** Rosa **

 

As we continued to fight, Amelia’s demeanour changed, if only subtly. She stopped being so flirtatious and began to watch my back like a hawk. Any time one of the Fear Gang guild members tried to flank me, she was there with her gun, blasting whichever poor sod was dumb enough to try.

That wasn’t to say she stopped with her flirting altogether, I thought wryly as she gave me a grin after she’d blasted some rogue who’d snuck up behind me. I had no idea how to respond to any of this, the idea that someone could enjoy my company simply for my company. This was in spite of being seen as a terrifying monster by most of the player base in this region too, which just added to the confusion.

The situation with the enemy players had gone from a difficult fight, to one that was fast getting out of hand in our favour. With each player we brought down, another ally was risen in their place, until we outnumbered them, and not the other way around. They had yet to figure out my weakness too, a weakness that my creatures shared.

I had discovered early on that my smoke form was highly susceptible to magical attacks, but physical attacks would rarely achieve anything. The opposite was true when I took physical form, and I gained a high resistance to magical attacks, but I was relatively weak to physical blows. I had been using this to my advantage for a long time, switching between forms where appropriate to avoid damage.

“We might want to just leave these idiots to deal with your friends and head out,” Amelia said as she moved into place beside me.

“I agree,” I murmured, watching my creations butchering the increasingly desperate players around us. “I think they should dissipate as soon as they run out of the fuel I used to create them.”

“Alright that’s good. Don’t want to leave them around to kill good players down the line,” she nodded.

I nodded back, then gestured for us to leave the chaos of the battlefield. Amelia took the lead, giving a cheeky wave to our adversaries as we departed before bounding off with her gravity defying stride. I almost stumbled to a halt when a realisation hit me, one that sent yet more profound shockwaves of confusion through my mind. Just this small skirmish had sated my need for combat, and I felt almost weary of it now.

Was this Amelia’s influence? I was beginning to think so, the way she’d been feeding me with every stray emotion and thought. The way she’d been making me smile despite myself. It had me off balance, this whole thing. I wasn’t used to finding nothing to fear in a person as they got to know me. How she so unashamedly flirted, joked and made a genuine effort to make me happy was so far removed from my experiences in life thus far.

We made good time as we escaped, although the sun’s meagre light faded further with every step. From what I could tell, the area we were in was near the southern pole of this world, and it was currently autumn, which meant the days were getting shorter and shorter. We’d only had around seven hours of sunshine today, and the light snow from before was beginning to turn towards dangerous as the wind and density of the fall began to pick up.

“Damn, this isn’t a good situation,” Amelia shivered when we stopped just as the sun was setting.

“Yes, I might be able to take on a smokey form to avoid feeling the cold, but it will still kill me regardless,” I nodded in agreement. I hadn’t yet died in the game, but it had been a close thing on more than one occasion due to the perpetually freezing temperatures of the region.

“I should have stopped us earlier… but I wanted us to get more distance before nightfall. They won’t stop looking for us even as the sun goes down, since they have the advantage of being the hunters. They can light fires to stay warm, set up camps and shit,” she grimaced, turning to look at me. Her lips looked blue, I noted with a little pang of worry.

“So what do you suggest?” I asked, deferring to her obvious skill in situations like this.

“Well… we can find a drift somewhere and burrow in. That will insulate us from the outside, and I have a bunch of fur blankets in my inventory for this type of situation that we can use to keep warm, so I guess we go find a nice cozy looking snowdrift,” she said with a tired smile.

“I have also got similar items in my inventory, as well as dried rations for dinner,” I replied as she moved off to find a suitable place for us to sleep.

“Nice, that makes things a bit easier,” she replied, her eyes searching our surroundings for shelter. “My emergency stores taste awful.”

We found a suitable snow drift a few dozen meters from where we’d been speaking, and we got to work hollowing it out a little. I thought that the snow would surely collapse on itself, but Amelia began using some spell to pack the snow together in a way that would allow it to stay structurally sound. I was impressed that she’d seen fit to craft a spell like that at all.

She had a couple of long bamboo poles too which she inserted into the wall while telling me about how we’d probably get snowed in, so the hollow tube of the bamboo would keep some air coming in from the outside. All in all, the improvised hut took us an hour or so to complete and left us shivering and bone cold by the time we could finally crawl inside.

“We need fatty foods, or root vegetables,” Amelia told me through chattering teeth, once she had the entrance blocked off.

“Why is that?” I asked, opening my inventory and sifting through the menu to look for the foods she’d asked for.

“They produce a lot of heat when they get digested, so if we eat a bunch now, they’ll warm us up from the inside over the course of the night,” she told me with another shiver. “Fuck I’m cold. I’m going to put the furs down and summon a little heat giving spell, but I won’t be able to hold it for long, since mana is a thing.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, summoning out my own furs.

Before I got the food out, I changed into my Tod Sifv form since the large furry tail would give a little extra insulation.

“Fox girl form again?” she asked as I handed her some dried rations. “For the fluffy warmth?”

“Yes,” I nodded, idly running my hands through the fur of my tail. It was nice and soothing.

