Dedicated to DoppelGengar, who is the biggest fan of this series and who pestered me to get this chapter out.

The light came back to my eyes. I was cold, and everything was white. It took me a second to realise that I was standing on a snow covered mountain.

"A little bit weird the first time, I know," said a voice directly behind me.

I jumped and spun away to assess who was talking. It was Arlen.

I looked around frantically. I was nowhere near where I was a few seconds ago.

He looked at me for a second, then started walking down the mountainside towards some trees.

"W-what are you doing?! What did you do?!"

He stopped and looked back. "It's my, Arlen D. White's, special technique: Re-bro-cation! I can teleport to places that I've never been before, but only places that I've never been before. It's the power of adventure!" He then walked up to a tree and broke off some branches.

I was dumbfounded. Questions raced through my head like racecars on a track, constantly racing around and around in my head only to come back to me seconds later, no different than before. My illogical brain decided to get stuck on the fact that his last name was the same as mine for some reason, no matter how many times I tried to force it out and think about something else.

"W-what?!"

"I'm just building a fire. If you want it to get done faster you should help too."

Is this guy for real?! "No! I don't know why you've brought me here, but I need to go back!"

He shrugged. "No can do bro. We're probably about 1200 miles away from them I think, and my power shouldn't fully recharge for another day or so. Even then we won't be able to get as far because I won't have Fantasia's help, but if we run 24/7 we might be able to get there in about four days!"

"1-1200 miles?!" My brain simply couldn't comprehend that large of a number. He was either lying or that scary of a person.

He saw my shift towards gloom and cringed. Something was bothering the guy. Part of me expected this, but the other part questioned it. He seemed so confident in his actions just a minute ago, so why was he regretting it now?

He stopped messing with the trees, glanced at me, and started walking further down the mountain. He halted and looked back when he could tell that I wasn't moving. "Well, what are you waiting for? Let's get a move on! The cold won't kill you, so we don't really need a fire."

I looked around. Unfamiliar landscape all around. No cities anywhere in site. If I didn't follow him I would surely find myself lost, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Also, there was no doubt in my mind that he could destroy me if he felt like it. I swallowed and reluctantly followed him.

Once he saw that I was following he smiled and broke into a run. I chased after him.

And so we ran. And ran. And ran. We didn't get tired, so there was no need to stop. Day turned to dusk, and with the coming of the night more dangers asserted themselves. Darkness could mean collisions, tripping, or even running off of cliffs. But worst of all, it brought the monsters known as blightmares.

Suddenly, several hours into our run, we were interrupted. A giant moth-like monster swooped over us as we passed through an alpine forest, and it saw us. It quickly beat its wings against the ground and changed its direction.

I pulled out my knife without thinking about it, but I knew that such a puny weapon would be unable to do anything against this monster. The moth flapped its wings forcefully and slashed at the tops of the trees with its many feet, slowly drilling its way towards us.

The monster rose into the air, which made me think that it was giving up, but it quickly did a backwards flip and dived down towards us. It was going to plow straight through the trees to attack us. It was far too fast, there was no way I could outrun it. I would need to bet everything on my comparatively small amount of power. I braced for impact.

Arlen unexpectedly stepped in front of me, standing in the way of the beast. He punched forward and his fist met the moth's head. There was a cracking sound as an explosion of air erupted from the impact and almost blew me away.

Just what kind of strength do these two have?! They must be at least at City level!

The burst of air subsided, and the moth fell out of the air, crashing down with an earth shaking amount of force.

"Well that's enough of that," he said, then continuing on our trek.

"Wait a second!" I yelled at him. I had finally gotten him to stop moving, so I wasn't going to let this chance go to waste. "Why would you save me?! Actually, why the heck would you drag me this far out here only to lead me back anyways?!"

He stopped, and looked at me, contemplating something. After coming to some decision, he started picking at trees again. "Help me build a campfire first."

-----

We sat around the newly created campfire in the snow. The light from the fire sent our shadows onto the trees and created such terrific projections that I half expected for blightmares to jump out of them. The smoke and crackling of the flames were unfamiliar to me, but I strangely felt right at home with them.

"Where to start," he pondered while looking to the starry sky.

"Why you attacked us would be a start," I said, admittedly with a little sass. I guess it was perfectly normal to be irritated, actually furious would probably be most normal, but at the same time I got the feeling that I shouldn't be angry.

He lifted up his shirt a little to reveal a dark purple blemish on the side of his torso. "You see this? This is called 'blight.'"

"You mean like 'blightmares?'"

"Yep, exactly like that. This is like a blightmare infection actually. It's slowly spreading, and after it spreads too far it'll actually kill me."

"How'd you manage to get that? I didn't think that diseases were in this world."

He shook off the question. "Anyways, this blight will spread much faster in a pure soul, so I have to do bad things in order to kind of taint myself and slow it down."

I looked skeptically at him. Something about his story didn't sit well with me. Even though I didn't want to make him angry, as he could definitely end me right then and there, I still wanted to know. "Bad things? I mean, teleporting me here against my will was definitely inconvenient, but I would think that 'bad' would be something more like killing or destroying towns."

