POV Isabella Martinez
One of the doors stands wide open, but the other hasn’t moved at all. The floor’s clear like glass, and whenever we step on it, mana underneath swirls and ripples, almost like water. Surrounding the open door is a barrier that only lets people in. Once you walk through, you’re stuck. You can’t leave. At the moment, there are about 50 of us in the room.
Some people are still looking around, trying to understand the situation. A few sit in the corners, clearly exhausted or hurt, whispering to each other. One guy with a broken arm keeps glancing at the barrier like he’s debating whether or not to continue his attempts to break through.
A few of the others are walking around the edge of the room, checking the walls and looking for clues or hidden triggers, even though it's obvious that nothing’s going to work unless we solve the mana part. Some are just standing still, watching Yama’s group with the kind of focus you’d expect from the sort of people with no backup plan of their own.
I spot one girl slowly etching lines into the floor with her dagger, probably some kind of inscription, but judging by her expression, she doesn’t really know what she’s doing.
There’s tension everywhere. Not the loud kind. The quiet, crawling kind that builds with every minute that nothing happens.
No one else from group 4 is present, but Yama has already grouped up with some of the attendees from her and gotten to work on opening the locked door by deciphering the movements of mana under the floor and trying to manipulate them to unlock it.
I don’t feel movement. It’s more like a strong emotion. Whoever’s controlling Nathaniel’s body stops next to me and looks down, and I look up at him. That’s when what Nathaniel asked me to do suddenly makes sense. I can feel the emotions from the thing inside him, and I remember what he told us earlier about the lurker in his mind.
"What is your name?" I ask, not wanting to call him Whitey.
He gives it some thought and smiles brightly, "Nothaniel."
I can only sense a kind of smug satisfaction from him over the lame joke, and I think I understand why Nathaniel would accept someone like him. Even though I can sense a lot of dark emotions radiating from him, the prevailing emotions for the moment are beautiful and pure.
Excitement radiates from him in waves.
Along with a heavy responsibility that he is happy to bear.
Slight annoyance blended with amusement.
The bravery of walking toward his death, mixed with something so beautiful that it nearly brings me to tears.
"He hates it when people twist his name like that," I tell him.
"Yes," he admits, smiling even more.
That expression is so unusual on Nathaniel's face it takes me aback.
"Are you having fun?" I ask while sitting down, and he sits next to me.
"You already know that, and I won't even try to hide my emotions from you. Did you know that you scare Nathaniel sometimes?"
"Do you wanna hear some of his deepest secrets?"
"Yes! I mean, no! That would be rude."
"I...n-yes! Don't tell me anything."
“I can hear your heart and feel your blood and muscles move. So why bother lying, you nosy little thing? But fine, have it your way. Why aren’t they unlocking the door?”
"It's very difficult, and they’re having trouble deciphering mana locks or something."
Nothaniel stands up and stretches, enjoying each of these movements. At the same time, Yama finally takes notice of him as she looks away from the inscription that she and her group have drawn on the floor.
He gives her a wave, which leads her to furrow her brow.
"Thank you," I shout to him before he can leave.
It causes him to stop, and he looks at me with those beautiful eyes, "What for, human?"
"For being his friend and refusing to turn on him. He still doesn’t know how to ask for help, and he keeps trying to carry everything on his own."
"He’s a mess, I know, but that doesn’t mean he needs anyone fixing him. Don’t underestimate him," he says with a nod, then freezes as I grab his hand.
It's a warm and strong hand, and he looks at me with a flash of awkwardness quickly replaced by surprise and annoyance.
"What?" he asks impatiently.
"I’m sorry he couldn’t help you, and that the rest of us never got the chance to know you."
He snorts and pulls his hand away from mine.
Then he gently taps on the floor with his foot. The mana swirling underneath gets pushed aside as if his foot were causing an invisible explosion. He repeats it, but where there was a single shockwave before, now there are five, each one entirely different from the others.
The mana under the surface crashes against itself, battered by the shockwaves and swirling in beautiful patterns until it stops entirely. Then the formerly closed door slowly creaks open.
I look away from them and back to him, but he’s already gone, and now standing in front of Yama. She teleports away, only for him to appear in front of her again, wearing that same smile and just staring.
Her strings spiral, move, attack, form defenses, or swing, but he avoids them all with the slightest movements of his body. Every time she teleports, he’s already there, within arm’s reach, just watching her with that smile. He tracks her constantly, even as she sets up fakes.
The attacks she sends his way stop mid-air, explosions frozen as if time itself had paused, flames refusing to burn and simply hanging there.
None of the people from her group can move. Ever since the beginning, they’ve just stood there, unmoving.
In the end, even Yama ends up the same. She’s frozen in place, not a single strand of her hair moves.
Her annoyance, which flared into anger and surprise, now barely masks her unease and growing tension.
Nothaniel steps closer and taps her forehead with that devilish smile of his.
"Know your place," he says.
Then he’s gone, and she just stands there, staring at the spot where he vanished. Her face remains calm and composed as always, but I notice the faintest blush on her cheeks and feel her confused emotions.
