54.

  “It’s all done?” Santi asked as he sat in the shade of the pillar. The afternoon had been a blur of burning and digging. Funeral pyres sent great billowing black clouds up to mingle in the heavens while the graves for Naomi’s people had taken a few hours. She had insisted that each of her four dead had their own graves, her non-combatant followers had trickled in and had started showing their usefulness.

  Santi had been forced to push aside his jealousy at the well oiled machine that Naomi's support staff was. They strippled corpses quickly and efficiently, harvested animal organs with ease, and helped clean as they worked. Even if Santi hadn’t just lost nearly the entirety of his faction’s Acolytes, they wouldn’t have been able to match the level of efficiency of Naomi’s cleaning teams.

  “The last of the termites are being harvested and burned now. Our fallen are loaded onto travois to be carried home. All weapons and armor that can be salvaged have been secured.” Mom rattled off each point like she was going down a checklist. She had a bandage over her cheek, having waved off Tank when he had offered to heal it for her. The big man was exhausted but hadn’t hesitated to try to heal every little scratch and cut.

  “What’s the final tally?” Santi asked.

  “Heavy losses amongst the hunters and Rayleigh’s teams. The rangers were nearly wiped out, but all the officers survived. Chad and Rayleigh are both badly injured but Tank was able to stabilize them. Frank didn’t survive and Tristan is currently in charge of all the auxiliary groups. We should be ready to leave in a few hours,” Mom said. Torin was wading a few feet away in her shadow, Grimvr next to him as the two spoke in their native tongue.

  “How are you doing? Are you alright?” Santi asked quietly.

  “I believe that’s my job to ask, Santiago.”

  “I am fine. Tired, but fine.” Mom stared at him for a moment, her hardened mask cracking slightly as emotion showed through for the first time in a while. Grief, concern, anger, it all flashed across her features so quickly that Santi wasn’t sure if he had actually seen it or if it had been a mirage.

  She took her shield off her arm, propped it and her spear against the pillar, then sat down next to him. Their shoulders brushed against each other as they sat there for a moment in silence. Santi could feel the tension radiating off of her and Torin glanced over at them with a concerned look for his protege.

  “It’s strange. All this. How can I protect my children against this? You three are all so much stronger than me. But I still want to protect my children.”

  “We all protect each other. I don’t think that anyone is strong enough to protect everyone,” Santi said. It was a slow growing realization that had been slowly blooming in his head over the last few weeks. No matter how much strength he accumulated, no matter how many resources he consumed, he could never protect them all by himself.

  “It’s hard to watch your kids grow up. It’s harder to watch them put themselves in danger like this. After your father…after your father,” Mom’s voice cracked a bit and the glimmer of tears were there for a moment before they disappeared in a slow blink.

  “I miss his stupid jokes,” Santi said.

  “They were the worst jokes,” Mom said, a slow smile crossing her face as she remembered.

  “I only get sick on weekdays,” Santi started.

  “Means I have a weekend immune system,” Mom finished with an actual laugh.

  “That was a solid joke,” Santi said.

  “Only the first ten times he said it. After that it was annoying,” Mom countered.

  “I really miss him. He helped me realize I had to be human. While I was…waiting for you all…I became cold and hard. I only thought of growing stronger. Of becoming so strong nothing could hurt me again. I was the strongest person in the entire city and he still died.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Santiago, is this a thinly veiled allegory about my own actions since your father’s death?” Mom asked. There was no heat in her voice, but rather just a single raised eyebrow.

  “No. Yes, but no?”

  “We all grieve in our own ways, Santiago. Your father was a strong man and he always protected me. And I him, in my own ways. Losing him meant I lost part of myself and I had to find that piece I was missing. I found it in training with Torin.”

  “I just don’t want to see you become obsessed with it. Have it become the entirety of your life,” Santi explained.

  “Thank you for your concern, Santiago.”

