Albert braced himself. As soon as something was out of place, he would react with overwhelming force and leave no room for the kidnappers to take him. Even if they overpowered him, he would not make their job easy for them. He would not.

Yet time passed, and the only thing that happened to him was that he almost jumped at random people bumping into him because they were too drunk, or they were dancing too energetically. He felt the tiredness of adrenaline withdrawal, and while his eyes almost threatened to close he swayed and propped himself against the nearest table, slumping on one of those cushioned chairs that they have in clubs.

Time passed. Nothing happened. For a moment he thought that he had been imagining it. That it was paranoia. But there was a clear case of his friends missing. Now that alcohol was not addling his brain so much, he was almost sober, and panic was rising and he could not keep it contained. It was almost desperate, and he just sat, still as death, he didn’t know what to do.

He wandered. There was no way he could stay there one moment longer. As he wandered the club, almost walking in circles as not to lose himself and his grip on reality itself, he thought. Time was the thing that had failed him, the one thing he wanted to overcome had been his downfall. Oh if he only had more time he could do things, he could act, he could take matters into his own hands. But no, and now he could do nothing, because anything that he did was many things that he could not do, many avenues of acting closed to him forever, parallel universes collapsing into this one depressing reality.

But if time was fictitious. But if it was an illusion. How dare an illusion do this to him. How dare something that was not even real put him in a state of panic?

He took a hold of his mana, and flexed it around. Instead of trying to influence the outside world, what he decided to act upon was himself. If trying to seize time and force it to a stop had failed all this time, what made him think that the next try would be different? He needed a novel approach, and he did so by changing the paradigm. A sort of Copernican revolution, with the new focus being himself and his own perception of this fake element of the world that was time.

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And suddenly everything changed.

[Skill acquired: Bullet Time I]

The world changed. The music stopped. No. It didn’t stop. It was low, the vibration of the air coming like powerful bass sounds instead of the shrill highs and girly screams. People were still dancing and moving and jumping and having fun, but they were slow and almost still in their motion.

With newfound calm, Albert took out his phone.

Oh. He had a phone. In his rising panic, the very concept of a mobile phone had escaped his mind. There were messages there, he saw. From his friends. From Marc especially, there were at least ten messages and a couple of missed calls. Ranging from ‘where the fuck are you?’ to ‘come to the smoking area outside, dammit!’

Smoking area outside? What? None of the three smoked. What was going on?

He found them there. All three of them. Time was still being dilated by the use of his skill, each second stretched to five times its normal length. He saw their carefree faces, laughing and joking while Aubrey and Colin shared a whiff of a cigarette neither of the two knew how to smoke and Marc laughed.

Albert stood in shock. For a few seconds, which was enough time for his friends to react to his presence even with the time dilation. Enough time to realize that he had played himself in a state of panic, only because he had constructed a whole scenario in his mind that was not real. Only because his senses had failed him. Or rather, his perception of reality had failed him. What he saw was not what was there, and there it came to his mind the Interface Theory his friends mentioned earlier on the way to the club. How the world is not as we perceive it. How reality is not what our senses tell us it is.

In this case it was blaring, how Albert had been played by his senses and by his brain incorrectly piecing the information together.

He dropped the skill, and let time resume its flow. He would have time to ponder about this later, in his bed, staring at the ceiling like it had become the norm these last few days. Sleep was not easy to come by anymore, not for him. Now, all he did was put on his party face, and make up some silly excuse.

“I was in the toilet! Sorry!” he said, and his friends laughed, no doubt imagining him doubled over the toilet seat, retching and heaving from too much alcohol. If only they knew.

They would be laughing twice as hard, for sure. And Albert knew he would have deserved it, for he had been quite silly. All was well, though. Better to learn his lesson now than when the danger was real.

And! Most importantly. All this served as a kickstart to unlock a new skill!