The wind brushed past Alec's face, kicking up his hair and coat jacket. As he zoomed past many caves, he found himself thinking of the day he was transmigrated. He felt strangely similar to when he was in that car, with that trophy on the passenger seat.

Now, there were no rewards. Only duty.

He guessed that Iris would have already located Evan and led him to the middle of the cavernous chambers. He didn't want to waste mana by using the signature locator spell.

He had wasted a lot of time. 75.000 points were not going to be enough. The students of the academy were resourceful. Alec was strong but he couldn't win while having wasted this much time. He had to achieve something that would surpass anything else. And that was to beat the middle boss.

Recovering his mana as much as possible on the way, Alec found the middle boss' entrance in ten minutes. He encountered students going through challenges, fighting lower-level bosses, and professors taking down demons here and there. Fortunately, with the speed they had dealt with the situation, things hadn't spiraled out of control.

The entrance leading to the middle boss wasn't inconspicuous. There was a five-meter-tall and wide entrance leading to a gate embellished with incredibly minute details and carvings. Right in front of that gate stood his friends. Their numbers exceeded what he had expected.

Putting aside Iris, Evan, and Evan's partner Lea—Alexei, Thomas, Alyssa, and Douglas were there too. Alec approached them calmly. The exam still had another fifteen minutes before it ended. That was more than enough. If they couldn't beat the boss in ten minutes, they wouldn't beat it at all.

The first to notice him approaching was Evan. He uncrossed his arms and looked directly at Alec, garnering the other's attention too.

"Where is Edward?" he asked with a frown. Alec kept silent for a moment and then answered.

"Not here," he said. A conceptual weight pressing on his back, Alec struggled to keep his head up. He hadn't done something wrong. He had done what was needed. That was all.

"Why?" Douglas asked. However, he shriveled under the dangerous frowns of Evan and Iris. They knew Alec. The situation wasn't good if he acted like this. Better to deal with it later, when they have the time.

"We have to beat the middle boss. And I will ask everyone here to assist me in doing so," Alec slightly bowed his head while changing the topic.

"I mean, we understood that on our own. But will we be able to?" Alyssa asked. Alec nodded in answer. He was confident.

"The problem is, I would like everyone to surrender right before we beat the boss," he said. Now that? That got some reactions. Evan and Iris were indifferent. They were used to Alec making unhinged requests. Alexei crossed his arms in confusion while Thomas scratched his head. They would probably be convinced easily. The other three, however, weren't on the same wavelength.

"I'm sorry Alec. But I think that is a bit too much to ask of us," Douglas said in all seriousness. It was understandable. They weren't particularly aware of the situation they were in. And for that, Alec couldn't blame them. Not everyone was blessed with a nigh untouchable base of memories like him. While the anti-meme could completely play around with their entire lives, it couldn't do the same to Alec.

"I will add your name as a co-author in my next-"

"I am always willing to help out a friend in need," Douglas said while slamming his fist on his chest as a sign of respect. Alec sneered at the guy's pretentious act before turning toward Alyssa.

"I'm sorry but I'm not really interested in academic achi-"

"Three hundred thousand credits."

"Three hundred fifty-"

"Get the hell out of here."

"I'm sorry," she answered, averting her eyes. "Can you give half as a down payment?"

"Sure," Alec answered. They touched their ID cards and he transferred one hundred fifty thousand on the spot.

Lea, on the other hand, seemed to have been convinced by Evan using some unknown methods.

"Well then," Alec wrapped up. He looked at everyone one by one and got their confirmations before continuing. "We have a deal. We will go in, and take down the boss. Everyone will surrender when the time comes. Let's do this."

He approached the huge gate and stood in front of it, taking in the carvings. It was the carving of two figures. A nondescript man with a line perfectly separating his body in two, doing a hand seal of some sort. Countless magic circles of the ninth circle surrounded him. However, the spells were unreadable. One couldn't decipher what they were merely from the carvings.

On the other side was a monster. The monster's looks seemed to have been sort of deified, made more surreal. However, it was a monster of countless eyes and countless fingers. Millions of those fingers seemed to coalesce into a single, gargantuan spear, pointed toward the man.

Alec traced those carvings, feeling the coldness of the stone gate under his touch before finally pushing open the two sides of the gates. They groaned and screeched against his push, trying to resist. But he was too strong. The gate wings gave way, and they entered the boss room in tandem.

