A blur of serrated green limbs and chittering mandibles filled his vision.

The creature that lunged at him was a grotesque parody of a praying mantis, swollen to the size of a grown man. Its exoskeleton was the sickly, veined green of rotten lettuce, slick with a greasy film that caught the flickering fluorescent lights in an oily sheen. Its head was a triangular horror of chitin swivelling on a thin, stalk-like neck, and its multifaceted eyes were a swirling galaxy of countless smaller, crimson lenses, each one reflecting a distorted, miniature version of John himself.

The constant, unnerving chittering came from a set of complex mandibles that clicked and gnashed together restlessly, dripping a foul-smelling saliva that sizzled faintly where it hit the floor. Its primary forelimbs, held aloft and ready to strike, were were lined with what looked disturbingly like shards of broken glass, each one jagged and stained with blood that had browned over time.

A hideous thing. But a pale imitation of the Headmaster, all in all. John found himself unimpressed.

He pivoted on his heel, the thick rubber soles of his motorcycle boots squealing against the blood-slicked linoleum. His Aurora Blade, shimmering like the northern lights captured in ethereal crystal, sliced through the air in a clean arc. It met the descending forelimb of the creature with a shower of sparks and a high-pitched shriek of stressed chitin. The blow wasn't clean; it didn't sever the limb, but it sent the monster stumbling back, its movements momentarily clumsy as it lost balance.

That was the opening. An opening he didn't even get the chance to take.

Before John could even fully register the opportunity, a trio of silver bolts, trailing faint wisps of green gas, thudded into the monster's abdomen. The creature shuddered, its movements growing sluggish as the venom did its work at an impossibly fast rate. Simultaneously, a ghostly red hand clamped onto the monster's head, sizzling against the insectoid's carapace with a sound like bacon on a ripping hot pan. The monster's chittering turned into a gurgle.

It was all a little diconcerting, if he was honest. He was used to controlling the rhythm of a fight, his Accelerate Skill giving him precious, dilated seconds to assess and react.

But things were different now, apparently. No longer was he left to be a solo performer; he was part of an orchestra, and the tempo was dizzying. His comrades weren't just supporting him from the background, fighting their own battle while leaving him to his. Now, they were following the flow of battle, anticipating his needs, and capitalising on his actions with a surprising level of synergy.

Only a few metres down the aisle, a brutal shoulder check from Doug sent another creature stumbling into the path of Chester's radiant light, which pulsed, drawing the monster's aggression and locking its attention. While it was distracted, Lily's crossbow bolts thunked into small gaps in its chitinous armour, and these ones, evidently, had a burning effect, small fires springing to life seemingly within the giant insect's carapace.

John's mind, which was usually a frantic mess of threat assessment and Aura calculation in battle, found itself with an unnerving amount of free processing power. He saw the stage. With the monsters pinned, staggered, and distracted by his comrades, he had a golden opportunity. He wouldn't usually risk something so reckless on his own, but with the team fighting alongside him he had more room to be a show-off, and, perhaps more importantly, people to show off to.

A silent command went to his System, switching out his Spells. Biomancy flooded his limbs, giving him a supernatural awareness of every muscle fibre. Not the intended use case of the Spell, he reckoned, but the side benefit was crucial.

He pushed off the ground with a burst of Strength, launching himself into the air. Drawing on the acrobatic grace of Ninja and the martial precision of Duellist, he twisted his body into an impossible spinning somersault. The world blurred. Aurora Blade became a shimmering haze of lethal light. Even without Accelerate, he had more than enough time to lash out in mid air. Thrice.

Three wet, slicing sounds cut through the din of battle as the heads of the mantis he'd been fighting, and two of its nearby brethren, were shorn clean from their carapaces. The world kept spinning only a moment longer. He landed perfectly, his back to his comrades, one knee bent in a three-point landing that sent a ripple through the pools of monster blood. He stayed there for a beat, letting his dark fringe fall artfully over one eye before rising slowly to his full height, his sunglasses materialising on his face at the last moment.

He heard a bark of laughter from Lily, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Doug give him an enthusiastic thumbs up. Chester and Jade, as expected, showed no reaction at all.

+1200 Aura

The lone wolf routine was good for Aura farming in its own way, but he was starting to see the merits of getting stuck in with everyone.

Having them in the thick of it, drawing aggression and creating chaos, gave him the space to get creative. He could never have attempted that ridiculous somersault on his own with multiple enemies around; he would have been torn apart mid-spin.

But with them as his unwitting stage crew, he was free to be the star. The potential for truly massive Aura gains was intoxicating. Of course, it also meant there were more eyes on him now. More witnesses if—when—he inevitably fucked it up and looked like an idiot. It was a high-risk, high-reward strategy, both for his survival and his ego.

