My name is Kyle Warren. I'm from a place called Quors, which is the kind of village that doesn't appear on maps and wouldn't benefit from appearing on them.

  Quors is a coal mining village. Everything there is grey. The sky is grey because of the dust. The buildings are grey because the dust settles on them and stays. The men are grey because they go into the mountain in the morning and come out in the evening and the mountain's color comes out with them. Sometimes they don't come out. My father didn't come out. I was ten.

  Cave-in. Section seven. They told my mother the rock had shifted and the supports hadn't held and the passage had collapsed and the men inside were buried. They didn't use the word dead. They used the word lost, as if the mountain had misplaced him and might eventually return him, like a coat left at an inn. They never dug the bodies out. Too expensive. Too dangerous. He's still down there, I guess. In the dark.

  My mother got sick after that. The coughing started a year later and never stopped. The village doctor called it coal dust lung and prescribed a tincture that cost more than we could afford and did nothing that we could measure. A real doctor, he told us, was in the city. A real doctor could help. Real doctors charge real money. Mining wages are not real money.

  I went into the mine at twelve. Same mountain that took my father. Same tunnels. Same sound the ceiling makes when the rock above you is thinking about coming down. A grinding noise. Low. You feel it in your teeth before you hear it with your ears. Every time I heard it, my body locked up. Every time, I thought: tomorrow it's me under the rock. Every time, I went back in the next morning, because the alternative was my mother coughing in a house with no money and no medicine and no husband and a son who was too afraid to swing a pickaxe.

  I was sixteen when I saw the poster in the mining office. Adventurer recruitment. B-rank adventurers earned in a month what the mine paid in a year. B-rank. That number burned into my brain. I couldn't sleep for three days.

  I left on the fourth day. My mother stood in the doorway and cried, and I told her I would send money every month and I would find a good doctor and I would make it work. Her face was half hope and half the knowledge that hope was a luxury she could no longer afford, and I carried that face with me out of the village and down the road and into the city and into the guild office where I registered as an adventurer and was assigned the rank of F, which is the bottom, which is where you start, which is where I still am three years later.

  Nineteen years old. F-rank. My party is four people who work together because working alone is not permitted. Galen handles the bow. Dorg carries the shield. Nina has [Appraisal]. I carry the sword and call myself the leader, which is a word that sounds better than what I actually am, which is the person who talks the loudest and worries the most and hides both behind a face that looks like confidence if you don't examine it too closely.

  I send money home every month. The amount is embarrassing. It covers the tincture that does nothing and a fraction of the rent and none of the real doctor that my mother needs.

  I am scared all the time. Of dying. Of not earning enough. Of the day the letter comes back unopened because there's no one left to open it.

  I don't tell anyone this.

  ***

  The dungeon was our first real one. F-rank assignment. Target: slimes. The weakest monsters in the registry. The kind of quest they give to parties that haven't proven they can handle anything else.

  The entrance was a hole in a hillside. Dark. Wet rock on both sides. The air coming out of it was cold and smelled like damp stone and earth and the specific mineral tang of a place that sunlight had never touched.

  It smelled like the mine.

  My hand was shaking on the sword grip. The leather was slick with sweat. I squeezed harder. Adjusted my stance so the tremor wouldn't travel up to my shoulder where Galen might see it.

  Galen noticed anyway. He always noticed. He had the eyes of a person who watched everything and committed to nothing, and he used those eyes to find weak spots, in monsters and in people, and he found mine and smiled.

  "Nervous, leader?"

  "Shut up. Let's move."

  Bravado. Always bravado. That's all I had. An F-rank swordsman is just a mining boy with a blade instead of a pickaxe and the same fear and the same dark and the same ceiling that might come down.

  We went in. Torchlight on the walls. Shadows that moved when we moved. The wet sound of something small dragging itself across stone, somewhere deeper in.

  We killed three slimes. They were weak. A sword stroke was enough. They burst and their cores shattered and the remains seeped into the cracks in the floor and that was it. Easy. Simple.

  I felt sick after each one. Not from the combat. From the thought that kept surfacing even though I kept pushing it down: these things are alive. They're weak and they're simple and they can't fight back and they're alive and I'm killing them because someone posted a number on a board.

  Don't think about it. Adventurers who think about it don't eat. My mother doesn't eat if I don't eat. Kill the slime. Collect the core. Turn it in at the counter. Send the money home.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Don't think about it.

  ***

  Deep in the dungeon. Past the main chambers. A narrow passage that opened into a small cavity in the rock, barely large enough for the four of us to stand in.

  Something was glowing in the corner.

  The other slimes had been translucent and dim, the color of dirty water, barely visible without the torchlight. This one was different. This one was blue. A clear, steady blue, bright enough to cast its own light on the stone around it. In the darkness of the dungeon, this one small thing was producing its own illumination.

  Dorg raised his sword. "Variant. Kill it."

  I stopped him. My hand on his arm before I'd thought about it.

  "Wait. Variant means we appraise first. Nina."

  That's what I told him. That's the reason I gave. Leader's judgment. Tactical caution. The rational decision.

  The real reason was simpler than that.

  I'd spent three years of my childhood in a hole in the ground where my father had been crushed by rock, swinging a pickaxe in the dark, listening to the ceiling groan. I'd spent three years before that in a grey village under a grey sky watching grey men go into a grey mountain. I had been in dark places for as long as I could remember.

  And this thing was glowing.

