(Dana)

They had set up camp just outside the college, but camp was a relative term. They had nothing to shelter themselves with, and everything in their bags consisted of items picked up of monsters bodies, and food.

There were nearby houses, of course, but no-one had the energy to go looking for trouble. They had no idea what might be in the individual houses, so it was probably best to just leave them until they could get back up to fighting strength. But they didn't have time for that.

They were all tired, but it was already past 6 and the sky was dark. It was getting colder by the second. They may not survive the night outside.

Currently, they were discussing what to do next. James was still sleeping off his 'heroic' actions as the others had called them. It was still a stupid thing to do.

Dana had assumed he was dead when they had all pounced at him, but she had no time to grieve and had to retreat into the room of hanging victims when half of them turned and scrambled towards her instead.

She relived the moments she remembered clearly of that room, the joy of finding the rest of the group, and the frustration at how long it was taking to find any of them. Then the fear as she hears something else moving in the dark. She hadn't dared use mana flame in case she set fire to one of the cocoons humans.

She hadn't known who was in which, so she just tore at the webs on the closest bundle.

She revealed the side of a face. A strangers face. But then she had heard the clacking of hard claws on a solid surface, and before she could turn, found herself paralysed, and rapidly losing consciousness. She felt herself spinning on the floor and being wrapped up. She had failed them. She had failed James.

But next thing she knew, she was conscious again and trapped in the blackness of the webs. But as she struggled, she felt the webs loosening and breaking. Rather unceremoniously and very painfully, she fell head first out of the cocoon onto the floor.

"Ugh..." She moaned in pain into the darkness.

She activated mana sight and saw that the few living people still in the webs were waking up. Only two of them though. She hurried to her feet and tore away at the webs on the two swaying bundles.

Dom slipped out of one, gasping for air. And may fell from the other, making a splat sound as she landed.

"Oh man... I need to pee."

Dana picked her up by her shoulders and set her steadily on her feet.

"Later. Find callum and Annie."

She lit up mana flame on her hand, and May did the same with Bunsens flame. The room was creepily lit with the two small flickering light sources, but they could see at least.

Dom was already up and using a green tinted knife to shred the webs, managing to avoid cutting whoever was inside.

He swore and moved to the next one.

May pulled at the webs on another one, while Dana looked around for the cause of her freedom. Unsurprisingly, she saw the door had been blasted open, but she at least recognised it as James's work.

She found him lying near the corner of the room. His gun was still firmly gripped in his hand and pointed at a half-exploded monster. It couldn't be analysed, but when she didn't need to analyse James, he had a status effect above his head.

High Stamina Exhaustion: (1:35:24)

She didn't need to read the information about it to know what was happening. He had passed out from overexerting himself again.

But he had killed whatever had surprised her. She tried to pick him up, but saw the condition of his clothes, and then hands.

She gasped loudly but then was drawn away from her own drama by May screaming.

She ran over to them and found Callum on the floor, still covered in wisps of the web, but his face was cold and unbreathing.

"SHIT!"

Dana screamed and got angry. He couldn't have been ununresponsive long, based on May and Dom's condition.

Maybe she could still resuscitate him.

"Get him flat. Take his shirt off. Dom... hold him down."

Dom did exactly what she said, while May sobbed uselessly against a locker.

Dom was sick of it already it seemed.

"For fuck's sake May. Find Annie."

She took a moment, but nodded and took his knife from his outstretched hand.

Dana had been messing with the basic electricity spell she had received with her class, figuring out how her mana channels circulated a powerful current through her body. She could cause a powerful spark to spring to jarring life between her hands and followed that theory now. It was easy enough to weaken the spell by using less mana, but couldn't make it any more powerful than its upper limit.

She laid her hands over his heart and the centre of his chest. She could only guess that was where she was supposed to put them. She had to focus on the mana input, so this was one she would have to say.

"Shock."

Callum's muscles tensed momentarily, but there was still no sign of life.

"Single Mana boost."

Live target or mana generator required.

"Shit."

She put her hands back and doubled the mana.

"Shock!"

Callum's arms clenched, and Dom strained to hold him down. This was the reaction she was looking for. She was at the right voltage.

But there was still no other from Callum's body. No breathing, no heartbeat. Nothing.

"Shock!"

She upped the mana only a little more, and steam started to rise from the area between her hands.

But still no reaction.

Dana looked around through mana vision. None of the other bodies had any mana in them. It was as if it was only being held in because the thing that had trapped them was keeping it in.

Mays light was moving quickly, so dom was likely working in the dark. But that was of no concern to Dana. In a last ditch effort, she unleashed the full power of the spell.

"Shock!"

A visible arc of electricity flared between her hands, burning the flesh on his chest.

She put her head down, sobbing. He hadnt meant that much to her. Why was she getting so worked up over this?

But she felt movement under her hand. Then again.

She secured her hand and felt a heartbeat. A second later, he gasped in air and sat up wincing.

"Owwwwwww. Who stabbed me in the goddamn tits?"

