Stand, Redux - Araceil - 나 혼자만 레벨업 - 추공 | Solo Leveling

Chapter 1 Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

It would take several hours for the thought to occur but.....

Somehow....

He didn't think Awakening was supposed to hurt.

At the time however.... Lying face down on the tarmac of the underpass between his school and home, cars thundering above him on the dual carriageway, the walls around him burnt and melted smooth, cold and buzzing with mana so strong it felt like he was lying on top of an angry washing machine. The shatter-proof light fixtures melted to slag and sparking with shorting electricity. The once colourful walls covered with graffiti done by his classmates and decades of teenagers and ne'er-do-wells before him had vaporised to shimmering white marble or white quartz. All of it cold. So very cold . At the time, as he opened his eyes, feeling like he had been stuffed into a sack and beaten with sticks until his whole body was one giant bruise, he didn't think much of anything beyond the fact that he was going to be late to his part-time job at the green-grocers.

His brain felt like soup, sloppy and lumpy, his joints like they had been welded into position, his bones filled with hot glass shards as he slowly gathered all of his limbs up under him.

He was dimly aware of the sparking lights, of how the 'tarmac' under his hands was too smooth, cold and static, buzzing against his skin up through to his bones as he stumbled to his feet. But all he could think of was that he was going to be late, if Lisa called his home phone then his parents would find out about his second part-time job and he would be f*cked.

People pointedly didn't look at him as he shuffled and stumbled his way down the road and onto the highstreet. Greg's Green Grocer's was halfway down, opposite the clothing store Peaco*cks, between the little cafe and the British Heart Foundation charity shop.

“Huey, you don't look too good lovey,” Bridget, one of the other cashiers, greeted him as he shuffled in. “One moment sir,” she excused herself to the customer she had been serving, one of their regulars from the carehome around the corner, Dennis, and hurried over to him before he staggered into one of the fruit-bins and shoved his hand into the carefully packed tubs of strawberries. “Lisa!” she shouted making his head swim.

The conversation flew over his head as he sagged against the shorter woman, he was vaguely aware of his boss, a very nice pug-faced woman with bleached blonde hair and overdone make-up who thought giant plastic hot pink earrings were fashionable. Blessedly cold hands with hot pink acrylic nails touched his forehead and cheeks, words and talk of a fever sounding as though it were underwater, worried talk about how he didn't like talking about his family and they probably shouldn't call them – he mumbled a refusal, he didn't want his parents knowing, they couldn't know, they couldn't know, they weren't allowed to know, it would ruin everything -

he blinked in and out of awareness, leopard print seatbelt, a PG tips monkey on a car dashboard, Lisa's car. The Estate. The piss stinking stairwell up to his flat. The graffiti on the walls. The dumb little stubborn daisy that grew out of the crack next to his doorstep. Door was open and unlocked like usual. No sign of his parents.

Lisa's concern as he stumbled in and tried to push her out.

She left. Finally.

He hid in his room. He passed out on his bed in all of his clothes and the throbbing in his head consumed everything.

He slept.

He woke briefly when he heard the door slam and his mother's raucous laughter, the staggering and banging as she and his father returned and headed to bed.

He slipped back into unconsciousness – and woke over an hour before his alarm for school.

He still felt like he was recovering from a terrible cold but.... his brain didn't feel like soup anymore....

Awakenings weren't.... supposed to hurt.

He'd seen a girl Awaken at school before, on the playground when she had been playing football with the guys, a golden light burst off her and she'd kicked the football so hard it physically exploded against the brick wall and dented the brick-work like a car had crashed into it. She had only been D-Ranked.

She had neither felt nor noticed her Awakening. The whole school had been talking about it afterwards and the Hunters' Association had come to do a special Assembly presentation to them all because Awakeners always go in groups . Where there was one there would always be more. Their school was now on a watch-list for future Awakeners and there had indeed been another two more, one who had even managed to reach B-rank, a Ranger who had been quickly taken to Queen Elizabeth Academy – a special school for all underage Awakeners C-rank or higher. They'd explained how to go about recognising when someone was undergoing an Awakening, how to identify a forming Gate, what to do when you saw one and how to report it, and what to do should there ever be a Dungeon Break in the near-by vicinity. Another thing that always occurred where there was a large number of Awakened.

But either way, what happened to him had been nothing like what happened to his classmates.

Even with his clearer head he still wasn't.... entirely sure what had happened.

Just that everything.... kind of exploded.... almost like what happened to the girl playing football with her burst of pale golden light, but as though the burst of golden light had been an explosion instead. Did it correlate to strength? He would have thought the Association people would have explained something about that during their assembly.

Had he really Awakened though?

Part of him refused to believe it.

People like him didn't get to Awaken like others. He was not lucky nor blessed. His existence was one that would forever be a struggle, the best he could hope for was contentment and he had been working his way towards that for years now. His paper-round at the age of ten, starting to work for Lisa when he turned fourteen, Claire and Archie sneaking him food and money when they could, Kyle, Dogmeat, Steph, Warren, and the other people his parents were friends with – he had been working towards his escape for years.

Awakening..... would ruin everything.

Awakeners existed all around the world, and almost every country had different laws around them. Some, like North Korea and Russia, forced them into the military regardless of Rank, former employment, or even age. There had been uproar on social media only a few short years ago when someone caught a glimpse of an eleven year old Awakener taking part in a Dungeon Break wearing their little tailored military uniform, face splashed with gore.

In the UK..... there were strict laws about underage Awakeners.

In the early days of the first Dungeon Breaks and Awakeners, there had been no laws. Everyone who Awakened was forced into military service like Russia and North Korea. When a gate appeared every Awakener within five miles was forced to attend and deal with it regardless of rank. There were A-ranks and D-ranks working together in E and C rank Dungeons, and even teams of E's and D's forced into A-rank gates and to their deaths because there just weren't any higher ranked Awakeners near-by. In those days, survival was luck of the draw. Would you be lucky today and end up in a Dungeon with someone highly ranked, or would you end up in a Dungeon beyond your level?

It got so bad that the Awakeners threatened to destroy the country if the laws weren't changed, there were riots, the Prime Minister at the time was nearly assassinated. The UK Hunters Association had gotten there just in the nick of time to prevent the D-rank Assassin from taking the man's head off. It forced them all to re-examine the laws around Awakeners and the processes around Dungeon Breaks and the forced military service.

These days.... all underage Awakeners were monitored by the UK Hunter Association. E to D ranks could remain in public school, anyone C or higher needed to attend Queen Elizabeth's Academy until they graduated and could go into whatever industry they wished – though it was generally heavily implied that it had best be one associated with Hunting. Guilds had every underage Awakener on a watch-list, Queen Elizabeth's had a contingent of Recruiters practically camping out on their doorstep every day and night.

But the part that chilled him to the bone.....

Every underage Awakener, regardless of rank, were reported to the Association, the Government, the school...... and their parents.

His parents.....

They couldn't know. Shouldn't know.

His parents.... weren't good people. He didn't even know what his rank was, he could be super weak, or his Awakening could have been messed up for whatever reason since it wasn't normal. They wouldn't care, only about how much money he could bring in for them.

He felt sick, his head spinning.

He didn't know what they would do, what they could do.

No matter what his Awakening Rank was, he absolutely could not let his parents find out. Which meant he needed to get up off his ass and get a shower before going to school.

The flat was silent, but he knew from experience his parents wouldn't be waking up until gone noon unless he made one hell of an unholy racket. A hot shower would not wake them up even if he slipped in said shower and took everything down with him. He stripped out of yesterday's school uniform and stepped under the hot spray, scraping what felt like weeks of dry sweat and exhaustion off with a scrubbing pad and his mum's cherry body wash – it was small and petty but he refused to use the bar of hard soap they got him. She never noticed him using her body wash anyway and he hated how the soap made his skin feel like leather.

His soapy fingers slid over the cigarette burns on his neck and shoulder, the sharp jut of his ribs and hip bone, the thin lines of his calves. Scabs he knew should be there gone as though they had never existed in the first place.

He had.... For as long as he could remember....

Been an unwanted existence.

Matthew Brook. Born on the 19^th of May in the year 2000. He had his mother's surname because his father didn't want to be legally responsible for him. He'd been named by his dad's bestfriend, by Dogmeat, because his mum was too busy begging for pain medication out of the nurses to fill in his birth certificate. He spent the first eight months of his life in the NICU due to complications that occurred during his mother's pregnancy due to substance abuse. Her friends thought she had been unaware of the pregnancy, she told them she's still had her period throughout it all, and it wasn't as though she were particularly thin, the pregnancy managed to go unnoticed by all her friends. But she had admitted to his face that she knew she had been pregnant, that she'd lied to them about her periods, she just hadn't wanted to stop using. Why should she give a sh*t about the health and wellbeing of the parasite growing inside her? She often wondered why she hadn't gotten him aborted, told him he should be grateful that she hadn't. His father told him outright that she'd tried. It hadn't taken. He survived against the odds.

He had his dad's fluffy blond hair and grey eyes. He had his mother's pale skin tone and high cheekbones. But that was where the similarities ended. Both of his parents were tall and overweight, his dad had a tone of tattoos and his mother changed her hair every other week and wore the nails to match. He was dangerously underweight for his age, to the point where his PE teachers had sent him to the school nurse for counselling because they were worried he had an eating disorder. He didn't. He just wasn't allowed any of the food at home, and was saving as much of his money as possible to move out. He told them he had a high metabolism and did a lot of parkour after school, they didn't question him further but he had noticed them watching what he ate for a while afterwards. The fact that Archie always gave him half his lunch seemed to settle them down though.

He didn't know why they cared.

It was a familiar story, one told several times over in this very block of flats alone.

His circ*mstances weren't even that bad in all honesty. Yeah, his parents knocked him around a bit, but it wasn't like they hospitalised him, or starved him to the point of brittle bones. He'd gotten really good at hiding bruises and tending to burns, his make-up skills were legendary as a matter of fact, Claire told him he should look into going to Hollywood as a make-up artist. And yes, maybe he had developed a habit of carrying a first aid kit with him just in case any of the injuries he had split open due to this or that. But they never f*cked with his head or his heart. Never tried to make him love them, or play mind-games with him like some f*cked up parents did. They didn't manipulate him into thinking that their treatment of him was because he had been naughty and imperfect. They just didn't like him, didn't want him, and made no secret of it. There was nothing sexual either. Or let anyone else do it either. Hell, his dad had gotten a couple of local lads together and beat the kiddie fiddler on the ground floor so hard he ended up in hospital with brain damage when he tried to exchange some co*ke for a night with him once. Everyone knew it was his dad that staved his skull in. No one breathed a word. The police didn't even bother to investigate too hard.

No one would believe that his dad raised his hand to him. And if they did, they would just wonder what he'd done to deserve it. At this point in his life, if his parents really did lash out and beat his ass hard enough to cause trouble then he would have definitely done something to deserve it. He knew how to navigate around them by now, if he f*cked up and got smacked around, that was on him.

He wasn't bad off. Really! Not compared to other people. His parents didn't force him to deal with paedophiles, they weren't paedophiles to begin with, they weren't in a weird cult, they didn't force drugs down his throat to make him sleep or shut up, and when they moved into the new flat he actually got a bedroom instead of sleeping in the dog-crate in the kitchen (was it weird he still kind of actually missed it? Padding it out with blankets and pillows and building himself a cosy nest, being enclosed and safe inside). He was allowed to go to school, and once he started his paper-round they stopped hitting him so much. Afterall, if he couldn't do his round then they wouldn't get extra cash for baccy from him. He wasn't bad off. He could manage until he got himself out on his own terms.

He climbed out of the shower and dried off, brushing his teeth and dragging a comb through his hair before tying it up out of the way.

The face that looked back at him from the mirror was tired, pale, and wan. Grey eyes, a scar cutting through his left eyebrow and temple, with his hair pulled back it could also be seen cutting through the tip of his ear – his dad had thrown an ashtray at him and it broke on his face. Shaggy blond hair that was usually fluffy and curled around his face but right now was dark and heavy with shower water. He was, in all honesty, entirely too full of sharp edges and bony points to ever be considered cute or attractive. And right now, he was even paler than usual, his eyes red-rimmed and his lips a little blue-grey at the edges. He looked feverish and ill. No wonder Lisa and Bridget had sent him home yesterday. The question was would school send him home too?

Hah. Not likely. Not unless he passed out or started crying blood. Gotta keep as many people as close to 100% attendance as possible or the school would lose funding.

He brushed his teeth and headed out to get dressed for school, turning his alarm off when it flicked on.

Washed, dressed, and much more awake than he was before, his brain felt like an over-stimulated ferret in a box of packing peanuts as he pulled his shoes on and quietly left the flat.

He needed to think of a plan of action. He needed to prepare and deal with this sh*t. He needed to figure out his Rank and then figure out how to hide it properly.

Awakeners, even the most lowly ranked ones, were superior to regular humans in almost every physical way. Stronger, faster, better reflexes – some even said they were better looking and it certainly seemed to correlate that the higher your rank the more physically attractive you were if you Awakened early enough to grow into it. The girl at his school who Awakened while playing football. She wasn't allowed to play anymore, or take part in PE either. Her careless kick had caused massive property damage, destroyed the football, and could have killed her classmate if it struck them instead. Awakeners didn't have to do PE in school, and they were barred from almost every single competitive sporting competition worldwide except Martial Arts and other combat sports where they would be pitted against other Awakeners of the same rank. MMA cage matches between low rank Awakeners had rapidly become one of the most lucrative sporting industries in the Western World.

He was going to have to take the weekend in order to figure out just how strong and fast he was before he ended up in PE class on Monday. That way he would know exactly how much he could get away with and how much he needed to fake or hide.

This was going to be a pain he concluded, spotting a commotion up ahead at the Old Boney, the graveyard between home and school. It was technically an old Catholic Church but the only times he had ever seen it actually being used was when someone was getting married and wanted the bells rung. He was only Year 10, fifteen years old. He had another year and a half before he could leave secondary school and get a job properly. But no one would let him rent without a guarantor until he was eighteen, or paid the first six or eighteen months up front for any place he did find that was willing to take him. But until he was twenty-two there was no legal requirement to pay him the full proper minimum wage, so he would have to be careful about what job he did find so he could aff- that was a Gate.

His classmates were clustered around the walls of the graveyard, not daring to step inside, gawking at the swirling blue-black portal, filming it and chattering and theorising what Guild was going to show up, if they would see any celebrities -

“If there's a new Gate, that must mean we're going to see more Awakeners soon, right?” he heard one of his classmates, Liam, say to his bestfriend Jamie from somewhere behind him in the crowd. He tensed, shoulders drawing up towards his ears. “There's always Awakenings when there's Gates. Think it'll be anyone in our class?”

Jamie snorted and he heard the two jostle, “Pff, well, it definitely won't be either of us!” he laughed.

He shivered and quickly moved away, ducking his head down so low his shoulders started to ache. He knew his Awakening had been non-standard. It would be just his luck if he was broken or something. A freak of nature. He didn't want to end up vanishing into the bowels of the Hunter's Association never to be seen again, held under a magnifying glass or dissected on a metal table and studied to see why he was f*cked up.

He had to be extra careful. It had taken a long time and a lot of research but while people Awakened all the time, there had been very obvious increases in the number of people Awakening before and after major surges in Gate activity. People were going to be extra vigilant now, looking for anyone Awakening. He was going to have to be extra careful despite managing to fly under the radar for so long.

Very careful he realised when he reached the underpass and saw it closed down, Association staff and scientists prowling the area with strange devices and crystals, attempting to take scrapings from the melted walls. Men and women in suits and sunglasses preventing anyone from going inside which left a lot of the students pissed off as they had to take the ten minute walk down the side of the road to the next underpass and then another ten minute walk up the other side in order to reach the road that would take them to school.

He quickly turned away as one of the devices started ringing and hurried along with the tide of upset students until the sound of the device faded away.

Claire was absent when he got into Tutor Room, and Archie was splayed across his desk like a big ginger spider, all gangly limbs and elbows, drawing more anatomically improbable anime girls in spine breaking poses. Claire liked to verbally tear his drawings apart, and occasionally Archie took her advice, but for the majority of the time he enjoyed making them even more cursed in response to her complaining. They had a very strange relationship, Claire and Archie. He gave them ten years to either hate each other to the point of never speaking again, or getting married and having one of the happiest most f*cked up relationships ever.

They exchanged the usual pleasantries but he didn't have the energy to take it further, thankfully Archie was pretty good at reading the room and knowing when people didn't want to talk. He was a pretty quiet person to begin with because he had a pretty bad stutter and it was annoying so he didn't like talking much – or was it because other people found it annoying and rarely gave him the chance to finish what he was saying so he just gave up most of the time? Hm. He didn't mind the stutter, he had a bad habit of finishing other people's sentences but he did consciously try to let Archie finish what he was saying without jumping in, not wanting to be rude.

“Diii-iiid you heeear about the Gate?” Archie eventually asked while he was checking his homework planner for what they were doing today. Tutor room first thing, Maths, Science, break time, then double English, lunch, Geography, and then Spanish.

“....Yeah,” he admitted unhappily. “Passed it on the way in. Hope it's dealt with soon,” he muttered as Mrs Radcliffe came in to do the register. Tutor room was basically a half hour slot first thing in the morning to see who had shown up, make any announcements, and for the teachers to check on them in general, if they had any concerns or wanted to address anything. Today all anyone could talk about was the Gate, and the closed off underpass. Theories were already flying around about an Awakening or a fight between Awakeners or even worse a Dungeon break. Idiots forgetting that it took a week before a Gate broke and they all used the underpass twice a day to get to and from school.

Maths was quiet and easy. Science was in the chemistry labs this morning but they didn't do anything interesting beyond listen to lecture, and do some exercises in their books. English was Shakespeare's Macbeth where they took turns to read it out. Jenny, one of the socially awkward girls in his class, tried to make it more interesting by voice acting her lines only for Camille and Laura to laugh at her. She immediately stopped and went back to reading in a monotone, red faced and embarrassed even as Mrs McGuire scolded the other girls for being childish and tried to encourage her to keep going. She didn't. By the time he was sitting down to eat his lunch, a bottle of water filled from the drinking fountain in the canteen, a fruit salad, and Archie's ham sandwiches, it was already all over the school that the Gate at the Old Boney had been beaten and was closing.

“I-iiiit was oh-oOOnly a DeEEe-rank,” Archie reported to him as he scrolled through his phone, ribena carton in his other hand. Of the two of them, he was the only one without a phone of his own, his parents would have broken it or sold it down at Cash Converters every other week of a tens of weed. His friends were pretty good about making sure he was in the loop though. “Damn,” he mumbled peering at his phone and squinting, almost nose to screen with how close he was. “Ee-even a DeEE-rank cah-aahn make stupid money.”

“Oh?” he asked listlessly as he idly mouthed the sports cap of his water bottle. Bored, tired, wanting to be at home, but not wanting to be mean to Archie and just ignore him for the day by hiding in the school library where he could find some manner of book and step out of reality for the rest of lunch time.

“Twelve thousand,” his friend reported, holding his phone out to show the news article from the Daily Star where the headline blazed with ' D-rank Gate worth 12.6k closed in 4 hours – a new record or a waste of tax payers money? '. He took the phone and skimmed the article, eyes widening as it explained that the twelve and a half price-tag was what was earned within the Dungeon, there was an automatic 3k closure fee paid by the Association that got split between the raid team. So in truth, the whole Dungeon was actually worth over fifteen thousand pounds – split between eight people. For four hours of work.

He ran the numbers quickly, 12600+3000/8=1950

£50 shy of 2k. Each.

His mouth felt all at once dry and wet and his whole body filled with static pins and needles.

That was four months rent on a bedsit flat if he got lucky to find a cheap one. Five months if he had to go into a houseshare, two-three months if he was unlucky and could only find a standard flat-flat. 2K could keep him comfortably for three months, including rent, bills, and food, in a place of his own where he could come and go as he pleased, where he didn't have to barricade his door whenever his parents decided to get high at home. That wouldn't reek of baccy and weed. Where he could actually cook and eat in his own kitchen and the bathroom didn't smell like dead animals or look disgusting.

His breath shook as he returned the phone to Archie who was already eagerly surfing social media for more information.

Despite all the regulations regarding Underage Awakeners, underage hunting was about as common place as underage drinking. It happened all the time, you just had to find an adult who didn't mind enabling you. An adult who wouldn't purposefully take advantage. He knew plenty of people who didn't care about underage drinking laws, most of his parents friends being some of them, they were always offering him alcohol whenever he dropped by because it was quicker than making a cup of tea – they were too lazy to get up and put the kettle on when he could just open a bottle of beer and their host duties would be fulfilled with that.

Two thousand pounds.

That could change his life.

He already had eight hundred saved, tucked away and hidden in his room because he had no where else to hide it and he didn't know where his personal documents were so he couldn't open a bank account. It had taken years to save up. He'd only had to dip into a small handful of times, when he'd needed to get a new pair of shoes and when he'd needed to pay the bills and eat that month his parents vanished off to a festival without telling him or leaving any money behind for the gas or electricity metre.

If one dungeon betted you two thousand in a single afternoon.... how much could he get if he swapped his paper-round with Dungeon Runs?

Enough to maybe get him away from his parents earlier than planned?

It was worth looking into.

Well worth looking into.

Notes:

Hi everyone, welcome to the rewrite of Stand.
Yes this is Stand rewritten, taken three steps to the left and out of the kitty litter that is Harry Potter. I've had to rework a lot of this in order to remove and unthread all the HP elements that I'd hammered into the original fic, so i hope you will all enjoy the Redux. As you will have no doubt noticed from some of the mentions in the story, for those of you new to it at any rate, the timeline has been CHANGED. This will be explained later, it is a conscious decision with plot relevence so please be patient. By all means, theorise as you please but please don't try to correct me/badger me for explanations. They'll be coming in the story >:3
And yesss, yes, i know, i said i'd catch myself up BEFORE posting the first chapter but - come here real quick, come closer.
i need the validation okay?
So please leave me some nice comments, let me know your thoughts and opinions because i have exceptionally low self-esteem and anxiety so knowing if people actually enjoying the redux with my original characters would be fantastic. Please and thank you <3

Chapter 2 Summary:

WARNINGS: Referenced child abuse, self-harming (cutting)

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

It was annoying, but he called out of work afterschool, pretending to still be unwell. Thankfully Lisa and Bridget were okay with it, they could hold the fort down easily enough between the two of them. It wasn't like the green grocers saw a lot of custom these days with everyone using the Sainsburies down the road most of the time.

He used a little of his savings to get the bus into the city centre to use the central library computers to do some research.

It was...... scary, exciting, interesting, tempting.

Historically, when the Gates first appeared, all Awakeners became Hunters. There was no option. They were pressganged into unofficial military service, and this was still the case in several countries around the world only they were officially-official, with ranks and divisions and everything. The UK had split away from that ignoble recent history after several Awakeners staged riots in protest and almost assassinated the Prime Minister of the time. Back then, they had their own ranking system, both an official one and an unofficial one.

Internationally, both Gates and Awakeners were ranked from E through to A. This lettered form of classification originated in the East though the exact country of origin is still a matter of debate. In the beginning of the Advent, the UK used Minor, Intermediary, and Superior. With no means of fine measuring an Awakeners' strength, individuals of E and D rank would be grouped together into the Minor Awakener Category, the same with Gates. Intermediary Awakeners and Gates equalled the modern C-rank, while B-rank was the equivalent of Superior.

But as Gates continued to appear and people Awakened in ever increasing numbers, the danger grew. Magical devices with greater sensitivity were developed, and the categories changed. Minor because the equivalent of E-rank. Intermediary equalled D-rank. Superior = C-rank. Champion = B-rank. And then the first A-ranks appeared, the first Heroes.

He was just a kid the first time someone broke the magic scanner, the lettered rankings were just beginning to be internationally recognised, the UK was still clinging to its own ranking but it was socially falling out of favour. He still remembered it though.

Paragon.

The first S-rank Awakener, Mohammed Arif, Healer.

He had been so excited at the time, excited enough to annoy his dad with his bouncing and chatter as he spoke to his friends while they were all hanging out at Dogmeat's playing Fifa and getting high. Dog thought it was adorable and spent an hour talking to him until he was distracted by someone else – his dad grabbed him by the ear and told him to shut the f*ck up and stop being an annoyance. He told him to get his ass home and into his crate because if he caught him outside of that crate before morning tomorrow then he would wish he had never been born. He had gone home and obediently gone to his crate before crying himself to sleep. He didn't even know why he had been so excited at the time. He couldn't remember. Maybe it was him just being a stupid baby and being excited because everyone else was happy about England having a super strong Awakener.

The UK Hunters Association remained the foremost authority on all Gates and Awakeners. Unlike other countries that essentially allowed their Awakeners to run amok, or controlled them so ruthlessly that they were considered resources and weapons instead of people, the Association acted as administrators, care-workers, assistants, and police on all matters pertaining to Gates and Awakeners. In the last twenty years they had become one of the largest and most powerful governing bodies in the country – to the point where they were considered an equal power to the House of Commons in Parliament.

Guilds as a concept were imported from overseas and adopted by the Awakeners in the UK but were still managed by the Association. Before them, it was a territory posting where every Awakener in an area would be called to deal with Gates regardless of rank – even Minor Hunters could be used for things like rendering monsters down or mining mana crystals afterall. Now, Guilds handled eighty percent of the organising and running of Gates and the Association retained tax fee of 20% for all earnings in Gates of high classifications. The tax fee was closer to 35% for all Gates under that classification though – and it was those Gates that were handled by Hunters too weak or ill-suited in some way or another to Private Guilds.

After all, not even Awakening could change a pre-existing Condition.

Someone old or born with a weak heart would still be old or have a weak heart even if they became a Paragon. Their definition of 'weak' might change, but they would still be more fragile than those of the same rank around them.

The Association focused most of their attention on policing the Guilds these days, 'Minor' and 'Intermediary' Gate incidents were left to the old Territory system maintained by the E and D-rank hunters.

By Law, all Dungeon Teams needed eight individuals. One tank, one healer, and one damage dealer – the remaining five positions were open to choice. Each Gate paid out a set fee from the Association for completion, and it was only Gates ranked C or higher that formed mana crystals or contained monsters that could be harvested and sold on.

No one paid attention to E and D rank Gates.

And that was where the majority of the illegal hunting occurred.

Thrill seekers sneaking into Dungeons with Hunt Teams, underage Awakeners, even hired killers dragging people into Gates to murder them – that had been a huge scandal in Italy when the story got out.

