3.4 To Regret

'Dumb mistakes' were a misnomer. They could happen to anyone. They happened all the time. Always had, always would. The term was as much of a non-entity as 'beginner's luck'.

With that said, had either of these taken place today? No. Would Kaz use them as an alibi? For sure.

Had he not miscalculated the radius of the ice mage's attack and he wouldn't have slipped, so then he would've been able to dodge the mercenary girl's attack on time, so then he wouldn't have broken... how many ribs did people have again? At least four. That's how many he'd broken. So then he wouldn't have limped back to his home while they looked for him amidst the icy, sandy mist, so then he wouldn't have been there when S of all people showed up.

Oh, right, and he wouldn't have surmised that person was S had Snail not slipped up earlier, while they had a tea party so she'd calm down. By that point, Kaz was near delirious with pain and would've killed something had he not become a pacifist recently. If anything other than his four... five... three? Ribs had broken, he might've actually put up a fight against S. But that was in the past. The past was unchangeable. To regret was to suffer pointlessly.

With that said, when S said 'I won't harm your friends', the last thing Kaz expected was for him to be in kahoots with the city guards. Him, of all people. Them, of all factions. If Kaz hadn't chosen the path of redemption recently, this might've actually infuriated him.

All the while, Snail had been under Kaz's yurt, in his meditation room. He'd taken her there once her friends abandoned her and she'd begun to cry. He'd told her about how revenge was the motivation of the emotionally weak, showed her his self-help bookshelf, and then brewed relaxation tea. While they drank it, Kaz's friends entertained themselves with the merch.

"Is this a joke?"

Kaz told Snail to pick one of his books if she wanted. That was then.

"No," Snail replied, as she held Kaz over her shoulder as though he were a sack of plums. That was now. Snail had said this to the leader of the city guards, who'd showed up with a sizeable group this time. Had Kaz not been incapacitated and he would've probably caught them, but that clearly wasn't possible anymore.

The leader of the guards squinted at Kaz. He waved, but the guard didn't wave back. "Out of all the times swindlers have tried to deliver 'the last survivor of the Sand Wraiths' to me," declared the guard, "this is, by far, the least credible."

"But it is him," said the foxgirl (she dressed like a catgirl for some reason). There was her, a fat beastman, a city guard that'd come bundled with the mercenaries, said mercenaries, and the ice mage. They'd showed up as S left—or, well, hid. After Kaz had turned on a lamp and showed S the way to his meditation room, S opened the trapdoor to it, which was under a suspiciously-placed mat, then told Snail, without even looking at her, to 'take Kaz to the rest'. So these were the rest.

The guard replied, "No, he's not. We've been trained to distinguish impostors from real ex-Wraith members. This boy's tattoo is fake."

Kaz said nothing, because why would he? Had S told him about the guards, and he might've actually done it. What was the bounty on his head again? A million? Something like that. Well, too bad. They'd get ten thousand for all of Kaz's friends if they were lucky.

"Hoo, boy," said the bespectacled mercenary, the archer (was that ironic?). "Are you people that incompetent?"

"Listen, outlander, we have our ways, and you have yours."

"How does that make any sense? There was a bounty on his head, right? Surely, you guys knew what he looked like? That's the whole reason why we're here. You just don't want to pay us."

The leader waved him off. "We'll pay you. This kid is not the Wraith, but it is true that you dismantled a slave trading operation. We'd been keeping tabs on this bunch."

Lies.

"Were any of you behind the magic anomaly in the area? Not that you'd tell me."

They wouldn't.

And if they did, the leader wouldn't believe them—that the mage had torn the magic field by teleporting four people at the same time. At the time, Kaz had been fascinated, only to find out that said mage was a fool with too much power on his hands. Why? Because it was borrowed.

But this, he didn't say. This, he wouldn't say to anyone. Why would he?

"In any case, it's thanks to that hole that we were able to track this place. The whole oasis was hidden under a mirage..."

All the while, other guards had dragged Kaz's friends outside the camp. Those who weren't unconscious already were magically induced to sleep. Soon, they'd be thrown into the guards' carriages, then thrown into cells until "justice" decided their fate. The same would happen to Kaz. Why? Beginner's luck with the ice mage's miraculous teleportation, dumb mistakes with Kaz's ennui-addled misjudgment.

"Put the boy down. We'll take care of him."

Snail did.

Kaz witnessed the scene as though he were an observer. A god, even. Gods weren't real, but it was a fun experiment nonetheless. What happened when you took a perfectly normal kid with a perfectly normal family living in a perfectly normal neighborhood, then slaughtered everyone around him? The kid became a monster. What happened when the kid fulfilled his revenge? The kid became a husk. At the time, wiith nothing left to live for, Kaz had thought of jumping into a den of wild man-eating lizards and see how long he lasted, and he would've done so, really, had K not shown up with his errand boy, S, to challenge Kaz. It was a tie. Kaz had never lost or tied at the time. He knew nothing at the time. He was nothing. And then, once again, he found a place to belong.

