Nathan frowned. Everyone who had returned from the Challenge and all of the females were in the cafeteria, eating, and yet Keith wasn't there. It looked like the Challenge was over, since he counted nearly the allowed survivors in there.

He walked over to Samantha.

"Keith?"

"No clue," she answered. "No one's seen him since he left."

Nathan frowned further.

"Did you come?"

"Yes," she snorted. "You slept for more than a day. From what I heard, you basically rushed through the whole thing. A few others passed out for awhile, but none as long as you."

Nathan shrugged, then left the cafeteria. He was hungry, but he was also concerned. While he didn't trust Keith, they did need to save every person they could when possible, and Keith was truly the strongest. He suspected the injured boy had made his way to the nurse's office first, so he started his search there as he thought about Keith.

Why did he not have Charisma? What did Nathan have that made the System think he was better-suited to surviving than the other boy? The Seven-Pointer likely only managed to hurt the mage with catching him by surprise.

Reaching the nurse's office, Nathan spotted Keith collapsed inside the dark room, just past the door. He actually had to push the door against the other guy's legs just to get inside.

Once inside, Nathan flipped the switch for the lights, then picked up the other senior. With his System-boosted Strength, it was a feat that took little effort on his part, surprising Nathan, who had momentarily forgotten about his greater strength.

Looking around, Nathan saw the door on the left-hand wall leading to the restroom, then the door on the right-hand room leading to the 'recovery' room, which was where there were two beds for students who needed it.

Nathan took Keith to the recovery room and laid him down, then returned to the office and started looking through the supplies, realizing that they had a fully-stocked medical room and no rules against stocking from it.

Pushing that from his mind, he continued searching, grabbing everything he thought he needed. Keith had a pretty nasty gash on his head and had lost a significant amount of blood.

Once he had everything, Nathan returned to the recovery room and got to work cleaning up the wound, then stitching it together. Keith remained unconscious the entire time, and Nathan assumed he'd remain that way for awhile. The other senior was pretty pale and his breathing was shallow. He probably needed a blood transfusion, but Nathan had no idea how to perform one on the spot.

Nathan cleaned up his supplies after stitching and bandaging the other senior's head, then grabbed something from one of the two nurses' desks and entered the recovery room. He was planning on watching over Keith until the other boy woke, anyway, and so it wasn't like he was going to be going out of his way to do this.

He loosened up Keith's tie, then moved it to the side and spread open the other teen's jacket and robe, then began unbuttoning his shirt. Once Keith's chest and stomach were exposed, he spread apart the shirt, uncapped the permanent marker, and started drawing.

Nothing inappropriate – just a bunch of smiley faces – but it still amused him to do it.

When Nathan finished, he capped the marker and fixed Keith's shirt, tie, jacket, and robe. Then, he sat on the other bed and stared at Keith. An hour and a half later, the mage woke up and reached up to rub his head, feeling the bandage.

"Huh?" He asked, sitting up and looking around, spotting Nathan. "You treated me?"

"Yes."

"Even though you don't trust me?"

"I don't trust anyone," Nathan stood up and walked over as Keith shakily stood off the bed.

"Thanks," Keith said, then started to leave. "I probably need to eat, so I can-"

"You owe me," Nathan grabbed Keith's arm.

"Ow!" Keith winced. "You're-how are you hurting-"

"Explanation," Nathan said in a commanding voice.

"Ow!" Keith yelped. "You're squeezing really-"

"Now."

"Okay!" Keith responded, and Nathan released his arm. The other senior started rubbing his wrist. "I'll explain. But… how did you do that? The System doesn't let us hurt each other. It's explicitly forbidden in the handbook. Or… did it change, while I was out? I didn't get a notice-"

"No," Nathan stated, frowning. "Either you're a good actor, or-"

"I have nothing to do with the game," Keith told him. "I only knew that it was possibly happening, and at that time. That was it."

"How?" Nathan asked, and Keith sat back onto the bed, leaning back and closing his eyes, rubbing his temples. "Here."

Keith opened his eyes to find Nathan holding a handful of dried fruit and a water bottle.

"Thanks," Keith said, eating the fruit and draining the bottle. "Not much, but… thanks. Ugh. My head hurts so bad."

"What happened?"

"Damn thing dropped on me," Keith answered. "I don't have a high Endurance, and it'd already taken out most of my Health. It slammed into me and threw me into the dome's floor, though I managed to kill it. How long was I out?"

"I dunno," Nathan answered. "Probably a day. I was sleeping for that long."

Keith groaned, rubbing his temples again.

"Continue."

"Alright," Keith said. "You know I'm a hacker, right?"

"Yes."

"Six years ago," the mage said. "I hacked into a website. It was hard to get through, but not impossible. Only took me about two days of work, but considering I'd hacked three different governments in that same timeframe two years before that, that was hard for me. It only fueled my desire to get through it.

"When I did," he continued. "I was both confused and delighted. I was twelve, and the site seemed to deal with the supernatural community. To my twelve-year-old self, that was amazing and proof that magic was real. I was slightly-skeptical, so I poked around, and got enough information without raising suspicions to learn a few basic spells.

"From there," Keith's eyes unfocused for a moment. "I started learning magics a bit faster. It seemed I had a natural aptitude for it, based on what I managed to learn through the site, which was a global site for the supernatural.

"To learn a bit more," he continued. "I mentioned that I was a kid who'd recently discovered magic on my own, but didn't have anyone to teach me. They wanted to find out where I was and how I'd found the password, and I simply told them that I had a psychic vision of the site and the password, but I was a kid, and had been told to never give out my location."

"Psychic vision?" Nathan asked.

