Better
title: "The Bloom's Offer" wordCount: 2010
The smell hit him first: burning hair and melting steel, which meant someone was cutting through his brand-new door with a plasma torch or something worse.
Remy grabbed the welding torch from the workbench, thumbed the igniter. Blue flame hissed to life. His hands weren't shaking yet but they would be. They always did.
The door sagged inward, edges glowing orange. Whoever was cutting through had precision—they'd traced the reinforcement points he'd welded just hours ago, targeting the weak spots between them. Professional work. That scared him more than the break-in itself.
The door fell with a crash that rattled his teeth.
A figure stumbled through the smoke, smaller than he'd expected. Female. Dark hair plastered to her skull with sweat or blood or both. She took two steps and her knee buckled.
"Safehouse protocol, I'm not—"
She hit the floor face-first.
Remy stood there, torch still lit, watching her bleed. The flame reflected off the spreading pool beneath her, turning it copper-bright. His System interface flickered to life without him asking:
QUEST AVAILABLE: Save the Intruder Reward: 200 XP, 1 Skill Point Time Limit: 4 minutes 17 seconds
He dismissed it with a thought. The timer kept counting down in the corner of his vision anyway.
Her health bar floated above her collapsed form: 12% and dropping. Red, then dark red, then almost black. He'd seen that color before. His father's bar had looked like that at the end, right before it disappeared entirely.
Move. Do something. Anything.
His legs carried him forward before his brain caught up. He dropped to his knees beside her, torch clattering to the floor. The flame died. His hands hovered over her back, not touching, because touching meant committing and committing meant—
She had puncture wounds. Seven of them, maybe eight. Small entry points but the edges were wrong, ragged and spreading like something was eating the tissue outward. Thornweaver venom. He'd seen it once before, on a scavenger who'd stumbled into his workshop begging for help. Remy had given him water and directions to the nearest clinic. The man had died three blocks away.
3 minutes 51 seconds.
"Okay." His voice sounded distant. "Okay. Here's the thing."
Here's the thing: he didn't have medical supplies. Didn't have healing potions or antivenom or whatever the System expected people to use now. He had materials. He had tools. He had the skills his father had beaten into him through ten thousand hours of repetition.
Good enough gets you killed.
So he'd have to be better than good enough.
Remy lurched to his feet, crossed to the material bins. His hands moved on autopilot, pulling components: Blightspawn chitin fragments, copper wire, a steel rod. The chitin was naturally heat-conductive, held temperature longer than any metal he'd worked with. If he could shape it right, bind it properly—
Binding agent. He needed something organic, something that would interface with her System-altered biology. The venom was spreading through her bloodstream. He needed to match it, fight biology with biology.
His father's voice, distant and distorted: Sometimes the material you need is the one you're most afraid to use.
Remy pulled the work knife from his belt and drew it across his left palm. The pain was sharp and clean and real. Blood welled up, dripped onto the workbench. He caught it in a ceramic dish, added copper shavings, began mixing with the knife tip.
2 minutes 8 seconds.
The chitin fragments went into his portable forge. He cranked the heat, watched them glow. His right hand was steady as he shaped them with tongs, forming a narrow blade with a hollow channel down the center. The copper wire wrapped around the handle, conducting heat from his palm into the tool itself.
His left hand bled into the dish. He didn't look at it.
When the chitin blade glowed white-hot, he pulled it from the forge and dipped the edge into the blood mixture. It hissed, steamed, and the blood didn't burn away—it fused to the chitin, turning the edge black and glossy like volcanic glass.
1 minute 3 seconds.
He knelt beside her again. Rolled her onto her side. The puncture wounds were spreading, black veins radiating outward from each entry point. Her health bar: 8%.
"This is going to hurt," he said to her unconscious form. "I'm sorry."
He pressed the cauterization blade to the first wound.
The smell hit him immediately: burning flesh, ozone, something sweet and wrong underneath. The black glass edge seared the wound shut, and the venom-blackened tissue crystallized, stopped spreading. His own blood in the tool was reacting with hers, creating a seal that the System recognized as valid.
His hands started shaking. He clamped down on the tremor, moved to the second wound.
The workshop tilted. His vision narrowed to a tunnel: wound, blade, seal. Wound, blade, seal. His breathing came too fast, too shallow. Hyperventilating. He knew the symptoms. Couldn't stop them.
Third wound. Fourth. His left hand was still bleeding, dripping onto her shirt. He didn't have time to bandage it.
Fifth wound. Sixth. The blade was cooling. He thrust it back into the forge one-handed, counted to ten, pulled it out glowing.
Seventh wound. Eighth.
Her health bar stabilized at 23%. The timer disappeared.
QUEST COMPLETE: Save the Intruder Reward: 200 XP, 1 Skill Point Bonus Objective Completed: Improvised Solution Additional Reward: Crafting Skill +2
Remy sat back on his heels, still holding the cooling blade. His left hand throbbed. The workshop spun slowly around him, and he couldn't get enough air, and his father's face was gone but his voice was still there saying good enough gets you killed and—
He crawled to the corner and vomited into a parts bin.
