(Thursday, 2nd of Dream King Moon, 2021)
Jack opened his eyes to see that he was lying on a bed in the infirmary. He sat up and felt a twinge of pain in his stomach, and looking down, he saw that his entire torso was covered in bandages. It took Jack a moment to recall all that had happened, but then he remembered his fight against Hero. The last couple moments were hazy to Jack, so he looked around for someone who could explain what happened during those final moments in the fight. Jack saw various doctors treating his classmates who lost their respective fights. Jack noticed how Alice was sitting right beside him, cutting up an apple right beside him.
"Oh hey, you're awake, sup dumbass." Alice breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing her best friend awake. "I was afraid you were made an amnesiac again."
"Relax, I won't go down that easily." Jack reassured his best friend before moving onto the next cause for concern. "So, my match, did I win it?"
"No, it was a draw." Alice then noticed how her best friend looked down. "In a way, I guess it could be a win for you though."
"What do you mean?" Jack curiously watched as Alice cut the apple using a pocket knife.
"When you first fought against Hero, you didn't stand a chance, and barely left a single scratch on him, all of us could tell." Alice was still as blunt and honest as usual. "However, all of us were speechless when we saw you fight Hero this time. When you first fought him, you were basically a punching bag for Hero to use that he's the strongest out of all of us. But today, today you shocked everyone by actually standing a chance against him. You showed everyone how far just trying your best can do, and that's just the tightest shit I've ever seen."
"You had to ruin the moment by throwing in that last thing, did you?" Jack asked Alice, who giggled with a smile, and she handed him an apple slice. "Thank you."
"Just a heads up, from next week forward, it'll be back to missions." Alice informed Jack, and he figured that would be the case. "So you should probably rest while you can, because after you recover, it's back to before Tartarus."
"Well I hope that we get to go on missions together in the future." Jack hoped out loud, and noticed Simo walking towards him with Jojo on his shoulder, then Jack noticed a journal in his hands. "Hey Simo, what's going on?"
"Not a whole lot, but I did decide to read through that notebook your mom left behind, then I let Nikola get a good look at it." Simo answered while Jojo leapt off the sniper's shoulder and onto Jack's lap. "He found a list of places you ought to visit according to your mom, so we requested Herakles that we get missions in those areas."
"Thanks Simo, smart move allowing us to go on missions and learn the secrets my mother's journal holds." Jack thanked his sniper while stroking under his familiar's chin.
"Just one problem, all the missions there are S rank difficulty, so they're challenging as shit and require at least eight man squads to undertake." Simo informed Jack whilst handing him some files. "Good news though, by fighting Hero, you've proven that you're capable of taking them. Especially since Hero is fucking terrifying."
"Yeah he is, not sure how I fought him to be perfectly honest." Jack replied before Jojo suddenly jumped off her master and began to waddle towards the window. "There goes my badger, off to harass someone as usual."
"So back on the subject of these missions, what can we expect to find at these places?" Alice wondered out loud.
"Not sure, but there was text written on page 23 that makes me think that this stuff might be useful." Simo commented, and Jack opened the journal up to page 23. "It just says 'Grab the shit from these locations should Herakles fuck up horribly with the Despairs'."
"So these guys we're preparing for are called the Despairs?" Jack began to read the locations in the journal. "Weird, all of these places are inside the enchanted forest."
"Oh sweet, I've always wanted to go to the enchanted forest." Alice comments out loud.
"I hope they have snow, otherwise I won't be able to use my abilities to their maximum potential." Simo informed Jack, and he began to wonder something.
"Oh yeah, Simo, what exactly was that stuff you pulled back in Vita Bergen?" Jack asked his sniper.
"Turns out, I'm pretty good at magic, not as much as you guys, but it works." Simo shrugged. "It works best the colder and snowier the environment I'm in is- Where'd Jojo go? She's not in the room anymore."
"Oh no..."
While everyone in the infirmary collectively panicked upon realizing that there's a honey Badger on the loose, but Jojo was no longer in the infirmary. Meanwhile, not too far away, on a nearby tower, a familiar crow was sitting on the tip of a tower. The crow from the 2nd chapter was watching everything through a nearby window. Weirdly enough, the crow appeared to be talking to an unknown entity that was nowhere to be seen.