Every Gate closure had a set 'closure reward' from the Association, it was something that was shared out amongst the eight party members. They were permitted to keep everything they obtained within the dungeon, but cashing it in would mean they got that 35% tax out of the gross profits of the Dungeon – including the closure fee. However, if they signed on with the Association and took a salary position clearing those Gates, then they didn't pay any tax, got to retain half of everything earned from a Dungeon and paid no tax, and received that salary even when not working.

The downsides were they could not refuse when called unless they were on an authorised holiday, or it was out of their league.

Given the history of Awakeners, Gates, and the right of refusal.... very few minor rankers took a salary position with the Association. They would rather pay the tax and be assured their freedom.

E rank, Minor Gates, paid £2000 upon completion
D rank, Intermediary Gates, paid £3000 upon completion
C rank, Superior Gates, paid £5000 for the low end and £6000 for the high end upon completion
B rank, Champion Gates, paid £7000 for low end and £9000 for high end upon completion
A rank, Hero Gates, paid £10,000 upon completion for low end and £30,000 for high end upon completion.

He knew he would never be seeing the inside of anything higher than a C on an illegal hunt. Word on the fan-sites said that the Association actually dispatched members of the Monitoring Division to those hunts on occasion to ensure that everyone was playing by the rules. The only time they bothered with the low end Gates was if someone actually lodged a complaint or made a report.

The only problem was..... there wasn't much information on how much magical cores were worth. Or how to sell them. And he didn't want to set off any alarms or investigations by using a proxy site on a public connection that had CCTV cameras watching who went in and who left the building. He knew that much about keeping his head down when it came to computers (he didn't but Claire had taught him).

But how did he even figure out what his Class was?

He couldn't show up to a Dungeon raid thinking he was a – a – tank only to end up actually being a healer or a ranger. He would get himself killed, or worse, someone else.

Weirdly, when he looked up how to tell, he not only found a lot of blogs from Awakeners in the past who detailed their journeys of discovery and some of their training and Dungeon tips and tricks, but weirdly: An actual f*cking personality quiz on the UK Hunters' Association website. An actual personality quiz that would supposedly tell him what his class was based on who he was as a person.

He was curious but....

A personality quiz? And it was painfully out-dated too. 'If you were an animal which would you be?' type of multiple choice questions. Over five hundred of them. He would need two hours to go through it all. Longer than he was permitted onto the library computers and longer than his lunchbreak at school.

He closed the page down and went back to the advice forum that recommended testing his physical limits and a few other exercises to ascertain what his class was – threads linked to it also detailed more classes than he had been aware of existing.

Tanks could have Berserkers and Transformers in their number – supposedly there was an S-ranker in India who could transform into a four armed snake woman, earning herself some questionable nicknames on the battlefield.

Amongst the damage dealers there was the more commonly well known Fighters and Rangers, but there were also Ninja types.

Mages of course had their various elemental specialists, but amongst them there had been Summoners and Barrier Casters identified in the past – Russia had been bragging about its Barrier Caster for a year now, a former construction worker.

Even healers had subtypes amongst them, some who specialised in providing buffs, others in regeneration, supposedly there had even been a healer in Venezuela who summoned his own barrier shields as well.

He would have to do some experimenting over the weekend to figure out what his class was. He would have to call out of his paper-round and the green grocers to figure things out. Thankfully tomorrow was Friday so he only had to deal with one more day of school before he could slip his parents and figure things out.

Or...... Or he could skip school......

Only Claire and Archie would care. He had never skipped school before so it wouldn't even be considered, everyone would just think he was ill. He could get away with it, especially if he were calling the office himself, he'd had to do it before – the receptionist had only needed to speak to his father once before she was willing to take any calls from him regarding being absent. It wasn't really the done thing, but a responsible kid calling out when they were ill versus an irresponsible parent who swears at them when handed the phone was the lesser of two evils.

He would have to be careful not to do it too often.

It helped that he looked so terrible today, no one would think twice that he was unwell if they recalled how pale he had been.

...........Maybe he would actually even feel better tomorrow. He still felt..... off.

Icky? Tired? What was the fancy word he heard in English class? Fatigued? He just felt....

Weak.

Maybe he was an E-rank?

Well....

He didn't know what the base standard was but....

He probably did not meet it.

Was his Awakening really that f*cked up?

He was sat in a quiet part of the bridal path that lead up from the estuary. It wasn't very popular for walks, not even dog walkers, because it was close to the river and that stank at low tide. All the flytipping and pollution rotting away under the water being exposed and smelling as it dried out. He'd found an old engine block half submerged. Those were supposed to be what? Three hundred pounds? That was.... a hundred and thirty something kilograms?

He was able to pull it out of the mud and lift it, but it wasn't easy. Supposedly even E-rank tanks were capable of hauling a car engine with ease, so it was looking like he wasn't a tank.

He tried to go super fast, running from one end of the bridal path to the other but...... He was only about as fast as he was in PE. And he was dying by the end of it so – he doubted he was a fighter.

He tried to throw stones at a tree to see if his aim had improved but hahaha, hell no.

Then he spent over an hour trying to manifest any kind of magic without success.

Now he laid on the grass watching the clouds overhead trying to work out what exactly he was feeling apart from sweaty, tired, and just over all.... miserable.

Wasn't this what he wanted?

Awakening was a pain, it would mess up all of his plans. But at the same time.... he was still disappointed. Who didn't want to suddenly be given the ability to protect themselves, the people they loved, to earn fame and fortune, to go on adventures and fight monsters? It was something that every child wanted to do growing up. So yeah. He was disappointed that he Awakened wrong. That he was weak and didn't have any abilities or skills. Had he even Awakened at all? It didn't seem so. Maybe he'd just been hit with a spell?

Yeah....

Yeah that actually made more sense.

He hadn't Awakened at all, he'd just been hit with a spell that f*cked up the underpass. Once he felt better, he would go back to being normal and.... He pressed his lips together, feeling his eyes sting. Back to normal Matthew Brook, the unwanted kid of a couple of asshole junkies who hadn't had a job in twenty years. Working two jobs and going to school, hiding money and food, hiding and creeping around like a beaten dog, waiting for the day when he could escape.

He sniffled, dropping an arm over his eyes.

Awakening..... would have changed everything.

But since when could anything good happen to him? To dumbass Atty? Cute little Huey who worked so hard and would never amount to much of anything beyond a green grocer's cashier.

He'd been f*cking stupid for thinking he could ever make anything of himself.

He went home.

He went home and hid in his room in the dark. His skin felt like static and he just.....

He took the Stanley knife from his bedside table. It was still sharp, despite the spots of rust on the blade. He'd not really used it recently so the blade hadn't dulled at all.....

It split open the skin of his calf so easily it took a moment for his brain to catch up to the fact he'd cut himself.

A sharp hot pain. A maddening itch.

He may have bruised easily, but he wasn't much of a bleeder, and legs didn't bleed much anyway. Any cuts on his legs he could explain away easily enough, and when his parents hit him they didn't aim for his shins. It was a safe place to.... release. To settle the itch in his bones and feel something on his own terms. To watch the red well up and bead between split skin and pale leg hair.

He watched in dull interest as his blood stayed stubbornly in the cut, refusing to overflow and dribble down. Another cut joined the first. The sharp pain grew, the itch diminished. A third cut. A fourth.

The tight band around his chest eased.

And he could breathe without feeling like he was going to burst into tears.

His leg went cold and a pale green light burst from his free hand, curled around his knee so he could angle himself properly to cut –

He sucked in a sharp breath as the light faded and – and the cuts with it.

He sliced his leg again, feeling his heart thundering in his chest.

It had been real, it had been real!!

The green light flickered across the cut and he watched it, he watched it seal shut in front of his eyes!

“I'm a healer,” he whispered.

He was a healer.

He had Awakened! He had Awakened!! And as one of the most sought after important Classes! If there wasn't at least one healer then no one was allowed into a Gate by law! If the healer went down then the whole Team was in danger because they were the ones who kept everyone alive and kicking!!

He wasn't broken, he wasn't broken!

Maybe cutting his legs open so much to test his healing last night hadn't been a great idea.

His bedsheets looked like his mom had decided to spend her money on weed instead of tampons again. Actually, thinking about it, he hadn't seen any in the trash lately.... Dealing with the bathroom bin every two weeks was one of his least favourite chores because it smelled and she never bothered to wrap her used hygiene products because it was a waste of toilet paper if it was all going to the same dump. But..... there had been a suspicious lack of bloodied products over the last two or three months. Had she finally gotten the implant? He'd heard her talking about it with Dogmeat's new girlfriend Becky. There was no way she was pregnant, she resented having to deal with him when she was pregnant and as a toddler so why would she bother with another kid now when she was using even more heavily than before?

He brushed the thought off and went to deal with his bloody bedding before his parents woke up. He was going to have to do back to the library to look up information on healers. He already felt a little better physically for knowing what his Class was, but whether that was because he had managed to heal whatever weird sluggish tired feeling he had along with his cuts or something else, he had no idea. Maybe he had some kind of.... magical constipation? He needed to push some magic out before it started flowing through him properly since his Awakening was weird?

He showered and dressed while his sheets soaked in stain remover. When he was done he shoved them into the washing machine, put it on a hot wash, and left the house after raiding his secret cash-stash. Breakfast was grabbed along the way to the library where he stood outside devouring his bacon roll and orange juice before going in as they had a strict no food or drink inside rule. He was a little less loathe to spend his money now that he knew, he knew, he had a sure fire way of re-earning it back and even more on top of that. He just had to keep telling himself it was an investment for the future and to stop flinching.

He beelined for his usual computer in the back where no one could look over his shoulder and see what he was researching and used the back of his English exercise book to take notes.

Contrary to popular belief, healers were indeed physically enhanced like all other Awakeners. True they were still weaker than even Mage types, but they made up for that by having more magic than most Mage types. A healer was the heart of the party afterall, they were the ones who kept everyone else alive and kicking. And while some countries did not require a healer's presence in low-end dungeons, every Gate team preferred to have one to hand regardless.

He probably wasn't a highly ranked one given how noodly he was when testing himself at the bridal path. A B-ranked healer was still physically stronger than an E-ranked Tank or Fighter, and an S-ranked Healer was stronger than any and every A-rank regardless of class. At a guess, he would assume he was D-rank at most given how he was able to heal his legs without any sign of scarring which was supposedly the mark of an E-rank or weak healer. Given how healers were often the ones first targeted in Dungeons by the more intelligent monsters if the Tanks were slow on their aggro skills he should probably think about training his reflexes, getting faster and stronger, etc. He still had more growing to do and he'd read in the forum posts that while an Awakened's mana pool was unchanging, thus their Rank could not change, the younger an Awakener was the more they could improve themselves physically because their bodies were still growing.

Okay, so, he needed more stamina and speed so he should look into cardio training. He would need some strength training too if he wanted to grab people and haul them back to safety for healing – or was he able to cast spells over a distance? Every clip and picture he'd seen of healers had them huddled next to their targets so maybe the further away someone was the less effective the magic? That would make sense. Magic was energy and air was not very energy conductive. A lot of it would bleed out and become less effective, like electricity or fire. He should probably look into hand to hand training as well. Magic users had wands and staffs but those were too delicate for smacking enemies in Dungeons he imagined – they were usually made of wood right? If something slipped past the tanks and the fighters, being able to use its own weight or redirect its attacks around him and his patients would be a good idea. He should look up some videos, see if there were any local classes.

He would also need a disguise. Hunt fans kept eyes on all local hunters, even the low rankers. You'd have thought after twenty years people would treat hunts as a nuisance but since regular humans couldn't tell when a Gate was low ranked or high, they clustered to each and every one until they found out the rank. Most would then leave, only the hardcore fans would stick around to see the attending Hunters if it were a D or a C-rank. Absolutely no one bothered with E-ranks.

So.

Plan of action.

Training. Disguise. And then finding a Gate team that were willing to take an underage Healer in with them, and pay him fairly at the end.

Notes:

The response on the last chapter was huge and blew me away, thank you so much everyone. You really made my week with that. I'm going to try and keep updated regular, stick to a Wednesday update date (or at least try to). I have read every single comment and I can't tell you how much they have all meant to me.
I'm not too proud to beg for more though lmao please do keep talking to me, tell me what you think of the story, your thoughts for what's going to happen, what you think of the worldbuilding, how you think YOUR country's hunter assocation might react to the Mana Advent and to the Gates. I would genuinely be thrilled to know.

Chapter 3 Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

A disguise, to be effective as a disguise, needed to be generic, dime a dozen, blend in, easy to obtain, and easy to explain away.

This meant a trip to Primark and purchasing a set of cheap, brandless clothing: A plain black hoodie, sweats, T-shirts, thermals (he'd heard a lot of Dungeons were cave systems and they got cold), and a pair of comfortable black sneakers. As generic and difficult to trace as possible. He got himself a box of medical masks to hide the lower half of his face from the pharmacy next door, and on his way home he stopped by the local fancy-dress/toy shop on the top floor of the shopping centre to find a hairnet to keep his stupid fluffy blond hair out of sight. Instead, he not only found a full face white mask with a black balaclava that went all the way down his neck and hid everything, but a cheap wide-brimmed witch's hat that he could use to make sure his hood remained jammed on his head, as well as a generic pair of fake glasses that actually looked pretty good on him. The hat had a thin flexible wire in the brim that meant collapsing and folding it into his pocket would be easy as well.

No weapons, armour would be useless unless it was mana imbued, which left him looking for some kind of something to act as a wand. Unfortunately, he had no idea what he was looking for and even if a regular stick would do.

Did he..... even need a wand as a healer?

He shivered a little as he left Claire's house. She hadn't been well enough to talk to him, laid up in bed with a migraine again, but her dad had been willing to help him when he mentioned trying to find a decent phone that he would be able to silence and hide. Claire's dad knew his parents weren't great, but also that he was more scared of going into the System, into Foster Care, than staying where he was. He knew what to expect with them, and how to navigate it. Fostercare would just force him to figure out and navigate entirely new people and their triggers, and that was a whole different and far more stressful ballgame.

Still, with his help, he knew what phone he wanted now. It was written down on a post-it note, along with several apps that would help him keep it hidden and keep him untraceable. He didn't want his parents to catch wind of him being online and go tearing his room apart for his phone or something else they could pawn and find all of his hidden money. He would need to specify a pay as you go SIM to the person in the store because he didn't have a bank account, and he honestly wasn't looking forward to explaining why – his old fallback of incredibly religious parents who didn't like the internet always garnered a lot of sympathy, but also a lot of conversation he had to talk his way around.

Getting a bank account would make things so much easier but..... he needed his birth certificate for that, and there would be no way to hide the bank statements and advertisem*nts that would come in the mail. If he set up a PO box it wouldn't be too hard but – he needed a bank account for that. Catch 22. Better to stick to cash for now.

Getting the phone was quick and easy with a battle plan provided by Claire's dad. He went in, showed the clerk exactly what he was after, explained that he had to hide the phone from his parents and she was more than willing to help. The clerk was a young girl not much older than him, and she took one look at him before pulling out all the stops to help him, even going so far as to charge his phone and how him how to change and apply certain settings so it would never go off unless it was the special Emergency Alert System. And even he wasn't stupid enough to try and figure out how to mute that. It was the alarm that only ever went off it there had been a Dungeon Break within a mile of its current location. He got the strongest protective case he possible could and a small hip-pouch to carry it in, not that he would ever use it in a Dungeon but somewhere to hide it along with his keys and wallet while he was training would be useful. He could hide it under his clothes at school so if his parents ever grabbed his bag to search it for money from his paper round they wouldn't find it.

And that was that.....

It was a lot easier than he expected.

Almost too easy.

He felt weirdly unsettled as he programmed in both Archie and Claire's phone numbers and texted them to let them know he now had a secret phone they could use to contact him.

Disguise, secret phone, plan of action – all check.

Now all he needed was a Gate team willing to let him join them.

That meant research.

Back to the library and one of his several proxy sites it was.

Paul Bellamy, D-rank Tank, Hunter Association “Raid” Lead.

Judging by the pictures on the fan forums he was an alcoholic and a hardass. He was also a bit of a rule breaker if the thread of him drinking directly from a bottle of vodka before getting into his car was any indication. Part of him wondered if alcohol even affected Hunters, it was the subject of discussion in the thread as a matter of fact and overall it seemed to be a 'Yes but...'. The 'but' in this instance being that due to their metabolism it would literally take drinking straight spirits for over an hour before Hunter Bellamy would be over the drink-drive limit given his enhanced reflexes.

How to approach him though?

Wait, weren't hunters supposed to be on a public registry? That was one of the reasons why he had been so terrified of being registered with the Association. Both his face, name, and address, plus ranking and class, would be publicly available information on top of being forwarded to both his school and his parents as he was still underage.

He went onto the Hunter Association's addressbook page and used CTRL+F to look up 'Bellamy'. Lo-and-behold, there he was. Along with a contact telephone number. Nice.

Kind of disturbing how much information was so freely available online though, thinking about it.

He would have to be extra careful.

Maybe he should look into some heel-lifts and shoulderpads? Make himself look taller and larger than he actually was?

Hmm..... not a bad idea..... he would need to get used to the heel lifts before going into the Dungeon, just in case they needed to run. It wouldn't do to twist his ankle or something dumb like that because he was running weirder than usual.

More money down the toilet. But.... the potential gain....

He sucked in a breath between his teeth and went to the shoe shop to get some heel-lifts to put into his trainers. And a set of shoulderpads since they were being sold behind the counter as well for some reason.

Heel-lifts were.... weird. And they did not feel secure under his foot as he paced around to get used to them. It wasn't quite being on his tiptoes, but it still felt like he was leaning forward and it was putting him off. Maybe he shouldn't have layered them to give himself an extra inch in height? But that extra inch could make the difference between being caught and sliding through. If people thought he was tall (er), with broad shoulders, they wouldn't look at scrawny little Atty Brook when looking for their mystery Hunter. It would also help the other Hunters to take him more seriously if they thought he was closer to eighteen than twelve.

He just had to get used to moving naturally with the lifts and pads, and not forget about them.

Next week, he decided.

He would give himself a week.

He would wear the lifts afterschool at work, and when he was training in the evenings and first thing in the mornings. Next weekend, he would go back to the bridal path and test how he moved on uneven terrain – it wasn't like a dungeon would have a nicely tarmacked and level floor for him to run around on. He wouldn't be surprised if twisted or sprained ankles were the most common injuries that Hunters had to deal with, better make sure he wasn't the one going down the most or he might not be allowed to join the Gate team again.

Waiting a week was hard.

He was restless throughout school, thankfully because he wasn't very strong to start with it was easy to temper his ability in PE on Monday and Wednesday that he didn't cause any injuries or draw attention to himself – though Archie did give him a suspicious frown at one point when he was.... not as out of breath as he usually would have been.

He was twitchy and quiet at work, more so than usual, but thankfully Bridget and Lisa put that down to him still feeling under the weather and put him on stock check and ordering out the back while they handled customers and bagging at the front. He was very lucky working with them, they were great ladies.

After work though, he slipped his heel-lifts in and started jogging. He alternated between sprinting, walking to catch his breath back, and jogging at a long distance pace before sprinting again. He tried anyway. He had to slow down whenever he came to roads or spotted other joggers so they wouldn't see him going just that little bit too fast to be human. But that was okay, he encountered a few people in neon and Lycra who were willing to give him a few tips when he tentatively asked for some advice. Proper posture was more important than you'd think when distance running, using your own body's motion to help you breathe. They even gave him diet advice, water, electrolytes, carbs, and showed him stretches to safely cool down. They were really nice people. He was torn between wanting to see them again, and avoiding them like the plague so he didn't become known.

He ran to the bridal path and found that old car engine. Since he was Awakened, he could move it alone, but it was hard. Especially with the mud. But he made a point of picking it up and waddling it through the forest, puffing and sweating the whole while, fighting against the unholy stink of it.

And then he was back to running. He did the length of the bridal path, on the path, four times. And then he left the path and ran through the trees and the undergrowth, trying to get used to the uneven terrain, to having to move quickly and suddenly to avoid branches and brambles and stinging nettles.

He had to use his healing magic a lot the first few days.

But....

But by the time he was running around on Friday....

Carrying the car engine was a lot easier. It felt like having to carry a heavy bag of shopping up the stairs instead of trying to carry a display cabinet. He had to do an extra six laps before he started feeling out of breath, and he was getting a lot faster at dodging tree branches and bramble thickets under foot.

Hell.

Friday night he.... He picked his phone up and he called Bellamy.

“Paul Bellamy speaking.”

“...I'm calling to enquire as to whether or not you need a healer for the E-rank raid at Westbank.”

“.............You sound young.”

“Do you need a healer? Half of everything I earn is yours if no questions are asked.”

“Are you f*cking with me kid?”

“I need money. You're leading a Raid. Half of what I earn is yours if you keep your mouth shut and don't ask questions. Choice is yours. Do you need a healer?”

“...hrngh....What's your rank kid?”

“Enough for an E-rank Dungeon.”

“No f*cking sh*t, Sherlock. You ever been through a Gate before?”

“I believe I specified 'no questions'.”

“.....How soon can you be here?”

“Five pm.”

“I want that agreement about your money in writing.”

“Having it in writing rather defeats the purpose of it being unofficial.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“I'll take it. But I won't be using my real name.”

“f*ck you. You had better pull your weight.”

The line went dead, and Atty breathed out slowly, his hands shaking as he shut his phone down and swallowed. He was really in for it now. An illegal hunt at 5pm at Westbank on the other side of the city, over by the industrial estate at North Bridge.

He could get the bus but..... he would actually get there faster if he ran, especially as home was between here and there and he could pick up the rest of his disguise as he went. He cracked his knuckles, stowed the phone in his hip-pouch, stretched, and started running. It was good to warm up before physical exercise, running his way there would count, wouldn't it?

He'd have to use some deodorant when he changed.

His parents weren't home when he got back, small mercies. He quickly washed with soap and water, sprayed deodorant, and dressed in his disguise, hiding his mask in the hip-pouch and the hat in his pocket as he left again.

He jogged up the road and as he took the turning onto the board-walk along west shore to the bridge that would take him to Westbank, he pulled his mask out and on, his hood up, and the hat on over the top to ensure the whole lot would stay where it was supposed to be on his head.

Time to start the rest of his life.

Paul Bellamy would be the first person to say he was an asshole. He was a grumpy bitter f*cked up old man who had the poor fortune to Awaken in the early days of the Mana Advent but not be highly ranked enough to change his life for the better. No. Instead he'd lost f*cking everything. Ripped away from the job he had poured his everything into, that he'd loved with all of his heart, that he had been proud of, and thrown head first into hell, a sword slapped into his hand, and told to fight a very different kind of monster than he was used to. Not given a choice because this was the beginning, before anyone knew how to mobilise, to protect themselves, before there had even been an Association, when Dungeon Breaks were a monthly occurrence. When the death toll was in the thousands, and no one had time to care about the wants of the people they were throwing into those Dungeons.

Paul had dedicated his life to fighting a very particular kind of monster. He had made the choice as a young man to fight them.

And as a social worker he had seen his fair share of Monsters.

But to have a sword thrust into his hands and get shoved into a portal to hell without a single care for what he wanted....

He lost his beloved job. The one he treasured. His Awakening ruined his career because at the time it was mandatory for all Awakened to Hunt. Hunting gave him PTSD. His PTSD ruined his marriage. His divorce drove him to drink. The divorce drove his wife and daughter to leave. A Dungeon Break killed them on the other side of the country. And so here he was. A D-ranked piece of sh*t twenty years later, putting his life on the line with a sword in in his hand for f*cking pocket change just to keep the leaky mouldy ass roof over his head and the bottle in his hand.

Just waiting for the day when sh*t went south enough to finally, finally, put him out of his misery. Because he was far too much of a coward to do it himself.

God he needed a drink.

He chewed aggressively on the filter of his unlit cigarette as he waited for the f*cking brat that called him earlier that day. They were down a man on the Raid after Raj's wife unexpectedly went into labour that morning and the fighter had to beg off in order to go take them to the hospital – if he'd had a drink in him, he could have probably found it within himself to be happy for the new father, but right now all he felt was bitter frustration. His bitch ass girlfriend who was only with him so she could bum alcohol and fa*gs in exchange for sh*tty blow-jobs and even sh*ttier sex had been kicking up fuss about how she wanted a manicure and hair extensions. If he didn't bring home the cash she was never going to f*cking shut up.

“Hunter Bellamy?”

He turned from where he had been leaning against the half broken wall separating the carpark from the pavement to scowl down at the f*cking kid in front of him. Plain unmarked black hoodie, sweats, sneakers, a f*cking Party City full face mask, a pointy wizards' hat, and a pair of f*cking black square plastic glasses that looked like they could pick up cable TV.

The words to tell this wanna-be-hunter brat to f*ck right off sat bitter and burning on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it back and down. Stopping himself because he definitely felt something from him. And for a near mana-null like him, that meant this kid was the real deal. He'd said he was a Healer but.... those eyes.... He chewed his cigarette filter darkly. He'd met and dealt with Healers from E rank through to A rank. None of them had eyes that sharp. He didn't disbelieve the kid, only an absolute f*cking idiot would lie about their class, but he had a feeling there was absolutely more to the brat than he was sharing.

Tch. Tunde was on a higher ranked Raid, otherwise he never would have considered this f*cking bullsh*t.

Notes:

Sorry for the delay in updating. I was attending my grandmother's memorial service yesterday and travelling back home. Her ladyship, in true grandma fashion, decided where she wanted her ashes scattering by splitting open the bag before we had even gotten half way down the path to the beach. So we ended up scattering her at the top of the cliff to her favourite beach amongst the gorse flowers where the view was best. Though given the weather, I think half of her may have ended up on the road, which is fine. She loved to travel, and I'm sure that if she ends up going home on someone's car she would enjoy the adventure into places strange and unknown and exciting.

Chapter 4 Summary:

WARNING: Gore, graphic depictions of violence

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Going into a Gate was.... uncomfortable.

It was impossible to describe the feeling of mana washing over the skin, buzzing into your bones, fluttering against eyelashes and eardrums, and the way the air-pressure changed with a snap that felt like the sudden punch of bass in a song. A blast of some kind of temperature change, the smell, and the thick choking veil of mana in the air. Like a wall of humidity, but electric.

