The witnesses.

It felt puzzling.

To be back inside one's body, to feel the touch of thin air, to sense the flesh inside me pulsing with blood, a heart beating with vigor.

My memories, which had seemed to vanish in the eternity I spent within the void, returned to their rightful place with surprising speed. Almost as if they had always been there...

Was I hovering though?

For some reason, I couldn't help but notice my body felt light. Lighter than it should have been. I opened my eyelids whole, my gaze darted around the room, half-obscured by the sudden change of lightning.

I was in... a room. Within the underground of base, right. I could recall that, we had returned from the plains safe and sound, we had survived the impacts.

Then, the last thing I did before I fainted... I grabbed the thing growing on Martha's head with my bare hands. Its shards had bitten onto my flesh, piercing my skin. It happened almost instantly, I stumbled backward as that creature...

I could feel the blood draining out of my face. Before my vision went completely black, just a few instants before I had lost consciousness, that thing...

"Didn't I get my neck impaled?"

My steps carried me back slowly, burning the inertia my body had accumulated. I was not paying attention to any of that though. My breath shook as my hands rapidly reached to coul around my neck, as if scared that the blood running still inside me would escape at any moment.

"No injury."

I muttered to myself, trying to discern whether those memories had been just an imagination of mine.

Sadly, figuring things out was not on schedule.

"Vaam- What in the name of-"

Any confusion or disorientation I harbored took a second seat the moment the familiar voice reached my ears.

It was Kevin.

Behind me, the old man stood in the exact same spot he had been ages ago when I last saw him. To the point, his demeanor, posture, and expression couldn't help but trigger a sense of deja-vu.

A cold tingle along my spine. The faint smile subconsciously surfacing on my face vanished, substituted by somewhat of an astounded expression. Like a fox, his hands were moving backward, trying to reach for something hidden behind his back...

A tingling. The same vague tickles you'd feel when someone neared too close to you. I did not need to think much. The shape, texture, grasp, function, and purpose. It all thundered inside my mind like a goddamned nuke.

"Don't Ke-"

I tried deterring the imminent action to no use. By the time I could say anything, Kevin had already pointed the firearm at me, he had not hesitated to pull the trigger directly centimeters away from my forehead.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The muzzle of his gun lit three times, then four, the five. Up until the very magazine had been emptied.

...

A miner's skin was thicker than most though, that fact had always made us proud.

Out of mere instinct, I consciously hardened my head, face, and neck. Mere bullets made of lead posed no match, each round fell to the ground, flat on its face.

"You can stop it Kevin, I'm fin-"

My hands lifted, trying to make it as obvious as could that I posed no threat. He did not listen. Before I could try to explain myself further, the old man had already neared me, his hand reaching for the left pocket of his grey military trousers.

His knife was always on the left side.

I knew it for sure, his stance... Kevin was about to do his best to cut me to pieces.

Not good.

We had tested it time and time again, the reason he always had that knife with him, it was one of the only blades able to easily slice our skin.

Hardening my skin would serve no purpose here.

By that point, someone as naive as me could perform the computations. They were not complicated, but they were painfully hard to accept. For some goddamned reason, Kevin was unhesitantly trying to kill me.

"KEVIN, ITS ME ASSHOLE, ST-!!!"

Fighting with Kevin in a hand-on-hand was suicide, I would die. All I could do was to try shouting some reason into his skull.

I thought it worked. For a moment, the murderous intent behind his movements seemed to be eclipsed by a cloud of fake emotion, his eyes glinted with something best-resembling understanding.

Kevin, what a fucking sociopath.

Killing, especially killing intelligent, sentient creatures was an art. One that required wits, endurance, and deceit... Out of the three basic requirements, Kevin easily excelled on the last one.

A pronounced lean rightwards, by the time I could see it, the cover of the blade was gone, its edge parted the air as it neared a dead angle on my neck. The short seconds of buildup had been more than enough though, my heightened sense of time returned, augmenting the revolutions of my brain tenfold.

"Gosh!!!"

In a last attempt to save my neck, I forced my two strained arms to stand between me and the rapidly soaring blade. With a bit of luck, it shouldn't be lethal...

So I closed my eyes, prayed, and waited for the blow.

...

A blow that did never come.

I had not really consciously noticed, but the door to our room had been long unlocked by a loud impact coming from the outside. I could sense a few breaths on hold, shockingly observing the scene through the broad frame of the entrance.

Mack, Tamm, Cass... I could tell apart a few familiar presences. I did not linger on those for too much though.

Even with my eyes closed, I could grasp the fact that there was another breath inside the room. It was not Martha's lethargic sips of air, it was not Kevin's battle breath-hold, and it was not mine either.

That very presence seemed to be the reason the blow had never landed. Something... Someone was standing right before me. His hands raised as he gripped the old man's wrist.

I could already get an idea of who it was. I let my eyelids open slightly, returning my vision.

His pale yellow eyes opened whole, as he stared down the droplets of blood that ran down the blade. My blood for that matter, one leaking off a particularly clean cut on my left forearm.

"Have you finally lost your mind, old relic?"

The only person that would use such a tone and such words when speaking directly to Kevin. A taller, strong-built miner, one with a good head on his shoulders, strong, and geeky in equal measures. Yyan stood between us.

"Yyan, back away. It's dangerou-"

Sadly, Kevin was not the loudest voice in the room anymore.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! YOU WERE ABOUT TO KILL HIM!!!"

...

Silence.

No one would dare to even gasp after the judge had made its sentence.

We lived in a deadly world. The cold killed, the vacuum killed, the falling debris killed, the machines killed, our handlers killed, the beasts killed, even the plants did kill. Our very existence revolved around death, it was a part of our lives.

"We shall never take part in death of our own."

Yyan said, reciting the long memorized verse. His gaze was still lost somewhere deep in Kevin's eyes, almost as if peering inside his soul.

To us miners, the act of killing one another was simply too wicked to understand. Murder of a brother was nothing short of a sin. One that transcended simple moral rules, ethics, or convenience.

Killing was sinning, in the most transcendent sense.

"Look at his body... Yyan."

Still, the man dared speak out. The point of his blade held back, but pointed at somewhere along my neck. His tone remained soft and slow, careful not to upset any emotions.

"That thing burst his neck open, I saw him with my very eyes."

Yyam's head cocked backward, even if it was just a little. His stare was lost somewhere slightly behind me. He was not the only one.

The ones witnessing outside, and Kevin's. All stares were on something... Behind me.

My hand reached back to the end of my vertebral spine. Surfacing along my nape...

Golden, crystal shards.