The battle went mostly the same as last time.
Except the guards arrived way sooner than they should have. Nothing I'd done was different. Nothing major had changed that would have alerted them earlier. Butterfly effect, probably.
The main thing was that people who were supposed to die had survived.
One of them was Liam.
He was standing at the edge of where the fighting had been, staring at the ground where someone had fallen. The air still smelled of blood and kicked-up dirt. I walked over.
"Come on," I said. "We survived. Isn't that the important thing?"
He looked up at me. Something shifted in his expression.
"You... do you even care about them at this point?"
"Obviously I do."
"THEN WHY DO YOU LOOK SO CALM?!"
He stepped forward, voice cracking.
"It looks like you don't give a shit about any of this. They were people we could consider comrades. Some of them were even our friends. Don't you care about them at all? Why did you change so much..."
His voice dropped.
"Just why..."
"What are we even supposed to do now..."
No response came.
In the silence that followed, something occurred to me. He was right. Standing over people who had just died, with the smell of blood still in the air — and I wasn't shocked. Wasn't grieving. The same stillness from leaving the Lin family. The same stillness from the alchemist's room.
When was the last time I actually felt something? Did I ever, after coming to this world?
Why, even thinking about this right now, am I still calm?
The silence between us stretched.
Then Liam exhaled slowly.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have..." He didn't finish the sentence. "The way you react, it's just... I don't know."
"I don't know either," I said. And I meant it. "Truthfully — I can't feel anything. I don't know why."
He was quiet for a while after that.
"It's fine, I guess," he finally said. "As long as we're... alive."
He smiled while looking at me. The tears were still falling.