It's been almost a month since Hanah went missing. She was probably dead, splattered somewhere on the ground deep inside of that fucking dungeon.
Hanah was a lonely girl. Always had been, even. She didn't have any friends, and there were some nasty rumors about her going around in the past. We all knew that they were complete bullshit, but it still didn't particularly make anyone want to associate themselves with her. Hanah didn't seem to have any intention of changing that either and kept mostly to herself.
I was different, though. She had always fascinated me. In school, I had always been the observant type, trying hard to understand the ever-changing relationships among my classmates. After all, the best way to avoid any trouble was to completely avoid troublesome people.
Now, while Hanah was certainly troublesome to some extent, I couldn't pull my eyes away from her. She was cute, yes, but that wasn't exactly why I liked her so much. She was so strong and yet so weak and fragile, it was maddening. I highly doubt that any other person in our godforsaken school was anywhere close to her in mental resilience. While she seemed icy and aloof to the unknowing observer, I think myself the only one who ever saw behind the serene facade of indifference she liked to wear.
It's because I saw what they did to her. Not entirely, but more than enough. How that fucking bastard Blake and his friends tormented her. I desperately wanted to help her in some way, but I didn't know the full picture, and that was a dangerous game to play.
I knew that Blake was dangerous. A twisted individual with enough power and influence to play around certain rules and restrictions was never a good thing. And Blake was a textbook example of such an individual.
There was something that I was missing in the case of Hanah, I was sure of it. While Blake was certainly wicked, his fixation on Hanah didn't make much sense to me. And neither did the way Hanah handled the situation. After all, not a single soul outside of the bullies themselves knew about this. Except for me, of course, but I don't count in this case. She never told the teachers or other school staff, hadn't informed the police despite multiple actions from Blake that clearly broke the law, and from what I could tell, even her own mother didn't know about any of this.
And then there was that one time, quite a way back. Hanah was found by some homeless guy, lying in a remote alleyway, strongly bleeding from her head. At first, the school gave some bullshit official explanation about her absence, which immediately hit me as suspicious. Smelling something foul, I started investigating by myself and came upon a police case that was seemingly quickly getting buried in the ground. The official explanation told by the police was a gang of street thugs assaulting the girl before running off.
While that was enough to satisfy the curiosity of some other nosy people who decided it was worth their time to investigate Hanah's prolonged absence from school, it wasn't enough for me. There was something more to it. The case report was held incredibly vague and kept out of the media as much as was possible. Both were signs that there was something going on behind the scenes.
While I immediately placed a fair bit of suspicion on Blake and his friends, I didn't have any real proof. I'm incapable of traveling to the past, and the only person who might actually know was Hanah herself. And I couldn't just ask her directly either, right?
While I could never actually confirm my suspicion, I noticed something strange after Hanah finally came back to school after being released from the hospital. For some reason, Blake treated her very differently now. Any direct bullying he had been so fond of magically disappeared. He didn't treat her nice or anything, but he seemed content with just avoiding her completely. While that was a good thing for Hanah, it was also incredibly suspicious. At this point, I was convinced that Blake was behind all of this somehow, but I still didn't have any real physical connection between Blake and his relation to the case of Hanah's brutal assault.
While this had been at the back of my mind for quite some time now, it got its rude awakening the day Hanah disappeared down the Abyssal Descent, deep into the underground.
My class was titled [Shadowstalker], a rare grade class that fit me like a glove. I was at its core a physical assassin archetype class with a strong focus on stealth and perception over any particularly strong attack skills.
The fall and presumed death of Hanah had broken us. While she obviously didn't have any close friends among our class, they didn't hate her. She was still a part of the class community, no matter how isolated she was. Seeing a death from close up was never easy, and the scene of her fall kept haunting me, replaying again and again in my head.
Some of my classmates took it even worse. Bronya, Zane, and Aurelia, two other physical fighters, and our [Sage] decided to drop out for now. While I was sure that they'd come back around eventually, it was far from being a good thing. In the next couple of weeks following her disappearance, the mood was generally very sour. It felt like a wake-up call. Any illusions and fantasies we might have held about this world were gone now, replaced by the hard truth of death.
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I was deeply hurt as well. Even if I don't like admitting it so openly, I was certain of my feelings. I had loved her, deeply so even. It was a strange kind of love, and I wasn't entirely certain how it came to this. I don't think I ever even exchanged as much as a single word with her. And yet I was certain. I couldn't pull my eyes away from her, like I was possessed by something. Every night, it was Hanah who I was dreaming about. I wanted to protect her somehow, stopping Blake and his goons from targeting her, but I didn't know how. As powerless as I was, I could only watch from afar.
