Chapter 7
Three Mysteries
Tara and Ronald followed Ethan out of the lodge and some two hundred yards deep into the forest in silence. Though they tried their best to suppress their excitement, whole bouts of it seeped out and spilled onto their expressions. From the looks of it, either Ethan would kill them and bury them this far out so nobody will ever find them, or they'd get what they were promised–supernatural stature transcending that of a human. While the first option wasn't impossible, it definitely felt unlikely. They'd gotten to know the strange man over the past week, and the indication was that he wasn't a mass-murdering-for-fun type. Or, at least, that's what the two were banking on.
They came upon a small, round clearing when Ethan stopped, turned around, and faced them. He had a rather serious expression on his face, causing both Tara and Ronald to tense up.
"First off," Ethan said. "I can in no way guarantee what kind of magic you'll gain access to. I can't promise you you'll become so monumentally strong you'll be able to piss flame and shit gold. So, if you get some shit barely worth a crap, that ain't on me."
"..." Both of them nodded in understanding.
"Secondly," Ethan continued. "You cannot tell anyone else this for the time being. You'll dispense with all your advantages and, well, that's just fucking stupid. Thirdly, even if you get that much stronger, don't flaunt it. You said I could have stayed in the city and ruled as a king, but that's not how it works. For instance, I probably wouldn't die from a couple of bullets making artsy holes in me, but I would definitely die if someone jammed a car into me and set it on fire.
"You'll understand more soon enough, but I'll also warn you that it will hurt. As far as I understood it, your body will be changed on a molecular basis, but you cannot pass out as the choice for which magic you gain will be chosen at random. Although, you don't have to worry about that. I won't allow either one of you to pass out.
"You'll also let me know precisely what choices you will be given, and unless you want to spend the rest of your life cleaning my shit out of the toilet, you'll listen to my 'suggestion'. If all that is clear, we can begin."
"It's clear," Tara said.
"Clear as a babe's tear." Ronald said.
"Man, you're a dumbass," Ethan sighed but approached the two slowly and stopped some two feet from them. "Close your eyes." They both listened. "Imagine that alien orb in your head–in as much detail as physically possible. Isolate it. Imagine its many arrays alight in hues running across its metallic surface, bending over its edges. The faint hum it makes when in contact with anything. The strobing lights at night. It's floating above the water, causing waves to bleed out and crash back to nothing." Both Tara and Ronald began feeling strange, as though in some kind of a trance–even with the most minor input from their ends, the perfect image that Ethan was describing appeared inside their minds, as clear as though they were looking at the alien sphere directly.
"The sphere is perfect. Without blemishes. And it turns to you, like an eye, and you hear its calling. Now, whisper, both to yourself and to the world at large–Awaken."
"Awaken…"
"... Awaken."
Tara felt scalding fire burst through her like a bolt of lightning, causing her to scream out and fall to her knees. The pain forced her eyes open, but she couldn't see anything but the bleeding pot of colours and shapes that made no sense. She continued screaming as the pain continued to mount inside her chest, akin to birthing a core of fire within her lungs.
By her side, Ronald was hardly better; he was bent over, hands on his knees, vomiting blood when he wasn't yelping in pain. He, too, eventually fell to his knees, his legs having turned to jello.
Ethan observed silently and expressionlessly; this was the reality of the Awakening. Some people had it relatively easy, some people suffered, and some yet died. But it was a miraculous thing, nonetheless–those who had cancer were cured, those who were blind could now see, those mute could sing, and those who could not walk could now run faster than ever before.
Their Awakening lasted a remarkably similar length–approximately two minutes, neither long nor short. It was just the first step–just like Ethan, they'll likely spend hours in a half-comatose state once they choose their class. For now, though, they stood up, breathing heavily and panting, dried tears on their cheeks. The look in their eyes, however, was resolute, something he liked to see.
"Well, the first part is over," Ethan grinned. "Look to your sides. There should be something there that makes no sense." Listening to him, Tara and Ronald looked around for a moment until their gazes landed on their respective welcoming windows. And then Tara said something that alarmed Ethan.
"Fifth Awakened," she said. "My choice of classes will be… better?"
"I'm sixth," Ronald asked. There were three others–three people in the world who figured out how to Awaken this early on. Ethan couldn't confirm whether this tracked the reality of his last life–publically, the first Awakened didn't show up for a couple of months, right around the time the first tunnels and the first Kaynul started showing up.
"But what is this? Like a game screen?" Tara quizzed, pushing her arm at thin air–from Ethan's perspective–but seeming to gain no desired results. "This has to be a joke."
"It's not," Ethan said simply, pushing the question of the other three Awakened out of his mind. "Now, tell me what classes you were offered."
"Oh, I already made my choice," Tara said.
"Yeah, me too." Ronald added rather innocently.
"..." Ethan gritted his teeth for a moment. "Alright. Those classes better be called 'God' and 'God but more badass' or I swear to the shitter, I'll kick your asses so hard your bowels will move up to your throat."
"Mine's Blood Devotee," Tara said.
"Hey, same!" Ronald exclaimed as the two glanced at each other.
"Blood Devotee?" it was the first time Ethan had heard of the class, but could quickly pick up on what it meant.
"Yeah," Tara nodded. "It linked me to you. Supposedly, all my stats will be doubled when I'm following your orders or defending you. And if I'm hunting with you, experience gained is also heavily increased, whatever the hell that means."
"Yup, same," Ronald nodded. "I have an excuse of being a kiss-ass, but I've no clue why Tara made the same choice."
"Oh, shut it," she rolled her eyes at the comment as Ethan sighed.