Atty fought not to audibly gag, or smack his lips in disgust behind his plastic mask as they stepped into a surprisingly well-lit cave system. No, tunnel system. Some effort had gone into shaping the walls and floors, evidence of rudimentary tunneling could be seen here and there, and in the distance down the tunnels that curved away into the depths, they could hear cackling and distant movement. The smell was unholy. That unique cold metallic stink of stagnant mineral water and dark stone places, unique to wet cave systems. But combined with that was smoke, something thick and musky, unwashed, and the unmistakable stank of rotting meat.

“Ugh,” Wahleed the ranger grumbled under his breath, pulling an expression of disgust. “I know these beasts have no concept of wudu but must we suffer for their – ” his eyes slid sideways in the midst of his complaining to land on him and he quickly pressed his lips together, before shaking his head and giving him an awkward smile. “Stinks, doesn't it?” he said instead.

Atty nodded silently. He knew a little bit about Islam, and how strict they were about hygiene. Having five prayers a day and having to wash multiple bodyparts before you could start. This must have been really uncomfortable for him.

“I have a face mask if you want?” he offered, pulling it from his pocket, “It's clean. I haven't used it.” One of the medical masks he had bought from the pharmacy.

Wahleed blinked at it, about to open his mouth, but a shout went up from ahead.

“CONTACT!” Bellamy's voice roared and suddenly everyone was up with their weapons ready.

It was chaos, goblins launched themselves at the hunters like murderous cats the size of toddlers, armed with knives of stone, bone, and occasionally rusty metal. Absolutely insanely in the back of his head, he wondered how the hell the monsters had any concept of metallurgy or blacksmithing even as he tried to focus his healing magic forward. His arms and hands felt cold, but he could see Bellamy's body light up and shimmer with green healing magic even as he roared and shoved a goblin off his shield and kicked another like a football so hard he heard the little thing's ribcage crunch on the tip of his boot.

A thick, meaty, sickening noise. Like wrapping a bag of crisps in a tea towel and lying on it – only wet.

He fought not to flinch and to aim his healing spells at those who needed them. He saw someone stumble, a knife in their ankle – the goblin yanked it out and he flung a wave of healing magic at them, the wound closing before the goblin could even raise its knife again. Wahleed took it out with a glowing arrow that punched it through the eye. Camella snarled something in Polish, likely foul mouthed, as she swung her mace into two of them like a golf club. He heard the crack of her hip as she moved and a healing spell washed over her before she could even notice the over-extension or dislocation or whatever the hell that sound had been.

And as quickly as it happened, it was over.

“Status!” Bellamy barked over his shoulder.

“Backline clear! No injuries!” Karen the fighter reported.

“Think I pulled a muscle at some point but – it's fine now?” Camella called in bewilderment. Atty tossed another healing over her, shivering at the feeling of warmth leaving his hands. He started rubbing them together and was privately very pleased with himself to note that no one else had any injuries. He had been quick at making sure any hits were dealt with immediately.

They took only a few minutes to check over themselves and their equipment before the fighters all got together and started..... pulling the magical cores out of the goblin corpses. Atty felt a bit useless when they started, his inexperience making an obvious showing as the only one not immediately getting to work. Also, he didn't really want to go..... putting his hands in that. Would it be.... warm still? What would it feel like? He wasn't sure he wanted to know but.... if he wanted a core.... he picked up one of the fallen goblin knives and sucked in a tight breath, before he moved to go and help – only for Karen to catch him before he could.

Her hand wrapped around his wrist completely, fingers overlapping, and she seemed to have some kind of mental hiccup when she realised, blinking for a moment before she frowned at him. “Look, I've got no problem with you as a person kid. But I'm not happy about bringing someone underage on a Raid though. And while I've got no intention of reporting you – for the love of god, I am not going to let you pick through dead bodies. Understood? Just.... stand watch if you want to be useful,” she ordered, letting him go with an unhappy twist to her lips.

“But.... I can help,” he muttered softly, scratching for an excuse, “It's no different from cooking.”

“It's very different. But I'm not arguing with you. Please stand watch,” she told him stiffly before tugging the goblin knife out of his hand and bending down to split the monster's skull open to pry the magical core out.

He fought not to flinch and prove her right as blood, fluid, and brain matter slopped out across the floor and over her hand as she ripped the core out. He turned away to keep an eye on the other tunnels, at the strange flickering shadows and distant calls and hoots of an unknown language – oh, they had their own language? He wondered if there was any way to learn? It would be super useful on Raids if they knew what they were planning, or if it were possible to speak to them and negotiate – find out why they were doing this and try to.... to convince them to stop....

He shook himself out of his naivety.

He would be far from the first soul to attempt learning the language and trying to speak to them, to find out why they were doing this, no doubt. For all that people liked to accuse humanity of being violent and bloodthirsty, they were social creatures and their first instinct after protecting themselves would be to try and find out why and try to de-escalate the situation. War was time, resources, and energy, humanity as a species were lazy and hated expending more energy than required. It was why they evolved to walk on two feet instead of four. Gates and Dungeons had been situation normal for years, longer than he had even been alive. The fact that they were still doing this meant that every attempt at communication and negotiation had thus far failed. He wasn't so arrogant to believe that he would be able to make a difference, no matter how much his heart told him otherwise. He was a small unwanted existence in the world, the best he could do was support himself and stay out of the way of others. That would be best.

He heard something above him and looked up.

He had a single splitsecond to register a goblin dropping down from a small hole above him, knife aiming for his face.

It was reflex to throw an arm up.

The goblin bounced off a shield – and then splattered across the ceiling when the shield burst upwards and crushed it into the stone above.

He squeaked, the shield immediately dissipating and the goblin's leg – the only thing that had had gone back into the hole it crawled out of and thus avoided being crushed – dropped down and thudded wetly in front of him.

He had to take several large steps back to avoid getting.... dripped.... on.

Wahleed stared up at the smear on the ceiling, at him, and then at the severed foot on the floor.

A magical core clinked as it dropped down in front of them, splattered with blood.

“Well.... that happened,” Wahleed muttered in almost absent surprise before grinning, “Healer's got a shield!” he crowed excitedly to the rest of the group who had largely not noticed the sudden attempted murder of their healer. Atty tried not to take it personally as he collected his blood-slick magic core.

With the knowledge that he had a shield, one of the tanks was moved into the forward team to act as an extra damage dealer, Atty was instructed to keep his shield ready for any backline encounters. The save was still fairly well lit so it wasn't exactly a hardshi0p, he just had to make a mental note to keep his eyes open for tunnels above and below he realised as he saw a crack in the floor with a glint of something metal inside. Bellamy stabbed his sword into it without skipping a pace or looking, pulling out a goblin skewered through the skull on his blade and roughly kicking it off mid-step. It was actually..... kind of cool. He was kind of cool....

Magic came easier with practice, he found.

The more he had to cast, the easier the spells became, the more he was able to feel for the energy levels and people's injuries. It was.... it was hard to describe something that he didn't have words for. It was like.... feeling a structure but with his mind? Rather than his hands? His magic felt almost like touch but it wasn't. There just.... wasn't an easy way to describe it. But the more he used it, the easier it became to notice places where his magic could be used. Wounds that needed knotting together and filling, blood that needed replenishing, infection and poison that had to be disscolved or burned or removed somehow. He also started noticing ways that joints and muscles and tendons stressed and strained and that if he used his magic just so..... he could make people around him faster and stronger, tougher. He could leave healing magic in them to take the edge off bad injuries as he focused on other people.

Bellamy split a red goblin in half with a single heft of his sword under the effects of his magical boost.

Wahleed was firing four arrows now in the same amount of time it used to take him to fire one.

Karen was flitting between the others in a blur, blood trailing her in ribbons.

Even he had several kills to his name – using his shields to crush goblins against the walls, floor, or ceiling. And when he figured out how to conjure two shields, one in each hand, he started using them like cymbals, and squishing goblins between them.

He didn't like doing that. He honestly didn't like doing a lot of this. He had to keep repeating to himself that he needed the money, and if he didn't do it then they would break out and kill everyone around them – little kids, pregnant ladies, teenagers, old people, anyone and everyone they could find. That was what monsters did. What they'd always done from the first outset even when people tried to talk to them. It was us against them.

But the sound of breaking bones and bursting blood was..... visceral.

And he knew he could be hearing it in his nightmares for many years to come. He just really hoped this would be the worst he ever had to deal with. He wasn't highly ranked so it was unlikely he would have to deal with worse things, and he only wanted enough money to get him away from his parents. He would be happy to get a normal job and live like anyone else afterwards, he would go to university and – it would be great. He would get a Loan and a Grant. Study something like – like – Mana Sciences? As a healer he would have a unique perspective to many others. Healers and Mages were some of the rarer Awakenings with Tanks and Fighters taking the majority. And even then, Healers were the minority of the minority for all that they were required for Parties to handle Raids.

He had never given any thought to his future beyond getting the hell away from his parents at the first opportunity but.... the sudden half-formed idea was appealing he realised as they came up to the final door of the Dungeon, having, if Karen was to be believed, cleared the entirety of the place for the first time in a long time. Usually, due to their low level, they rushed in to kill as much as possible on their way to the boss room, killed the boss, and fled. If they missed a few monsters along the way, missed a few cores in the corpses, then they missed a few along the way. It wasn't as though there were any crystals to be mined, and the low level monsters weren't useful for any of the crafters or weaponsmiths so there was no point in stopping to harvest anything beyond the mana crystals.

Wahleed slipped to the front of the party, his tall lanky form casting flickering demented shadows across the cave walls as the torches or bonfires or whatever from within the Boss's chamber lit the area up. They could hear stomping and shouting, the sound of war-drums and wild laughter.

He returned, half-smile, half-grimace on his face.

“'bout what we expected,” he reported to Bellamy, keeping his voice low. It was rare but not unheard of for a Boss to leave its room, in fact, those human-esque monsters were the ones most likely to do so. “One Hobgoblin, four war goblins to act as bodyguards, and a number of red goblins as an entourage. More numbers than I'd like, but with Goose being a DPSing Healer, I think we'll be able to manage. It isn't like we'll need to have someone on backline to watch our asses this time.”

Atty wasn't sure if this kind of conversation was common in other Raid teams, but the fact that everyone felt comfortable offering up observations and ideas, and Bellamy actually listened despite all of his swearing and short tempered-ness.... it was reassuring to see.

“We have four tanks,” Camella pointed out, hand on her hip, mace resting on the floor, handle in her palm. She had sparkly nail polish he noticed almost inanely. A different colour on each finger. “Assign one to the boss, one to the guard, and the other two to the reds?” she suggested looking amongst them. “That way no one gets overwhelmed. Me, Karen, and Wahleed move into full AOE mode while Goose goes full healing?”

“And who protects the kid if we miss one?” one of the tanks asked with a frown.

“We won't,” Bellamy grunted, “We've done this run with just me tanking before. It's tough. We don't have the fire power to make this quick, it'll be a drawn out exchange,” he explained with a grimace as he stretched his arms and legs out. Shaking his limbs so as not to cramp or cool down too much. “We'll just have to move into a circle around the kid, cover each other. We'll do it inter-cardinals. Kid, start buffing the tanks for strength, the others for speed. And don't forget to hit yourself for speed as well. You're going to need it to keep up,” the man warned pointing the pommel of his sword at him, thick ropey forearm muscle in stark shades of bronze and gold in the low fire lighting of the dungeon.

Atty nodded, nausea rising in his guts like a sickly belch that he had to swallow back down. It sat thick and hard and gross in the pit of his stomach as he started casting magic on the others.

In the heat of battle, he hadn't ha da chance to see the effects but it was interesting to see the way the magic stirred around and from within them all. Strength buffs flowed like golden water around the tanks, gently lifting and running through clothing and hair like an underwater Loreal advert, and speed buffs rushed like a green whirlwind around the fighters and himself.

Bellamy nodded, looking as though he were moving underwater as he slowly turned, hefted his sword and shield, and bolted into the chamber with a Warcry – instantly affixing the monsters' attention onto him as he made a direct line for the Hobgoblin boss. Ian, Gary, and Tom, the other tankers, were on his heels with their own bellows as they made directly for their respective targets. Ian with his own sword and shield took one half of the red goblins while Tom with his lance took the other half, leaving Gary and his mace to handle the four war goblins.

Karen vanished from sight, only blurs and splatters of blood to indicate where she struck like lightning. Camella could have probably fought as a tank in a pinch with how she ploughed through the red goblins, mace crushing and tossing them aside like nothing. Wahleed stuck to his side like glue, darting around him with lightning precision, pin-point arrow blows between eyes, through open mouths, knocking weapons from hands, not a single one missed. Atty would have been impressed, if his attention wasn't wholly on the tanks, healing magic flowing like water in a near endless river of green and white and blue from his hands.

And then he saw Bellamy's ankle go down a hole.

In almost slow motion, he saw the tank slide to the side, shield moving out to balance himself, sword swinging wide. Spreading his arms like an invitation, head, chest, and belly open for cutting.

“NO!!”

he flung a hand out. The shield came out wrong.

His hand wasn't palm forward, it was flat, fingers outstretched, like he was throwing something instead of pushing something.

The shield came out sideways, flat, horizontal – and sheered straight through the hobgoblin's weapon, forearm, torso, and the wooden throne behind it.

Bellamy's shield hit the ground, his leg gave an awful stomach turning 'SNAP', the hobgoblin's body hit the ground with a resonating wet thud, and the goblins around them screeched.

The fallen tank yanked his broken ankle out of the hole, face white with pain. The healing magic flowed out of Atty's hands without conscious thought or direction and he saw it, Bellamy's ankle, twist around with a second sickening snap, glow green, and immediately change colour – back to normal.

All around him was chaos as the tanks drew the enemy closer and everyone focused on wiping them out. Without the hobgoblin they were in disarray, running around without cohesion, bumping into each other and into the walls and structures around them. It was.... honestly.... it felt cruel to him. A senseless slaughter – but it wasn't senseless. Not really. Not when they were the enemy who were trying to kill every human being, every cat, rat, dog, horse, fox, bird, and insect on the otherside of the Gate. It was necessary. It was needed. He just.... he hated it.

And then it was silent.

Save for the sound of harsh breathing and dripping blood.

“Sound off!” Bellamy's voice barked through the room, making several of them jump.

“No signs of life. Uninjured,” Karen the fighter reported from the far side of the room, painted in more blood than could be considered socially acceptable, even amongst Hunters.

“Fine. Gunna need a new shield though,” Ian the tank with the sword and shield complained as he eyed his now severely dented and gouged metal shield.

“Few bruises and scrapes, otherwise fine,” Camella reported as she dropped herself down onto the corpse of a wargoblin with a gusty sigh.

“I'm good. Nice healing kid,” Gary the tanker with the mace rasped, hands braced on his knees as he drew in deep ragged breaths.

“All good,” Tom the tanker with the lance called back, delicately poking a few goblins with the tip of his weapon. “We should probably make a start on getting the cores out before the Dungeon closes, shouldn't we?” he asked rhetorically, to a chorus of tired groans and cheers and laughs from the assembled hunters.

“I'm good too. Nothing a cup of tea and hot bath can't fix,” Wahleed reported, patting Atty on the shoulder and smiling at him.

“You kid?” Bellamy demanded, narrowing his eyes on him. Atty stiffened and nodded wordlessly. He was fine. Heart still going three hundred miles an hour but he was fine. Not a scratch on him. The older hunter squinted suspiciously at him a moment longer before sheathing his sword and shoving his shield onto his back. “Get to harvesting the rest of you. Kid, you got a bag or something?” he asked and Atty winced and shook his head.

“I do. Here. Never know when a bag could be useful,” Wahleed told him, digging out a fabric shopping bag from his back pocket. When Atty unfolded it, the emblazoned anime face of a girl with fairy wings and a school uniform winked up at him declaring 'AYA-CON 8 2012'. He blinked slowly and looked up at Wahleed who merely arched an eyebrow at him, utterly unrepentant.

“Thank you,” he said instead of any other kind of questions because he'd never heard of Aya-con and what kind of anime it was about and where it was when it was, did they allow under 18's, could he go, could his friends go, etc, etc. Claire and Archie often talked about anime conventions, but they had o0nly ever been to the big London Expo convention with their parents, and that was apparently not a fun experience so they wanted to go as a small group with friends to one that was more than just a glorified Dealers Room.

Basically, as there were no more monsters, everyone was on Core Harvesting duty except for him (because Karen would have gutted them like fish if he was made to dig around in monster corpses), he got to hold the bag for them to drop their cores into. In fact, he was going to be holding all of the cores as everyone came over to empty their pockets and side-pouches into the bag for him to carry. The atmosphere was light and cheerful, happy almost, as people waded through gore on their sickening scavenger hunt.

Wahleed was apparently an Electrical Engineering Graduate working on his PhD Masters while working part-time at the industrial estate in aeronautics, apparently his working hours contributed to his degree, but because of his low position he wasn't paid as much as he would like. Especially given that he was responsible for his mother and younger sisters as the man of the house – his father having run off back to Pakistan to marry a younger woman when his mother refused to let him raise a violent hand to their daughters. Karen was a stay at home mother with a disabled partner, his chronic pain and fatigue meant he couldn't work, but the disability allowance he got wasn't enough to keep them comfortable, so she hunted on the side to bring in that extra stability for their small family of three. Camella was actually a pre-school teacher, teaching kids aged 4-6 their letters and numbers, the parents apparently liked the fact he she was an active hunter, it made them feel their kids were safe in her classroom, and it also meant she could drill the important parts of Dungeon Break safety into their little heads at a young age.

He didn't catch much about the others, Bellamy worked in silence, while Ian and Gary were prone to ribbing each other – Tom occasionally chiming in with a terrible pun or a 'your mum' joke that saw him get pelted with severed limbs at one point which.... was disgusting (if a little funny when someone held up a goblin's hand and folded all the fingers down but the most obvious one).

They made sure to be quick and methodical, going from one end of the room to the other, moving bodies into neat piles so as to ensure they got every core without having to waste time hunting. And then they were moving at a brisk run to the exist. There was usually an hour between the Boss's defeat and the Gate closing, and they'd spent about forty five minutes harvesting, they had fifteen minutes to get to the exist before they were trapped in the Gate – and no one had ever survived that.

They burst out into the crisp, cool, evening air and Atty almost ripped his mask off to breathe freely, only for the touch of skin warmed plastic to stop him before he could do so. He was wearing it for a reason he reminded himself, sweaty and itchy and suffocating as it was. He was wearing it for a reason!

“Alright kid, hand over the cores,” Bellamy ordered, turning to him.

Notes:

And we are posting on time!!
I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter, I did consider making it longer but the next segment is from Bellamy's POV so it just seemed like a good spot to end it. I'm glad everyone's enjoying it, I'm loving all the comments and feedback from you all, it's really kicking the depression beast in the teeth, love it.

Chapter 5 Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Fresh air never tasted so sweet as knowing there was going to be a fat stack of cash at the end of the day.

Paul was the first one out, standing to one side, counting his people as they followed. It was dark, but according to his phone and its now reconnected service, it was midnight. They'd cleared the dungeon shockingly quickly – almost breaking a record, they were ten minutes eleven seconds late to break it but still.... he eyed the slash in the side of the kid's Halloween hat, taking in the split polyester and how it now drooped sadly to one side and reeked of dead goblin. When the hell had any of those little bastards gotten close enough to the kid to cut his dumb hat?

Camella headed to her car and returned with the energy drinks and snack bags she usually made up for post dungeon debrief and payout, just a little pick-me-up for everyone to get them home before they conked out in exhaustion. And then Bellamy turned to the kid to get the cores off him for Gary to cash in.

The kid immediately looked nervous, tense and almost defensive, like he was trying to steal from him. Which was to be expected, thinking about it. The dumb f*ck did say he could have half of whatever he earned, it would only be too easy to take advantage. He sighed in annoyance as his own rough tone and behaviour came back to bite him in the ass yet again. f*ck, but he used to be good at dealing with kids. Just another part of himself he'd lost in the unholy clusterf*ck of his life.

“Chill your sh*t, brat,” he grunted as he accepted his snack pack from Camella. “Hand the cores over to Gary so he can cash them in, park your ass, eat some nuts and get a drink down your neck. Gary'll be back with our money, in cash, along with the standard gate closure fee,” he explained dismissively as he cracked open his drink. Tropical flavour, nice. Camella always remembered what his favourites were. She'd even included dry-roast mixed nuts in his snack pack.

The kid was still hesitant, but none of them held it against him as he slowly handed over the bag of magical cores to the other tanker who gave them a jaunty salute, grabbed his snack bag, and got in his car to go cash in. Leaving the kid now hesitantly clutching his own snack bag while Camella happily presented Karen with her special gluten free bag. Paul snorted quietly to himself at the kid who somehow managed to look lost even with his face entirely hidden from sight and scrolled through his phone app to record that the Gate was already beginning to collapse.

He listed the kid as 'emergency contractor', which was typically shorthand for someone they'd been forced to call in from one of the bigger Guilds – it was often used as a loophole for illegal hunting, but as long as he didn't bring the kid along to an audited hunt, everything was gravy. Having a Guildie for an 'emergency contractor' would also correlate to how swiftly they managed to close the gate, and since it was only an E-rank, the money earned in there would be the equivalent to pocket change depending on the Guild. They were famously known for not reporting such minor amounts of earnings. As long as they paid the rank tax, which was simply an employment tax that was calculated on what your hunter rank was as opposed to what work you did, then no one was going to investigate their earnings too closely.

The issue he was now ruminating over as he chewed on his dry-roast nuts and skittles was... that kid... he was reasonably sure that kid had actually gotten noticeably stronger in there.

He hasn't been weak going in, Paul was as close to near mana-null as you could get and still be a D-ranked Tank, but even he could sense the kid had magic out of the ass. Now, part of him could chalk that down to inexperience. His spell casting had definitely gotten smoother as they went along, he had been discovering new aspects of his abilities the entire time they'd been in there as well, going from general healing spells that flushed the whole damn body and wasted too much mana, to smaller bursts that dealt with specific wounds, to ones that burned and itched and flushed poison and infection out before they got too far in. And then there wee the buffs. They were rough and clumsy at first, and then they got smoother and stronger, and stronger. He had long been suspicious that Karen wasn't actually a Fighter type but was one of the rarer Assassin Awakened, the buffs the kid put on them all only confirmed it 100% for him. But the point was, no one in their team was higher than D-rank. Those buffs had them at C-rank or higher in Karen's case. Hence they they had been able to clear the Dungeon so quickly.

That kid.... he was no low ranker.

Hell, Paul had seen a lot of magic types in his time. Back in the early days, there was no ranking system, no payment system either. Whenever a Gate popped up, the police would roll up to the door of every Awakened within five miles and demand they close the damn thing. He'd worked with just about every rank of hunter, even an S-rank once when the first handful started appearing. This kid... it was hard to say what rank he actually was since inexperience made it seem like he had improved a whole ass rank while in the Dungeon itself, but if it were lower than C he would literally turn around and walk back into that Dungeon and use his tongue to clean the hobgoblin's asshole

The kid was probably safer in those dungeons than the rest of them, and was clearly not safe out here.

He watched as the kid slowly sat down on the carpark tarmac in the shadow of Camella's car, sliding a skittle under his mask in mute unhappiness. Like a puppy that had just been told off. Despite obviously being of a significant rank, the kid was quiet and shy. He hadn't been comfortable or happy in the Dungeon, but that wasn't unusual for healers. Unlike the rest of them, one could say a healer's mentality was the closest to an ordinary human's out of all Awakened. Very few of them actually liked Raiding or fighting or violence, but they cared about their fellow humans very much, so they continued to join raids in order to make sure as many people as possible survived. But he wasn't a wilting wallflower either, he was desperate, but not dumb about it. Kids were amazingly resilient, but they developed a whole host of often worrying coping mechanisms and techniques to hide what was happening to them and deal with it. More often than not, their issues at home would manifest in other ways in their lives and look like completely separate issues. He remembered one of his first cases where one little girl's school was absolutely certain she was just autistic and precocious, but her science teacher was certain there was something going on. It took over a month of investigation and speaking to the girl repeatedly before they managed to get the story out of her – molestation at the hands of her elder sister's boyfriend.

He couldn't say for sure what this kid's problem was. He would need to get closer for that.

The problem there was that he just didn't want to.

He wasn't a social worker anymore. This wasn't his problem. And it wasn't his job to fix whatever the f*ck problem the brat had. As long as he was kept in booze and blowj*bs then what the f*ck did he care what was happening to the kid? (He did care. He cared a lot. And it barely took an evening and he hated himself for it. He was a f*cking idiot. A f*cking IDIOT. He knew where this road led. He'd been down it before. He knew better. He f*cking knew better but here the f*ck he was a-f*cking-gain.)

He chugged the last of his tropical drink and viciously wished he'd thought to spike it with the vodka he kept in the boot of his car before scowling and shoving the final handful of peanuts into his mouth.

A couple of the other tried to question the kid, but he stubbornly remained as untalkative outside the dungeon as he had been inside it, letting the conversations eventually flow over and past him as he silently consumed his snack bag piece by piece underneath his mask.

Paul turned away and pointedly ignored the kid, focusing only on mentally attempting to calculate how much they'd cumulatively made on this venture and how much he'd have at the end of it as he cleaned his sword and shield. They'd killed every goblin in there, a first for his team in a long time. Being only an R-rank their closure fee wouldn't be very high when split between the eight of them, but with all those magical cores.... maybe 10k overall? That would be one thousand two fifty each between the eight of them, with an extra six twenty five for him if he took the half the kid promised him. Which would take him to one twenty five short of 2k.

.....damn.

That was three months rent for him.

“Hey kid,” he grunted, looking up from where he had been polishing his sword in thoughtful silence. “You looking to make a regular thing of this?” he asked bluntly, watching as the kid's silver eyes peered out from beneath the brim of his stupid lopsided hat.

“...Yes. I need the money,” he eventually said, quite plainly.

“Why?” Ian asked with a grimace, “If you want a new X-Box there's safer sh*t to do.”

The kid picked at his snack bag, looking down again. “I need to save up for my own place. You need to pay a year's worth of rent upfront to sign on without a guarantor.”

Paul closed his eyes and lifted his empty bottle to suck the last dregs out rather than look at the f*cking kid. Because of course he was putting his life on the line in order to escape whatever was waiting for him at home. Of course he was doing the smart thing and making sure he had resources in order to escape whatever was waiting for him at home instead of just packing his f*cking bags and running for it.

