I rush into the little tavern with the girl in my arms.

The place is close enough that I don’t have to run for long, maybe a hundred and sixty feet from the street where I found her, but every step through the mud feels too long with her limp weight against me.

The Horizon Armor covers her body like a makeshift blanket, hiding what the street tried to turn into a spectacle. Her breathing is still there, weak, uneven, but there. For now, that’s all that matters.

The tavern is packed.

Travelers, laborers, Divers, and Drowneds fill separate tables, as if someone had drawn invisible borders between groups that share the same roof. They don’t mix and they don’t talk to each other. Still, they do one thing together the instant I step inside.

They all look at me.

The music dies a second later. Cups stop near mouths. Forks hang in the air. Faces close off, not in surprise, but in that defensive irritation of people who watch trouble walk through the door and decide, before any answer comes, that the trouble is whoever carried the body in.

No one offers to help. Not one of them.

For a few seconds the whole tavern just watches me while the girl breathes faintly in my arms. That tells me more about Thirstfall than any warning ever could.

The owner notices the silence before he understands the scene. He comes out from behind the counter with a rag between his hands, wiping some grime off his fingers, and crosses to the middle of the room.

It’s the same man as before: heavy belly, a face that ought to look friendly under better circumstances, a long mustache hiding half his mouth. His eyes move over me, over the armor draped on the girl, over the way she doesn’t react, then across the whole room.

He looks like he’s assessing damage.

He doesn’t ask what happened. Doesn’t dramatize. Doesn’t try to look generous for the audience.

He just tosses the rag over his shoulder and goes serious.

"Quick. Follow me."

His calm gives me a chill.

It isn’t the coldness of indifference. It’s worse. He’s seen this kind of scene before, enough times to know that every second spent on outrage is a second stolen from someone who might still survive.

I follow Richard to the back. As I pass a few tables, I notice Divers rising once they realize the person in my arms is a Drowned.

Maybe it’s curiosity. Maybe ignorance. Maybe that miserable human urge to stand near suffering without having to touch it.

Whatever the reason, the owner cuts it off before it turns into a mess.

"Back to your fun, you bunch of layabouts," he shouts over his shoulder, holding a swinging door open so I can pass without knocking her head against it. "Jess, cover for me."

A woman’s voice answers from somewhere out of my line of sight, and then the door swings shut behind us, muffling the room.

The back room is small and functional. A bunk, shelves of bottles, wooden crates, two chairs, a relatively clean table, and the signs of a tight life squeezed between work shifts. It doesn’t look like an infirmary, but it doesn’t look unprepared either. That’s the first thing that bothers me.

Richard points at the table.

I set the girl down carefully, keeping the armor over her. Her body offers no resistance. She went out somewhere along the way, maybe from exhaustion, maybe from pain, maybe because her brain finally decided to save energy just to keep breathing.

"Sir—"

"Richard," he cuts in, dry, already pulling a metal basin out from under a shelf. "My name is Richard."

"Dryden."

He doesn’t answer the name right away. He fills the basin with water from a side barrel, drops clean cloths in, and hands it to me without ceremony while he starts hunting through the shelves for other things. Dried herbs, small vials, salves, bandages already rolled.

I take the basin and go to the girl. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

I clean her face first. Then her arms, her neck, her legs, only where I can touch without robbing what little privacy she has left. The mud comes off easily, still damp.

Even if infection here doesn’t work exactly the way it does on Earth, badly tended wounds drain OXI faster, and Drowneds don’t have the luxury of chewing Scales to recover the way Divers do. For them, OXI comes back the natural, biological way: food, water, rest, and hygiene.

Which is to say, all the things the Red Squid Slums seem designed to deny.

"She still has a pulse," I say.

"I know."

The answer comes out too quiet.

Richard moves in with a second basin full of supplies. He starts applying support solutions and salves to the wounds with a strange precision. It isn’t a doctor’s technique. It isn’t a medic’s speed. There’s no formal training in the way he reads pressure, adjusts cloth, chooses where to touch first.

But there’s no shortage of care.

He holds the girl as if her body might break if his hands landed wrong. The big hand that has probably snapped bones in some trench supports her shoulder with a gentleness that doesn’t match the place, or the hard face he’s trying to keep.

"You know her?" I ask.

Richard doesn’t answer. Instead, his eyes stay on the medicine.

"Was it you?"

The question doesn’t come loud. Maybe that’s why it lands heavier.

"Do I look like a man who’d do that and then ask for help?"

He stops.

For the first time since we came in, Richard looks me dead in the eyes. The appraisal is brief, but it runs deep. The corner of his mouth lifts into a small, tired smile, born from an irony that maybe took a while to surface through his memory.

"Latrine boy," he says. "You’ve changed."

I sit with that for a few seconds, unsure what to do with it. Of all the marks I’ve left on Thirstfall, apparently the first impression that survived in the Red Squid Slums was me begging for work scrubbing toilets.

"For a veteran Diver," I answer, reading his energy more clearly now, "so have you."

I can feel it better now. Rank B at the very least, unless he’s hiding part of his own strength. That changes the whole picture. Someone that powerful pouring beer in a slum, pretending to be nothing more than the fat owner of a bad tavern, didn’t land here by accident.

Richard tips the last of a solution into the basin and wipes his hands slowly.

"Depends on your point of view."

"Almost everything does."

He lets out a breath through his nose, humorless. Then he goes back to the girl, settles the armor over her with care, and ties a bandage around the injured arm. Only then does his face slip.

Not much, but enough for me to start understanding.

His eyes go red first, before any tear finds the courage to fall. The mustache hides his mouth, but it doesn’t hide the jaw locking. All that strength, all that Rank B presence compressed into a small room, seems to turn inward and try to hold something that was never built to be held.

"She’s my daughter."

The room changes size.

Everything fits together with a simple cruelty. The calm. The lack of questions. The supplies too ready at hand. The way he touched her. The tavern full of people who didn’t help. The whole Red Squid Slums breathing as if this were just another night.

I look at the unconscious girl on the table.

Then at Richard.

And for the first time since I walked in, I don’t reach for any useful cynicism to ease the weight of the night. I just accept life the way it is.