Having filled with his teasing, Wise wasted no time.
With deliberate steps, he gave his lady the proper distance she had asked for and moved through the hushed, ruined mall. He made his way back to the camping store, where months ago he had first scavenged for survival. The air was stale, the lights long dead, but the supplies remained untouched, like relics waiting for a pilgrim.
From his old stash, he retrieved the hunting rifle its five precious bullets still inside. He slung it over his shoulder. Then came the pocket knife, a tool sharp in both edge and history, and finally the rope. A simple, old creation, yet one of mankind's most enduring tools. He wasn't suicidal anymore not with her inside his chest. The rope would serve some new purpose, maybe even vital.
He scanned the shelves once more. Rebecca Etch's decayed corpse still rested in the corner. He passed it without a glance.
Next, the warehouse.
Wise stopped at the threshold and slowly closed his eyes. The world shifted the moment he opened them again vision warped into golden clarity. Lines, edges, heat, shadow, every detail rendered in the divine geometry of Aurum's perception.
Beyond the crates and racks, deeper into the darkness, something tall no, slender stood still. Taller than the brute that once tore him apart. It was an infected. A grotesque statue frozen mid-thought, head drooping like it slumbered. Hibernating.
"Wise, I saw that corrupted... Prithee don't do anything stupid."
Her voice was sharp in his mind. She saw through him now literally. The shared core let her see his vision as clearly as her own. That connection meant nothing he planned would be hidden.
Wise remained still, compiling options in silence. The rifle might be necessary. If so, he'd only have four more bullets after. He inhaled slowly, then turned back.
When he returned to her Aurum's radiant center his expression was composed, but unreadable. Eyes half-lidded, mouth relaxed, yet focused.
Then he bowed.
One hand behind his back. One hand across his chest. The posture of a proper knight paying homage to a queen.
She trembled. Something in her branches fluttered uncontrollably. He was acting far too appropriately dangerously charming in his fealty. If she had lips, she might have bit them out of flustered confusion, as she'd seen in his memories.
"My lady. Would you kindly grant me the case that lies within thine roots? I would love to get it myself, but thou hast forbid me for the time being."
She twitched again, envying that he could close his eyes. She could not her vision never faltered. Not from desire. Not from embarrassment. Not from the golden knight before her.
"Why would doust need this rifle? Please, Wise. Don't do anything stupid. Prithee please."
"Well..."
"You know the gun shot will definitely attract more corrupted, right?"
"Trust me. I am not without a plan."
His lips curled into a slight smirk. The idea was clear in his mind: push the gun barrel into the infected's eye socket and fire, using its own skull as a sound dampener. It worked once before.
"Wise, if thy plan was to shoot that infected in the eye by the gun barrel like the brute before nay."
He deflated a bit. "This one now doesn't have a plan."
"This one knew it from miles away. Just forget about that warehouse for the time being."
He sighed deeply, stretching his arms behind his head with a groan. "Can't be helped then... guess I need something else."
"Please, not another plan. Just leave it be, Wise."
"Alright, alright."
"Much more like it."
He stepped back slightly, glancing down toward the thick, tangled roots beneath her golden trunk there, nestled within them, the case that held the rifle, the knife, and the rope. It was close. A few steps. A few fingers reaching.
His eyes flicked to her again. She didn't need to speak. Her bark shifted slightly, like muscles tightening. Her refusal was louder than any spoken word.
"...You're not gonna let me get it, huh?"
"Nay."
He pouted exaggeratedly. "But I'm your knight."
"And this one is thine sovereign."
He chuckled, defeated. "Aye, Your Majesty."
Wise walked the cold marble halls until a faint pastel-colored glow caught his eye a candy store, long abandoned. The once-cheerful sign had faded to a sun-bleached ghost of its former self, and the glass windows were cracked like frozen spiderwebs.
He stepped inside.
The place reeked faintly of dust and aged sugar. Plastic wrappers crinkled beneath his boots. Rows of sweets lay untouched most exposed, melted, or rotted, but a few were still sealed, still holding their shape as if waiting for someone to remember them.
He hated candy.
Not for any deep symbolic reason.
Not because of its sweetness mocking his pain.
Just because it was bad for you.
His family had a long and miserable history with diabetes, and so candy was always the enemy. Yet here he was, sifting through the shelves.
A glint caught his eye. A familiar brand.
Chocolate.
His fingers brushed the wrapper brown with golden print. A famous brand. His mother's favorite. His little brother's too. Dust clung to the packaging, but he swiped it off carefully.
EXP 17 APR 2029
He snorted softly.
"What even is today?"
No answer. Time was a joke now.
He tore it open.
Still intact. No mold. No decay.
He hesitated.
A phantom voice whispered in the back of his mind
"Oh, come on, Big Brother. Just one, please!"
A soft smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He missed that little gremlin.