The kid was going to hunt again. He was going to get as much f*cking money as he could because he wasn't a f*cking idiot. He was going to ditch his home as soon as he got the chance, job or no job, but he was going to live off that money until he got said job if he didn't already have one.

“Surely you could get a paper-round and save up?” Karen asked in deeply disapproving tones.

As if a paper-round would let him save up a f*cking year's worth of rent before he was in his f*cking thirties.

The kid was withdrawing into himself, he mumbled something about how he already had one but.... but what? But it didn't pay? But it wasn't enough? But... what? The kid never answered, and the sound of Gary honking his carhorn, careless as to the hour of night, as he pulled up flushed and excited, saved the kid from answering. And Paul from having to consider it further as he tossed his trash into the back of his car and got to his feet to meet his friend.

“Over ten thousand!” the man was cheering as he tumbled out of his car, just a little wild-eyed. Paul blinked in surprise as the man waved a folder of envelopes at them. “We made just over ten thousand on the cores alone! With the completion payment on top of that, split eight ways, we're looking at a cool one and a half thousand each!” he crowed as they all crowded around him in excitement. “Here, I know you prefer cash Camella. Wahleed, your slip. Yours, and yours, Ian? Yeah, here ya go. Goose? I figured given your circ*mstances you'd prefer cash too. It's all in small notes so your envelope is a bit bigger than the others,” the tanker explained, handing over an A5 envelope to the kid that was positively stuffed with tens and twenties.

The kid's hand shook as he collected the envelope, “Thank you very much,” he whispered, his voice rasping with emotion.

Camella laughed, “Don't sweat it. Just don't forget about us the next time you wanna Raid. I know I'll be happy to have you along.”

“Oh yeah,” Wahleed said with a grin, jostling the kid a little with his elbow, “You did really good in there.”

“Count me out,” Karen refused with a deep sigh and a shake of her head as they all looked at her. “Sorry. I won't say anything, but I don't agree with taking kids into Dungeons. No matter how strong they may be. If you plan to invite Goose, don't bother inviting me,” she declared with an apologetic look at the kid who had wilted in place, now looking down at his feet in uncomfortable silence, clutching his envelope for dear life.

It effectively cast a pall over the mood of the others, and he could see Ian and Tom exchanging looks.

“I'm.... not going to lie, I'm not particularly cool with it either, man,” Ian admitted as he folded his arms and frowned. “Don't get me wrong Goose, you did damn good in there. But what happens if he gets hurt next time? Dungeons aren't playgrounds, people die in them all the time. We've almost died in them.”

“Not to mention we could lose our licences if we're caught Raiding with a kid,” Tom muttered nervously, giving Paul an almost accusatory look.

Gary huffed, “If you guys object so much, give the kid the money he earned in there then,” he told them, pointing at Goose before Paul even opened his mouth. The tanker wasn't frowning at them, but he did look rather fed up. “I'm not too wild on the whole underage thing, but he's not a complete child. Roberts was raiding when she was even younger. He did as he was told, he was quiet, competent, and got the job done. If he hadn't been there we would only have half of this money. So how about instead of running your mouths you either shut up or you give Goose what he's owed?”

To the surprise of absolutely everyone, Karen did exactly that.

“You've got a point,” she agreed plainly, and then held her envelope out to the kid. “You did earn this. Take it. Take it and use it to get your new home and wait until you're legally old enough to Raid. When that happens, I'd love to run with you again. But not before,” she said firmly, smiling a little before huffing in amusem*nt when he made no move to take her envelope. She stuffed it into his hood before he could jerk backwards and then turned to her car, positively beaming. “Get home safe guys!” she called, waving as she started walking away. “And don't forget to stretch before getting into bed or you'll cramp up!”

The kid was fumbling with both his hood, hat, and the envelope as everyone looked to Ian and Tom. But the pair only looked away. They made no move to hand over their envelopes. They needed the money, same as Goose.

Gary nodded to himself, and then got to his feet.

“Ya all have a good night now,” he told them as he stretched to a chorus of agreements and returned sentiments.

With the money distributed, and the matter of the kid seemingly resolved, everyone began to say their goodbyes and pack up to go. Lifts were offered, jokes made, complaints about aches and pains to be expected tomorrow morning. Paul was obligated as Raid Lead to stick around until the Gate was completely closed, which shouldn't be too much longer. At this time of night it only took five minutes to drive into town to the bureau, twenty to sort out their pay, and another five back. Ten/fifteen minutes until the Gate closure proper. It took about that long for everyone to finish waving their f*cking hankies at each other and piss off, leaving just him and the kid alone in the car park.

At least the kid waited until everyone had left before opening his envelope and beginning to count out his money before nodding and holding a small wad of twenties out to him.

“Seven hundred and fifty. Half. As promised,” the kid announced as if Paul couldn't figure that sh*t out himself.

He eyed the cash.

He would have well over four months rent if he accepted that. In a single night.

And it wasn't like the kid was going to lose our either. He still had Karen's envelope, so they were both going to walk away tonight with an equal amount of money. Two thousand, two hundred and fifty. Even if two thirds of that couldn't be cashed outside of a bank, and they'd need to see a Hunter's ID before cashing an Association slip. Ignoring that, he had no reason to not take the money.

No reason except the fact that as big a piece of sh*t he often felt he was.... taking money from a desperate f*cking kid.... that was f*cking low. That was really f*cking low. And he'd done some f*cking awful sh*t in the darkest moments of his life, sh*t that made him want to crawl into a bottle and never get out of it just for the sweet release of not remembering anything for twelve hours. But he would always tell himself that doing so wasn't fair to those he'd wronged. He f*cked up, he had to live with it. He had to accept that he had done something awful and live with it just as much as those he'd f*cked up had to live with his decisions.

It wouldn't be fair to the f*cking kid if he took that money. And it wouldn't be fair to Paul either, to force himself to live with that f*cking guilt.

He sighed harshly, “Keep your f*cking money, kid,” he grunted, digging into his pocket for his somewhat battered cigarette carton. “I'll cut you a different deal in exchange. You get final say whether or not you go for it though,” he declared, rummaging his lighter out.

The first hit of nicotine in his lungs was heaven-f*cking-sent, and he could already feel the corkscrew of stress wound up his back beginning to loosen. Now if only he – actually, yes, he f*cking could now. He had no hunt scheduled for tomorrow. He crooked a finger at the kid to follow him and headed to his car where he wasted no time in reaching under his sword and shield for the bottle of vodka he kept in the back for when hunts went bad. Or good. Or just whenever he got out of a hunt and wanted a drink.

f*cking rocket fuel hit his system with the first swig, burning all the way down. But he left it there for now. Kid would freak out over him drinking and driving judging by the way he was fidgeting.

He couldn't help but bark a laugh at him. “Calm the f*ck down Princess. I ain't having more than I can handle until I get home,” he promised with a hoarse laugh, the alcohol burning oh so nicely down his throat to warm him up from within. Nicotine, alcohol, money, he was on top of the f*cking world right now. He sat himself down on the back of his car boot and took another drag on his cigarette. “Okayt, here's the f*cking deal:

“There's a lot of assholes out there. I'd know, I'm f*cking one of them. But I'm not the kind that'd take advantage of a kid. Used to be a social worker before the Mana Advent, don't f*cking look at me like that. I ain't gunna rat you out. No one would f*cking believe me,” he grunted and took another drag, blowing to the side away from th4e kid. He might have been wearing a mask but it probably wouldn't do him any favours to come home stinking of fa*gs and blood. “So, I let you raid with me, I tell you other guys who are trustworthy to raid with, we set up a system where if we're joined by potential Association monitors we arrange it so you don't come with. And that's that. You don't raid with anyone else, just me and the guys I vet. You keep your money, you get paid cash, small notes, and me and mine get the services of a decent healer and the guarantee of a decent pay packet at the end of the night.”

The kid was frowning at him, the way his eyes creased through the slits in his mask showed it clear as day. “Only people you vet?” he echoed unhappily.

Paul shrugged, f*cking on his filter. “Google Jason Alford. Then ask me that again if you still don't like it,” he grunted before shaking his bottle thoughtfully. A second mouthful wouldn't be so bad.... would it? Hell. He planned on leaving soon. A seconds mouthful wouldn't even hit his bloodstream before he was through the door of his own place – and it wouldn't affect him either way if he did.

He took a swig. Or three. Or five. And then stoppered the bottle before he drained the whole thing again and had to replace it.

“You've got my number. Think about it,” he grunted as he shoved the bottle back beneath his shield and got to his feet. He dropped his fa*g and crushed it under his shoe. “f*ck off home kid. It's a school night or something, innit?” he sighed making a shooing motion with his hand to get the kid to back up enough so he could close the boot of his car.

Of course it was as he was getting into the car that the kid had to pipe up one last time.

“Bellamy.... thanks. For taking the risk.”

And then he was f*cking done. Sprinting out of the carpark like the hounds of hell were on his ass. He didn't even head to the highstreet where there was likely to be a bus running at this time of night. He went in the opposite direction, towards the industrial estates and the rat-warren of council houses. Buffed to the gills and moving much too quickly to be anything but an Awakener.

“f*ck's sake,” he muttered quietly under his breath, feeling his mouth pull into an unwelcome smile. He shook his head and climbed into the car to head home.

And of course his good mood was f*cking ruined the second he got through the front door and found Michelle in his bed with another f*cking man.

Because Paul Bellamy isn't allowed to have a f*cking good day for once in his entire f*cking life apparently.

Atty got as far as the front door of the flat before he realised the lights were on, meaning his parents were home. Sneaking in wouldn't be possible.

The front door opened out into the living room, and he would have to pass everyone inside to get to his bedroom at the back. He had shoved both his hat and his mask into his pockets along with the payslip and envelope of money from the Raid. If his parents through he had even a £5 note in his pocket they'd be shoving their hands in there whether he liked it or not, or hitting him until he turned his pockets out. They would find the single magical core he'd kept as a souvenir, along with the near-enough 3k of money he'd gotten that evening. Almost three thousand pounds. His hands were still shaking.

He couldn't risk it.

He turned on heel and went to Claire's house.

Her mum answered the door and took one look at him, grey faced, shaking from an adrenalin crash, and he was ushered in without even having to explain himself. Mrs Brown was really nice like that. She had the kettle on and a cup of hot chocolate in his hands before bustling him into the living room to drink and settle his nerves as she went upstairs to quickly make sure the guest room had clean bedding.

She came back when he was finished with his hot chocolate, her long clean fingers running through his sweaty greasy hair without hesitation or a single hint of disgust on her kindly face as she gently ushered him to his feet and took him upstairs. A familiar routine by now. But a comforting one as she made sure he had a towel and a pair of her husband's nightclothes to borrow. She was soft and warm, and smelt like lily of the valley when she hugged him goodnight, her small hands rubbing his back in a way that made his eyes ache almost painfully.

His clothes would be clean, folded, and waiting for him in the morning on the dining room table – just like every other time he'd washed up at her house, too scared to go back to his own for whatever reason. Claire would be surprised to see him, but ultimately bully him into actually having a shower and a full breakfast before she let him out of the house.

And yet, despite how much he wanted to crash into the bed, and how little he wanted to waste their money on hot water he didn't earn or contribute to affording – he couldn't. He just couldn't. He needed to shower right now. He needed to get the chill and the stink of that Dungeon off his body, the blood from under his fingernails. How the hell Mrs Brown hadn't noticed it – or rather, hadn't asked – she was good like that – she didn't push when he wasn't able to speak – she was too nice – she had noticed right? He was reasonably sure she'd noticed – it was so obvious? But it was also dark and late and she was probably tired and – she'd notice the blood on his clothes for sure – how did he even explain that?

He found himself in the bathroom, mask and money on the side, clothes tossed to one side, and hands on the knobs for the shower. He shook himself out of his spiralling thoughts. The hot water was amazing, he turned it as high as it could go and just.... tried to boil the cold out of his bones. He washed until the foam that sworled around the plug hole was white instead of grey, until running his fingers through his hair no longer felt gritty or oily or sticky. Until all he could smell was Claire's cherry and vanilla bodywash and coconut shampoo and conditioner, and his fingertips no longer felt like ice against his stomach or legs.

He tried off and got dressed in Mr Brown's spare clothes before shuffling back to the guest room and crawling into the bed. He curled into a ball with as much of the blankets wrapped around him as possible.

He was unconscious before he had even finished telling himself he would have to remember to hide his money somewhere good when he got home. Safe at the Browns' house. Warm, and comfortable. The smells of safety and home in his nose.

Notes:

Sorry about the lack of update last week, got slapped with the Big Sads. And since this chapter hadn't yet been typed up out of my notebooks.... I just wasn't in the brain space or had any energy to do so. Still, I hope Bellamy's POV is everything you ever hoped for and more lmao
Yeesssss, Atty has made some friends, got his first pay packet, and been in a Dungeon babeeeeeey!!.
This will surely not awaken anything in him, not at all.
:)

Chapter 6 Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

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All ��s ��.

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Th�y ��d y�u. �� y�u wo��d still �� th��?

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��ey �� what �� m�� t��m �� be. All of ��.

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I �� st��.

A�� m�?

Oh, �� li�tle b��d. �� eatest ��. It �� yo�r ��. It has always �� yo�r ��. You h��e always �� a ��ice. � �� �� that � could n�t �� you bet�� ��, kinder ��. I am sorry th�� ��not �� so now. I �� �� for these ��, th�se ��less ��ials, for never ��ing.

I �� you. I �� al�� gi�� . All of ��. They �� not �� u �� and ble�d �� w��. W�� r t��m. I �ave. And s� � �� y��. And condemn ��.

�� was �� ch�ice. They �� k��w.

Th�� didn't �� .

I am ��.

�� are. I f�� .

I �� stay.....

I ��. Go. Take with you my Blessing.

I �� you.

�

He was so tired that he slept without dreams, and woke feeling like he'd been hit by a bus and in fire need of the bathroom. Atty sniffed and frowned blearily at how sticky dry and also wet his face felt. Had he been crying in his sleep?

A door slammed, making him jump in his borrowed bed and clothes, the sound of Claire's voice shouting down the stairs, asking her mother where her jeans were. Muffled voices, his bestfriend yelping 'is he okay?!' and then footsteps. He huffed on a small smile as a very tentative and quiet knock was tapped onto the door. If he had been asleep it wouldn't have woke him, but the banging and shouting beforehand? That – might not have actually, thinking about it. Given the usual noise levels back home when his parents were home.

“I'm awake,” he said, wincing at how rough he sounded.

A moment later, Claire was rushing in, still in her own nightdress. A long knee length t-shirt with a lion-sunflower emplazoned across the front. It was soft and worn and faded with age and many, many washes. It looked comfortable. She sat on the edge of the bed, her pin-straight dirty blonde hair unbrushed and stucking up on one side of her head as she peered at him with a plain if pretty face and similar grey eyes to his own.

“Are you okay?” she eventually asked, her voice tentative as she set her hands delicately on the blankets in front of him, as though his hands were somewhere under them. He shifted so he could pull them out and grasp hers. Her mother was one of the only people who could hug him without him tensing up horribly, without him wanting to crawl out of his skin. Claire had gotten into the habit of holding his hands over the years when the idea of hugs was too much but he needed something and she couldn't stand to just sit there next to him and do nothing. He.... he liked holding hands better than hugs most of the time.

He nodded, “I lost track of time. Mum and Dad were home. I co-didn't want to risk seeing them,” he admitted softly, squeezing her hands gently. Oh so gently. He could feel how fragile her skin and bones were with his new perception of mana and the world around him. It was scary to sit there with her hands in his, and know that if he sneezed and squeezed just that little bit, he could break her bones. By accident. That he could feel inside her body to where her migraine rested, static and throbbing in the back of her skull, a low level discomfort, easily ignored. But he could feel it sparking further, threatening to reach out, to bleed through her mind and consume her awareness entirely in a storm of pain.

He wasn't even aware of his mana washing it away until he no longer sensed it.

Claire blinked slowly, staring at him.

He swallowed.

She looked down at their hands. Their hands that very clearly still glowed in the gloom of the drawn curtains of her spare bedroom. Flutters of green mana rising from their joined fingers like butterflies. He felt his stomach drop.

And then she pulled his hands up to rest her forehead against them.

“That's much better. Thank you,” she whispered.

“...You're welcome,” he rasped, at a loss of what to say further.

“You want toast or cereal for breakfast?” she asked briskly as she lowered his hands, squeezing them briefly before she got to her feet and letting him go.

“...Toast, please.”

“You got it. Get dressed and come on down. We'll get some breakfast down your neck before getting Archie and going to the park,” she decided before heading out of the room and leaving him to.... feel everything that he was feeling and creep out, down the stairs, to find the clothes that Mrs Brown had been kind enough to put in the washer-dryer the night before.

They smelt of her summer fresh fabric softener and were still warm from where they had only just come out.

He got dressed in the spare room, doublechecking his envelopes and his phone which thankfully still had a lot of battery. When he went downstairs, Claire was already sat to the table with a plate of toast and peanut butter, and a jar of marmalade and raspberry jam was in front of his usual seat. He felt a soft clench of affection for her. She knew he loved raspberry so made sure there was always a jar for him, even though no one else in the house liked it. He sat down and Mrs Brown bustled into the dining room with two more plates, one for herself, another for him. She set hers down and then his, leaning over to press a kiss to his forehead before rounding the table to do the same to her daughter who made a noisy complaint around her toast while her mother laughed at her before sitting down.

His hands tingled as he carefully spread the seedless raspberry jam onto his fresh buttered toast.

It was a surprisingly stark realisation to have all of a sudden.... that he would kill for these people.

That if a Dungeon Break occurred tomorrow morning he would stand between this family and every monster that crawled out of that cave to protect them, to keep them safe, to give them time to escape.

He chewed his food slowly, feeling a thousand miles away as he watched Mrs Brown delicately spread marmalade onto her toast and eat it bite by bite, while Clare smothered her toast with a layer of crunchy peanut butter that was guaranteed to stick to the back of her teeth and need at least two cups of tea to wash away. Lit in warm golden morning light, the smell of sunshine fresh laundry detergent tickling the edge of his nose from the washing on the table to his right. Mrs Brown smiling, soft and gentle, lovingly at her daughter, her eyes cringled with decades of laughter and joy, her hair threaded with shining glittering silver. Claire with her dark baggy comfortable clothes and long straight blonde hair that she'd pulled back into a ponytail for the first time in a long time since she didn't have a headache. How she enthusiastically decided what they were going to be doing today with Archie, chattering happily with her mother.

Did they know how important they were?

How priceless and beautiful and wonderful they were?

How much he loved them?

“Are you even listening?” Claire demanded, looking at him in amused annoyance.

“Yeah,” he admitted, trying to force himself back into his mind and body as he blinked back into himself. “Can't say I took any of it in though,” he admitted with a small smile he hid behind his cup as she tsk'd in disgust and her mother chuckled.

“Go easy on the poor thing. I'm surprised he can listen at all with how late he showed up last night,” Mrs Brown said reaching out and smoothing her hand through his hair again, “Are you sure you don't need more sleep? Just because this horror is an early riser doesn't mean you have to be as well. Growing boys need their sleep.”

He shook his head, feeling deep in his chest a fierce love for this woman who he knew would have taken him in in a heartbeat if she could. “I'm okay. I was already awake,” he assured her.

Claire stuck her tongue out at him and quickly gathered their dirty plates, complaining all the while about her lazy bones father still snoring away upstairs and how the only direction he was going to grow was sideways.

They called on Archie, who was sleep mussed and none-too-pleased to see them, but when Claire ordered him to get dressed and come to the park with them he just yawned, grumbled an okay, and shuffled back upstairs. Bouncing off the bannister like a light-blind moth in the process.

He was awake and clutching his canned drink in both hands by the time they reached their usual hang-out spot at the park beneath the currently flowerless cherry tree.

“Atty's an Awakener,” Claire told their ginger friend without preamble.

He winched as Archie paused, squinted at him, and then set his drink to one side.

Claire continued.

“He healed my migraine this morning. All green lights and glowing an' sh*t,” she told him as she swung her legs from where she was sat on one of the low hanging branches. Atty squirmed from his own usual spot on the concrete drain cover. “Mum said he showed up gone midnight looking like death warmed over and smelling like it too.” She gave him a Look. “Your clothes were covered in blood and dirt apparently. She thought your dad had kicked the sh*t out of you.”

He winced and wilted in his seat.

“Carry on like this and she won't care that you don't want to go into foster care,” she warned him seriously. “Mum's been talking to Dad about getting a foster licence, specifically to help you. She thinks of you as one of hers already, y'know. She'd turn that spare room into yours in a heartbeat if she thought she could get the legal rights to your guardianship. Dad's had to talk her out of calling CPS more than once for dear of what would happen to you. We don't want you vanishing into the System.”

He squirmed.

“Yooooou were hu-UNting,” Archie concluded flatly.

...he nodded.

“I – I looked it up. Low level Gates have an automatic payment for closure at two thousand pounds. It has to be shared between the whole Raid team but, they usually have to be eight people minimum and they always have to have one tank and one healer. The magical cores mean that – I made one and a half thousand last night, for four hours of work!” he told them semi-hysterically as he pulled one of the envelopes out of his pocket. “One of the ladies, she gave me her portion as well, but I can't cash it in. I don't have a Hunter ID but – but they said I can Raid with them again. They'll pay me the same as everyone else. I can – I can get out sooner if I do this right. If I can get out, if I can get away from my parents then I'll get registered, I'll get ranked properly. But – no one can know until then.” He shook his head, feeling static shiver up his sides and down his arms, leaving his mouth vinegary and his feet tingly. His stomach twisted. His parents couldn't know. They would force him to work with whomever would give him the most money and they'd force him to give it all to them, he owed them fifteen years of back rent, bills, food, clothing, etc. He owed them his life. And for as long as he was alive, it was a debt that he needed to pay for. If they thought they could get money out of him, he would never be free of them. He would – they'd –

Archie grabbed his hand, and Claire grabbed his shoulders.

“We won't breathe a word, but you need to calm down. You're glowing,” Claire warned, her voice shaking a little.

He looked up and saw her grey eyes reflecting gold back at him, and felt as though he had been doused in cold water. The light immediately cut and he felt cold and shivery all over again.

She hugged his head to her chest, Archie laced their fingers together in his other hand, and it was all he could do not to cry as he wrapped an arm around her waist in an awkward embrace.

They stayed like that for several minutes until Claire pulled away.

“Okay. You're Awakened. You're Hunting. You've got a stupid amount of money. We need to get you away from your parents. Ideas?” she declared briskly, looking at Archie.

“Legal emancipa-Aa-tion,” he said immediately, making Claire nod.

“Good plan. GCSEs ahead of time would help with that. We'll need to figure out rent and bills too. Dad's forever complaining about the Council Tax so we know it isn't just rent and bills that need to be accounted for,” she said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. “We should go to the library, use the computers to look up everything we might need.”

He loved them.

He loved them so much.

Most of the information they found was American specific, which was annoying. Just because they had the largest speaking English population worldwide didn't make their country the only one that might be seeking information online. It took them ten solid minutes of refining their search results to get anywhere.

Apparently he could get emancipated at fourteen or older, the problem was that everything they found indicated that it was hugely expensive and very complicated to do with a low chance of success unless supported by the police. He needed to get a court order, and this was likely to involve the social services as well. He needed to be completely financially independent, receiving no money from parents, relatives, or even friends, absolutely no one. He needed to be independently wealthy and prove he could handle his own money. It also needed to be lawful, which immediately made him nervous because he was hunting illegally, even if the repercussions for it never got more severe than a minor fine. He could claim he had been saving money since early childhood, he knew Dogmeat and his parents friends would back him up if social services showed up to question them. They'd say they handed him money since day dot if he asked them to. And more importantly, it needed to be in his best interest not to be living at home and his parents explicitly needed to agree to let him move out.

Most of the legal advice just boiled down to 'suck it up until you're eighteen – it'll be easier'.

Which was disheartening to say the least.

He then asked them to google Jason Alford, as recommended by Bellamy.

That had been a horror story and a half to read.

How had they not heard about this? Admittedly they were little kids when it all came to light, but given the Hunter Junkies in their school, this sort of sh*t should have been common knowledge in almost every social circle.

Jason Alford, B-rank Fighter and Raid Leader. Convicted murderer, rapist, child molester, thief, embezzler, all around psychotic sad*st, and one messed up motherf*cker. He had multiple documentaries dedicated to his f*cked up crimes in the early years of the Mana Advent.

Notes:

I missed another week. In my defence - I don't have a defence. I'm just a messy bitch lmao
Still, I'm registered at a new Doctors' Surgery so fingers crossed I can get back on my medication soon and stop being such a f*cking mess. Not a hot mess, because I am not unless it is temperature wise (looking likely with how England is set for a heat wave), just a mess.
And ooh, what's this? Mystery dreams eh? Well, I wonder what I have up my sleeves, what I've got planned, especially since I've axed all the HP stuff from the fic, so what could I be planning with this foreshadowing I wonder???

Chapter 7 Notes:

WARNING: Violence, gore, fire, post-apocalyptic urban decay, Bellamy's potty mouth

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

It was another three weeks before he got a text message from Bellamy inviting him to another hunt.

In that time, Claire had put together a meal plan with help from her mum and Atty got used to going home from school with her to go food shopping. Her parents helped him prep the food and were kind enough to store it for him and Claire would bring his breakfast and lunch in for him every day in exchange for him preventing her migraines. She and Archie put together a training plan that he technically could follow – if he was willing to stay out later than he would normally risk.

His parents were too wrapped up in themselves, they didn't notice his later than usual comings and going as long as he kept putting his weekly paper-round envelope on the top of the TV in the livingroom for them to take to the nearest dealer. He honestly thought they needed to change dealer, his mum had been vomiting all over the bathroom for a week already, and leaving it for him to clean up. The smell of vomit made him gag and he ended up throwing up once or twice as well when trying to clean it. But despite throwing up all over the place she didn't stop using his obviously bad product, and nor did she stop drinking either – he could always tell when she had too much snakebite-black, the vomit in the bathroom was purple. She always threw up when she drank snakebite-black, because she didn't stop drinking until she threw up. And then she would keep drinking. Until she passed out.

She would have flipped her sh*t if she knew how many times he had been forced to roll her onto her front and stick his fingers in her mouth to make sure she didn't swallow her own tongue or drown in her own vomit. At the end of the day she was still his mum.... He didn't want her to die. He wanted her to stop using more than anything. He'd seen her talking to her friends, how warm and kind she could be with them, seen her smile and mean it, watched her offer food, money, time, care, attention, to other people who needed it. Watched as she held and cuddled and cooed at Lorna's daughter, a baby of only a few months and so small and soft that he had been terrified of dropping her the first time Lorna asked him to hold her while she went to the bathroom. He knew his mother was capable of being a mother, of being a decent person....