He switched out his Spells once more as he turned, letting his shadow cloak billow around him (+400) and saw Lily fighting just a few yards away. She was a whirlwind of controlled violence, her crossbow rising and falling in a smooth, practiced rhythm, loosing bolts with unerring accuracy.

She was deliberately staying close and had been ever since that first time the others had joined in on 'his' fight, her movements a dance that complemented his own, covering his flank, her magical bolts weakening targets before they could even fully commit to an attack on him.

It was a tactically sound move, he supposed. A close-support ranger working with a frontline fighter, exploiting the gaps each other created. It made perfect sense from that perspective.

That was all well and good. But why was she smiling at him like that when she noticed him looking? Why did she laugh when he executed a flashy move? She'd never done either of those things before.

Not for the first time, John's thoughts stuttered. Why is she staying so close? His brain, scarred by a lifetime of social missteps and cruel jokes, tried its best to accept the simple, logical explanation that this was all part of their fighting strategy. She was just being nice. Smiles meant nothing.

A montage of past humiliations flashed behind his eyes: the time in Year 9 when Sarah Jenkins had asked him to the school dance, only for him to arrive and find her and her friends waiting to laugh at his cheap suit; the incident in sixth form when a girl from another class had flirted with him for a week, making him believe she was genuinely interested, only to reveal it had all been a dare. He'd been the butt of the joke, the gullible loser, the awkward boy who couldn't read the room.

He looked at Lily, at the focused intensity in her eyes as she loosed another volley of bolts, and the old, familiar poison of suspicion seeped into his thoughts. Is this another setup? Is she fighting close to me for some other reason? Is this a test? He searched her face for a hint of mockery, a flicker of deceit, but found nothing.

Luckily, his System didn't care about his internal turmoil. It only cared about the external performance. He forced his expression into a mask of detached confidence, standing unbothered with his arms crossed while his comrades finished off the last few monsters around him as if any further action was unworthy of him after his flashy move.

+200 Aura

The next hour was a blur of gore and coordinated violence. The first few empty aisles had not set the tone. Quite the opposite; it seemed like the further in they went, the more monsters could be found in each aisle. Soon enough, they were encountering 'customers' as well as 'employees', the aisles were sometimes growing busy enough to bring to mind those ridiculous Black Friday sale rushes, and they soon found checkout tills waiting for them at the end of the aisles, staffed by fake cashiers who were going through the motions of bagging up gory body parts for nonexistent customers before chucking it all on the ground with wet slaps. It was a slog.

Still, they moved from aisle to aisle, a well-oiled machine of death. The supermarket, with its grotesque parody of commerce, became their hunting ground. Greens were by no means trivial in these kinds of numbers, but the danger wasn't massive, either.

They cleared the 'Canned Screams' section of a nest of scuttling, beetle-like creatures, their carapaces cracking satisfyingly under Doug's fists and Jade's blade. They fought through 'Personal Mutilation', where slimy, slug-like monsters oozed from behind displays of what looked like flaying knives and bone saws. In the 'Frostbite' aisle, they battled shambling horrors that looked like emaciated ants covered in frost.

With every fight, their synergy grew, and so did John's confidence. He started seeing the battlefield as a stage full of opportunities.

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When Doug, with a mighty heave, sent one of the frozen ant-horrors flying into the air, John didn't hesitate. He used Flash Step to appear directly above the airborne creature, raised his Aurora Blade high over his head, and brought it down in a slam with all his weight behind it that blasted the monster into a shower of icy fragments before it even hit the ground.

+1000 Aura

Later, as a particularly large slug-creature lumbered towards them, Lily and Jade worked in tandem to pin its gelatinous appendages to the floor with spears of light and shadow. Instead of attacking the immobilized beast, John used its broad, quivering back as a springboard. He landed lightly atop it, ran the length of its body, and launched himself into a cluster of smaller slugs, his blade a whirlwind of destruction that cleared them out before they could even react.

+1000 Aura

The flow of Aura was becoming a heady rush, a drug that fueled his creativity. He started anticipating their movements, seeing the openings before they even fully formed, turning the brutal calculus of combat into an art form.

Yet, beneath the surface of this newfound efficiency, his anxiety simmered. This was going too well. This fragile alliance felt like a house of cards, and he was convinced he was just one clumsy social misstep away from bringing the whole thing crashing down. He kept his words to a minimum, defaulting to curt nods and single-word affirmations, terrified that opening his mouth for any longer would expose the awkward, fumbling person beneath the badass persona.

