Becoming a Monster

Chapter 673: Chapter 672: Realizing Noah Wasn’t The Problem

Bailey never noticed the slightly crazed look that had begun to show in Ailetta’s eyes.

Her attention had already returned to Noah, too caught up in everything she had finally begun saying to notice the reaction her words had caused.

Whatever had happened when Noah changed Ailetta, the friend Bailey remembered hadn’t come back from it.

And after finally saying that aloud, Bailey felt no reason to hold back anything else.

For a moment, her voice was the only one that could be heard between the two groups.

What had started as an answer to Noah’s question had quickly become something far more personal, leaving many people around her listening to accusations they knew almost nothing about.

Even Thalric only knew pieces of what had happened before their group arrived in this world.

He knew they had lost people. He knew their experiences with Noah were complicated enough that some of them credited him with saving their lives while others could barely speak about him without anger.

But hearing Bailey explain where some of that anger came from gave him a much clearer picture of just how complicated their relationship with Noah had actually been.

Yet instead of feeling that Noah was in the wrong, he only felt even more certain that Bailey and the others had pushed this person further away from humanity.

To be blamed for someone else’s death just because you were strong enough to save them?

How many times had he himself been blamed for not arriving fast enough? For sending someone out on a mission that they didn’t come back from? For leading a group into a dangerous fight where they all knew that death was on the table, only for it to still become his fault when someone didn’t make it back?

Of course, Thalric always felt responsible in most of those situations. If he could, he would go back in time and change what had happened.

But there was a difference between feeling responsible for someone’s death and having someone else decide that their life had been your responsibility in the first place.

Thalric had chosen to become an adventurer. He had chosen to lead others, and eventually, he had chosen to become the Guild Master. Each of those decisions came with people depending on him, which was why he accepted much of the blame whenever something went wrong.

Noah hadn’t chosen any of that.

From everything Thalric had learned about their time before coming to this world, Noah had never asked to be responsible for Bailey or any of the others. He hadn’t been their leader, nor had he made some promise that he would keep all of them alive.

He had been trying to survive just like the rest of them.

Yet because he had the strength to help, somewhere along the way that seemed to have become something they expected from him. And when he didn’t use that strength the way they believed he should have, the consequences of their own decisions somehow became his responsibility as well.

Perhaps that wouldn’t have mattered as much to someone else.

But Noah had already been willing to give up his humanity before any of them came to this world. Thalric could only imagine what constantly being placed into a role he never asked for would do to someone who already had so little attachment to being human in the first place.

Every person who blamed him for something he failed to prevent gave him one less reason to care the next time someone needed his help. Every accusation gave him one less reason to accept responsibility for people he had never promised to protect.

Until eventually, perhaps there wasn’t much compassion left for anyone he didn’t consider his own.

Looking at all the creatures gathered around Noah now, Thalric couldn’t say that he had lost the ability to care about others.

If anything, he was beginning to think Noah had only stopped allowing everyone else to decide who he was supposed to care about.

—

Thalric wanted to speak before Bailey could continue. The way this conversation was going, he couldn’t see anything good coming from allowing her to keep throwing every bit of resentment she had toward Noah directly at him, especially when Thalric was beginning to understand how differently Noah might view the same events.

However, wanting to stop her and actually being able to were two different things. Thalric had spent too many years being responsible for other people’s lives to make decisions based entirely on what he wanted.

Even when he did everything he could, even when his decisions saved more people than they lost, there would always be someone who only cared about the person who hadn’t made it back and wondered why Thalric’s best hadn’t been enough to save them too.

It was something he had accepted when he chose to lead others, but there were far too many people standing behind him now for Thalric to forget that lesson merely because he didn’t like where Bailey was taking this conversation.

Noah had been the one to ask her for the truth, and interfering before she finished could just as easily make things worse if Noah believed Thalric was trying to prevent him from hearing it.

So despite wanting to intervene, Thalric could only allow Bailey to continue as she finally reached the last reason she had come here in the first place.

“And then there’s Paul.”

