1st Person View | Solution's (15%) PoV
Bits of chalk drift through the air like snow.
I holster my revolver and turn toward Scout. She's still sitting where the shockwave left her. Her knees are drawn up, crossbow lying in her lap. Her violet eyes flicker, the glow fading to hazel.
"Hey," I call. "You good?"
She blinks up at me, and tries to laugh. "Define 'good.' Because right now, I'm feeling a lot." Then she sags forward, catching herself on her hands. Her breath trembles.
"Your eyes," I say. "Hunter's Mark finally wore off. You certainly made good use of it."
"Yeah. I burned through both of my spell slots already. I feel exhausted."
I kneel beside her. "Can you stand?"
She shakes her head. "My stamina is worse than my GPA." The bad joke breaks halfway through, her voice cracking.
I reach out before she falls. She's lighter than I expected. I can feel her heartbeat through her jacket.
"You overextended a bit," I tell her.
"You think?" Her eyes flutter shut. "It's a habit from when I played the game. Short rest should fix it… if I don't… fall asleep first."
Her head tips against my chest. Out cold before I can answer.
I stay kneeling for a long moment, listening to the slow rhythm of her breathing and the wind moving through the hole in the gym wall. It's oddly calming.
Two spell slots burned, and one reckless heart. I can't help the small sigh. She fought like she meant it. I have a feeling she'll be a loyal ally.
My interface flickers again, scanning the area. No new hostiles, but no survivors in the gym either. I bask in the breeze, listening to Scout's heartbeat a little longer, before I decide to keep moving.
I shift her weight and stand. My jacket snaps in the wind as I lift her, one arm under her legs, the other braced around her shoulders.
"Come on, Scout," I murmur. "You earned a break."
Her HUD tag hovers faintly over her: [Scout – Level 1 | Exhausted (Short Rest Required)].
I start toward the west hall, where sunlight filters through the broken windows. The system chimes with a new quest marker:
[Area wide notification]: The boss has been defeated! You are now free to exit the campus.
The way the notification is worded, it doesn't look like we'll have much time to rest. Still, I glance down at Scout, her hair streaked with chalk dust, lips parted in sleep. She looks fragile.
I shake my head. That's a weird observation to make.
Scout's weight doesn't slow me down. If anything, it steadies me. Something constant in a world that's rewriting itself by the second, someone to protect. It's fulfilling.
The corridors are quieter now. Blood stains trail across the tiles. I keep my eyes forward.
The immersion smooths it all out. I know what this would look like without it—a horror movie, I imagine—so I'm grateful for the mental distancing.
Scout stirs, muttering something in her sleep, and I adjust my grip to support her head.
"You did an amazing job Scout," I tell her quietly. "Just rest for now."
Outside, sunlight cuts across the campus. The barrier that trapped us is now gone, evaporated into red mist.
We could leave, but I need answers before we take another step. And I can't drag Scout through the city; it could be too dangerous.
That means finding Christian.
He's loud enough, even before I see him.
The field opens up beyond the academic buildings—a wide, open sprawl of trampled grass where kids used to play soccer and baseball. Now it's filled with students. Dozens, maybe hundreds. They're gathered in loose formations, grouped by class or club, some armed with whatever they could scavenge.
At the center of it all stands Christian.
He's climbed onto one of the dugout roofs, giving orders. I stop at the edge of the crowd, shifting Scout slightly in my arms.
From here, it looks less like a school and more like an army forming.
Lines of students hauling supplies. Others setting up barricades from tables and goalposts. Someone's drawing maps on a piece of poster board. They've built a command post out of what used to be the equipment shed.
Christian gestures toward the city beyond the fence, his voice rising just enough for me to catch words like "organization," "zones," and "protection."
Looking back, he's always been good at this. Even in class, he'd be the leader of all the group projects.
Now, with the professors gone and the world flipped inside out, he's exactly what these people need: someone who sounds like certainty.
I glance down at Scout. She's still out cold.
I adjust her weight again and start forward through the crowd. The hill leading up to the dugout feels steeper than I remember.
Christian raises a hand, and the noise dies down. He waits just long enough for the silence to settle, then starts speaking.
"Listen up! I know some of you are scared. You should be."
His voice carries across the field, but he's not shouting. "The world we knew—stressing over grades, worrying about what clubs to join, late-night cramming—it's gone. Everything has changed in a blink, and no one asked us first."
"Look at me," he says. "You woke up today expecting the same routine as always. You woke up in a world that still smelled like that life—and it hurts because it was simple, because it was ours. That hurt is honest. Let it be honest. Don't be ashamed of it."
He pauses. "But feeling hurt isn't a plan. Feeling terrified isn't a strategy. We can cry about what was, or we can build what's next. And I don't mean 'we' as in a handful of loud people.
'We' means every person here. The janitor who stayed late to make sure our school was clean. The kid who's never missed a class. The quiet girl in the back who thinks AP Calc is fun!" The crowd chuckles. "You are not extras in a story written by strangers. You are the authors now."
A murmur from the crowd ensues. "They put us in a system that expects us to be predictable. Rules, quests… we all know how that story goes. But here's the secret: systems are only as strong as the assumptions they're built on.
If the system expects you to panic, don't panic. If the system expects you to scatter and be easy prey, stay close. If the system expects you to repeat the same mistake we made yesterday, break the cycle today."
He leans forward. "Breaking the cycle isn't dramatic. It's boring. It means showing up when it's cold. It means sharing food. It means teaching someone to aim. It means accepting that we don't all start at the same place, but we can move together. Heroics are a storybook thing. Survival—real survival—is a thousand small, ordinary mercies that add up to something no algorithm can predict."
