I sat on the edge of the bed, losing a staring contest with the wheelchair parked directly in front of me.

Tikki sat beside me, left foreleg wrapped in a cast the color of a swimming pool, staring at the wheelchair with the exact same suspicion I currently felt.

We looked like two war vets contemplating several poor life choices in a row.

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the afternoon sun sat low enough to throw long shadows across the bedroom floor, while the clock on the nightstand read three in the afternoon.

Yep, I had slept for over twelve straight hours, and every part of my body currently believed that twelve more would have been the better call.

"If it was just us, Booger..." I said, scratching behind his ears, "We’d already be out of the city."

"Mea."

"Exactly."

The North27 Ascender, the open highway, music running through the speakers at full volume, nobody to rescue and nobody waiting on a comms channel. Just driving west towards the final bastion of humanity.

Instead, here we sat. One crippled cat. One crippled human. Neither one capable of standing up without immediately regretting doing so.

And this was only day two.

The thought arrived cold and practical and completely undeniable, the kind of thought that didn’t care whether I wanted to have it.

Saving people you love came with a bill attached.

"Still worth it, though..."

Tikki blinked slowly at me.

The wounds had finally stopped pretending they weren’t that big of a deal.

Last night I’d run a rescue mission in a mafia compound, blown up a university department, and committed several acts that probably qualified as international incidents and then some more.

Adrenaline had carried all of it. But now...

I pulled my shirt collar down and looked at my chest.

Yesterday, the bruising looked bad. Today it looked like a genuine art project.

Deep purple spread across the center of my sternum and out across the entire left side of my ribcage, darker now than it had been twelve hours ago, with swelling along the edges that had clearly used the night productively.

But still, considering I took a 7.62x51 round to the chest from under ten meters, I frankly got off easy.

The Level IV plate had stopped the round completely. No penetration. Somehow, no broken ribs either.

But as ordained by the laws of physics, the soft tissue underneath the plate absorbed the entire transfer of kinetic energy, which is why standing up straight felt manageable while bending forward, twisting, or raising either arm above shoulder height produced sensations best described as deeply unwelcome.

Brushing my teeth twenty minutes earlier had required more strategic planning than Kara’s rescue.

That wasn’t even the worst part.

The graze along my waist had stiffened overnight into something with an entirely new personality. Turning my torso even slightly sent a sharp line of pain straight across my side, and combining it with the chest meant I currently moved through the world with the exact posture of an elderly aristocrat with severe spinal complaints.

Then there was the neck.

I touched the back of it carefully and immediately regretted the decision.

The skin there had swollen overnight, tender enough that even gentle pressure sent pain shooting down and up.

The memory surfaced without invitation, the hammer strike to the back of my head in the mafia compound.

Somebody sneaked up behind me while I was half blind, deaf, and managing a splitting headache courtesy of overusing Telekinesis.

The ballistic helmet had stopped the skull-caving part of the dude’s plan. But my neck absorbed the rest of the bill on the helmet’s behalf.

A sprained neck. Wonderful addition to the collection, isn’t it?

On top of all of that, my arms and legs felt like overcooked noodles after a full night of sprinting, climbing, and rappelling off buildings at unsafe speeds.

And underneath everything else sat a hangover from drinking half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s directly from the bottle after surviving the literal end of the world.

Altogether, I felt like complete and total garbage.

"My chest looks like I grew boobs." I couldn’t help but sigh as I looked down at my chest one more time.

-Knock-! Knock-!

Tikki and I both looked up at the same time at the door.

"Come in... It’s unlocked."

The door opened, and Nora stepped inside, and within about half a second, her eyes found my chest.

-Pffft-!

"You got boobs now!" she burst out laughing.

"I swear to god, kid..."

"Okay, okay! I’m sorry!" She threw both hands up, still giggling. "... I came to check on you."

Crossing the room, she crouched beside the bed.

"How are your wounds? Kara told us everything that happened to you."