An hour later, he was sitting against the far wall with the welding torch in his lap when she woke up.
Her eyes opened. Brown, he noticed. Dark brown, almost black in the dim light. She blinked twice, focused on the ceiling, then turned her head to look at him.
"Hi," she said.
Remy said nothing.
She pushed herself up on her elbows, winced, looked down at her torso. The wounds were sealed with black glass, smooth and glossy against her skin. She touched one carefully, testing.
"Okay, that's new." She looked at him again. "You did this?"
He nodded.
"With what? I've never seen—" She stopped, seemed to reconsider. "Thank you. Seriously. I thought I was dead."
"You were close."
"How close?"
"Eight percent."
She whistled, low and impressed. "Bet you a sandwich I looked worse than that. The Thornweavers got me good—three of them, ambush pattern, I didn't even see the third one until it was already—" She laughed, cut herself off. "Sorry. I babble when I'm nervous. Or when I almost die. Which I guess makes me nervous, so, like, same thing?"
Remy watched her. She was talking too much, moving too much. Compensating. He recognized the pattern because he did the same thing, just quieter.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Voss."
"Just Voss?"
"Just Voss."
"Okay, Voss. I'm Kess. Kess Orinai." She sat up fully, testing her range of motion. "This is going to sound weird, but do you take commissions? Because whatever you just did to save my life, I need more of that. Not the life-saving part—well, hopefully not—but the crafting part. You're good at this."
"I work alone."
"I'm not asking you to join a party or anything. Just—" She pulled up her System interface, fingers dancing through menus he couldn't see. "I can pay. Five hundred Credits for the emergency work you just did. And I'll come back for a real commission later, something planned, with actual materials and time and stuff. Don't you think that's fair?"
The question hung in the air. He could say no. Should say no. She'd leave and he'd never see her again and his workshop would stay his, private and safe and empty.
"Five hundred," he said.
"Yeah. Transferring now."
His System interface chimed. CREDITS RECEIVED: 500. More money than he'd made in the last two weeks combined.
Kess stood, wobbled, caught herself against the workbench. "Okay, still a little dizzy. That's fine. Totally normal." She looked at the ruined door, then back at him. "Sorry about your door. I didn't have time to knock—the Thornweavers were right behind me and your workshop was the closest safehouse beacon I could find."
"Safehouse beacon?"
"Yeah, you registered it, right? When you reinforced the structure? The System automatically flags reinforced buildings as potential safehouses for anyone with the right clearance." She paused. "You didn't know that."
"No."
"Oh. Well. Now you do." She moved toward the door, testing each step. "I'll be back in a few days. For that commission. If you're interested."
"Why?"
"Why am I coming back?"
"Why me?"
She turned, and for the first time since waking up, her smile looked genuine instead of compensatory. "Because you saved my life with blood and chitin and whatever that black glass stuff is, and you did it in under four minutes while having what looked like a pretty serious panic attack. That's the kind of skill I need on my side."
She left through the ruined door before he could respond.
Remy sat on his cot in the back room, staring at the 500 Credits in his interface. The quest completion notification was still there too, waiting for him to acknowledge it. He dismissed both with a thought.
His left palm was bandaged now, wrapped in clean cloth he'd found in a drawer. The cut wasn't deep but it wouldn't stop bleeding. He'd used too much, given too much of himself to the tool. The cauterization blade sat on the workbench in the front room, cooled to black glass, still faintly warm to the touch.
He'd saved someone.
The thought should have felt good. Redemptive. Like maybe he was worth something after all, like maybe his father would have been proud.
Instead it felt like falling.
He'd saved someone and now she knew where he lived, knew what he could do, knew his name—well, half his name, but still. She'd be back. She'd said so. And when she came back she'd want more, and more after that, and eventually she'd want to know things he couldn't tell her and see things he couldn't show her and—
His hands were shaking again.
He stood up, crossed to the front room. The door was still ruined, hanging half-off its hinges. Cold air poured through the gap. He could feel eyes on him from the street, real or imagined.
Work. He needed to work.
Remy pulled on his father's oversized leather gloves and started gathering materials. New door frame, reinforced this time. Steel plate for the exterior. Better locks. A proper security system that didn't just scream at him through his System interface.
He worked through dawn, through the moment when the sky turned from black to grey to pale blue. His bandaged hand bled through the cloth. He ignored it. The door took shape piece by piece, weld by weld. Each strike of the hammer was a thought he didn't have to think, each measurement a feeling he didn't have to feel.
This is the first time since his father's death that he's saved someone instead of watching them die or leave.
He pushed the thought away. Measured the door frame again. The numbers didn't add up. He measured again.
The thought came back: he'd saved someone and it terrified him more than losing them ever had.
His father used to say that fear was just your body telling you something mattered. That the things worth doing were always the things that scared you most. He used to say that, and then he'd died, and Remy had learned that sometimes fear was just your body telling you to run.
He was three hours into the door repair, hands cramping around the welding torch, when Petra's voice came through his System interface:
"We need to talk. Now. Your shield just started a war."