Ricky watched from a distance, breathless and covered in blood. Zockair watched from the hill, his eyes bulging in horror.

Ricky thanked his luck that he was John’s friend; Zockair could only wonder what grave mistake he had committed for his perfect setup and trap to go down like this.

"Not this easily, Mr Mirage!"

Just before John could close the gap to deliver the final blow to Zockair, the woman whose neck had been cut open slowly began to rise. She didn’t look human anymore. Her body stood at an impossible angle, limbs cracking and bones audibly crushing as she underwent a horrific, high-speed transformation.

"Do you think you’ve got what it takes to kill me?" John smirked. He didn’t wait for whatever transformation Mark was planning; he leaned forward to dash, prepared to activate his absolute defensive ability at any given sign of danger.

Yet, in that same instant, the woman’s body swelled like a balloon being over-pressurised. She exploded in the blink of an eye.

The blast was sudden and incredibly fierce, a shockwave of thermal energy and shrapnel that sent John flying backwards for tens of meters. Luckily, he had never lowered his guard.

The moment he detected the flash of light, he activated his absolute defence ability. He skidded across the grass, landing peacefully without a single scratch on his body, yet his uniform was a total mess.

However, when the smoke cleared, John’s eyes narrowed. Where the woman and Zockair had been, there was now only a massive, smoking hole and few lingering cracks in the air. Zockair was gone.

"This... This is bad!" Ricky shouted, running as fast as he could toward John, his face pale beneath the blood. "That bastard... He’s working with Mark as a partner! And Zockair isn’t weak! He’s already absorbed thirty souls through a previous ritual. He’s far stronger than both of us combined!"

"I know," John said, his voice flat as he scanned the desolate grassy horizon. He didn’t look at Ricky, but his mind was already thinking about the little information Ricky threw amidst his words. "You said he absorbed souls? How does that work exactly?"

Ricky took a ragged breath, leaning heavily on one of his swords, the many wounds he got started to wear him down as he briefly explained the brutal hierarchy of their bloodline. The PARIES weren’t just brothers; they were fragments of a whole.

When one fell in battle against another of the bloodline, the victor could initiate a soul-resonance to absorb the loser’s soul, effectively consolidating the Paragon’s power. Hearing this, a slow, dark smile spread across John’s face.

"Why don’t you stay behind then and absorb these souls?" John gestured to the carnage surrounding them. "There are twenty-nine of your brothers dead. That’s a lot of fragments. Take your time, get as strong as you need to, and leave that bastard Zockair to me."

Ricky knew John wasn’t the type to take a threat like this lightly. He could see the coldness in John’s eyes, the kind of look he got when he fought machines back at the pocket trial. Ricky stepped forward and placed a firm hand on John’s shoulder, his expression grim.

"Don’t let him escape. If he gets away and recovers, he’ll have Mark’s backing and the souls of thirty brothers in his tank. We’ll face tons of problems later if he’s allowed to survive."

"Count on me," John replied, his gaze already shifting toward the cracks in the sky. He paused, looking around the infinite green plain with a sudden realisation. "But first... How the hell am I supposed to get out of here?"

John used to touch the entry point of a dungeon to enter, and crushed the Bug Dungeon to get out. Yet standing in the middle of the open like this, without crushing the dungeon, without having any wall to touch, left him quite puzzled.

Ricky blinked twice, the silence stretching between them for a moment. He looked just as confused as John. "It’s... It’s by using the same method you used to get inside, I assume?" He scratched the back of his head, looking completely at a loss. "This is your domain of expertise, not mine."

"Let me try then."

John closed his eyes for a second, focusing on how he could get out until he got an idea. He cut his palm with a quick flick of his blade and held his bloodied hand high in the air, trying to trigger a resonance with the dungeon’s air as an exit. Yet, nothing happened. The wind just whistled through the grass.

"If that doesn’t work, then..." He knelt and slammed his palm onto the ground. The moment his skin made contact with the dungeon’s floor, the familiar notification flared in his vision.

-

[Ding! Handshake initiated!]