The room was underlit, with small, wisp-like fires barely visible from the distance. When they walked deeper, however, those wisp-like fires raged. They increased both in size and luminance.

With their light, the room, or the chamber they were in revealed its entirety.

It was a football-field-sized, cylinder-shaped chamber with monotone stone blocks covering the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. It looked like a bigger, much bigger version of those rooms under the alchemy supply shop. Maybe those were somehow related to the cavernous chambers. Its size made Alec guess that it was directly under the middle clearing of the academy, which would coincide with its location anyway.

Walking further inside, they stopped right in the middle.

"This place is empty," Douglas said with his hand in his pocket. Alec threw him a glare.

"Don't say that."

"Hey. Uhh... Was that always there?" Iris mumbled while pointing in a certain direction.

Everyone turned their heads. There was a singular column standing right next to them. However, Alec could swear that thing wasn't there until recently.

Before he could walk up and inspect it, however, the column slipped back into the ground like a mischievous rabbit. Just like that, it disappeared.

That rung alarm bells inside Alec's head.

"I think it's under us!" Douglas shouted. Alec thought so too. But there was something wrong with that statement. Very wrong. Alec looked around. Why wasn't his attention pointed downward? What about Iris and Evan? They were looking around too, instead of at the ground like the others.

What made them different?

The first one to figure it out was, unsurprisingly, Iris.

"It's anti-memetic! It's not under us. It's around us! Everywhere!" she exclaimed. Her words weren't registered fast enough. Most couldn't react in time. Other than Alec and Evan, obviously. They had been trained for this.

While Evan's entire body suddenly started blazing with golden flames, Alec took out The Author's Pen.

'I need to write a mental cleansing potion right now!' he thought. However, before he could do so, he found himself inches away from a dark crack in space. It was as if reality cracked like a glass, revealing a dark abyss. Alec froze. There, in the deep abyss, an eye opened. A few million more eyes appeared in quick succession. Their pupils thrashed around erratically before settling on Alec. Perfectly synchronized. From there, their attention slowly shifted toward The Author's Pen.

'Is this really an illusion..?' Alec couldn't help but ask in his frozen state. Cold shivers crawled up his spine like millions of spiders. Before he could react, a human-wide finger appeared behind him, slamming against his hand. He watched in terror as The Author's Pen was launched away, slamming against the further wall of the chamber before falling to the ground.

With a guttural growl, everything around him seemed to fade. His body lowered and dodged a finger trying to slam into his head from behind before dashing forward like an arrow released from its bow.

'The pen! I can't lose it! Or everything will be over!'

Then...

More than fifty cracks in reality appeared around the pen. Those fingers came out. Alec felt pain. It had cracked his hand, even with a small amount of contact. Before he could even make it halfway there, however, the fingers started crushing against the pen with all their might, repeatedly. The floor cracked. Huge pieces of rocks were launched in every direction as they repeatedly attacked the pen.

'It's fucked. I'm fucked.'

Alec's shoulders slumped as he watched a dust cloud cover the fingers slamming against The Author's Pen. If it was his body in The Pen's stead, he would have already been ground to dust. He couldn't even imagine what had happened to the artifact.

In his stupor, another finger came out from behind him, launching him forward. He growled in pain as he crashed into the same wall The Pen did.

'I'm no one without the pen. What am I if I'm not writing? Just a cripple. What the fuck do I do now?' Alec thought with a self-deprecating, soulless frown. However, he could hear his friends still fighting in the distance. How could he stop now? He had come this far. He would at least fight till the bitter en-

'Huh?'

As the dust from the fingers' massive assault dissipated, Alec's eyes locked onto the pen, sitting there silently, etched into the ground.

'It's unharmed? The pen... It's... Is it indestructible?' he thought. He tugged on his connection to the pen—which he had lost track of because of his chaotic mental state. It disappeared and reappeared inside him. Once he took it out, he found it to be in pristine shape. 'Holy shit. There isn't even a scratch on it.'

Then, however, Alec thought of something.

'Wait...'

'If it's this durable...'

Getting up with hardship, he inspected the pen once more. A wide grin appeared on his face. He activated a gravity spell, and the pen flew up.

At that moment, he noticed a couple of fingers approaching him from every direction.

With a flick of his hand, the pen blasted away at an incredible speed. It ripped through the fingers like they were butter, completely shattering them and returning to Alec's side. Floating in the air calmly.

Again, unscratched.

"The pen! The pen is fucking mightier than the sword!"