Nox was so tired when morning finally came, he could barely keep his eyes open. He had found some abandoned, mostly collapsed building to crash in for a bit, but rest hadn't really happened.
He had spent the entire night following that blinking map marker for the princess, and despite his best efforts, he still hadn't found her. The damn marker kept shifting, or the paths were blocked by rubble, and it was seriously starting to piss him off.
He leaned his head back against a surprisingly stable piece of wall and let his eyes drift closed, just for a few minutes. Sleep claimed him quickly, dragging him into a dream he didn't want.
He was back in his old school, before the monsters, before the system. The same faces, the same taunts. He saw Mark, saw his other classmates. The dream shifted, the question hanging heavy in the air: if none of this new world stuff had ever happened, would he eventually have gone through with it? Would he have killed them?