He took a bite. Chewed slowly.
Waited for a flood of memory, a taste of something warmer.
...
His expression dropped.
"...Tastes like cardboard..."
He stared at the rest of the bar. Then, with a shrug, popped the rest in his mouth anyway.
Wise wandered deeper into the candy store, stepping past the wreckage of childhood colorful wrappers faded to ash tones, gummy bears fossilized into sugar rocks, shattered glass cases that once held delights for eager hands.
He grabbed another bar one he remembered stuffing in his little brother's backpack when their mother wasn't looking.
He smiled at the memory. That kid would always beg, whine, or trade chores for sweets. Sometimes he'd sneak extras. Sometimes he'd offer Wise the last piece.
"Just take it! I like the sour ones more anyway!"
A lie. But a loving one.
Wise chuckled under his breath, unwrapping another candy
Something grabbed his ankle.
He stilled.
There was no panic, no flinch.
He looked down slowly.
It was an infected.
A child.
A boy.
His skin glowed faintly blue like moonlight through a broken window. The veins pulsed with the corrupted ichor. His limbs were thin, sickly, too light. His legs were pinned beneath a fallen candy shelf too heavy for a child to lift.
The boy's clothes were torn, soaked in dried brown and black. Bite marks covered his tiny arms, his neck, shoulder.
It didn't take a genius to piece together the story.
Left behind. Eaten into. Alive or dead who could know which came first?
And now?
Trapped. Weak. Groaning.
Still reaching.
Still trying.
The child clawed gently at Wise's leg not with violence, but as if grasping for help, as if his body remembered more than his mind did.
Wise didn't move.
His breath caught in his throat.
Not from fear.
He crouched slowly, meeting the child's glowing blue eyes.
His golden left arm reflected in those hollow orbs.
An arm once bitten once doomed until it was remade.
Blessed. Redeemed.
This boy could've been him.
No was him.
Or his brother.
Or anyone's.
Wise reached to his chest, his real chest, where his heart beat not alone, but alongside something divine.
Aurum's core.
The life she gave him.
The second chance.
The impossible mercy.
His hand trembled. He felt something deep, like grief buried under rusted steel. The way his father once looked at him, wide-eyed and full of guilt, when his own arm had turned purple from infection.
Is this what his father had felt?
The slow realization of powerlessness in the face of cruel fate?
The agony of knowing you can't fix what should never have happened?
The child gurgled barely. Not even threatening. Just... there. Stuck.
Wise's vision blurred a little.
Then, a voice.
"Wise! Art thou fine!? Your heart! It's... heavy what happened? Did something happ "
She cut herself off.
Her consciousness slipped into his.
She saw what he saw.
The boy.
The broken shelf.
The reaching hand.
Silence followed.
The kind that buried itself in your lungs.
"...Oh..."
Aurum said nothing more.
She didn't need to.
Because for the first time, she understood something no amount of eons in darkness could teach her.
The meaning of "too late."
The weight of innocence undone.
The sharp, quiet scream of what could've been.
Wise slowly reached down, brushing the boy's hair aside.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "You deserved better."
Wise's hands trembled slightly just slightly as he placed one on the child's crown with the crowbar's tip.
The boy didn't resist.
Still groaning.
Still trying.
Wise took a breath, steady but hollow. Then
CRACK.
The sound echoed through the ruined candy shop like a shattering memory.
He bit his lip.
Not from pain, but from grief so deep it didn't know how to scream.
The taste of chocolate still lingered in his mouth. Bitter.
But nothing compared to this.
This was the kind of bitterness that stayed behind your eyes.
He rose slowly, the weight on his shoulders heavier than the crowbar strapped to his back.
Not a word.
Not a sound.
His long hair veiled half his face as he stepped out of the store, leaving behind sweetness turned grave.
The open ceiling of the mall welcomed him with gray clouds.
Shattered glass above allowed the first droplet to fall soft, cold splashing against his cheek.
He looked up.
Another droplet.
Then another.
Then rain.
He didn't wipe his face.
He let it fall.
His lids closed slightly, and the water slipped over them
They looked like tears, even if his heart had forgotten how to cry.
"Wise..."
Aurum's voice echoed gently inside him. She felt his pulse through the shared core.
It was tight. Silent. Writhing beneath the weight of something too human.
He hated people.
He detested them.
And yet…
All his life he saw the same suffering on his cracked screen.
The wars far away.
The children needing help.
The pain he could never reach.
A couple bucks here and there, just to feel less helpless.
His father showed him the world's darkness.
And his phone showed him how common it was.
But nothing prepared him for this
To see it.
To feel it.
Why must the world be like this?
Bleak.
Unfair.
Cursed.
The rain continued to fall, soaking him, cleansing nothing.
Even the golden eye his divine sight saw no meaning in the downpour.
