Chương 123: The Foras Funhouse, Part 2

The kinds of twisted games this thing could come up with made me nauseous. Foras put me in a situation where I had to stop the school shooting that took Chris' sister from him. I didn't have my powers. Power. Whatever it really qualified as. I didn't have my team. Didn't even have Shivvy. He must not have had any kind of hypna-whatever for Foras to use. But I did have my brain. I still had my training. I still had my instincts, and my memory. The gunshots hadn't started yet.

Sprinting down one of the hallways, the screaming had only just started and the crowds began flooding towards me. The thick haze lingering around them stood out to me like an almost translucent smoke. Steam or vapors, maybe. Prominent enough that I could infer how wide a berth to give them before they even came close. BANG BANG BANG First three shots already rang out. Had to pick up my pace.

Seemed the school itself was reacting to my hurrying, as greater floods of "students" passed by me, no longer in simple blobs but now great streams of bodies, trying to trample me. All I could do was stick to the walls, sidling along lockers that felt as cold as the grave between tides. The one advantage of this restart is my body still seemed fresh. No fatigue in it physically, just mentally. So I was able to give it my all with every sprint between avoiding herds of fake people.

BANG BANG BANG Second set of shots. Sounded closer than the first go around, and I was right to note that. Turning a corner, I could see the same scene as last time. Hooded man leveling his gun at that girl. On the other side of a swarming crowd. Too wide to just sidle against, all I could do was weather the storm and push through them. I avoided slugging at them, as much as I wanted to with the understanding they weren't people, simply because that could take energy I was saving for the shooter.

The son of a bitch that ruined Chris' life. Took his sister's life. I pushed through the tsunami of people. All I could do was try my best to lean out of the way of the individual hazes these things were making, worried that too close a contact with them could do something worse. Finally, breaking through to the other sid- Arms shot out from the crowd, grabbing at my face and neck and jacket and yanking me away. Too many at once to simply pull out from as I was dragged along the linoleum.

More of that sickly haze emanated from the gun, my mind's eye practically drawing a clear line from the inevitable BANG Lights. Fluorescent lights. Cream-colored walls and floors. Blue-black doors every ten feet. Halls and corners and turns that go on forever. Thick metal lockers that looked more like miniature jail cells. And screaming. Still only one broken heart in the corner of my eye. That wasn't me dying that started it over. It was a failure. Lily died, my fault. Wasn't going to let it happen again.

Had to evaluate. If I didn't have my powers, that meant my brain wasn't busying itself with maintaining them too. I could afford time to think for a second. Had to go over the things I saw, what I knew, first. Speculation after. The panic already was occurring before the shots happened. Even before any gunfire, there were crowds of "people" screaming and trying to escape from the shooter. Likely meant to convey gunfire was happening before the "memory" starts, or that word had already spread.

The key detail, regardless, was that crowds would be trying to evacuate. They never came all at once. Always in clumps. They were bigger clumps the second go around. The third likely would have the same. Just touching them was harmless. So long as I could avoid being tripped and trampled, I could likely pass through them where needed. Physical contact was not a risk with them, necessarily. That being said, they could act in ways beyond just running. They grabbed me and held me still, dragged me away.

I didn't know if contact with them prompted it, as if they wanted to make sure I permanently joined the crowd, or if that was an addition to mess with me. Save that for speculation. The distance and direction of the shooter and Lily were the same both times. So I could rely on navigation to just hurry there. It also meant I could take a different direction if I really needed to experiment. My body did not stay tired in any reset. So I could go all out every time. That would be pivotal on my part.

While I didn't have my powers, I still had access to my physicality. Lines up with Tudor saying I didn't simply have enhanced strength. There were always seven shots. Two sets of three. The seventh shot killed Lily on the last run. On the first run, it killed me. That was my countdown, and it wasn't a long one. The lack of things to interact with meant I had no reason to waste time on anything. Just had to focus on getting to him. Alright. That was everything set in stone. Now for speculation.

