Soren slipped back into the shack without a sound.

  Vivian was still asleep, a faint smile resting on her lips. Then something shifted behind her closed eyes. The smile vanished. Her small, pale face twisted with fear, and she began to murmur: "Brother... don't go... don't leave me..."

  "No!"

  "Don't grab me! You're all bad people!"

  "Hiss... bite them!"

  A whimper escaped her throat.

  "Hiss... what's wrong? Don't scare me..."

  Her small hands clawed at the air, eyes still shut, her thin arms reaching for something that wasn't there.

  Soren had been about to strip off his blood-soaked clothes, but he crossed the room in two strides and laid his palm gently against her back to soothe her. The moment he touched her, Vivian's face crumpled in pain. He pulled her shirt up and froze.

  A bruise stretched across her back--purple-black and mottled, the kind left by a heavy stick swung hard. The blood beneath the skin had congealed to a dark, ugly stain. The wound was old. Days old, at least.

  His expression turned to stone.

  Killing intent blazed in his eyes--white-hot and immediate.

  He stroked her cheek, lowered her shirt with exquisite care, and whispered, "Silly girl."

  "Why didn't you tell me you were hurt?"

  The injury was serious. She'd endured it in silence all this time, bearing the pain without a word--afraid, no doubt, of making him worry.

  Soren felt a sting behind his eyes. It was a warmth he'd never known before. In the interstellar era, social welfare had advanced so far that parents didn't need to raise children, and children owed nothing to parents. Family bonds were something he understood in theory but had never truly felt.

  Yet this girl--this stubborn, brave, eight-year-old girl--had cracked something open inside him. A warmth pooled in his chest, quiet and fierce.

  He was the kind of person who adapted to wherever life placed him. Over the past two weeks, every small moment had woven a bond between them that ran deeper than anything he'd known in his previous life. The solitary existence he'd left behind no longer called to him.

  "It's all right," he murmured, still stroking her hair. "It'll be better by tomorrow."

  He bent close, soothing her through the nightmare. "I'll find a healing potion tomorrow. A wound like this is nothing--it won't even leave a scar."

  Vivian's breathing gradually steadied. The fear melted from her face, and she sank deeper into sleep.

  Soren rose and peeled off his clothes. Beneath them, his body was lean and hard with corded muscle. He fed the bloodstained garment into the stove and stood watching the flames eat it, his gaze drifting over the scars that mapped his torso.

  There were dozens of them. Slashes, punctures, and the thin, parallel lines left by a whip. The story they told was clear: a boy who'd been fighting since before he was old enough, raising a three-year-old sister through means that were anything but normal.

  He'd brawled. He'd killed.

  Eighteen years old, and his body looked like a battlefield. Impossible to say how many times he'd cheated death.

  Some of the marks came from street fights. Others were whip scars--souvenirs from the times he'd been caught stealing.

  An ordinary young man, yet what he'd survived would have broken most professional adventurers.

  Faint firelight flickered across the walls.

  Soren pulled on a clean set of clothes--Vivian kept them washed and neatly folded, despite being only eight. She was diligent that way. The shack was always swept spotless, every surface wiped, every garment stacked with care. Small acts of order in a world that offered precious little of it.

  He touched his own face, tracing the sharp line of his jaw. His ears came to a subtle point--not as pronounced as a true elf's, but enough to notice. The original Soren's father had been a quarter-elf, which made Soren himself one-eighth elven. That trace of blood was the reason his reflexes ran quicker than most humans'. Elven grace was bred into the bone.

  Darkness posed no obstacle to his vision. Nearly every half-elf possessed some degree of night sight. In shadow, they made the finest assassins alive.

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  "Solid foundation," he said quietly.

  He flexed his wrist, and a dagger danced between his fingertips, its edge catching the dim light in cold flashes. "No professional hero template. Can't redistribute my attributes. But the raw material is better than most."

  "The only weakness is strength. Average people sit around ten. Twelve puts me on par with a dock laborer--nothing more."

  "He never trained for it. Always relied on technique."

  "Agility is high. But without proper combat training, high agility is less useful than raw strength. Strength can end a fight outright."

  He switched the dagger to his left hand. The blade spun faster, its movements blurring into afterimages. His left hand was extraordinarily nimble--even more dexterous than his right.

  An innate gift. With a little training, he could develop dual-wielding proficiency. That was a considerable advantage.

  "Gaining power requires experience." His silhouette grew hazy in the darkness as he spoke, half-lost in shadow. "There don't seem to be any quests available, which limits my options for earning experience points."

  "But killing should still grant them. Probably."

  "What I don't know is whether the rogue's lockpicking and trap-disarming skills generate experience as well."

  Kill Experience was the highest tier--universally applicable, assignable to any class, subclass, or prestige template. The experience earned from lockpicking and disarming traps was merely Class Experience, a lower grade that could only raise the rogue's level.

