Festus stared down at his dying script of dream runes. Half of it was already gone, its once soft blue and tainted green now translucent. Whatever he’d attempted to do, he’d only succeeded in powering whatever spellform Zed had apparently used on himself.

Around him he could hear the chaos dying.

He hadn’t wanted to use the influence of his rank to take command but his project had been right in front of him and he’d been far from willing to allow it sabotage itself. People refused to believe a simple truth of the world. Mind mages weren’t the most terrifying mages to deal with. Rune mages were.

But the world refused to understand this and Rune magic was too difficult a line of study, so what did the world do? They banned uncontrolled mind mages and ignored traveling the path of Rune magic.

But he’d never given up on his dream of the perfect Rune mage, and the young man in front of him was a clean canvas to be drawn on. And so he refused to accept that Zed could be a mind mage.

With his runescript all but gone, Festus didn’t need so much focus to hold whatever was left of it intact, so when Ven stepped up to him, standing beside the girl with no magic to her name, he saw the Olympian clearly.

“Were you successful?” Ven asked.

There was a barely concealed bitterness in his voice and Festus couldn’t blame him for it. He could already imagine the loss the current fight had caused. There was already at least one missing aura signature that he could tell.

“I don’t—”

Zed’s face squeezed and Festus cut his words off. He returned his attention to the young mage, praying he hadn’t just helped awaken a mind mage.

Zed smacked dry lips as his eyes fluttered open. Soft green pupils took in the world above him, darting from side to side as it studied the now translucent runescript in front of him.

Doing his best not to aid any further development in mind magic, Festus terminated the script immediately.

“How are you feeling?” he asked Zed.

“Wrong,” Zed answered, sitting up and groaning. He put a hand to his head and frowned. “Do you ever have the kind of headache that you know it’s there waiting for you to just slip up but you really can’t feel it, so you just want to shake your head just so you feel it?”

Festus looked up at captain Ven, then back down at Zed, and he and the captain answered at the same time.

“No.”

Zed nodded slowly. “Me neither. As for how I feel, I feel like I just took a very long piss. I think there’s a word for that.”

“Cathartic?” Shanine offered.

“No, that’s not the word I’m loo—” Zed turned to look at her and smiled softly. “I take it the fat man didn’t get you, then. Where is he, by the way?”

Shanine thumbed over her shoulder and Zed looked past her.

Festus watched whatever else Zed could possibly have wanted to say die on his lips as he took in the sight around them.

………………………………………..

Zed stared at the chaos of dead monsters and tired people. It was, for lack of a better word, brutal. Only the Olympians looked unbothered, yet the blood stains and claw marks on their once sleek armors were proof enough of the fight they’d been in.

There were more monsters than the ones they’d fought before Zed’s notifications had dragged him into his pocket memories, and somehow his memories of pain and betrayal and a mana surge that had kept him alive left little impact against the current view in front of him.

His eyes panned the monster corpses before settling on two mages kneeling in front of a tree. Their bodies hid one more mage from Zed’s view but he saw enough to note the red stains of blood on whoever it was. The fact that he didn’t recognize the mages from their backs gave him a small hope that he didn’t know whoever was dying.

“Where’s Oliver?” he asked quietly, despair stalking on the horizon of his hope.

“Your friend is fine,” Festus assured him, and Ven nodded. “They’re just cleaning up the monster corpses. Extracting their cores and all that.”

Zed sighed in relief. Still, he could not ignore the death around him.

Why didn’t we move? he asked himself. If I was unconscious why didn’t they just carry me and run? Why did they stay and fi—

His mind went to the collage of spinning runes he’d seen when he’d woken up, all a translucent blue. All of them alive.

He turned to Festus and met the old man’s eyes.

“What happened?” he asked.

“We were ambushed,” Festus answered. “We had to fight.”

“Why? What were you doing that you all couldn’t run?”

Festus tilted his head to the side. “Are you accusing me of something, kiddo?”

Zed shook his head.

“Well then, you best watch your tone.”

In truth, Zed was accusing him of something, he just didn’t know what. He knew Festus enough to know that the man was capable of getting lost in his tasks and ignoring everything else when it came to runes.

And he’d woken up to the man activating runes.

But as much as he would like to accuse him of something directly, Festus was the stronger of the both of them. And even if Zed could still feel the power of his recent growth coursing through his veins, he wasn’t stupid enough to believe it would make any difference here.

“When I woke up,” he said cautiously, “there were runes, and there was you.”

“Yes?”

“I’m just asking what was happening.”

“He was healing you,” someone said.

Zed turned to the side and saw a familiar armor. Despite the blood stains riddling the armor, he recognized it immediately. Beneath the armor he knew there was a man with hair as red as blood.

“Ven,” the Olympian said, offering him a handshake.

Zed took the hand in his, tightened his grip and pulled himself to his feet. If Ven felt the weight of him, he didn’t show it. In his armor he was as still as a mountain.

