Spiraling Tensions

Before I could be drawn too deeply into my thoughts, I was roused from my trance by a voice. To be more exact, two voices yelling loudly. Rapidly, I rose from my seated position, ignoring my protesting legs, and strode over to find out just what had transpired.

As soon as I arrived at the position where I had left the sleeping trio, I understood that something was wrong. For starters, the two other students were arguing loudly while gesticulating expressively, which was a bad sign in an already terrible situation.

Secondly… the teacher on the floor was as still as a corpse. To be more exact, he was a corpse.

In very little time, the argument had deescalated and we were sitting glumly in a circle, the body to our side. Our strongest combatant and leader had died, apparently of mana exhaustion. At first, there had been suspicions of foul play, but due to a distinct lack of injury, it became rapidly evident that his death was due entirely to overstraining himself for our sake.

Personally, I was not too much affected by the death, other than a stark realization that we had just lost a strong leader and our only shot at getting out of here in one piece. On the other hand, my two companions were mourning the fallen mage who had 'sacrificed himself for our survival'. 

However, we had bigger problems at hand. Though for now there was no immediate threat, it was inevitable that we would encounter danger later on if we did not want to die of starvation in this desolate land. Though water was not an issue, there were sadly no spells that involved burying your foe in a mountain of food. At least, not one that we knew of.

This meant we would have to travel in search of food… or perhaps we would just be marching towards our deaths. 

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In little time, an argument started to flare up anew as the other two people debated our next course of action. Even at this early stage, the spiraling tensions were creating fractures in our unity.

While half-heartedly listening to their pointless arguments, I absently pondered my chances of survival if I encountered danger of any kind in this land of death. It wasn't really hard to get that we were almost definitely not making it out of the Bone Plains. After all, meeting something like a Lesser Light Lord would be enough to wipe out our entire group, since I highly doubted that any of us would survive the initial assault. If we encountered a Greater Light Fiend or skeleton horde, we would be completely dead anyway, so it hardly mattered.

Following this line of thought, I considered once more the unmoving skeletal army on the other side of the bottomless ravine. Perhaps it would have been better had I fallen to their relentless assault….

Suddenly, a thought flickered through my mind. Assuming that the illusions were finite, or at least that they would end at some point… what if I just….

I walked to the edge of the chasm and threw myself into the endless abyss.