"I feel like absolute shit..." I said honestly. "Only I know how I managed to brush my teeth this morning."

"Come on..." Nora smiled and stood back up, offering her hand. "Let’s get you into the wheelchair."

Dignity was, at this point, an entirely optional luxury.

Getting from the bed to the wheelchair took a long and noisy process involving more swearing than I expected to contribute personally.

Nora handled most of the actual weight transfer with surprising steadiness for someone barely over five feet tall.

Once I settled into the chair, she carefully picked Tikki up.

"Mea."

"You weigh less than three kilograms, Booger. Calm down."

He ignored both of us completely and let himself be placed onto my lap, where he immediately curled up.

"Kara told us about the System..." Nora said as she pushed the wheelchair into the hallway. "Do you actually have magic powers and stuff?"

"Yep."

"Damn."

The main hall opened up ahead of us, where Kara sat on one of the sofas with the laptop balanced on her knees, surrounded by what looked like several empty coffee mugs that had each made meaningful contributions to whatever the cause was.

"How are your injuries?" She looked up the instant I rolled into view.

"Been better... What are you working on?"

"Downloading books." She turned the screen slightly toward me. "First aid, trauma medicine, survival, bushcraft, firearm maintenance, water purification, agriculture, anything I could think of..."

"Smart," I grinned, genuinely meaning it.

"There are entire forums dedicated to people who romanticise this kind of stuff..." she added. "I already searched through several of them for recommended reading lists."

"Bet they’re having the time of their lives~"

"Doubt it."

I opened the System and bought several USB drives, the purchase notification barely counting as anything notable after last night’s fireworks.

"Once you’re done, zip everything up and copy it across... These’ll become real good trade currency once the internet stops existing."

"Already planned to."

"Perfect."

I scratched behind Tikki’s ears, and somewhere in the middle of that motion, a different thought surfaced.

"What did you all eat last night?"

Nora raised a hand from where she’d settled onto the sofa beside Kara.

"There were supplies in the RV up on the roof... Leo went up and found a bunch of MREs."

"Right..."

I’d genuinely forgotten about that entire purchase.

"Speaking of food..." I turned to Kara, "I need a grocery list from you. High calorie, high protein, enough for two weeks minimum."

Kara nodded immediately and started typing.

[Need to buy training weapons too...]

Nobody in this group knew how to properly handle firearms except me.

Leo’s only exposures were bolt actions and pump actions.

And that gap needed closing fast. AR-platform chambered in .22LR, a couple of Glock 44s, were the perfect toys. After all, AR platforms were the most commonly available military-grade firearms out there, same went for Glocks.

As for chambering them in .22LR... I’ll get cheap rimfire ammunition that I could buy in bulk without making a dent in the credit total. They’ll get minimal recoil, maximum trigger time, building actual fundamentals before anyone touched anything with real stopping power.

Once everyone stopped flinching at every shot, real weapons came next.

"Where’s Leo?" I asked, still scratching Tikki’s head.

And the whole room shifted at once.

Nora’s expression dropped immediately. Kara stopped typing mid-sentence and looked up from the screen.

"Some people crashed their car outside last night," Nora said quietly. "After you went to sleep."

I already had a sinking feeling about exactly where this was going.

"He tried to help them," Kara added, her voice gentler than before. "Used your rifle... Shot a lot of infected. But there were too many."

A pause settled over the room that nobody seemed willing to break first until-

"There were two kids in the car," Nora finally said, barely above a whisper. "He’s been out on the balcony ever since..."

I understood immediately, completely, without needing a single additional detail.

I had lived through this exact thing more times than I could count across three years in the previous timeline.

The first failed rescue stayed with everybody, permanently, in a way later ones somehow never quite matched.

It wasn’t only the failure itself. It was watching an entire family get torn apart while every option you had access to ran out one at a time, especially when twenty-four hours earlier your biggest concern had been the deadline on a civil engineering assignment.

"Go talk to him." Kara looked up from the laptop screen.

[So I’m apparently a therapist now too... fine.]