“Markus.” The appearance of my ex-girlfriend is enough to make me flinch and bow a little under the weight already pressing down on my shoulders. I wasn’t expecting this. Last time, the challenge presented me with a vision of my ‘perfect’ self; I was rather expecting round two of that. But I force myself to readjust my expectations – allowing the appearance of this challenge to get to me will just lessen my chances of succeeding. Last time I got an A grade. This time, I want to get an S or even SS.

  The pressure has already subtly increased so I push back on it to stand upright.

  “Lucy,” I breathe, unable to stop myself from hungrily drinking in her features. She’s even more beautiful than I remember her, her features heightened to an almost supernatural magnificence. And yet…there is none of the connection I remember us having. My arms are not sure whether they should be aching to wrap around her or happy to remain by my side – I’ve never felt as much of a gulf between us as right now.

  Of course, I know that this isn’t Lucy – it’s merely a projection of my own inner insecurities. I understood last time that the Challenge offers me the opportunity to face my inner demons in a way that is easy to conceptualise. And I’m grateful for that – my sense of being a failure has eased ever since overcoming the last challenge. Not gone completely, but it has been easier to rationalise and refute ever since I faced my inner demon and won. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering whether I’d have the same reaction to seeing Lucy in person.

  It is rather irrelevant, though – I’m never going to see Lucy again, and even if I could, she chose to leave me. Heck, she was already with another man before I came to this world. The door there is shut very firmly; locked, even. But it doesn’t stop me wondering about might have beens.

  I grab my thoughts and firmly chide myself about not getting distracted. In this place, thought is worth far more than deed and if I allow my mind to wander onto irrelevant topics, I will lose this challenge entirely, my intentions of getting an S grade burnt away like the morning dew. Time to focus.

  I suppose it’s not too surprising that guilt is the topic of the day – I’ve certainly felt plenty of it lately. And is it any surprise that, instead of my own skin, my inner demon is wearing Lucy’s, one of my greatest regrets?

  I might regret my mother’s death – deeply – though that has eased a little since my experience at the end of the samurans’ Festival, but a part of me recognises that I was a child at the time. Lucy is another matter. There, I was an adult, fully in control of what I chose to do – and what I chose to do hurt her deeply.

  After her greeting, Lucy has been silently gazing at me, her chestnut brown eyes the mirror of when she walked out of the door and out of my life. I flinch at the look in them – it brings up memories of when she asked me to look for another job, for the sake of our relationship, or at least to spend less time at work…and I refused. The hurt had shone as brightly as the tears which had started running down her cheeks. A moment after, that hurt had turned to piercing accusation as she yelled at me that I cared more about my job than I did about her.

  I should have swept her up in my arms right then. I should have told her how much I loved her, valued her, needed her in my life. That she was the one constant who had been there through so much of my life. My best friend, my lover, and the woman I wanted to marry. That nothing was as important as she was to me.

  But I didn’t, and the guilt of that tears at my heart. I was silent, tongue-tied. At the time, I thought that she didn’t understand, that she didn’t realise why I was pushing so hard at work. I remember that the deputy head of HR had recently announced his retirement and thought that if I showed how hard I could work, how dedicated I was to the company, I might be considered for the role. I told myself I wanted to make a better life for us.

  Naive idiot that I was. The post had already been filled, interviews going on without my awareness. I never had a chance, and my choice to put a soulless company ahead of my own lover again and again destroyed my relationship with her. The best thing I’d ever had, though I only realised that when it was gone.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to her, words that I’ll never be able to say to the real woman. “I put the company ahead of you when you should have been first among my priorities. I’ll always regret what I allowed my ambition to make of me. You deserved better and I hope that your real self is…is happy with her new partner.” I swallow, the words feeling like glass scouring the inner lining of my throat, the pain even greater than the pressure pushing down on my shoulders. It urges me to give up, to buckle under the weight of my own guilt.

  “I can never be with you again,” I say, forcing the words out past a lump in my glass-torn throat. I feel a prickling at the corner of my eyes as I accept that grief – the knowledge that no matter how much I might regret the way we left things, there is nothing I can do to change it. And because of that, I have two choices: to give up, or to accept what has happened and resolve to do better in the future. Yet, to give up and allow the weight on my shoulders to push me to the ground would be a disservice to far more than the girl of my past. “I have to let you go.”

  There’s a long beat of silence, and then Lucy’s eyes flare with fire, her features twisting with a fury which I have never seen in her. It just brings home the fact that this is not truly Lucy, merely a mirror image of myself with her features overlain like a skin on a game avatar. Because I recognise the taste of that fury – I have felt it far too often myself.

  “Let me go? As if it’s that easy? As if you can just drop me like I was nothing to you!” she spits at me, her eyes flashing. She tosses her head, the gesture achingly familiar as she flicks the beautiful black locks she used to spend so much time in the morning straightening from their natural curls. Unbidden, memories come to mind of her moaning about how easy other women had it when half the techniques she tried to straighten her hair would leave it even more frizzy afterwards, and the other half took far too long. Cornrows were the most effective strategy in some ways since she didn’t need to do it every day, but often left her complaining of headaches.

  I shake my head, pulling myself out of memories which I hadn’t even realised that I’d kept, her complaints about how difficult her hair was to manage were frequent enough to be almost predictable. Now I realise that they were hiding a deep sense of insecurity about her appearance. At the beginning, I used to reassure her that she was beautiful to me whatever she did with her hair. But as time went on and my focus shifted more and more to work, I stopped reassuring her. Perhaps that was another nail in the coffin of our relationship.

