With all the extra baggage, it took much longer to reach the mysterious grey portal than it had to get to the tower. I had to stop multiple times simply from Astoria regaining consciousness and beginning another round of squirming, before I threw her to the ground, cranked her hypersensitivity to max, and kicked the shit out of her. The resulting impact would send all her pain receptors into overdrive as they struggled to comprehend the shear intensity of something like a kick in that state. Then after a few minutes of her puking some disgusting, black tar substance, I would pick her up and continue our journey.

I was really starting to look forward to when I got Aiyla back, if shes this sensitive to a simple kick imagine what actual torture would do.

Fun aside, I stepped up to the portal that had previously appeared after exiting the petrified forest- which according to Astoria, had been a proving grounds for most pioneers to evolve. I’m guessing I was an anomaly, being not only a pioneer but also a scourge. Good thing too, if I had been trapped in the supposed carnivorous forest without a weapon I would’ve died all too fast.

The portal was easily ten feet tall, a constantly swirling mass of a transparent liquid. Strange patterns slowly rippling outwards to form the elliptical structure of the portal. I reached out my left hand to touch it before having second thoughts….

This thing could kill me… In excruciating ways at that….

Once again setting her hypersensitivity to the max, I start spinning in circles before chucking the barely conscious Astoria through the portal. After she passed through, it began to collapse on itself, barely giving me time to jump in after her.

What happened next is hard to explain as alien images and senses bombarded me. Time lost meaning as reality warped and I felt my body be shredded before being reassembled. There was no pain, just shear nausea. It felt as if every particle that constituted my being was rejecting me, leaving me retching on the ground for a few minutes before I could control the train of bile constantly being ejected. That point really hit home the fact that I hadn’t eaten in days.

Standing up and dusting myself off, careful to avoid the pile of greenish liquid, reveals the charred remains of the city I once had plans for… I guess it would be too convenient if time had stopped for the rest of the world while I was in my trial. Thats a shame, I had spent so much time thinking on how I could quench the fires and lure the zombies to their camp. I don’t regret going past pyrokinesis and causing myself to evolve like I had, my new eye is really fucking cool. Still, I now have to worry about that Renzo guy constantly… I’m sure my plan would’ve taken him out of the picture permanently.

Plan B then!

I start to walk towards where the camp used to be before remembering my luggage. It only takes a second to find her, the sound alone was quite disturbing…. She was on the ground shaking as if she was having a seizure, the tar like substance being slung left and right as her neck snapped in several directions in fast succession.... That alone would have stopped me from getting closer as I knew from experience, that shit was hard to remove. What made the situation worse however, was the slowly growing yellow pool below her….. *Sigh* I didn’t take you to raise kid….

Not bothering to remove her hypersensitivity, I snapped my fingers before a small white flame appeared above Astoria… There were two more things I had discovered on my trip to the portal… For one, whenever I summoned flames from the ambient Aether, unless I actively tried to make them another color they would appear as whitish with hints of black creeping in from the edges… The second….

I slowly lowered the white flame until it nicked the edge of one of the tar puddles….

Astoria’s screams echoed across the ghost town as her body was doused in flame.

Whatever the tar substance was, it was highly flammable.

To the point of nearly setting us on fire when I was playing with my kinesis earlier on our trip. And that had been with a small amount of the tar… now there was veritable gallons of the stuff, so you can only imagine the blaze that had encircled Astoria….

Although she had been convulsing pretty hard before, no doubt from the portal and hypersensitivity creating a feedback loop causing her to experience untold of amounts of nausea… Now she was full blown losing it as the Choker simultaneously weakened her enough for the fire to seriously burn her while also allowing her godly regeneration to heal all her wounds instantly creating even more sensitive new skin. She thrashed left and right, even with a severely weakened body she was putting dents in the concrete…. Good thing that choker scaled to the wearers power… If not she might be able to just rip the damn thing off, despite the pain….

Needless to say, I bought some snacks and that couch I had been eyeing before sitting back to watch the show….

A few hours later, I was left with a naked Astoria in the middle of an enormous crater she had made through repeatedly bashing her body against the ground to put out the flames….. Her skin had an unhealthy pink look similar to her hair as it visibly steamed as it came into contact with the air.

A simple phrase continuously echoed through the surroundings, as the girl struggled to breathe,

“Kill me.”

“Pfft, hahahahhahah!”

Mark could barely contain himself as he fell out of his chair, into the pile of wrappers of all the candy and snacks he had eaten in the meantime.

“Oh man, that was a good one Astoria! I can’t wait to actually make you beg, if you scream so easily from just fire, you’re going to regret being born when I get done with you…”

Walking up to her, he quickly dialed back the suppression on her judgement and reception before allowing her to speak….

….

….

….

“Kill-”

She could barely get the first word out before Mark kicked her straight in the abdomen once again.

“Coherent dear, I don’t want to waste my time nor do I want your piss all over my clothing. That tar shit was bad enough but that whole bodily fluid thing was never my fetish so ill pass.”

Reaching into his ring and ripping the clothes off Juliana, Mark proceeded to use a combination of Telekinesis and Aerokinesis to force Astoria’s limp body into the baggy clothing...

“Good enough, as long as it covers you it should work. Don’t want people thinking I am a pervert or anything.”

“Got anything to say, or can we get back to our road trip?”

Astoria was actually suffering more than normal as her brain could actually comprehend the excessive amounts of pain it was feeding her…. Having a higher intelligence was always a double edged sword as it meant you could comprehend things you were normally not meant to comprehend, so when her pain normally exceeded this limit, it had simply ignored it… Now, with her consciousness no longer being repressed, she was forced to endure such extreme amounts of pain from a simple kick that her entire body seized up. Not able to open her own mouth, the tar substance began to leak out of her ears and nose once again, causing her to suffocate on her own puke….

Unfortunately, her being stuck in a human body meant she needed to supply it with its basic necessities, and while she could normally do this easily via her main body…. Now she needed to actively tend to it, so without oxygen she quickly lost consciousness.

Staring down at Astoria, waiting for a response, Mark shrugged before setting all the values back to normal. Which meant more or less, keeping everything on their highest settings except her sensitivity…. He really meant it when he said he didn’t want that shit all over his clothes.

Picking her up once again, he finally decides to go check out the remains of the old evacuees…. Hopefully there were a few left that he could…. Ask for directions… The smile on his face was unmistakable… They had no choice whether or not to tell him, rather, it was more of how long they could last against him before they spilled what he wanted.