He just.... he just wished she wanted to be a mother or a decent person to him.

Part of him said that she did, that it was just the drugs and the alcohol that told her otherwise. That if she just stopped drinking and using she would..... she would care. She would smile and kiss his forehead the same way Mrs Brown smiled and kissed Claire's forehead.

But the larger part, the one that had watched for years, who had seen the look in her eye when she told him she wished she had aborted him, when his father said she had tried, but it just didn't take.... the one that had felt the harsh side of her hand, the one that felt the hollow pain of an empty belly for most of his life, the burn of soiled nappies, and dirty clothes because he'd been locked in the crate and couldn't get out to go to the potty or the bathroom.

That part had given up a long time ago.

He shook the dark thoughts off. He needed his wits about him if he was going into a Dungeon. Bellamy said that it was another E-rank so even though he was reasonably sure he could handle it, he wasn't about to get complacent and potentially put himself or someone else's life in danger.

They were on the West side of the city this time, at the water treatment centre at one of the major industrial parks on the outskirts. He hung back for a little bit, making sure his mask, hood, and hat were secure. He messaged Claire and Archie his location and that it was an E-rank, he'd tell them when he got out. He got a string of emojis from Claire that basically told him to take care and she would stab everyone if he got hurt, Archie actually used his words to wish him luck.

The small group in front of the Gate had a number of familiar faces.

Bellamy, smoking like a chimney and scowling at his phone in a pair of faded jeans, a lumpy red sweater, and a collared shirt that was more grey than white these days. He looked like he hadn't shaved for a few days, or slept particularly well either. His hair was looking a bit long too, tied at the nape of his neck in a stubby little tail.

He spotted Wahleed with Camella and Gary, all three were chatting casually. Camella was wearing a new leather jerkin of soft turquoise green – she was showing off the silky padded lining that would keep her nice and warm in the dungeon. Wahleed looked like he had a new pair of gloves as well. Gary remained unchanged, he had actually lost the coat he wore last time and right now had just an old faded black t-shirt with bright yellow 'One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila – FLOOR' emblazoned across the chest.

He didn't see any sign of Karen, which.... he wasn't sure how he felt about that. He had kind of liked her, but he guessed she was holding fast to her ideals and her refusal to raid with someone underage.

Tom was leaning on his lance and chattering to two unfamiliar men, one of whom had a bow much like Wahleed and the other had a long spear he was jokingly comparing to Tom with a lot of phallic hand-gestures and grins. One of the men was white, the other was black, they seemed fairly normal in casual clothes, even with their weapons. The white guy had anime tattoos on his forearms Atty quickly noticed, a Fairy Tail symbol on one bicep and the Strawhat Flag on his forearm, the other arm had one of those old timey pin-up girl sailor tattoos. He was in just a generic pair of jeans and a black t-shirt while the black guy he was stood with was in a pair of red tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie. They seemed friendly.....

Atty hovered a little until Wahleed's sharp eyes spotted him and he shouted over, waving enthusiastically. It drew everyone's attention and soon he found everyone looking at him, immediately making him want to turn around and leave but – three thousand in one day..... He forced his feet to move closer.

“Goose,” Bellamy grunted, “Good we're all here. Dave, Rob, this is Goose. Independent Healer. Goose – Dave, fighter, D-rank. Rob, Ranger, C-rank. Touch dicks later where I don't have to give a sh*t,” he growled, gesturing to the spear wielding Dave and the bow wielding Rob. Rob gave him a friendly little wave while Dave frowned a little before shrugging. Atty just nodded to them both, tucking his hands into his hoodie nervously. “Preliminary info on the Gate tells us it's a Slime Swamp, so watch your footing. Those f*ckers are basically acid and they'll melt holes in the floor for you to fall in. They'll do their best to drown everyone so don't let them get on your heads or faces. We're all going to have a tough time in there, these f*ckers have resistances to physical attacks, but there's no Mages available anywhere. Goose, you're the closest we've got with those shields of yours, do your best to keep the f*ckers off our heads.”

He nodded nervously. It looked like his job today was going to be a lot more.... not tedious but harder and longer and more exhausting.

“Get your sh*t together. We're going in ten,” Bellamy announced, apparently seeing nothing more to add to his pre-Raid checks of briefing.

Wahleed slung an arm over his shoulder, “Gunna be my buddy again this time?” he asked cheerfully, “Rob, come meet Goose properly.”

The big black guy in the tracksuit meandered over, bow slung over his back. He smiled down at him, dark eyes friendly, “Hey little man. You good?” he greeted.

Atty nodded, nervously reaching up to twist his repaired hat more firmly onto his head.

“He's quiet, but he's good,” Wahleed said. “First healer I've ever met who can use a shield like a hammer, little mans was smearing goblins against the walls last time, it was epic!” the Ranger enthused, which made Atty wince a little as he recalled the wet crunching sounds of his barriers knocking the goblins into the dungeon walls. Rob looked quite impressed and enthusiastic about this knowledge which only made Atty feel even worse.

Was he the only one who thought this was a bit messed up?

Like, yeah humans could be a bit bloodthirsty, but the enthusiasm hunters had for violence was.... not normal. Or rather, the lack of lasting psychological impact on killing monsters didn't seem normal.

Before too long, Bellamy was shouting for them all to get their asses moving and issuing the same instructions as last time. Gary the tank would be in the rear, Bellamy would be in front. Camella would be at the front along with Tom and Dave. Wahleed and Rob would flank him as protection detail for both front and back squads. And then they were stepping through the Gate.

That same awful feeling washing over him.....

The environment they stepped into looked like some dystopian post-apocalyptic warehouse taken over by nature in a bad way. Mould and rot as far as the eye could see in the shifting darkness – and stinking worse than the goblin town.

Wahleed gagged, and this time didn't even protest when Atty handed him a face mask, only gratefull shoved it over his mouth and nose while the rest of the party gagged in revulsion. Tom even threw up.

They made such a noise that Atty was the first one to notice the approaching jewel coloured monsters.

“Front!” he shouted, forcing everyone to face to the front and spot their company.

The slimes were..... brightly coloured. That was probably their only similarity with the slimes of popular fiction.

These creatures had no eyes, and they moved across the floor like rolling bread-dough that was still too wet, leaving streaks of hissing slime in their wake. They weren't see through or slick in appearance, but matt-coloured and thick, more doughy than gelatinous, and every time they opened their 'mouth' it was like their flesh tore open to reveal a maw of jagged broken glass teeth – like crystallised hard-candy or broken sugar-glass.

Most of them were blue, but he did spy a red one in the back. The red one had a visible heat haze around it.

“Wahleed, kill the red one, I think it has fire,” he told the ranger even as he summoned a barrier to shove one of the slimes away from Camella as it tried to 'fall' off a nearby piece of machinery onto her.

Their surroundings were not particularly helpful to their survival, plenty of rusted high machines, broken walkways and ladders and stairs, hanging ivy from which they could ooze their way down, and metal grating beneath their feet that gave way with all too much ease. As Bellamy found out when he almost went down into a pool of suspicious brackish water that peered up at them with an oily grey-green and purple sheen. And then opened a mouth filled with yet more crystalline broken glass teeth lining it like the mouth of an eel.

As Atty expected when he saw the heat haze around the rest slime, some of them were able to cast magic, but thankfully they were so minor that he didn't even have to strain to heal them. The hardest part was dealing with what he could only tentatively identify as poison, or some kind of toxin. He had never dealt with that before, he could feel it ripping through Dave like an almost visible change of colour beneath his skin, a kind of strange boiling heat inside him. It was an abject lesson in working fast under pressure while multi-tasking and keeping an eye on his surroundings. Because he needed to not only prevent slimes from falling on him, falling on Dave, falling on the rest of the party, but also on healing everyone else, and healing Dave. He had to isolate the infection or the toxin before it got too far, he had to stop it in its tracks, he had to neutralise or destroy it or remove it, then he had to heal the damage done to Dave's internals. In the end, he tore the toxin apart on a cellular level, rendering it harmless, and allowing him to just pull it out of Dave's skin like a gross purple coloured sweat. Then he healed the damage it had done inside. What that damage was he wasn't too sure, but he knew something was bad in there because it made his magic itch to fix. So he did.

Going through the warehouse was messier and harder than the Goblin Town – the slimes couldn't just be stabbed in a vital point the way the goblins could. They needed to basically have their regenerative ability overwhelmed by damage until they couldn't reform, until whatever chemical or magical reaction that created them was used up.

Then there was the warehouse dungeon itself.

It was just..... weird.

It looked like any other industrial warehouse you would expect, but there were pitch black oozing corridors that – when in a fit of frustration at having slimes constantly trying to drop on his head, Atty formed a shield the width of the corridor and pushed, scraping the walls clean of slimes and sludge, revealed themselves to be rusting shipping containers that lead from one warehouse to another. Meaning their dungeon wasn't just one building, but several, all connected by shipping containers.

The first one they'd stepped into seemed to be a car manufacturer by the way the machines and the rusting parts and heavy production machines were set out, the second one looked to be a roofing company with pallets upon pallets of roof tiles, rotting wooden beams, rusting scaffolding, etc. And the third one they were slowly making their way through was.... some kind of lab? Atty frowned at the mouldering posters on the wall. They were so water damaged and mildewed the image was hard to make out but it looked like..... someone playing cricket? But in black and white with the colours inverted?

The car manufacturing place had plenty of red and blue slimes, a handful of toxic purple ones. The roofing place had a lot of blues and a number of tough sticky caustic grey ones that could spit nails and glass shards at them. While this place...... There were a lot of purple slimes. And the first appearances of white ones, that left icy wet streaks in their wake, and greasy looking yellow ones that stank of farts and left chalky yellow trails behind them, like slug lines.

They learned the hard way that these two slimes would explode if you hit them too hard.

“Liquid nitrogen,” Wahleed concluded, his voice tight with pain as Atty healed the ice burns puckering his forearms and cheek, looking equal parts fascinated and disturbed. “This place reminds me of where I work. We had nitro-tanks out the back for some of the labs. If the slimes we see are indicative of their environments then it stands to reason that blue is standard, red has access to petrol or other flammable liquids, purple is toxic and poisonous. The grey ones from the last building – maybe roof sealant? Tar? Doesn't explain the spitting beyond the increased mass allowing them to generate better kinetic force. Maybe the others don't spot those horrible fangs at us because they can't? Yellow.... explosive and yellow..... phosphorus maybe? Sulphur? Is sulphur explosive?” he asked, peering at the rest of the party positioned protectively around them who were now exchanging various looks of uncertainty or annoyance.

“No clue. Stop gassing. He good to go, Goose?” Bellamy grunted behind his torn shirt-sleeve face mask. Eventually the smell had grown so bad that everyone had ended up wrapping their faces to ward off the worst of the stink, and to make it harder for the slimes to try and drown them by climbing down their mouths and noses.

He nodded as he got to his feet, “Yeah.”

Bellamy grunted and tugged on the tip of Atty's hat before they all fell back into position, Wahleed still mumbling about potential chemicals that might be in such a location and what that could mean for future slime variations they had to deal with.

“Still no sign of a boss room,” Camella muttered unhappily, “And we've been in here for several hours.”

“We've got time before the break,” Gary reassured her from the backline as they continued walking.

“Enemies have been getting tougher, for R-rank. We should see something soon,” Rob the ranger commended idly as he fingered his bowstring.

Atty eyed it.

The slimes were able to change their elemental composition based on what they'd eaten....... that was a chemical reaction. One that was only possible because of their unique mana adaptations. Wahleed had told him earlier that Slimes were one of the only low rank monsters that could change their abilities based on what they ate. Opposite the slimes, they couldn't do the same, not physically. But he had just spent the day summoning physical objects using his mana, solidifying his mana into shapes and using it to.... burn illness and infection out of people? To cool swelling and inflammation, and regenerate flesh. To shred and pull and wash toxins away. Next to him Wahleed and Rob had been using their mana to form arrows, to enhance their eyesight, and reflexes and speed.

He could move his shields and use them offensively. He'd summoned a flat shield to basically act as a throwing disk. A razor edged throwing disk, more of a buzz-saw than a disk. Or an evil pizza cutter without the handle. But he'd changed the shape of his barrier from a dome to a flat. Could he effectively..... use the same burning technique he used to remove toxins on the slimes? To burn the toxin out of them?

They carried on walking and he resolved to try it on the next slime they found.

Eventually though, Wahleed paused and frowned before pointing down a corridor that had some unholy sludge glittering across the floor, like the plastic linoleum had melted or turned to wet sludge. With no better ideas, they shrugged and headed down, being careful with their footing as they passed what was unmistakably a machineshop and opposite it a forklift bay, two more shipping containers and finally a squat-low brick wall and a sign next two a pair of dissolved chemical tanks – 'CHEMICAL STORE' glaring out at them in stark black letters from a yellow plastic plaque that was half-melted.

It was, at first glance, a small room. But the backwall had rotted away and opened up into one of the labs from the look of the huge cats that had rusted open, their contents congealing into a thick semi-crystallised sludg-

Atty swallowed, feeling a chill across his shoulders and up both his arms.

“I think – that's the boss,” he rasped behind his face mask, staring in horror at the semi-crystallised mass sleeping quietly within the rusted tanks. It – it was a deep dark black and brown colour, the areas that it had crystallised had glimmers of other colours where the light caught it. The mass was roughly the size of a car, but that wasn't what made Atty's blood chill. It was the fact that spreading out from it was a much thinner and familiar toxic ooze that slicked the entire room and parts of the walls and ceiling, consuming all of the lab tables, the free-standing equipment, eaten through every tank and bottle of chemicals and box of powders in the room, and even dried on the ceiling into fangs of dagger sharp crystal above their heads. Hidden from sight. But now that he'd seen it – he couldn't help but thing the doorway looked like a mouth full of teeth.

Bellamy's breath left him in an annoyed woosh.

“Looks like we've got a Puller on our hands,” he complained, sheathing his sword and rubbing his chin through his facemask as he observed the room in question, his eyes lingering on the sludge up the walls and the stalagtites overhead.

Atty frowned and looked up at Wahleed who didn't notice, too busy muttering as he observed the sludge boss.

“Means we're going to have to pull the monster out of the Boss room,” Camella explained, spotting his confused expression. She gestured to the room, “You run into them now and again, it isn't common but sometimes Boss rooms are just too small or too awkward for a proper fight, so you gotta pull them out. Karen used to be our runner, she was fast and hit hard enough to draw them out but now.....” She chewed her lower lip before scowling at him, “Don't even think about volunteering kid, or I'll put you in timeout,” she threatened.

He quickly lifted both hands and backed away from her.

There were some fights he knew better than to attempt.

Crystal Sludge was..... not an easy fight.

Being semi-solid, cutting it didn't seem to do an awful lot, bashing it didn't seem to do anything either. At least, not at first. Fighting it was just..... the same as fighting the others but more exhaustive. It was an exercise in frustration. An endurance slug-match that saw Atty tired, sweaty, and pissed off as he did his level best to find some kind of weak point, some kind of central nervous system or vital organ he could cut off!

The problem was.... it didn't seem to matter how much of it they carved off, it just reabsorbed it. And as they lead it out of its chamber, it rolled over and absorbed its dead comrades. Becoming bigger and grosser and more dangerous.

Was this thing a f*cking E-rank?! He had his doubts!!

“To hell with worrying about chemical reactions,” Wahleed eventually muttered – right before his arrow caught fire.

To say it was effective would be an understatement.

The Sludge screamed as the flaming arrow hit it, and all at once it was on fire, writhing and thrashing.

Atty summoned several barriers to stop it from escaping, or charging them.

Bellamy shouted something and from the corner of his eye he saw the man douse his sword with a hipflash before it lit up on fire as well. The Sludge screeched again as the flaming sword tore a chunk out – a chunk that noticably did not rejoin the rest of the body after hitting the floor.

“Set it on fire and carve it up!” Bellamy roared, tossing his hipflash over his shoulder to the nearest person.

Wahleed grunted and soon fire was raining from his bow, Rob not far behind.

Atty grunted as the Sludge shrieked and slammed itself against his barriers, attempting to escape as they circled it and started carving flaming chunks off. He could feel the way its body was burning, feel the way Wahleed's mana scorched and hurt it. The death of cells and mana. The way the alcohol fuelled fire in its wounds heated and melted and felt cold before it just went dead.

He knew what Wahleed's mana felt like. Had felt it in his heart's blood, felt it pulsing through his veins as he healed the man's wounds, as he bolstered his speed, fed his muscles and ligaments. He knew how it moved, how it felt, how it.... resonated. And he knew he could manipulate it. Knew. Somehow. Deep in the back of his mind that if he just.... touched and pushed, fed it a little more power, gave that burning mana a little more oomph -

The Sludge shrieked as fire engulfed its body.

“Go, go, go!” Bellamy shouted as the Raid team descended like locusts, tearing chunks off the burning monster and tossing them aside, the fire scorched sludge hardening as it cooled, inert, blackened, and dead.

It was easy, Atty realised, to turn the fire from being fuelled by chemicals in the body... to being fuelled by its own mana. To kill it with its own magic. The more it tried to fight them, the faster it burned until.....

the fire burned out.

Leaving nothing but the reek of burning chemicals, alcohol, and rot.

Bellamy heaved on a breath behind his mask. He was quick to shove his hand into the no doubt still hot ooze, his flesh red and scalded as he yanked out the magical core. A core he promptly tossed at Atty whom fumbled to catch it, squeaking at how hot it was in his hands before he shoved it into his bag where it wouldn't burn him.

“Let's get out of here, place stinks like my ex's dirty underwear,” the man sneered as they began to gather themselves to leave.

They retraced their steps, following the glow in the dark chalk-pen markings that Camella had been putting on the walls as they went so they could find their way back more easily if they had to run it. Throughout it all, Wahleed kept looking around, his expression perturbed, as if seeing ghosts. At least until they reached the opening that brought them into the lab-warehouse.

The ranger paused in the threshold, looking back over his shoulder down what should have been a very long corridor but due to the way the insides had rotted and rusted and broken, was now untraversable, the ceiling caved in. His eyes lingered on the dirty wall posters and signs, on the rusted piping that had fallen down with the ceiling, and the grimy rusted mirrors that lined the walls beneath what had once been electrical cables but now hosted moss and lichens and ferns, all manner of plants growing out of the crevasses their roots desperately clutched at.

He shook his head, mouth twisting, “Don't be dumb,” he muttered to himself as he turned away and brushed past him to climb up the fallen freight container that took them down into the warehouse.

Atty frowned at his back, and turned to look down the corridor same as he had, were they being followed?

Nothing greeted him. The dirty posters remained as they were. Wet flooring glistened. Leaves rustled in a non-existent wind from broken windows somewhere within the facility. Rusted overhead piping creaked, a length of ancient plastic wrap, half unravelled, fluttered faintly in the wind where it had been tied around a red valve.

He frowned, ans then jumped when someone shouted his name, quickly wheeling around and rushing after the rest of the group.

Notes:

What's this? An update that's actually on time? Will wonders never cease???
Atty conquers Dungeon number 2!
How is everyone actually liking the dungeons? I do plan on doing a few before we get him ranked and what not thus off to Queen Elizabeth's Academy. I did go nyoom on the previous story because that do be how Harry goes and his development as a powerhouse was never going to be a question, but with Atty, who is baby and brand spanking new, I do think I need to show the progression for it to be believable.
And don't worry, while Sung Jinwoo isn't planned to pop up any time SOON, we will be seeing him before he visits the Double Dungeon o/

Chapter 8 Notes:

WARNINGS: Terrible slang, violence, mentioned past racism

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

£14,000 in total for the raid, that meant a payout of £1750 each.

As promised, Atty went straight to Claire's when they got out of the Dungeon where she gagged immediately upon getting a whiff of him and told him to get his stank ass in the shower because he sure as sh*t wasn't sitting anywhere until he no longer smelt like burning car tyres. Two blistering hot showers (and an entire bottle of teatree and mint bodywash), Atty was sat at the dining room table inhaling what was probably half his bodyweight in fresh cooked pasta and pan-fried paprika chicken, a grilled porkchop, two cold smoked macerels, a Caesar salad, a multipack of crisps – basically whatever Claire could cook up or reheat while he was washing.

He ate the whole damn lot and when he was done went pink at the look on her face and the number of dishes he'd utterly destroyed.

“About damn time you actually ate like a boy your age,” she huffed eventually with a grin as she began to clear the dishes away. “How did it go? Any trouble?”

He grimaced and began to tell her about the weird warehouse dungeons, how derelict and run down they were, how dirty, and the variations in the slimes they encountered and how they had to deal with the Sludge Boss by setting it on fire and tearing it apart chunk by flaming chunk. He didn't mentioned Wahleed's weird reaction to that last warehouse, how he'd frowned at the posters suspiciously and squinted into almost every lab they passed with a strange look on his face. If he wasn't willing to explain, then it was none of Atty's business. They weren't friends. They just raided together.

Things fell into a comfortable monotony after that. Claire and Archie came up with increasingly wild training ideas for him to try out, a training regime that sounded like something out of an anime. He snuck into a minor injuries unit at the hospital and quietly used his abilities to heal a few of the injuries he could without giving himself away, exploring the different things he could sense and what he could do about them (apparently he could heal infections that required antibiotics which was a fun discovery). His runs at the bridal path stopped really giving him any kind of work out so he started going around the city centre, then the closer catchment areas, then half the city, then the entire city. He, in all honesty, stopped actually sleeping at his parents' place, he only went back to change his clothes and take his money out of its variety of hiding places to smuggle it to the Browns'.

He honestly wanted to kick himself for not taking the risk and asking them for help in storing his money before now, it would have been a huge weight off his mind if he'd known that was at least somewhere safe and out of reach. But no use in crying over spilt milk now.

He couldn't pay them rent the way he did his parents, he couldn't afford the two lots if he was legitimately saving – but it turned out that Mr and Mrs Brown didn't want him to pay rent anyway, just pick up after himself and help out around the house and the garden when asked. The work wasn't even hard! Cleaning the bathroom, taking out the trash, folding the laundry, weeding the garden, watering the greenhouse, little things that barely took an hour at most. It was surreal to him. The whole house was surreal, like a fever dream of happiness. He knew that Mr and Mrs Brown were in high spirits and much happier now that Claire's migraines had seemingly vanished – she still had the minor ones that she wouldn't let him heal just so no one would get suspicious that they'd suddenly stopped. She didn't want anyone to accuse her of faking, or get her parents into trouble for it. But they were no longer worried about their daughter's health so much now that the truly crippling migraines had tapered off. They weren't terrified that one day they would wake up and find their daughter brain dead in her own bed.

Gate Activity was starting to calm down as well according to the hunter forums he was keeping his eye on, he had seen that Bellamy had gone on a few more Raids since they handled the Slime nest, but they were all at times of day when Atty was at school and wouldn't have been able to attend – until now at least.

“We're reasonably sure it's a demon nest. Minor demons, probably your basic spectrals. You don't tend to see anything nastier until B-rank at minimum,” the tanker explained roughly on the phone during Atty's lunchbreak. “Ordinarily I wouldn't be calling but the healer we had on tap for this got called out by a Guild for an emergency A-rank and offered them triple pay to ditch us. Can't blame the guy for taking it even if he's a dickhe*d for doin' it.”

Atty twitched a smile a little at the tone of the man's voice. “Where do I meet you?” he asked quietly instead of anything else.

Bellamy told him to meet them at St Boneyface Station, it was the small train station in the fancy part of the city not far from the golf courses. The only issue was that because the healer had called out so last minute, everyone was already on site and ready to go – so Bellamy wanted him there asap. And Atty still had three more hours of school.

However, class took a backseat to cash in this instance, and he knew Claire and Archie would cover for him.

He shot them both a message and then headed to the bushes behind the gym where the sixth form girls would go and smoke where they couldn't get caught, and, after making sure no one was there to see – he hopped the fence with barely a flex of his legs. Stripping out of his school jumper and tie, he shoved it all into his backpack, donned his dorky fake glasses, and took off running. With any luck, without any identifying clothing items making him obviously a school kid, people would just assume he was a baby-faced apprentice or college student. Good thing about England was that people were far more prone to not causing a fuss if there was a chance they were incorrect, the benefit of the doubt was a powerful thing.

He took the residential roads and.... while he did push the reasonable speed limits of the average human, his young face just lead people to assume he was in athletics or something, so didn't look twice when they saw him booking it. 'Must have slept in/missed the bus'. Nothing to see.

When he reached the trainstation though, he whipped out the bucket hat he had in his bag and donned a medical mask, using his phone to quickly check and make sure all of his hair was tucked up out of sight under said hat. It was better than nothing and he didn't exactly have his normal mask with him.

He could see Bellamy at the entrance of the carpark, but he wasn't alone, he was arguing with an unfamiliar red headed woman who was grinning like a shark while Bellamy looked like he was an inch from actually breathing fire. Atty hung back uncertainly. Was she.... an auditor? Turned up late and last minute? She looked like she was in her late thirties-early forties, her ginger hair shot through with grey, her smiling mouth and grey eyes lightly lined with the beginnings of age. She wasn't very tall, but she was tanned and freckled in a way Archie had yet to achieve, that Atty had only ever seen on Archie's dad who worked as a bricklayer. She wore a pair of grey sweats and sturdy combat boots, an old faded band t-shirt with the sleeves torn off showing her.... impressive biceps, and the martial art wraps around her knuckles and forearms.

She didn't..... look like an auditor. But then again, she wouldn't make for a very good one if people knew at first glance..... would she?

Bellamy spotted him before he could get worked up and pinched the bridge of his nose, which in turn had the woman cackling a moment before the tanker waved him over. That just drew her attention to him and for a moment, Atty considered turning tail and running, but.... if he did, they wouldn't be able to do the Raid. They needed a healer to make it legal, even if his being the healer was illegal in of itself. Being underage was actually the lesser of the two evil and the least punishable when it came to Raiding – going in without a healer was putting everyone at unacceptable risk that came with possible jail time, while him just being underage was a fine at most. And not even a big one. He'd been researching to find out what would happen to him and to the rest of the Raid team if they got caught, just to brace himself. To his relief, it wasn't all bad. He wouldn't even get a criminal record for it. A slap on the wrist at most. No, the worst thing would be getting his ass registered as an Awakener and having his parents involved.

