"Way to ruin the mood," Christy stood up, one of her daggers out.

The words didn’t come with panic. They came with that flat, bitter tone people used when they were already tired of being surprised.

Kael followed immediately as he rose up, fitting his helmet tightly on his head.

The last warmth of whatever had been happening between them evaporated the moment the notification hit. That wasn’t romance. That was the tower reminding them it could pull the rug whenever it wanted.

Looking at the map, three dots were too far away from any of them, and from each other. How did Garron die?

Kael’s eyes flicked over distances and spacing instinctively, trying to force logic into a situation that didn’t want to be logical. No clustered red dots. No obvious ambush formation. No one standing near anyone long enough to have "accidentally" done something. And still, leadership transfer.

Kael didn’t even need to check the dead person, because the Leadership transfer was an obvious tell.

The tower didn’t hand that out like a condolence. It handed it out like a replacement. Someone dropped. Someone else was now responsible. And responsibility in a trial wasn’t a reward, it was a knife with your fingerprints already on it.

He walked forward with Christy behind him and saw Garron laying against a palm tree, with what looked like the bag in his hands held tight.

Garron wasn’t sprawled like someone who got dragged. He was sitting wrong, shoulders slumped at an angle that didn’t look like rest, head tilted as if he’d nodded off and never finished the motion. His fingers were still clenched around the bag strap, death grip stubborn enough to be insulting. As if even in the end, he trusted the bag more than people.

His eyes were closed, and his body was not breathing, it looked slightly purple.

Moonlight made the color worse. Not the normal pale of exhaustion, this was the ugly shade of something that had stopped moving long before the body accepted it. His lips were parted just enough to look like he tried to draw a breath and couldn’t.

He approached a bit, there was something leaking from his lips.

It wasn’t blood. Not red, not fresh. It was slick and wrong, thin foam gathering at the corner of his mouth, catching dust, glinting faintly. The smell wasn’t meat or sweat. It was faintly bitter, like crushed weeds and stale metal.

"What have you done?" he heard.

The accusation came fast, like the speaker had been waiting for a chance to throw it.

Turning, he saw the old man, with eyes full of terror, seeing Kael kneeling next to Garron’s body, it was obvious what he was about to say.

Fear made people stupid. Fear also made them loud. The old man’s gaze was glued to Kael’s hands as if Kael had to be caught mid-crime for the world to make sense again.

"Fuck..." the thin kid said as he noticed the dead Garron.

The curse fell out of him like air escaping a puncture. Whatever hope he’d been clinging to, water, shade, a brief stretch without murder, collapsed the moment he saw the body.

Finally, the man with the cover over his face appeared.

He didn’t rush. He didn’t stumble. He just arrived, silent as ever, the cloth around his face unmoving, eyes already scanning the scene like he was reading tracks on sand.

He had a frown on his brows as he saw the scene.

That was the first real emotion Kael had seen from him, and it made Kael’s skin crawl more than the corpse did.

Fracture was rising while everyone gathered.

Kael could feel the tension hardening in the air. People drew closer out of instinct, then immediately regretted it because being close meant being vulnerable. The kind of vulnerability that got you stabbed "by accident." The oasis that had felt like shelter an hour ago now felt like a trap with palm trees.

"It’s no him, he didn’t kill Garron," Christy said.

Her voice cut through the murmuring before it could become a mob. She stepped slightly in front of Kael, dagger still down but ready, like she was daring someone to decide he was the easiest scapegoat.

"And who the fuck is you to say that? The leader is dead, and I saw you standing over his body."

The old man’s voice climbed higher with every word, the kind of pitch that came from someone trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. His finger twitched like he wanted to point, but he didn’t want to risk getting too close to Kael.

Kael stood up, and sighed, "Who got the leadership?" Kael asked.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The question landed heavy because it wasn’t emotional. It was procedural. The tower had rules, and Kael was forcing everyone to acknowledge them instead of drowning in accusation.

"Why are you switching subject!" the old man said.

The old man snapped like a dog guarding a bone, but it was already too late. The question was out. And everyone’s eyes shifted, not to Garron’s corpse, but to the invisible system that had just reassigned authority like it was shuffling cards.

Kael turned to the thin kid, "Not me..."

The kid shook his head so fast it was almost a flinch. Hands visible. Weapon not raised. The universal language of don’t pick me.

He then turned to the man with the cowl over his face.

He shook his head.

The silent one didn’t even speak. He just denied with the smallest motion, as calm as someone refusing an offered drink.

"So, after Garron’s death, you became leader?" Kael asked the old man.

The words weren’t an accusation. Not yet. But they put a spotlight on the old man like a blade edge.

"The hell are you trying to say? That it’s me? Who killed him and got the leadership? I was taking a shit not too far away from here, how can I have killed him? Also, you were standing over his body!"

He tried to laugh through it and failed. His voice cracked at the end, more defensive than righteous. The excuse came out messy, too detailed, the way liars over-explained. But he might not have been lying. Panic made people overshare.

He took another deep breath, "Someone killed him, I don’t give a fuck what you all do with each other, but you’re all threatening my own survival."

Kael’s voice stayed level, but his posture changed. Weight settling. Shoulders squared. He wasn’t looming like a bully. He was bracing like a man who’d already decided what he’d do if this spiraled.

He flex both gauntlets. They hummed and began whirring, rattling, a sound that made one’s bones shiver.

The mechanisms inside the fists answered like something alive. Metal shifting over metal, cylinders aligning, the faint click of locks seating into place.

It sounded like stone grating against itself.

Added with the pressure of his own internal energy seeping out, everyone realized that he was being serious.