“Samuel,” Zed answered absently, ending the handshake, his voice oddly empty.

Then the weight of his memories hit him.

He had pretty much died. He could still remember the state of his legs when the second awakening had happened two years earlier than predicted. He could still remember the pain, his determination to survive, motivated by nothing but words in the air and the fear of death.

It was all too vivid. All too clear.

He glanced down at his leg even though he knew he would find it intact.

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“Zed?”

Zed turned at the sound of his name and found Oliver standing with an armful of brown stones the color of mud, each one was too large for one of his hands and he held them uncomfortably.

“Festus fixed you,” Oliver mumbled with a broken smile. “It worked.”

No, it didn’t. He wasted his time and doomed you all to an unnecessary fight. Did he even ask if you all wanted to stay and fight?

Zed held the words trapped in his mind, however, kept them unuttered and unsaid. There was no point in telling them they’d risked their lives unnecessarily. That whatever Festus had been doing hadn’t done anything for him.

“Yea,” he said, instead. “he did.”

Something must’ve reflected in his tone because the joy on Oliver’s face slipped slightly. Ash came up behind him with a handful of cores herself. She peered at Zed, head cocked to the side as if in study.

“What happened to your face?” she asked.

Zed’s mind fell back into his memory for the briefest moment and he fought back a frown. “A building fell on it.”

The joviality he usually felt was slowing, slipping from his grasp. It now felt feigned where it had once come easily. It seemed the happy man with jokes for everything hadn’t been who he was. He wasn’t the man-child running around causing annoyance and discomfort with a smile too wide on his face. No. He was a person with friends he’d lost when the second awakening had sundered the earth.

So he stood here more worried about the safety of friends far older than the ones standing before him. No. Ash and Oliver and Jason and Chris weren’t friends. He couldn’t call them friends. They’d treated him horribly since the day they’d met. Zed was appalled as he thought of everything that had happened: the shrike, the moscovian sloth, the pain and the hurt.

He frowned.

They had been horrible to him. Worse, he had allowed it, tried to understand it. Thinking about everything weighed down on him. No. The truth was that it hadn’t been all of them, but the others had let it happen. Oliver and Ash had been nice enough but…

Zed shook the thoughts from his head. It didn’t matter now, not anymore. All he needed to do was to get back to his real friends, to find them. He had completed one of the quests of the second awakening and all three of his friends had escaped the chaos of a crumbling club Cabavi. Finding them was his priority.

But did they survive the chaos of the world after? He thought.

Chris arrived a moment after with Jason on her heels. Unlike Jason and the others, she had no core. One of her hands was occupied only by the massive club it dragged behind her.

“What’s wrong with his face?” she asked.

“Why does everyone keep asking that?” Zed scowled, then turned to Shanine. “Is there a problem with my face?”

Shanine’s nod was slow but it was Festus that answered.

“You aren’t smiling,” the old man said. “You’re normally always smiling like you just got away with something.”

Zed reached a hand to his lips and touched them. He already knew he wasn’t smiling. He wanted to see what kind of psychopath could smile after experiencing what he’d just experienced. He wanted to see what kind of heartless bastard would smile after realizing he’d forgotten about his friends and almost dying. He wanted to see how—

His mind balked as a terrifying thought came to him. The second awakening had happened two years earlier than anticipated and a lot of things had gone horribly wrong in the process, but there were gaps in his understanding.

The first awakening had given the world a handful of mages, and in thirteen years Doctor Tilda had only been able to rise to the rank of a category two Rukh. And while the second awakening had been speculated to fill the world with far more mana than the first, birthing and advancing far more mages, a year was too short to have already produced a category three Rukh in the name of Jason.

A new found panic in his heart, Zed asked a question.

“How long ago was the second awakening?”

Jason shrugged. “A few y—”

“You mother fucker!” someone bellowed.

Zed turned just in time to find someone rushing at him, rage contorting the man’s face. He only had enough time to remember his name before the mage punched him in the face.

Francis’ fist connected with Zed’s nose and it was like being bashed in the face with a large piece of diamond wrapped in leather.

Zed heard the sound of his nose breaking as he was sent sprawling to the ground.

“You weren’t worth this!” Francis bellowed, standing amidst a watching audience. “You weren’t worth her life.”

Zed sat on the ground, a hand covering his bloody nose even as his mana cycled through him to heal it.

Tulip rushed up to Francis and grabbed him by the arm.

“Leave it, Frank,” he muttered softly. “She wouldn’t have wanted this. They wouldn’t have wanted this.”

Francis shrugged the mage off him violently.

“Fuck what they would’ve wanted,” he spat. “They’re dead, and it’s his fault! They died because of him!”

Zed looked past Francis’ blood stained clothes, torn in one or two places. He ignored Tulip as well, and peered beyond them to the body rested against a tree.