Then S killed the entirety of the Sand Wraiths except for Snail and himself, and Kaz (accidentally), so then the cycle renewed. Did this count as a new beginning? Kaz's friends were still alive this time, so there was that. The highest sentence in Khon-Pak was five years in prison, though usually people got out earlier by agreeing to unpaid labor under the guise of 'rehabilitation'. There were worse fates out there.

It could've been because of the effect of the five tranquilizers they gave him, but all of a sudden, as Kaz boarded one of the carriages, everything seemed... distant.

It was always like this.

Would it always be like this?

Probably?

He might not meet most of his friends again. He'd just find new ones once he left the slammer. Maybe join one of those 'rob from the rich, give to the poor' bands next time. He didn't kill anymore, so normal bandits were out of the question. Selling tourists was nice and all, but in this day and era, finding customers wasn't as easy. Besides, it was annoying to have to keep merch alive and presentable while finding a buyer.

Was this how the merch felt when they awoke, disoriented, in a place they didn't recognize, towards a place they did not want to go? Was this how it felt to have your future decided for you? To be powerless.

Not really, no.

Kaz thought he saw S sitting next to a yurt on the outside of the camp. He wasn't sure, though. S always had a mask on when around the Wraiths. Who else could it be, though? Both S and that man shared the same gloomy aura, same build, and... was that a sword? Then that was definitely S.

Not that it mattered.

Even if Kaz were to yell, 'Look, that's the other survivor!' no one would believe him.

For almost a decade, he'd wondered how the strongest Wraith looked behind the concealing spell and the mask, and the answer was... whelming? Well, aside from S's terrifying laughter. Kaz could've lived without hearing that.

They—Kaz's friends, Kaz, the guards—were ready to leave now. Next to the carriages, the leader spoke to the guard that'd come bundled with the mercenaries. "So there were nine of you, correct?"

The guard nodded. He had a purple eye. It looked kind of funny.

"All right... so that would be sixty thousand zuli, divided by nine... uh... like three thousand per person, right?"

"Yes. What. No, that's—"

"Ah, right. Math was never my strong suit. If you send everyone's citizen ID, I'll deposit the money by tomorrow. Why do you look so disappointed?"

Unfortunately, Kaz couldn't see them from the angle he was at. He'd had a sixth tranquilizer and didn't feel like getting a seventh. Best not to alert the guards by pretending to be asleep.

"I'm not..." But the bundled guard clearly was. "It's just... I'm fairly certain this is the Wraith."

"No, he's not. Remember our training."

"I suppose..."

"It's still a very hefty sum."

"Yeah," said the bundled guard, who wasn't bundled anymore.

"I wish I'd been here to get part of that bounty, too. Oh, well. I'll be off now. You should be, too. They'll close the anomaly tomorrow."

"Yeah."

Yeah.

That ice mage had torn a rift the way one would an old rag. It was frightening, really, but none of his friends seemed to notice. None of them knew S was the other Wraith, either. When Snail and him had reunited, she'd looked more afraid than relieved, and he had remained indifferent, merely telling her to take Kaz 'with the rest', and that he'd be busy. Next to them, Kaz's conditional, transcient relationships were airtight. So was his future.

Once a bandit, always a bandit.

It could happen to anyone. A bad day, a bad decade, a bad instant. A mistake. Misfortune. Didn't matter.

"Why are you doing this?" Snail had asked Kaz during the tea party. "Why do you have to live by making others suffer?"

To which Kaz had replied, "To live is to make others suffer. The resources you take could have gone to somebody else. It is what it is."

To which Snail had said, "No, that's not right."

"It's not? Someone's dying of thirst as we drink tea."

"That shouldn't have to happen. It does because some people, um, hoard too much tea, for example. If everyone helped each other, then maybe there would be a day where no one would die of thirst anymore."

"Wishful thinking," Kaz had replied, to then take a sip while somebody died of thirst.

"Yeah. I know. But it's true."

"It's not."

"It is to me."

And then she'd told him about her 'experiment', and then Kaz had told her about his journey to betterment. Neither of them had listened, because to do so would be to acknowledge the bitter in the sweet.

"You can still change," Snail had told him. "Everyone can."

"That's an interesting experiment, but it might not work for me."

"Why not?"

"I wasn't destined to be good."

To which she had replied, "No one's destined to be bad."

To which he'd sipped, because to answer would be to realize, and to regret.