Even after deciding on their next course of action, they didn't go rushing straight to Watford. There were plans to be made first, and, more pertinently, Doug wanted to do a bit of training.

They left the house shortly after midnight and headed north. Alissa, Sam, and the two kids intended to split away from them the moment they came to a fork in the road, deciding to head west out into the countryside and see what they could find out there. They seemed to be holding out hope there'd be a larger, more organised human resistance group out there somewhere.

"I'm tempted to check Heathrow," Alissa mused as they said their goodbyes. John had given the all clear at an intersection, and they were going to take a winding route through back alleys before emerging out onto the fields and circling around west. "And if there's nothing there, or if it's overrun, I think there are some military bases out that way we can have a look at, too."

"Are you sure about this?" John asked. He wasn't quite so optimistic about finding a militia group.

"Not really," Alissa admitted softly, glancing at the kids over her shoulder. They were still mute, standing next to Sam a few paces away. She lowered her voice and said, "They can't fight, John, and we can't drag them into danger in good conscience even if they could. Especially not Watford. The only way they're going back to that hellhole is if it's the last bastion of safety on Earth. The best thing we can do for them is try to find a reasonably secure refuge so they can wait the bulk of it out."

John grimaced.

"Might not be possible to wait it out," Doug said, speaking John's thoughts in just the tactless way he'd wanted to avoid. Then again, John had actually been thinking more along the lines of, I'm pretty certain it'll be impossible to wait it out, so Doug's statement was kinder, after all.

"I'm aware. But we must try." Alissa sighed. "God knows, I don't want to fight either. Especially not in this way the system wants from me. If it's to protect the children, I'll do what I can. I'll strive to find someone who can provide them with true safety."

Well, now I feel guilty, John thought, eyeing the two children briefly. From a moral standpoint, it was probably "better" to escort the two kids to safety, in the short term. They were innocent and vulnerable, and adults were, generally speaking, meant to look out for the youth, or something.

John had excuses prepared to go. For example, it was better in the long term for all of humanity if he got strong enough to take down portals and slaughter monsters en masse, thus providing safety on a much larger scale for far more people.

But he knew it was just an excuse. That kind of moral calculation never lead anyone anywhere good, and he knew, deep down, that he was just being selfish, prioritising his own needs and goals. He didn't want the burden of having to protect a pair of children. Looking after a group of adults who were weaker than him was already bad enough. It would completely upend the operating procedure they'd established, forcing them to vastly slow their pace and change their focus, in his estimation, to a strategy that revolved around carefully clearing a path forward so they could move the kids. It sounded like a pain in the arse.

"Look," John began, holding back a sigh, "if you wait a while, until we're done with Watford, we can come with you to Heathrow. I was planning to follow the M25 clockwise to Dagenham, but there's nothing saying we can't go counter-clockwise, which would take us right past the airport, from what I remember. I don't think it's that much of a difference in distance, either. We're pretty much directly on the other side of the city from our goal."

Alissa gave him a hard look. "How much waiting are we talking about?"

"Don't want to be in there for more than three days, so that's when we'll start trying to fight our way out in earnest," Doug answered for him. "But things could always go tits up, of course. Let's say a week max."

"That's a long time," Alissa said slowly.

"We can spend some time gathering supplies," John said. "And you could argue it's better to wait in a defensible position than get caught out on the streets. Or in the middle of an open field." He let out a soft sigh through his nose. "It's your choice. If you think it's safer to just make your way straight there with just the two of you to look after them, then do it. If you want more safety in numbers, wait for us."

He didn't mention the possibility of John and co giving up on their plan to head into Watford. None of the others brought it up either, not even Doug, who was far more familiar with the two kids. That option wasn't on the table.

Alissa glanced between the five of them, then looked back at Sam. She and Sam stared at each other for a long moment, communicating without words, before the man gave a slight, helpless shrug. Alissa sighed as she turned back to them. "Do you have anywhere in mind for this? We will need to decide on several places beforehand, since long distance communication is not possible."

Doug had several. After spending a few minutes listing out a few golf courses, churches, and various locations that sounded suitably remote and defensible, the two groups parted ways, with Alissa, Sam, and the two kids disappearing into back alleys, where they'd eventually circle around and head along the fields to Watford's west, while John, Doug, Lily, Jade, and Chester followed a main road directly north, heading right for the centre of Watford.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"That feels a bit crappy," Jade said, speaking up for the first time in a while. She hadn't said a word throughout the exchanged with Alissa, which came as a bit of a surprise. John had expected her to advocate for looking after the kids, too.

Seeing his stare, Jade scowled. "Do I even need to say what we're all thinking? They're a goddamn liability. If Sam and Alissa want are willing to nerf themselves, I applaud their generosity. I really do. Genuinely. But I'm focusing on surviving, growing strong, and getting to Inverness so I can hug my mum and dad."

