John hated swimming class. This always happened when the teacher stepped out for a smoke. ‘Why would you even be allowed to smoke during the lesson?’ the pubescent boy asked himself and tried to make himself as small as possible. Legs pulled in, he kept sitting against the wall. He hoped, like always, that Frank would just go away.

By a common definition, it was an insane hope.

“Yo, piggy bank, I know you heard me,” Frank said and stepped on John’s foot, slowly shifting his weight. Puberty had accelerated the differences between the two of them. Where the little nerd had turned into a lanky nerd, Frank had become a freakishly strong thirteen-year-old. To some degree, that could be explained by him being in the football team. Mostly, John was certain of it, Frank was stronger than him because that was how the unfair world worked.

‘This is why I’m happy staying inside with my PC…’

Even with that cynical thought bouncing inside his head, John was surprised how far Frank went. Soon, the nerd’s foot started to seriously hurt. Frank had been slowly upping the violence lately. Their relationship had always been hostile, but there was only so much damage a boy could do to a boy before the hormones kicked into high gear.

He heard a girly snicker from the side and made the mistake of raising his gaze. The clique of female classmates looked at him with belligerent amusement. All ahead the blonde cheerleader Vanessa. It hurt almost more than the physical pain. It was only recently that he had started to get really interested in what girls thought of him and, so far, it had never been positive.

“Shouldn’t be surprised you have trouble getting up,” Frank mocked and stepped off his foot. A brief flash of hope was extinguished when the blond guy grabbed him by the arm.

“Jesus, can his mother afford food?” one of the other boys mocked, when John’s thin body was pulled to his feet. “Skeleton-man!”

“If he was my son, I wouldn’t feed him either,” Vanessa shouted, always eager to raise the heat in the room. “He’s just a pathetic gamer.” What made her pick on him so much? John would have loved to know. There seemed to be no reason aside from that sociopathic glint of satisfaction in her eyes. Not that he had experienced enough in his life yet to properly identify that being enough for people like her.

John wanted to defend himself, but no words came to mind. He was stunned. Then he was tossed into the pool. He was under the surface of the water. He came up again. He was shoved back down by Frank jumping on top of him. Pain shot up his spine. He came up again. He desperately snapped for air.

“Mute and can’t even breathe right.” Frank’s mockery barely got through the water that had gathered in John’s ear.

‘He’ll get bored soon,’ the young gamer told himself.

“Here. I’ll teach you,” Frank grabbed John by his messy hair. “Breathe in, Loseman.” Before John could, he was forcefully dunked under water. He struggled. His lungs burned. He struggled more. Helplessly, his hands hit the surface. He was ripped out of the water.

The Gamer shot up into a straight position, breathing heavily. “John?” the worried voice of Gnome reached him and his mind quickly snapped back to reality. Shaking the vision of his past off with the wisdom of the present, he analysed the situation. “Are you back?”

“Yes,” he responded, watching as his body reverted to what Stats and effort had made it, filling out his clothes. They were absolutely drenched, sparing him the question of how they had gotten him out the vision. “Thank you, Undine,” he said, while letting Metra help him to his feet. The abysstide elemental had completely rinsed him clean with enough water to flood the entire hallway. Parts of his skin still tingled, but there wasn’t enough of the Sands of Time on him to continue the debuff. “Note to self, don’t get any of that on your head, or you will experience flashbacks.”

“Are you doing well?” Gnome asked, holding onto his arm. “Do you need a cuddle? A hot bath? A nap?” She was so worried for his well being, she just said these in spite of their current environment. None of the gathered harem members were in a mindset to make fun of her for it either.

“I’ll take all three of these with you after we are out of here,” John told her with a reassuring smile. “Just some unpleasant memories. Nothing that I haven’t confronted before. I’m not the boy I was back then.” He looked around. “What exactly happened after that thing appeared?”

“Cunt-ass-bitch-slime crashed into you and then stopped existing before I could get that done for it,” Eliza cussed out. “What the fuck was that?!”

“I don’t know… yet…” John answered, already having a few theories run through his mind. “Let’s not get stuck here theorizing. We don’t know if it can form again, if there are still any Lorylim around or even exactly what killed them. Better to wrap things up here.”

They easily agreed to that and continued on their journey. Siena insisted on scouting ahead now, but John forbade her to. The last thing he wanted was to have one of his girls isolated somewhere. Like Sylph and Undine, she was to remain incorporeal until needed. Gnome continued to sense for any vibrations in the earth, while Salamander used her body heat to dry John off. They heard that wailing, “Roooooo,” one more time, but didn’t encounter the creature again.

They opened more doors, aimlessly, until the fizzling frog creature appeared again and gave them a rough sense of the direction they needed to go. Finally, they found one gate that was heavily fortified. A symbol was engraved in the heavy steel, a frog, unsurprisingly. John hammered against it a couple times and waited for an answer.

Finally, there was a sound in the underground corridors, as the locking mechanism clanked and snapped several times. The vault barrier opened with a hydraulic hiss. Nobody stood on the other side, so John entered and checked what all of this was about himself. What he found inside was, at last, progress.

Fundamentally, the structure of the room was similar to the other ones where they had found the corpses. There was one large tank in the middle, surrounded by four seats, illuminated by lamps. Unlike the other rooms, however, that tank opened like a flower at the top and ran along the ceiling in several intricate pipes, which vanished into the walls. John noticed that the tank wasn’t empty, as it had been everywhere else, but instead filled with an alchemical fluid. The most important difference, however, was that the people in the seats weren’t sacks of dead meat. They were alive, slowly breathing with their eyes closed. All of them had shaved bodies and were naked.

