Nate surveyed the area around the office and the rooms next door, in case the one controlling the Fadens was hiding somewhere, but found no luck.
"Tch..." Nate wiped away the blood from his mouth. "Nothing at all here."
After realizing this, he went towards the library after getting a drink from the water dispenser, but a sudden pain struck his head as he felt dizzy.
It had to be the overuse of the theomic abilities he was using, so he turned de-summoned Rupture and made sure First Stage wasn't currently taking a toll on his body.
However, everything seemed weird when the room started to distort around him; his vision started to get pulled into things closer while other parts of his view looked farther away than they possibly could.
Nate stumbled from the vertigo it induced.
* * *
"Sup, guys, miss your favorite baseball player?"
Sam posed in front of his beloved friends as Cloey ran up to him and wrapped her arms around him.
"Sam! Sam! You're back, you're really back!" she squealed delightfully. "And did you see me fight those scary monsters! I was like a hero, and it was so fun now that I think about it."
"Cloey! My best friend! I miss you so much! I saw that you have those metal shoes that fight for you!" He returned the embrace.
"Hey, Sam," Manson pointed at him, "you have a power too?! Does everyone here have some sort of crazy thing that they are hiding from?!"
"Um, I don't think I have powers; I'm just an ordinary person," Sheila stated.
"Oh, yeah, Sheila doesn't have one... but Sam! You just blew those big Fadens like they were nothing. You turned them into dust!"
"That's kinda a long story; could take a while to explain..."
Sam pointed at the entrance of the school, with Cloey still not yet ready to release her grip on his broad shoulders.
"I returned just to see the Fadens attacking my beloved school. So, let's find these injured people here, and see if they need any more help from us."
"Oh, right!" Cloey said with her head up. "Manson did heal them with his own powers; he told me and Sheila about them."
"Yeah, I called it Shadow Heal; don't laugh... for the people I treated, I've told them to go to the second floor in the nurse's office if they need any more treatment."
Sam nodded. "Alright, let's go check on them."
The four of them proceeded to go inside the main building and walk to the second floor where the nurse's office was. While they were walking, they found someone sitting on the floor with a bleeding leg.
It was Tom Stardom, a classmate from their first period class.
"Oi?! It's you guys from my first math period. I need you chaps to prop up the wound on my leg, yeah? Some weird beast just bit my leg when I was looking for some towels."
Cloey approached him first and knelt.
"It's Tom! Manson, look, his leg is hurt; we have to heal him."
"You don't have to tell me twice."
Manson opened his palms and faced towards Tom's legs. After a few seconds, a shadow from Manson's back loomed over the wound, where it then miraculously covered up the bite marks and cuts, all good as new.
Tom blinked, feeling his leg in amazement at what he had just witnessed.
"What is this?! I've never seen anything like this..."
"Oh, this? It's kinda like my super healing," Manson answered. "Now let's go t—AH!"
Manson grunted in pain as he held his own head. Cloey followed up with her stumbling as she rubbed her eyes. Sam, also affected by what was happening, fell to one knee as he breathed heavily over the pain.
"Guys? Guys!" Sheila caught Cloey before she hit the ground. "What's wrong with you three?"
The three of them were first not responding to her worries, but eventually they went back on their feet, their eyes straining with red lines going through them.
"What was that?" Cloey asked dizzily.
Manson rubbed his temples. "I don't know... Sam?"
Sam only shook his head, meaning he didn't know what caused their head-splitting headaches.
"Ah, what a jolly day, am I right, fellas?"
Tom stretched his arms high up in the air as Quad Four looked at him with confusion.
"What?" The movie star slicked back his hair. "You are all acting like I just got bitten by a dog. Or am I that pretty or ugly?"
"Tom, are you feeling alright? Was Manson healing you with that shadow thing messed up your mind?"
"Healing me with a shadow? That's a new one—I'm fine as fresh pair of clothes, now if you would excuse me, I got to go somewhere..."
Tom brushes them off and goes away, leaving Quad Four looking at each other.
"What's up with this jerk?" Manson demanded to know.
Then a bunch of students came walking down the hall, all exiting downstairs to the first floor. It was the same group that Cloey and the others tried to protect. But they were unusually calm, like they were on their usual day with a problem in their schedules.
"Hey! You guys wait!" Cloey was the first to go up to the group and ask one of them. "Hey! You're all leaving; we need to make sure that there aren't any more of those monsters, and to also check for any more injuries for Manson to heal up on."
The person tilted his head, his face unsure if he was registering her words correctly.
"What? Monsters? Healing? Save that for the theater play coming up. I have to get to my locker downstairs..."
The guy then went with the others as they descended downstairs.
"What the heck?" Manson uttered. "What's going on with these people?"
"I don't like how this looks," Sheila admitted.
"Uh, guys? You may want to check this out..."
Sam was looking overhead in a nearby window, pointing to whatever was outside. The others quickly went over to see what he was seeing.
Upon viewing through the window, they saw that the courtyard didn't have trash everywhere or broken table parts piled up in one of the corners of the brick wall. And most importantly, the front gates of the whole school were intact, not even a single scratch on their metal bars compared to when they were just there before. The whole area looked like it wasn't even attacked by Fadens at all.
Cloey took a step back from what she was seeing.
"We were just there, and it was all so chaotic, but now it's just gone. Sam... guys, what is really going on here?"
* * *
Nate finally got up from the dizziness that brought his knees to the ground. His head no longer felt pain.
"What was that all about? Why did my head go crazy all of a sudden?"
A bad feeling started to form in his mind regarding the events that went on in the library, and he quickly walked directly there.
When he finally arrived, he quickly opened the doors and was met with the whole library room completely free of black goo painted everywhere.
It was a normal, tidy library room. No monstrous Fadens of all sizes, no more rooms changing to a memory, and no body of Pallnem after his gruesome death at the hands of the Fadens he used to control.
There were only a lot of teachers and staff sitting down with a presentation on a screen, all sitting down on chairs.
Mr. Mouch was the first one to notice him. "Nate? Is that you? You seem a little troubled."
"Halt, student!" Sole security guard Mortin Kowpinn held out his palm to stop Nate from going further. "This is a private meeting for the staff. Only students with books to return can enter and then quickly leave."
"..."
Nate didn't say anything to Mortin, his mind too overwhelmed by the sudden change to peacefulness in the library. The teachers looked at each other at the boy's lack of reaction and response.
"What is with the kid..." Mrs. Ferge whispered.
"Go along, boy!" Mr Simmons firmly said to him, with his open hand placed on the table. "Leave now before you get in trouble for interfering with the staff."
The sight of Mr. Simmons finally made him turn away.
Seeing them... that they look like they forgot the things that happened. What Pallnem did to them. It was so agonizingly confusing to him
Nate definitely did feel them alive and aware that Pallnem was there with the Fadens, trapping them in that black goo from the Levelarciest Faden.
He ran out of the library, firmly shutting his eyes as he pushed the door open to the side entrance of the school, where he would slowly climb up with a ladder he picked up nearby.
Then, after scaling the school's brick wall, he ran towards the alley where he first arrived.
Tears in his eyes swept over him as he tried to turn his face away, as if not to let anyone look at him.
"Why is this keep happening? Why does everyone keep forgetting the things related to Fadens?! I don't understand... I can't understand..."
There wasn't anything he could do, so he ran away to home. Nate could hold the memories within his mind as he struggled to forget them entirely and go back to his ordinary way of things in life.