"A bullshit lie," Keith shrugged. "Though not long after that, I discovered I actually did have slight psychic powers?"

"When your eyes turned violet?"

"My actual eye color," Keith snorted. "It shines through my contacts when I use my psychic ability."

"Your eyes are violet?" Nathan asked, and Keith tilted his head back and moved a finger up to it. When he pulled it away, a contact with a brown ring was on his finger, revealing a bright purple iris beneath.

"They started turning after I started learning magic," Keith told Nathan. "I started wearing the contacts when I noticed it so others wouldn't. Thankfully, it was summer, so I didn't really interact with a lot of people."

"Parents?"

"Clueless," Keith answered. "I used my hacker skills to get the contacts. Well, and my contacts to get them, but those came through my hacking. I found out later that purple eyes were a sign of psychic abilities, but by that point, my actual psychic abilities were already pretty active, and my eyes had fully turned."

Nathan nodded, then sat down on the other bed and stared at Keith, who put his contact back in.

"Did your girlfriend know?" Nathan asked.

"My girlfriend?" Keith asked. "I've never had one of those, and wouldn't fake it, either. Why did you think I had one?"

"You're actually gay?"

Keith shrugged.

"I bet that if you offered to teach Michael in exchange for getting blowjobs and getting to fuck him, he'd be happy to let you."

"No," Keith made a disgusted face. "I don't want to even touch Michael, much less in a sexual way."

"If you ever do, let me know so I can watch."

"Aren't you with Samantha?"

"She'll watch with me," Nathan nodded.

Keith stared at the other senior for several long moments.

"I don't know if you're serious or just fucking with me," he said, then looked at the mirror over the counter on the wall the beds weren't touching. "I look like shit. At least you didn't draw on my face."

"Yeah," Nathan said. "So. Continue."

"Who did you think was my-oh," Keith sighed. "You live near the place we were meeting up. That was a forty-year-old witch who looked like she was our age, Nathan. I wasn't dating her, I'd finally given in and agreed to meet up with her for a little project of mine. As good as I am with air magics, I'm even better with enchanting, and I was working on a project that needed some stuff I couldn't get online. Ancient enchanting techniques that were highly-guarded by the handful of people in the world who still had them."

"What were you making?" Nathan asked. "And why are ancient enchanting techniques guarded and kept secret?"

"The last time they were used caused an Ice Age," Keith answered.

"You attempted to cause an Ice Age?" Nathan's eyes widened.

"No! No!" Keith held up his hands, then winced. "Ow. No, I wasn't trying to cause an Ice Age. Theoretically, there are other worlds with humans out there. As well as with beastkin or whatever, and elves, and dwarfs. Real ones. I was attempting to create a gate to them."

"Success?"

"Failure," he shrugged. "We're going to try again this summer. Or… were. Who knows if I'm going to be one of the survivors."

"One of the?" Nathan asked. "So you do know stuff about it? Specifics?"

"Yes," Keith nodded. "Because of my hacking. Have you wondered why Madeline has tried to turn everyone against me? And continued even after she succeeded?"

"That did make me wonder," Nathan said. "She knew, too, then?"

He wasn't asking that after coming to that conclusion then, but rather, to confirm his long-standing suspicion that she'd known before it started.

"She didn't just know," Keith said. "She's part of an organization that forced this particular incident. We aren't the first, but we are the first forced one. No one knows what's been triggering them. The organization she's a part of is global, and when it discovered these incidents a few months ago, and decided to force them to happen to attempt to get their younger adults stronger, they did everything they could to. The power boosts from these events are massive, and if they can get just a few people stronger, they can just break the rules and wipe out any competition and take over the world.

"Madeline wasn't their first attempt," he continued. "Just the first one they succeeded in forcing. She'd already been attending here, so it's not like it'd be suspicious. The reason she went at it with me is because she realized I somehow knew. She didn't even know I was a magician until then."

"If she's supposed to be working her way to the top," Nathan said. "Why does she gather as many as she can and bring them to her side? So that they'll side with her after this?"

"No," Keith answered. "Remember in the Survival Challenge? The more people gathered together, the more often monsters would attack."

For the Experience. She gathered people as her allies so that she could farm monsters easier. She did steal a lot of kills from those with her, but it was played off as the others needing help or her payment for their protection.

And Keith being that much better than her likely only increased her animosity. That, and the fact that he knew about the situation, who she was, and that she was part of the organization behind it.

"What else?" Nathan asked. "Do you know, that is."

"The Charisma thing," Keith answered. "And that in the nine incidents so far, the survivor count has been five, three, one, six, four, two, five, three, and three, in that order."

"So we're the tenth?" Nathan asked. "How come no one knows about it?"

"The governments are keeping it a secret," Keith answered. "We're the fourth in the States. Two have been in China, one in Japan, one in Hong Kong, one in Brazil, and one in Britain. I'm not sure what the other governments are doing, but ours, after the last batch, bought up an abandoned prep school campus and is converting it into a recovery place, where the victims – us – can recover and continue their education safely. We'll probably be moved there to join the other survivors."

"Okay," Nathan said, then stood and stretched. "Want me to bring you some food?"

"I can make it to the cafeteria," Keith told him, realizing only after the offer that he was feeling light-headed and probably needed more than a handful of dried fruit. "Thanks, though."

"Teach me how to use magic."

"Why?" Keith asked. "You're a martial artist, aren't you?"

"Yes," Nathan nodded. "But I'm only around the same amount of power as everyone else – despite being several Levels higher than the next-highest. Some of you are probably even stronger than me. Having a better set of abilities would be useful."

Keith thought over the request. It was a fair request, and there were several reasons why he should be willing to teach Nathan. However…

"Why do you believe me?"