Every time one of them gave him a nod of approval or a quick, comradely grin, a part of him preened at the validation, while another, much larger part screamed in panic, convinced he was misreading the signals again. They're just being polite. It's a trick. Don't fall for it. The fear of exclusion, of being cast out again, didn't seem like it would ever leave him.

They finally found what passed for a safe haven in this hellscape: a relatively clear space that looked like a parody of a supermarket's in-store café. It was, however, immediately and abundantly clear that this was no ordinary coffee shop.

A low, discordant melody, like a funeral dirge played on out-of-tune violins, crackled from a tannoy speaker mounted in the corner, a constant, nerve-jangling soundtrack to the macabre scene. The acrid smell of old blood and something cloyingly sweet filled his nostrils when he stepped in.

The tables and chairs appeared to be fashioned from bone. Undoubtedly actual, polished bone, too. The tables were flat slabs of what looked like pelvic bone, resting on legs made from femurs and tibias lashed together with what had to be muscle. The chairs were even more grotesque; their backs were constructed from entire ribcages, the curved bones forming a curved embrace, while the seats were made of intricately woven finger and toe bones. The whole effect was one of sitting in the disassembled skeleton of some giant creature. It was a testament to how far they'd fallen that no one even commented on it.

John briefly wondered where all the bones had been sourced from, but dismissed the thought as something really not useful right then.

Behind the counter, a grimy, stained menu board listed the available fare in dripping, blood-red letters. The offerings were a study in culinary horror: 'Blood Lattes', 'Scream Cheese Bagels', 'Marrow-infused Muffins', and the house special, a 'Fleshaccino'. A display case that should have held pastries was instead filled with what looked like preserved organs, floating in cloudy jars of formaldehyde.

A monster stood at the till, its false human form giving a fake smile. Before it could even open its mouth, a crossbow bolt from Lily burst its skull like a grape, and it flopped bonelessly to the floor, falling out of sight.

"Alright, ladies and gents." Doug let out a heavy sigh as he stretched his arms above his head. The old man was tall enough that the tips of his fingers seemed inches from brushing the ceiling. "Let's take a few. Catch our breath."

John's brow furrowed. "Here? This place is…" he trailed off, unable to find a word that adequately captured the level of wrongness. "We should keep moving. We're making good time."

The thought of sitting on a chair made of human remains, listening to that god-awful music, was enough to make his skin crawl. Pushing forward meant more fights, more opportunities to farm Aura, and less time marinating in this charnel house.

Doug didn't argue verbally. He just gave John a long, tired look and then subtly tilted his head, his gaze flicking towards the back of the group.

Confused, John followed his line of sight and his stomach dropped. Jade was standing a few feet away, her arms wrapped around herself. Her face was pale, almost translucent under the flickering lights, and her eyes were wide and unfocused, staring unerringly at a long, spray-like bloodstain at her feet. Her gauntlets were creaking where she gripped her own arms, and a faint tremor ran through her entire body. She looked like she was about to shatter.

A hot flush of guilt washed over John. He'd been so wrapped up in his own performance, in the thrill of the fight and the constant, buzzing anxiety of his social interactions, that he hadn't spared a single thought for how the others were holding up. Specifically, how Jade was holding up. Recent events had taken a heavy toll on her, and this place, with its relentless horror, was grinding her down.

"Fine," he clipped out, the word sharper than he intended. He couldn't look at Doug, couldn't look at any of them. He felt like an idiot, a self-absorbed asshole who had just been publicly displayed a distinct lack of empathy. "We'll rest."

Without another word, he turned and made a beeline for the most secluded table in the far corner. He felt their eyes on his back. The social blunder, as he saw it, was a fresh wound. He needed to bury himself in the cold, hard certainty of his System, to analyse his Aura gains and plan his next move, so it could have time to scab over.

He had just settled into the chair, the menus already springing to life in his mind's eye, when the squeak of another chair being pulled out opposite him shattered his solitude. He looked up, his heart giving a nervous little flutter.

It was Lily. She sat down, placing her crossbow on the table with a clack, and pushed her motorcycle helmet up, revealing a face smudged with grime and sweat. But her green eyes were clear, direct, and unnervingly focused on him. He felt like an insect being pinned to a table.

"Hey," she said with a smile.

John just nodded, his throat suddenly tight.

"I wanted to ask you something," she began, leaning forward slightly, her gaze intense but curious. She was still smiling.

His mind went into overdrive. A question. What kind of question? Was it a trick question? Was she testing him? Probing for weakness? The possibilities churned in his gut like a nest of snakes. Every past social disaster he'd ever experienced screamed at him to shut down, to get up and walk away, to retreat into the safety of aloof silence. It was the only defense he knew.

