Increased Talent Level 6 -> Level 7

-6400 Aura

Experiencing and surviving the first encounter with the headmaster's poison had not, unfortunately, prepared him for the second. If anything, the reunion was worse. The accumulated agony from the thousand most painful deaths in human history surely wouldn't match what he'd just been through.

John lay on his back for a long time, just breathing, letting the level up do the work of repairing his body. It took even longer last time, which was saying something since last time had been an even more drawn out affair than when his body had been literally pulped by a giant crab monster running him over. Eternities went by before the soothing balm of the increased level flooded his body, gently caressing his nerve endings with healing magic.

Even when the pain dispersed, he stayed on the floor. Now that his senses weren't being overwhelmed by suffering, he could feel that his arms were at his side, his legs shoulder-width apart, and his back was against cold, smooth stone. The mild scent of ammonia filled his nostrils, and he knew where he'd find himself before he even opened his eyes.

Indeed, the sight that greeted him when he worked up the will power to undergo the herculean task of lifting his eyelids was a small closet with a few brooms and mops leaning up against the wall, beneath shelves stacked with cleaning products. His upper body was inside, with the top of his head mere inches from the back wall, while his legs were sprawled out in the corridor. The door was hanging off its hinges.

Silence engulfed him. There wasn't a hint of activity in the immediate area, no matter how he strained his ears. Not even wind. For a moment he worried he was still inside the portal world, but a quick check with Mana Sense showed there were no monsters nearby; either he was out, or all the monsters in the portal world were dead. Either way, he was safe to keep lying here and feeling sorry for himself for a little while longer.

"I hate school," he muttered, letting his head fall back so he could glare up at everything and nothing at once.

After a minute or so more of indulgent self-pity, silently cursing the world and the monsters and the portals and everything else he could think of, he heaved a monumental sigh and pushed himself to his feet, accepting the fact that he had to face it eventually. He barely made it a step out of the door before his worst fears were confirmed.

Well. It's not actually the worst case scenario, he thought to himself. There weren't any new blood stains, familiar corpses, or telltale signs of his comrades' demise like a scrap of the fabric of Doug's swimming shorts, or something like that. But right outside the janitor's closet there were scorch marks and scratches and broken masonry that hadn't been in that state when he'd entered the portal world, he was pretty sure. Looking further along the corridor, more signs of a battle were in evidence: broken glass, shattered floor tiles, doors smashed off hinges, etc. It wasn't anything that couldn't be discounted as the aftereffects of the monster waves swarming through, but the last few days hadn't exactly taught him to be an optimist.

Mind kept carefully blank, John followed the path of destruction. It ended up pretty much retracing the route they'd taken from the arena to the portal world, and he started to construct a crude idea of what had happened, based on what he knew of everyone's capabilities. The picture he was forming had him blinking.

No matter how he looked at it, Daniel's trio had been the ones on the retreat.

The holes in the floor would've been Marius' heavy footsteps in that ridiculous ruby armour, by his reckoning, and the tall Polish man seemed to have been rushing back and forth, perhaps playing defence for Daniel so the mage could cast Spells. And some of the strangely patterned scorch marks might have been an application of Farah's ability she hadn't shown inside the portal world.

But much more of the damage was familiar to him, easily attributable to his teammates.

The sickly scorch marks were definitely the product of Jade's Caustic Hand, the great gouges in the floors, walls, and ceilings were almost certainly the golden projection of her machete, and he saw several spots where the ground seemed to have been churned up like a blender that could only be caused by her blade storm thing.

The second most damage was caused by Lily, in his estimation. There were little holes all over the place, massively increasing in frequency the further he moved from the portal world, as if she'd been building up confidence, or perhaps anger. Some of the holes were burned, some were melted, and still others seemed to have been turned into a kind of purple crystal. A new ability she'd gained in the fighting, perhaps.

There were signs of Doug's handiwork, too, though it was hard to distinguish them from Marius'. Certain craters in the ground had a different shape to them, like they were formed by force rather than sheer weight, and there were places where the walls looked much older than their surroundings.

He saw no indication of Chester's contribution, but that didn't mean anything. The guy's abilities were far from destructive, but they were still potent in a fight. It was entirely possible Daniel's trio had wanted to disengage and run, judging by the odd patterns of Marius' footsteps, but Chester's aggro-drawing abilities kept them around.

Of course, there was plenty he couldn't identify, and he attributed those parts to Daniel by process of elimination. As far as he was aware, the others weren't able to warp stone like clay to make grasping hands, spikes, and blades, and he'd be very surprised if it turned out Marius or Farah possessed the ability to warp an entire corridor until it was so narrow John had to crawl through it.