“Wel..” “”Welcome, President Newman,”” “...ewman.” Their speech was as disturbing as the rest of the place. Noticeably out of synchronicity, their voices layered into a barely understandable mess. They all spoke the same words, so John focused on a single one of them and ignored the others. “Thank you for hearing our plea. You yourself coming humbles us greatly.”

“I have a great number of questions about what happened here, but let’s get you out first,” John asserted. “Let’s leave the barrier.”

“We cannot,” the four people said. “The gestalt must be maintained. We need your help to transport the machine.”

“Will you experience a deadly psychic backlash if we don’t?” John asked, inspecting the tanks. The alchemical brew inside looked a lot like what covered the ground and, by extension, what the wailing creature had been made out of.

“No. We must maintain the gestalt.”

“Why?” the Gamer wanted to know, straining his eyes and seeing the tiny grains of sand swimming around inside the liquid. They gathered in tiny clusters. ‘Its trying to form again here,’ John realized. ‘That’s where the fluid went everywhere else. It escaped and then walked the halls.’ “Why do you need to maintain your hivemind?”

“Recreating it will take too long.” “I don’t want to be lonely.” “We must maintain the gestalt.” Individual answers were given, only to unify into a central statement. “We lost the other machines already. The final messages. The last thoughts. We received them. We cannot lose each other.”

John saw something else bubble inside the alchemical fluid beside sand. Streaks of black that whirled around. Some of it consolidated into a grinning shape. Grew jagged teeth for a moment. He snapped back and shouted, “Metra.”

“On it,” the First of Wrath raised Rex Magnar.

“NO!” the four people shouted at once, their eyes flying open. It was far too late. The prismatic weapon smashed into the central tank and burst it open like a frozen lake hit by a meteor. Coming spilling out as a wave of goo, the slime spilled over the floor, only to be met immediately by Salamander’s purging flames and turning into nothing before either the Sands of Time or the Lorylim inside could shape into anything.

The people finally rose from their seats, got on their feet and immediately collapsed. John noticed the weak trembling typical for people that had been dehydrating and starving for several days. They tried to get to him, grabbed him by the sleeve with motions of helpless rage.

““Do you have any idea of the damage you just caused?!”” They shouted as loudly as their parched throats would allow. Their connection still existed, though in what shape exactly, John did not know.

“This machine was what got your brethren eaten inside out by Lorylim, not to mention the other weirdness going on here.” John calmly grabbed the hand clawing into his shirt and forced the person to let go. “If you think you can retain your machines after corruption like that, you are delusional.”

Mouths opened, but a distant scream shut them up, “Ro…Ro…G…Ga…Fer…krona…” It echoed through the hallways. It sounded almost like crying.

“Be mad at me all you want, but you don’t have a reason to keep staying,” John told them. “Let’s leave and get you something to eat. Then you will explain to me exactly what is going on.”

That, at least, was an argument they subscribed to, and so John led the charge out of the underground network. There was no telling where they would end up in the real world if they exited right there and John would only take that risk if they walked into that phantom again. Luck had it that it stayed in the deeper areas of the complex. According to the group they had just saved, only twenty people were supposed to be in this complex. Given that they had found a total of 17 bodies, 16 as sacks of meat and the one (formerly) living Lorylim above, that meant he had rescued what he could.

Whatever kept the gooey time phantom from reforming, it was not worth investigating in person at that moment.

They emerged on the surface and John took easier breaths upon seeing that things had reverted to the average landscape. Trees were trees and grass was grass, even if both still went through odd time loops. Once they had left the barrier, even that was gone. John created a new one and they walked back to the car.

“You three will need to run,” John told the girls who couldn’t go incorporeal, while fishing the unused note out from under the windshield. Because of the limited space of the car and the people they had rescued averaging level 15, there was no other choice but to have them follow on foot. Not a big problem with the Mobile Barrier around.

The East Gestalt members let their continued annoyance be known by not saying a single word as they entered the car. The Gamer wasn’t interested in grilling them either way, not yet. Only when the engine was running and the barrier was up, did one of them ask, “Where are we heading?”

“The next set of coordinates. Here, take this.” He reached into his inventory and distributed water and some dried food among the people. “Eat up. Gather your minds. I’ll have a lot of questions before I enter the next one of your facilities.” He took his eyes off the road for a moment to stare at the one person in the front seat next to them. The naked man shrunk in his seat while the Gamer’s Charisma caused an intimidating aura to spread through the car. “I won’t save anyone else before I know as much as I can.”

“You would forsake more minds-?”

“Yes. I don’t screw around when it comes to the Lorylim and I will definitely not take any more risks while there is something you set loose that KILLS Lorylim,” the Gamer interrupted. “If the Sands of Time phantom and the thing that killed them is even the same entity.” He floored the gas pedal. In a terrain truck without traffic, there was no reason to pay attention to the speed limit. The girls outside kept up. “I came to your aid with as little intel as I had because I had no choice, but I will not just risk my life and the life of my girls and people because you are too attached to your gestalt consciousness to shut down infested machines.”

Sighing, John ended his little rant and concentrated on driving, while the people in the car started to eat. Whatever their thoughts were on what he had just said (disagreement with almost absolute certainty), they were too intimidated to voice them. John was fine with that. All he cared about was that they gave him accurate information. Their opinion of him was only important insofar that they didn’t lie to him. As long as he was the only one who could save more of their brethren, he was confident he would learn all he wanted to.

“What do you want to know?” the man in the front seat asked, once water and food had been consumed.

“Start me with a summary of what exactly your guild is and then give me the timeline between the beginning of this situation and me arriving,” John instructed. “Give me all of the details you can recall.”