Chapter 75: Motivation
Miles glanced at the broken handle in his hand, then at the ghoul snapping vainly at him from the ground, and finally the one barreling straight towards him.
A familiar numbness settled in his mind, making him act without hesitation.
He tossed the handle into the face of the approaching ghoul, disrupting its momentum. Then he pulled out his knife and charged forward, stepping directly over the helpless ghoul on the ground.
’It can be paralyzed.’
Reaching the rapidly recovering monster in no time, he stabbed the knife’s blade directly into its head. The weapon bounced off hard bone, but the force behind it still knocked the monster backwards.
He tackled the ghoul before it could even stabilize itself, bringing himself into intimate range with the monster’s claws. It made sure he knew this; its dark claws racked against his back and side.
Fortunately, his sweater was thick enough to withstand most of the damage. What little made it through barely registered under his curtain of numbness.
Taking advantage of the monster’s busy hands, he brought his knife down on the monster’s head, this time solely targeting one of its eyes.
The milky white orb burst in a spray of foul black blood. His weapon pierced through it, stopping abruptly on something hard. Undeterred, he struck the same spot with all his force, over and over again, even as the monster’s attacks grew more desperate.
Soon enough, he broke through that hard layer, sliding his knife into the soft, rotting matter behind it.
The ghoul froze, then its hands fell down from his back. The sweater was mostly unharmed, aside from a few tiny rips in the fabric.
A notification played in his head. He paid no attention to it and pushed himself off the corpse. He turned back in search of the ghoul that had been approaching from the other side, only to find it motionless on the floor with a cracked skull.
Chloe stood above it, having apparently taken care of the ghoul that had been targeting her upfront. She stepped back just in time to intercept the ghoul before it reached Sarah.
The rest were finishing off their quarry. Mia wiped gunk off her fist as she looked down on the three ghoul bodies surrounding her. Ryan was putting in his last few swings on the second ghoul that targeted him, making sure it was dead.
Behind them, Grimm was throwing stones on ghouls he’d struck down earlier. Brandon, on the other hand, just watched as a flaming wooden broomstick he’d impaled a ghoul with slowly burned it to death. A similarly charred corpse lay nearby.
Ryan had been right about being able to handle them. As long as it wasn’t an outright horde of ghouls or one of those abnormal variants, he doubted these creatures would prove to be much of an issue.
He looked to Sarah, only to find that her condition had further deteriorated. Her shivering reached a fever pitch, and she had already started falling; she barely looked aware of her surroundings now.
Ryan noticed it as well.
"Sarah!?"
His shout jolted her, destabilizing her balance and making her fall off the bench onto the cold ground below.
She didn’t get up.
"Shit!"
Ryan rushed towards her, joined by Chloe. They both pulled her back on the bench. She was so out of it that they had to keep supporting her, else she’d fall back down immediately.
Miles watched this all happen without moving. With every passing second, her death grew more and more inevitable.
A strange thought passed through his mind at that.
’Would it be so bad?’
They would have one less worry to care about, one less potential traitor, and also get rid of a person who had next to no combat capabilities of her own. One less mouth to feed.
The thought barely lasted a moment before he smothered it. Regardless of her actions, or whether she was a bad person, he held no right to condemn her to death, not unless she proved herself a threat to him or the group.
All she had done so far was for the selfish reason to survive. A chain of logic he felt intimately familiar with.
Glancing at the paralyzed ghoul near him, an idea crossed his mind.
He grabbed onto its legs, the cold flesh feeling like blocks of ice in his hand, then began dragging it back. The monster began snapping its teeth even more violently in reaction to that; it was about as harmless as an angry puppy at this point.
"Out of the way. I have a plan!"
Ryan and Chloe glanced at each other before stepping over the bench and supporting Sarah from behind, making way for him to drag the ghoul before her.
He dropped it down, then picked up the wooden club she’d dropped on the ground.
"Sarah!"
Her eyes remained unfocused. They rolled around, swimming in and out of consciousness. He grabbed her shoulders, then shook her.
"Sarah!"
The others didn’t stop him, having figured out what he was trying to do. She still showed no reaction.
There was precious little time to consider anything else, so he raised his free hand as high as he could, then slapped her.
Its impact sent pinpricks of pain into his numb palm. The smack barely registered over the wind, yet none of that mattered.
Her eyes shot open.
Miles stopped his hand, just short of giving her another slap. The girl flinched upon seeing its trajectory.
He immediately handed her the wooden club.
"Kill it, or else you’re going to die."
There was no time to mince words.
Sarah blinked, a mix of confusion and fright on her face.
’She’s going to die like this.’
Ryan started.
"Sarah-"
Before he could go anywhere with the sentence, Miles knelt to her level. Prying her hand open, he pushed the stick inside, then forced it shut.
He looked her dead in the eyes. An emotion he couldn’t name rose within him as he screamed.
"You are a horrible, horrible person, Sarah. Your friends are dead because of you. You killed them to save your sorry self. Have you forgotten? Or is it that you no longer want to live anymore? So what did they even die for? Nothing. Because you are going to die, Sarah, and you will die the same terrible, hypocritical person if you do not kill that ghoul!"