“What about a thousand? Where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line? What is the point where you would look at a monster that you care for, and decide that enough is enough?” Ghoul spoke over the speaker, and for once, her attention broke, her mind finally registering the background noise of his voice.

She paused, feeling anger spark in her chest.

She grabbed the communication tablet lying inert on the table with a short, snappy motion, abandoning the framework she was working on in her moment of frustration.

“Are you interrogating the intruders or me, Ghoul?” She hiss-clicked out into the voice-port, her wings fluttering in agitation.

After a short moment of no reply, she returned to her makeshift forge, a pale imitation of what they had before Carnage’s colossal fuck-up, using three hands to form the runes and the fourth to carelessly throw the com tablet onto the table, before using said hand to stabilize the mana flow.

The fact that he hadn’t killed them already was baffling.

What if they had messed around with her power source? Did he have any idea how rare it was to find a machine like that, just lying around with a mana configurator already inside it? It took her days of nonstop work, with absolutely zero sleep to convert the crystal into lightning energy, and another week to wire that into her current, measly forge.

She wanted him to kill them already so she could stop fussing over their presence. It was stressing her out.

Leave it to Ghoul to turn a simple extermination into a lecture, or whatever the hell he was doing. She wasn’t even sure of who-

…

Her mind idly worked through the backlog of information it had cataloged but not processed, and she turned stiff for a brief moment.

She snatched the com tablet with her two top arms, sticking her mask right next to the voice port.

“Did you say wolf? Are-...” She trailed off, processing the rest of the conversation.

There was a wolf in the Dungeon, just a couple hundred feet from her forge and their measly excuse of a new hideout. He could be mistaken, but he was the most perceptive person she’d ever met. There was no way.

There was a wolf nearby.

A wolf that could, with one careless swing of its paw, break her power source beyond repair.

“I swear to every god in the cosmos if that creature breaks my forge I am smuggling myself out of this continent and going to the Xhilatni jungles to live in a tree.” She ground out, and hoped that despite her stunted vocal abilities, her rather emotionless delivery could convey how irate she was right now.

“If… if it goes for me or K-... someone I care about.” A croaky voice replied through the com tablet, and her chitinous fingers shook, her mandibles clicking and grinding together.

She turned it off, and tossed it to the corner of the table, a lot harder than she’d intended.

For once, she was thankful of how weak she was, because if it had broken she would have lost her mind.

She took a deep breath, trying to focus back on her work, but the moment she returned to the enchantment framework, her mind wandered, sticking to that woman’s words like glue, refusing to leave her alone.

And working on enchantments with a wandering, furious mind, was either a gateway to losing a limb or destroying the materials one was trying to enchant.

Her hands fell on the table with clicks that hung onto the silent room uncomfortably long, and she bowed her head, white hair falling forward to block the sight of the damp, cramped room around her, her shoulders slackening as her breaths deepened.

The sight of her hair only made more resentment and fury boil up in her throat. Her mind always screamed at her that the color was wrong, it should be different, but it never told her what the right color is supposed to be.

Her eyes flicked down to the floor, littered with bits and pieces of machinery and crystal dust.

Unreasonable as the emotion was, she hated that woman.

Because she couldn’t help but project herself onto her, years ago, saying much the same thing without knowing what that would really mean.

And here she’d been for the past week and a half, working herself to death to avoid having to confront the things she’d seen, been complicit in, to avoid going through that moral crisis always waiting just around the corner.

Where did she draw the line?

She didn’t know anymore, because she constantly had to re-assess everything, lest she be forced to leave behind the only family she’d ever known to shield her conscience.

When a flaming demon in a gas mask and a creature covered in boiling gore broke her out of Tillenhall, she’d been ready to do and agree to anything, everything, merely a shivering, mad husk of a human being, in a body that wasn’t hers.

It took a long time and countless days of struggle and agony to stop hooking her chitinous fingers into every nook and cranny of her exoskeleton, trying to peel away the insectoid armor and find the human body that she knew was hiding somewhere in there, trying to rip off her second pair of arms because they shouldn’t be there.

It took years for her mind to start resembling some rough notion of sanity. It took years of being a worthless burden for her to finally start participating and being more than simple dead weight.

At some point, Ghoul had asked her the same question he asked the intruder, and she’d answered in a very similar way, watching with mild distaste as he ate someone’s leg.

And yet, now, every time she looked at Carnage’s face, still lying in that pod she herself created, her mind flashed back to the day everything went to shit, and she had to ask herself that same damn question a hundred times a day without an answer.

Where did she draw the line?

It was one thing to say she drew the line at Carnage trying to kill Ghoul, and only there.

It was another thing to walk through hell itself, through a tornado of flames, with orange rods of latticework metal slowly sagging down from the sky like the web of a spider closing down on its prey, over piles of charred corpses, molten glass raining down on her back.

It was another thing to check a newspaper and read the casualty report, go through the thirteen hundred names of the dead, and the two thousand injured.

It was another thing to watch The Guard flood the Dungeon and beat submission onto innocents to appease the upper city, for they could not find the ‘terrorist’ who attacked the teleport station, to watch the country be brought on the utter brink of a civil war.

It was another thing to watch the world turn against them. To have to leave everything behind and crawl into the sewers like rats, because everyone, both from the Dungeon and above, wanted their heads on pikes.

After all, there were only three pyrokinetics in Carmera who could wreak such destruction, and two of them lived in the upper city. The person who did it was obvious.

And she didn’t know if she could just ignore the actions of her friends anymore.

There was less to be conflicted about when the extent of moral questioning she had to do was ‘where is Ghoul getting these body parts from’, and ‘I should probably be more concerned about how happy Carnage is to be burning anything that can scream’.