  This small, helpless, trembling thing in the corner of a cave was doing something I had never been able to do. It was producing light. Its own light. Not borrowed from a torch or reflected from a lantern. Light that came from inside it. And the idea of destroying that, of swinging a blade and shattering the core of a thing that could glow in the dark, made something in my chest tighten in a way I hadn't felt since I was a kid watching my mother cry in a doorway.

  I didn't want to break the only light in the room.

  That's it. That's the whole reason.

  Nina's [Appraisal] activated. The display appeared.

  Species: Slime (Variant - Heal Type)

  Skills: [Heal Lv.3] [Absorb Lv.1]

  Disposition: Gentle

  [Heal Lv.3].

  The calculation hit me like a punch. Instant. Reflexive. The kind of arithmetic that runs itself when you've spent three years counting coins and measuring them against the cost of medicine and finding the balance short every single time.

  [Heal]. Healing. A slime that could heal. Potions cost money. Potions were the reason we couldn't take higher-rank quests, because every injury ate into the profit margin and the margin was already nothing. But if we had a healer. If we had a healer that didn't charge a fee. If the healing was free, we could take risks. We could fight harder. We could rank up. D-rank. C-rank. B-rank. B-rank and the money that came with it. B-rank and my mother in a real clinic with a real doctor who could do more than hand her a bottle and shrug.

  The calculation ran. The calculation was fast and cold and complete, and it happened in the space between seeing the [Heal] on the display and reaching my hand toward the slime, and by the time my hand was extended, palm up, fingers open, the calculation had already finished.

  I knew what the slime was worth.

  But.

  The slime was looking at me. In the way slimes look at things, which is with their whole body. Its blue light pulsed. Hesitant. Uncertain. The glow dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened, like a heartbeat that wasn't sure whether to trust the next moment.

  It was scared.

  I knew what scared looked like. I'd seen it in the mirror every morning for years. The slime on the cave floor was afraid the way I was afraid in the mine, the way I was afraid in the dungeon, the way I was afraid every day: fundamentally, constantly, in a way that colored everything else.

  I held my hand out. Low. Near the floor. Open. I didn't move. I waited.

  The slime inched forward. Touched the edge of my palm. Pulled back. Came forward again. Touched. Held.

  Then it climbed on.

  Small. Soft. Warm. Warmer than I expected. Its body settled into my palm, and its light brightened, and the blue became vivid, became something that filled the small chamber with color, and the slime was glowing on my hand and I could feel it trembling and the trembling slowed and stopped and the glow steadied and the warmth increased and the slime was calm on my palm and trusting me and I hadn't done anything to earn it except hold still.

  "You like that, huh?"

  It got brighter. Bluer. Happier. I could feel it.

  I laughed.

  I don't know when I'd last laughed like that. Not the sharp, defensive laugh I used in the guild when someone made a joke at my expense. Not the forced laugh I performed for my party to keep morale from dropping. A real laugh. Surprised out of me by the fact that a small blue creature was sitting in my hand and was happy about it and was showing me that it was happy, and the showing was so simple and so honest that my chest did the tightening thing again and this time it didn't hurt.

  The feeling was real. The calculation had already happened, and the calculation was real too, and the two things existed in the same moment and neither cancelled the other. I was holding a creature that could save my mother's life, and I was holding a creature that glowed in the dark, and both of those facts were true, and I didn't know yet that one of them would eventually eat the other.

  ***

  Outside. Sunlight. The slime on my palm caught the light and its blue deepened into something I didn't have a word for. Rich. Alive.

  Nina looked over my shoulder. "Going to name it?"

  Name. Right. You name your tamed monsters. I thought about it. My mother's name felt too private. My father's name felt too heavy. I wanted something lighter. Something that matched the glow.

  "Luca."

  I don't know why. The sound was right. Two syllables. Bright. Easy to say. The kind of name you'd give to something you found in the dark that made the dark less dark.

  "Your name's Luca now. Good to meet you, partner."

  The slime got brighter. The whole body pulsed with light, and the warmth on my palm increased, and I could feel something that I can only describe as joy radiating out of this tiny creature because I had given it a name and called it something that mattered.

  I put Luca in the pouch on my belt. Close to my body. I could feel the warmth through the leather. I didn't think about why I chose the pouch instead of the pack. I just did.

  On the walk back to the guild, I was calculating. [Heal] uptime. Quest selection. Risk thresholds. Rank progression timelines. The math was good. The math was very good. Luca changed everything.

  The warmth in the pouch was steady. I noticed it the whole way back.

  I was doing both things at once and I didn't know yet that you can't do both things forever.

  ***

  I remember that day.

  The dark dungeon and the blue light. The warmth on my palm. The way I laughed. The name I chose because it sounded like what light would sound like if light had a sound.

  I thought I found it. That day in the cave. I thought I reached into a dark place and pulled out something valuable and the finding was mine and the value was mine and the story was about a boy from a mining town who got lucky.

  But the longer I look at it, the less sure I am about who was in the dark.

  I was the one with the shaking hands. I was the one who couldn't sleep. I was the one standing in a cave that smelled like the place my father died, holding a sword I barely knew how to use, pretending to be something I wasn't because the alternative was admitting I was a scared kid from a coal town who didn't know how to save anyone, least of all his mother, least of all himself.

  And there was this light.

  It came to me. Climbed onto my hand. Chose to trust me before I'd done anything to deserve it. Glowed for me. Made the cave brighter by being in it.

  I didn't find Luca.

  Luca found me.

  ...When did I forget that?