"ELARA!"

  My voice echoed violently against the grimy, blood-stained walls of the alley. I had shouted so hard and ferociously that my own throat ached.

  Elara jumped. Her shoulders shook, and the painful sob about to escape her throat was cut short by terror. She flinched, staring at me with tearful eyes wide with shock. The hysterical cloud in her gaze dissipated for a moment, replaced by pure dread.

  "Snap out of it!" I hissed, taking a step toward her. Ignoring the blood dripping from the tip of my spear, I brought my face close to hers. "Do you want to draw more monsters to us? Do you want to die? How much longer are you going to keep crying? They’ll hear your voice!"

  Elara cowered against the wall, but her brokenness and anger suppressed her fear. Pointing at the corpse on the ground with trembling hands, she shouted back at me:

  "You didn't tell me I was going to kill a real human! You didn't tell me this... this was a murder!" Tears dripped from her chin. "Don't talk to me like you understand when you haven't killed a human yourself! I am not a monster!"

  Her words hung in the air. I paused for a moment. Except for the howling wind and the distant sounds of destruction, there wasn't a sound in the street. I loosened my grip on my spear. I didn't look away from her.

  "I did," I said. My voice was no longer a shout; it was an ice-cold whisper.

  Elara gasped. "What?"

  "I killed a human, okay?" I continued, feeling the weight of the words in every syllable. "With my own hands. And not like this stranger, this child you just killed." I took a deep breath, trying to push down the sting in my chest. "If you paid attention to the system notifications, you'd know that fifty percent of the people who didn't spin the wheel received a penalty. This is their penalty. Mutation. Losing their consciousness and turning into heaps of flesh that attack everything."

  Elara’s lips parted, the anger in her eyes slowly giving way to realization.

  "That was how I found out about the quest," I concluded. "Because I killed someone. Someone who had turned. And at that moment, I realized I had to do whatever it takes to survive."

  Elara went completely silent. Her eyes filled again, but this time there was no trace of a hysterical crisis; there was only a heavy, crushing sadness. She swallowed, looking at me as if she were looking at a ghost.

  "H-how?" she whispered tremblingly. "How are you so calm..."

  "I'm not calm," I said, with total honesty. I made sure she looked into my eyes. "In fact, I'm scared to death. I don't want to kill anyone or live through this shit. I feel nauseous at every step. But if there’s one thing I want, it’s to survive. And I will survive, no matter what."

  I leaned slightly toward her, closing the distance and looking straight into her eyes, into her terrified soul. "If you want to do the same, wipe your tears and follow me. If you keep crying, you’ll end up in a worse state than that creature."

  Elara looked away. She looked down at the asphalt, at those small sneakers. She remained frozen for a few seconds. Then she let out a long, shaky breath. She roughly wiped her tears and the blood splatters on her face with the sleeve of her jacket. She gritted her teeth. When she looked up at me, I could see something hardening inside that fragile girl.

  I nodded. "Let's go," I said, scouting the surroundings. "Monsters must have heard us. This place isn't safe anymore."

  We quickly left the alley. Clinging to the shadows, we moved behind overturned cars and collapsed walls. Hours chased one another. As the crimson in the sky gave way to a pitch-black darkness invisible through the smoke, the suffocating atmosphere of the apocalypse seeped into our lungs.

  Our concept of time consisted only of that damned timer provided by the system. When I checked it out of the corner of my eye, I saw the number that made my stomach cramp: 30 hours remaining. We had both reached a breaking point. My feet were dragging, and my arms ached from holding the spear. Except for those minutes I used my skill, we had long surpassed the endurance limits of a normal human. Elara’s condition was even worse; she stumbled as she walked and flinched at every sound.

  However, this march through hell had not been entirely in vain. After hours of tracking, hiding, and searching for prey, we had found two more isolated, weak monsters. One was a giant street dog mutation that looked as if its skin had been melted by acid; the other was another transformed human with a broken spine trying to crawl on a wall. We took both down with the same tactic. While I distracted them and pinned them to the ground, Elara set aside her hesitations and finished them with trembling hands.

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  When the lifeless body of the last creature slumped to the ground, we took shelter in a dark corner in the middle of a street.

  Elara dropped the bloody knife from her hand and leaned her back against the cold wall. She was out of breath, her face unrecognizable from dirt and sweat. Looking at the invisible screen before her eyes, she tried to force a tired smile. "Yes..." she said, her voice rustling like a dried leaf. "I'm Level 3. This last one gave 60 EXP."

  I was trying to stay upright by leaning on my spear, but my legs were shaking.

