As he navigated his way to the edge of Bushey towards Watford, the same route they'd been following earlier, John reviewed the new options he'd received from levelling up Talent:

Level 7 Skills:

Cellular Regeneration: 32000 Aura

Mighty Leap: 32000 Aura

Adaptive Musculature: 32000 Aura

Memory Palace: 32000 Aura

Triple Casting: 32000 Aura

Techno-Shaman: 32000 Aura

Warlord: 32000 Aura

Artificer: 32000 Aura

Medium: 32000 Aura

Conqueror: 32000 Aura

With "only" 20,000 Aura to his name right now, he couldn't afford any of them yet. Still, it was worth theorising what he could get out of them.

Triple Casting caught his eye first. It was pretty self-explanatory, especially since he had a prior data point in Dual Casting for reference—and it also neatly explained why Dual Casting had never been available for upgrade. He earmarked that one as a high priority; being able to run three Spells at once would massively increase his efficiency in multiple ways.

Not far behind it in his priorities surely had to be Cellular Regeneration. That one screamed healing, and he wouldn't be able to safely rely on level ups to bail him out for much longer; already, they were reaching 12000 a pop, and really at this point he should've been pumping them up higher for their own merits, rather than relying on them as failsafes.

He was also intrigued by Adaptive Musculature. The name brought to mind an ability that would constantly shift his body around to optimise him for whatever he was trying to do. Strengthening one set of muscles when lifting, prioritising another set when running, and so on. Not high on the priority list by any means, but something worth considering.

Mighty Leap seemed pretty straight forward. He'd jump really high. Whether that came with an accompanying ability that'd let him land safely from said jumps was up in the air at this point, but he leaned towards believing the system wouldn't give him useless abilities. Again, not a high priority when he had other stuff that covered similar ground and this would cost him 30k, but it would go on the list somewhere.

Of all the options, Memory Palace, ironically, left him with mixed feelings. The concept wasn't unknown to him, but he assumed it would be a lot more effective than what a particularly determined human could mentally construct with some practice, considering the price tag. A form of eidetic memory had its uses. He knew that.

The problem was, there were a lot of things he'd really rather not remember. If the Skill came with some guarantee he'd have complete control over what he remembered and what he didn't, it'd be much higher on his priorities than he was currently inclined to assign it. It was dumb. He knew he was being dumb. The Skill would be too useful to ignore in some situation or other, eventually. Until then, he'd put it off.

And look at that, he thought as he turned his attention to the second half of the list, I've once again fallen into the habit of disregarding the passives out of hand.

In his defence, it was generally more difficult to speculate on what they'd do with only their names to go on. Like, Techno-Shaman at least sounded like an ability that'd let him communicate with technology with shamanic rituals, or something. What did Warlord actually mean? Or Conqueror? There sounded like there'd be a lot of overlap there. Even Medium wasn't entirely clear to him, though he assumed it was something more straightforwardly related to ghosts.

The same had been true for the Level 6s. Speed Demon; go fast, obviously, but in what way? All Brawn; hit hard, clearly, but how did that manifest? Trick Shooter; that one wasn't actually so bad: get all flashy with ranged shots. Magnificent Bastard; again, not too opaque: Machiavellian schemes and charisma. And Archmage; some sort of boost to his Spells that were particularly magic-y, he assumed. All interesting in their own right, but not enough to have him slamming his finger on the button, so to speak.

Of the Level 7 passives, Artificer was the most intriguing, but the image it conjured kind of clashed with what he imagined Enchanting would be, so…? Would it just make him really talented at building magic stuff without the special Inventory menus?

He saw how they could all be good, was the thing. The problem was there were other abilities where it was much, much easier to see how they could be good, and he shied away from the risk. If he had 32,000 Aura and he had to choose between the unknown of Conqueror, awesome as it could potentially be, and the near-guarantee of Telekinesis, he knew what he'd choose a hundred times out of a hundred.

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There's another aspect to consider now, too. Gotta think about how I can potentially fold these Skills into my Spells.

But that, frankly, could come later. The Grange Academy and its portal world had been located on the edge of Bushey already, and following the main road directly out of the school gates swiftly bore him around the edges of a sprawling green park devoid of life, after which found him outside a small hospital that looked like it had not had a good time in the apocalypse.

He'd almost missed it. Trees popped up to line the main road once he was past the park, and the hospital itself crouched behind a small hill at the roadside, accessed by a short road that wound around the rise. It looked to be a mere two-story building of sandy brick, blocky and square in the way of post-war brutalist Britain, and he'd hazard a guess that not a single window in the place was intact, and every car that had been stuck in the car park when the apocalypse hit had been overturned.