  “What do you think of Naomi?” Santi asked, changing the conversation after recognizing his mom’s tone of conversation being over.

  “Alan likes her. Says she’s very organized and runs a tight ship.”

  “That’s not an opinion.”

  “I’ve known her for two hours. She helped us in our fight and isn’t cackling maniacally while rubbing her hands. Seems to be a decent sort.” Mom shrugged at that.

  “It’s great to see Alan managed to survive.” Santi had known the man would live, but seeing that he was still sane was a massive improvement over the last time Santi had heard of him.

  “Cameron is relieved. It was tearing him apart not going to look for Alan, but after what happened with Abraham and how tenuous everything was at Homebase…he just never wanted to push leaving so soon.”

  “He’s a better friend than I deserve.”

  “He’ll be another great son,” Mom said with a chuckle.

  “Eeeewwww, mom.” She just laughed as they sat together. People began to trickle closer to them, including Cameron and Alan. The duo hadn’t allowed themselves to be separated, working together in tangent while Bianca had stuck with Yessenia, giving the two of them time together.

  “Everything is ready to go, Santi. Injured are loaded up and are stable to move. The dead are ready to be moved and everything of value has been extracted,” Cam said. Naomi was in a clustered huddle of her own people, slightly isolated away from the rest of the survivors.

  “Alright. Let’s head home and bury our dead.” Santi stood up, groaning in pain as his barely healed wounds protested. Mom grabbed her gear as he touched the pillar and thought of shrinking it down. The amount needed drained whatever he had left, including what he had picked up from the dead.

  Watching it shrink down until it was little more than a quarterstaff was always amazing. How something so tall could become both that compact and manage to not weigh a metric ton managed to befuddle him.

  “Got these two, too Santi!” Cam said, hefting two more pillars up from the ground near a travois and offering them to him. Santi groaned inwardly at the thought of having to lug all three of the heavy staffs around, but he took them and laid them all across his shoulder. The moment he touched them he got a prompt for claiming them and accepted. There was no challenge period here for them since their owners were already dead.

  Another award popped up in his feed, but he added it to the long litany of levels and rewards he would go through once he got home and didn’t have a new Apostate inches away from him. As Cam finished handing off the pillars, he shrugged off a small satchell and handed it to Santi a moment later.

  “What’s this?”

  “Daniel found it out by where Duncan and his team launched their assault,” Cam said with a smile. Santi couldn’t help but open the zipper of the satchel and look inside of it. His finger’s brushed over objects that radiated mana, treasures or items that Duncan couldn’t use in the fight.

  A small, smooth, orb, no larger than a marble, was near the bottom of the bag. Santi plucked it free, struggling to juggle the pillars and the satchel at the same time. Raising it up he saw it was an inky black sphere, power radiating off of it.

  Jewel of Shadows (Rare)

  Part of a collection of Affinity based Jewels

  “Well what do we have here?” Santi whispered to himself, lost momentarily in the swirling depths of it.

  “Looks like a black marble,” Cam said helpfully. The rest of the party had managed to get moving, soon leaving only Santi, Cameron, and Alan behind if they didn’t start moving. Naomi had taken a double look at the jewel, but hadn’t slowed as she marched with the rest down the streets and away from the scene of the battle.

  “I think this is what his reward was from the dungeon. Why was he so obsessed with pushing through it even though we were underleveled? Also why did he kill his team?”

  “Thought you said he killed them to get his final experience for his level?”

  “A dungeon isn’t going to give a rare grade reward to a full team. Not when everyone gets a reward. Even with us fighting up levels, it wasn’t so far ahead that we all earned a rare grade,” Santi muttered under his breath. Cam had learned enough over the weeks to not ask how Santi knew when he had these little intuitive moments.

  “Allright, enough whispering under your breath. You can go all Gollum on that when we get home and lay the dead to rest,” Cam said after another moment of waiting. Santi grunted and let the marble slide back into the satchell before following after the tail end of the rest of the group.