Three days into the Threshold and he was ready to kill someone out of sheer frustration.
Not the monsters, those were fine, predictable and stupid and dead the moment they got too close. The problem was everything else: the stumbling, the fake exhaustion, the careful performance of weakness that made his skin crawl every time he had to lean against a tree and pretend his legs were tired.
'This is the worst part of regression, not the weak body or the suppressed skills, but the constant acting.'
He was currently trailing behind a group of seven candidates who thought they were protecting him, the poor weak kid who couldn't keep up with their pace. In reality he was using the position to watch their backs while they navigated a route that would add two unnecessary days to their journey because none of them knew about the shortcut three kilometers east.
"You okay back there?" Sarah called over her shoulder while adjusting the pack straps that kept slipping down her arms. She took it upon herself to be motherly toward anyone who seemed helpless. "We can take a break if you need it."
"I'm fine," he said, hunching his shoulders and putting a slight wheeze in his voice while pretending to catch his breath. "Just not used to all this walking."
'I could run this entire floor without stopping, and I hate every second of this.'
The group slowed down anyway because Sarah wasn't the type to push and the others followed her lead. They stopped in a small clearing and started setting up a temporary camp while he found a rock to sit on and pretended to catch his breath.
He spent the break cataloging everything wrong with their setup: the fire placement that would be visible for half a kilometer, the lack of a watch rotation, the way they piled their supplies in one easily-targeted location. In the original timeline groups like this died on day five or six when something bigger than wolves decided to investigate the smoke.
'Not my problem because I'm not their babysitter.'
Except the longer he watched them fumble around, the harder it was to convince himself of that. These were people, stupid and unprepared and probably going to die, but still people who had families somewhere waiting for them to come home.
'Stop it because you can't save everyone, and you couldn't even save the ones you actually cared about.'
The group moved on after an hour and he followed, still pretending, still hating it, still counting the days until he could stop playing weak and start actually climbing.
---
Day four changed everything, starting with the shouting he heard while scouting ahead of the group.
He convinced them he needed to "stretch his legs" when really he just wanted five minutes without watching amateurs trip over their own feet, and that was when the voices reached him. Human voices, not monster sounds, raised and angry and coming from somewhere to the northwest.
'Not my problem.'
He kept walking for about three seconds before stopping because the voices were getting louder and one of them was distinctly younger, distinctly female, and distinctly terrified.
'Still not my problem.'
His feet were already moving before his brain finished arguing with itself, carrying him toward the commotion with the silent efficiency of someone who spent years learning how to approach threats without being detected.
What he found was a mob of fifteen candidates forming a loose circle around a girl who couldn't have been older than twenty. She was backed against a tree with her hands raised defensively, and even from this distance he could see why they were angry.
Lavender skin. Small curved horns peeking through dark purple hair. A slim tail wrapped around her leg in a gesture he recognized as pure terror.
Half-demon with infernal blood, probably succubus lineage given the skin tone and horn placement. The mob saw a monster wearing human skin and they wanted to kill it before it could betray them.
"Demon spawn! It'll charm us all in our sleep!"
"Kill it before it breeds!"
"Tower sent us a gift, boys. Easy points."
The girl was crying, tears cutting tracks through the dirt on her face while she kept shaking her head and trying to speak but nobody was listening. Her purple eye and her blue eye held the same expression: the numb acceptance of someone who knew exactly how this ended.
'Not my problem.'
His jaw clenched hard enough to hurt.
'She's going to die if you don't do something.'
He remembered Floor 50 in the original timeline, a different half-demon who spent three years proving himself to a party that never fully trusted him. That one died saving the people who hated him, threw himself between the team and a floor boss because he was the only one fast enough to intercept the attack. His last words were "tell them I wasn't a monster."
He never got the chance to tell anyone because the team was gone by Floor 52 and there was no one left to hear it.
'This is stupid because she's not the same person and saving her won't bring him back.'
The mob was closing in now with weapons drawn, and the girl stopped crying because crying wasn't going to help. She raised her chin and squared her shoulders, facing death with the dignity of someone who expected this moment her entire life.
'Damn it.'
He stepped out of the trees and fifteen heads turned toward him as the mob's ringleader, a heavyset man with a sword that looked too expensive for someone on Floor 1, stepped forward with a grin that showed too many teeth.
"Hey." He kept his voice flat, almost bored. "What's the girl done?"
"None of your business, kid. Unless you want to help us take care of this demon bitch."
"She doesn't look like she's hurting anyone."
"Not yet." The man spat on the ground. "But it's in her blood. Infernal spawn can't help what they are. Better to put her down now before she gets strong enough to be a real problem."
The girl's eyes found his across the clearing and he saw something there that he recognized: the complete absence of hope. She wasn't looking at him for help, just looking because he was the last new thing she would ever see.
'Walk away because this isn't your fight and you have bigger problems.'
"Let her go."
The words came out flat with no request in them at all, and the mob's amusement shifted to something uglier.
"What did you just say?"
"I said let her go." He moved forward, slow and steady, letting his body language shift from harmless to something else entirely. "She hasn't done anything to you, so walk away."
The ringleader laughed and raised his sword, pointing it directly at him. "Walk away, kid. Before you join her."
'If I have to.'
His answer was a knife through the man's throat.
It happened so fast that nobody processed it at first because one moment he was ten feet away and the next he was behind the ringleader with a blade buried to the hilt in the soft tissue just below the jaw. The big man made a gurgling sound and dropped, blood spraying across the grass while the knife was already moving toward the next target before the body hit the ground.
The second one died with a knife in his eye while the third caught a slash across the femoral artery and went down screaming. The fourth tried to run but he was faster, always faster, and his blade found the spine with surgical precision.
[enemy slain: Leon Vane]
[enemy slain: Derek Hollis]
[enemy slain: Peter Sung]
[enemy slain: Alan Cork]
[system points: +40]
Four bodies in as many seconds, and the remaining eleven were finally starting to understand that they were not the predators here.
"What the fuck!"
"He's a monster!"
"RUN!"
They scattered and crashed through the underbrush with all the subtlety of panicked cattle. He let them go because chasing wasn't worth the effort and because dead witnesses meant questions he didn't want to answer.
He flicked the blood off his knife and turned to look at the girl.
She was still pressed against the tree, staring at him with wide mismatched eyes while her whole body trembled so hard he could see it from ten feet away. The fear on her face shifted from resigned acceptance to something new, something that wasn't sure if she was rescued or if she just traded one death for another.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, keeping his voice flat and his movements slow. "They were going to kill you and now they're not. That's all this is."
She didn't say anything and just stared at him with those two-toned eyes.
"Can you walk?"
A tiny nod, barely visible but enough.
"Good." He turned away from her, toward the path he followed before all this started. "You're coming with me."
---
He didn't wait to see if she followed, just walked, and after a long moment he heard the soft footsteps behind him, hesitant and careful and probably ready to bolt at the first sign of danger.
'What are you doing? You just killed four people and picked up a half-demon stray, which is the opposite of keeping a low profile.'
He didn't have a good answer for that. All he knew was that walking away felt worse than the consequences of staying, and sometimes that was the only calculus that mattered.
The girl followed him into the forest, and he pretended he couldn't hear her crying.