Bailey’s hands tightened almost immediately after saying his name, with the anger she had shown while speaking about Blake and Ailetta becoming harder to control now that she had reached the person she had actually come here to protect.

“If it wasn’t for you, Paul would’ve never needed to be saved! Fenrir was yours! Without him, that abomination never would’ve infected Paul!”

As far as Bailey was concerned, everything that happened afterward could be traced back to that moment. Paul would never have been infected if Fenrir hadn’t been there, which meant there would’ve been nothing for Noah to save him from in the first place.

“And then you turned him into a monster just like Ailetta!” Bailey continued before Noah could respond. “Wasn’t that enough for you? Why do you still want him? Why are you trying to take him away from me too?”

Her anger only grew as everything Noah had taken from her seemed to pile together in her mind. Blake had died when she believed Noah could’ve saved him. The Ailetta she remembered was gone, replaced by something Bailey could no longer recognize as her friend. And now the one person she had come all this way to protect was someone Noah claimed belonged with him instead.

“You took Ailetta! You let Blake die! And now you want Paul too!” Bailey cried as the thought behind all of those accusations finally came out with them. “Why do you have to take everyone away from me?!”

The question affected Bailey more than she expected because Noah wasn’t responsible for everyone she had lost. She still didn’t know what had happened to her parents after everything changed, and she knew even less about her younger sister.

She didn’t know whether they had survived, whether they had been brought to this world somewhere else, or whether she would spend the rest of her life without ever learning what became of them.

There were countless others who had been forced to live with that same uncertainty. People had lost parents, children, siblings, and everyone else they loved without even being given the certainty of knowing they were dead.

Some had managed to find one another again after arriving in this world, while others could do nothing but continue hoping that the people they were searching for were still somewhere out there.

Bailey hadn’t even searched as much as she knew she should have.

In the beginning, she had been too concerned with keeping herself alive to worry about much else. Thinking about her family wouldn’t help when she didn’t know where they were, and searching for them wasn’t possible when she could barely survive the dangers directly in front of her.

At the time, Bailey could at least tell herself that staying alive was the best thing she could do if she ever wanted to see them again.

That excuse became harder to accept once she grew stronger. There eventually came a point where Bailey wasn’t struggling just to survive every day, and even if she had no idea where to begin searching, she could’ve at least tried to learn something.

Instead, she found other reasons not to.

If her family had survived, Bailey could tell herself that they had probably found somewhere safe just like she had. Her parents would’ve protected her younger sister, and perhaps they were searching for Bailey themselves.

With an entire world separating them, it wasn’t unreasonable that none of them had found each other yet, and believing that let Bailey to continue hoping that one day they somehow would.

It also allowed her to avoid what frightened her far more than never finding them. As long as Bailey didn’t know what happened to her family, there was still a chance they were alive somewhere.

Actually searching meant risking the possibility of finally learning that they weren’t, and the longer Bailey put it off, the more guilt she felt for realizing that part of her preferred the uncertainty.

What made that guilt even harder to accept was knowing that fear wasn’t the only reason she had been able to avoid searching for so long.

Bailey had lost her family without ever learning what happened to them, but she hadn’t been left alone afterward. She still had the others.

They were the people who had survived those first days with her, the same people she continued moving forward with whenever thinking about everyone she had lost became too difficult.

Having them had made it easier to tell herself that she could wait a little longer before searching.

It made it easier not to think about what she might eventually find, because even if the worst had already happened, Bailey still had people beside her when she woke up the next day.

And now even that was beginning to disappear.

Blake was already dead. The person Bailey remembered as Ailetta was gone. She didn’t know whether she would ever see Jasmine, Alicia, or Isabelle again after coming here without telling any of them what she intended to do.

Which left Paul.

The one person Bailey had come here because she couldn’t accept losing.

And as she looked at Noah standing across from her, Bailey finally understood why there was nothing he could say that would make her leave this forest while he was still alive.

—

We got our first review! So this Friday, I will do a mass release of 5 additional chapters. Make sure if you have any questions or insights that you would like to see in this battle or happen after the battle, to please comment them.