Blink and You'll Miss It

self preservation instinct? who's she?

 "What's stopping him from just coming after what he wants?" Youngjae wondered aloud as they walked back to the rest of campus.

"The glamour," Jinyoung answered, paying close attention to his footing. "He can't sustain it if he gets too far away from the building."

"He whines about it constantly," Mark added.

"So what's our plan?" Jaebum asked.

"Get some more of those magic items you guys have and go back." Yugyeom glared at the ground as he spoke. "We can't leave your friend behind."

"Oh, here's your bracelet back," Jaebum remembered, pulling the peridot off his wrist and holding it out to her. "Thanks for. . . Sanha are you okay?"

"Hmm?" She looked up, eyes fuzzy. "Oh, yeah. Thank you." She slid the bracelet on her wrist and returned her gaze to the ground.

"We're going to get him back," Youngjae said softly.

"I know. I'm just. . . strategizing." Her hand moved to rub the ebony pendent. She'd almost said 'worried'. "What happened while we were upstairs?"

The semi-diversion worked. "Everything was going fine, and then he suddenly went nuts." Youngjae waved his hands as though to demonstrate, and Sanha nodded, recognizing the instance as the loud noises that had rocked the building just after finding Mark's body. "He broke through the wall, and everything went downhill."

"How so?"

"He put up a glamour, and we didn't have enough charms for everyone to see around it." Jaebum took his flower crown in his hands as he spoke, turning it around and around. "So we lost some help there. We decided maybe it would be better to take the fight outside, so we tried, but he nabbed Jackson and vanished."

"You'll be glad to know he about broke the demon's nose before he went, though," Youngjae added. The boys snickered a little, probably imagining the look on the demon's face. Sanha noticed Yugyeom laughed a little too loud, and wondered if maybe he blamed himself. She knew that feeling.

"Probably he won't even need our help," Jaebum reassured her.

"Yeah, for sure." She scrambled through the fence before he could mention her tone.

They kept walking. As it turned out, fifty years held more than a few technological advancements, meaning they were explaining something they'd taken for granted with every step. Eventually, they made it back to their own building. Sanha paused at the front with her hand on the knob.

"Whose dorm?"

"Yours."

And that was how Sanha found herself sitting awake, researching online in her bed, as they formed an impromptu sleepover in her living room.

The time on her computer read eleven pm, meaning they'd only been in the building for a couple of hours. The whole adventure felt like it had taken much longer than it actually had, so much so that she almost wondered if time was elongated in the building. Then she realized that it was functionally just a building draped in a bedsheet and that it was a stupid thought.

The only sound was the steady breathing of the boys in the next room and her pencil scribbling notes. She figured Jackson wouldn't mind if she gave away his bed for the night, so the older of the three had gotten it. And honestly, even if he did mind, he wasn't exactly in a place to do anything about it. That was a semi morbid thought, but it was almost midnight. Stuff like that tended to happen.

She slid her shoes on, careful to not make noise and wake up the boys in the other room. They were down to twenty five hours; an arbitrary seeming number until you realized that it meant their deadline was midnight the next day. She wasn't sure why he didn't just say it outright, but maybe twenty six hours made it more dramatic, more pressing. The guy was a dick, but he did have a rather stylish flair.