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  “I’m sorry,” I say again, “for not telling you every day that you were the most beautiful woman in the world to me. For not showing you how much you meant to me when I had a chance. If you had still been part of my life, I wouldn’t have accepted Nicholas’ offer.” It’s true, but honestly, if I was suddenly given the opportunity to go back to Earth and make things right with Lucy, the price only to give up this dream of magic and power which I’ve gained…. I’m not entirely sure what my response would be. Perhaps the fact that I can’t say immediately that I would choose to be with Lucy is an indication of its own that I shouldn’t be. If I can’t put her first even in my own mind, I don’t deserve a second chance.

  Acceptance goes through me. I made my choices back then, and I’m making them now too. There is no way of turning back the clock, and I would not give up what I have learned to do so even if I could.

  Unlike the ‘perfect’ version of me, this projection which looks like Lucy doesn’t batter my ears with words. Instead, it’s like she knows exactly when I’m deeply in thought, and stays silent, only speaking when she senses my attention returning to her. Which, I suppose, a reflection of myself would be perfectly capable of.

  “You’re sorry? Is that all you can say?”

  “I’m determined to recognise and accept my faults,” I say calmly, though with more than a hint of sorrow, sensing that I am shutting the door on something, “and will do my best not to repeat my mistakes in the future. And I thank you for teaching them to me,” I offer, bowing my head slightly to her, sincerity in my tone. In this moment, I feel deeply grateful for whoever conceived this Challenge space – the ability to confront that which I do my best to hide from myself is both deeply painful and immensely freeing.

  “Then what do you call becoming a murderer?” ‘Lucy’ snaps at me, her features twisting even further from the gentle-souled companion I knew. For all that I know it’s not truly her saying it, the words still hit me in the gut, the sudden change in topic taking me off guard.

  “I’m not a murderer!” I protest, but if the weight that doubles on my shoulders and makes me grunt is any indication, even my inner self knows that it’s a weak rebuttal.

  “You acted as judge, jury, and executioner to that samuran. You killed others without thought and directed your followers to do the same. And worse, you let several of your companions die. Trinity, Flicks, hatchlings….the most vulnerable were left without defence because you wanted to rush off and be the hero to creatures you owed nothing to and had never even met!”

  My knees shake, the weight of my guilt intensifying even more. I have no defence. I can say that I didn’t realise that it was a trap, and not only for me, but as the leader, I should have been prepared for that. I’ve been lulled into complacency because of how straight-forward most of the samurans I’ve met have been.

  But Flying-blade had already proven how duplicitous she could be – instead of challenging me directly, she tried to use the Hunt to disgrace both me and my village in one fell swoop. That she miscalculated was more an indication of her arrogance than of her cunning being lacking. I should have realised that she wouldn’t be satisfied with the failure of the hunt; I should have recognised that the fires of her hate would only be stoked.

  In a way, it’s good that she attacked now and not soon after I left this world, taking some of the strength of the village away from me. It reminds me that I must make sure my departure doesn’t weaken my village, that I must ensure the power I hold is passed on – and to the right people.

  But it is my shame that my village was left as vulnerable as it was in my absence, that I didn’t consider seriously how the call for help could be a trap until it was too late. It’s a wake-up call – I need to be more careful, especially heading into Nicholas’ world soon where interpersonal dynamics are likely to be more complicated than they have been here.

  “I was judge, jury, and executioner because I had to be,” I tell Lucy slowly, focussing on my knees until they stop shaking. I feel the words settle deeply inside myself, my acceptance of my actions lessening the intense pressure on my shoulders. “I have taken on the role of the village leader, an autocratic leader who holds the power through force of arms and magic. I am responsible for their safety. And so when someone proved themselves to be a danger to my village even with a Bond, I made my choice with their benefit in mind. And I cannot be sorry about that.”

  The release of a noticeable amount of pressure enables me to stand upright again – I hadn’t even realised how much my shoulders had been bowed down by it.

  “You were the one to put your people in danger in the first place! Your arrogant assumption that your enemy would take her defeat gracefully, your high-handed, unfair choice to take so many of your people with you on the Hunt when she was forced to act alone, those were the reasons for why she came after you – through your people.”

  “I do not claim any responsibility for her misjudging the situation,” I refute, crossing my arms. “She called for the Hunt and had every opportunity to realise that going for a single-Hunt was a bad idea when I could call on everyone of my village present at the Festival to aid me even within its limitations. I do not accept responsibility, therefore, for her humiliation at the end of the Festival – she must be responsible for her choices just as I am for mine.”

  “But you do not refuse the fact that you put your people in danger!”

  “I do not,” I admit, but refuse to let the guilt push me to the ground even as my acceptance makes it intensify. “I accept that I should have prepared better for the chance of betrayal, and resolve to make sure they’re not taken by surprise again.”

  “And even after they attacked your people, you still showed them mercy, forcing your own people to suffer further because they are required to share their space with those who were trying to kill and capture them only days ago.”

  I suspect that Lucy’s accusations are running out – both the weakness of her last attempt and the significant lessening of the pressure on my shoulders seem to indicate that. I stare deeply into her eyes, responding to what is probably her final accusation.

  “I could have executed them all, yes, but what would that have gained us? Corpses to bury and possibly the enmity of several other villages. Killing so many Pathwalkers might have even caused several villages to unite against mine, seeing us as a threat to their people. Keeping them alive gains us their work in the short term, and perhaps far more in the long term. I regret that it may hurt some of my people, but I doubt that most of them want their brethren dead. I feel no guilt over this decision. I made it for the good of my people, as I will try my best to do in the future.”

  And it’s true, I realise as I say it. The pressure on my shoulders intensifies one last time as if in a last-ditch effort to make me submit to my own guilt. But I remember that from last time and just stand firm.

  A moment later, Lucy vanishes like she was never there, and the sense of intense guilt vanishes with her. I breathe in and out deeply, feeling lighter than I have for a long time. With a grin, I look at the notification which appears before me.

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