This room is the size of a small city. It has the same cube shape, gray walls, and red ceiling, but the floor is covered in ankle-deep water. In addition, there are floating droplets of water, thousands of them all throughout the room. Each of these droplets explodes on contact, with a force capable of killing even a Hell attendee.
And they are impossible to perceive with any sense other than sight.
For the last five hours, the event has gone pretty well. Aaron and I were following Derick and Hector, the 6th and 8th round tournament winners, having been lucky enough to have been thrown into the same starting room.
So, obviously, we decided to stick to them. Who wouldn't?
Together, they dealt with the Korean King's avatar and a few of the Beyonder avatars. Sometimes it's hard to see because Nat’s always beating the shit out of these people, but they are pretty strong in their own rights.
Of course, we still do our part. We even created a few illusions to confuse avatars so that the invisible Hector could snipe them down with his poisonous, self-guided spear. We also created a communication link between the strongest members of our group.
That got us a surprised look, and I think it's because we did it so easily without any need for an anchor, and because the connection is so stable. It's something that group 4 considers normal at this point. We even have countermeasures against people using a similar connection to take advantage of them in combat, and secondary connections hidden below the main one to ensure that the enemy thinks they got rid of everything.
It would be funny to mention to them that between us and Nat, we’re probably a few years away from the possibility of sharing mana through that connection and a decade or two from sharing vitality or something similar. Get full chapters from Novᴇl_Fire(.)net
So yes, we did well, things went well, and we’ve already cleared a few rooms.
Some of them weren’t easy. One room had shifting gravity and reflective surfaces that kept bouncing our attacks back at us. Another was filled with some kind of thick fog that messed with sound and made it impossible to judge distances.
We worked well together. It hasn’t been perfect, of course, but we aren’t just some random group anymore. We were starting to feel like a real team. Maybe even the best team. Friends for life. Angry Kitten Slayers!
Then Tacita's avatar appeared, and Derick and Hector died within seconds, both of them.
For the first time, I understood why Nat is scared of her and why he kept telling us that when it comes to fighting attendees, Tacita is likely the most dangerous person in Earth's tutorial.
Holding a dagger with a gray blade in one hand and one coated in blue mana in the other, she calmly steps toward us. Pale blue particles still shimmer around her, the last remnants of the two Kings. There are a few dozen of our illusions, but her eyes never leave the spot where Aaron and I are.
I use [Haste] and she disappears. I can't even follow her movement, but the moment she is gone, I exchange places with one of my illusions through [Connection].
When I start looking for her, she isn't there, and in a panic, I do it again, and so does Aaron. Every time, just for a faint moment, I see an attack slash through the place we once stood, but she’s quick to catch up, and already we’ve been reduced to a handful of illusions.
After a quick message, we both prepare, relying on our [Connection], which is much stronger than anything we can create alone, especially in combination with Aaron's dexterity. It’s not perfectly efficient, so some of it gets wasted, but in that moment, my speed increases dramatically, and I use [Haste] on my mind.
Aaron disappears, exchanging locations with the illusion we left far behind, and only now do I barely see Tacita's avatar.
Every surviving attendee moves in slow motion, but she still moves incredibly quickly. The water under her feet barely splashes, and she’s already far away from that spot.
I barely lift my dagger to block a single attack, and I swing my short sword at her, only to watch my severed arm go flying through the air.
Then I realize she hasn’t even been going all out against me and Aaron until now.
Her dagger aims at my heart, but then she freezes, the blade just barely touching my chest.
And behind her, stands Nathaniel, just an arm's reach away. He is smiling demonically. Only then do I see his red eyes and white hair.
He mouths something, but the air around Tacita's avatar flickers, and she turns around and swings at his head. She doesn't even bother finishing or attacking me, fully focused on him.
Nathaniel dodges her attack with these erratic, impossible movements that look even more confusing than usual, and Tacita keeps avoiding attacks I cannot see that send shockwaves through the water or cause the water behind her to explode into geysers.
They move all over the place, slipping between the attendees without so much as disturbing the surface of the water. Even with all the effort I’ve put into overclocking my perception, I can barely track them.
But I notice that even as quick as Nathaniel is right now, he can barely match her. She even seems to be faster than he.
At first, it seems to annoy him, but the annoyance is quickly replaced by a vivid grin.
In a burst of motion, he sends her flying backward, and she slides across the water's surface before coming to a stop.
She tosses aside both of her broken daggers and pulls a new one from her clothes. It’s dark red, its glowing tip leaving a trail in the air with every movement. She takes a stance.
Nathaniel mirrors her, taking a stance unlike any I’ve seen from him before. A deep thud erupts from his body, shaking the massive room and causing all the floating water droplets to explode. Several bursts near Tacita forcing her to dodge.
He appears at her side. Despite moving at incredible speed, he stops so abruptly that the deceleration alone would’ve killed any normal person. The red dagger slices through the air, its glowing tip carving a line that just barely misses him. Then he regains momentum and crashes into Tacita with the same force he had before stopping.