn’t do a little to help her friends.

  She rounded the corner, and the town gates came into view. Twenty feet tall, they had been shut tight the moment the sun went down. Around it, five guards stood at attention in the stiff, motionless way that only NPCs could achieve. They wore dull bronze breastplates and helmets, and leather grieves. The two up in the watchtowers on either side of the gate held bows, while the three on the ground had spears, shields, and sideswords sheathed at their hips.

  Cakewalk.

  “Hold, citizen!” one of them shouted as soon as Miranda came within twenty feet of the gate. “Nobody goes in or out while the gate is shut! Return to your home!”

  Miranda kept walking, and the soldiers shifted into battle ready stances. They were NPCs too, which made them all level zero, just like Jeremy had been. But unlike Jeremy, who was a simple store owner, these guards were equipped with armor and weapons. Their base stats might have been zilch, but they could still cause some serious damage if you let them.

  “Stop where you are, lawbreaking trash!” the lead guard said when she got within five feet of the gate. “Nobody gets away with that in my city!”

  He charged without giving her a chance to comply, thrusting out with his spear, and the other two followed suit. Miranda could hear the bowstrings up above her being drawn back.

  She stepped easily to the side, skirting around the first spear as it came rushing toward her chest, and then spun in the opposite direction, passing between the leader and the guard on his right without touching either of them. Eagle Feather was in her hand a moment later, and it glinted in the moonlight as she tossed it up and over the gate.

  “Silverwing!”

  She reappeared outside the city, dropping the last couple inches to the ground.

  “Huh. It must have been the wind,” the guard’s muffled voice came from the other side of the gate, followed by the sound of shuffling footsteps as they took up their positions again.

  It was dark out here, with the gate blocking out the lights from the city and the thick trees obscuring what little ambient light there was. Miranda quickly cast Brighteyes, and the woods immediately snapped into focus around her.

  Then, taking a running start, she leaped herself up into the air.

  TO BE CONTINUED: 2/18/2026