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All things considered, it was quite remarkable that the first new-ish blood stain he came across was all the way in the arena. The building looked small to him now, after his experience with the portal world, but the distance from the entrance to the patch of red sitting innocuously in the carpet near the centre of the room seemed to go on for miles. His pulse pounded in his head. He came to a stop a pace away from it, and stared for a long while, willing there to be some kind of clue that would tell him who this belonged to.

Insight just gave him a few observations about how the pattern of the blood spatter implied someone had been struck in the lower half of the torso by a projectile. Intuition revealed it was a survivable wound. His own logic told him it must have been patched up on the spot, or some kind of temporary solution was found, because there was no trail leading out of the place.

There were no further signs of fighting in the arena. With the way everything had been ransacked by the monsters already, he didn't think he would have received many clues on the matter anyway.

John frowned down at the bloodstain. How long was I in the portal world? I was grinding for a good few hours, but how long was I in detention for, insensate because of that bastard headmaster's poison? How long was I out the second time, too?

For all he knew, the fight could have taken place days ago. They could all still be out there, or none of them, or any combination in between. Hell, maybe they'd teamed up after all, for some reason.

Probably not. It seemed to him that his team had gone after Daniel's in revenge for screwing them over, and Daniel had done his best to lead his people away. Some damage had been done, and… He didn't know what came then. Hopefully, they'd disengaged and gone their separate ways. He didn't want any of his comrades to have become killers. He didn't want them to be dead, either.

John moved to the side of the giant room that made up the main area of the arena and pulled up one of the least mangled chairs. Grabbing a snack bar from his inventory, he opened his aura menu.

Still got 20,000 Aura. Not bad. He'd been worried about what losses he might have incurred for getting poisoned a second time, and whatever his body got up to while he was immobilised from the pain. Then again, I can't remember exactly how much I had after unlocking Earthquake. I could've been penalised 50k for all I know.

After a few seconds of trying to do the mental calculations based on when he did remember his precise Aura count, he gave up. It wasn't worth worrying about, right now. Speaking of things I probably shouldn't be worrying about too much, what happened with the portal world? The headmaster let it collapse after all?

That seemed… odd. He had been sure the headmaster wasn't going to let him go for anything, since the insults and threats it had been throwing at him had appeared to be growing more personal, more serious. It had been like the monster had started off playing a character, to a degree, and slowly shed that persona as it got genuinely frustrated with his actions. Though he couldn't understand what, exactly, he'd done to piss it off.

Then, of course, there were the things it had said at the end.

The definition of futility.

John was no walking dictionary, but futile meant… pointlessness, essentially? An action that wouldn't lead to anything useful.

It had told him to give up. That it was better to let himself be killed now. That the monster's poison was a kinder end than what was in store for him.

If there's a narrative factor to all this, John thought with a small wince, that bastard's given me a huge hurdle to jump. Either my story's going to be a horrible tragedy, or a tale of overcoming the odds where no one else could.

Logically speaking, he knew which side he'd put his money on, taking his luck into account.

His jaw tightened. He crumpled his snack bar wrapper and tossed it over his shoulder as he rose to his feet. Doesn't mean I'm gonna give up, though. Fuck that. Been through way too much bullshit already to roll over now. The sunk-cost fallacy can kiss my arse. I'm overcoming the odds.

Even so, he found himself wondering exactly what the monster had meant by all that. What did it know? What did it think was so bad that dying horribly now would be better than facing it later? How did it know? He was more sure than ever that every aspect of the world's end was connected, and the monsters were working with the system itself, but he was only grasping a small part of the greater picture, operating with too little information to form any conclusions he could really plan around.

It was frustrating, but he'd have to circle back around to that stuff later. For now, he needed to focus on the more immediate term.

Namely: it looked like he was going to be running solo for a while. How did he want to approach this?

Whether Doug, Lily, Jade, and Chester were out there would have to be dismissed as irrelevant at this point, callous as that sounded. If they were alive, finding them didn't seem likely, and they had a set of rendezvous points for Alanna, Sam, and the two children anyway. And if they weren't… well, searching for them would be even more of a waste of time, wouldn't it?

Despite himself, the thought lodged in his throat and stung the back of his eyes. He couldn't say he was super attached to them or anything. Barely even knew them, really. But they hadn't been horrible to him, and that was a lot better than most people he'd met, even before the world ended.

I hope they're okay.

The idea of going straight to the rendezvous points was summarily dismissed. He'd set a quest for himself, and he was going to see it completed before he left Watford. The portal worlds were still going to go down, even if he had to do it all by himself, no matter how many PvP shitheads he had to go through to get there.

Mind made up, John nodded to himself and walked out of the school. Hopefully for the last time.

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