Solomon felt as though his head was about to split apart. At the same time, the strength in his legs faded away. He had to reach out blindly with his left arm to find a wall to prop himself up against before he fell. Massaging his temples didn't do a thing to ease his headache. Solomon grit his teeth and called up his interface.

He cursed at what he saw. Both his HP and MP had been drained completely. What he had thought to be the system fully healing his wounds had actually just been the magical powder suppressing the pain. A brief inspection confirmed that he at least wasn't bleeding to death, but it would be a while before the system had him back in top shape.

The powder had given him a powerful boost, but it carried with it a devastating hangover. Not to mention the side effects.

A much-needed pulse of system healing passed through Solomon's head, starting at the base of his nose and radiating backwards in a cooling wave. When it passed, he still felt like he had been shot, stabbed, and beaten up, but at least he could think straight.

He dropped his hand to his side and opened his eyes. The first thing he was confronted with was the sight of the two dead guards on the ground, red armbands difficult to make out on their arms under the gore that had poured out from their ruined skulls.

He sighed. He remembered exactly what he did under the influence of the powder. It wasn't like he'd been possessed, or out of his mind. Everything he'd done had been something he'd wanted to do. Exactly what he'd wanted to do, with no hesitation or pause for reflection.

He definitely had resolved in his heart to kill the guards. They had signed up to work with the aliens at the first opportunity, betraying humanity in exchange for a little positive treatment. They'd hurt him and probably had wanted to kill him. They had seemed perfectly willing to hurt his sister if it would get him to talk.

He had wanted to kill them. If he'd had the gun to do it, he would have shot them all without a second thought. Killing them up close and personal with his bare hands? He might have been able to do it, but not without a shred of hesitation. The powder had spurred him into the action, given him the power to do as he wished, and silenced any internal sense of restraint that might have held him back.

He might still be unsettled by the gore, but he didn't regret his actions. Anybody who collaborated with the aliens to that degree was fair game, as far as he was concerned, even before they started messing with him directly.

He turned away from the bodies. The guards had frisked him and tossed his items down the hallway, no doubt intending to examine them after they were done with their interrogation. Nobody had ventured down the hallway yet despite all the commotion, so all of his things were still where he had last seen them.

Solomon picked up his gear, making special note of the gun and the six cartridges that were all he had available to him for the moment. If he was going to be consuming powder directly as well as using it as a propellant, he was really going to have to build up a stockpile of the stuff.

Gear collected, Solomon hesitated for a moment before returning to the dorm room. He spared only a brief look at the third dead guard before turning his attention to the student. A look of surprise was frozen on his face, punctuated by the hilt of the dagger sprouting from his eye.

Solomon felt a twinge of regret as he gazed at the body. He'd been angry at the guy for knuckling under. He'd felt contempt. There must've been a murderous impulse mixed in there, too, but nothing he ordinarily would have acted on.

These last few days had been rough. Solomon's conscience wasn't as finicky as it once was. Even so, he wasn't so far gone that he would kill a guy just for being a coward.

Setting aside his conscience, he still could have gotten a lot more information. What had happened on campus? What were the new rules everybody was expected to follow? Where did that alien guy take Kanmi? The student had seemed happy enough to answer anything Solomon wanted to ask.

Instead, Solomon had gotten just enough information to send him charging off towards his next fight and then killed the guy out of hand. He'd made a stupid, impetuous mistake.

It was a mistake that could hurt him in the long run, too. In order to succeed, he would eventually have to turn the mass of people against their alien overlords. That wasn't going to happen if he got a reputation for murdering anybody who ever cooperated with the aliens in any way. That would be a good way to turn the people against him and solidify the hold the aliens had on them.

Solomon shook his head. Nothing he could do about it now. He untied the armband from the student's body and pulled the dagger out of his eye. He did his best to wipe it clean before tucking it away in his inventory. He checked his MP. It had recovered a little bit.

With a moment of concentration, he activated the disassembly spell. The student's body vanished in a wash of light, leaving behind a core that was smaller than any he'd seen since he was fighting furballs.

Solomon didn't want to make it easy for whoever cleaned up this mess to figure out what had happened. He didn't have any illusions that he could hide everything, especially considering the possibilities opened up by system magic, but he could make their jobs harder, at least.

He readied another dose of powder and crept down the hallway. Part of him wanted to hide in the dorm room until his stats had recovered, but the thought of just sitting around like that chafed at him. If there was going to be a fight, he wanted to start it on his terms. Otherwise, if there were people on the floor who he could pump for information, he wanted to get to them as soon as possible.

As it turned out, the rest of the floor was deserted. It seemed his interrogators had wanted a little privacy while they worked. Perhaps the alien hold on the students wasn't quite as strong as he'd feared. Solomon was happy to have the breather while he figured out how he was going to go about rescuing his sister.

He also needed to think about Kanmi. If he was being watched over by fighters at the same level as the guy that had defeated both of them so easily, though, well... at least Solomon had some time to think it over.