The group walked to the end of the park, and Achilles began to cross the street when Kimsung stopped him.
"Where are you going?" He asked, a bit confused. They could easily walk to the hotel from where they were, and even if they couldn't, there was a wide selection of cars all over to drive in.
"To the train. Where else?" Achilles replies calmly. He himself was also confused. Why wouldn't they want to take the faster route if it were just across the street? Unless, of course. They thought the trains weren't safe, and probably crawling with monsters? That was most likely the reason.
"Oh… The train is safe, so you know. I was using it to get around for the past few days, actually. Did y'all not know that?" He asks, chuckling.
A silence came between the group, and they followed Achilles into the train station, down the stairs, and onto the platform to wait for the A-train. The silence between them remained even as the A-train pulled into the station, coming to a stop and its doors opening.
A pigeon, previously perched on a sign, flew down and landed on the platform next to Achilles, hopping on the train as the group also entered.
'Why is a pigeon on here?' The group thought unanimously. Of course, Achilles had no such thoughts, almost unfazed by the pigeon as he sat down. The pigeon brought a wing to its beak before clearing its throat.
"Yo, what's good?" The pigeon greeted him, hopping up to the seat next to Achilles.
"What's good?" Achilles greeted back, and the two became silent, as if a pigeon talking to a person, both of them sitting on the train bench, wasn't the strangest thing to see.
"Did that pigeon talk?" Heidi asked, still processing in her mind the idea that a pigeon spoke in a perfect human voice.
Achilles gave her a slightly confused look, as if her question made no sense to him: "What, you've never talked to any of the pigeons before? The New York pigeons can talk, everybody knows that." He says, as if stating the obvious.
The group did not speak for the rest of the ride until reaching 34th Street, and getting off the train, the pigeon did the same. The group left the station and went into the hotel, which was surprisingly still intact.
The elevators were naturally not in service, so the trio took the stairs to the floor they had been on before.
"Fuck… Do we really gotta walk all the way up?" Achilles asked midway through their walk up the stairwell.
Heidi sighed. It was the fourth time he'd asked, and it was annoying her to the point she couldn't believe someone like this idiot could become a world threat in the future.
"Yes, and this is the fourth time you've whined about it. Couldn't you shut up until we get there?" She snapped at him as they finally crossed the sixth floor, treading up the next flight of stairs to the next floor.
Achilles looked at her, feeling a bit insulted. He knew he was being a bit annoying, but he intentionally kept it to a minimum to see if they could actually handle his personality. But he hadn't expected Heidi to practically snap at him.
He could've simply gone up the building his own way, but Achilles could be a patient man when it benefited him. He formed a platform of barriers under him and stepped on it, delicately controlling the platform to move and hold his weight, which it did with surprising ease. Perhaps its weight limit was greater than he had expected.
With it being formed, he moved it up the stairwell, simply choosing to fly up to the tenth floor with his skill. It's not like anyone could blame him for ingenious use of his skill anyway.
Granted, he did bump into the walls a few times, but after passing the eighth floor, he had gotten a good control of it. Suddenly, a notification showed up from his system, announcing a change.
[Congratulations, you've reached Mid Tier with your skill usage!]
His eyes widened. He always wondered how the whole tier thing worked, and as he rose the stairwell, leaving the trio back down at the seventh floor, he began to theorize that perhaps the tiers depended on how the skill was used, specifically in creative and unorthodox ways.
He must've been close before, using his barriers as weapons to kill monsters instead of having a sword, so that meant all he had to do was use his barriers in a way they normally wouldn't be used, like transportation.
Once reaching the tenth floor, he waited there for another ten minutes and heard the trio before he saw them, trudging and struggling up the stairs. However, that Kimsung guy didn't seem as winded, but he was winded nonetheless.
Kimsung himself felt annoyed that he didn't have a skill like Achilles', because he watched the man use that platform of his barriers to hover and fly up the stairwell at a fast rate, reaching the floor faster than the elevator would've.
"You are a selfish asshole, you know that?" He told Achilles point-blank, his breathing heavy from walking up the tenth flights of those damned stairs. Achilles simply smiled, a bit amused at his weary and slightly exhausted form.
"You never asked me to make one for you, so how should I have known? I'm not a mind reader, you know." He said with a smile that was both smug and mocking.
When the siblings got to the door, they did not speak and pushed the door open, only to be met by people. People holding knives and makeshift weapons. Some of them were injured, others had fearful looks in their eyes. A few of them also appeared to have their skills and some mana, judging by how their hands were held out like they wanted to shoot something out of them.
Achilles was the first to speak, shocked to finally find other people besides the Koreans with him: "Well fuck… guess everybody didn't die, huh?" He joked lightheartedly, but the mood was not good for such things at the moment.