What does Otrov want?

It wasn't real. She was lying to him, setting up a trap. It was just another ploy for her to lead him into **** and... possible dismemberment...

Yet, he had to hear her request... just on the off chance that she could have been making an actual deal with him. The two of them stood there staring at each other as John tried to consider the possible ways that she was going to try and kill or capture him with this... but Otrov didn't finish her request yet. She wanted to hear from him first.

"I want to hear you accept this deal before I tell you what it is," she said, and John stiffened again. "A favor for a favor. That's the proposition." He knew he shouldn't have been so uneasy at the sound of something as simple as a deal, but his little experience with the Abyss had taught him that certain Abyssal deals could be bad. It wasn't by contract, so it shouldn't have been binding, but he was still uneasy. Otrov was a Cabalist... he couldn't tru-

"You have to trust me," she interrupted his thought process before his own paranoia could finish taking him away from the deal. "If you want to do this, if you want to get them back, then you need to trust me. That's the only way this works." They had been standing in the street for so long that the sky above them seemed even darker than it had been before, not from smoke but from the sun dipping into the horizon. In his mind, there was no way that that much time had already passed them by. It had to have been the light playing tricks on him, but he couldn't pay it any attention. "Come on, John..." she took a sudden step backwards and John immediately cast Observe again. He was still staring at her.

She expected him to follow her. He took a brief glance at the button to enter his kingdom again and almost grimaced when he still found it gray and unusable. There was no way for him to teleport out.

"This is your deal. If you want this to work, you have to go along with it," Otrov said and took another step away from him. She gestured down the street as she started walking away from John, as if to try to get him to walk ahead of her, but the Gamer quickly shook his head. No teleporting... no running. He'd just stumble across Otrov again, eventually, even if he did get away.

"You walk in front. I don't want to see you turn around," he ordered and watched as Otrov's lips pursed and tightened... like she was considering arguing with him... and then she turned and started walking.

...So he followed.

The journey went on mostly in silence. Whenever one of them tried to look at one another, they would lock up and both would stop in the middle of the street, as if they were about to start fighting all over again. They moved slowly, walking from block to block, on a path that John didn't realize was familiar to him until they had escaped from the smoky area around the fire and moved into a part of the city that had them weaving and bobbing through crowds of people. John was worried at first that it was an attempt to try and break line of sight from him and where Otrov was actually at... but as time passed, he realized that she wasn't actually creating any more illusions to try and fool the Gamer. She led him onto a road that he had not walked down in days by that point... and then they both stopped as they finally reached their destination...

...outside Gun's Gym, the place where John worked and had first met Michel.

"What the hell is this?" he asked, but Otrov didn't answer. She just opened the door for the two of them and cautiously stepped inside. The entrance bell that rang and clattered upon having new customers enter didn't make a single sound as Otrov led the way inside. It stayed still and silent… even after John had followed Otrov into the building, and the two of them stopped in the middle of the room. The gym... felt oddly empty now that John had come back to it. Out of everyone that John was used to seeing there, there were only two faces that he immediately recognized. The first was Dina, the Russian bodybuilder woman who had hired him... and the elderly trainer who had worked alongside Michel to make sure that the blonde man had been prepared for all of his fights. The old man was sitting by himself now, sleeping in a corner with dirt smudged on his face and Dina was staring at the rest of the gym like she was trying to keep watch... but neither of them noticed John or Otrov.

"She can't see us," Otrov explained after John had tried waving to his boss a couple times. "If she could, then she would have to report it."

"Report it? Wha-" he turned to look at Otrov... and then blinked as he realized what she was saying. "Dina's a part of the Cabal?"

"She's a front. A cover, nothing more. Calling her Cabal is like saying any slab of meat can be a piece of beef." Otrov actually scoffed at John's question... but to him, he was technically right. Even if she wasn't some crazy powerful warrior or necromancy obsessed mage, she was still a part of that group.

As much as John would have liked to continue questioning Alanah about the Cabal and what it was doing with a simple gym, Otrov did not want to dawdle. She led him out of the main room and into the back of the shop, into a place where spare supplies were stuffed away and locked into a closet. The smell of sweat and steam filled John's nose as they moved past locker rooms and showers... and then they stopped as Otrov opened the closet with all the spare supplies. At first glance, it was no more than a storage room. They had to stumble and trip just to get past the clutter of gear that had been strewn about the floor and shelves in the room... and then they stopped at the wall furthest from the storage room door. Otrov pressed on the yellowed, plain wallpaper with one hand and then gave a subtle wave with the other, and he watched as the wall in front of him slid open... like some kind of hidden door. They stepped into another room with a concrete floor beneath them and brick walls on all but the side that they had come through... and then the wall slid shut behind them.

You have been pulled into a Trap Barrier! Defeat everything inside to escape!

The pop-up made John's heart skip a beat, like he had just realized that he had been tricked, and his hands clenched up into fists. Before he even managed to utter a warning, his hands were aflame, burning preemptively with the power of his Infused Strike as the two of them disappeared from the main world... and then reappeared in a dark hallway. Concrete floors and walls surrounded them from all sides as John tried to peer past Otrov and into the darkness that obscured the ends of the hallway from him. He didn't see any enemies coming at him, but there was no telling how long it would take for them to arrive. He tried to take his battle stance... and nearly fell over as he realized how much of a decline he was standing on. The whole hallway was built atop a slope and slick enough for John to slide down it!

