Several implications struck John at once, each one carrying the force of a blow to the stomach.

First, and perhaps most important: I could revive all three of them right now.

Luckily, cold logic won out before he could make an emotional decision. As much as he wanted to give Claire another chance, a better chance, he knew he couldn't.

And if he was to bring her back, could he really deprive her of her father? Forcing her to travel alone with a stranger, in the current circumstances, seemed cruel, even assuming he could find a way to wrangle his Biokinesis so he could deal with her condition. And if he was going to forgive the sins of someone like Curtis, he couldn't justify letting Marian stay dead.

It would feel good to bring them back, absolving him of his guilt and his failure, but doing so would cause him serious problems.

Judging by Claire's experience, he was confident the three of them would come back without a system empowering them. Whatever gains Curtis and Marian had made, whatever Spells and Skills they had unlocked, it would all be stripped away from them, leaving them vulnerable in this hellish place.

Three baseline humans, and John would have to protect them. He had ideas, at least. With Crafting, Enchantment, and Alchemy, he reckoned he could whip up some special gear that would give them some protection and firepower, and failing that he could unlock Portal World and, hopefully, stick them somewhere safe, away from the monsters.

But that wasn't considering the interpersonal dynamics that would be at play. They'd be no threat to him, but they'd be a threat to each other, especially in the close confinement of a portal world, and he didn't have much faith in his diplomatic abilities to prevent Curtis and Marian trying to kill each other. Or Claire.

If he was going to be bringing anyone back, he couldn't do it now.

That left him with the second implication, and perhaps the hardest gut punch: everything Curtis did for the sake of his daughter truly was unnecessary. None of those murders had needed to happen. It just made the man's crimes more unforgivable, in John's mind.

Sure, the Soul Drain aspect of John's Ultimate Shot wasn't necessarily a Spell available to everyone, but he figured there'd be some similar kind of reward for anyone who took down a portal world. It made too much sense. Narrative sense. A kind of twisted irony.

And that was another implication, right there. The narrative of it all.

Almost everyone still alive today would have lost loved ones and comrades, and he was pretty damn sure that Revive option would be dangling in front of plenty of faces, a constant temptation. Watford wouldn't be the only location PvP was being heavily encouraged, so to speak. He was sure there'd be places like it all over the world. And, hell, even in areas where PvP wasn't being deliberately propagated like here, there'd undoubtedly still be plenty of it happening elsewhere.

How many people would have seen that option and come to the same conclusion Curtis had? How many people had died because their minds went straight to killing other people, over the arguably more difficult option of clearing out portal worlds?

These thoughts felt like steel chains constricting his heart. It was hard to breathe through the ache, but he managed it, going about collecting the other two bodies left in the clearing. He wasn't going to bring them back right now, where they'd be liabilities who'd almost certainly end up dead again before long, without even taking into account Claire's illness. He'd bring them back later. He had plenty of souls to do it.

Another implication there. A pretty damn big one, occupying his thoughts of the short, medium, and long term.

Right now, after his destruction of two portal worlds, one containing three 'eyes', the second containing only one 'eye', he was sitting on just under 23,000 souls. That was, what? 46 opportunities to bring people back from the dead? They'd be diminished, compared to a system user, but that was a lot of leverage. A lot of responsibility, too.

It did make him wonder if the Revive mechanic was meant that way at all. It could be entirely possible he was wrong, and Soul Drain was actually unique to him after all. But he didn't think so. There had to be at least a few million people still out there, and one of them would have something similar, surely.

If it was the case, however, and this ability had fallen through the cracks, so to speak, then would he see another sudden hotfix, like what had happened when he'd merged his two Combine abilities to let him merge Spells and Skills? Something was watching over proceedings, and it remained to be seen how it would take this seemingly overpowered ability.

Better to err on the side of caution either way, for now. When he did eventually feel the time was right to spend on some Revivals, he'd make it count as much as possible, just in case the overlords of this whole farce decided to patch the ability.

It was harrowing, looking at his Inventory and seeing three entries of Human Corpse, only being able to tell them apart by their weights; 96kg for Curtis, 73 for Marian, 26 for Claire. Their clothes had ended up in his Outfits menu. None of them had had much more on them beyond that. Marian carried no weapons, beyond the curved dagger he'd knocked out of her hands before…

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Before I killed her, he thought, tried to swallow down that damn stupid lump in his throat.

It was all a little surreal. Dream-like, almost. Now that he knew he could bring her back, the guilt had receded somewhat. Like when he'd taken a pack of sweets from the corner shop without paying, and told himself he'd come back the next day with money to pay for it, so it wasn't really stealing.

