Chapter Seven: The Story Without Me In It
They put Grayson on camera within the hour.
I found out because Denny texted me a link while I was still sitting in the guild's medical tent, letting an automated regen unit knit the worst of the claw marks shut, my hammer propped against the cot beside me like it was waiting to see what I'd do next.
you need to see this, the text said. Nothing else. Denny wasn't usually a man of few words, which told me more than the message itself did.
I opened it anyway.
Grayson stood in front of a guild liaison backdrop, hair still artfully mussed in the way that read as survivor instead of ran, a medic's blanket draped over his shoulders for effect even though I'd watched him leave that dungeon without a scratch on him. His voice, when he spoke, had exactly the right tremor in it practiced, I realized, the same tremor he'd used two years ago telling me he cared about me right before he told me why that didn't matter.
"It came out of nowhere," he was saying, eyes doing something soft and haunted for the camera. "We lost Marcus and Priya trying to hold the line. I got the killing blow, but I don't know. Something happened to me down there. I don't fully remember it. I just remember it finally going down, and then I was standing over it, and everyone else was just... gone."
I sat very still on that cot, regen unit humming against my ribs, and watched a man take the worst thing that had ever happened to me and wear it like a costume that fit him better than it fit me.
He never said my name. Not once. Not even to say I hadn't made it which, I understood a moment later, watching the comment section scroll beneath the clip, was doing a different kind of work entirely. If he didn't mention me, nobody watching had any reason to ask where I'd gone. As far as the official story was concerned, there'd been a five-person party. Four of them died or survived clean. And somewhere in the wreckage he never described, a fifth thing had crawled out a thing the extraction footage had already started circulating, tattooed and armed and laughing softly to herself as she walked past a crowd of stunned onlookers.
Nobody connected the two. Not yet. Not out loud.
I didn't correct him.
I want to be able to say that was strength some clean, deliberate choice to rise above it, to let the lie exist because I no longer needed anyone's validation to know what had actually happened in that dungeon. Some of that was true. But mostly, in the moment, I simply didn't have it in me. My shoulder was still knitting itself back together. My hair was two colors I hadn't chosen. There was a hammer leaning against my cot that hadn't existed twenty-four hours earlier, and somewhere behind my ribs, a laugh was still sitting, coiled and patient, waiting to see what I'd do with the rest of my life now that it had rewritten the terms.
Correcting the story would have meant standing in front of a camera myself. Explaining tattoos I couldn't account for, a class the System had never had a name for until it built one from scratch, hands that reached for weapons before my mind caught up to why. It would have meant being looked at, fully, by everyone who was already looking at the extraction footage and calling me a monster in the comments beneath it.
I wasn't ready for that. I'm not sure I ever would have been.
So I let him have it. I let the story exist without me in it, the same way I'd spent most of my life existing in rooms without anyone quite seeing me in them. It wasn't new. It was just louder, this time, and stranger, and it came with a body that didn't entirely feel like mine yet.
The guild released me two days later with a small stipend, a formal note thanking me for my "cooperation with the incident review," and absolutely no acknowledgment that the incident in question had happened to me at all. My credential still worked. My apartment lease was still technically valid, six months behind on payments I hadn't managed to catch up on even before the dungeon, in a building that smelled like old pipes and somebody else's cooking three floors down.
I went home in a taxi that overcharged me for the ride, because taxi drivers everywhere had already learned to smell fear and desperation off a fare, and I paid it without arguing because arguing took energy I didn't have anymore.
My phone had forty-three notifications by the time I got inside. Guild press releases. A short clip of Grayson's interview reposted eleven times by different accounts, captioned with increasingly dramatic language hero survives horror dungeon, mourns fallen teammates. And underneath all of it, buried a few pages deep in searches nobody official was running yet, the extraction footage. Grainy. Shaky. A girl with two-toned hair and a hammer on her back walking calmly through a crowd of people too afraid to get close, a blowpop clicking against her teeth like none of it had touched her at all.
What is that thing.
Did they see what came out after the party left??
Genuinely scared rn. Someone tell me thats not real
I sat on the floor of my apartment with my back against a door that didn't lock right, phone glowing in my hands, and read every single comment underneath a video of myself that nobody had bothered to caption with my name.
I didn't cry. I'd stopped being able to, somewhere between the noodles going cold two years ago and the hammer settling into my palm like it had always belonged there.
I laughed instead. Quiet, exhausted, a little bit unhinged, alone on a floor in an apartment that hadn't heard from its own owner in longer than either of us wanted to admit.
Nobody knows it's you, I told myself, and meant it as comfort, even though some small, honest part of me understood exactly what that actually meant.
Nobody knew it was me because nobody had bothered to ask.