Chapter 47: Offer II
"Jayce."
Miles called out again at his silence.
"Five. About five points each."
When the boy finally spoke, his voice came quiet and resigned. Miles found it hard to tell if that was due to guilt or fear of the principal.
Still, he nodded. He felt nothing but that strange numbness and a faint sense of dizziness. Like his body wasn’t quite his, and he was just a soul looking through its eyes, puppeteering it coldly.
Something squirmed in his chest for a moment before drowning beneath the wave of numbness.
His mind had never been clearer, yet he had the acute awareness that he was missing something. Something vital, necessary even. Like the world had zoomed to a focus, blurring out other details.
He ignored this strangeness. Jayce had just confirmed what he already knew.
Twenty-two students, worth five points each, added up to 110. Killing them when they reawakened as ghouls bumped that number by 220.
330 points in total.
"You killed them, didn’t you?"
Killed them first, then dragged them out. After waiting for them to resurrect as ghouls, they killed them a second time. Farming, in its most twisted sense.
For the first time since meeting again, Jayce faced him properly.
"I... I had no choice."
Miles said nothing. He just stared at the boy silently, prompting him to continue.
"W-when I first came here after fleeing the classroom, there were about twenty-six of us. The cafeteria itself was busted, so we had to settle for the storage."
The boy took his hand off the back of his head, lowering his gaze before resuming.
"That’s when Max found the pylon and... and its requirements. There were five of us that gained skills. Max only knew us three, and he was going to execute his plans with or without us. With the others joining immediately, I... I..."
"...chose to kill them?"
"I said I didn’t have a choice."
Miles was sure he would’ve shouted if he could. Jayce glared at him, a boiling mix of guilt, anger, and determination in his eyes.
"What would you have done, then? Who are you to judge me? What? I should’ve stood there and died? Or maybe I should’ve gone out to kill ghouls myself and gathered those points. How many were in your group? They couldn’t have been just nine. What makes you think I wouldn’t have died, just like the rest of them?"
He remained silent under the barrage. There was no answer he could’ve given that would satisfy any of those questions.
In the end, Jayce sighed again, looking back at Miles.
"I have a family out there, Miles. I haven’t been able to connect to either of my parents since the snow hit. My sisters are still alone at home right now, and I can’t even contact them because of these fucking rules. I mean, you understand that, Miles? I have to get to them; they’ll just die otherwise."
Miles nodded slowly in response. Anna and Henry remained so far away. If he was forced into making the same decision as Jayce, he wasn’t sure what he’d do.
Tears welled in the corners of Jayce’s eyes as he placed a hand on Miles’s shoulder.
"I... I knew you’d understand. We’re friends after all, right? I mean, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Even if we only ever talk in class, things always felt much simpler around you."
Miles remained silent, yet the boy continued either way.
"I know you have a family out there, Miles. You mentioned a sister before. I-I can help you get to them. It’s why I called you here. I want to help you, Miles, and... I want you to help me."
He’d already figured out where this was heading before the boy reached it. Miles glanced back at the group still facing off Maxwell and his friend.
"You want to kill them too?"
Jayce’s eyes darkened, yet he continued staring at Miles silently. That much was enough of a confirmation.
He ran some quick calculations in his head.
The group was eight, excluding him. That meant forty points for killing them as a whole. Eighty more points when they were resurrected, summing into a gain of 120 points.
That, plus 330, would end up with 450. Fifty points short of their target. Even if they were to kill him, they still wouldn’t reach it.
"There aren’t enough of us to activate the pylon."
Jayce was willing to reply to that one.
"The points accumulated by the dead transfer automatically to the hands of their killers."
Gently, he questioned.
"Miles?"
Miles didn’t reply, still pondering.
’That explains things.’
He alone had fifty points. Grimm was bound to have much more than that. The others wouldn’t be lacking in points either.
The question of whether they needed to kill each other, or if just pooling points together would be enough to meet the balance, was a thought he suppressed very quickly.
If Maxwell had really killed all those people, he doubted the boy would struggle with the thought of doing the same to Grimm or any of them for that matter. It was simply a matter of eliminating any threats to his control of the storage room.
Miles honestly considered Jayce’s offer to switch sides.
His group was cold, weak, and hungry. Injured too, having just survived the journey here.
’Morgan is out of commission. Brandon and Grimm are both exhausted, too. Sarah doesn’t seem very reliable yet. Neither Ryan nor Chloe has combat-focused skills, while the rest are non-combatants.’
In comparison, besides the bags under the pale girl’s eyes, Maxwell’s team barely seemed fazed at all. If the two groups were to fight right now, it’d be very hard for Ryan and the others to make it out in one piece.
Switching would be a sure way to get out much faster, and it would drastically reduce the amount of risk he’d take in doing so. He’d be able to still keep his friend, too.
By all means, it seemed the logical option.
And yet, for all the veneers Jayce had used to hide much of himself, he failed to notice that the classmate he called his friend was one such veneer.
One perhaps even larger and more ambiguous than his could ever hope to be.
The mere thought of betraying the group behind him sprang forth such an overwhelming sense of disgust that it gave him a headache. It’d be lowering himself from rock bottom, straight into the abyss.
He blinked once, letting the numbness wash over those feelings.
But his mind was already made up then.
"No."