And now it was too late. She was probably dead. Even so, I won't give up hope. As long as I don't see her lifeless body right in front of me, I will not give up searching for her. She is down there somewhere, and I am going to find her. No matter what.
Apart from me, the person who was affected the most by this was actually our teacher, Ms. Edelwei?. She was the one who held her speech about how she was going to protect every single one of us with her life on the morning of the second day. Having broken that promise so soon broke her right back. She lost her signature smile that had been on her face almost permanently, and she felt like a different person altogether. She was far from the joyful teacher she used to be.
The rest of the classmates weren't unaffected either. The only exceptions were probably Blake and his two friends Eric and John. That guy Eric was a bit creepy to begin with. I didn't know all the details about his class, but I heard that it was pretty dark. My own class also had a correlation to the dark, but of a different kind. My aspect was
There was one thing on my mind that was still a complete mystery to me. What I'm talking about here are our 'instructors', as they like to call themselves. It doesn't sit right with me, though. That one instructor, the slimy guy Wyn, gave me the creeps right away. The way he was looking at us was far from normal. I couldn't tell what it was exactly, but it was strange.
Also, weren't those instructors supposed to be tier four and super strong? I didn't know exactly what it meant to be tier four, as we had no reference to compare the power they held to, but they had to be mind-bendingly powerful. After all, Instructor Carmelia seemed to have little problems flying that behemoth of a spider to us, and even that thing was only tier two.
There was no way that they hadn't noticed it all going wrong. They were there to protect us, so why hadn't they protected Hanah? Without their protection, some other classmates would have long since perished in that fight as well, but they didn't. Because the instructors protected them. As they should. So, what happened there?
The instructors gave us some bullshit excuse on how they realized what had happened a tad too late, but I don't buy it. Something is very wrong here.
With my thoughts still churning, it was just another night like many before. I was trying hard to fall asleep, but the images just wouldn't go away. Just like I had many times before, I went through the sequence of events once again, trying to find any details I had maybe missed before. My almost perfect memory had to be good for something, right?
In the chaos the giant spider unleashed upon us, I kept my cool. I fell to the edges of the group, avoiding the spider's rampage as much as possible, while also keeping away from my panicking classmates. And then I observed, like I always did.
Because of my personal preferences, also known as obsession, I was watching Hanah when it happened. Call me a stalker all you want for that. While I didn't appreciate the negative connotation of the word, I wasn't stupid enough to not realize that I was pretty close to the definition of a stalker when it came to Hanah. My class [Shadowstalker] even had that word in its name, and that was probably for a good reason.
Anyways, as I noticed the spider barreling towards her, I got a sinking feeling in my chest. She was very close to the edge of the Abyssal Descent, so options for dodging were limited. The spider wasn't particularly focused on her, so when I saw her jumping to the side in an attempt to avoid the big spider, I was certain that the situation would resolve itself. It would miss her and fall down the hole, resulting in an effective win for us. Maybe that was even the intended way of how we were expected to win to begin with, we certainly didn't have much of a chance in an actual fight against that thing.
But then it happened. Out of seemingly nowhere, the spider tripped on something and started rolling over the ground uncontrollably. However, the fall had veered it slightly off its original course, now shooting straight towards where Hanah had dodged to.
Time had seemingly frozen as they collided, her small body having no chance to contend with the physical might of the behemoth that hit her. I desperately wanted to save her, but I was way too far away to do anything at all.
Instead of wallowing in despair, though, my mind immediately went to analyzing the sequence of what led to her tragic fall. The spider tripped, yes, but on what? While the ground was made of natural-looking rock, it was unexpectedly even and smooth, especially so close to the hole. There wasn't anything there that could have caused it to trip as drastically as it had.
Replaying it in my head again and again, I finally noticed something I had missed before. While I hadn't actively observed it, it was a detail that had been unconsciously imprinted into my mind, along with the rest of the scene that I had observed from my vantage point.
Just before the spider tripped, a tiny yellowish barrier formed in front of one of the spider's legs. The impact of its leg with the small barrier, even as it shattered, was enough to send it tumbling to the floor.
The thing about the barrier, though, is that I had seen it before. Not too long ago even, just a couple of minutes before it all happened, when Blake blocked the initial charge of the spider with his big yellowish barrier. As that thought finished forming in my mind, it finally clicked.
The tragic fall, the death of my beautiful Hanah, it was all caused by Blake? That fucking bastard! How dare he! I don't care if he's the [Hero] or not, he will pay for this with his life. I will make sure of it. This is personal now and far from over.