"Yes My Lady, everything is going according to plan." The crow appeared to watch Jack, Alice, and Simo look around the infirmary for Jojo. "The Archeologist, the girl, and the mystery person are reading the journal of the Dreamer. If we follow them, then maybe they'll lead us to her creations?"
"Well done my agent, but you just need to get the 'dolls' that Nihilism prepared ready for use." A female's voice spoke into the bird's mind almost like telepathy. "Rage, Violence, Faith, Sacrifice, Authority, and Solitude would like to run around for a bit."
"As you command, My Dark Mistress." The crow lowered its head in respect of the voice as something snuck up behind the bird, baring its fangs curiously.
"Oh, and who's this dark mistress you speak of?" Jojo snuck up behind the crow, and without so much as a thought, the crow tried to take off into the air for a quick escape, but Jojo grabbed it's wing with so much force that the wing's bones shattered. "Hey now, don't try and run away just yet, it's rude to keep secrets you know."
"That voice, you're-!" The crow fell on its back and Jojo slammed her paw over the crow's beak while pinning the bird down on the tower's rooftop.
"Nope, don't say another word about who I truly am." Jojo growled at the crow. "When the time is right, I shall reveal myself to my master, so tell me, who is your master, Mr.Crow?"
"I shall never reveal the mistress!" The crow shouted before suddenly getting a part of its chest bitten off by Jojo. "GYAAAAAAH!"
"Careful birdie, I don't like liars." Jojo smiled, and she continued to torture the poor bird.
The scenery focused back onto Jack's group, who were still looking around the infirmary for Jojo. Thor, Valerie, and TJ tried helping them, but to no avail, Jojo was nowhere to be found. Jack sat back in his bed with a defeated sigh, but on the bright side, he was confident that Jojo would come back when she completed whatever it was she set off to do. While Jack sat back down, you noticed a Mokupunian man was walking past him. Jack noticed how there were stitches all around his mouth like roots, and moving down from his shoulders were more stitches that lined the back of his arms. Over his eyes was a set of white bandages, yet the man was able to move around and navigate just fine.
"Yikes, you good bro?" Jack asked the Mokupunian man, who simply looked at you.
"Ah, you're Jack?" The man turned his head towards Jack and smiled. "It's me, Kaimu Akamu, or would birdman be more fitting?"
"Oh shit, you're finally human again!" Jack smiled, even though Kaimu was covered in stitches, he looked better than he did as Birdman. "So please don't tell me the stitches are permanent."
"Don't worry, my body just needs time to heal, then my skin will return back to normal." Kaimu informed Jack before being called by Elizabeth. "Gotta go, Elizabeth is letting me work as an assistant for the time being."
"Alright, I hope you're having fun." Jack watched as Kaimu walked off to go help Elizabeth.
After that brief introduction, Elizabeth walked towards Jack and performed a kind of checkup on your condition using a stethoscope. Throughout the entire checkup, he felt as though someone was watching him through his head. Elizabeth concluded that Jack was fine and allowed him to leave the infirmary, but he needed to change bandages every once and a while. Plus, Jack had to soak his wounds in water so they would heal properly. Jack walked back to his room alone with Alice, since Simo needed to train his magic to properly master it. So Alice volunteered to go with him, just to make sure Jack didn't collapse on his way there. So now Jack and Alice were walking back to his dorm room, alone together.
"Hey, nice job during your fight." Jack complimented the goth girl, who chuckled. "What's so funny?"
"I didn't even use anything I got in my training, I just used my devil contract, Alighieri." Alice informed Jack, and he looked confused. "Oh right, I forgot to tell you, but my first and strongest contract is with a devil named Alighieri, and using his power allows me to turn into one of nine forms based on the nine rings of hell, and it gets stronger the lower the ring. So Limbo is my weakest and Treachery is my strongest. I only used Heresy on Luna."
"So you think using Treachery would allow you to stand off against Hero?" Jack asked the goth, who thought for a moment.
