Chapter 15: The Fragile Human Psyche

I crawled up from out of the crater, unfortunately, my clothes had become singed from the explosion. A few small holes were in it now and it was covered in ash.

I saw the applicant to me, his body heavily injured from the explosion, the one which I had walked out of completely unharmed. The S-Rank psychic quickly came over and began healing the applicant.

The S-Rank and I stared at each other for a moment. A smile grew wide on my face, I felt my facial muscles contract unnaturally. The S-Rank froze as he looked at me. His healing, for a moment, stopped. He drew back his hand for a moment and on his face I saw hostility.

My smile grew even wider as he vanished from view, taking the injured applicant with him. I began to feel a strange laughter rise from my chest. I struggled to restrain it, but small creeps came out.

‘Control yourself. Carefully.’

I turned back and saw my teammates looking at me, confused at how I was unharmed. My smile radiated throughout my entire body. For a moment I saw a possible future, where they never made it across this minefield, their bloodied and broken bodies strewn across the ground.

‘Calm yourself. You have to remain calm Mark.’

I felt my smile rapidly dissipate and walked to the minefield's end.

…

After assisting the others in crossing the minefield, largely by ensuring nobody would try and throw something at us again, we began our run once more.

While running I thought about how each of my teammates had reacted when I helped them cross the minefield.

I was forced to admit to them that I had a unique power that I hadn’t told them about. I didn’t explain the specifics of it and luckily they respected my decision. For now, keeping it secret might prove beneficial in the future.

Roland didn’t mind that I had kept such a secret from them at all. He had done mostly the same by keeping his unique power under wraps until recently. However, he did ask me to at least mention I had such abilities next time.

Violet looked at me with heavy suspicion. It seemed she noticed the strange mental state I had entered following the explosion. It was a mixture of multiple factors and a side effect of the unique power, although I didn’t tell her this. She seemed to have pushed it to the wayside for now.

While running I turned towards Vivian. I saw her arms still shaking even though it had been quite a few minutes since we left the minefield. Her eyes were cold and distant and her lip quivered ever so slightly.

I thought back to when I had led her across the minefield. She had practically wrapped herself around my arm and refused to leave. Her hand constricted around my own until I felt a cracking inside of it and forced her to relax her grip. Her breathing was heavy, fast, and irregular despite a lack of strenuous physical activity while moving across the minefield.

‘Is she shell-shocked from the injured applicants?’

Such a possibility was likely. Most people didn’t realize how brutal a hero's work could be. Most C-Rank heroes, which took up the majority of them, would stay out of dangerous situations. As such the internet was largely filled with relatively safe and easy hero content, made largely by C-Ranks.

However, B-Ranks and above were the ones that dealt with dangerous villains, as such their missions and duties were more deadly and horrific. While it was largely kept silent so as to not impact a country's morale, if one searched deep enough, one could find numerous testimonies of the absolute hell that many heroes experienced in the line of duty.

It’s for this reason that many S-Ranks were often considered slightly insane, having been turned into new people as a result of their brutal environment. It was even more true for SS-Ranks, the principal was a prime example of such. Becoming someone of such strength took years of brutal and horrifying work that could break a person's spirit and psyche to a point of no return. While some broke worse than others, not one person made it through unscathed.

I shook my head and returned my thoughts to Vivian. She would likely continue down the hero path, considering how far she had come, but whether or not she could last was entirely different. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Nobody deserved to experience something so traumatic ever in their lives. But it was for this reason that AGH was able to consistently produce a large amount of S-Ranks, they were all trained to deal with such stress.

…

We passed the 20-mile marker. I suspected now that every ten miles there would be an obstacle for us to traverse since the previous 2 obstacles took place at 0 miles and about 10 miles.

Sure enough, as we rounded a bend behind a mountain the path ahead opened up and we came to a halt. Catching my breath for a moment I looked in awe at the sudden expansion of the path.

The path grew out massively, now seemingly as wide as the length of 5 Ameriac football fields. On top of that, across the entire path were the ruined and destroyed remains of what appeared to be a city. The buildings now stretched to be 400 feet tall, towering above our heads. Everywhere we looked fires were consuming any building they found and broken hydrants flooded the streets with water.

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In all directions, there was rubble and destroyed buildings. Parking garages falling apart with cars still in them, houses caving in with wood rotting away, and even the tallest buildings appeared to be leaning and had destroyed windows throughout them.

‘This place, it looks just like a real ruined city.’

“Hello again future stars.”

I jumped in shock as I heard the principal's voice ring out from hidden speakers, I even heard echoes of him coming from deep inside the ruined city.

“Welcome to the third obstacle. The place you see before you is a replica of a portion of a city that was destroyed during a battle between Heroes and Villains. 1 S-Rank hero was involved, 12 A-Ranks heroes, 17 A-Ranks villains, and about 300 B-Ranks on each side.”

I stared in awe at the destruction. This is what happened when elite psychics entered into life-and-death combat. The city would have taken decades to recover from such an event. For just this portion of the city alone, it could have easily taken well over a year to clear out the debris.

“This was one of the least destroyed sections of the city as the S-Rank did not fight here. In the spots where she did fight, not a single building was left standing, and it was against 12 A-Ranks.”

‘What?’

I stared in shock at the destruction in front of me. This was a less destroyed part of the city? On top of that, nearly vaporized? The power of an A-Rank was already enough to completely devastate a city, the power to throw entire skyscrapers multiple times in a day could easily lay waste to even the largest of cities. Yet an S-Rank took on 12 A-Ranks and the results that the principal described spoke for themselves.