She ended that statement with a glare, as if daring anyone to question whether her parents were even still alive. John couldn't blame her, he was doing his best to avoid pessimistic thoughts about the status of his own family, too. Mum and Dad. Grandma. Sophia. They had to be alive. There was no other option. The only people who'd ever unconditionally cared for him would be waiting for him in Dagenham, and the world would still be worth living in.

"Still feels bad, though," Lily muttered.

Chester nodded in agreement.

"Sometimes you have to be pragmatic," Doug said. "Look out for yourself, because you can't always guarantee someone else will."

"Ominous words, when we're relying on working as a team," Jade said, squinting at the old man's back.

Doug flashed her a toothy grin. "In that particular case, selflessness is selfish. We're currently much stronger as a team, so it's in our best interests to stick together." Then his smile vanished, eyes turning hard, unforgiving. "And it's not in our best interest to be escorting a pair of kids, right now—letting them stick with us is one thing, but going out of our way is another. It's callous as fuck. Utterly heartless. It's an adult's duty to look after children, and we're ignoring that duty. We all know it. No point dancing around that fact. We have to live with it, own it."

John was awfully tempted to say something edgy about for the sake of his Aura, but kept his mouth shut. He didn't know how the others would interpret his lack of participation in this conversation, but he didn't want to actively sabotage his standing with them.

Doug drew in a sharp breath, then slowly exhaled. "But the thing about doing bad things, is that you can redeem yourself from most of them. In the future, when we're all stronger, we won't have to choose between doing the good thing and the personally beneficial thing, and we'll make up for it ten times over by slaughtering so many monsters that no other kid will ever be in danger again."

"I hope so," Lily whispered, voice brittle. She kept glancing back to where they'd just parted with Alissa's group. "I really hope so."

There was a sports centre right on the edge of Harrow, complete with its own running track and football pitch, and Doug lead them there for what, in his words, promised to be a more robust primer on what they were about to face. After checking that there weren't any monsters nearby—which involved actually having to go and kill a few—they moved to the centre of the running track, where Doug faced off against the four of them and crossed his arms.

There was always a bit of unreality to looking at Doug in his swimming shorts. The man was built like Arnold, but his skin was pale and liver-spotted, with only thin wisps of hair atop his head. His eyes were keen and bright beneath his bushy white brows, and there were some gaps between his teeth, not from any missing, but from a lifetime spent in a country where 'professional' dental care had been a notoriously unpleasant experience in the days of his impoverished youth.

And that was after the man had already turned back the clock significantly on his age. He'd looked even older when they first met. Many of his wrinkles had smoothed out, though there were still a lot, like waves washing over his face, and there was a leathery quality to his skin that spoke of a life of outdoor labour.

Still, when he got into a boxing stance, he was as threatening as any heavyweight boxer in their prime. The manic grin really sold the picture.

"Now then. We've established two things: one, that we're probably going to be facing off against human opponents in the course of our little mission, and two, you lot haven't had a proper scrap against another human being before. Jump in now if that's false."

No one said anything. John shifted a little uncomfortably, since he technically had been in a scrap or two… he'd just lost quite severely. Saying that didn't seem like a good idea. The Aura system was always watching, and it didn't care if those humiliating defeats occurred long before the end of the world. He hadn't even seen Luke Farnell in five years.

Doug grinned. His eyes looked a little manic. "Good. Now then. I figure it'd be a bad idea to let you experience your first fight against a person who's determined to kill you."

"We've fought monsters," Jade pointed out reasonably.

"Hordes of monsters," Lily added.

"And really big ones," Chester mumbled. The look of wide-eyed terror on his face might have been comical if John wasn't intimately familiar with the feeling.

"You have," Doug agreed. "I have a feeling this will be different. No, scratch that. I know it'll be different."

"They'll be much smarter than monsters," John said.

Doug nodded, and his grin lowered into a neutral line. "There's that, yeah. But more importantly, they'll be humans."

A moment of silence passed.

"You know it rationally, I reckon. Monsters are easy for you to kill, because they're monsters. They've slaughtered millions, potentially billions, and they're horrible, ugly bastards, like a nightmare out of an old horror picture. You can dissociate, classify them as other. Even then, I've seen it causes some trouble." He nodded at Jade, who acknowledge the point with a grim nod of her own. "Fighting people will be different. They'll talk to you. They'll taunt, insult, and berate you. And they're equally likely to scream, cry, and beg. Hurting them will weigh on your soul. If it goes so far as killing them… That can mess you up. It can mess you up real bad. Some of the strongest men I ever knew turned to shadows of their former selves after taking a human life, no matter how justified it was."

"And what do you want us to do about that, exactly?" John asked.

Doug's grin returned. "You're gonna fight me. And it's going to be so unpleasant that maybe we'll desensitise you to fighting humans, just a bit."

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