He looked down at where he hurt most, across his chest, but couldn't see anything in the dark. He sniffed, and upon smelling his own burning flesh, collapsed again.

Dana breathed a sigh of relief and analysed him. His health and mana were both severely low but were increasing.

One crisis down. One more to go.

"May! Did you find Annie?"

May stepped around the corner, a dark bundle in her hands.

Dana deactivated Mana sight and lit her mana flame. Dom squinted at the sudden light but quickly saw what May was holding.

"We. We were too late."

***

"Dana!"

Dom shouting pulled her from her flashback. Suddenly she was outside again, away from the dark room.

She was outside, still dark, but less so.

May had ignited a fire, providing light and warmth. It looked like they had simply torn down a tree to use for fuel.

"Huh? What was the question?"

"I asked if you live nearby. I don't feel right breaking into one of these places, and it's a bit of a trek to get to any of our houses."

Dana nodded. Somehow, she was ok with letting them all in her house. If her family was still there, they would provide excellent protection.

"Just down the road. Only a few minutes walking."

"Ok. Let's go as soon as James is up. We need all hands on deck to transport this stuff."

He gestured to all the loot they had recovered from the hall of spiders.

When they emerged from the side room, with James over Dom's shoulder, they found the foul smelling but rapidly deteriorating bodies of the spider horde.

Dom whistled at the destruction.

"The two of you did this?"

Dana was almost as surprised as Dom was.

"No. This was James. I only killed twenty of them. There must have been about four times as many left. He... killed them all."

May kicked a pile of limbs. Her arms empty.

"He tore them apart. Jesus, what were you guys doing in the workshop when we left? Super screwing? Do you have a magic vagina?"

Dana looked seriously at May and left the question hanging despite her obvious need to try and make the situation less tense.

"Just get the goddamn coins and shit. Did the one back there drop anything?"

Dom shook his head.

"I couldn't see anything. Like the one in the workshop. All it left was its skin and skeleton. No coins or anything."

***

"DANA!"

Dana was pulled from her memories again. It scared her how easily she could be drawn into them.

"What? What's going on?"

"Jesus fuck, are you going to be like this from now on?"

Dom was getting and angry for the first time, at least as far as she knew.

"No. Sorry. I'm just... tired."

Dom calmed down when he realised what he was doing.

"Yeah. Me too... Sorry. It's just, I liked Annie. we were friends for a long time."

"Yeah... I'm sorry about her. I... I wish we had come faster."

Dom shook his head and looked down. She could hear the threads of pain in his voice, and the strain it was for him to keep his voice level.

"Don't. Don't do that. If you'd come faster, you might have died, then we would have all died. This... I can only think of it as the best scenario. The lesser of two evils."

She could see tears falling from his face, and Callum put his arm around Doms shoulder.

"I know dude, I'm gonna miss her too."

Dom started to cry then, which set off May, who had just been staring into the fire and was now silently crying into her hands.

Callum stayed still, but Dana could see tears rolling from his eyes.

This wasn't a moment for her to see. This was three people who had lived through their own versions of hell as social outcasts, and as soon as they might have become alpha figures, one of them was lost.

She was sure that several others of the guild they talked about were also dead, but Annie was the only one who had been there and experienced it with them. It was the hardest for them to deal with.

Dana couldn't stand this. She looked over at James, sleeping off his own demons. She remembered what he had said about losing people, and knew he might never go through the same sense of loss as they were now. Unless she were to die.

She stood up and walked away from the fire. It may be dangerous to be alone in the dark, but she didn't care. Hopefully, the others wouldn't notice.

She knelt on the lawn that bordered the entrance to the college,and pulled all the flowers from her armour in turn and gathered them into a bunch.

She was infinitely grateful that they were still there when her magical girl costume disintegrated in the spiders web.

With the slightly dried flowers held in her hands, she used one of her occupational skills for the first time.

She crushed the flowers and let the petals fall from her hands, slowly letting them fall.

Petal divining

"What do I do? How can I help them?"

She instantly felt the stamina drain, and the petals started swirling in patterns. When they fell to the floor, they landed in a distinct pattern, spelling out the word: Remember.

Dana's breath caught in her throat. She had been expecting a direction to take that would help them get to her house faster, or safer. Maybe she wanted to help them deal with Annie more than help them get safe.

She threw away the steps of the flowers and gathered the petals again.

"How do I help us all remember her?"

And she let the petals slowly drop again, a blue curtain falling in front of her.

Memorial

Dana didn't have the stamina to ask again, so she thought about what memorial she could do. James might be able to craft one, but that would probably send him back to sleep.

She could do this. She debated burning Annie's name into the grass, but it would likely disappear in a number of days. This should be permanent. It should be beautiful.

She remembered how James had described the mana constructs in his gun as beautiful, and how they were made.

She could make a crystal memorial. She had the mana and the control.

Taking a deep breath, she imagined the structure of solid crystals and activated Mana sight. She used mana force and pushed the mana into sheets as thin as she could, all in the shape of a circle about 10cm wide. The detail helped her focus on the problem of maintaining layer after layer of mana.

