John didn't bother trying to fight a monster that so vastly outclassed him. Quite apart from the distinct possibility of death, a fuck-up here risked putting his Aura back into the negatives for the first time since the very beginning of the apocalypse. He couldn't afford a setback like that.
At the same time, straight up running away from a fight came with the implication that he acknowledged being weaker than an enemy. It made him seem scared. That was almost as bad as getting the shit kicked out of him, in coolness terms.
Thus, as he chained together Flash Steps, he made sure to throw taunts over his shoulder during each cooldown. With Accelerate active, it would probably sound like garbled gibberish to anyone moving at normal speed, but he'd already established that the headmaster could match the speed of his time dilated state, and he figured that would satisfy the Aura system—otherwise, it would punish him for making squeaky chipmunk quips.
"Too slow!"
+200 Aura
"Can't catch me!"
+200 Aura
"Is that really the fastest you can go?"
+200 Aura
And so on. He didn't have the brain power to come up with anything particularly witty right now and no one was around to see it, so the Aura gains were infinitesimal compared to what he'd been accumulating recently, but it at least meant the system was interpreting his actions as a rule-breaking rebellion rather than running from a fight.
The courtyard was ridiculously large. Surrounded on all sides by classrooms windows, it was easily twice as long as the thirty-classroom corridor this portal world had started out in, and the lack of ornamentation or decoration left it feeling empty. It was just a wide expanse of paved tiles and gravel, with a small section of dead white grass at the centre.
John did a full lap around the thing before he accepted that there were no doors back into the corridors. The headmaster never gave up its relentless pursuit, charging after him with the hellfire in its bulbous eyes narrowed to pinpricks that never strayed from him even with his endless chain of teleports. Every time he emerged from a Flash Step and looked over his shoulder, the giant mantis seemed to get closer and closer, like it was learning the rhythm of his Skill and adapting to predict where he'd emerge.
By the time he was halfway through his second lap, where he was trying to see if he could figure out which of the sets of classrooms were part of the "block" where the portal was located, the headmaster was appearing mere metres away, too close for him to even risk pausing to throw a taunt while Accelerate was active, let along out of it.
That forced him into action. If he couldn't banter, it was only a matter of time before the system would realise he was, in fact, running away from the fight. He took a few more Flash Steps to assess his options and decide how he was going to approach the rest of his time in the portal world. Long term, he couldn't just keep running from the headmaster. He needed a solution.
The first and most obvious option was to find the portal and get the fuck out of here. That course of action relied pretty heavily on his theory that the headmaster wouldn't be able to cross a blue portal—it was evident that a blue portal world didn't necessarily mean that there would only be blue monsters inside, judging by the mantis' presence, so the next best guess as to why the portals were coloured was that it signified what level of monster could actually pass through them.
Regardless, that option came with its own obvious issue, and it was the very same problem he'd been trying to avoid during his circumnavigation of the absurdly huge courtyard: running from a fight in that manner could potentially get him labelled uncool, unless he found a way to play it off. He had ideas on that front, but…
But. The thing was, the Aura system wasn't the only motivation driving him. He wasn't just thinking about the quest he'd set himself to destroy the portals and free Watford from the death game, either. There was more to this than pragmatism and some nebulous long-term goal.
A rather large part of John wanted to destroy the portal just for his own satisfaction. Killing monsters felt good. It felt right. It felt like goddamn justice. How many giant insects had emerged from this very place at the beginning of the apocalypse? What kind of havoc had they wrought, when their portal opened up right into a secondary school? The headmaster talked a big game about punishment and discipline, but he couldn't imagine there were many beings on Earth that deserved damnation as much as that monster.
A secondary school. A place where kids from the age of 11 to 18 went to study. They would have woken up that morning thinking it was just another day. Some of them would have dreaded it, some would have looked forward to it, and others would have been indifferent. Friends would have met up, laughed together, chatted, gossiped, made plans for the weekend. He could picture the uniformed kids thronging the corridors, showing a mixture of smiles, frowns, and everything in between, blissfully unaware of what was to come.
He didn't want to imagine what came at around lunch time. There'd been plenty of blood stains. Enough to tell the story. Most of the students wouldn't have stood a chance, taken too quickly to wrap their heads around whatever system had been given to them, assuming they'd got one at all. It would have been a slaughter, and he was sure the monsters wouldn't have stopped there, forming up into their column and sweeping across the town, ruining lives and reigning with terror.
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And he had to admit there was some personal spite in him, too. That poison bullshit had really hurt. He was going to pay the headmaster back for that if it was the last thing he did.
So, no. John wasn't going to escape. He wasn't stepping out of that portal. There was never any possibility of him abandoning this mission, even with a red-souled monster chasing him down. The only way he was going to make it back to the real world was through the portal collapsing and dropping him back outside, just as it had done in the bus depot.
