[TTIABAD] Chapter 125: Anger and Resentment.

Being bedridden fucking sucks. Being bedridden due to not having limbs, in a B-Rank dungeon, was worse. I’m sure it had something to do with me waking up, maybe it was just the enthusiasm Riary and Tyler suddenly felt after two weeks of it being touch and go, but the monsters were finally done with our nonsense of just hiding around them.

We were not, and had not been, in a safe area. I’d made sure of it. It was to make it harder for B-Ranks to get us. Something that ultimately proved utterly pointless. Which was… kinda frustrating. At the very least, it made it harder for even more B-Ranks to show up… I was holding onto that little slice of hope because the adventurers Rinkaru had clearly hired had never come for us at any point. Nor had anyone else.

Honestly, something was wrong and afoot. Wrong… I shook my head. No, need to, focus. Nothing quite made sense to me. Like I was missing something, or a lot of something. How did… when did Rinkaru find us? It was too soon after we came down and if someone like that was waiting here in ambush… I refused to believe Xilvia had betrayed us. And she would have known someone like that was in the City… she wouldn’t have sent me to my death. I believed that. So why send me down if someone that strong was around?

That question and many others plagued me as Konohora carried me on her back, fiercely running away from what looked like a horde of crocodiles… except the size of boulders, with spikes all around their bodies. Definitely not ambush predators, these ones. They were quite fast too.

“Going to want to dodge left.” I said, as the crocodiles reared back and a spray of spikes came at us.

Konohora was already leaping through the air. My stomach didn’t really like that, but that was no surprise. It didn’t seem to like anything these days and I had no idea if it was because of everything or just because of my new constant meat diet from being in the jungle.

She landed not long after and continued, Tyler and Riary moving faster than her. Which was kinda cheating. Tyler, sure, he had enough strength for it but Riary was just floating on her own flames, shooting herself forward at a rapid pace. Honestly, no care at all for ecology. If everything hadn’t gotten so damp in the past few days there’d have been at least two more forest fires. Jungle fires? She’d already set at least three since I’d been awake.

“Konohora, remind me why you can’t at least heal one of my limbs at a time? I could probably be faster than all three of you with just one leg. Or one arm.”

“You seem cockier than normal.” Konohora replied, dodging more spikes. I could hear the happiness in her voice and the smile on her face. “I hope that means you’re doing better.”

“Mm.” I replied non-commitally.

“I am trying Derek.” Konohora said, sounding a little exasperated. “It is hard. I have studied bodies and healed many. I have never healed a demon before you. The healing energies have almost stopped letting me direct them once they enter your body. They spread all around, your own vitality fighting any focused healing now that you are no longer near death.”

“Wait, it’s my fault? How do I stop doing that then?”

“Study anatomy, become a healer, and then feeling your own vitality, would be one of the speedier paths.” She said.

“It’s amazing you can tell the truth fully and still be sarcastic at the same time.”

“Thank you.”

We continued on, making me feel like a baby as we continued. After all, I was only tied to Konohora via vines. My limbs were only half made, including my wings, tail, and horns. I looked absolutely ridiculous. Something Riary had spent absolutely no time in making fun of once it became noticeable. Tyler was now partially on my shit list for explaining to her what a ‘chicken nugget’ was when I’d off handedly called myself one in annoyance.

Speaking off…

“Derek!” Tyler practically screamed at the top of his lungs. “How did One Piece end?!”

“What?! How should I know?! Wait, you really think it ended?!”

Tyler had been… overjoyed would be an understatement… to find out that we were both from Earth. We’d been too caught up with being hunted at the time but now that we weren’t… he had a lot of questions. To be fair, everyone did, and it was a great way to move things along. Dwelling on the fact that I’d nearly died was, well, terrible. Dwelling on the fact that Konohora was still exhausted, Riary had nerve damage and would twitch occasionally, Tyler had massive scarring across his body and found it hard to breathe at times, and I was still useless in a fight, was even worse. Well, for me. Earth had seemed like a fresh, interesting thing for everyone. I had a perspective completely different from Tyler’s after all.

“I really can’t believe this… what are the chances?!” Tyler said, blocking a bunch of spikes from in front of us. The crocodile area was large. But it was also relatively safe, if you didn’t get caught up with the Alpha’s I could feel in the distance. I at least wasn’t useless. We’d not run into a calamity yet. Scouting for the win.

“You’ve mentioned that before.” Riary said, blasting fire all around us, melting or directing most of the spikes that had come near her sides. While Tyler had apparently god damn “Fuck you, I’m going to shield anywhere” aura abilities, Riary had mostly kept things… baseline. She had more fire, stronger. That was really ‘it’. And oh my god, it was great and scary to watch. I was reasonably sure she could burn down most of a city before anyone could stop her.

She had truly become the Queen of AOE.

“Don’t you find it amazing?!”

“I find it… impossible. There’s a relation there, somehow.” She said drolly, but I could hear the slight happiness in her voice. Things were looking up. The clouds were gone, we had all ranked up into new levels of power, her teammate was alive, her boyfriend and best friend had survived, yadda yadda. Things were going great all around.