"Seeing as you two are nonchalantly chatting, you haven't begun your class assimilation yet. It's gonna last a while, so you better start. I'll check up on you periodically. Good luck~~"
Ethan left the two mildly confused kids behind and went back to the lodge, his subconsciousness pushing forward once again the question of the three Awakened. It felt fast, all else notwithstanding. While it wouldn't be out of the question for somebody among the billions of people to simply luck into Awakening by sheer happenstance, it happening three times, especially within less than a month of the Descent, felt… contrived. Either there was something else entirely at play, or he supremely underestimated the sheer volume of stupid antics people were willing to experiment with just on the off-off-off chance it might lead to something.
Returning to the lodge, he saw that Layla was still fast asleep, and sat on the couch opposite of her silently, speeding through the internet news cycle, looking past the ever-living cycle of news around the orb and for some anomalies, news that appeared odd or strange–a man lifts a bus to save his kid, an unknown fire burns ten people, a frozen hut appears in the middle of Sahara's Desert–things of that nature. But there was nothing. Even if there was though, chances were that it would get buried in the news cycle that never slept.
This felt like one of those gut moments for him, where despite the lax, if any, 'evidence' of anything wrong, things simply did not add up in some fashion. It was difficult even for him to properly assert it as a plausibility, but he'd relied on this exact feeling quite a few times before.
The first time was when he was forced to escape from the third military encampment that he was sent to. He stayed there for four months in total, and the person who triggered his escape was no other but the previous beholder of the Blood Inheritor Class–Logan. The man came into the military camp two days prior to Ethan's escape, and though he seemed amicable and friendly on the surface, something about him caused Ethan to nearly piss himself–and thus, two days later, he escaped.
About a month after, he heard what actually happened at the military camp–everyone, everyone, had gone missing. No corpses, no goodbye messages, nothing–it was as though they vanished into thin air. It would only be years and years later, when Logan's crimes continued to stack to the high heavens, that the truth behind the 'Mayson Camp Disappearances' would come to light–one key reason why Ethan ended up picking the Blood Inheritor Class was to simply take it away from Logan, but also because of what he learned from studying that disappearance.
Logan forced everyone in that camp to Awaken, whether they wanted to or not–and when they did Awaken, he used one of the core abilities of the Blood Inheritor Class to quite literally suck the life out of everyone, taking some of their base stats along with their lives. And he did this repeatedly–at least four times as far as Ethan learned, likely even more.
He eventually got killed after crossing over one of the so-called Ten Beasts, but even so, he did not go down without a fight, and a large part of it was the army of brainless 'zombies' that heeded every one of his commands to a fault.
While Ethan had zero intentions of ever going on a wanton massacre just to increase his stats, there will likely be no shortage of people he'll have to kill, so even as a side-effect, the added stats would slowly stack up. He also suspected that there was a similar effect for the monsters themselves, but Logan, if he ever did hunt monsters, never spoke about it, and was never seen or heard of as hunting monsters. His prey were exclusively people.
Though he wouldn't have access to Blood Inheritor Class, Logan was one of the people on Ethan's radar as chances were he'd still be the same evil, opportunistic monster he was in the past, just in a different way.
He trusted his 'gut feeling' back then at the military camp–and he trusted it now. There was something decidedly off about the three Awakened between him and Tara and Ronald. There really were only three likely possibilities: the first one was that he wasn't the only regressor and that there were at least three other returnees familiar with the process of Awakening. This one didn't seem as likely, though, since Ethan waited some time before actually Awakening rather than doing it immediately after the Orb descended.
The second possibility was that one person figured it out by pure accident and taught two others immediately. This one seemed the likeliest, albeit it was also the one Ethan was hoping for. While alarming, he could simply chalk it up to coincidence and move on. The issue with this one was that there was no trace of them. People who just Awakened, especially ordinarily, followed a simple pattern–getting as much as they could as violently as they needed to. But there legitimately seemed to be no trace of them anywhere online. There was still a chance they Awakened somewhere with a limited news cycle, or where their crimes were yet to be discovered, but Ethan wasn't banking on hope to survive.
That left the last possibility–they were directly told by someone or something how to Awaken and to lay low for the time being. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility–while the Orb itself never communed with anyone, it wasn't as though it opened portals only to dimensions with low-intelligence beasts. There were numerous worlds with clearly highly intelligent species, and, on occasion, there would be exchanges–goods, services, knowledge, a trade like any other.
Ethan's prime suspicions were on three different groups–the aforementioned Ten Beasts, a collection of ten mysterious people who largely moved independently unless faced with a much bigger threat. Past their names and some class information, nobody was able to dig up much info about them even twenty years into the future.
The second group was the cults devoted to the Orb–any one or all of them. The speed with which first cults not only appeared but grew was always quite alarming, but it was easy to chalk it up to people simply needing a refuge for their thoughts and fears. But now, he wasn't so certain.
And the third group was the cabal that would eventually leave shadows and form the official world government some fifteen years into the future, proclaiming the Earth a unified nation and calling it Utopia.
All three of the aforementioned groups held immense power, more so than any other, but the reasons and direct line for how they came to hold that much power could never be gleaned, be that due to the nature of their operations or simply the fact that they seemed more ghosts than people on the paper. Whatever the case was, though, Ethan knew he'd have to investigate. And it just so happened that he now had two 'Devotees' that were quite apt with computers–he'll have them write a code or a script or whatever those things were called that would send alerts when a 'strange bit of news' appeared online. It was just a question of keying in on the most important words and phrases so as to not get overwhelmed by the sheer volume. But that was his job–and, even over twenty years later, he was still very good at it.