She could make them thinner, and denser, but they became harder to control. How the hell did James make his mana sphere stable?

Trying to remove energy was pointless. It was made of energy. She pushed the layers together and shut her eyes, hoping this would work. She was rewarded with a cracking sound, and when she opened her eyes, there was a thin disk of blue crystal on the pile of petals in front of her, roughly the size of a CD.

Construct discovered: Crystaline

Spell discovered: Mana Construct (B)

She took a closer look at the disk, it was pure vibrating mana through mana sight, but a perfect disk through normal eyes.

Dana didn't have a lot of mana left, but judging by how much it took her to not only discover but use the method enough to make the disk, she could do a little extra.

"Mana Construct."

Dana imagined the crystals growing on the disk in the desired form, and closed her eyes, willing the spell to work how she wanted it too.

When she opened, there were small letters made of the same blue crystal that spelled out a phrase.

"Ahead lies Annie Decker, she of cold blood."

Dana jumped at the voice from behind her, but relaxed when she saw it was James, his eyes glowing bright blue.

"That's beautiful."

She turned at the new voice and looked into the glistening eyes of May. She was still crying a little but even in the dark, it was easy to see she was grateful.

Dom and Callum appeared too, and Dom put his hand on Mays shoulder.

"Thank you."

Callum nodded to show his agreement.

She laid it down on the petals and stood up, facing the group.

"Shall we go?"

It was abrupt, but she felt that if she stayed here any longer, she would start to cry.

James took her hand.

"Your place, right?"

Dana nodded and the two walked back to the fire. May, Dom and Callum would likely lay their respects, so Dana packed away all that she could carry into her bag and pulled it on. She picked up one of the flaming branched from it Stu unlit end, using it as a torch and heat source. If it got too far down or started to go out, she was confident in using her mana to fuel it.

They waited a few minutes until the others approached the fire again. They all looked lighter this time as if they had left some of their grief with the memorial crystal.

"Come on." Dana urged them on with a wave of her hand.

"The sooner we get going, the sooner we can get inside."

The others were all ready in an instant, Callum and May armed with torches of their own.

Dana realised then that none of them had their spears anymore, and that she had no idea how any of them were defending themselves. Well, she had seen the knife Dom used but had no idea what Callum or May were doing.

They could work It out the following the morning, so she shrugged her own curiosity away.

"This way."

She walked off, with James next to her, still in his tattered clothes and armour. She noticed that his hands were healed and cleaned, but his nails were black now. Maybe it was a skill of his? Something to do with his role as a priest to a deity. She just asked. He would talk to her.

"James, why are your nails black?"

James looked down at his hands in the light, surprised. So it was the first time he had seen them too.

"I have no idea."

"Do you have any skill or something about It?"

James looked through his status for a minute, but came up blank.

"No. I have no new skills."

Dana sighed, puzzled.

"But I do have a new feature. It's called arachnic talon."

"Somehow I feel I'm going to regret this. Does it say how you got it?"

James read through what Dana guessed was an info screen,and nodded.

" Yeah. But it is kind of gross."

"Just tell me."

James put his hands up in a mock surrender.

"Fine. Apparently, I got it because I soaked my wounds in the blood of my enemies while in a berserker mode."

Dana grimaced.

"So there's spider blood in your hands?"

She could already see an end to their relationship if he couldn't touch her without her spine crawling.

James focused on his nails, and then showed them to her again. They were clear this time. Normal.

"I can turn it on and off. I think it's a feature because it's more biological than magic."

"Still, you're a bit spider now. And that worries me."

"How so? Despite the whole spider aspect of it."

"How easy is it to take on part of your opponent if all you need to do is get a bit of their blood in you?"

"Maybe having a berserker mode is rare?"

"I hope so. I don't really want to see the remaining human race become weird hybrids."

James looked away, probably imagining some animalistic feature that would look good on her, but short of some wings, she wasn't interested.

"Stop imagining impossible stuff. We're here anyway."

They were in fact at Dana's house. They had walked quickly as they talked, and the others had kept up, silently.

There were no lights on in her house, as expected but the door was still shut and unbroken, unlike many of the houses they had passed.

Dana pulled a key out from her shirt pocket and unlocked the door. It swung inwards easily and silently.

She turned back and handed James her torch.

"Get rid of this. There's a pond over there."

James threw the torch into the pond in Danas garden, and the others followed suite she instead pulled out her phone and used it as a torch despite it somehow being on low battery already.

"Come in. I'll get everyone some blankets and break out the paraffin lamp."

Dana was secretly distraught that her family wasn't here, but there were no signs of a struggle inside, so she still had high spirits. They must have gone somewhere safer.

Dana breathed in the familiar smell of her own house and beamed at the prospect of sleeping in her own proper bed tonight.

Once she had sorted out the three out with blankets and shown them where they could sleep, she walked to her bedroom where she expected James to already be.

She was right, and he was standing in the centre of her room reading a post-it note.

"What's that?"

James looked up with a suspiciously neutral look on his face.

"It's from your mum. They're safe Dana. They're all safe."