"Maybe it's not very bad to you, bro-cally grown cabbage, but it is to me. To me, the worst thing someone can do is obstruct another's adventure. It's just like how the worst thing for Fantasia is being a burden other people, and how Sandra's is restraining others."

"But isn't this sort of an adventure in itself? Surely that isn't bad right?" I was trying to get on his good side by making him rethink his ways and help me go back faster, but it didn't quite work.

He gripped his side in mild pain. "Dang! For a second there I had actually convinced myself of that too!"

I suddenly felt guilty. "Sorry?"

He smiled a sad smile. "It's okay. I guess I'm just not very good at being bad. I'll probably just have to return to Earth before too long because of the blight anyways..."

Now I felt really bad. "I-is there a way to get it cured? Like, cutting it out or something?"

"Sadly, not that I know of. If you haven't noticed, our bodies aren't quite like they were in the previous world. Makes healing an affliction that only a few people have quite difficult."

I put the pieces together in my head. "Are Sandra and Fantasia some of those few people?"

He shook his head gravely.

I didn't say anything after that, and we just sat there, listening to the sounds of far off monsters and the crackling of the fire. Slowly, the flames died down, and he stood up and brushed himself off.

"You ready to go?" he asked, extending a hand to help me get up.

I took the hand, and suddenly when I did he threw me up into the sky. He put his hand up above his eyes as if he was blocking the sun.

"Woah, would you look at you go!" He smiled rambunctiously.

Flying was nothing new to me, but being thrown sure was. I may or may not have let out a small yell in fear as I plummeted downwards.

"Such a crybaby," he said.

I hit the ground, but happened to land in a deep snowdrift, making my impact only somewhat painful.

"You act like I would throw you into concrete or something."

I stood up and my head hardly poked out from beneath the snow cover. "Well considering how I hardly know you..."

"I wonder about that~" he said, grinning wildly.

Have I met him before? Not that he mentions it he sure sounds familiar...

He broke out into a run, headed in the direction of the others.

"Hey, wait for me!" I plowed my way through the drift and ran after him.

However, we didn't get very far before running into an unfamiliar face waiting for us out in an open space.

When Arlen saw him, he froze on the spot. Startled, I too stopped.

The new face had neck long brown hair, dark clothes, and a lab coat as white as the snow around us. He had his hands in his coat's pockets as he smirked at us behind a pair of thin framed glasses. The glasses are what struck me as the most odd, as they had holographic data projected upon their lenses.

Electronics... in this world?

"Well well well. You and the other two have been quite the hard bunch to find, Arlen," said the new guy. "Always teleporting around any time we get close. I had to personally come out to find you guys because my underlings couldn't do it. Do you realise what kind of inconvenience this is to such a busy man as I?"

"Sid," Arlen said quietly, terror in his voice.

Sid got even angrier. "Hey, what did I tell you about my name?! You are to call me by my Sentinel name: Hades!"

Arlen swung his hand at me and touched my shoulder. Next thing I knew I was hiding in a tree, watching the events play out. I wanted to move, but my body wouldn't let me. I could only observe.

"Oh? You've teleported him. Now why would you do that? You should know that resistance is futile against me."

Arlen shuddered, but forced a grin in the face of danger. "Because if I didn't at least try then that would make me a terrible big brother."

Big brother? Then it all came to me. That common last name? It was mine for a reason. "Arlen D White." With a little rearranging, you can get "Lenard White." My elder brother's name. My jaw dropped as I realised this. Why is he here, in Insomnia Wake?!

"I see. So you stole a scanner and escaped the facilities to find your little brother?" Hades laughed. "How heartwarming," he said sarcastically. "Only a fool like you would search out someone that you didn't even know for sure was in this world and get lucky enough to be right."

"I'm not that big of a fool. Someone told me that he would be here."

"No matter, you are a fool none-the-less for thinking that you could escape me."

In a blink of an eye Hades had his hand covering Lenard's face, then he spun around and threw my brother at lightning speed towards the horizon. I shook as I saw my brother, who had single handedly overwhelmed me in strength, get singlehandedly overwhelmed by someone else and get tossed like a rag doll.

The man looked straight at me in my hiding place. "I hope your idiot brother didn't actually think that he could hide you from me. Then again I could've missed you since you have such a small soul power. Let's see... 0.001 kilo-Neumans?!" He hit his glasses. "I'm not sure how a bug like that works its way into the system. I'll have to have a serious talk with my programmers." He glared at me. "Say, kid. What's your nightmare?"

He held his index finger out in front of him and a tar-like black substance collected around it, getting bigger and looking like it would drop to the ground. Suddenly the substance was sucked back into where it came and he turned around.

"Curse him! He teleported mid air! Now I have to track him down again." He glanced back at me. "You got lucky kid."

And with that he pounced into the air, almost as if he was flying. I didn't know what to think anymore. I was alone in the woods with no idea how to get out, my brother was in this world and being targeted, and I had not the slightest clue what was happening to the other four. I was in a very difficult situation, but one question stood out among all my others.

How is Lenard still alive when I watched him die?