But he didn't. He held her gaze, forcing his own expression to remain a carefully constructed mask of stoicism. He gave a single, curt nod, as if to say, Go on, I'm listening. I'm not bothered by this at all. It was a monumental effort of will. He told himself it would be fine. It was just a question. She was just being friendly. It couldn't be that bad.

"It's about your System," she continued, her voice lowering conspiratorially. "How do you cope with it? The expectations. The demands." She gestured vaguely towards him with one hand. "You've got… well, you've got a lot. That sword, the teleporting, the superspeed, and a million more spells and skills to choose from, it feels like. Seems like a much broader toolkit than any of the rest of us have. Mine is all about precision, every bolt a pass-or-fail test. Simple. But you're different. The System is clearly rewarding you for something else, or you've figured out a trick. A different kind of performance."

The snakes in his stomach went into a frenzy. This was worse. This was so much worse. She wasn't just making small talk; she was analysing him, dissecting his very means of survival. The core of his secret shame was being laid bare.

His mind went blank. What could he possibly say? The truth? 'Oh, I just pretend I'm in an anime and the cosmic entity that runs our lives throws points at me?' He'd be laughed out of the room. Out of the apocalypse.

He needed to bullshit. He needed the best bullshit he had ever produced. Taking a slow breath, buying himself a precious second, he leaned back in the bone chair. He opened his Outfits menu, intending to summon his shades, only to realise he was already wearing them. Luckily, no one but him would ever know about that particular mishap.

"The System rewards those who rise to meet the moment," he said slowly, Biomancy ensuring his voice was deep and level. "It's not about having broad powers. It's about having the will to use them decisively. The System doesn't give you power because you're special. It gives you power because you prove you can handle it. Pressure is just a filter. It weeds out the weak."

+400 Aura

It was a stream of meaningless, pseudo-inspirational garbage. He half-expected her to call him out on it, to laugh in his face. Instead, she just watched him, her head tilted slightly, a thoughtful expression on her face.

Then, she sighed, a sound of profound weariness that seemed to come from her very soul. The smile was gone, replaced by a look of raw, unshielded vulnerability. "Yeah, that's what I'm talking about," she said softly.

She looked down at her crossbow, tracing the lines of the stock with a gloved finger. "This thing… it wants me to be a perfect hunter. Cold, efficient, emotionless. Every kill has to be flawless. Every movement has to be economical. No wasted shots, no hesitation. It wants me to be a machine." She looked up, and her green eyes were shimmering with an unshed moisture. "And when I do it, when I act like that person, it showers me with points. But it's not me. I'm not that person. I want to scream sometimes, I want to cry, I want to miss a shot because my hands are shaking so badly I can't see straight. But I can't. Because the System is watching."

Her voice dropped to a near whisper. "So I'm asking you… please don't judge me for it. If you see me act like some heartless killing machine, just know that it's an act. It's what I have to do to get stronger, to survive. It's not who I am."

The air left John's lungs in a silent rush.

"And it's the same for the others," she continued, her gaze sweeping over to where the rest of the team sat. Doug was whispering softly to a hunced over Jade while Chester's gaze flicked back and forth between the two. "We're all playing a part that the System has assigned us. If we start judging each other for the roles we're forced to play, we'll tear each other apart. It'll be so much easier for all of us if we know that we can… lean into it. Without our friends thinking we're monsters."

And there it was. The world, which had been a chaotic, terrifying mess of indecipherable social cues, suddenly snapped into sharp, painful focus. It wasn't a test. It wasn't a trap. It was an olive branch. She wasn't calling him out; she was reaching out. She was telling him, in the only way she knew how, that she saw him. She saw the act, the preening, the sometimes-douchey persona, and she didn't blame him for it. She understood.

A wave of emotion rose in his chest. It was a feeling so foreign he couldn't immediately put a name to it. Gratitude. Relief. A dizzying sense of connection that was both terrifying and intoxicating. He felt his own eyes begin to prickle behind the safety of his sunglasses.

"I'll keep that in mind," he managed to say, and he was horrified to hear his voice crack ever so slightly on the last word. He'd let Biomancy slip. He cleared his throat, desperate to regain his composure. "Thank you. For, um. Telling me that."

A small part of him, the old, paranoid part, was still screaming in terror. She's seen through you! She knows you're a fraud! But for the first time, that voice was drowned out by something else. Something warmer. The terrifying, exhilarating feeling of being seen, and, impossibly, being accepted.

Lily's smile seemed a touch more sincere. "You're welcome."

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