6: The World’s End
“You wouldn’t believe what happened after we left!” she said, while fiddling with her hair ornaments, “Doyle started hitting on this older girl, not realising she already had a boyfriend! I don’t think he’s coming in today…”
Joel rubbed his shadowed eyes and yawned. “No way Doyle would’ve had a problem. The dude could take down a beast,”
“Not when he’s drunk,” replied Kaori. Joel shrugged and returned his attention to dozing on his desk. He spent most of the morning slumped at his desk, and he failed to contribute in any way to his classes. Phantasia was the only person who seemed to notice or care though. She figured it was a common thing. During their lunch break, however, Joel returned from a long period in the bathroom with damp hair and a renewed light in his eyes.
“I wanna take them down,” he said, “Those demon-summoning bastards who’re behind all this crap. They’re crawling around in those catacombs like parasites, reeling in guys like me who’re too wrapped up in their own despair to notice what’s really going on,”
Byron looked up from the notes he was scrawling. “Survival of the fittest, man. That’s what it’s been about in this world for generations. The weak are used by those who want power, and those with power don’t have to live in squalor like us.”
“You’ll get yourself fooking killed,” said Lyra, “Those bloody twats ain’t gonna be stopped by some ranting teenager for feck’s sake. You gotta think of something clever, like… well, something!”
“What’s with all this demon crap anyway?” asked Doyle, who had shown up during the break, much to his friends’ surprise, still wearing the same – now somewhat tattered and stained – clothes he’d been in the night before.
As much as she wanted to wander around and get to know everyone else, Phantasia watched in silence as the friends debated the topic. When more people began to loiter around the common room, Kaori guided them away to a classroom and shut them inside.
“They’ll still be bugging us, you know,” said Byron as he perched on a windowsill.
“Nah, they’ve been watching Shelley for days now,” said Joel, before Kaori shot him a glare and he quietened down. After an awkward silence, Kaori was smiling again and turned her attention to Phantasia.
“I know this might be a little abrupt, but there’s something I wanted to ask you,”
Did she know? For a second, Phantasia panicked. Maybe Kaori had seen her pass through a wall, or had heard about how she escaped having a knife at her throat… Only two days in and-
“You know, don’t you? How the world really ended?”
She relaxed. At least this was something she could tell them about. Mostly. Or maybe she couldn’t? What would Queen Thetis say? Would Faye chastise her? Her new friends were all looking at her with eager eyes…
Ah, what does it matter?
“They say there was a great shadow that enveloped the world. It was given many names, but the one my people used was ‘Erebus’.
