"What the hell do you mean that was an Aberrant dungeon!?" The outburst of anger had startled the entire area except the party members, who in all fairness, was simply too tired to care about the small details right now.
The group of officials sent by the awakened association was trying to calm Gareth down, and their leader, a young woman who looked to be in her twenties, was barely holding back tears as Gareth vent his anger on them.
It was only Silas that managed to make Gareth finally stop. Which had almost, almost devolved into a brawl between the two men. Only prevented by the fact that Silas thought with more than his disgustingly defined, thanks to him being shirtless for that information, muscles.
Aris turned his gaze back to the more important matter, too occupied to care about muscles or fights right now.
"Aberrant...huh" The words left his lips quietly, more a statement than a question. His eyes stared dully at the closing dungeon gate, what used to be a gigantic swirl of mana now almost half his size as it dwindled down into mundane ambience.
Dungeons were already quite the phenomenons without the extra complications, scientists and scholars have poured centuries worth of resources into studying these gates—pocket dimensions since they first appeared a hundred years ago. Only to still end up managing to barely create a standardized ranking system for these things. Not to mention the fact the innate dangers and instability these places brought with them, and the cherry on top, the monsters that resided in them. Barely the surface has been scratched in terms of what people knew about dungeons.
So considering that, an Aberrant dungeon could be compared to hell itself.
No, literally.
The first Aberrant dungeon that showed up was around sixty years ago, if he remembered correctly, somewhere in the western part of what used to be Europe. The initial hours leading up to the dungeon break had been normal enough, considering that Europe had lacked the forces to clear every dungeon that spawned on its land, they were simply going to contain it once the monsters started pouring out.
However, things took a turn when the actual break happened.
Three hours into the dungeon break, the region of Europe where the Aberrant dungeon had spawned into was deemed a death zone. Two more hours later, an evacuation was issued for the entirety of Europe, the continent deemed entirely unsafe for everyone below the level of a B rank awakened. It was a part of history that people reminisced with despair, a grim reminder of how unfair this world was to humans, and how fragile their lives where in the face of something that was left to pure chance and luck.
From what he could remember from his studies, it had taken the death of three S ranks, and countless sacrifices from the lower ranks to contain the break, the clearing itself having been done by the world elites of that time., half of them still missing to this day.
Aris blinked, letting the weight of the situation settle on his shoulders as the last of the gate fizzled out of existence.
All things said and done, they probably might have saved this country from immediate ruin.
But that wasn't exactly the problem right now.
Aris turned around as Gareth rounded up all of them, filing away the concerns about his abhorrent luck in order to be think about how to slip away once this mess gets more chaotic.
"I'm sure you've all understood what's going on already." Gareth paused for a long moment, letting the silence hang in the air to signify the seriousness of the situation. "We're going to be here for a while."
Nobody argued with that. The kind of paperwork an Aberrant classification generated didn't care about anyone's evening plans, nor the schedule they had for the considerable future.
"Association's already got a lock-down on the site. Nobody talks about what happened inside until the formal debrief, not to friends, not to family, not to anyone who wasn't in that chamber." His gaze moved through the group with the slow deliberateness of someone making sure each person understood that this was not a suggestion. "Questions?"
Silence.
Then, from somewhere to Aris's right, one of the younger party members, a B rank.
"Are we in trouble?"
Gareth looked at him. "No."
"But the dungeon was—"
"The classification wasn't known on entry," Gareth said. "That's on the association, not on us." The look he shot toward the officials across the perimeter carried the full weight of a man who intended to make that point at considerable length to the appropriate people at the appropriate time. "We cleared it. Everyone walked out. That's the job."
The young man nodded, apparently satisfied, or at least sufficiently intimidated to hold back further questions.
Aris, who had been half listening to this with the surface attention of someone present and the deeper attention of someone calculating an out, noted the moment Gareth's eyes found him again across the group.
He had been doing that—finding him, looking for slightly too long, looking away.
Aris filed it and returned his attention to the association officials, who were setting up a secondary perimeter further out with the focused energy of people grateful to have a procedure to execute.
"Alright." Gareth rolled his shoulder, his right one, which had taken the worst of the first giant's grip, and which he was carrying with the careful neutrality of someone pretending it didn't exist. "Medical first, debrief after. Don't wander."
The group began to disperse toward the association's medical station, moving with the particular quality of people who were running on the last of their adrenaline and would feel everything properly once they stopped.
Aris didn't move.
He really, really didn't want to stay here any longer than he had to.
Maybe if he came up with a proper excuse...
"I don't think it would be easy to slip away with Gareth around," Silas said, from directly beside him.
Aris hadn't heard him approach.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You've got the look." Silas settled into a stance beside him that managed to communicate absolutely no intention of going anywhere. "The one where you're thinking about leaving but you're being polite about it in your head first."
"That's a very specific observation."
"I'm a very observant person." A pause, he then pointed forward. "Also you keep looking at the road."
Aris looked at the road.
He looked back.
"Medical first," Silas said mildly, in the exact cadence Gareth had just used somewhat jokingly. "Debrief after." Another pause, this one with the texture of something being carefully not said. "And then you can do whatever you were going to do."
From across the perimeter, Gareth called Silas's name.
Silas glanced over, then back at Aris, with the expression of a man who had made a decision about priorities and was comfortable with it.
"Don't leave, we need to go out for coffee later," he said.
Then he went.
Aris stood where he was for a moment, alone in the particular way you could be alone in the middle of a busy scene, surrounded by motion and noise, none of it directed at him for once.
He looked at his hand.
Closed it.
Let out a small, weary exhale, and relaxed the tension that had been building up in the back of his mind this entire time. Deciding that whatever happened, he wouldn't have any choice in it anyways.
And the offer for coffee was too good to let go, he had been looking for someone he could forc-
...who would help him with carrying his bags after shopping.