My three-year-old’s spear sunk into my arm.

Again.

I took a deep breath and tried to control myself before I spoke. Showing anger would only scare Cassie, and she was scared enough, standing out here in the open with no Tagon or Summoned Shell to protect her. I wasn’t very hurt: the blade had mostly been caught by my armor, but my brilliant child had managed to somehow find the tiny gap in my protection, the tip slicing slightly into unarmored skin.

A thin trickle of blood was staining the pages of the childrens’ books I’d pressed into service as vambraces. I grimaced, seeing it. It wasn’t that I minded the mess, not really… but I couldn't help but think about the fact that our ramshackle armor wouldn’t last forever. I could make more, but Micah’s new awkward gait was an everpresent reminder that we’d need better protection soon. A monster in his Trial had sheared through his boot, muscle, and bones in an instant.

“Cassie.” I did my best to keep my voice level, although I wasn’t quite badass enough to utterly ignore the stinging pain. “Do you see my arm?”

She glanced up at me, then gasped, releasing her spear with one hand to point upward. “Mommy! You have a boo-boo!”

“Yes. I do. Do you know how I got it?”

She looked confused. “No?”

“You hurt me, Cassie. You weren’t paying attention to where your spearpoint was, and you cut my skin.”

Cassie’s eyes got big. She glanced over her shoulder, as if hoping a hiding place would appear in the middle of the sunny road. Not finding one, she hunched over guiltily. “I’m sorry!”

I knelt down, holding my arm up close enough that I was sure she could see the injury. “I don’t need you to be sorry, I need you to be careful. When you have the spear-cover off, you need to know where your spearpoint is and keep it away from people. I told you the last time you hit me that it would be easy to hurt me, and this time you did.”

“I’m really sorry!”

Cassie was practically in tears. I wasn’t sure that I was getting through to her. Someone unfamiliar with small kids might have thought the tears were proof that she was taking my words to heart. That was possible, but I thought it far more likely that she was wholly preoccupied by the horror of “being in trouble” and “causing a boo-boo” and completely missing the “being careful is important” lesson.

She’ll learn eventually, I thought. This is what we’re out here for. A few feet away, Gavin and Micah were finishing off a leafenrat with their spears. We’d been practicing combat today. For the boys, that meant trying to kill monsters without taking injuries and with minimal ability use. For Cassie, that meant trying to get used to being in the open, and getting used to holding a weapon without injuring herself or anyone else.

Baby steps.

Sighing, I stood and took off my vambrace so I could clean the cut. “Gavin, hon, got a scratch here. Can you hook me up with a heal?”

“Got ya!”

Gavin didn’t even move closer, just stretched out his ridiculously long tail and wrapped it around my hand. With an itchy tingle, the wound closed.

“Thanks!” I called.

“Noooooo problem!” Gavin gave me a grin and used his tail to pump my arm up and down in an approximation of a handshake.

Gavin: you could upend his life, destroy his home, and surround him with monsters, but you couldn’t stop him from goofing off. I shook my head, undecided between infuriation and gratitude. I didn’t want my sweet boy to lose what made him special, but I wanted him to live!

I gave him my best mom glare. “Focus! We’re not in a safe place!”

“Okaaaaaay.” Gavin unwrapped his tail from my arm and gave me one last sweet smile before he turned around to scan for more monsters.

The sun was getting high, and the heat was getting oppressive. Even if Gavin could heal sunburn, I still wanted to get inside. “Next one’s the last before we head back.”

To my surprise, neither of the boys argued. I didn’t expect Cassie to - the trip had been tough for her, with no Pointy Turtle and no sheltering Tagon - but her older siblings had been enjoying themselves, I thought.

I took a moment to examine Micah, carefully. The kids had taken a few injuries. Gavin had healed them up in short order, and both boys had been adamant that they were fine and that the temporary pain hadn’t been a big deal. I had known they were putting on a brave face, of course. I hadn’t wanted to let them get hurt, and I knew they wanted to prove to me that letting them take on more dangerous jobs wasn’t a mistake. Still…

I think Micah’s been doing a better job of hiding his stress than I realized, if he’s not pushing to stay out and earn more points.

He could just be getting tired, I supposed. He hadn’t been using his abilities much, and our newfound strength made it hard to tire us out physically, but mental exhaustion was definitely real. That mental exhaustion was likely higher for my oldest child, as he was re-learning how to walk and run on top of everything else. His missing big toe affected his balance a great deal, and it was easy for him to try to rest his weight on the absent chunk of footpad when he moved in a hurry. Mindy, a nurse, had assured me he could adapt to the missing parts of his foot, but it would take time. The foot would always be more easily injured, as well.

An approaching mobmu distracted me from my thoughts. Its headfeathers were on fire, courtesy of Micah. Gavin lashed out with a knife held in his tail as it drew near, sinking the blade deeply into the base of its long neck. His hit wasn’t enough to behead the monster. He was strong enough, and the knife had a reinforced edge that was plenty sharp… but without Assisted Strike to guide his actions, Gavin didn’t quite have the right angle, and much of the force was directed into the mombu’s shoulder. He’d get better with practice. Or maybe I should have him take Assisted Strike? We’d all have enough Points for new abilities this evening. It was worth revisiting our planned choices now that the kids were getting up close and personal with danger.

