Chapter 15: Boss
The anomaly wasn't exactly trying to be sneaky. Walls were caved in pretty much everywhere, which made following its trail dead simple.
They bumped into more of those gobdogs as they went, sometimes a couple, sometimes just one. Nox mostly let the girls take care of them. He'd only step in if it looked like one of them was about to get seriously injured, but they were holding their own.
Their levels kept going up. Kendra and Vasa both hit level 5. Even Yeda, who was still just whacking things with her pipe and didn't have any real powers yet, made it to level 3 from the shared experience points. Nox himself was level 10 now. He didn't feel a massive change each time, just a little bit stronger, a little quicker.
All the trashed hallways eventually led them right to the main gymnasium. The big double doors were just gone, completely ripped from their hinges.
'The gym, huh?' He thought. He wondered for a quick second if Ava and that jock, Jax, were still kicking around in there, or if they'd managed to bail. 'Probably left' he figured. 'They have no reason to stay here at all.'
"Whoa," Kendra said, stopping a ways from the entrance. "Whatever's in there, it feels... heavy. Like, seriously bad."
Vasa nodded, her face unreadable. "The air around here is different. Something powerful is inside."
Yeda just clutched her metal pipe tighter, looking like she'd rather be anywhere else.
They weren't wrong. Nox felt it too, a kind of pressure in the air that hadn't been there before. But he wasn't about to let some other thing, or some other person, take out his main objective. This anomaly, this boss, was his.