The woman's expression didn't so much as flicker when he hesitantly made his way over, Bellamy glowering at him the whole while. She had an idle smile on her face, sharp features, and a lot more freckles than Archie.

“Goose, Mary. Mary, Goose. She's a fire mage. He's a healer. There, done,” the tanker introduced roughly with a flap of his hand.

Mary scoffed, her grin turning sharp as she tilted her head at him, “No way in hell, Old Man,” she taunted, making Atty's eyebrows shoot uip because – weren't they both over thirty? They were both old. “You bring a green little grasshopper, a little cricket, to one of our Raids and don't think I'm going to ride your ass on it?” she demanded with a particularly ghoulish grin that sp0ke to an awful lot of history between them.

“f*ck off bitch,” the tanker groaned in..... exhaustion? Okay, yeah, Atty was getting an idea of what was going on now.

Mary was his Claire.

He smiled a little behind his mask and coughed, “I'll just – go and join Wahleed,” he tried to excuse himself, only for Mary to throw an arm over his shoulder and practically staple him to her side.

“Oh no, Cutie, you're not going anywhere,” she declared with a grin that was all teeth.

He tensed, feeling his skin starting to crawl, swallowing hard at how hot she felt against him, how orange the freckles on her tanned arms were, how the weather beaten skin wrinkled and crumbled as she moved. The lavender smell of her washing powder at the band t-shirt rubbed against his school shirt. The lines that bracketed her shar's grin -

Bellamy shoved a hand into her face and pushed her backwards, his free hand grasping her wrist and lifting her whole arm for him to duck away, which he did – at speed.

“You know better, Mary,” the tanker growled with a disapproving frown as he casually released her face and spun her via the hand he still had hold of, and pushed her away. Atty swallowed hard, unsure of what the hell was happening or why Bellamy was stepping in, but appreciating it none the less. He – he honestly didn't like people touching him. Mrs Brown and Claire got away with it because.... because they were just.... Mrs Brown was so gentle and she gave the best hugs and he – Claire was his bestfriend, same as Archie, but she was.... she liked touching. Just sprawling out on them. And it took getting used to but he didn't mind being a pillow for her, especially when she had a headache and all she wanted was to curl up and be hugged when she felt miserable. It was hardly as though she wanted him to move heaven and earth for her. But he didn't know Mary, and he didn't – he didn't know her.

“Ow, geez, okay. That was my bad, sorry Goose,” the woman sighed as she rubbed her wrist and shook her head, “Goty carried away with myself. That was a line I shouldn't have stepped over without your permission. I apologise, it won't happen again,” she told him firmly, her expression serious.

Bellamy grunted in approval and relit his cigarette.

Atty shifted uncertainly before nodding slowly. “I'll just – ”

“Hold it,” Bellamy grunted, freezing him in place. He looked aggravated. “Much as I hate to say it, she had a reason to stop you. Get on with it bitch,” he huffed with a glower at her.

She flipped him the bird and stuck her tongue out before adopting the serious expression she'd had when she apologised and looked at Atty. “What Paul's rather lacklustre introduction didn't tell you earlier is that I happen to have one of the ignoble distinctions of being the youngest Awakener in the UK during the Mana Advent,” she told him grimly. “I was thirteen. And then I was seventeen when the age limits came in, twenty when we actually got the legal right to choose whether or not we actually became Hunters. Not that it was much of a choice since I hadn't been in education since I was twelve, it wasn't like there were many other options for me at that point. But since then, I've made a point of being involved with as many of the underage Awakeners and Support Groups that I can. Sharing my knowledge, experience, whatever.”

He swallowed and looked at Bellamy in confusion. The tanker stubbornly avoiding both of their eyes.

Mary gave the man a look, one part soft, another exasperated. “Paul here asked me to come today as not only a fellow magic user, but someone who also had to go into Dungeons far too young.”

“Oh.....” he mumbled, still unsure of what to say to that. Or how to react honestly.

Mary didn't take offence, chuckling a little wryly. “No need to look so enthusiastic,” she teased with a playful crooked smile. “I don't bite, promise.”

“She does,” Bellamy corrected flatly, and didn't even twitch when she slapped his arm with a sound of annoyance. The tanker then sighed and stubbed his cigarette out, making Atty stiffen because that only happened when it was serious business time. “She's got a better idea of how to navigate what you're currently dealing with than anyone else I have access to. And as big of a pain in my ass as she is, she's one of the few I trust without reservation.” She cooed and made kissy faces at him which just made his whole expression screw up like he'd bitten into a lemon, rind and all. “Which means, that when I noticed something off about your magic, she was the best person to bring in.”

Atty felt cold all of a sudden.

“Something off with my magic?” he asked faintly.

Mary smiled gently at him, “Not off. Not bad. Just different, Sweetpea. Paul's absolutely certain you're a Healer type, and ordinarily I wouldn't doubt him, but some of the stuff the others have shared about your abilities have me wondering.” She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, her palm actually catching fire. Fire that she cradled in her hand as she held it out to him. “Can you manipulate this flame?”

He made no move to reach out with either his hand or his mana.

“Why? Should I be able to manipulate it?” he asked suspiciously.

Mary shrugged a shoulder, “Don't know. But, Sweetpea, you've already done something that's widely considered impossible. So faking this out won't really matter,” she told him with a somewhat wry if apologietic smile, effectively dousing his insides with ice.

“Wha-t?”

“The barriers, Sweetpea. The barriers and the buffs,” she told him gently as she crushed the little palmful of fire. “No healer alive can use both, never mind at the same time. If I'm right, you might be a little like our Late beloved Steve, a duel-class. They're rare, but not unheard of. He was a Fighter-Tank, primarily a fighter but when it came down to it he was a damn fine Tank too. Able to use a lot of their mana techniques too. Shame about that Red Gate,” she sighed mournfully, her whole presence dimming sadly before she shook her head and looked back at him. “There are other dual-classers out there. Fighter-Assassins, even Ranger-Assassins. Magic users rarely dual-class, but our very own Wahleed has some potential,” she explained with a grin. “You remember the fire arrows he used in the last Raid, yeah? Well at his rank he shouldn't be able to do that. Rangers typically have to use specialist equipment, alchemical coatings, or some severe physics f*ckery to get that kind of result. But Wahleed's Raided with me before, spent hours talking to me about Fire Magic. He figured out how to use his own mana like a mage to make fire. And if I'm right about what everyone's told me..... you used yours to give his fire arrows a boost after that bootleg Grimer rip=off was already burning, right?”

He didn't answer. Still reeling from what she'd told him.

Nothing on any of the forums or social media groups or reddit threads or hunter fandom wikis or anywhere had mentioned a single damn thing about..... about dual-classers. It was unheard of. Unheard of everywhere, except.... here....

“I don't believe you,” he whispered nervously, “There – there would be something about it.... something online, on the Association Websites, reddit, somewhere.”

Mary scoffed.

“Oh sweetpea, you think any of us actually trust the Association enough to tell them something like this?” she asked almost pityingly. He jerked in realisation and she nodded. “This is one of the best kept secrets us Hunters have. Dual-Classers are rare and we sure as hell don't advertise them, but they're very real. And if I'm right, you might just be the first Healer-Mage to date,” she explained with a small snap of her fingers, conjuring the flame back to hover at the tip of her finger. “Which is important to know because if you are, then we can expect more with your abilities in the future. And what's more? It also means this area in particular is doing to be going through Gate Turbulence.”

He frowned, unfamiliar with the term.

“Red Gates,” Bellamny grunted, leaning against the street light behind him, eyes a thousand miles away. “There's always a urge of Gate Activity and Awakenings at the same time. The more strong Awakenings, the more dangerous the Gates. The stranger the Awakenings, the more Red Gates appear. Lot's of Awakenings but no Gates guarantees a Red Gate. Lot's of Gates but no Awakeners guarantees and A or S-rank Awakening.”

“That same old song and dance,” Mary agreed solemnly with a nod before looking at him. “Twenty years, sweetpea. If we hadn't noticed a pattern by now, we'd all be long dead.”

“Yo! Is the healer here yet?” a voice called from the group.

“Goose! My man!” Wahleed's voice cheering.

Mary snuffed the little finger of fire with a chuckle, “Oh well. We've got time later.”

Atty nodded slowly, still reeling from their talk as he followed them in a daze to where there were roughly about fourteen people all grouped together. Raid teams needed a minimum of eight people, with himself, Paul, and Mary, they had double that number. He saw the familiar faces of his Raid Team, still minus Karen, they were tentatively socialising with a few of Mary's team. A few of them gave him looks but otherwise brushed him off. He was Bellamy's problem, not theirs, seemed to be the consensus amongst them.

The Gate was in a derelict guard-hut used for railway sleeper storage and other maintenance equipment.

When they stepped through, it was nothing like what Atty expected from a Demon Nest potentially full of ghosts.

An opulent abandoned mansion unfolded in front of them – every window boarded up, the hallways lit with candles, rich red velvet drapes, dark wood furniture, and aged gold moulded picture frames around smeared and torn canvas paintings. Their subjects utterly unrecognisable or identifiable. The rug under their feet was thick and plush and muffled their footsteps as they stepped into the Dungeon, and immediately felt every hair on the back of their necks stand on end in discomfort.

“Keep eyes on the Gate,” Bellamy grunted over his shoulder, glaring into the gloomy rafters overhead with deep suspicion.

“....Still standing. C'mon Paul, you know Red Gates don't happen below B-rank,” Mary chided playfully, but noticeably she did check the gate as well.

“Is this unusual?” he asked in a whisper, his voice curiously muffled in the strange silence of the opulent hallway.

Wahleed tightened his grip on his drawstring, “Non-cave like Dungeons are uncommon, but they do happen. It usually means monsters of human like appearance or intelligence. They're very uncommon below B-rank, but they do happen.”

“Was the ranking wrong?” he asked nervously, fingers sparking as mana gathered at his fingertips.

“Unlikely, but it can – CONTACT!”

Atty yelped as he was shoved down and the ranger bodily threw himself on top of him. There were shouts and a rush of cold and wet overhead, sharp commands from Bellamy, Mary's unfamiliar voice cracking like a whip, Wahleed's pained hiss. Shouts from the other team - “They're going for the healers!” - “Mary – duck!!” - “Form up! Protect the magic users!” - “I f*cking hate imps!”

He tugged himself out from under Wahleed, hands going up and around the man's ribcage to knit together the claw-marks that ran the length of his back. In the orange and green light of his healing spell he could see winged humanoids, the size of goblins or human children dropping down from the rafters and ceiling they were crawling across like bats, or insects, to try and dive bomb them behind the front line of tanks.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Mary at Bellamy's side, practically tucked under his shield as he skewered and threw imps to the ground to be stomped on. She shoved her hand into his pocket, and – he didn't see what was happening but a moment later she shoved the shield aside and spat fire up at the imps. A rolling wave of flame carpeting the ceiling and sending them all dropping like flies as their fur and skin caught alight. A painful way to die, and he cringed, squeezing his eyes shut, the smell of burning hair and flesh filling his nose.

“Christ, what the f*ck is this crap? Engine cleaner?” Mary coughed in revulsion, shoving Bellamy's hipflash at him as she coughed up embers and stuck her tongue out, shuddering and pulling a face of disgust.

Bellamy gave her a Look, but didn't answer, too busy stomping imp skulls into mush.

Wahleed ruffled his hair as he straightened up, “Thanks Goose, you alright? It didn't get you, did it?” he asked, gently patting him down.

He shook his head, “I'm – I'm good. You – ” he flushed then, and had never been more thankful for his face mask and hat than ever when he felt the heat searing his cheeks. No one had ever protected him at their own expense before. No one had protected him full stop really. “ – you covered me.”

Wahleed grinned, white teeth flashing, cheeks dimpling on one side, curly hair bouncing as he tipped his head to one side briefly. “Course, gotta keep my battle buddy safe,” he declared cheerily. Atty nodded, smiling weakly, he felt queasy and his heart was beating really hard in a weird way that he didn't like very much.

“You kids okay?” Mary's voice interrupted as she appeared, her voice smelt like burning alcohol and her cheeks were flushed. Just standing near her he could feel the amount of heat she was radiating, like an actual furnace.

“We're good,” Wahleed told her. “Goose patched me up good. You?”

“Paul had 'em down before I even realised there was a problem,” she admitted with a rueful smile.

The ranger whistled, low and impressed, “What a beast. You didn't even get a scratch, did you?” She shook her head with a toothy grin, flashing a peace sign, “Fast reflexes. Daymn,” he muttered respectfully, looking over to the tank as he held his hipflash to his ear and gave it a shake, looking mournful and disgusted in equal measure at what he heard. Atty nodded slowly, considering. Tanks were damage sponges, they weren't generally the fastest. Atty hadn't even been aware they were under attack until he was under Wahleed – and the imps were aiming for the magic users, of which were were only four in the party. The two mages, Mary and a nervous looking water mane, and the two healers. Himself and a stern looking black woman with short curly violet hair and equally violet eye-make up. That Bellamy had indeed been fast enough to shield Mary and kill the enemy before she had gotten hurt, or even noticed the attack, was...... very impressive.

A comment on his skill, or his experience as a Raider, Atty didn't know. But he wondered how the man would do as a higher level Raider if given the opportunity...... he liked to think he would be good. Damn good. But high level Raids meant more dangerous Raids, and Bellamy was.... tired. And it didn't take a genius to notice that he hated both his life and his job.

“ – proper ballache, innit,” a chav with a samurai sword and elaborate designs shaved into what little dark hair he had remaining was complaining, his Nike tracksuit practically hanging off him as he slouched his way over. “Oy, Boss Lady, y'knowin' wat these munters mean righ'?” he demanded looking pissed off.

She turned to him in all seriousness. “Enlighten me,” she asked.

“Imps is hench an' all. But they's smallfry, innit,” the chav declared, sniffing hard and grimacing in disgust, “Imps is liek.... nuffin', mush. Nuffin'. But they got bros, see?”

“I do,” Mary agreed patiently even as Wahleed turned away from them both to pull a face at Atty.

“Succubi, bruv, we's gunna be seein' demon bitches up in 'ere. If not vamps, y'get me?” the chav finally said looking annoyed and a bit fearful.

Mary cursed and whirled around to go and speak to Bellamy.

Atty swallowed, “Excuse me? What do you mean by Succubi? Like... the lady demons?” he asked uncertainly as the chav looked down at him in surprise.

“Yer. Lady demons, lil man. Bare hot, but man eaters. Eat the mana righ' outta yas, innit mush?” he asked looking at Wahleed who was looking worried at the mention of the demonic women.

“Succubi are usually considered a C or B-rank enemy,” he said slowly. “Do you think the Boss will be a Succubus?” he asked, and the chav shrugged, his sword coming up to rest on his shoulder. He was tall, lean, and ropey, wearing deep navy blue Nike tracksuit bottoms and an open Nike jacket over a white basketball vest. His necklace was a chunk flat silver chain and he had a single pierced ear with a large white gem-stone earring. A scar cut through one eyebrow and, honestly, he looked like he could have been Atty's next door neighbour at the Estate, but he knew he wasn't. There were no Awakeners in his Estate. This guy was probably from the Flowers on the other side of the city.

“Bare tough t'say,” he complained before giving one of the imps a kick, “Munters is usually mid-tier Dinge trash. Seein' 'em in trash-pull greetin' rush is bad news, innit. Then there's the digs, get me? Fancy ass pish sh*t at the doorway, bruv, we's goin' in blind, liek. Possible Boss Bitch, but 'ow's that against our luck, bruv?” He shook his head again, glaring into the darkness up ahead while Mary and Bellamy had a quick hushed and likely nasty conversation judging by the scowls on their faces and the fire licking out from between Mary's lips. “Luck's sh*t, bruv. Bare sh*t.”

Wahleed had a weird look on his face that said he didn't understand what was being said, Atty had a better idea growing up on a Council Estate, but even then, his parents were stoner metal heads. His dad was rather of the opinion that chavs should be hunted for sport.

“I'm Goose. This is Wahleed.”

“A'ight lil mans. Name's Dean. Figh'er. Everyone calls me Sharky. You the relief healer for Hardass, righ'?” he asked, quirking a friendly grin at him. His teeth were surprising straight and white. He had a snaggle tooth on the left side of his jaw too. Hardass? Was that Bellamy? ...Well he couldn't say it didn't fit...

He nodded slowly, “Yeah.... I sub in if Bellamy can't find another healer.”

“Badass, bruv. Ah, looks liek we're movin'. Keep it kickin', mushties,” he said, gesturing at them both respectfully with his free hand before sloping off back to his rather eclectic group of hunters working under Mary.

“How the f*ck you understood that....” Wahleed muttered with a shake of his head.

“I grew up on a Council Estate,” Atty admitted. “He was nice.”

“Yeah well, I went to Junior School with him. Guess he doesn't remember calling me a Paki and telling me to go back home every day for a year until my sister caught him and kicked his ass,” he muttered making Atty grimace in alarm and discomfort. He.... didn't know what to say to that.

“....I'm sorry you had to deal with that,” he mumbled, unsure of how to reply, but not wanting to be rude by saying nothing or not acknowledging him.

Wahleed huffed a little, and ruffled his hair through his hat.

Notes:

Kids do terrible evil sh*t - thankfully the majority of them grow out of it. But it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and people got hurt because of it.
This chapter was meant to be a lot longer and comprise of the whole Dungeon, it's all written up in my notebook, but getting it onto a word document to but up took a lot longer than I intended in the writing. So I guess you'll just have to be content with knowing that the next chapter is finished, it just needs typing up - yaaay, next week's update is almost ready :DD

Chapter 9 Summary:

WARNING: Violence, gore

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Sharky was right about the Succubi – just not about how many.

The dungeon was crawling with them.

For a blessing however, they were weaker than they had been expecting. Bellamy stated outright during one of their brief breaks that if Atty hadn't been capable of buffing them to the degree he had then he would have turned the whole Raid around and left already. Let the Guildies play with the demon spawn. Sharky floated around them on occasion, but seemed to pick up that Wahleed was uncomfortable so only really loitered on the peripherals of their team without really interjecting himself.

The succubi were.... not as pretty as Atty was expecting in all honesty? There was something a bit too uncanny valley about them for his tastes, they looked a bit like someone had stretched them with a hook through the top of their heads. No pupils or iris, just clear orbs of white and wet almost oily looking hair that plastered flat to their skulls and draped almost artfully over their long pointed ears as it clung to their necks and then flared out, floating behind them like a horizontal flat. Most were grey skinned, some had paler pinky coloured skin, and others had deep brown skin. They, none of them, wore very much. And their magic seemed to be mostly hypnotic or mental based as they tried to pick people off one by one – paying particular attention to the magic users.

Atty's counterpart, the stern black woman on Mary's team, ended up gett8ing three long talons lodged in her shoulder when she was forced to grab Mary's water slinging counterpart and drag him away from a pair of giggling succubi that had been luring him away.

Of all of them.... it seemed to be only mostly the women, Sharky, and himself who were immune.

A blade whistled above his head and a succubus dropped to the floor – her head thumping down a moment later on Wahleed's other side. Sharky didn't even look at them before he shoulder barged another away from them and throat punched a third.

Atty wondered what it said abut him, about all of them, that the succubi only seemed to affect some of them. That their enchantments didn't work on a small minority. They had worked on Bellamy at first, but then he got angry, and it was as though every time they tried using it on him again, he got even angrier. Now they were actively trying to avoid fighting him head on, or even luring him away from the group. Mary had needed to be hauled back more than a few times, to the point where, in a fit of temper, Bellamy threatened to put her on a kiddie leash if she didn't stop thinking with her clam instead of her brain.

He wasn't 100% straight, he knew that, but he had certainly appreciated girls more than a few times. But the succubi just looked silly to him. Not only were they weird looking, but he was a little uncomfortable by how little they were wearing. Not because it was a lot of skin, he was a healthy teenage boy, just because he didn't have a private internet connection didn't mean he hadn't seen stuff (Archie wasn't shy about sharing his questionable manga or comics), but it just looked really cold. And uncomfortable. 'Dental floss for the ass' appeared in his mind more than once. Plus, the giggling and gyrating looked weird and disturbing with how boneless their bodies seemed to be, how they were just that hair too..... rubbery?

Maybe it was because they were low level? If they weren't very strong then it made sense their enthralling magicks and appearances wouldn't be the best at attracting people?

The dungeon itself was actually rather small. A few corridors but plenty of rooms. Kitchens and bathrooms with a combination of imps and succubi, bedrooms and walk in closets and drawing rooms with giggling succubi women, the expected phantoms and glow flies and will-o-wisps. Even a handful of ghouls, undead humanoids shuffling around in the darkness. They also found a bathroom that made Camella, Bellamy, Sharky, and the others who were unaffected handle it, making sure those who were more easily enthralled weren't permitted inside where the succubi were wet, soapy, and touching each other. (Wahleed slapped a hand over his eyes muttering memes under his breath as he turned them both away, 'By Allah you people are dogs, I shall reblog as usual', and snorting at himself.)

The uncomfortable part was.... Atty was reasonably sure they were being watched the whole time.

Bellamy was wound tighter than a guitar string about to snap, and twitchier than a crackhead on withdrawal. He was so bad eventually he snapped at Mary that if she could please stop being such a useless lesbian for five f*cking minutes – she had gone very pink with embarrassment and snapped something indistinct at him right back. Atty couldn't hear what was said at the distance they were, but it did answer his questions about why some people were easier to enthral than others.

He paused then.

The succubi had aimed for him several times, but their magicks hadn't really worked on him. Not really.

Did that mean he was actually gay? And not just..... bi or demi like he thought he was?

For that matter..... he looked to the rest of the Raid team, noting that Bellamy hadn't been successfully enthralled since that first time, in fact, the Succubi were having the opposite affect on him. Wahleed had to shake his head like a dog underwater an awful lot and sometimes spaced out but was better able to function. The black lady healer on the other team was completely unaffected, and Sharky hadn't even blinked at the Succubi even though a few of the girls on the other team had been caught briefly before being able to shake themselves out of it.

“Don' read too much int'it, bruv,” Sharky told him bluntly when he caught the way he was looking at the rest of the team. “Liek, sure, Mars likes gash. Who don't? But these munters ain't special, uggos innit. Depression, bruv, kills interest y'get me? Just gets y'steamin' instead,” he said, pointing directly at Bellamy who had turned to attack a sneaking succubus with a lot more aggression than usual.

“What about you?” he asked uncertainly.

Sharky shrugged a shoulder, unconcerned, “Gay an' depressed, bruv,” he said wryly, throwing another weird hand gesture towards him along with a crooked self-depreciating grin. The grin faded quickly and he moved away as Wahleed moved back to his side from where he had been supporting the back row. He was unharmed, but Atty cast a healing spell on him anyway to wash away the exhaustion and fatigue, and refreshed his buffs.

“Found the boss room,” Camella called, and the group moved up.

“Of course it's a f*cking ballroom with a throne,” Bellamy growled in disgust.

“Lot of succubi in there,” Mary noted with a frown, fire licking from between her lips, eyes glowing green with her mana. “I'm not seeing, or sensing anything stronger though. But the Boss is definitely here, somewhere.”

“Awww, you don't like my girls? But they're so cute,” a masculine voice cooed from above in the deepest shadows of the rafters.

As a whole, the Raid team whipped around.

“Incubus,” Sharky whispered going pale. “That is bullsh*t, bruv,” he complained weakly.

The incubus was huge, a good two to three feet taller than his female counterparts and was.... well, he looked almost human? Completely in proportion with himself, muscular without being grotesque, his skin was a blueish grey and his eyes glowed a vicious bloody inhuman red under an artfully touseled mane of ink black hair. His clothing left little to the imagination, being comprised of tight black leather, belts, and chains, and no shirt. He had a succubus under each arm, the ladies in question looking more human than the others, not quite so stretched out or deformed, they also, all three of them, had actual wings and tails. Looking more like the typically seen succubi and incubi he saw in Archie's questionable manga.

“And after I went to all that effort to lower the power of this Gate to attract some little morsels for our daughters,” he continued, oblivious to the hostility below, one hand circling a succubus' hip thoughtfully as he looked down at her.

Atty frowned, daughters? The succubi they had been fighting up until now were his daughters? Their daughters? So – oh. It was a triple boss. Or – or he was the Boss and the two succubi with him were his bodyguards (wives?). Wait, why was no one reacting to the fact they were talking? Everyone was always saying that monsters couldn't be communicated with but these guys were speaking completely normally.... right?

Lowering the pw- oh no.

This wasn't an E-rank Gate.

“He's the boss!” Atty shouted and ramped the power of his buffs up even higher, as high as he could make them.

The room exploded into chaos as the incubus laughed and his wives were suddenly in the middle of them. Atty grit his teeth, wounds closing the moment they appeared, barriers where and when he could. This was an experienced Raid team though, himself excepted. They made quick and clean work of the two succubi and Wahleed was already three arrows sunk directly into the Incubus who was ignoring Bellamy and the rest of the Tanks to aim directly for – him?!

Atty squeaked and conjured a barrier between himself and the mountain of a demon that tried to shove a clawed hand through his skull.

Bloody glowing red eyes leered down at him.

“Little morsel.... I think that once I've fed the rest of these appetisers to my daughters, I'll be keeping you to myself. Mana like that.... should be savoured.... so similar to theirs,” he crooned with a grin that made his entire body throb and his insides turn cold and shivery the way that had only happened once before in his life – the time his dad broke a bottle on the edge of a table and threatened to gut him in a drunken rage. He'd hidden under the bed where his dad couldn't reach him for hours while the man destroyed his mattress trying to get to him.

Bellamy rammed the demon off him with his shield and into the wall with a bellow that shook the picture frames off the walls.

The incubi's eyes gleamed with vicious glee as he turned to try and rip the shield off his arm so he could get to him.

Atty gasped for breath, feeling cold and clammy as his hands shook. It took a moment but – but he was able to muster the focus to cast a reinforcement on the tank. But the use of mana immediately had the Incubus leaping for him again.

He yelped as a blast of fire magic swept over his head along with several arrows.

“Cover the healers!” Mary roared.

The black woman behind her was grey-lipped and trembling as she clutched her bleeding shoulder. One of the succubi must have gotten her earlier. Atty immediately moved to her, healing away the wounds. They had gone through to the bone and torn a nerve cluster, no wonder the poor woman couldn't cast, she was in too much pain to focus on even healing herself!

