True to his request, Cain was awoken exactly five hours after he had fallen asleep in the chair in the meeting hall, and from how he felt, they hadn't even bothered to move him.

Standing and stretching, he winced as his shoulders popped back into place, while his neck felt like a golf ball had taken up residence next to his spine.

"Oh… that's a big knot…" he muttered, putting pressure on it as he tried to work it out on his own. Just pushing on it had caused his head to go from a blinding headache to a full throb, and after a minute of kneading it, he sighed in relief as he felt the knot give way.

"Cain, everyone is ready to go."

Alice's voice popped up from behind him, causing a slight gulp of air from Cain as he turned around the face her.

"Alright, then let's get this over with," he said, beginning to head outside.

"Wait a second. Are you sure this will work?" Alice asked, standing in front of his and leveling him with a fiery gaze. Cain returned it calmly, knowing exactly what she was trying to get at.

"Not in the slightest. I won't die from it so don't worry about that, but I have absolutely no idea if y'all can even leave. Like, am I tearing into an existing gate that can be exited? Am I creating an entirely new gate with no other exit? I have absolutely no idea. I haven't exactly been able to be free enough to test this ability in the past few weeks, with y'know, being under scrutiny by everyone." Cain sighed as he saw Alice's gaze turn soft.

"It isn't anyone's fault I got a high rating, and my sister is who she is. But it's the only option we have unless you think you can kill Skoll."

Alice nodded and turned around, heading outside. Cain followed shortly after, having spent a second wondering if he really should be lecturing someone older than him. But at this point. It was water under the bridge and he had work to do.

Once outside, the sheer amount of chattering and murmuring instantly set the hairs on Chain's neck standing straight up.

'I had forgotten I was a total introvert until this point,' he thought, shifting uneasily before all of the eyes testing on him as he exited the building. It was extremely nerve wracking, and something he had most definitely not been prepared for. Luckily for him, Alice took over speaking, almost as if this entire thing had been planned by her in the first place.

“I’m sure many of you heard the rumors floating around, even though I ordered everyone in the meeting to keep quiet,” she said, leveling a glare individually towards everyone that had been in the hall less than six hours ago. Understandably every single one of them shrank from her gaze, but to Cain, this just meant that everyone that was technically in charge couldn’t be trusted. He filed that not away for future reference.

“Yes, we have a way out of here without having to kill the gate boss. It is our last resort, but if I am to understand that people couldn’t actually keep quiet to try and avoid mass hysteria, then you all already know what we are dealing with. So, to be honest, not only is this our last resort, but our only option. In order to make this work smoothly, you all need to listen to Cain. If he says move somewhere, move. If he says jump, then jump. He is our only hope for getting out of here alive.” With that, Alice turned to Cain and waved him forward.

‘It doesn’t look like I have much of a choice but to do this now,’ he thought, realizing deep down that he had been hoping for some sort of a miracle where he didn’t need to reveal his skills.

Sighing, he opened his skill window and looked for the one he wanted.

System Alert: Creation selected. Place the skill? Y/N

“Yes,” Cain said, blinking as his vision lit up. It was like someone had placed weird contacts in his eyes that created designs upon the ground in front of him.

‘Huh, this is actually larger than I thought it would be,’ he thought, turning his head slightly and watching the circle move across the ground as he did so. It looked like everyone had gathered close enough to the point where he could actually put the Gate under them without actually having to move anyone.

As he opened his mouth to speak, the ground shook, and an immense howl filled the air, causing everyone to freeze up in fear, except for Cain.

System Alert: Apathy activated. Resisting fear effects.

‘Fear effects? Well, that explains a lot,’ he thought, making sure everyone was still in the circle. Luckily no one had moved, or they were all completely frozen in place. The rumbling he could hear underneath the echoing of the howl though did not bode well for the group though, frozen in place as they were. Looking off to his right, he could see Alice stuck in place too, and she was the only one just out of reach of the Gate’s location.

Keeping his gaze fixed on the ground in front of him, once he had placed the circle back where he wanted it, he stretched an arm out and shoved Alice into the proper spot. Unfortunately, as she was still under the fear effect, she landed face first into the grass.

‘I’ll have to apologize for that late,’ he thought. “Activate skill Creation. Coordinates set.”

System Alert: Creation activated. Use current markers to place?

"Yes," Cain said, praying that this activated quickly. He wished that he had had the time to test this out more thoroughly before now, but that was all in the past.

As the skill confirmed and he felt the energy drain from him, he noticed a mass of clouds forming over the next hill closest to where their base was.

"Observe."

Observe active. Mutated creatures causing a dust storm. Advised course of action: Run.

'Great. Run. I'm TRYING to do that System,' Cain thought, swearing incoherently at the system in his mind.

A flash of light almost blinded him in the middle of his internal monologuing. The ground began shifting below him, a deep red light seeping out as the Gate began forming right beneath everyone's feet.

"Oh, that's cool," Cain muttered softly, staring in awe as the red light enveloped the entire base camp. "And a lot bigger than I initially thought it was going to be."

As he watched, a slight ping to his right caught his attention, and he turned his head to look at the blue window that had popped up.

Countdown timer: Five seconds remaining. Four, three, two, one.

Gate activated.

As soon as that notification popped up, Cain' s knees buckled as the rest of the energy left him, and the ground disappeared through the swirling red vortex. Everyone in front of him began falling through, buildings included, with the exception of himself.

System Alert: Error detected. User cannot traverse through this Gate due to outside interference.

"Outside interference? What outside…. The Over-System. Son of a…" Cain was cut off as a howl erupted through the air, this one filled with more rage and bloodlust than the first one. To cement this point, the system popped up a new window and he swiped it away without looking. The odds that it was his danger sense was astronomically high, and he didn't need to worry about it right now.

Looking around, he saw that everyone except himself was through the Gate, and since he wasn't able to enter it, he did the first thing that came to his mind.

"Close Gate."

And with that, he began running towards the dust cloud and the sound of the howling. His only option to leave now was to somehow survive and kill Skoll, and he was hoping that everything running at the base's old location was so hyped up and enraged that he could manage to slip by them easily.

It was a foolish thought, but still the only one that managed to cross his mind at that point in time. Cain was almost positive that the only reason he was remaining calm and able to think during this exact moment was because of the ‘Apathy’ passive. But like all things, reality came crashing down on this foolish notion as he reached the bottom of the hill. Something he hadn’t counted on, and also something that ‘Observe’ hadn’t told him, was that among the mutated creatures attacking were insects.

Cain slid to a stop and stared in front of him, a buzzing swarm of mosquitos blacking his path. Even in a different world, they were still an utter nuisance to everyone’s existence. ‘I guess they weren’t an issue in the forest because Skoll was gathering them,’ he thought, watching them slowly move towards him. But they were just mosquitos, and something that he thought he could deal with easily enough with the fire skill he had learned the day before.

That was what Cain thought anyways. The reality of the situation began setting in the second he started preparing the fire spell, when a guttural laugh erupted inside his head.

‘Foolish human. You remember how I killed Bronn?’

Cain’s memory flashed back to the explosion, realization setting in as the first of the mosquitos reached him.

“Shit.”

BOOM.

-----

Cain opened his eyes, sitting in a space that was pitch black from every angle. He was fully aware of the fact that he had just died, but there was just something amiss about where he was right now. It didn’t feel like he was actually dead. A soft ping and blue light drew his attention back in front of him as he stared at the window that had popped up from the System.

Tutorial has ended. Proceeding with compilation of points and rewards.