  "Good," I whispered, though I didn't feel like celebrating. I stared into the darkness of the street. Moving at this pace, with this tactic... it was suicide. We were spending hours to find weak creatures, facing the risk of becoming food for a massive monster at every corner. Our efficiency was too low, and our time was running out.

  "This isn't going to work," I said, unable to hide the exhaustion in my voice. "At this rate, we'll both die from exhaustion or a mistake before that timer runs out. First, let's find a safe place and eat something. Then we’ll have a change of plans."

  Elara didn't even have the strength to object; she just nodded.

  A bit further down the street, we saw an abandoned auto repair garage with its shutter halfway down. There was no movement around it. We crawled silently under the shutter and slipped inside. It smelled of oil and gasoline.

  I pulled the shutter down with all my might and engaged the locking mechanism. When that dull metal sound echoed through the garage, all our ties to the outside were cut.

  Neither of us could stay standing any longer. Elara collapsed next to a pile of car tires, and I leaned my back against a tool cabinet and slumped onto the cold concrete floor. My spear slipped from my hand and hit the ground. Inside the dark garage, only the sounds of our heavy, ragged breathing could be heard.

  We were alive, but I didn't know how much longer we could keep going like this.

  The inside of the garage wasn't pitch black; the faint moonlight and the flickering reflection of streetlights seeping through the narrow gap under the shutter elongated the shadows of the tools and old car parts. The smell of oil, rust, and stale gasoline hung in the air, but right now, this place felt safer than the most luxurious hotel in the world.

  I leaned my back against the cold concrete wall and stretched my legs. As I pulled my bag to my lap and unzipped it, I could feel my muscles twitching.

  Elara had collapsed right across from me, at the base of an old workbench. There was a strange, sad expression on her face as she looked at the food she pulled from her bag. She tore open a pack of oat biscuits, then pulled out a pack of marshmallows crushed at the bottom of the bag. She carefully squeezed a pink marshmallow between two biscuits, pressing them down with care as if she were working on a major engineering project, and took a large bite.

  "What are you doing?" I asked, opening the cap of my water bottle. My voice was raspy from fatigue.

  Elara shrugged while chewing her mouthful. A nostalgic smile appeared on her face that didn't fit this hell at all.

  "The last time I did something like this was with my girlfriends at school," she said, the tremor in her voice vanishing for a moment. "We saw it in a video online and tried it. I think they call them S'mores. Of course, normally you're supposed to melt the marshmallow over a campfire or something, but... it's quite tasty like this, raw."

  She took another bite. Her eyes drifted into a memory, likely of those girlfriends she would never see again.

  With her girlfriends...

  "Friends," I thought to myself. I pulled the water bottle away from my lips.

  I didn't have many friends. In fact, to tell the truth, Matt was probably my only friend. I wasn't one of the school losers or an antisocial type who couldn't talk to anyone. I just... preferred being alone. People's superficial conversations and fake troubles had always felt like nothing but noise to me.

  But Matt wasn't like that. Matt was the bullied, excluded, truly lonely kid in school. Because he saw me sitting alone, quietly, in the cafeteria, the library, or the yard, he felt a kinship with me. He thought our loneliness stemmed from the same reason. He took my silence as an invitation and began sitting next to me, talking to me, constantly following me around. He was too talkative to silence and too pathetic to drive away.

  Was he really my best friend? I wondered, looking at the ceiling of the dark garage. In the corners of my mind, Matt’s smiling, excited face came alive. Then, that same face melted by acid, bruised, with elongated teeth...

  Was I really given a choice to be friends with him? Or were we declared "best friends" just because he followed me around and I wasn't rude enough to brush him off?

  A heavy stone sat on my chest. My hands gripped the strap of the bag in my lap tightly.

  And what about now? After shattering his head with a fire extinguisher and stepping through his blood to leave that lab... Am I a total piece of shit for thinking all this? I killed my best friend and now I'm questioning if he was actually my friend. Maybe this system didn't give me a penalty, maybe I was a monster deep down all along.

  As that toxic spiral of thoughts pulled me deeper and into a darker place...

  "Hey."

  Elara’s soft voice pulled me out of that pit. I snapped my head toward her. The distant look in her eyes was gone; she was watching me. She had her hand extended toward me. Between her fingers sat one of those biscuit and marshmallow sandwiches she had carefully prepared.

  "Want to try one?" she asked, smiling slightly.

  In the dark, I looked at her, then at that simple, childlike sweet in her hand. After those heavy, bloody thoughts, the offer was so absurd, so innocent...

  I let out a deep breath, closed that dark door in my mind for now, and reached out to take the biscuit.

  "I think..." I said in a low voice. "Yes."