"Alanah!" he growled, but the rogue latched onto John before he fell down the hall and away from her. One of her daggers lashed out at the wall, and with a loud clacking noise, she embedded the blade six inches into the stonework. They hung for a moment as Otrov swore down at him, and then John relaxed... barely.

"Put that out, you fool! They can't see us!" she snapped... and then waited until John obeyed. The flames on his fingers gradually died down until they were engulfed in total darkness again... and then Otrov pulled her dagger free and they began to slide down the stony slope. Thankfully, they weren't in the hallway for very long. It was impossible for John to tell how long the hallway was, especially since he never found the end of it, but after they reached a certain point, the two of them just... left the trap barrier. They dropped out of a spot on the wall like the two of them had fallen out of a laundry chute, and before John could ignite his hands again to try and find some light... a familiar blue glow lit up his face and the ground around him.

John stood, his feet leaving compressed prints in the soft dirt and pebbles around him, and then blinked as he realized where he was. He didn't bother paying attention to Otrov any further or the rest of the room around him. He didn't check for other enemies. He just stared, as the face of his schoolmate and redheaded ally stared right back at him, frozen with her mouth stuck open in a silent scream. Moira's eyes didn't even move as John was dropped to stand right in front of the Warden's own personal Mana tank. She just floated in place... in the same thick, glowing, blue jelly that he had dreamed about. A part of him remembered how sour the jelly had been in his dream, but he didn't dare to try and question whether or not that was true.

He was more focused on how close to the truth the rest of his dream had been. The tank itself was about as large as a small bedroom. It was sat upon a giant metal, mechanical base, complete with a small spigot for Mana to drain out of, and a giant metal top sealing the protective glass casing to keep anything from climbing in... or out. Long, dark, scaled hoses extended down from the dirt ceiling hundreds of feet above them to plug into the top of the tank while a little motor hummed beneath the entire device. The slime inside the tank itself pulsed with a brighter glow every few seconds, like it was declaring the fact that it had managed to steal some more Mana, but the slime did not move. It was already in everything, and there was nothing to stop it from staying that way.

The Cabal had stripped Moira of all of her belongings before throwing her into the Mana tank. Her armor... her weapons... even her clothes were all gone and nowhere to be found. Her large, pale breasts hung suspended in the tank like the rest of her body, and despite how much he hated looking at the tank, he couldn't help but peek at the little tuft of red hair that Moira had on her groin.

John stumbled back away from the sight without speaking. He didn't think about Otrov... or where she could have been at that moment. All he could think about was the dream he had had where he saw his mother suspended in one of those tanks too. All he could think about was looking at the other tanks where he noticed Cassandra from the Frozen Flame, just as naked as Moira was... and then he saw a stranger in the tank beside her... and one in the tank beside that person... and one in the one after that. There were so many that John had to back up just to try and see down the line of kidnapped warriors and mages until he realized that that blue glow continued on for so long that it just eventually disappeared from sight... and then he realized that there were more lines of people just like that one.

Row after row of glowing blue faces passed John by and continued further than he could see as he stumbled through the Mana factory that Otrov had brought him to... and whenever he found the face of someone who looked even remotely like someone he knew, his mind immediately made the connection. It wasn't hard to imagine his mother ending up in a place like that if the Cabal had already managed to capture so many people. It wasn't even hard to imagine Robyn in the Mana tanks before him... or Mary... or June... or Urga. There were certainly Orcs there, amongst the many other races that John had yet to see in the rows of Mana tanks.

There were so many things that John didn't dare to even count them all. He didn't think to swear or try to break people free... He could only question it... because it didn't make sense to have that many people there and not know about the fact that they had all gone missing.

"How?" he asked finally, and surprisingly... Otrov was still there with him to answer his question.

"Some are taken from kingdoms, some from here on earth... some have been here longer than you've been alive. The tanks keep them from passing on... at least until they're turned off. After that happens... the years start to catch up to them." she said, and John swallowed dryly. He had nothing left to say to that. "Your friends were put in recently... so they will be fine if the tanks get turned off right... but if you want me to let them out, then I want to see that you have done a favor for me."

"Hell," she said and crossed her arms in front of her chest. John turned to look at Otrov, both of their features lit up in the Mana tanks’ blue ambient light. "If it makes you feel any better, I'll let out whoever you want in exchange for this." That gave John a moment to stop and think.

"Anyone?" he asked and watched as Otrov raised an eyebrow at him. "...Everyone?" He doubted it... but, after a moment, Otrov nodded. He stopped to look at the ground and think... his thoughts were jumbled and torn in either direction. There was so much risk on either side that he couldn't make a decision based on the pros or cons of the situation. Eventually, he looked at the Mana tanks and grimaced when he thought about the faces of the people he knew appearing in those tanks again.

Chances were that he was going to end up dead anyways. He might as well take a chance and say 'Fuck it.'

"What do you want me to do?" he asked and could have sworn that he almost heard Otrov sigh in relief. A look in her direction showed him that her head hadn't moved though.

"I don't know how powerful you are, I thought I did..." she grunted, and John watched as Otrov slowly stepped around John... and past a few of the rows that John had yet to traverse. He followed after Otrov as she bobbed and weaved through the factory until she found the spot that she wanted and stopped... right in front of another familiar face. It wasn't moving, just like the rest of them, but this time it was for another reason.

Michel was already dead. The tank was just being used to preserve his body.

"...but if you're powerful enough to beat him. You might have a chance." John stared at the corpse of his friend with a blank face. He could feel his stomach turning again and with good reason. The Order should have been able to confiscate Michel's body... but somehow the Cabal beat them to it.

"I want you to kill Daniel Salvador."