Martyr woke up to the sounds of people rambling outside his door.
He propped himself up, doing a push up out of the same position he fell asleep in.
The sunlight of the window by the bed hitting his eyes that he was struggling to keep open.
He felt like a mess. His hair and the clothes he had on for the past 36 hours felt greasy.
After a quick trip to the shower and a fresh change of clothes he grabbed his bag and opened the door out of his room.
There was no one else in the hallway, all the racket of unfamiliar voices had traveled to the opening of the stairs.
Martyr peered into the rooms around him. The doors had been left open showing the obliterated rooms with white sheets and pillows on the floor, food wrappers scattered on the beds and carpets.
While he made his way down the stairs the smell of an assortment of breakfast foods slowly grew the more he traveled down.
He can smell bacon and eggs, pancakes and syrup, orange juice and chocolate milk. All of these smells hit him at the same time to paint a pleasant aura from the ground floor.
The room was completely full of contestants.
There were probably 30 people, all of them grabbing or eating food. He noticed Vulcan in one of the bars serving food with a mom apron, and at the other bar was Kryphia unenthusiastically serving drinks to a water girl on her team.
The contestants were everywhere, most of them being water and light. The teams Nova and Kryphia had picked out were much larger than Martyr's team of 5, the exact minimum for a team.
Nova herself was outside in the parking lot escorting the pub keeper he beat up into a black car with one way glass.
The doorway was still completely smashed, although the debris had been cleaned up. The dome the bartender was once trapped in had completely disappeared along with the cracks of the concrete.
The outside was even crazier than the bar. There was a crowd of people outside seemingly trying to get in. The only thing that was holding them back from getting in was a fleet of light knights standing in front of them in black earth police-like suits.
Martyr had a lot of respect for what they were doing. There must've been 10 of them that were guarding Nova like a queen. They stood completely still as people yelled and flashed camera lights right in their faces.
Nova's team had taken up multiple tables near the food bar to the right.
Kryphia's team was by the drinking bar, taking up two tables. Most of them looked like they had a water element, one looked like they had a forest element, another one looked like they had air.
The one that caught Martyr's eye was a strong looking girl that definitely had a water element and maybe even another one. She was staring at him while the rest of her team was talking amongst themselves happily, looking like they were having a great time.
Martyr wasn't sure how to react to her. He didn't know if he should be looking back. It seemed like a flirty look but she wasn't taking her eyes off him at all.
If anything it was creeping him out a little bit.
"Good morning."
Martyr snapped out of his uncomfortable eye contact with the water girl to look to his right to see a lightning girl with a plate of food.
Seeing her calmed him down. Her presence was so familiar despite him only meeting her the day before. She was wearing a long sleeved cyan blue shirt now, with the sleeves rolled up and black swishy running pants with two neon yellow strings hanging out of the front.
Her blonde hair was laying out on her back, no longer in any hood or hairband. It didn't look nearly as messed up as it was before during the storm. It was back to its normal state of only kind of messy.
She had a cute smile and generally seemed really happy to see him as well.
"I don't know how you slept through all of that." Vanagloria said, finishing an extremely crispy piece of bacon she was eating with a crunch. "Or through any of the night really, I woke up like 3 times to Nova's team. First with them making us move rooms and then the next two times because they were partying in their own rooms."
"Nah I didn't hear anything, I was out cold." Martyr looked at the massive plate of food she was holding. She had blocks of cheese, mugs of orange juice, crackers, scrambled eggs and probably a million strips of bacon, each one almost fully black with crisp.
"What happened?"
"Come over to our table, we'll explain it."
…
"So basically, none of you got any sleep." Martyr said, picking food off the platter onto his plastic plate. They had picked out a booth by the window with nice cushioned sears. Martyr had slid into Samsara and Spectre's side of the table.
He was sitting across from Vanagloria with Blair next to her by the window. Pentas had apparently said goodbye a while ago and left for school.
"Nope, Nova really fucked us over when she chose her team." Spectre said, angrily drinking his milk as he glared over to their table.
"The moment they made us all move into the same room was when I knew I wasn't sleeping."