-

"Tsk! Another ten minutes... Another high cost to get out!" John hissed through his teeth. "I hope that bastard won’t run away fast enough to disappear completely."

Ricky watched from the side as John began to pull massive piles of metal scraps from the pocket trial out. He would hold them for a few seconds, draining the Mental Points from the parts, before tossing them aside like useless trash.

Like a mirror image of his entry, the grassy world began to groan. Violent cracks appeared in the white sky, accompanied by a low, rumbling trembling that shook the hills. Finally, a hole tore open in the air, a vacuum of black portal that began to pull at John.

"See you on the other side," John shouted over the roar of the spatial distortion.

The hole sucked him in with an irresistible force. His vision blurred, and his stomach lurched as he was dragged back to the city. A moment later, his boots hit hard, cracked asphalt.

"You... Where the hell did you go?!!"

John stumbled slightly as he landed in the same narrow alley where the Instant Dungeon was. He looked up to see a figure standing just a few feet away, watching him with a mixture of suspicion and alarm. It was the Headmaster.

Unlike the old man, John wasn’t that much surprised to see him. After all, he spotted him on his map a long time ago and knew he was closely following and watching.

"Headmaster... There is no time to waste on talk!" John shouted immediately, not waiting for the interrogation he knew was coming. "Did you see someone running out of here? A wounded youth, looking like he just crawled out of a meat grinder?"

"This..." The old man hesitated, his eyes narrowed as he assessed John’s dishevelled state. "I only arrived here a few minutes ago. I haven’t spotted anyone coming out of this alley except you. What is going on, John?"

"Dammit!" John hissed. He snapped open his map interface, his eyes darting across it, looking for his enemy. The red marker for Zockair was already gone. "Did he run outside the city already? If he’s out of range, that explains why I can’t spot him."

Without another word, John turned and dashed out of the alley toward the main street. The Headmaster, despite his age, was hot on his tail, his movements possessing the agility that spoke of decades of harsh training.

"Wait a minute! What the hell is going on with you?" the old man demanded as they blurred past closed storefronts. "Why were you here in the first place? And where did you disappear to for the past half an hour?"

"Ricky was in danger, I already mentioned that back at the infirmary," John replied, his voice strained by the pace. He didn’t have time to satisfy the old man’s curiosity with a full report. He was already ten minutes behind his enemy.

"And the one who ambushed him is running fast. I need to find him and kill him, Headmaster. If he lives, none of us will live in peace any longer."

The Headmaster’s expression shifted. He could tell the youngster wasn’t lying. There was an urgency in John’s tone that made it clear this wasn’t a normal academic spar; it was a real war.

"Is he that strong?" the Headmaster asked, recalling how Ricky had singlehandedly crushed five opponents during the latest competition.

John nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on the distant city buildings. "Stronger than you think. And he’s not alone."

"Then I’m coming with you," the Headmaster stated.

"No, you need to stay back and guard that alley," John interrupted, stopping for a split second to look the old man in the eye.

"There’s no telling if that bastard is feigning a retreat just to circle back and finish Ricky off once I’m gone. Ricky is still inside that sealed space, doing something crucial. He can’t be interrupted, or he’ll die."

The old man hesitated, torn between his duty to protect the student in front of him and the one trapped in the alley. John knew he had to offer a heavy enough bribe to tip the scales.

"Once I’m done hunting down that bastard, I’ll tell you everything," John promised, his voice low and serious. "The pocket trial, the machines, the things we’ve been hiding, you’ll get the full picture."

Between the escalating threat of Mark and the competition within the Kraken PARIES that started to get heated up out of his expectations, John knew they couldn’t keep the Headmaster in the dark anymore. They needed a high-level ally to shoulder any political and bureaucratic troubles that were coming.

If his enemy was upping the game, then John responded by elevating the list of his allies.

The Headmaster finally sighed and nodded. "I’ll wait for you back there. Don’t venture too far alone. Who knows what other traps the enemy prepared for his retreat. If you aren’t back by sunset, I’m coming after you."

"I won’t take that long," John said, already turning to sprint toward the outskirts of the city. He prayed he could catch the scent of those red codes before Zockair vanished into the dark for good.