“And were you with her or the other top ten? Well, were you?” Pete asked. His tone was sharp, almost bitter.

“Neither were y—“Sofia stopped amidst her sentence. She kept her gaze on him but simultaneously revisited her memories. In the cave, she remembered Pete being awfully chummy with Stanis. At the time, she had thought it was just because the two of them had known each other from before. But, what if they had been together in the same group- the strongest group on Earth? No, she shook her head at Pete.

“So you’re part of the top ten, are you?” she asked.

“Of course, what else would I be?” Pete proudly responded. Internally, however, he was biting his own teeth. It had been going so well and this bitch just had to overcomplicate everything.

“I don’t remember seeing you in the first war against those one-eyed Aliens. In fact, I don’t remember you fighting the purple Titans either,” she said.

Catching her cue, Moonshine carried on. “Weird, I don’t remember seeing you in the fights either. It’s almost like you simply weren’t in any of them, like you didn’t even fight, despite claiming to be so strong,”

‘Shit, shit, shit,” Pete thought. But just like before, he kept his actual expression masked with a smile, albeit more forced this time. Rikkey leaned on the wall next to him, her short and dirty hair staining the surface. She had her eyes closed, and seemed to not be listening to the discussion. To his other side, Serb sat with Niss. Yet, despite sitting, they were still taller than everyone in the hall by at least a head. He had his beady eyes cast on Pete, the two options in his head clashing once more.

“Did you fight with the rest of us in the battles or not, Pete?” Alyona asked, straining his name. “Did you, or did you not, fight for your survival, and that of everyone’s in the village?”

“I didn’t fight in the war,” Pete admitted with a bright glint in his eye. Due to him saying it so confidently, most of the people in the hall almost believed that what he was saying wasn’t incriminating. Almost. “But, I was doing something far more important,” he added.

“What wer—“Alyona asked, before being cut off by Pete.

“Did you think those Titans came right after those one-eyed freaks just because they love queuing up? Well, did you? Somebody had to hold them off, y’know,”

“And that somebody was you; is that what you’re trying to claim?” Moonshine asked. “So why is it that when I did catch peeks of you in the village, safe within the walls and sniggering with your other two fools, that you were virtually unharmed? Your clothes had no blood on, no tears, and you weren’t even tired,”

Pete coughed out a laugh. Despite being forced, the people in the hall heard something different. It was confident, just like his previous actions, mocking, just like his character, and cracked, also just like his character. “We’re not all as weak and pathetic as you are, sweetheart,”

Moonshine grinned in response. She looked to Alyona, then the whole audience. “We have Mr. Top Ten here who apparently doesn’t fight but instead spends his time daydreaming. I think we should test out his claim, what do you say?”

The crowd cheered her on, excited about the fight like children on Christmas Eve. While none of them had seen Pete fight, they also knew he was strong from the aura he had given off when trying to get into the village. But how strong was he?

Alyona looked at Richie. The portly man, in response, began to think off who would be the best match. The reason why he had been one of the main leaders before Stanis had arrived was because of his analytical skills. However, he felt his ability useless here as he realised that he knew nothing about Pete. He simply hadn’t been a big enough character before the war for anyone to care about him. In the end, he looked at Orena and Caleb. One was extremely strong in certain conditions and weaker in others, while the other was a solid all-rounder. Eventually, he wiped his forehead sweat and nodded at Caleb.

The massive, black man stepped forward. He looked the same as he had months back, mostly anyway. He was still muscular, to the point of being sculpted, and he still had large tattoos ranging down both arms. On his back was a greatsword: he would have put it across his waist but it was too long for that to be practical. But what was different about him was his eyes and his face. He looked exhausted, snuffed out of the life that had previously filled him.

“Here or outside?” Caleb asked, lifting the sword off his back.

“Now, let’s just stop here,” Pete replied, raising his hands in front of himself. “No need to devolve to violence like beasts,” he said while cringing at his own words.

Caleb ignored him and shot forward, his steps like that of a rocket’s blast. He swung the sword at Pete’s head. The entirety of his strength was behind the slice, his muscles tightening around each other like bloodthirsty snakes; he was intent on ending it in one strike.

<Empathetic spread>

Caleb’s grip suddenly loosened and the sword lost balance, heading lower than it should have. Simultaneously, Pete stumbled back and hit the wall behind him. The blade missed him by the hair.

Furious at the lack of control he found himself with, almost as if he was drunk, Caleb swung again, this time wider and more careless. Pete tripped and fell beneath the blade. He turned his head once the blade passed and found his mind blank. The sword was headed towards Rikkey, and due to Caleb’s lack of control, it was obvious he wouldn’t be able to stop it in time. Rikkey herself had opened her eyes in the time but found herself lacking to escape the blade. It was like she was running away from a bullet…

In Pete’s blank head, one thought appeared: This cannot happen. Mana surged from him and swallowed Caleb, blinding him. Pete’s arm shot towards his waist, towards his hatchet and then towards Caleb who stood right next to him.

<Superhuman strength>

Pete hit Caleb with the blunt end and pulled on it. Caleb went flying, completely unaware and frightened of what was happening. He landed on the other side of the hall, unconscious with his leg torn off.

Silence usurped the room and reigned supreme for a few seconds as everyone turned towards Pete. They had been looking at him before, but now they were looking. He had completely twisted their perceptions of him within a second.

Pete himself felt reality dawn a second after Caleb landed. He looked at the bloody hatchet in his hand and felt a horrible nausea in his stomach. ‘Fuck,’he thought, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ This wasn’t meant to happen. They weren’t meant to look at him with those gazes: they shouldn’t be. This fucked everything up. ‘No, no, no,’ he thought, ‘it’s alright.’ He could still salvage it. Stanis needed to be alive, and they needed to see him as the leader figure, not him. Anyone but him.

Pete began chuckling, before choking on his laughter. After coughing away most of the respect and fear they now held for him, he pointed at Caleb. “Will you believe me now? I was with Stanis, and that beast of a woman. Believe me, as much as he isn’t perfect, you’d much, much prefer him to that freak. Believe me,” he ended on, before practically running out of the hall.

Serb watched Pete leave with wide-eyes and a frantic heart. Pete was even stronger than him and yet had acted unassuming all this time. This thought went around the entire hall, all of them frightened of what state they could now be in if they had been in the wrong place and chosen to fight.

After Pete left, over half of the people on the right side moved to the left. At first, they moved fast with their heads down but after a few of them had crossed sides, groups did so proudly, glaring at Alyona and the people who stood to the right.

****

In the two days that passed by, Pete, Skint, and Bear were largely left alone by the whole village. As the news spread, more people began to watch the building they stayed in but few dared to go inside. The trio spent the two days gathering materials and creating medicines out of them, pouring each and every one of them over Stanis’s recovering body. The stench was unbearable, but the trio carried on anyway. And throughout the entire period, not a single person questioned what they were doing…

****

Stanis felt… alive. He felt the heavy eye-lids over his sight, and yet at the same time, they were light. Opening them, he came eye-to-eye with a small room, empty of all life…