The streets turn out to be dangerous

Mary was still sitting down by the time that John left the room. Her head inclined to stare at the leather collar on her lap, and there was an aura of breathlessness that permeated the area around her as the door shut behind him. A large part of him wanted to know how long she just sat there, staring at the little gift he had made for her, before she eventually moved.

There wasn't much else for John to do after that. He had gotten Cassandra's book... which in some way was apparently evidence of the fact that she had discovered his powers? He still wasn't sure. There was still a lot left in the book to go through, he wasn't even sure if he had gotten through half of what was left in Cassandra's section alone.

He had learned a little more about some kind of ritual that the book kept referring to and about these trials she had been put through. Trials that, when her mother **** her to compete in them, had her killing other people. Trials that were not so much a bunch of puzzles, but were instead a kind of lethal tournament instead. It was something that had apparently been made up to find the strongest fighters that the Frozen Flame had to offer. A competition made to find the one who could survive the kind of rituals that the book spoke of.

It didn't go into any specifics on what the ritual itself was yet, just that she went through it.

It didn't hold his attention for very long. His focus, as sharp as it normally was, felt stretched and thin after the past few days. In a way, it was like he hadn't even gotten any sleep. He was just... awake all of the time.

It even turned out to be a little bit of a relief for him when he put the book away to just forget about his whole situation for a little while. He ended what bit of studying he was working on, and with an imagined sucking sound, John stuffed the book into his inventory.

His one moment of seclusion came when John pulled out his phone instead. There wasn't much he could do to get ready for work after school. Aside from simple mental preparations, the only thing that John could think of was listening to something. Specifically, John used his phone to open up a replay of an event he missed the previous night. An event that he had been offered to watch.

Michel's fight.

It took him a few minutes to find a video replaying Michel's match, mostly because of how obscure the channel actually was, and it took him even more time to find the moment when Michel himself was actually fighting in the video, but when he did, John silently set his phone into his pocket and listened along. From the very beginning, John felt like he was able to pick out the problems the channel was having with gaining popularity. The voice of the announcer rumbled obnoxiously in the background like some overweight mouth-breather. Literally, without even taking the fighting into account, John could make out what sounded like the strained exhalations of an asthma attack for every word that came out of the man's mouth. The problem was that his asthma attack never ended. He just had it, always there, in the background.

Fortunately, he was able to accurately and quickly follow along with the fight as John listened on. The announcer's heavy voice somehow, in its breathless rambling, kept up with what it was that the fighters were doing and correctly described each match.

Michel's fight started off strong. From the very beginning, he was on his opponent, charging his guard with a roar that could be heard all the way out to the camera's watching them. The battle itself turned out to be fairly neat. Michel slammed into his opponent, knocking him against the walls of the cage match they were in, and with a flurry of blows, he just began pummeling the other guy into the dirt.

"Hey, look over there..." a familiar voice called out from nearby John as he kept on walking to the gym.

The announcer had a brief moment of surprise as Michel's opponent suddenly slipped under his guard and, like John had done, switched the situation around on him. In a heartbeat, Michel was **** off balance and curled up defensively in one of the cage's corners as his opponent's fists punched into him again and again. Nearly a whole minute went by of the announcer just crying out for Michel as he struggled to get a hand up on his opponent or just move from the damn corner.

"It is him... Hey! Hey, shithead!" It was Frank's voice calling out to him. John sped up a little bit as he heard Frank's voice getting louder as he approached.

The crowd in the video went crazy for a moment, cheers erupting so loudly for a split second that it even silenced out the announcer himself, as Michel suddenly dipped and slid out from under one of his opponents arms. The experienced fighters in the crowd only grew in volume as Michel physically reared back for something the announcer referred to as a superman punch... and then the cheering died, cut off with a wave of groans.

John lifted his phone up just in time to see Michel hit the mat, his body going limp beneath him from the jaw smashing kick he took. Referees dashed into the frame, shoving the other man aside with a crude amount of ****, and after a couple seconds, they called it.

Michel had lost.

"Shit," John mumbled under his breath before he felt a large, calloused hand close around one of his shoulders.

"Hey, scumbag," Frank hummed almost playfully and slapped the phone out of John's hands. It clattered loudly against the sidewalk, bouncing hard until it was a few good feet away from its owner. "The fuck do you think you're doing out here?"

John's brow furrowed slightly. Frank had skipped school, and if he wasn't sick, then what was he doing out in the middle of the street?

"You looked like you were about to head into our gym there, but... knowing you, you wouldn't do something as stupid as that, would you?" Frank snatched John up by his shirt as he spoke, gesturing to the crew of football players standing behind him with a shake of his head. His mouth was turned up into a wicked grin as he spoke, and with a simple look, John could make out a whole crowd of wicked grins to match Frank's own. An air of danger filled the area around John as one player in particular actually cracked his knuckles as Frank spoke. John's hands clenched tightly at his sides. "I mean, that just sounds like a bad idea to me, don't you thin-"

"You're looking pretty distracted there, John!" Michel suddenly called out with a sly, little laugh. A loud, defined click followed quickly behind Michel's sentence as the Gym's front door shut behind him. "I mean, I was just coming out here to try and talk to you about something important, but it seems you are quite busy at the moment." The danger in the air came to a slow pause as Frank turned to look at Michel and slowly nodded for John.

"Ah," Michel grunted with a little smile and crossed his arms in front of his big, beefy chest. "There anything I can do to help you rid yourself of such a distraction?"

The grins slowly disappeared off of each and every face of Frank's team until Frank himself was the only one left. He didn't even bother to lift his hands up and off of John's shirt as Michel closed the distance between them. Behind him, the gym door opened again as he moved, and without a sound, another crowd of people appeared, slowly filtering out of the gym. They didn't disperse or disappear to go their own separate ways. They followed Michel, and as he rounded on Frank to the point that the football player began to back away from John, they all in turn moved to chase off the people following Frank.

A smile crept across Michel's face as Frank's posse slowly abandoned him.

"If you're going to be harassing my coworkers while you're here..." he paused to put a hand on Frank's shoulder, "...then don't come back."

Frank didn't say anything. His eyes narrowed at Michel, then at John, and with a scowl, he turned away to follow after his friends. The street fell quiet, and after a minute, all of the fitness enthusiasts made their way back into the gym, leaving Michel and John out on the street alone.

"Damn..." Michel grunted again. "I was hoping for a reason to hit him." That made John laugh.

"Oh, there are thousands," he said back, and Michel smirked at him. "Chances are that you just made things worse for me though." His words were ended by a sudden clapping on John's back. Michel stepped up beside him to give him a reassuring pat.

"You'll be ready for him," Michel said and turned back to the gym. The building was one of many on the block. A piece to a puzzle that was squeezed together. It was so tightly packed into the rest of the complexes there that, even from a distance, it looked as if the gym had just been slotted into place. One part that sat right next to a small coffee house and an old printer shop. It was practically invisible.

Worse than that, as John moved to follow him inside, something moved out of the corner of John's eyes. He spun on instinct, fearful that it might have been Frank charging back at him already, but when he turned to see...

...it was Cassandra standing there at the end of the block.