"I mean, I don't even blame them for doing that, they only had 4 rooms to fit 2 other groups. I just wish the light kids would've actually used those rooms for sleeping, they were so loud." Samsara said. She was exhaustedly laying her head on Spectre's elbow like she couldn't hold it up on her own.
Nova's team kept on glancing over to their booth. Everytime one of them turned back the group laughed to themselves. They didn't seem to be trying to hide it at all.
"They're just a bunch of entitled rich kids, they'll find their place soon enough." Martyr was trying to ignore their table laughing at them.
"Also why didn't they make me move rooms?"
"Your door was locked and I guess you weren't awake to hear them yelling at you." Blair carefully was eating her waffles, trying not to look like a slob.
"I hope she's able to get them to stop being annoying soon. One of the bitches over there slapped my ass when they put me into a new room." Vanagloria was angrily gripping her plastic spork with a plate of just bacon.
"Ok well try and hold off from starting any sort of fight with them, because that will get us kicked out of the competition real quick." Martyr stopped looking over, trying not to agitate them.
"At the very least wait until they hit first or something."
"Do you think we could take them?" Blair hooked her arm around the back of the seat pulling herself up so she could see Nova's team. "They're team is like twice as big, but not a lot of them seem very tough."
"Blair sit down, don't make it obvious that we're talking about them." Martyr said. He was maybe being overly cautious but he really didn't want to risk getting kicked out of the competition.
It's such a dumb new rule. Fighters should be able to fight each other to put the other in shape.
"Calm down, they won't do shit." Spectre said. "And no, they don't look that tough at all."
"I don't know man, they look like the type of kids to start shit just to look tough." Martyr looked over at them, still chattering amongst themselves.
There were two light guys and two light girls, one dark guy and a dark girl. The other two were both guys, one of them was an earth guy and the other was a big fire guy, the only one that looked like he could fight.
He still looked familiar… Martyr really couldn't figure out where he knew him from. It must've been when he went to a combat meet to fight another school and this guy was from there.
All of a sudden one of the light guys shot up from his seat with a completely straight face. His teammates at the table he was at started chortling, it seemed to be like he was performing some sort of dumb comedy act for them.
He started walking over in the direction of Martyr's booth. He wasn't a very big looking guy, skinny and probably around 5' 8-9. At most Martyr could give him 135.
He looked so cocky that you could tell he thought he was a lot tougher than he looked. He wore a cap that came down low over his eyebrows, a clean white shirt, fake ripped jeans and extremely white shoes.
"This kid." Samsara muttered. "This kid is such a little shithead."
The guy walks up with the whole light table looking over at him and laughing, he had their full attention.
He leans down and puts his hands on the table and looks around their booth. His eyes landed on Martyr, who made sure to make full eye contact with him. not trying to look like he was staring him down as he didn't want to seem too aggressive but also didn't want to look like he wanted to join in on this joke.
"You got a good sleep?"
"Yup."
"It sure looked like it."
"I bet it did."
His team behind him were cracking up as was his face. Martyr knew he was making fun of the fact he fell asleep in a dumb position, and his team probably dared him to go up to them and say this. He could feel his anger boiling in his chest, he still tried his best to keep a normal face, not too angry but still enough to get this guy to fuck off.
He opens his cocky mouth about to say something but stops once he notices Vanagloria to the right of him.
"Oh there she is…"
Vanagloria looked like she was seconds away from socking this guy in the balls.
"So this is the earth bitch that got your tea…"
All of a sudden he jumps as a hand grabs his shoulder.
"Getting along with the other teams, Xander?" Vulcan said cheerfully, contrasted to the strong grip he had on his shoulder.
"Uh yeah." Xander looked like he was really trying not to laugh, like he was actually funny.
"Great, I'm glad to hear. But I'm gonna have to steal my team back from you." Vulcan shooed Xander back over to his table. He started laughing as soon as he saw the rest of his team laughing.
"Thanks." Martyr told Vulcan after Xander got out of hearing distance.
"Yeah sorry about that, you guys might have to put up with them for a bit. Nova told me she's going to try to fix their behavior but that might take a while."
"In the meantime…" Vulcan moved over plates and mugs on the table and put a large yellow-brownish coffee stained colored map onto the table.