Heat rolled off him, not visible, but felt, like standing too close to a furnace door. No one wanted to be the first to test what those gauntlets could do in a real fight. Not after seeing him rip a snake in half like it was rope.

The face covered man approached the corpse and with a couple of his fingers pried the jaw open with careful pressure. The foam stretched in strings and then spilled, yellow and thick, stinking like bile and something sharp underneath, chemical.

"He wasn’t murdered..." the face covered man said. "This isn’t something artificial..."

Something had entered Garron’s body and turned it off from the inside, fast enough that he never even got the chance to scream.

"Snake poison," he said as he pulled up one of Garron sleeves.

He moved with the certainty of someone who’d seen the same death before. Cloth-face’s fingers slid under the sleeve and rolled it up, exposing skin gone mottled and darkening.

There was an obvious snake bite there.

Two puncture marks, close together. Too clean. Too deliberate. Not a slash. Not a claw. A bite.

Kael sighed, "I guess he was unfortunate."

He said it like it was simple. And it was. The tower didn’t care if you were competent or kind. Sometimes it just decided you were convenient to kill.

Kael looked at his map. There were no red dots, nothing nearby. No monsters that he missed and no creatures that snuck back into the oasis.

He couldn’t share that information, at least for now.

The oasis felt still again, too still. No rustle in the shrubs. No ripple in the pond. No movement except their own shifting feet and quick breaths.

Not to mention, the size of the snake bite, or at least the distance between the two holes was much smaller than the snakes that tried to take a bite off Kael’s face earlier.

That detail mattered. The big ones announced themselves. The small ones didn’t need to.

"We can’t stay here any longer, if there are more monsters like that snake, we’ll need to move." Kael said.

Kael’s eyes swept the perimeter again. He didn’t like the idea of staying in an oasis after learning it could hide things small enough to strike without being seen and fast enough to vanish afterward.

"We’ll need to gather more supplies first." The kid said.

His eyes flicked to the dates, the shade, the water. He sounded practical, but desperation leaked around the edges.

"Don’t bother..." the Old man said.

He said it quickly, like he was eager to sound useful now that he’d been exposed as leader.

"Why?"

"Because the moment you take anything with you from this oasis, it’ll disappear once you step outside a specific range." The old man said.

Silence followed. Not disbelief at first, more like everyone trying to decide if the old man was lying to protect himself.

"And how do you know that?" the skinny guy said.

The skinny guy’s suspicion came sharp.

"Because when you become a leader you get a bit more information. The bag is the only thing that can hold and carry food. Outside oasis, all food and water that isn’t inside this bag will become useless."

The old man spoke faster now, riding the momentum of finally being believed.

"And," he said as he looked at everyone, "If the leader dies and a transfer happens, all the food and water stored in the bag will disappear and be replaced with the same jerky and small waterskins we got earlier."

The air turned colder despite the oasis. Not from wind. From realization.

"Are you sure you’re not saying that because you just don’t want someone to kill you and they become leader?" the skinny kid asked.

He wasn’t even subtle. The question wasn’t just accusation, it was a warning. And also a realization.

"Fuck, take a look at the bag then," the old man said as he grabbed the bag from Garron’s dead hands.

He pried the strap loose, fingers trembling just slightly. Either from grief, fear, or greed, Kael couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. He dumped the contents out like he was proving innocence in court.

With the bag content on the sand, they all noticed the change.

They had filled it with roasted snake flesh and hefty waterskins. But all of it was gone, replaced with waterless waterskins and the same crackers and jerky they threw away.

The sight was almost insulting. Hours of work reduced to nothing because the wrong person died. The smell of roasted meat was still in the air, but the actual meat, the thing that mattered, had been erased like it was never real.

"This is to keep us on edge," Christy said.

Her tone wasn’t surprised. It was disgusted, like she’d seen systems like this before in other parts of the tower.

"Just in case we never got to this oasis. Killing a leader will refresh the stock... I guess this is the way people die. They kept killing leaders to get a better chance at surviving."

What Christy said made sense in Kael’s head, and probably everyone else.

It was a feedback loop designed to rot groups from the inside. Kill to survive. Survive to kill again. The tower wasn’t just testing endurance. It was testing whether you’d become a monster faster than the desert could.

"We don’t have that issue though, let’s refill the waterskins, while we can," The skinny kid said.

For once, his urgency made sense. If the bag was reset, then time mattered. Water mattered. And leaving without enough meant dying halfway to the next beacon and becoming another "refresh."

They all stayed together this time, becoming more and more suspicious of each other while they moved toward the hole that Kael dug to get filtered water.

No one turned their back fully. Even when kneeling, they angled bodies sideways so they could still see hands, still see weapons. Kael watched their spacing tighten, close enough to not be isolated, far enough to not be grabbed.

They boiled it, poured it, and decided it was time to head.

Kael heated helmetful after helmetful, steam rising in short bursts into the night air. Waterskins filled slower than anyone liked. The old man kept glancing at the shrubs as if expecting another bite to come out of nowhere. The silent man stayed on the edge of the group, eyes scanning, never fully relaxing.

Unfortunately, they don’t have more food left.

The jerky and crackers sat heavy in pockets like a threat rather than comfort. Eating them now would make thirst worse, and thirst was already the thing that had nearly killed them before the oasis.

So, they needed to get to the next beacon which was slightly further away now they took a detour, but with enough water, and the night having blanketed the sky, it was the best time to move.

The desert looked different at night, less like an oven, more like an open grave. Cooler air, sharper shadows, and the kind of quiet that made every footstep feel loud. They gathered what they could, tightened straps, checked knots, and stepped away from the oasis together.

Not as friends.

Not even as allies.

Just as people who understood that splitting up right now meant dying faster.