And I was going to damn well keep things that way, even as I wanted to tear myself apart. I had to bury that feeling but speaking of burying shit…

…I had to admit something to myself, even as everything was rainbow and sunshine. It wasn’t… good, or great. I’d been… stuck here, with only my thoughts, for days. I couldn’t really move. My aura felt destroyed. Even my soul-mental barrier felt weaker and that was bad. All of that time, it gives a person time to think.

And sadly, I’d come to a really annoying conclusion.

I think I honestly, slightly, hated my three friends.

I was sugarcoating it. I hated them. I hate them now but it wasn’t, well, hot or cold hate. It was more like a, a bead of resentment I couldn’t really bury. I had before, buried it so, so deep even I didn’t think I had any in me. It was only as I saw Riary feed me, a worried look on her face. Konohora, exhausted to death, still pouring energy into me. The tears and sobs at night of Tyler, from fucking relief, that I realized that a small part of me had started to feel… lighter.

And that was when I had noticed it. Just how deep and buried my resentment with them was. Even now I kinda felt… mixed and I shouldn’t be mixed. We’d been through so much, thick and thin, help after help. They were the reason I was alive. I had so few reasons to truly despise them. But the reasons I did have were strong. Namely, I didn’t think or feel it was fair that we’d been shoved together. I think… I honestly think at some point we needed to separate. Not now, but when it was safe, I needed some time away. Some time away from them, to view them in a better light and not like this fantasy world was shoving them down my throat, forcing me to be with them or die or worse. Being around them made me always feel, I guess, powerless. Not in control of my life. Not because they were powerful, even though they were. Just because… I could never really forget it. Being forced away from what I had begun thinking of as my village, never even being able to see it, shoved away from my small moment of stability, away from my first friend, my first halfway lover as well, my first slice of fantasy, all because they were stronger and could. Because one of them hated me. How it would have been so different if I hadn’t been turned into a demon. Seeing Riary nearly kill my friend, feeling my life enter into a complete and total railway track of hell, constantly one thing after the other. Getting to the only good area in a long, long time, and still getting screwed over because of them in so many ways.

If Riary hadn’t taken that Gem and hidden it from everyone, if Tyler had never told me about his origins or convinced me, if Konohora had been more or less of a stand up friend, anything really. It’d all be so different. But would I be alive? Would I be better or worse off? Did it matter? My feelings fought my own logic. I was getting a first hand account of what it must feel like to be Riary all the time, hating people for arguably flimsy reasons all the time.

“Derek?” Konohora called out, worried.

“Hmm?” I said.

“You weren’t answering me. Are you okay?”

Fuck. I must have… gotten lost in my dark thoughts. Fucking hell, I hated this. Not just not being able to move but that my thoughts kept… drifting away and always to the worst of the worst, the bad parts, as if my friends were only a horrible burden. That wasn’t true. They saved my life. They, they loved me. They truly loved me. They would do anything for me. I was just, I was just suffering and everything felt so wrong wrong wrong wr-

“I’m, well, I’ve been better.” I replied, smiling and laughing a little bit. Konohora still seemed worried. That was fine.

As long as she didn’t realize the absolute depths of hell I was currently experiencing.

Because beneath everything, I fucking hated my own body right now. It hurt. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt. It was mental agony. I felt like a vampire under the sun every second of every moment. Everything was wrong. My dysmorphia was going full blast all the time, constantly, and… and… I was not winning against it. I felt like I was going insane. I hate, I hate it, I hate it so much. Fuck you, fuck all of you, why couldn’t you just let me die…

No, no, it was going, going to be okay. Just, we need, we actually need to-

“So,” Tyler said, starting off a new conversation. “We’re going to stay in the dungeon for a while right? Spend a few months stabilizing our new powers.”

Months? Months… stuck… here. Feeling this way. Constantly, forever, all the time. No. No way. No no no no no no. I couldn’t, I needed, I can’t, no come on, focus. Focus. Think things through, use logic. It, might, get better after I heal up. My body might just feel wrong because it isn’t complete. Once I have all my limbs back…

The lie died on the vine, unable to survive on the soils that made up my soul.

“Actually, we should probably go back up as soon we can.” I said.

Konohora frowned at me and I realized I’d fucked up immediately.

“Ah, well, at least I should. I feel like something was, strange, with our last battle. I think Xilvia will have more information for me.”

“So you noticed it too.” Riary said, nodding.

“Huh? Noticed what?”

“Someone that strong… if they were in the city, Derek would have noticed them. If they were down here, at least one of our trainers would have told us… and did you notice the B-Ranks we kept almost running into? How they ran off almost immediately after our fight?”

“Yeah.” I said.

“What? What about them?” Tyler said, bewildered.

“We saw them once, when they were fighting the cavemen. They were all wearing masks.”

Masks weren’t so strange. I’d kinda filtered it from my brain, but a good fifth of people that were B-Rank wore either a helmet, a hood, or a mask. Usually a helmet. No idea why none of us did, armor sounded like something we should’ve invested in immediately. Would have to ask about that at some point. Then again it might slow me down and speed was kinda my whole thing at this point.

“Yeah that, does kinda sound strange.” Tyler said but I could tell he wasn’t really getting it.

“They weren’t hiding their faces from us.” I said. “They were hiding them from Rinkaru and her group.”

“What?” Tyler said.

“I think…” I said hesitantly. “I think we just saw and experienced exactly what happens when a group wants you dead… or at least a group willing to sponsor and support a team…”

“Someone is out to get us.”