Even from a distance, John could see the bloodstains. Never had so many been collected in one place. It looked like someone had taken a great bucket and splashed it over the lower floors of the hospital. For a moment, he wondered if he'd been transported to a horror movie set. Something like this couldn't be real.

But it was. The weight of that realisation settled on his shoulders, making it harder to breathe. A lot of vulnerable people had been trapped here, sick, frail, weak, and helpless to fight back even if the system and its magic powers had come online for them before the end.

His head felt hot. It's less than five hundred metres from the school one, but this seems like exactly the kind of place a portal would be.

And yet, his feet didn't carry him forward. No part of him moved, in fact. He just… stood there. For a long time. Staring. The seconds dragged, and he began to question why this was affecting him so much. There had been plenty of harrowing sights in the last few days. They'd hit him hard, yes, but they hadn't rooted him to the spot, hadn't closed up his throat, misted his eyeballs, squeezed his lungs, punched him in the stomach, and poured ice water in his veins to freeze his heart. Not all at once, at least.

Eventually, he had to face things he didn't want to think about. Hadn't wanted to even consider for a moment. John wouldn't call himself a man with great mental fortitude at the best of times. He'd been the kind of kid for whom emotion meant tears pouring out of his eyes in short order; he just hadn't been able to handle them at all. It was always awfully embarrassing, and the embarrassment was just another emotion he couldn't handle, making everything worse. He hadn't gotten any better at handling emotions, he'd just learned how not to cry.

Thus, he avoided things. Anything that made him feel bad got ignored for as long as possible, crushed into a little ball and shoved away deep down inside. It was a flaw he was well aware of. How many times, in the last few days, had he really stopped to face his worries in any depth? The short answer was he hadn't.

For example, he had been doing everything to avoid thinking about Grandma, and the way her hands had trembled even while she was sitting still in her favourite armchair, last time he'd visited her. He'd deliberately given a wide berth to the reality that she frequented a local hospital not too dissimilar to this one.

No. His voice rose in his own mind unbidden as he blinked rapidly. He pulled in deep breaths. No, it said again, but nothing else.

He wrenched his gaze away from the hospital, turned on his heel, and power-walked onwards down the road, fists clenched at his sides, shoulders hunched.

No, it said for a third time, without elaboration.

He got a hundred metres down the street before he finally stopped. His eyes screwed shut.

"For fuck's sake," he whispered to himself. Mana Sense radiated out with every beat of his heart, and right now his heart was racing. Swallowing past the lump in his throat, he forced himself to acknowledge the situation.

Within his kilometres-wide range, he felt four waves of monsters racing towards him, coming from all four cardinal directions. They were almost perfectly equidistant, by his estimation, and moving in sync. He didn't need to make any calculations to know they'd all arrive around his location at about the same time. Or, to be more precise, they'd overlap at the hospital, a hundred metres behind him.

There were no words to describe how little he wanted to go inside that hospital. It was irrational. He was being ridiculous. If there was a portal in there, it would be more efficient to go and destroy the bastard thing and gain a bunch more points to put into Spells and Skills that he could then use to go destroy more portals and in the long run—

John took a deep breath. Wind sighed through the trees. The burning sky crackled high above. If he listened really closely, he was sure he'd be able to hear the rumble of four swarms of giant insects converging on his location, undoubtedly sent for the express purpose of pushing him to go somewhere he clearly didn't want to go.

It was honestly kind of surprising. If the bastards behind the system could figure out he was reluctant to enter that place, why hadn't they deducted any Aura for not facing his fears?

He narrowed his eyes. There had to be more to this situation. If it really was a narrative, would it make sense to immediately force him into another portal so soon after he'd just escaped another? He was reluctant to commit to thinking of all this as storylines being orchestrated by higher beings, but now that the hunch had taken root, he couldn't pull it out. Something was telling him it wouldn't be so simple as another portal. When he tried Insight and Intuition, they kind of just shrugged, pointing out the same ideas in slightly different wording.

Squaring his shoulders, John turned and started moving back the way he'd come. This time, he didn't stop at the end of the little road that linked the main street and the hospital grounds, instead striding boldly into the car park. The asphalt was littered with broken glass, bits of twisted metal, brick, and other detritus, crunching under his feet with every step. There was little chance of stealth here, so he didn't try, striding forward with his head held high.

The full view of the hospital was revealed to him as he emerged around the bend of the hill. The building was set out as a two-story L shape, with a rounded, one-story building with floor to ceiling windows filling the angle. Closer up, he could see there was a lower floor sinking down below ground level. The curved building in the middle contained the reception room, and there he saw the reason why the system had pushed him towards this place.

His lips twisted into a grimace. Sometimes, being right wasn't a good feeling at all.

He would've much preferred to be greeted by a portal than a cloaked man with great leathery wings, wielding a katana.

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