In a way, Ghoul’s question had been prophetic.

She couldn’t just ignore how many times the age of the deceased was in the single digits, how their bodies crunched and crumbled beneath her feet as she looked for her friend in the fire, how all those innocents were burnt to a crisp for no seeming reason.

She could just imagine their horrific screams of agony as their flesh was rent off their bones, and it made her sick.

They still didn’t know what happened, as Carnage was comatose.

Did she just decide she wanted to hear some screaming that day? Was she attacked? Did she just want to ‘let out some steam’?

She was torn between leaving, unable to deal with the guilt of what Carnage had done, the consequences of their actions that could lead to thousands more people dead, and reinforcing the answer she’d given Ghoul all those years ago. That she would only draw the line if Carnage tried to kill him.

Her emotions were going haywire.

She knew she shouldn’t even be hesitating. Her friends were a genocidal sadist who would happily burn the entire planet just to watch the fire roar into the sky, and a ruthless, remorseless, intelligent ghoul that had no idea what the word ‘guilt’ even was besides a dictionary definition of it.

Logically, morally, she shouldn’t even be here with them, she should have walked away the moment she realized what Carnage had done.

But she just couldn’t.

It was Carnage who would act like a heater for her whenever she was cold or needed some physical comfort, offering some dry commentary that would make her mandibles try and twitch into some imitation of a smile. It was Carnage that helped her practise and work with mana, that taught her the basics, that taught her how to read again. It was Carnage who commissioned the mask she was wearing right now, one that allowed her to look into a mirror without breaking her fists on it, a present for her ‘freedom-day’.

It was Ghoul who would pry her clawing fingers off her chitin plates whenever she was trying to peel them off. It was Ghoul who taught her how to calm herself down during a manic episode, how to stop herself from succumbing to the intense urge to harm herself, to crack her shell and find the human within. It was Ghoul who taught her how to fight, how to think for herself, how to regain independence and confidence, how to find something that clicked with her.

And when she’d found it, it was him who would spend days running around trying to find books and information and Spellbooks to support her, him who would show her how she could apply her talents out into the real world, in the Dungeon, in a fight. It was him who brought her out of her cocoon and allowed her to help them with the things she made.

It was those moments and another million smaller ones that all made her love them with all her heart, like family.

But guilt was tearing her heart in two.

She had to speak to Ghoul. Honestly, and openly.

Not these underhanded questions through a fucking com tablet while he was interrogating someone who somehow busted into her power room.

With a long, long sigh, she rubbed her two top hands on her mask, tracing the edges of the white rubber-like material, perfectly shaped into an imitation of a human nose, mouth and jawline, pressing into the space just below her eyes and extending to wrap around her neck.

And with her bottom two arms, she reached for the com tablet once again, clicking the button with a childish scribble of a skeletal head on it.

Carnage’s work.

After a couple of seconds, Ghoul accepted, and she simply stood in silence, listening to him give out instructions to the intruder and give some barely believable excuse as to why he was giving her a task to complete.

Cold, cynical, remorseless, she could call Ghoul a lot of things, but she couldn’t call him cruel. Especially considering that task was meant to be given to someone else he knew.

Her mandibles tilted into a rough ‘v’ shape from under her mask, an automatic response that was the closest she could get to a smile.

Her mask gave a slight, polite smile, the enchantment as off-kilter as usual.

Still, it was better than nothing.

She waited until the background explosions had faded before speaking.

“Sorry for being snappy. When you have time, could we… just sit and talk?” She asked, her trilling, clicking voice still unable to properly convey much emotion. Deep and mechanical, almost, with a vague hint of femininity.

Maybe she could imbue some voice enchantment into her mask. It would probably help with the surge of sickness she felt when hearing the inflectionless hiss-clicking rhythm that her insectoid throat made.

“Sure. I’ll clean up the other tunnels from whatever’s getting close so you can work in peace, make sure our new informants leave, and then I’ll come by.” He replied easily, and she breathed out a slow, deep breath.

She appreciated how unflappable he was.

She supposed that for someone who had basically raised two borderline insane freaks like Carnage and herself after breaking them both out of Tillenhall, he’d simply gotten used to having nerves of steel.

She still remembered when she tried to stab an electric rod into Ghoul’s skull during an episode of hers, and Carnage sat with her afterwards and listed off the times she’d tried to hurt him while freaking out over one thing or another, as if that was supposed to comfort her from her guilt.

Her mood lifted just from the memory alone. The way Carnage was trying to comfort her but failing so miserably in her execution was actually rather funny in hindsight.

…

Gods damn it, what was there to talk about?

She knew she’d never leave them. Carnage and Ghoul could both tell her they would kill her, and she’d just tilt her head away to give them better access to lop her head off. They’d saved her from a fate worse than death and she owed them more than just her life. She owed them her very sense of self.

She didn’t need to talk to Ghoul to come to a decision. She had to talk to him to figure out a way to cope with the heart-rending guilt. She could probably take it.

Losing them wasn’t something she could take.

“It’s… thank you. I think my line… is still the same. Just… nevermind, we’ll talk when you’re here, face to face. I’ll go back to making those grenades.”

“Alright. Be there in a couple hours at most, Mirena. Oh and, if you ever need help with something-”

“You’ll try to help if I let you know, I know. Thank you, Ghoul.”

He gave off an acknowledging hum, and the com tablet’s light flicked off.

She let out a sigh through the mask’s nose, and got back to work under the uncaring glare of half a dozen light crystals.

-

(If you are reading this story on any website that isn’t RoyalRoad. com or Scribblehub. com, you are reading stolen content from free sites that run no intrusive or obnoxious advertisements. Just google the story name with one of those websites next to it and you'll get to my story on the sites it was meant to be hosted on.)