Yoel's eyes darted around the vast landscape. It felt as if he really was back in his own body, he could breathe and smell, and he could also taste.
It was not a pleasant experience figuring out the latter, but it was a discovery nonetheless.
What truly caught him off-guard, was that the place his body had manifested in, was slowly being covered by falling bricks, which quickly began to resemble a large stadium.
Trees and plains as far as the eye can see, being crushed by the merciless assault of bricks, cinderblocks, marble, and stones coming together to form a massive arena.
When Yoel tried to find out where the bricks had been coming from, he realized that a separate mist cloud had lowered itself to ensure the job was done.
And of course, the bricks manifested out of the mist. The mist swirled around itself as if caught in a typhoon, from the eye of it manifesting the many materials used to create an arena of such immense proportions.
When Yoel was about to be swallowed by the ocean of stone, a part of the mist that was generating the materials broke off and glided to his side.
It did not waste even a second for Yoel to process what was going on or what was going to happen, before enveloping him whole and rendering him incapable of movement.
The mist had been thin enough for Yoel to see through it as it was rising to the sky back to its larger counterpart.
I would love to admire the landscape like this… if there wasn't a huge shadow of the arena looming over it.
Much of the landscape had been destroyed, trying to make room for the huge arena. From the outside, it looked very wrong as it stood unevenly on many small plains.
Why didn't they just materialize the arena from the start…?
Saving Yoel from the unpleasant sight, the mist that swirled around him quickly vanished beyond the waves of materials.
Once inside, Yoel was left speechless.
A gigantic arena was slowly materializing before his eyes. A few colored spots appeared on the otherwise spotless white marble floor.
Pure white pillars of hundreds of meters rose to stabilize the slowly manifesting yellowish round roof.
Stands and seats manifested after the core of the arena was finished, rows upon rows of seats filled empty space; all of that being done at incredible speed.
As the seats swirled into reality from the mist, they were filled by countless spectators whose face Yoel couldn't quite get a grasp on.
Aggressive cheering erupted from the spectators and Yoel noticed the mist returning to where he had been, in the middle of the arena.
As the mist cloud hovered a few meters over the ground, several other thin mist clouds parted from it, within their holds being the students from Yoel's class.
Yoel didn't know if he should be concerned that such bizarre events were happening all of a sudden. He vividly remembered entering the pod and drifting off to a faraway dream, but everything still felt quite real.
His thoughts were interrupted by the noise of the wind and a scream of another student slowly approaching him.
When Yoel stared in the direction of the scream, he saw a thin layer of mist covering a female student, slowly gliding over to his location.
When the mist had finally arrived, it hovered over the ground a meter or two, and abruptly broke apart, while also leaving the girl to free fall on her own.
Yoel panicked– he didn't know if he was supposed to try and save her or if she had her own means of landing.
He was about to move to where he believed she would fall, but he stopped as he watched her cross her hands, trying to form an X with them.
So, I shouldn't help… then?
Yoel scratched his brown hair as he stood still, puzzled at what she had been trying to signal to him. He was about to continue running towards her, but all he could do was look dumbfounded when she suddenly strained her arms, acting as if she was grasping a sword, and simply sending a full power slash at the ground.
What the fuck am I watching…?
The wind scurried away at the power of her swing, and an invisible force crashed against the ground, causing rubble to form where she would land.
The force of the slash had been strong enough to slow her fall considerably, but Yoel thought he saw something more, something hidden also at play.
Upon taking a closer look at her, he remembered that he had met her before. It was Julia, one of the girls who had been with Brandon back when they had faced that monster horde.
"Well, you're a familiar face. I'm glad to know that someone else I know is also inside this, uh, simulation."
Her voice became unsure when she spoke about the simulation, perhaps she was also wondering if what was happening was really a simulation, or not.
"I can't say I felt any better being here alone. Anyways, what did you just do? That weird slash thing, that just slowed your fall, somehow."
Julia blinked a few times, confused by the question. After a few moments, her eyes shone with the light of realization as she opened her mouth to speak.
"Oh, right. I forgot to tell you. That's my enigma!"
So she's awakened as well, huh? I guess not a lot of people didn't awaken. An exception could be Vasil, but I don't think many who haven't awakened are still here.
"That's amazing. From the looks of it, it was pretty powerful too. Julia, right?"
A hint of surprise showed on her face, and she smiled once again, her brown eyes being quite a match for her somewhat long dirty brown hair, which was left untied to sway in the wind freely.
Other than that, she wore almost full medieval body armor, except for her head. It still confused Yoel to this day as to why Blessed fought with medieval weapons and wore medieval armor.
It wasn't something he had to find out immediately, but something he questioned when he had nothing to do or when his mind simply wandered aimlessly.
"How did you get that sword? When I came to, I only wore my clothes and nothing else."
"Ehh? All I remember was that I felt uncomfortable without it, so I wished for it… and it kind of just manifested from the mist."
That works? I should give it a try.
Responding to her answer by closing his eyes, Yoel concentrated on the image of the spear he wished to wield.
He once again felt the wind, only this time it concentrated on his palm, the wind became colder and colder until Yoel felt the soft and cold touch of a newly-made spear.
"Wow, that was pretty cool. I never really saw how it manifested because I was too focused on my surroundings, but when you see it from another perspective it looks magical."
Yoel felt the spear, beginning from the cold butt of it and towards its shiny and sharp tip.
"A standard military-issued spear, nothing too special. However, I can agree. Being able to summon weapons out of the air is something I wouldn't have expected to be doing."
He felt it a bit more, doing practice swings and thrusts to test its weight until the silence between them built up to a slightly concerning level.
As he opened his mouth to end the silence, a sound as if someone was tapping on a microphone erupted from around them.
As Yoel was startled, he defensively began looking around, trying to gather some kind of clue about what was happening.
He noticed that he and Julia were not the only ones standing in this humongous arena.
Many others had been here, perhaps the entire class even. As far as he could see, each student was paired with another.
The gigantic arena could hold almost twenty times the number of people in Yoel's class, so Yoel and Julia who were on the edge of the group of students, saw just how big the arena was.
To Yoel's right, was the group of confused students, and to his left was white marble for at least a hundred meters or so.
Yoel saw Loki amongst the pairs that were closer to him, and as if he had felt eyes on his back, Loki had turned as well.
Upon seeing him, Loki's expression eased and he began a slow walk towards Yoel.
…However, as if he had bumped into a wall of concrete, he was stopped dead in his tracks.
Confused, he tried to walk forward once again, only to find himself bumping against an invisible wall.
The surrounding students who watched this immediately began experimenting themselves, and soon enough they all had come to meet the same negative results Loki had.
Before panic could truly erupt amongst them, the tapping of a microphone once again distracted all of them.
[Ah, this garbage finally worked. Anyways, You must have noticed that you are stuck in some kind of invisible box and that you are each paired with another student, your pair is supposed to be your opponent for the day. They were chosen at random, by the way.]
[Try and scope out the strengths and weaknesses of your abilities as much as you can. I don't care enough to pay attention to each one of you, so pay attention to yourselves. You'll need it. Good luck, I'm going back to getting some well-needed sleep.]