There, face held in the empty placidity of the dead, was Lovina. She was propped against the tree with blood no longer streaming down a violent laceration in her shoulder. Her face was pale and stained with blood, and her aura was empty. He felt her death in the emptiness of it as easily as he saw it in the paleness of her skin. Then her aura was gone.

Still, he stared a while longer.

He wanted to blame her death on Festus instead, point out that he had done nothing. He wanted to remind Francis that he hadn’t asked them to wait; hadn’t even known they were even here.

Instead, he sighed helplessly.

The truth was he had played a part in the girl’s death. Festus might’ve been the one to keep them here but it didn’t change the fact that he had been the reason for it. His mind had dragged him into a world he hadn’t been ready for, against his own will, and Festus had attempted to save him from it.

----------------------------------------

* You have unraveled [Pocket memory(incomplete)] (who am I?) 1/1.

* [Pocket memory(incomplete)] (who am I?) remaining 0/0.

* You have unraveled [Pocket memory(incomplete)] (who am I?).

* You have 0 [Pocket memory] undergoing repairs.

* You have gained +2 [Wil].

----------------------------------------

Zed ignored the notification, dismissing it with a casual thought. Control over it came far easier than ever and it slipped away without any focus. He’d had the notification longer than he’d thought. With more whispers of his memories returned to him, he knew more than he’d ever known.

For instance, he knew he was wasting his time here. He needed a map and he needed to find the California R and D institute. He needed to get back to his friends.

But more importantly, he needed to get back to his family. He’d sequestered the memories he’d felt were important into the things he’d called memory pockets and information about his family was in one of them.

Unfortunately, Zed knew nothing of how to access them. The one he’d been able to access had been granted to him as a reward for a quest. Perhaps the others will be the same.

But there was a slight problem. His memories taught him that quests were guides designed to get him to where he need to be with the tools he needed to get there. His survival of the world’s second awakening was proof of that. Escaping the institute had gotten him a military knife that had helped him protect himself and his friends when their unfortunate hanger-on had tried to get in their way.

But if I’d never left the safety of the institute, I’d never have been in such a situation, he pondered. But then Anthony and the others would still have gone and they would’ve been in danger.

What were the chances that they’d have survived as long as they did if he hadn’t gone with them?

Then why did the notification try to get me drunk?

If he hadn’t been drunk he might’ve run better, fought better. Survived better. He wouldn’t have had to suffer the pain of having a building fall on him or have had to go through the pain of a broken leg.

I wouldn’t have needed a mana surge to survive.

Zed frowned at the thought, another one coming to mind.

How sure am I that I would’ve survived the chaos without the surge?

There were too many questions with not enough answers. And while he trusted the notifications, there was no doubt that they were playing games with him, games he did not understand. Doctor Shequifa had said they were his mind’s way of protecting him, guiding him. They were supposed to be a defense mechanism.

What if she was wrong? What if they weren’t from him at all? What if—

Zed shook his head, discarding his thoughts.

“No,” he said, as much to the world as to himself and got up from the ground.

His nose was healed already even if the bloodstain still remained. He had things he needed to do now, and questioning himself and filling his mind with doubts wasn’t going to help him. What he needed was information and action.

He watched the anger of loss on Francis face as the mage heaved. The man had experienced loss and had someone to blame for it.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Zed said to him, knowing there was truly nothing to be said.

Francis spat to the side, his anger unassuaged. “Fuck you!”

He shrugged off Tulip’s hand once more and stormed off to another body. This one was stuck in the jaws of a dead monster.

Zed recognized Kev easily. Francis had lost too much and he understood his anger. But that was all there was to it.

Zed hadn’t really known Lovina or Kev much, but in the brief encounter he’d had with them all those days ago, they’d seemed like nice people. Nice enough not to deserve a death so early.

But that was all the sorrow he could spare for Francis. It might’ve made him a monster but Zed had his own problems now.

He had a family lost somewhere in the world that was likely worried sick about him with no idea of what had become of him. He didn’t know the details of who they were or where they were, but he knew he had a mother with the most beautiful smile that left a warm feeling in his heart. He knew he had a father who was stern and decisive. He had two brothers who had once been the bane of his existence and a sister who liked to trouble him for his hobbies.

Each of them had loved him in their own way. And while he didn’t love them now, he was aware of them and knew he would love them once he unraveled the pocket memory he’d stored them within. After all, if he had chosen to give himself a chance to remember them, then they must’ve been gravely important to him.

And if he did not know how to find them, there was a place that did. The California R and D institute. That place had a file on him.

It was a long shot, but a shot nonetheless.

Zed took his hand from his healed nose and turned his attention to Oliver.

“How long has it been since the second awakening?” he asked again.

Oliver’s expression remained worried even as he answered. “Five years.”

Five years, Zed mused with concealed shock. That’s a lot of years.