With that resolve, though, he didn't immediately go charging off recklessly. Keeping Accelerate in his back pocket for now, he instead lifted his arms, and started firing Ultimate Shots every time he emerged from Flash Step. It was a neat alternative to taunting the headmaster, he figured, and it served multiple purposes. First, firing behind himself with one arm forced the headmaster to slow down a fraction to slash the shot out of the air, lest it impede the insect. Second, it scattered burning foliage and ice and steam all over the place, creating an environmental hazard that'd slow the monster down while not impeding him. Third, and most important, he also aimed some shots at the windows with his other arm.
Ultimate Shot was a constant roar, filling the courtyard with the echoes of rolling thunder, multiple great growls clashing together into an ear-splitting cacophony that actually drowned out the headmaster's furious threats of infinite detention. If you listened closely, though, you'd hear plenty of shattering glass, too. John did another full lap of the courtyard, taking out as many windows as he could while keeping ahead of the headmaster.
Then, he activated a double hit of Shadow Stream, and started throwing up columns of smoke after every Flash Step. The darkness didn't linger long outside when he didn't have time to unleash a large volume, but each time it threw off the headmaster temporarily. It came to a stop each time, hellfire eyes scanning left and right, unsynchronised from each other, only to fix on him when he became visible after the next Flash Step.
"HIDING WILL NOT SAVE YOU! THE EYE OF JUSTICE SEES ALL!"
John sneered inside his black cloud. "What the fuck would you know about justice, you murderous piece of shit?"
The urge to unleash a barrage of Ultimate Shots at the headmaster after that was strong, but he resisted. That the monster's taunts were getting to him was a sign to John that he needed to disengage, however. His next Flash Step took him inside the nearest classroom, and he barely paused, activating Accelerate the moment Catfall put him on his feet and running for the door. Darkness kept erupting from both arms, flooding the place in a heartbeat. The insect monsters at their desks didn't react to his presence, though every seat was occupied.
Since this class wasn't next on the schedule, the door was open. He noted it read 58-G as he passed it by. Bursting into the corridor, he snapped his arms to either side, unleashing torrents of inky smoke in both directions while curving some of it around to cover himself, too. The corridors were wide and tall, so he didn't bother even trying to fill it up completely; that would take way too long. Instead, he focused his efforts on creating smaller passages of darkness within the corridor. They wouldn't last forever, but they'd give him room to manoeuvre, for a while.
John picked a direction at random—right—and set off, letting the shadows billow in front of and behind him. The headmaster hadn't pursued yet, and from within his greyscale world he saw a shape blur across the courtyard, dispelling the darkness he'd left there with sheer force. He could still hear its shouting, though somewhat muffled.
"VANDALISING SCHOOL PREMISES! IS THERE NO END TO YOUR DEPRAVITY?!"
"FACE YOUR PUNISHMENT, HONOURLESS CUR!"
"HOW DARE YOU MAR THIS BEAUTIFUL SCHOOL WITH YOUR DARKNESS!"
Whether it genuinely still thought he was outside in those dark clouds or just dispelling his smoke to get rid of the so-called vandalism, it wasn't pursuing him right now. John breathed a sigh that was part relief and part frustration as he ran, taking in the corridor he'd found himself in through this pencil-sketch perspective.
It was clearly longer than the first 'block'. The dark end with its grasping arms was barely visible ahead of him even with Eagle Eye, and when he looked back over his shoulder he couldn't see the other end at all no matter how he tried.
58-G, the classroom he'd gone through had said. Looking around, he saw the classes on the right were labelled G, and on the left they were Fs. This would be the fourth 'block', then, if the letters went up with each block. He wished he'd thought to ask Daniel's group how many blocks they'd been through, specifically, but he supposed it didn't matter.
He had a decent enough idea of how this portal world worked overall: human invaders had to fight their way through the class schedule for each block depending on the day, and their motivation to keep to that schedule and not just blast through the windows and skip entire blocks was to avoid the headmaster. Since he'd already attracted the headmaster's ire, John saw no point in keeping to the schedule.
The pertinent question was: how did this portal world end? Back in the bus depot, it had concluded with finding the room where monsters spawned and destroying the three great eyeball things that facilitated the process. Would it work like that here, too?
John slowed his pace a bit as he swapped out one of his Shadow Streams for Mana Sense. A pulse of magic burst out in an omnidirectional wave, pinging a dizzying number of monsters sat in their classrooms, ahead of him, behind him, and to his right. To his left, the space beyond the windows was just an endless sports field that stretched out beyond the horizon. Everywhere else, the monsters sprawled all the way to the edge of the Spell's range, which at Level 3 now measured two kilometres. Someone attacking the portal wouldn't have to clear out every classroom, of course, but beating this place would still be a slog lasting over an entire day, if you did it the conventional way.
John wasn't going to do it the conventional way.
A smirk came to his lips unbidden. Not all the monsters were waiting around in their classrooms. Plenty were on the move, all coming from the same direction. It was beyond the edges of his range, but instinct told him that would be the spawn point.
He also couldn't help noticing that he couldn't see the headmaster anymore. The shadows in the courtyard to his right were all gone, and there was one aberration in his Mana Sense: a single signature rushing through the corridors at dizzying speed, crossing half of John's range in a second. He moved to follow it.
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