“NOT ON YOUR LIEF!” Sharky roared, and the woman he'd just healed wrenched him backwards as she lunged up past him -

and took three talons to her face and throat

her hand outstretched and glowing with healing magic as two of the talons that went into her skull punched through the fighter's chest.

The incubus cackled as he wrenched his nails out of Sharky's chest and the woman's skull, the light in her hand fading as she crumpled with a wet thud on the foul carpet floor.

Sharky coughed up a mouthful of blood – and rammed his sword into the incubi's thigh, the wounds in his chest closed.

Atty's hands glowed as he grabbed her, her body flooding with mana.

She wasn't dead yet! She wasn't dead yet her heart was still beating her brain was still lit up! She wasn't dead yet!!

The tanks were screaming, trading off Battle Cries whenever the Incubus lost interest in them – they traded off attacks, a dance of mana and light and violence as blades and weapons flashed in the candle-light. All of it ignored as Atty focused on the damage to the woman's breain, on her throat. Sharky had blocked one of the incubi's hands when he attacked them, and the woman had yanked him backwards and taken the claws on the other hand right through her head.

She coughed on a breath and her chest swelled of its own volition. She would live, she would survive.

Atty whipped around, barriers the size of coins spinning on each fingertip as he threw himself into the fight, unthinking, uncaring, he slipped under Wahleed and threw -

but didn't let go.

The barriers missed the incubus and he yanked them around – they arc'd – and tore through the back of the demon's skull and throat. He opened his mouth to shout, or gasp, only for Atty to reverse the direction of the disks and rip them to the side – all that came out of the demon's mouth was blood.

He dropped with a wet, anticlimatic, thud.

“Is it – over?” the water mage on the other team asked timidly, peering out from behind one of the tanks that had been shielding him.

Mary boldly stalked over to the dead incubus and kicked him.

“Yeah. It's over. Alright team, we've got an hour, fan out, grab the cores! Hustle time!” she shouted briskly.

Atty swallowed, shakes starting to settle in, his eyes felt itchy.

That was – the second time- THIRD time.... the third time he'd killed a boss. But this time – this time it was because he was..... was he angry? He didn't think he even knew what he was feeling, he certainly hadn't been thinking.....

Bellamy, mana buzzing under his skin, a heavy hand landing on top of his head. Grounding. Solid. Steady-

He sucked in a breath so sharply and suddenly it hurt his throat and blew the cobwebs from his mind immediately.

“I'm okay,” he promised, shaking himself.

Bellamy grunted wordlessly, conveying his doubt without saying it. Atty shuddered.

“I'm just – ” he blurted, hesitating because he didn't know how to put it into words. He shouldn't say anything about understanding the monsters, that was stupid, everyone heard them talking, they just chose to ignore it. “ – She almost died,” he finally said, breath rushing out of him all at once as his whole body sagged. She almost died. She did die. Should have stayed dead, would have stayed dead, if not for magic. But she also would have never been in that position if he hadn't been stupid and turned his back on an enemy. If he'd retained even a little self-awareness, it wouldn't have happened. Sharky wouldn't have been hurt and she wouldn't have been killed and -

“ – mana exhaustion,” Mary was saying, her tone decisive as he looked up at her in bewilderment. She was knelt in front of him, an overly warm, rough skinned hand on his head and shoulder. When had she gotten there and just how long had he been lost in his own head so as not to hear what she'd been saying?

“Not surprising given how much magic he was tossin' around,” Bellamy grunted. “Ian, can you – thanks.” A moment later, there were arms under his knees and his back and he was being hoisted up.

He jerked and squirmed, but he might as well have been trying to move iron bands before he Awakened, “I'm fine!” he squeaked as Bellamy physically carried him out of the Dungeon. Ian following behind him with a sh*t eating grin carrying the other tank's weaponry.

“Mana exhaustion is dangerous, brat. Don't force me to carry your ass to the hospital because I f*ckin' will,” the tanker threatened, forcing him to settle down as he was carried out. The man smelt like cigarettes and alcohol, sweat and heat and rust and mineral oil, and for some reason Atty just..... it smelt like home but cleaner. No weed. No drugs. No old vomit or rancid food. Fresh air blew the sticky thoughts from his head and he found himself lowered onto one of the benches outside the closed off train station. It was late evening, but not so late that his parents would have been back from Dogmeat's ordinarily.

It wasn't long later that Mary appeared in front of him, checking his temperature, pulse, and examining his eyes with a little torch.

“He's not so bad. Skirting the edges,” she declared straightening up. “I wouldn't let him walk anywhere or do anything strenuous until he's had the chance to eat and sleep it off, but he's not in danger.”

“I'm fine,” he told her with a shake of his head.

“Wait until the adrenaline passes then say that again, Sweetpea,” she told him gently, patting his head. “You sit there and rest, I'll get you some of my energy drink while we wait on Simon to get back with our payouts, okay?”

The hour passed quietly and easily, the Gate closed, he was fed and watered, the other healer came to think him and introduced herself – Tanya Cooper, mother of three, parking inspector for the local council. He met a few others from Mary's team who were impressed with his ability to use his barriers as weapons, saying it was inspired and they'd be telling the other healers they knew to see if it could be replicated. Every little helped, and us low ranks gotta stick together, y'know?

The runner returned with their pay and it was distributed to everyone evenly. They did tell him how much was in there, but he was distracted by Sharky and Wahleed – the ranger trying to walk away only for the chav to suddenly burst out with “I'm sorry okay?! I was a dumb f*ckin' brat who didn't know how f*ckin' messed up the sh*t he was sayin' really was, an' it's no exucse, an' I'm not expectin' forgiveness or nuffin', but I'm sorry I hurt you. An' that I was too much of a coward to say it first thin t'day. It was bare outta order – ”

Wahleed looked like a deer in the headlights, and everyone else was quickly moving away to give them some privacy, though a few chose to hover just far enough away to give the impression while still being close enough to get involved if needed. Except for Bellamy, who wasted no time in bundling him up into his car and starting to drive away as Wahleed said something slowly, frowning uncertainly at the chav who grimaced and nodded miserably.

He watched them in the rear view mirror for as long as he could but then they turned a corner.

Bellamy dropped him off just around the corner from Claire's place, a frown on his face as he told the man he wasn't going back to his parents place, but spending the night with a friend instead. But he didn't fight him on it, just gave him stern instructions about food and rest and to get his scrawny ass in the f*cking shower before going to bed because he stank.

Atty saluted him with all sarcasm before escaping down the street on unsteadier feet than he was willing to admit to.

He fell asleep in the bowl of cereal he was eating and had to be bullied into bed without taking a shower twenty minutes later. Of course Claire took a picture of him face down in cereal first to share with Archie before she woke him.

The bench was sundrenched beneath an open blue sky, ducks quietly calling their piping fluffy offspring to heel, marching them from water to shore and back again. Dragonflies buzzing to-and-fro across the water reeds to accompany the rasping song of a thousand and one crickets and grasshoppers. A pair of swans peddled their way lazily across the lake in elegant dismissal of everything but each other.

Mary gave him a look as he drank noisily from his bag covered bottle, but made no other comments as she tossed some partially defrosted peas into the water for the ducklings.

“....thoughts?” Paul eventually asked once he had fortified himself against this conversation as much as he could without compromising his ability to think straight.

The woman sighed, “If you'd told me he was D-rank when we set out, I wouldn't be surprised,” she told him. “Course if you told me he was C-rank when we left, I'd call bullsh*t. The amount of mana he was throwing around in there to buff all of us to the degree we were would have put a lesser magic user into a coma if their brain didn't pop beforehand.”

That was about what he had been worried about.

Back in the early days, there was no way to gage the power of an Awakener. It was up to those who survived, the people who were involved, to get together and figure it out themselves. The Government had been very against them meeting up outside the Dungeons back then, almost made it illegal. But what happened in Dungeons could not be regulated by them, so the Awakeners figured out their arseholes from their elbows, they worked out how to categorise themselves, their powerlevels and their abilities, their roles, themselves. Being Advent Awakeners, Paul and Mary had gotten good at gaging those powerlevels themselves – there were times when, despite Mary's greater mana sensitivity, Paul had a better eye for examining than she did just from experience.

“He was barely E-rank when we met the first time. His mana was off, different, made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I thought he was a High ranker until I saw him in action,” the man explained gruffly, taking another pull from his bottle, slumping on the bench as he watched the ducklings.

They used to do this a lot back in the day. After tough dungeons. The two of them going to the lake in the park to feed the ducklings, to watch the swans, pet any of the overly enthusiastic dumb dogs that ventured close to the dangerous humans that smelt like dark places and death. God bless labradors and golden retrievers, too dumb and good natured to fear humans that smelt like blood when they were so obviously also sad.

Mary sighed and leaned back on the bench, splaying her legs out and stretching hard enough that had she been a normal human woman she would have no doubt given herself a cramp in three or more major muscle groups from her foot up to her shoulders.

“Bad enough he's a baby multiclasser,” she muttered, “But to be a New-Type – what? Growing Awakener?” she pondered under her breath, “on top of that..... Poor kid is never going to know a moment's peace if any of this gets known. And we can't shield him much longer.”

Paul grimaced and chugged the last of his bottle.

If the kid had remained a low ranker, C at the absolute HIGHEST, they would have been able to tuck him under their wings for the rest of his life if he so chose. No one paid attention to the low rankers, and if the Advent Awakeners took exception to your attention, you looked away pretty damn quick. They had connections and were no above breaking the Law. The UK came down a lot harder on their Awakeners than other countries, so to have people who gave not a single solitary flying f*ck with the power to back it up tended to make a lot of people very conscious of the hundred and one other things they could be doing with their time. But the kid was getting stronger with every Gate. It was like.... the more mana he was exposed to, the more he absorbed it and the stronger he got.

The problem was.... soon he would be setting off the Guild's and the Association's mana detectors. When an Awakener reached a certain point, their mana capacity would outstrip that of the low level Gates, thus setting off the detectors if they came too close. Other Awakeners would be able to sense them as well, and the Guildies were nothing short of relentless when it came to furthering their finances. The Adventers would ignore them, they knew the price of Awakening and if someone didn't want to invite that bullsh*t into their lives, they weren't about to out them to the Association. The Guilds were another story. Desperate for money, for fame, for power – they wouldn't hesitate to hound an unfamiliar Awakener. The Association were able to keep them on a leash, but if an Awakener wasn't registered with the Association, those stories of coming home to find a Recruiter in your home, complimenting you on your lovely family and how it would be a shame if anything happened to them because exponentially more likely. After all, you would have absolutely no legal protection from the Guild Recruiters if you weren't registered as needing that protection in the first place.

Guilds had some awareness of multiclassers, but it remained one of the few things that just wasn't talked about outside a select few circ*mstances. The Association did not recognise or know about Multiclassers, and the Guilds had come to understand after a few history lessons that it was actually in their best interest to keep those with extra abilities on the downlow. For their own safety. One only needed to look at the situation in Russia and Belarus with how their Awakeners were handled to conclude that it would be an overall bad idea.

The problem was that newer Awakeners were already being given the sanitised version of events, the one that was trying to rewrite or downplay the atrocities the government had committed. They weren't willing to listen to the older hunters, or the Adventers, and were more money and fame focused – they would kill and eat one another to get ahead. They would chew Goose up and spit him out for a sign on bonus.

“f*cking mess,” the tanker complained, calmly crushing the glass bottle in the paperbag so it could be disposed of.

Mary laughed, “Ain't that the truth.” She threw another handful of peas at the ducks.

They sat in silence for a while.

Paul watched the ducklings, now joined by a couple of other river birds he never bothered to learn the names of. The stretch of water in front of them filled with peeping and feathers and wagging ducktails. He smiled entirely against his will as he watched the yellow and black ducklings tumbling all over themselves.

Mary fed them until she ran out of peas and shoved the bag into her pocket.

They sat, absorbing the sun, the peace and quiet, the blue skies overhead and the peeping ducklings. Reminding themselves that this peace and quiet, this beauty, was why they continued to Hunt (beyond the need to keep the roof over their heads and the food on their tables).

She patted his leg, “We'll figure it out old man,” she told him gently. And smiled when he looked at her with dull disbelief. “You kept me alive through that cluster f*ck,” she reminded him, referring to the Awakener Riots that she had stupidly thrown herself bodily into, young and furious at having her life stolen from her. “Between you and me, and all the other Adventers, Goose'll be fine. We'll make sure of it.”

He sighed and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he looked out over the lake.

“.....We'll see,” he said instead of anything else. His doubts, his pessimism, his observations. Mary would notice the same sh*t he did eventually, then she'd figure out that this was no where near as easy as she thought it was going to be.

They hadn't seen any upticks in Red Gates, and Goose Awakened at a low level for all that he was seemingly getting stronger. He had already shown himself to be a potential Healer-Mage, but the way he controlled that last barrier.....

That was a ranger technique.

Notes:

Sorry for the delay in updating my guys. There has been all sorts of fun and games at work, for once I'm not the one in trouble, but I'm still having to deal with a fair chunk of work while my manager handles it. We've had racism, hom*ophobia, sexism, a crushed foot, assault, vandalism, etc. All sorts of nonsense.
But, I finally had time to write this ~~don't @me yes this was done while waiting for ffxiv Dawntrail to download leave me alone~~
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to no life this expansion for the next week as I booked it off work.
Give me something fun to read my lovelies, I live to see your comments, no lie. They are literally the source of my serotonin when I need to remind myself I'm not a massive f*ck up, so I go and reread them often.

Chapter 10 Summary:

WARNING: Physical child abuse, financial child abuse.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

If it hadn't been for both Archie and Claire, Atty would have forgotten entirely about his mock GCSE exams.

Four months. He had been hiding his Awakening for four months already, and had been in three Gates. Two E-ranks and one misranked D-rank that no one was going to inform the Association about as an investigation would be launched and Atty's involvement revealed. They cumulatively agreed to take the pay cut rather than the blackmark of raiding with an underage unlicensed Hunter.

His time had been completely filled with all things Hunter, from training to worrying to sneaking to hiding his money. He had completely forgotten about things like homework and exams. To the point where his teachers had actually pulled him aside to ask if there was anything going on at home, he had been acting strange for a while and now his grades were suffering, a lot of them were really concerned if he would pass his GCSEs next year if he continued on this downward slide.

He had to scramble for some excuses, mumbling something about his mum being ill and money was getting tight. With increased Gate activity came increased Guild activity, and the bougie opportunists looking to make cheap places look fancier and thus increase the cost of them. Admittedly the Council Estate wouldn't see any of those improvements, but the shop keepers would definitely hike their prices up in order to 'compete' with the big superstores. They didn't have to work hard to accept it, they knew full well he lived in the Estate and his parents were unemployed, on benefits, and doing drugs. They didn't even bother to hide it. They came in to every parent-teacher conference reeking of weed.

But it did remind him that if he wanted a job that wasn't hunting when he finished secondary school he would need to actually get some decent grades – because there was no way in hell he would get into college or university, not when he could get a job straight away and fund his parents doing nothing. So he set aside hunting and money hoarding for a little bit to actually focus on his studies. It was a good thing he'd been pretty studious before, determined to get good grades and get the f*ck away from his parents by any means necessary. He didn't have to work particularly hard to catch up.

It was actually.... concerningly easy?

He already knew Awakening improved your physical abilities.... but could it also improve the mental ones?

He mulled it over as Archie and Claire argued over algebra.

In all honesty, if things like physical durability and energy were so significantly improved, he didn't see why human intelligence couldn't be as well. Brain tissue was an organ the same as the skin. If the skin's elasticity, healing, and durability could be improved, why not the neural tissue or synapses or – he didn't know what brains were made of in all honesty, but he did know that brain damage happened with headshots and a LOT of drinking. So it made sense.... that Awakening would improve memory retention, memory recall, and even processing power. It needed to be able to do so in order to process things happening at beyond human speeds.

Regardless, he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He was, instead, going to take disgusting advantage of it and memorise everything he could get his hands on.

Atty woke to his father dragging him out of bed by his hair.

It was – he almost took the man's head off, startled awake like that, hitting his bedroom floor completely disorientated after going to sleep at entirely too late of an hour last night. The stink of cigarettes and weed was thick in his nose before a bare foot hit his stomach – it was nothing, but he curled up like a shrimp out of pure reflex, pretending otherwise. His father spat and cursed at him for hurting his foot, for being a lazy piece of sh*t who did nothing but ruin their f*cking lives.

His brain finally clicked into gear and he struggled to maintain his act for a moment as weak fingers latched into his hair and tried to yank him up to his feet – he went with minimal struggling, stunned and confused, marvelling absently in the back of his head that.... it didn't hurt. None of it hurt. Not the hair pulling, not the kick, not even being shoved into the doorframes. He wouldn't even get a bruise from this?

His dad shoved him face down into the bathroom, screaming at him about not cleaning – oh. Mum had been drinking again. Vomit f*cking everywhere. And of course because he had been studying and snuck in, he hadn't been there to clean it up. His dad was screaming about sitting in it and kicked him in the head before storming off. Cursing as he hobbled away.

He sighed in annoyance. The smell was bitter and acrid but.... nothing compared to the rotting flesh and rancid chemicals of the Goblin Town or the Slime Nest. Not even the weird musky perfume and rot of the Succubi's Mansion. He pushed himself upright and pulled the cleaning supplies out from under the sink, may as well clean this up, he had to use this room too and neither his mother or his father were going to bother when he was there – and of the three of them, he would break and clean up first. He hated dirty bathrooms and kitchens.

It was as he was spraying everything down that he chewed over his realisation that.... his parents couldn't physically harm him anymore.... Nothing his dad could do would hurt him. Hell, judging by the swearing.... hitting him actually hurt his dad more than it hurt Atty right now! Like punching or kicking a wall!

What a strange thing to realise....

He wasn't quite sure how he felt about this. Was it pity? Loss? A strange relief?

...Yeah. All three maybe? There was relief, but it was also a kind of.... grief? He scrubbed a chunk of stubbornly dried vomit and used tissue paper to wipe it up as he thought over it.

And he realised as he looked down at his unscarred legs, at the lack of bruises and scars. He had crossed a line at some point, where the normal, mundane, and human, could no longer harm him. He was.... something that could not be considered human anymore he realised as he skated his fingertips over shins where self-inflicted scars once rested. When the pain he caused himself was the only thing he could control in his life. When the choice to harm himself seemed revolutionary and extreme and rebellious and freeing. It was taking ownership of his body, it was his and he could control at least when he hurt, how much he hurt, and where. This body that was unwanted and unloved that housed him in a place that if only he had been born somewhere and someone else, he might have been loved.

Now the only things that could hurt him were monsters, and himself.

He washed his hands and slunk back to his bedroom, flinching purely in reflex at the sound of his dad swearing and throwing his game controller as he lost at Fifa again. He sighed quietly as the door closed behind him and he looked up. His clock read midday – on a school day!

And – his dad didn't give a sh*t?

Wait, why had he even gone into his room if it was a school day? And midday at that??

Atty frowned, casting his eyes over his room, worry and suspicion in equal measure making him focus more than usual. And realise that it was that he had missed before now.

His figurines, the cheap little plastic anime characters that Claire and Archie got for his birthday were missing. Several of his books too, the nice ones that Dogmeat and Louise got for him at the Christmas Markets, the expensive ones they only got because he was old enough to appreciate them now. The pot he kept his loose change in had been moved too. The scant electronics he had that he rarely bothered with, his table lamp and radio, they were missing.

When he opened his change pot it was empty.

His dad had taken it. And – he had been combing through Atty's room while he wasn't there for sh*t to sell!!

Every time money got tight and they couldn't afford a tens or twenties of weed, or a bottle of milk for tea, the X-Box or the TV in the front room would end up at Cash Converters until the next Universal Credit payment came through and they were able to buy it back. It was a constant revolving door of taking the same electronics in, buying it back a little while later, and then selling it in again.

He felt hot and cold all at once with the realisation that his room, that ordinarily his parents wouldn't bother with, that everyone understood was his space, in the same way that he didn't touch their room, that they didn't mess with – hadn't messed with – when he wasn't there.......

It could have only been a recent development, he concluded distantly, because he had been hiding money in here for years before he Awakened and had been very paranoid in checking all the time. His parents would have skinned him alive for hiding money from them, never mind the sheer amount of money he had managed to.

He snatched up his backpack and threw open his bedroom window. He was only one floor up so it wouldn't be too unbelievable that a dumb teenager who maybe did parkour for fun would be fine jumping out. And he knew that he would be fine. His body was sturdy enough. He doubted that even jumping off the roof would hurt him. And he was right. He hit the ground in a small crouch just to bleed off some of the force, and give a better illusion of difficulty, but really it was like hopping off a slightly too tall kerb.

He ran to the local Cash Converters, the one he knew his parents frequented, the security guard watching him the second he walked in with his obviously empty backpack and poverty. He made a beeline for the display cases where toys and small items would be and, as he expected, the models his friends gave him were right there.

He swallowed and pointed to them as the overweight guy in a blue uniform shirt approached him, “Can I have those please?” he asked, his voice cracking a little.

The middle-aged man looked at them, and then his face. “Sure thing. You okay kiddo? Sounds like you've been having a rough day,” he asked gently as he jangled a set of keys out to unlock the cabinet.

He swallowed again, nodding, “Dad – sold them. I just found out,” he rasped as the man's hands hesitated in collecting the small figurines.

He grimaced apologetically, and opted not to say anything further as he took them out and began to wrap them. Atty saw the leather bound notebooks he had been given and asked to look at them as well – to his heartbreat, the messages written in them had been torn out. The pictures Louise and Lauren, his parents friends, practically his aunts, had drawn in there, Archie's Self-Portrait, Claire's ugly looking attempt at a dog. Cut out. He handed the book back with shaking hands as he paid for his figurines and quietly left the store, the world swimming unhappily around him.

He went straight to Claire's.

She was in, even though he was healing her migraines she was taking occasional days off to maintain the illusion of her illness. And with her parents working, it wasn't like they would be there to check. Her face fell the moment she opened the door and found him, tears streaming down his cheeks.

He went straight up to his room and gasped for breath between his tears as he sat on the bed and tried to pick the price labels off with his useless chewed to death fingernails. Claire eventually had to take them and pick them off herself. She didn't ask what had happened. She was smart enough and knew enough about his parents to take a guess. She was quick to take the labels off and force the figurines back into his hands before curling up against his side, resting her chin on his shoulder as he sniffled and dripped on her.

It was stupid. It was so f*cking stupid.

They were just dumb models but – but – they were his. They were gifts from his friends, from the only people who cared and he just – his dad just – he barged into his bedroom and he – took them and – the book with the messages – the only written confirmation – proof – undeniable declarations that he was loved and wanted – he –

He was never going to forgive him for this, he realised distantly. The knowledge settling into his bones like molten iron, cooling and solidifying into something hard and certain inside of himself. This was... the final line. Bruises could heal but these precious things, the signs and proof that he was loved.... stolen from a place that was unspokenly his and not to be touched.... he knew he was unwanted, but it had never quite sunk in that he was.... that he was actually hated.

In the end.... it wasn't that he bounced back quickly, like Claire assumed, the following day after his little revelation and he was being back in school like nothing had happened, it was more that he had finally accepted a truth he had been skirting around and ignoring for years. The acknowledgement that his parents really did hate him, and there was nothing he could say or do that would have them treat him like an actual person instead of a burden. An obstacle. Trash. A parasite.

It was a painful realisation, but.... ultimately freeing.

The shackle of hope and childish desire to please that had kept him tethered to them had been cut at long last. He felt unmoored. Almost disconnected. As though he could float away. It wasn't a good feeling. But it wasn't a bad one either. He was still bound to them by legal obligation but.... Mr and Mrs Brown had given him their spare room without hesitation, there would always be a space for him on Archie's bedroom floor (the flat he shared with his parents not having a spare room), and if worse came to worst, he was an Awakener. He could handle sleeping rough without a problem. He could pay to use the showers at the local swimming pool, there were three laundrettes in the local area, and the library had free Wi Fi and mobile phone chargers. He could dip into his Dungeon saving to get himself a tent, and there was a quiet little clearing behind the bushes at the duckpond he could set up and be left alone overnight. He had options.

It was....

f*ck it felt like he had been locked in a stuffy room until now and had stepped out to take the first breath of a crisp winter's morning. Sudden and sharp and cold, but oh so refreshing.

It was then he stopped bothering to hide his activities from his parents. And the first time his dad tried to hit him – throwing a bottle across the room at his head – he caught it without looking. And pondered for all of a heartbeat on how best to intimidate them before deciding to just crush the glass in his bare hand, look at them, and then walk away into his room after dropping the broken pieces on the floor.

Oh they flipped their sh*t, but they didn't get within arm's reach again. There was something primal itching in the back of their minds as they screamed at him from the doorway, barking about how he wasn't permitted any food and that he was grounded and if he kept this up he would go back to the dogcrate. As though he had ever viewed his first crib as a punishment. (He knew, of course he did, it was abuse. He was hopeful not stupid. But the crate was his first crib, his first bedroom, his one safe space until he outgrew it and got his room.)

Attempts to ground him were met with him jumping out of the window. Attempts to withhold food and he just bought his own using his 'rent' money. What were his parents going to do? Call the police? With all the weed on the living room table? They would search the flat and find their other drugs.

His grades picked back up at school. He kept all of his personal belongings at Claire's, the stuff that really mattered. He only bothered to go back to his parents' place to get some spare changes of clothing. And of course to give Mr and Mrs Brown a break from him, he didn't want to take the piss given how they refused to take his money for rent.

Everything had been going well. So he wasn't expecting Bellamy to call him the weekend after his mock exams while he was at the park with Claire (Archie having been told he needed to clean his room and wasn't allowed out until it was to his mother's standards).

He thought Gate activity was supposed to taper off, not pick up?

“It's more training than emergency work,” the tanker explained, his voice was rougher than usual, either from sleep or whatever he had been drinking. “Mary rightly pointed out that you hadn't had any kind of formal training. So we're putting together a training raid and you're invited. Took some time to arrange, but you had exams so it worked out.”

“Have I done something wrong?” he asked uncertainly. He thought he had been doing pretty well.

“No. Clean your ears out. You haven't had any training, so we're giving you some. You haven't done anything wrong, but that's down to luck and common sense. This is to make sure you continue to not do anything wrong. Prevention is better than correction,” he explained brusquely.