"No, the major downside of using Alighieri is that I have to sacrifice something in return, the more powerful the mode the bigger the sacrifice has to be." Alice showed her best friend her arm, and it had bandages over it. "Limbo just requires a single fingernail cell, while Treachery requires so much blood I go into a coma for a while. Luckily, Heresy just needs some skin."
"Damn, doesn't that hurt?" Jack asked the girl, who shook her head. "Does Alighieri use magic to make the process painless or something?"
"No clue, but yeah, it doesn't hurt." Alice said and they finally reached his bedroom to see something of an audience in front the door. "Eh, what are you guys doing here?"
"Oh hey, we were wondering where you were." Milunka was standing outside Jack's dorm along with Adrian, Catherine, Lorelei, and Juana. They both noticed how Catherine was holding what looked to be a cake. "We came here to celebrate your guys' victory."
"But you weren't home, so we just waited around here for a bit." Adrian finished Milunka's sentence. "I almost broke down your door to be honest."
"Quick question: What are your powers again?" Jack pointed at Adrian and Milunka. "Like we're sixty something chapters in, and you guys can be considered secondary characters, yet we don't know your abilities."
"Adrian is immortal and uses a big ass sword, I and I make stuff explode." Milunka explains as Jack opened his dorm room, and allowed everyone to flood in.
When Jack opened the door, he saw that Jojo was underneath the coffee table, chewing on the bones of some kind of small creature. Upon closer inspection, Jack saw that it was actually the bones of a bird of some sorts. Lorelei walked into his room and fell face first onto Jack's bed, and in the span of seconds, she drifted to sleep. While Catherine set the cake on the coffee table, Jack walked to his kitchen area and got some spoons and knives for them all to use. Jack walked to the coffee table and sat between Alice and Catherine whilst handing them the silver ware. Juana cut the cake first, and Jack saw that it was a vanilla cake.
"You know, this is the first time I've ever spent time with actual friends." Catherine pointed out something random. "Back in the Heliosian Palace, my father only arranged for stuck up nobles to meet up with me, trying to set up alliances from territories across Desponia."
"Yeesh, and I thought the old couple was bad enough, your father's a dick." Juana sighed whilst rubbing the back of her neck. "Eddy and Maria constantly bickered back when we were in Cuauhtli. I wonder if they still fight while we're here."
"You all have family?" Adrian asked, and Milunka calmly sipped a red solo cup full of something. "Milunka and I grew up in an orphanage until the Hooded Ones adopted and raised us to be who we are today."
"Speaking of the Hooded Ones, how and why did you turn a bunch of cows into sludge?" Jack asked the two, who thought for a couple minutes.
"We only did it for a request." Milunka answered as she set down the cup, and Adrian put a piece of cake in his mouth. "Some guy gave us a bacteria and told us to infect someone's farm cattle. He said he'll give us a portal that connects from our base to the random dude's farm. Then yada yada yada, we do this for a while, you kill our douchey leader, and kumbaya, here we are."
"Can you describe this guy?" Alice asked before using her spoon to put a piece of cake in her mouth.
"Let me think...he had long black hair, ice blue eyes, wore all black, and was so pale he almost reminded me of a vampire." Milunka described the man to the best of her ability. "He also held a skull head for no reason."
"That last part was random." Jack added before sipping something from a red solo cup. "Why did he have a skull?"
"No clue, I'm guessing he just likes the extra drama that it gives the air around him." Adrian guessed with a shrug. "I wonder whose skull that was anyways."
"There are multiple answers to that question and I am liking exactly none of them." Jack heard the door open, and he looked at the door to see Simo walking in, both Jack and Alice then noticed lipstick marks on the parts of his face that weren't covered. "Oh hey Simo, how was Titania? Have you finally decided to move out?"
"Need I remind you I'm only here because you brought me into this world?" Simo glared at Jack before walking into the bathroom to wash the lipstick off.
"So you two live together?" Catherine pointed at Simo with a confused expression. "I don't see another bed, don't tell me-"
"My bed's too small, it can't fit more than one person and one honey badger, I just stole a couch that turns into a bed." Jack pointed at the couch whilst interrupting Catherine. "Simo takes the couch, I get bed because I existed first."
"You're an odd one."
"Of course I am, that's how I lasted this long."