He was still avoiding looking at his hands.

Movement in the corner of his vision drew his attention. Through the trees, he could see the other four slinking away, battered, defeated. The golden twins were leaning on each other as they stumbled away, while the suited guy who'd been in the Gundam was limping along, looking dazed. The Trooper guy was already at the broken treeline by the hospital, and he disappeared past the rubble as John watched.

None of them looked back. If they cared that Marian was dead, they didn't show it. He couldn't help noticing that they weren't all going in the same direction. It seemed their little band had broken up, now that the job was done.

A part of him didn't want to just let them walk away with so little punishment, but it was drowned out by the bone-deep weariness that set into him when he remembered those three new entries in his Inventory. He couldn't bring himself to add more to that list.

John narrowed his eyes. Paranoia and an inkling feeling had him swap out for Mana Sense. The Spell matched his heartbeat, radiating an omnidirectional wave that pinged a vast constellation of signatures into his mind, giving him a map of where any monsters stood relative to his location. It took a second for his mind to decode the information it was receiving, cataloguing the signatures, their direction, and distance.

With a sigh, his eyes fell shut. Of course more waves of monsters were closing in. Of course they were coming from almost every direction apart from a direct route to Watford. He knew from observation that the columns of insects could pass each other by without breaking stride even at their full speed, like one of those fancy marching parades the army occasionally used to put on, so it didn't matter that the several-dozen lines appeared to be on overlapping courses.

If he hadn't already been working with a narrative theory, positing that there was some kind of overseer to all this bullshit who wanted drama and entertainment, he might have wasted his time trying to calculate just where this horde of monsters would be herding him to.

But he was working with that theory, and so he didn't need to do that. He knew, without checking, that the monsters wanted to push him towards the four enemies who were currently in the process of slinking away.

He could already see what would happen, the future opening up like a book only he could read. It would come to another fight. Of course it would. There was pretty much no possibility of parlay between them, per his perspective. No trust. No truce.

Maybe the knives wouldn't come out straight away, but they would. It was only inevitable. The overseers were counting on it, in fact. They'd probably crank up the pressure until it boiled over, too. They'd make it happen. The narrative demanded an endless cycle of revenge and violence. Maybe they'd contrive a way to time it so someone out there who still cared for one of these four saw it end. Or maybe it didn't even have to go that far; perhaps they'd tilt the scales, so one of the golden twins would escape, form up a new kill squad, and come after John again in the future. They could even succeed, just as John was about to reunite with Doug and co, creating yet another sequel in this ridiculous tale.

John decided, right then and there, that he wasn't going to play into this bullshit.

Luckily, he already had a good idea of how to get out of it. He went straight into his Aura menu and scrolled through until he found the Spell he wanted.

Unlocked Dragon Wings Level 6!

-16000 Aura

It was a good thing he'd gained points from so much fighting. Taking inspiration from a mass murderer like Curtis didn't fill him with pride, but the man had unequivocally proven that one could simply… fly over the monsters.

When the mana sphere in his navel had settled and the Spell's instruction manual had imprinted itself on his mind, John wasted no time in activating it.

To say having wings sprout abruptly from his back was an unpleasant experience was quite the understatement. It wasn't painful, at least, but he could have done without the strain of excess skin flowing out from his back as bones sprouted from his shoulder blades. They elongated into massive wings impossibly quickly, unfurling like they'd always been there. The excess skin calcified and hardened, going from the pale pallor of flesh to the obsidian black of a dragon's skin in the blink of an eye.

The transformation was complete in perhaps five seconds, and when it was done, they felt absurdly natural. Flexing them was as easy as moving his arms, and just as familiar. He couldn't help looking back and forth, admiring them. Each was easily twice as long as he was tall, dark as obsidian but with an opalescent sheen, like oil. There was nothing leathery about them. They looked hard as diamond, thick enough you couldn't see the bones unless you squinted, each featherless phalanx tipped with a spear-like protrusion that looked like it could pierce armour.

He grimaced as he realised they'd absolutely torn apart the back of his red leather jacket. That would take a bunch of Aura to patch up. Frustrating, but it didn't really matter. He could pay for that with the Aura he received just for the fucking coolness of having dragon wings.

+2000 Aura

Had someone witnessed his transformation, or were these wings just so awesome that the system felt obligated to give him some Aura even though he was alone here? He supposed he'd find out for sure when someone inevitably saw him flying around.

John closed his eyes, letting the wind rustle his hair. At moments like this, he could almost convince himself all the bullshit going on was worth suffering through.

Then he opened his eyes, gave a great beat of his mighty wings, and launched into the air.

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