‘This is the power of those that are nearly the gods blessed.’

I gulped at the thought of potentially facing an S-Rank, someone who could lay to waste an entire city singlehandedly and take on 12 A-Ranks at once. This was the power at the top of the world, the power that gave one the right to change the world. And yet there were even those above them…

“The S-Rank hero involved in this goes by the hero name Aurora. Her title is Queen of Twilight. She was a student who attended this very school.”

I nodded to myself. Aurora was an exceptionally famous hero, as all S-Ranks were. She was considered to be one of the most promising psychics of her age while in school and at only 29, was one of the youngest S-Ranks in the world.

“Your goal for this obstacle will be to find a volunteer inside this rubble. Only then will you be allowed to progress past this obstacle.”

So, they wanted to train us in our search and rescue skills. Fighting villains was only part of the job of a hero, patrolls, press meetings, search and rescue, and rebuilding were all duties an elite hero A-Rank and above would undertake.

“This battle actually happened very recently, on a very famous night in this country.”

Suddenly I felt the blood in my veins chill and my face pale. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare use that night. It was the most destructive night in Panaj ever since the Great War 2000 years ago. Such a disaster still rang true for all the people who lived here, even if one was too young to live through it.

I felt my head grow heavy and I felt the world spin slightly beneath my feet as memories flooded into my mind. I heard screams and crying and felt myself in a woman's arms, being carried as fast as possible through the wreckage of a city as a magnificent fight occurred in the skies above.

The woman's face had streams of tears running down her face as she ran, desperate for life, a man behind her, closely following had the same.

“This is The Night of the Massacre, an attack on the largest cities in Panaj by multiple villain factions that resulted in the deaths of 100 million people, or 3.3% of Panaj’s total population. For the attacked cities, only 8% of civilians survived.”

Vivian beside me cupped her hands around her mouth as tears filled her eyes. Violet didn’t react as extremely but she wasn’t left unshaken by such an event. Rokea and Panaj were neighboring countries, there was no way she didn’t hear about this event. Roland was the only one who was relatively unaffected. Ameriac was heavily involved in international affairs and Roland likely knew many stories that happened in war-torn countries as a result of his social standing in Ameriac society.

The fact that the principal had dared to replicate an event from such a night was obscene. Such actions could be shamed by the entire country, Principal Sever might even be punished by the National Hero Committee. This was nearly on par with mimicking the Sholotcau of the Wijesh People or the 250-Year Enslavement of Friacan Ameriacs.

“Now then, good luck rescuing. Oh, you should know that each volunteer will be grading you on your performance and will give or take points accordingly. Good luck future stars.”

Roland, Violet, Vivian, and I stood in front of the ruined city for a minute or so. Vivian and I struggled to keep ourselves under control from what we had seen. Vivian appeared to be a citizen of Panaj like myself, it would only make sense that we would be so aggravated by what AGH had done.

“Do we have any plans?” Roland asked us after we had calmed down.

Violet raised her hand, ready to respond to Roland already.

“I can use my Soul Seer to find volunteers hidden in the rubble.”

Roland nodded, “Yes that could work well. The only problem would be finding out how to get to them without causing potential collapses of other structures. Let’s leave in 3 minutes, the applicants behind us will be catching up soon.”

As of now, we were likely somewhere between 35th and 50th place with many applicants having failed the previous obstacle. We agreed to Roland's plan and took a short rest. I sat down next to Vivian, whose eyes had gotten increasingly wider since the principal announced the city was based on The Night of Massacre.

“Are you ok Vivian?”

She curled her legs up into her body and formed a ball, sealing herself from the rest of the world.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice muffled through her legs.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“No… maybe…? I don’t know.” She moved her hands to the top of her head and began gripping her hair tightly.

I sighed quietly so she wouldn’t hear. What she had seen earlier was affecting her greatly.

“Vivian, are you scared?”

She now brought her head up and looked at me. Her eyes were slightly watery and she sniffled a little. She looked at me as though I was about to patronize her.

I gave a bittersweet smile towards her, hoping to let her know I was genuine in my concern.

“I’m not going to insult you, you know.”

Vivian sniffled again and nodded at me. She wiped the tears forming from her eyes, her hands shaking.

“Yes… I’m scared.”

I nodded again and offered my hand out to her.

“Hold my hand, I’ll help you through this.”

Vivian looked at me strangely for a moment before taking my hand. I filled it with a small amount of psychic power to make it more warm as I felt her cold skin touch me. Her hands were incredibly soft and delicate, almost fragile it seemed.

“Thank you, Mark.”

I smiled at her, “Don’t worry about it. Just keep holding on tight alright?”

I gave her hand a firm but not painful squeeze, something which she returned. We walked over to Violet and Roland who were standing at the edge of the obstacle, hand in hand.

“Are we all ready?” Roland asked.

We all nodded, affirming our resolution to pass through the obstacle. Violet and Roland looked at Vivian and me strangely for a moment before regaining composure. I didn’t blame them, suddenly holding hands like this was awkward for me as well, but it appeared to provide Vivian some comfort.

With all of us ready, Roland made his way into the third obstacle, followed by Violet and then Vivian and I, still holding each other's hand as we walked into the ruined city.

…

‘...’

‘You remember it all don’t you?’

‘...’

‘Yes, I do…’

‘...’

‘No. I remember it all just fine.’

End of Chapter 15