Christian lifts his hand and points to the ragged fence where the city waits beyond. "Out there, authority will look like a machine. It will want obedience and order. We don't get to plead for mercy. We get to make a plan.
So we'll train. We'll form teams. We'll make sure one person's weakness becomes another person's strength. Today you guard the perimeter. Tomorrow you're the one who drags someone out of a fight. The day after, someone else teaches you how to patch a wound. That is how you win."
He stops to breathe, then his voice softens. "And listen, don't mistake my talk of structure for a call to harden into something inhuman. Compassion is not a weakness. If you treat people like expendable resources, you'll have numbers but no reason to fight.
If you treat people like partners, you'll have something worth defending. We don't keep people safe just for strength in numbers. We keep stories, laughter, the ability to want something more than survival. That is the prize."
A few heads nod. Christian's voice rises. "We will teach one another. We will learn quickly, and we will teach even faster. Nobody gets to sit on the sidelines and watch the rest of us die.
If you can hold a pencil, you can learn to draw a map. If you can lift a tray, you can learn to carry a first aid kit. If you can run through a rainy field, you can outrun a monster patrol. The real magic we can all learn is effort."
He steps back and the sun slips across his jaw. "Fear will tell you small things: hide, hoard, blame...We refuse those small things. We refuse division. We refuse the easy cruelty of assuming: 'If I get mine, who cares about you?' Because the morning after 'I get mine' there's nothing left to keep. Trust is the only true currency that compounds. Trade it freely.
We are not the broken endpoints of someone else's experiment. We are the unpredicted variable! The system can chart us, flag us, study us, annotate us, but they did not write the part where we choose what we become. So I ask you this, right now: will you be the same person you were when you woke up, waiting for someone else to save you? Or will you be the person who turns around and saves someone else?"
The silence that follows is the silent sound of contemplation. Men and women who looked like kids five minutes ago straighten up. Someone laughs, unexpectedly—and it feels a silent, unanimous agreement: we will try.
Christian is getting riled up, making grand gestures: "We will not be an army of one. We will be a chain that holds. If a link breaks, we bind it! If a wound opens, we stitch it! And when the world asks for a villain or a savior, let them be confused, because what we become will be neither. We will be something new!"
The students erupt. Cheers, chants, stomps of approval. The sound rolls across the field.
The crowd moves as one, with a renewed sense of purpose. I stand with Scout in my arms and watch them coordinate with one another. Christian hops down from the dugout, smiling like he just won the world.
He scans the crowd, calling out names, delegating in passing. Then his gaze catches on me.
His smile falters.
"Solution?"
He blinks twice as he walks toward me, like he's not sure it's really me. "Holy hell, man. I-I thought you took off after we killed the goblins. Where have you been?"
I shift Scout higher in my arms. Her head lolls against my shoulder. "Here and there," I say. "Mostly trying not to die."
The humor doesn't quite land. His eyes drop to Scout and widen. "Is she—?"
"She's fine," I cut in before he can start panicking. "Just burned out."
He breathes a sigh of relief. "Good. I had been wondering where she went. I've got med students setting up a triage tent near the field—"
"She doesn't need one," I interrupt again. "She just needs rest. Preferably somewhere quiet."
He studies me for a moment. "Alright," he says finally. "There's a classroom on the east side we're using for shelter. She can sleep there. We've got water, food, and blankets."
"Perfect."
I start to move, but he steps in front of me. "Hold on. You're not planning to head out there alone, are you?"
"Yeah."
"Into the city? You saw what's happening here. We're organizing. People are scared, and half of them are still trying to figure out how to open their inventory. You'd be a lot more useful staying here."
"I'm not useful standing still."
Christian crosses his arms. "And what happens when you get yourself killed out there? Who's going to tell us what you find?"
"I won't die."
"Not the point." He seems irritated now. "You can't keep treating this like a solo campaign. We need to think long-term. Communication, supply lines, scouts, defense perimeters—"
"Exactly," I say. "You've got all that handled. You're best suited for leading. I'm better off figuring out who pulled the trigger on this world in the first place."
He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I can tell you always do this."
"Do what?"
"Charge ahead. Disregard others for your own objective. You're supposed to be helping us."
I glance down at Scout. "She deserves somewhere safe while I find out what's coming next."
Christian looks up at me again. "You trust me with her?"
"I trust you to keep her alive."
He huffs out a dry laugh. "High praise, coming from you."
"Don't prove me wrong, Christian."
He glances back toward the field, where students are moving every-which-way. "You sure you don't want backup?"
"I'll move a lot faster when I'm alone."
He gives me a long look. "Be careful, alright? If the city's as bad as we expect it to be, you might not like what you find."
I start walking, the grisly scene in the gym at the forefront of my memory. "When have I ever liked what I found?"
…
At the door to the east hall, I pause. "If she wakes up before I'm back, tell her…"
I pause. What do I tell her? It's not like this is goodbye, but depending on the situation, I may be gone for awhile. I guess I've already grown attached to her company; life-or-death situations will do that to you.
Christian raises an eyebrow. "Tell her what?"
"Nothing specific," I say. "Just tell her to rest, and that I'll be back soon."
He nods. "I'll keep her safe, Solution. That's a promise."
"Good," I say, and walk toward the gates.
Behind me, Christian's voice rises again, giving new orders. Ahead, the city waits under a darkening sky.
I adjust my jacket, and keep walking.
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◆ System Notice: [Party Coordination]
This buff is placed on a [Party] of three or more. Temporary leadership boosts morale, [Focus], and [Armor Class] among nearby allies.
Baseline buff: +1.
Effective command requires Charisma attributes above baseline.
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