  The same applied to arcane scroll transcription for wizards.

  In Battle of the Gods, experience had never come easy. Monster kills yielded meager returns. Even a legendary-tier adventure--the kind that ended with slaying adult dragons or liches--might reward only a few tens of thousands of experience points. Barely enough for one or two class levels. When Soren had first pushed his rogue into the legendary realm, the grind had taken years. Three dragons and six liches, all told.

  Of the team that had fought alongside him, only a third survived. The rest were dragged into the cycle of the underworld.

  "Universal Deft Hands."

  A sharp light entered his eyes. "I don't know when this soul-resurrection weakness will fade. But if I can unlock Universal Deft Hands again, it'll change everything."

  The night deepened.

  Soren stowed the dagger within arm's reach and climbed carefully into bed. Vivian's small body shifted toward him without waking, her slender arms wrapping around his. She murmured something unintelligible and went still.

  A night passed.

  He woke to a faint rustling. Vivian was lying on her side, watching him with her head tilted. When she saw his eyes open, a sweet smile bloomed at the corner of her mouth.

  She eased herself off the bed, wincing as the wound on her back scraped against the mattress. A flicker of pain crossed her face, quickly hidden. She slipped on her tattered cloth shoes, took up the broom, and began sweeping the room, wiping down the crude furniture as she went.

  Then she spotted the bloodstains on the floor.

  Alarm flashed across her features. She darted to the bed and yanked back the blanket, checking every inch of Soren's body. When she confirmed he wasn't injured, she pressed a hand to her chest, exhaled, and quietly wiped the blood away with a rag.

  As long as the blood wasn't his, nothing else mattered.

  She remembered a day from when she was very, very small. Soren had gotten into a fight with a group of older boys over a silver Daler they'd found on the ground.

  They'd surrounded him--four or five of them, kicking and punching while he curled up and took it. Vivian had hidden in a corner, crying, too small to do anything. Finally she'd gathered every shred of courage she had, picked up a stone, and hurled it at the biggest boy.

  He'd slapped her across the face. Her cheek swelled instantly, and a baby tooth went spinning onto the cobblestones.

  She still remembered what happened next, even though she'd been so very young.

  The moment Soren saw her hit the ground, something snapped. The boy who'd been silently enduring the beating exploded forward like a wild animal and sank his teeth into the older boy's ear.

  The ear came away bloody.

  Soren snatched up a stone and brought it down on the boy's skull--once, twice, again and again, blood sheeting down. Vivian had thrown herself at him, grabbing his arm, and that was the only reason the boy wasn't beaten to death on the spot.

  He died anyway. Days later, they found his body floating in the filthy drainage ditch outside the slums. By then, there wasn't much left to recognize.

  They had lived such a hard life. They had nothing in the world except each other.

  Vivian didn't care that Soren was a thief, or that he'd broken laws, or that he'd killed. Whatever sins he carried, she was willing to bear half.

  Vivian swept the room with quiet care.

  When her eyes fell on the empty rice sack, worry flickered across her face. But it lasted only a moment before she whispered to herself, "Brother's awake now."

  "It'll be full of rice and grain again soon."

  She believed in Soren. It was a faith beyond reason--absolute and unconditional.

  She'd gone hungry before. There had been long stretches when hunger was all she knew. But her brother had never let her down. Even when the food he brought home was stained with his own blood, even when eating it made her chest ache so badly she could hardly swallow, she'd never doubted him.

  As long as her brother was there, everything would be all right.

  Yes.

  Everything would be all right.

  So she set the small worry aside, hummed a tuneless little song under her breath, and swept every corner of the room until it shone.

  Soren rose slowly to his feet.

  He pulled on his faded, threadbare clothes. Vivian stood before him, and he reached out to touch her head with a tenderness that would have stunned anyone who'd seen the cold thing he became in the dark.

  "Stay home today," he said softly. "Be good."

  "In a couple of days, we'll move into the city."

  Vivian nodded, a spark of joy lighting her face. It never once occurred to her how impossible that sounded--how much money it would take, how they'd need to secure the status of free citizens just to qualify.

  She believed in Soren.

  Because everything Soren promised, he delivered.

  And if there were things even he couldn't do, that wasn't his fault. It was because there were too many bad people in the world.

  Morning sunlight fell across the little shack, catching the dust motes drifting through the air.

  Soren used his dagger to saw through the black bread that had hardened overnight into something closer to a club, cutting it into rough slices of equal size. Vivian stood on tiptoe on the low stool to lift down the pot of rice porridge, but she was so small that she swayed with the weight of it. Soren smiled, steadied her with one hand, and took the cracked ceramic bowl from her.

  The little girl tilted her face up to him. In the sunlight, her pale skin glowed, and she smiled--sweet and unhurried--two shallow dimples pressing into her cheeks.

  For one quiet moment, everything was beautiful.