Stick to useful speculations. No tangents. Between the increase in crowd size and the arms grabbing me, it was likely the memory would make itself harder with each iteration. I had to account for the world deliberately adjusting itself purely to make things difficult. I had to view the entire environment as a trap. Both times, seven shots rang out. Did the gun only have seven bullets? It's an imagined scenario, so it may have more. It may have an infinite number. No point guessing.

The haze over everything might have some effect or phenomenon. I needed to figure out what that was, but for now all I could tell was getting close to it wasn't lethal. Could his gun be taken? BANG BANG BANG Would have to figure it out later. Time's up. Gotta get to work. The actual direction of the shooting was always ahead of me, just off to my left side. I usually had to pass by four "blocks" of classrooms. Most of the time was wasted on just outmaneuvering these crowds. My first test was on the arms.

By not bothering with sidling and instead just trying to push through the stampedes, I had a much faster path I could take. Even with having to weave through all of the horribly deformed and almost offensive faces in the crowd, it was faster than slowly sliding against the lockers. When I burst through the first crowd, my test was answered with arms reaching out to grab me. Seeing them coming this time, I was able to swat them away and continue moving. That gave me the answer of what I had to do.

Break through, slap away hands, get to the shooter. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. BANG BANG BANG Right on time. As I turned the corner, I could see the shooter on the other end of the next herd of false students. By this point I had gotten the outmaneuvering down to a science. I wasn't as graceful as Chris when it came to dodging, but I was still able to move in ways the things couldn't keep up with.

Breaking past the crowd, I opted to just duck past the limbs instead of wasting time swatting them. It was higher risk, but much faster. And the faster I moved, the more time I had to deal with the shooter- As I looked up, the barrel of the shooter's weapon stared me in the eyes, the rest of his body un-moving. BANG Lights. Fluorescent lights. Cream-colored walls and floors. Blue-black doors every ten feet. Halls and corners and turns that go on forever.

Thick metal lockers that looked more like miniature jail cells. And screaming. Two broken hearts now. This was bullshit, the world was cheating. Wait. No. The world wasn't cheating. It was following the same rules as me. I had remembered the previous two goes around, and I was able to adjust. The memory itself was adjusting too, I saw that as early as the second go when the crowds were denser and they started grabbing me. So it remembered my strategies. Including the direction I charged from.

If I ran in the same directions again, tried to flank him the same way, the shooter would know and would punish it. That's what happened. Okay. That's actually something I could work around, work against. I didn't wait for the starting "bell" this time, swinging to the left instead of rushing forward. The easiest solution would be to go for his back, but I needed to hold onto that just in case the memory pulled any new bullshit.

So I forced as much as I could out of my body to go all the way around, to try and flank him from the left side. I was already past the two blocks I needed by the time I heard the start. BANG BANG BANG The memory knew I was catching on, though. The crowds were denser than before. Rushing through them was like climbing up a waterfall. I was dodging riptides at this point with how many there were. And now they were trying to grab at me through the crowd itself instead of at the end.

The world around me was doing everything it could to make sure I failed. Maybe there was something poignant there, but my focus was on what I knew was possible. Foras wouldn't put us in this situation if he didn't think there was a potential success. He discussed the idea of fairness multiple times. Balancing. If he wanted to just torture us, he clearly had more effective means to do so. BANG BANG BANG Right on time. As I rounded the corner, the last shot was still ringing through my ears.

I could see the shooter raising the gun off to his other side as I rushed him. Old reliable came in handy as I tackled him to the ground, and immediately began scrambling for the arm that had the gun. My only rule was to keep the gun pointing away from Lily and away from me. In the scramble, the haze around him thickened and welled up with every almost panicked flail to either strike back at me or to pull the trigger. It was starting to repulse me with its texture in the air.

I lost patience with the simple grappling, opting to instead punch him across the jaw and yank the pistol from his hands in the moment he was stunned. If he was alive, he might try to target Lily some other way. He might have another weapon stowed on him. There was only one answer. The shooter knew, and threw his hands up, letting out some guttural moaning noise in an attempt at speech. I lined where his head was supposed to be, deep in the dark of that hood, in my sights. BANG Lights. Fluorescent lights.