And then softly, gently
"Cometh here, Wise... It's okay now."
Her voice.
His anchor.
His breath hitched, as if he'd forgotten he could still inhale.
He turned, slowly toward her.
Wise crouched beneath her, the golden canopy above shielding him entirely. Not a single drop of rain dared fall upon him now not with Aurum's leaves spread wide like the arms of a divine guardian.
Her branches warm, alive, soft with an unnatural gentleness curled slowly around his torso. She embraced him in her own way, holding him together. Drawing the water from his soaked clothes, drying him in silence.
Wise buried his face into his knees.
"Prithee, it was the best thing thou couldst do for that corrupted child."
His shoulders rose slightly.
"Best thing was a cure but..."
"Dost thou believe I should've cured him?"
"...No. It's already done anyway."
"Aye... That child was fully taken. Unlike thee, there was naught left to save. Had I tried..."
"He would've been mine entirely. Not himself. A husk of what he was, breathing only because I willed it."
His lip trembled.
"...That child could've been anybody's, Aurum..."
His voice was muffled, small beneath all the weight.
"...I keep thinking... What if... what if I never met you. What if they found me like that. My mother. My father. Searching through cities thinking hoping believing in a miracle... that I'm alive somewhere."
He clenched his hands tighter against his shins.
"...Only to find me among them. Just... another twisted body. Just another monster. Their son gone nothing left but the hunger."
Aurum did not speak.
She only held him tighter.
The memory of the child the broken body, the soft grip on his leg, the cracked skull was etched into his mind. But so was this:
Her.
Aurum.
The miracle he never earned, but still received.
He should be dead. Worse lost, like that boy.
But he wasn't. He was alive. Remade. Blessed.
And all because of her.
"Hey, Aurum."
"Yes?"
"...What would've happened if you failed to remake me?"
The question came low, quiet drawn from the weight of fear still curled deep inside him. Aurum knew exactly where that fear came from. That boy. That possibility.
"This one would feel the utmost sorrow... This one wouldst have lost its precious knight... and the name given by thee."
He stared at his hand his golden, blessed hand. The same hand that had silenced a twisted soul. A child.
"...All those infected... they had stories once. Names. People who waited for them. People who loved them."
His voice cracked.
"I was on that path too. Right up until I met you. Honestly... I don't know why, but meeting you it's nothing short of a miracle."
He looked at himself. At what he'd become.
"Remade into this 'Abyssal Guardian'... Immune to corruption... new limbs, new sight, new organs... and a core your core."
He looked up at her. Her glowing golden leaves still spread like a mother's arms above him, shielding him from the rain. One of her branches reached down, soft and steady, and gently wiped the tears from his cheek tears he hadn't even realized were falling.
He took hold of that branch with trembling fingers, guiding it slowly to rest against his face. His head leaned to the side, cheek pressed into her warm bark, his eyes soft with exhaustion and something deeper.
"How blessed I am. How damn blessed."
Wise's voice trembled not with fear, but with fierce conviction.
"Aurum... not even the luckiest soul to ever walk this dying world would have found you. That miracle fell to me. You don't know how lucky I am to find you first."
His hand brushed her bark gently, reverently, like one would touch the edges of a sacred relic.
"My kind... they would've chopped you down. Dissected you. Turned you into data and dust and labeled you as an anomaly to exploit. They'd call it salvation while cutting into you with knives and lies, all to bottle and sell your miracle. They would've bled you dry and called it progress."
He clenched his jaw, the hatred in his voice not cold, but burning.
"But I found you. I was the one. And I know what that means."
He looked at her, really looked golden leaves glowing above like a celestial crown.
"You're one in never, Aurum. A miracle that was never meant to be found. Not by the world. But I did."
He leaned forward, resting his forehead against her body. His voice dropped, shaking.
"Looking at that child back there... it made something clear. How ridiculous it was how weak to still hesitate after everything. After being remade. After being saved."
"Wise "
"No."
His voice snapped sharp with resolve.
"I swear, as long as I draw breath, I will not hesitate again. Not once. Not ever."
His fists clenched against her bark.
"If a knight hesitates, he is no knight. He is a failure. And I will not fail you."
She raised a branch, tilting his chin up gently. His eyes locked with the golden veins of her body.
"If millions of infected come charging in then I stand. I defend. I'll become your shield, your sword, your storm."
His voice grew louder, firmer, like a vow carved into the marrow of the world.
"If my own kin come to hunt you down I'll hunt them back. One by one. I don't care who they are. I don't care what they were. If this entire world wants you gone, then let the world burn."
His golden eye blazed like a flame reborn.
"And if the universe itself decides you don't belong here then I'll rewrite the stars until the sky bends to your will."
He pressed his brow into her again, not in despair but in fealty.
"My forever miracle... my charming tree... I'll serve you with more than I am."