Claire leaned over, “And just where is this training happening and who's going?” she demanded, shoving her face up next to his so she could be heard, making him squawk in – well, not surprise because he heard her coming, but more reflex?

Bellamy was quiet for a moment, “You his girlfriend?” he asked with some measure of judgement in his tone that made Atty want to crawl into a hole for some reason.

“Ew no, gross.” - “Hey!” - “He's my brother, or as good as. And you didn't answer!”

“Don't see why I should,” Bellamy's voice was cool, but there was a thread of humour in it that made the awful knotted feeling in th4e pit of Atty's stomach ease. He wasn't really annoyed or angry by Claire butting in, he found her funny. Atty could kind of see it. Claire was sort of similar to Mary, less violent and a lot younger. And Bellamy liked Mary, rough edges and all. Even when she was driving him insane with aggravation.

“Because I'm insurance,” Claire told him smugly. “Every time Goose goes to a Gate, he tells me where and when. And I raise unholy hell if he doesn't come back.” This putting his ass directly in the firing line going unspoken.

Bellamy barked a laugh, “Good. You're not as dumb as I thought you were.” Ow. Rude much? “Myself, Mary, and a few of the old crowd. Advent Awakeners. They won't take issue with your age, and they'll have better advice to pass along.”

He exchanged a look with Claire and she shrugged. “You should go. There's only so much training we can help you with out here. Going into a Dungeon where you can actually use your mana is better than doing endless slow laps of the city because you can't let CCTV or people catch you running full speed.”

He grimaced. She had a point. His physical training had stalled out and taken a backseat as he tried to find ways of pushing himself but couldn't find a safe location to do so that wouldn't have CCTV or other people who could identify him doing something abhuman. England was a small country, and it was surprising how built up it was when a lot of what people saw were rolling green farm fields. But there would be a house or a village every fifty miles, often more than one, up and down the entire country. There were no untamed forests or fields here. None. Every inch of the country had been touched by humanity. The bridal path he used to do his training in was a public footpath, what was worse was that it could actually be seen from the train tracks a mile away due to how the tracks were raised in case of flooding at the river – it was only distance that prevented anyone from identifying him if they saw him doing anything not physically possible. That and good old British 'None of my Business' attitude towards ignoring what was around you.

If he wanted to cut loose.... he would need to go to Scotland where the Association and the Government had purchased islands to facilitate the training of Awakeners outside of Dungeons. But he couldn't do that without a Hunter Licence, and he would need to register for that.

He sighed.

“When and where?” he eventually asked.

Notes:

Hi guys, sorry for the long delay and the shorter than normal chapter. I just wanted to get something out for you on time for a change!
It's been a bit crazy for me, ffxiv Dawntrail dropping was amazing, I finally got back on my ADHD meds (It's all over for you bitches), then I had to catch up with work from my week off, renew some important stuff, get my driving licence updated, then the Southport Riots came to my city, I was working remote while dogsitting for a friend a few cities over so I only got caught up in the initial stuff - I'm perfectly fine, some good friends made sure I was able to avoid trouble. And now i'm back! /insert exhausted jazz hands here.
I've got most of the next chapter written up, it just needs to be input onto the computer which I can do tomorrow night to make sure I'm on schedule for the next update Wednesday next week. I have a schedule, damnit! I want to stick to it!!

Chapter 11 Notes:

WARNING: Gore, violence, does monster abuse count as animal abuse???

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The dungeon was in an old decrepit mechanics garage behind a block of flats. A nice block of flats at that, with four floors of little French-balconettes and neatly maintained grass verges and bricked carparking spaces instead of concrete/tarmac pour. Behind the decorative red brick wall was the grey and lichen covered derelict mechanics garage that had closed down due to lack of business as the bigger commercial tyre fitters moved in up the road and their signage was positioned to physically hide the more humble one from the road without outright covering it up.

The glass windows were all broken, the road leading to the main doors was cracked and filled with brambles, nettles, grasses, and moss. The pre-fab concrete walls were blotchy with lichens, moss, and in all the building looked tired, harsh, and more appropriate for a post-apocalyptic comic than reality. The gate was inside the building, and inside was.... not much better than outside. It looked remarkably similar to the Slime Den they had finished with before, but the smell was infinitely better – damp, cold, and petrol. No nose hair curling stink of rancid chemicals and rotting meat for a start.

The group of people that greeted him was more or less what he expected.

They were all grizzled and older. Bellamy's age or older as a matter of fact he realised as he looked over them all with some surprise – they weren't even all low rankers either. There were ten people in total not including himself, and they were all seemingly familiar with each other and acting as though this were a happy reunion instead of a training exercise. And then he realised, because it was. He was the only one in training here. All of these people were veterans that Bellamy and Mary had contacted to help with his training.

Looking at them, he could clearly see two tanks, Bellamy and a Sihk gentleman with full beard, turban, and metal wrisatband. He didn't know the name of it. He was actually in armour, and Atty was reasonably sure he was something like a C-rank tank for one of the major guilds in the South Coast. His face was familiar.

Mary was stood with two other people, one of which in robes. An Asian woman with short-cropped hair in biker leathers, heavy boots, her helmet under one arm, and a long magic staff at her back. Next to her was a.... oh wow, he'd never seen anyone with actual Dwarfism before. The little person was in a long flowing dark green and gold lined robe and it wasn't until she turned around that he recognised her – Miranda Ackerly, the Guildmaster of Six Oaks. She was an A-rank Mage casually known as the Destroyer for her skill in summoning f*cking meteors. She was an online legend. She was fairly public that if it hadn't been for her Dwarfism she would have actually been considered S-ranked, but physical disabilities and health conditions didn't just magically disappear when someone Awakened, they still had to deal with them, and on occasion, even though an individual had Awakened, they might not be able to work as a hunter due to those health difficulties.

Then there was a group of five, one of whom seemed to be shadowboxing at a tall slender woman who was doing her level best to pretend he didn't exist. He recognised one of them as a Fighter from Trinity, one of the major guilds in the UK. They were famous for teaming their Hunters up in groups of three: One tank, one healer, and one fighter – and only doing Raids in teams of nine or twelve to support this preference. He couldn't remember the man's name, just that his team were rather infamous for being two fighters and a tank, a group that acted as support for emergency dungeons that needed closing within the day normally.

He felt small and stupid all of a sudden as he looked at all these adults with their scars and their wrinkles, their too sharp grins and their tired eyes who had seen too much. Hands that were weathered and calloused and had probably held the dead, the dying, and killed and tore and defended.

“Goose!” Mary called, spotting him and waving, “Come on over Sweetpea! Don't be shy!”

She was grinning brightly, and now everyone was looking at him and he wanted to run away.

The slender woman that had been doing her best to ignore the others unfolded her arms and straightened from where she had been leaning against the wall. “The little healer is here. Into the Dungeon,” she commanded, catching the annoying fighter by the scruff of his neck and bodily tossing him into the Gate in such a smooth and casual motion Atty blinked before the reality of what she'd just done actually settled in.

He yelped, “What the hell?!” and immediately rushed in after the person she'd just launched into an incredibly dangerous death-trap of a Dungeon alone!

He burst into the Dungeon, healing magic and barriers already blossoming around his fingertips and – his shoes splashed in a puddle of blood as he came to a stop in a bloodbath.

“Man,” the man complained, “she could stand to be a little more gentle,” he said rubbing the back of his head as he nudged a dead wolf with the toe of his shoe. One of eight. “Damn near cracked my skull open.”

“You are fine,” the woman said brusquely as she appeared behind them.

Atty jumped out of his skin and quickly skittered out of her way, the rest of the Raid team following behind her in varying degrees of good humour.

Ms Ackerly grimaced as she stepped in and had to hike her robes up to avoid them dragging in the puddles of blood. “That'll teach me for dressing nicely when meeting you idiots,” she complained before smiling at him, “Not you sweetheart. These idiots. Mary has only had good things to say about you.”

The one that got thrown into the Dungeon waved a playful fist at her, “Hey! I resemble that remark!” he laughed.

“We can confirm he is most certainly a base Healer,” the woman who did the throwing concluded factually as she plucked a – a f*cking camping chair from one of the other men as he came into the Dungeon. She snapped it open without a care or concern and dropped herself down into it, legs crossed, as regal as a queen on a throne instead of a fifty something year old woman in yoga pants, sneakers, and a collared blouse. She looked like someone's mum.

He was having difficulty processing this.

“What – ” he croaked.

Bellamy groaned, “I said go easy, Paulina, this is not easy,” he complained long-sufferingly.

She tilted her head to the side, “This is a D-rank Dungeon. We are going easy on him,” she pointed out with a faint frown of bewilderment. Bellamy threw his hands up in disbelief and left the Dungeon while Mary and a few of the others laughed.

“He means that we probably should have introduced ourselves and explained what we plan to do before going inside,” Ms Ackerly suggested as she sat herself down in a much smaller camping chair that someone had brought in specifically for her. Atty frowned a little. It was a child's seat which seemed.... a little insulting, but it was also the perfect size for her to sit comfortably, unlike the others. So... was it insulting, or was it accommodating? He didn't know. But.... as long as she was happy, what the hell did he have to do with it?

The woman, Paulina, hummed thoughtfully, and then abruptly got to her feet and marched over to him amongst amused looks on the faces of everyone around them.

She thrust a hand out to him.

“I am Paulina. Assassin. B-rank. I am here to observe, advise, and train you at Paul's request. I hope we can get along,” she stated, giving him some truly intense levels of eye-contact as she spoke, sounding as though she were reciting from a queue card or something.

He nervously took her hand and let himself be shook. “G-Goose. I'm a Healer. Th-thank you for coming?” he offered. She had a firm handshake and pumped his whole arm up and down three times before releasing him and nodding.

“I am happy to have been called. It is nice to see everyone. Even the annoying ones.”

“Hi, I'm annoying!” the thrown man shouted with a laugh. “Also known as Steve on weekends. Local shortsword enthusiast and occasionally I LARP as an Accountant.” Atty couldn't help but snort a little on a laugh, which just had Steve grinning absolutely unrepentantly and waggling his eyebrows at him as Paulina returned to her seat.

Bellamy stomped back into the Dungeon then, this time armed with his sword and shield.

“Steve,” he said, pointing to the Accountant LARPer. “David, Jack, James, Paulina,” he listed pointing to the group of five that he hadn't recognised in the beginning. “Fighters all of them, Paulina is an Assassin. M0oving on,” he grunted. Jack Spider, that was the name of the Trinity Raider. “Mary, Miranda, Asuko – Asuko is a Healer, the others are Mages,” he continued, pointing to the Asian biker lady who nodded while Ms Ackerly gave him a jaunty little wave, and Mary looked ip ipon hearing her name from where she was already wrist deep in one of the dead wolves, prying its magical core out. “Me and Amar are tanks. Everyone, this is Goose. Don't ask his real name, he's doing the smart thing and keeping his Hunting life separate from his real one. Okay, done.”

“Always a charmer,” Asuko observed as she cracked her neck. Bellamy flipped her the bird.

There was a soft clap and all eyes turned to Ms Ackerly, she smiled at them from beneath her large hat. “Now that introductions are out of the way, and thank you for that Paul,” she said with genuine sweetness that had him looking away with a quiet grumble. “Shall we address the reason we're here? Goose, sweetheart, they tell me that you haven't registered with the Association yet?” He shook his head and she nodded gracefully, “I can't say I approve but I certainly understand. Many of us would have avoided it if we could, and if what Paul has shared with us is any indication – ” there was a howl from one of the tunnels, and Paulina turned like a dog hearing a whistle and disappeared into the darkness, no one even blinked or tried to follow her. “m – then I certainly cannot council you to make yourself known to them. Luckily, as a Guildmaster, I can request supplemental training documents for 'refresher courses' should I feel my employees aren't up to snuff,” she explained with a smug twinkle in her eye as she withdrew a USB stick from her pocket.

He stared at her in surprise as he reached out to collect it. When he turned around, Paulina was back in her previous spot, lounging on her campchair throne, unruffled, only a little bit of blood speckling her cheek and shoulder.

“Do I – read them now?” he asked hesitantly, because how the hell was he going to do that? Did someone have a USB adaptor he could plug into his phone?

“God I hope not,” Steve said with a theatrical shudder.

Mary tossed a magical core at his head, “Reading can happen later. In all honesty, I've never been to a training session outside the ones I run myself. I would honestly run through general group tactic names and then have Goose demonstrate his skillset for evaluation. Thoughts?” she asked, plannting her bloody hands on her hips as she looked over to the rest of them.

“Group tactics can be discussed later. It isn't like we'll be using them today,” Bellamy grunted, “I say put him through his paces, see what needs cleaning up. Off the top of my head I'd say Mana Management and aim. I'd also say we need to figure out what his current limits are.”

And that was how he ended up at the vanguard of their formation, leading their charge into the Dungeon. Ms Ackerly at his side with Asuko and Mary beside him. What kind of vanguard was entirely magic users? He didn't know but apparently that was what they were going with right now and.... It was frighteningly effective.

The Dungeon was a shopping centre, its windows boarded up with flickering electric lights. The bottom floor was flooded and they were seemingly working their way down from the top floor to the basem*nt sub-level where a single shaft of actual light could be seen through the filth encrusted glass dome roof. It was the light reflecting off the murky water below that allowed them to get an idea of what they would be fighting as a Dungeon Boss when the water shifted ominously with a rather distinctive serpentine shadow.

Still. They prowled their way through the Dungeon.

His barriers drew a lot of attention, his Buffs had Ms Ackerly making some very admiring noises and Asuko asking him to go into detail about the sensation of casting them, his thought process, and desires. She, after all, was a healer who specialised in Buffs as well as recovery magic. In all honesty, it was actually kind of fun, even if he couldn't find amusem*nt in the way the other fighters were literally pinballing a rabid wolf between them like a football. He ended up being the one to put it out of its misery when Paulina clicked her tongue in annoyance and handed him one of her daggers with a pointed look. If he didn't like it, he should do something about it instead of making a fuss and noise. So he did. It was.... entirely too easy to grasp the dagger in his hand, examine the poor creature, and know exactly how much mana to put into his strike, where to land and drag the blade – how to.... fold his mana around it and push it out to split the creature in half. Like throwing his barriers, only directing it through his knife.

The wolf died quickly, and he made sure it was painless.

“Aww, and I was winning too,” Steve complained as he drooped, and then casually kicked a rat monster into a wall. Splattering it up the water damaged brick cladding without sparing it a glance.

Of them all, only he and Asuko wrinkled their noses in distaste or grimaced in upset. No one else cared, or otherwise found the violence entertaining.

At one point, Bellamy pulled him to a stop and asked him to check his vocal cords. Bellamy had always been curious if tanks had mutated vocal cords, or if it was purely mana that allowed them to use things like Battle Cry to demand an enemy's attention. When Atty pressed his hands to the man's throat and focused his mana, he could feel the hum of the technique vibrating just under the tanker's skin, coating his vocal cords. It was fascinating because it wasn't just a mana technique, the tanker's entire musculature was reinforced compared to others, even his lung capacity was twice that of everyone else's. Combined with how powerful his neck muscles were, his vocal cords may as well have had the physical strength of steel-cables. Add in his mana..... it was like snapping a whip at an enemy with the force of his voice, using mana to activate certain centres of the brain to make the primal hindbrain pay attention to the biggest threat in the room. And of course the force of the Battle Cry was combined with the lung capacity and – the louder you could roar, the stronger your effect.

None of them had known this, and many were thoroughly interested in his theory.

To the point where Bellamy shoved his sword and shield into his hands and told him to try a Battle Cry of his own at the distant pack of wolves that were sniffing around in the gloom further up ahead, outside what looked like a milkshake cafe.

It took him a try or two before he could feel the mana gathering in his throat, so when he bellowed as loudly and as hard as he could, it wasn't surprising that the wolves stopped, perked up, and immediately started charging at them. What was surprising was the fact that creatures from other floors started screaming and there was a cacophony of noise and movement from all around them.

Ms Ackerly chuckled merrily as she drew her staff, “Oh my, it looks as though we've kicked the hornet's nest with that one.”

Mary groaned and drew a lighter, using the sparks to form a fireball in her hand. “Just had to go and make it interesting, Sweetpea!” she complained with a fierce grin, eyes glowing red and gold in the firelight.

“KAWABUNGA IT IS!!” Steve proclaimed with a kind of breathless unhinged glee as he drew a pair of short-swords and bodily threw himself at the approaching wolves, rats, and bears?!

Atty tried to shove the sword and shield back at Bellamy who lifted his hands and stepped back with a sly smirk on his face, “You pull, you tank. Good luck kid. Remember to buff your defence,” he said while Atty started swearing and shoved the shield into the face of a wolf that tried to go for them.

He couldn't summon any shields! His hands were full!!

The fight was thankfully short lived though.

Steve was absolutely insane, and terrifying.

“I hate you so much!” Atty hissed as he shoved the bloodied sword and shield back to their owner, the tanker laughing without concern as he accepted them back with bloody knuckles – he'd been forced to punch a few wolves that managed to get past Atty's amateur tanking.

“You still gunna hate me when we cash these badboys in?” he asked rhetorically as he tapped the healer's nose with one of the weirdly warm mana crystals. Atty didn't know what it was, but the mana crystals were always warm and a shade too smooth that felt kind of oily with it.

He snatched the core from him with a scowl to a chorus of laughter from the others.

“Oh don't pout. You did great, now come here, 'bout time you learned how to harvest your own crystals,” Mary ordered, gesturing him over. “When you're a big legal adult and can register yourself without worrying about whatever, you'll want to know this when you're going into your own Dungeons,” she explained as he slowly headed over to where she was knelt beside a wolf. “Most crystals will be lodged in the back of the head or the neck. When it comes to others, you might find them in the ribcage. You can usually sense them when they're dead. It'll be the strongest pinpoint of mana in the corpse,” she explained as she traced a finger across the Wolf's skull, neck, hackles, and then chest. “I left this one in. Try to find it.”

He honestly couldn't sense the crystal, and he didn't really want blood all over his hands..... maybe if he covered them in mana before he put his hand in he could stay clean? Like.... a skin tight barrier? Barrier glove?

Carefully, he slid his hand into the ribcage first. Better to get the less likely area out of the way first, and it would be easier to get his whole hand in. Mary snorted in amusem*nt and jostled him. “Drop the barrier kiddo. You're not going to be able to sense or feel anything through that. It's just a bit of blood. It'll wash.”

He grimaced at her but.... he dropped it. And immediately felt the squishy, warm, slimy wet raw meat his hand was in. His insides heaved for a worrying moment – he gagged, and yanked his hand out before he did something embarrassing like vomit on it. And he knew Mary and Bellamy would still force him to stick his hand in there, even if ti was covered in his own vomit.

He just wasn't expecting to drag something huge and gold out along with it!!

Shouts went up as he overbalanced and fell backwards, two huge paws slamming down on either-side of him, his world drowning in shouts and yells and gold-white.... fur?

Mary swore and Atty summoned a barrier that did exactly nothing even as his bones started buzzing in his body – something deep inside him singing with recognition and... oh, oh this was.... this was what he felt when he was with Claire and Mrs Brown that breakfast morning when he healed her migraines. That warm golden feeling of – he didn't know the word, he didn't know how to describe it.

“Oh my,” Ms Ackerly's voice observed almost mildly. “Oh calm down, it's just a Summon.”

He heard her steps scuffing on the floor not far from his head, the rustle and swish of her robe, and a moment later there was a thunking noise and a huffing whine, like a chastised dog. “Off you get, the poor thing can't breathe under there.” The paws shifted, and there was another clonk before it shifted properly and moved.

Atty bolted upright with a gasp as cold Dungeon air slapped him back into awareness.

Ms Ackerly was stood next to him, a thoughtful frown on her face as she examined a – a huge f*cking wolf made of white and gold mana in front of her. It was a little different from the ones they had been fighting, its face was a lot gentler, and there looked like there were tufts of feathers in place of ears, and on each of its ankles. Like.... like vestigial wings? It was also three times the size of the wolves they were hunting and could have been ridden like a horse even by Amar in his full armour.

“It is certainly an A-rank,” the diminutive mage concluded.

“Where the hell did it come from?!” Mary snapped from where she was still on the floor, behind Bellamy who had one hand knotted in the shoulder of her clothing, the other with a sword in hand. It looked like he had scruffed and dragged her back and wasn't letting her get back to her feet, even as fire sparked between her lips.

“The monster,” Paulina stated as though Mary were being particularly dim. “You were there and watched yourself.” When put like that, yes, it was a stupid question.

Mary snarled, fire curling from between her lips.

“Both of you act your ages,” Amar scolded before dismissing them as Steve jeered childishly and one of the other fighters snorted. “Mages do not make summons out of Monsters,” he stated flatly, eyeing the large feathery wolf expectantly.

“They do not,” Ms Ackerly agreed absently as she waddled in a circle around the wolf, “But new types are discovered every now and again. Rangers, Assassins, even Mages themselves are 'new type',” she reminded him. “You may not know this Goose, it isn't particularly talked about and outside the education you would have received if you attended Queen Elizabeth's you won't find much information on it unless you were looking for a degree in Mana Sciences, but originally Awakeners were simply Tanks, Fighters, and Healers. From the ranks of Fighters we obtained Mages, and then we discovered Rangers. Healers split into Buff orientated healers and Regenerative orientated healers. Assassins were the next to be officially discovered, though we had known about them for much longer. Back then, we geared what the reaction to them would be and so we hid them as carefully as we could, until it was impossible to hide any longer. There were repercussions to it, horrible ones, but worth it. After that, Summoners came from the ranks of the Mages, and Healers subclassed further into Barrier healers. But officially, Healers remain their own class. On the paperwork there is no distinction.”

“So what, he's..... a Necromancer or something?” Jack Spider asked, folding his arms and frowning slightly.

Atty didn't like the idea of being something as creepy as a 'Necromancer'.

The wolf's ears drooped as it lay down, and looked up at him with pitiful golden eyebrows. His stomach dropped. Oh gods, he was feeling bad for upsetting it. What the f*ck.

“Possibly,” Ms Ackerly mused, “Gate Activity has been odd. It stands to reason we are seeing New Type disturbance. And it makes sense for a Necromancer type to be born of a Healer instead of a Mage. When Summoners were first uncovered they utilised their mana pool for form constructs of Mana, their skills at freely manipulating their mana allowed for it. Healers are used to manipulating mana within others, it seems reasonable then that in order to create their own summons they must build them off a pre-existing mana structure,” she continued to theorise with growing enthusiasm, her eyes brightening up in her excitement.

“Aaaand there she goes,” Steve muttered with a dimpled grin as he dropped into a slav-suqat beside him. “You good kid?” he asked, peering at Attyu who was still sat on his ass on the blood streaked shopping centre floor. He nodded slowly and the wolf whined sadly, still staring at him like a dog that had just been told off. A dog the size of a horse. Not a pony, anm actual horse-horse. A big horse.

Ms Ackerly was off on chattering about her theories with Asuko about the differences between Mages and Healers and why it made sense for a Healer class to give rise to the Necromancer class given its symbiotic nature where as Mages were considerably more –

Atty stopped listening as he slowly levered himself to his feet and stared at the wolf he had apparently created, by accident. Because nothing in his life could ever go to plan.

A wolf that was aware of what he was thinking, or feeling?

He lifted a hand out to it uncertainly, and immediately its ears pricked forward and it very slowly crawled up to sniff his fingers. The first swipe of the tongue was tentative and uncertain, golden eyes watching him carefully for a reaction. He was surprised but also not? Lucking was what dogs did. Same as sniffing. It – she, he decided, carefully started nosing her way into his hand until he started stroking her. Her tail slowly starting to swish and thump on the ground as he curled his fingers around her muzzle in helpless fascination. He'd always wanted a pet, a dog or a cat, hell, he would have been thrilled with a hamster or a gerbil. He'd caught stickleback fish at the pond one year and brought them home in a plastic cup to set himself up an aquarium. His dad flushed them down the toilet and smacked him for bringing wild animals home, accusing him of animal abuse and how the hell was he going to take care of them because he sure as sh*t wasn't going to pay for his pet supplies. At that age, he hadn't thought about how he would take care of an animal, and accepted the fact he had been short-sighted and cruel and gotten those fish killed through his selfishness and never tried to get a pet again.

This though? Did an undead glowing wolf count as a pet?

Did he have to take her for walks, he wondered semi-hysterically, picturing himself trying to put her on a leash and taking her for a walk about the Estate. Trying to shoo away Gavin's annoying pitbull that humped everything and everyone at every opportunity because he couldn't afford to have him neutered (And would have anyway. Gavin was definitely one of those weird guys who was obsessed with being an alpha man and thought dogs had an opinion on the colour pink – despite dogs being colourblind). He laughed a little helplessly at the mental image of the horse sized wolf just kicking the pitbull off her backleg like a clump of grass while he was desperately gyrating away.

His good mood and humour must have translated to her somehow because she was whining quite happily now as she snuffed and sneezed and shoved her entire head into his hands, pressing against his chest as she continued to shuffle herself forward, tail whipping around with enough force to cause harm to an actual animal.

“Well that's adorable, and gross. Please stop playing with dead things,” Steve mused with a small grimace, and Atty froze, doused in cold realisation that he was, indeed, cuddling a dead animal that just happened to still be up and walking around.

But he – he couldn't bring himself to pull away.

She was warm and soft and – he could feel it down to the very marrow of his buzzing bones. She would never hurt him. She would do anything he asked of her. She loved him in that simple, honest, childish way only an infant could love their mother. Because they knew no better.

His fingers curled tightly into her fur. He didn't want to let go, but at the same time he could see how much she was making everyone else uncomfortable, which wasn't fair to them. Not when they'd spent the last twenty years being attacked by creatures just like her, and now they were seeing him cosying up to one and –

The pressure against his chest and in his hands eased up and turned soft, and vanished. The texture of her fur turning to pale air as she faded out of existence, and something in his chest burned. Like a searing hot pinprick in his sternum.

And he knew where she was.

Hiding within his bones. Out of sight, but there all the same. Ready, willing, and able to protect him whenever he should so wish it.

Notes:

Ara updating on ~~semi~~ schedule? Will wonders ever cease?
Well yes, probably, because this is the end of my buffer lmao, my back hurts

Stand, Redux - Araceil - 나 혼자만 레벨업 - 추공 | Solo Leveling | Only I Level Up (2024)

Chapter 1

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Chapter 2

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Chapter 3

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

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Chapter 6

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Chapter 7

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Chapter 8

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Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

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Chapter 11

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