These thoughts went by in the back of my mind as I watched the fight carefully, ready to intervene if the danger got too great. Micah stumbled as he tried to put weight on his missing toes. The mobmu lifted a taloned leg to strike at my disoriented son and I froze it with Paralyze.

Instants later, Gavin’s next blow landed more accurately, severing the mobmu’s neck and causing the previously-physical monster to lose cohesion, drifting away on the wind like smoke. Micah turned toward me, face irritated. “Mom! You helped!”

“You tripped!”

He rolled his eyes. “A little. I could have still dodged! I need to practice. Even if it hurt me, Gavin is right here.”

I opened my mouth to argue… then shut it. Much as I hated to admit it, my oldest son was right. His younger brother was a strong healer; with Micah’s helmet and armor, there wasn’t really a chance the mobmu would kill him before Gavin could intervene to reverse the damage. It could hurt him, but that was temporary. Even if it bit off a finger, that finger wouldn’t disappear when the monster did. We’d seen people successfully reattach body parts by quickly killing the monster and holding the dismembered part against the wound and applying Healing Touch. Healing Touch wouldn’t regenerate lost body parts, but it would bridge the gap to severed ones if people acted quickly. The risk that Micah would have suffered any long-term consequences from my inaction was low, and he needed the experience. Mobmu and leafenrats were one thing, but the Trial had made clear that we’d have to deal with much worse.

“Sorry,” I said instead. “It’s tough, holding still when I’m worried you might get hurt. I’ll keep trying.”

Micah looked at me suspiciously, but nodded. “Should we fight one more before we head back, then?”

I shook my head. “It’s getting hot, and we’re all getting tired. I’m sure we’ll find more monsters on the way home. I’ll do my best to restrain myself, but we should get moving. Besides, when we get home, we can pick out new abilities!”

That possibility perked everyone up. Cassie even gave me a smile. “We can see Pointy, too!”

The turtle hadn’t joined us on our outing this morning. The Shop and Fort Autumn were continuing to draw people in with their lure of safety, and last night another person who’d taken the Information Assistant ability had arrived. We’d left Pointy behind so she could continue exchanging information with her fellow AI. Cassie had agreed to leave her friend behind since Pointy was “hurt,” a slash along her neck and back that she’d taken during the Trial. As an artificial intelligence with the body of a stuffed animal, the cut didn’t cause her any pain… but it worried Cassie anyway. I was glad it seemed to be slowly sealing itself up; if there was a way to close the cut seamlessly, it wasn’t something my previous meager sewing experience had educated me on.

We headed east, back through farm fields and through the now-friendly Cotton Acres. It went far faster for us than it had for the rescue group the week before. Cotton Acres had made the most of the Dragons’ defeat. While many had relocated to Autumn Hills, others had stayed… or had visited our neighborhood only long enough to take part in a mobmu defense or two and jump-start their abilities. They were out on the streets now, grimly doing their best to play catch-up on Points. All the local defenders meant travelers like us had to do very little fighting as we moved, and my Life Sense helped us keep our speed high, giving me confidence that the coast was clear.

I wondered how well humanity had weathered the first Trial. In Autumn Hills, near the fort, I was proud of our performance. Many people had been injured - some heavily - but of all the people who’d signed our charter, only one hadn’t made it through a portal in time for our waiting healers to patch them up. We did have a number of permanent injuries, as we still had no one who could replace body parts that had been wholly removed or destroyed. We were all hoping that the aliens would give us some form of regeneration eventually, but even if they didn’t, missing body parts didn’t mean the same thing they once did. Missing an arm? Biological Augment: Extensible Limb would give you a prehensile tail. Missing your eyes? You could pick up an extra sense like Life Sense or take a different Biological Augment to grow extra eyes. There was one kid who had done that and grown literal eyes on the back of his head. He could now only see behind himself… but at least he could see? That was a positive, right? Weird situation.

Colonel Zwerinski had been in contact with some of the other organized groups, like the Jackson clan to the south, the group controlling the dwindling supplies at the grocery store to our north, and the Living Legion at the hospital. What he had heard was positive; all the groups actively trying to adapt to the messed-up world around us had done similarly well.

“Actively trying to adapt” was kind of key, though. Even in Autumn Hills, there were a handful of people who had refused all efforts to coax them into improving themselves or fighting monsters. For example, Helen’s next-door neighbors, an elderly couple, had been flatly refusing to leave their house for weeks.

“If we die, we die,” the husband had told Helen. “But we’ve made it this far.”

Helen had repeated his words to me, her voice thick with frustration. She’d sent Darryl to check on them after the trial, but…

“He said there was no trace of them. None at all. I hope… I hope they didn’t suffer much. They were fools, but good neighbors. Made damn tasty peanut brittle every Christmastime.”

People that stubborn were rare in our neighborhood, but I had heard of two or three similar stories. Those numbers had to be higher elsewhere. Pointy and I had gotten the word out relatively quickly, locally, and the Colonel’s regular Announcements had only reinforced those messages. On top of that, Fort Autumn and the mobmu had made gaining Points comparatively trivial. Even those people who’d trickled in the day before the Trial had been able to gain a second ability before they had to fight for their lives.

The people who had stayed in Cotton Acres had been given information and a chance to prepare, at least, but we didn’t really have any idea on how well they’d made it through. People elsewhere? I was worried casualties had been very high.

I blinked as Life Sense pulled me out of my maudlin maunderings. “Badblanket up ahead, kids! Right in between the mailbox and the storm drain. Let’s see what you can do!”