She didn’t say anything for a few moments after that, content to eat her food in silence.

When she did speak, it was with quiet anxious words. “Will you come with me? Back into the Taeru, to my guild and guild house?”

The question was a heavy one, full of double meaning and the promise of so many things. What did I want to do? Did I want to stay with Amelia, follow her into Joret? I wasn’t sure, until I flipped the question around. I didn’t want to let her go off alone, never to see her again, that much was abundantly clear… which meant that my answer would have to be yes, no matter any other misgivings I had.

“I will,” I told her softly. “I’ll need to use this form and keep who I am a secret. I can’t imagine the players and NPCs of Joret are particularly happy with my previous actions.”

“No, probably not,” she chuckled. “You’ll also need to get yourself some ability trees, make a build and get some gear.”

I gave a snort at that one, because she was right. I’d need to pretend to be a normal player, and normal players started with at least three ability trees to play around with.

“How do you even get a hold of them?” I asked thoughtfully.

“Well, you can buy them, although they are stupid expensive,” she said. “There’s trainers for them, and sometimes you can get a quest to get them like I did with the artificing tree.”

“I am… reasonably wealthy in the game, considering the number of people I have killed and looted,” I said with a wince, staring at the raw figure that was my ingame wealth. Somehow I’d managed to become wealthy within the game, as well as without.

“Good to hear, you can use it to kit yourself out then!” she said happily.

I waited with twisting gut for the other shoe to drop, for her to ask for some of it, or help her with buying some piece of gear, but it didn’t happen. She sat there in silence for several minutes, her expression lost in the darkness. What was she thinking now? Was she still considering the best way to ask for money from me? Was she going to turn on me now? Many other gamers had done just that in the other games I’d played.

“Fuck, I’m so cold,” she swore instead. “I can deal with wind chill, my race is good with that, but raw ambient cold like this just does me in.”

“You’re… cold?” I asked in disbelief as I realised her thought process had already moved on from my wealth.

“Yeah, the food isn’t helping as much as I thought it would, and because I lost so much heat out there I don’t have anything for the furs to keep inside,” she explained through her now perpetually chattering teeth.

I was actually feeling rather warm, at least compared to how cold I had been out there as we had made the hut. My tail was now wrapped around me, and my furs were cozy. It wasn't as comfortable as I'd have liked, but I could deal with it. Amelia on the other hand, didn't sound at all happy right now, and I found a little pang of sympathy rise up within my heart.

I could help her, I realised, with my own body heat. It was something you saw so often in media, two people trapped and forced to share body heat. It would work though. I could go to her and offer my heat… so what was stopping me? Plain old fear? I shook my head to try and clear away the anxious worry. It was getting harder for me to justify in the face of Amelia's overwhelming kindness towards me anyway. What did I really have to fear?

"We should…" I began, before my voice trailed off.

"Hmm?" she asked tiredly, sounding far worse than even a few minutes prior. 

"I'm going to come over and give you some of my body heat, because you do not sound great right now," I told her, bracing myself for what I was about to do.

She made a grunt of affirmation, and murmured, “Cuddles are good.”

Cuddling? Is that what this would be? The word made me hesitate again for a moment, but it was just a small worry, and one that I mentally pushed aside. If that was what she wanted to call it, that would be fine with me.

I crawled over to her quickly and delicately wormed my way inside her cocoon of furs, adding my own to the layers in the process. Since I was smaller than her in this form, I decided it made sense for me to place myself nervously in her lap. 

"Oh… you're warm," she murmured, carefully wrapping her cold arms around and pulling me tight against her.

Wow. For a few desperate seconds, my heart hammered away in terror. I had not been held like this in… well, forever, and my mind rebelled at a base level. But then the panic faded, and in its place rose a buzzing happiness that took my breath away. This felt incredible. She was so amazingly soft!

"Thanks," she murmured appreciatively. "I know that was probably hard for you."

"It's fine. This feels surprisingly nice," I whispered back.

“Really?” she asked in quiet surprise.

Humming tiredly, I carefully laid my head on her shoulder, mindful of my larger fox ears. Her arms felt strong and sure around me, and that sent little happy swells of emotion through me with every breath I took. Yet more confusion, my mind twisting in a feeble attempt to deny truths that were becoming more and more apparent. How could letting my guard down like this be giving me so much comfort?

I could feel her heartbeat too, its slow and the steady thumping was shifting my head ever so slightly with each pulse. She was so… real, so tangible that it took my breath away and left me spinning off into the void like some lost cargo container in space.

Then she found my tail and began to do what I had been doing earlier, running her fingers absently through the fur, and I gave a little shiver of delight. My gosh, that felt far more incredible when someone else did it. Almost too good, in a ticklish sort of way.

“Scratch it,” I almost purred, suddenly feeling a little demanding.

“Alright,” she chuckled, and my word did that chuckle sound strange with one of my big ears pressed against her chest like that.

She began to lazily scratch up and down my tail with one hand, while the other one started up similar motions in my hair, and from that point onwards, I was a goner. It was so much to process, more human comfort than I had experienced since I was a child. I fell asleep.