Cream-colored walls and floors. Blue-black doors every ten feet. Halls and corners and turns that go on forever. Thick metal lockers that looked more like miniature jail cells. And screaming. What the fuck? I stopped him. The tragedy didn't happen, I prevented it. What was I doing wrong? Lily was stopped, the shooter was killed- I'm so fucking stupid. This was Chris' tragedy. It wasn't just that Lily died, it was that Lily died and he killed a man who surrendered.

I was viewing the world through his eyes, so I had to do what wouldn't have been a tragedy in them. So I somehow had to- BANG BANG BANG No time to think, I'd have to figure it out as I go. I only had to cross half the distance from last time, as now I could follow the one hall straight to his back. This was going to be my only opportunity to take his back. This time I had to be more aggressive with the crowds. I remembered from the first attempt, the shooter took every hit I could give him.

I didn't have super strength, but I've put on muscle in the past couple of months and I've been learning how to properly punch for just as long. In the mounted position I was in, I should've been able to knock him out cleanly. But that wasn't the case. So these guys are durable. Meaning, I was more than within my rights to slug them whenever they got close instead of just trying to weave out of the way. Being able to beat my way through parting the "seas" of people, I was clearing through even faster.

Part of me felt bad about hitting "civilians," but I knew this was all made up. None of it was real. They weren't real people like the ones I wanted to be out there saving. I could swallow my morals for a minute. BANG BANG BANG I could see the shooter as I was moving. The shots just blared out in the air. He wasn't even in a different position. That settled it in me that this was all just fake. That I had no reason to feel bad about doing anything I could to prevent the tragedy.

Finally breaking through the last crowd, I rushed up to the shooter. He was looking to the left as I reached him. I decided the best move for this was the same one that stopped Technofiend. I planted my feet down firm, before swinging my right hip forward. He made the mistake of looking to his right at the same second. My shin collided with his face with a firm WHAM that sent him straight to his back, gun flying out of his hands. In his scramble to get up, I grabbed the gun from the floor. His hands went up.

I leveled it. BANG A clean shot through the thigh. He collapsed to the floor, letting out more guttural wails, but alive. I tossed the weapon aside, making my way over to what was supposed to be Lily.

"Hey, you're safe, I got you," I stated. She looked up. That wasn't a person. Her eyes and mouth were just dark pits. The cavern pretending to be a mouth stretched into a smile, as she spoke in the same wailing tone as the shooter.

"If only you were there instead of Chris. I wouldn't be burning in Hell right now." Black. Then, the lights of the circus. The crude attempt at cheers from the false audience. Foras loomed over us, looking smug. Glancing around me, I could see exasperated looks on everyone's face except for Tancred and Lafeuillade's. Their gazes were set firmly on the thing orchestrating our suffering.

"Congratulations to the winners of the first round! Leo Holt, Abichail Tancred, and Jairo Carter succeeded in their first rounds. They get to continue to the next!" Get to continue?

"What the Hell are you talking about?" I interrupted, yelling up to the giant.

"Losers don't get to keep playing, Leo Holt! They lost their chance! Now you have to shore up for the rest! Now let's move on to the next round!" Black again. Foras' face gazed at me in the void as the wheel was dragged back into view. Its spinning took a while, which gave me time to process what happened. The tragedy was stopped in Chris' perspective. Was it all in Chris' perspective? The thing copying Lily didn't act like I was Chris. But… the haze.

It occurred to me how Chris described being able to see things like "smoke" with his power. Was I borrowing Chris' power for that? Were the others using my powers in their own situations? The wheel's ticking and tocking slowing down interrupted my thoughts. All I could do was keep in mind that I had to be prepared for having others' powers if my theory was true. As it landed on the next option, the strange runes shaped out into clear words. Not just words. Numbers. LOSING HER ON 9/11