Gabriel turned back to the Tyrant. It was lying in wait at the center of the immense chambers.

Thank god we, I… read it in one go, right, Liz? Isn't it fucked up to think of ourselves as a 'we'?

She gave a confused shrug, and he felt it meant 'not really,' more than another 'I don't know.'

Gabriel snorted, "If you say so."

But Liz felt different, somehow. Maybe it was the endeavor she had taken for both of them, that of eating and drinking on his own flesh to sustain themselves. Or maybe it was a more profound level of understanding that was developing among them, maybe something the Tyrant "soulscape" brought forth.

Anyway, something felt different to him, but that thing might have been tied to what they were going through. It's just so fucked up...

Once again, they stood in front of the Tyrant, ready for another go.

"Are you ready?"

"Let's speed things up. I just want to get out of here. And remember that we need to push through my Epiphany Skill, and I need to get to Class level 20 after that. I don't see how to since I doubt I could kill you, even if I wanted to. And I'm not lying here when I say I'm starting to wish I could," Gabriel said.

The Tyrant chuckled in his profound and a little terrifying low voice, "Good! That is exactly the spirit you should have. Now sit and take a comfortable position."

"Yeah, I challenge anyone saying that the padmasana position is comfortable after sixteen hours straight!"

"What is that?"

"Nothing; let's just start."

***

"Oh, here we are. Finally."

Gabriel, Liz, and the mayor stood in the clearing.

"You've finished the book," the mayor started right away, "You should know that it was a means to install in your mind what you are going to be facing. Now it's time to start practicing for real," he paused. "Your next training will be quite simple, yet at the same time, much darker. It's by far the easier, by my standards at least, but with your type of upbringing, I think it might be one of the most, if not the heaviest scenario for you."

"Wait a minute, how do you know about our upbringing?"

"You are in my spirit with your mind, Gabriel. Now, don't think about it, because" the landscape changed in a dense forest of slim trees, the first thing Gabriel thought was how difficult it would be for someone to hide oneself from persecutors in it, the mayor finished his sentence, "you will be running for your life."

They started sensing shuffling and hurried footsteps in the distance.

"I hope your psyche survives it because this is only the beginning! Good luck, young human." The mayor disappeared.

Fuck.

The footsteps got closer and closer, but something was weird about them. They were… they did not know how close. They couldn't tell.

But my Enhanced Senses were better than this!

They started running slow at first, then way faster.

Uselessly.

The footsteps were many. They were directly behind them.

An arrow flew by his side, inches away from his right calf.

What the fuck!

Voices started becoming clearer, and as they turned, they saw.

There were at least a dozen men following them, and a woman.

Gabriel and Liz had no idea what the hell was going on, but the men were running at them, and surely not because they wanted to sell them insurance. They were out for their blood.

Their faces, Gabriel only saw them for a fraction of a second, and yet they looked familiar. They could not exactly place them, but they were sure; those were people they knew.

The young man and his lizard decided to split up. They shared a conscience now; they were one and only. So they started looking for a way out. As Gabriel went left, Liz went right, hoping to find an escape point. A weird-ass door in the middle of the forest or a big ass tree on which to climb, damn, even a manhole with a counter to reset every few hours would be fine for them.

That was when Liz's perception of the world shut down, and Gabriel found that she was orbiting his core once again. They knew the lizard had been shot down. They would be next.

Fear started really creeping up now. They turned back again to check the situation. The persecutors were close, too close.

The next moment terrible pain exploded from the back of their left knee.

They fell, rolling twice on the ground, the perforated knee damaging even more from the arrow's shaft, hitting the dirt and shaking the fragile bones from the inside.

Gabriel and Liz screamed. But that would only be the start.

As they clutched their legs, the first man, then a second and a third, and a woman after that, reached them. Each of their wicked smiles dedicated entirely to them, their teeth, shining solely for them.

The first one that had reached them was loud. They had no idea what he was saying, maybe questions, maybe not. Another question followed, then pain, incredible pain, so much pain that they wished it to end there.

Another man slashed down at their foot. It now hung weakly from their ankle.

They laughed and hit once again; they targeted their arm this time.

Screaming in pure agony, Gabriel had no idea what was going on anymore.

When their eyes, his vision wet by tears, opened up. He saw the woman spit on them. After that, she raised her crossbow and shot through his eyes.

Gabriel and Liz woke up in the clearing. Upon the big central rock.

They were hyperventilating.

It took them almost a minute to regain their focus.

"What the hell was that!? You sick fuck!" They screamed at the mayor.

The mayor smiled. It wasn't a wicked smile; it looked like… one of grief?

"That is the first step. The only way for you to learn Dark Magic is through suffering and fear. If I don't ingrain that in your soul, you will never be able to use it. It is the very first step."

"We swear to god you are just so messed up… didn't fifteen thousand years teach you anything else than this? Do you really want to make us think there's no other way?"

"That is the first step for darkness, Gabriel. The second step you will walk once you are able to fend them off, to truly fend them off."

"What do you think? That killing them will teach us something? Those are just illusions. We are in one big illusion. What would that teach us when we know that our actions have no consequences. This is just one huge-"

Gabriel and Liz found themselves in a forest again. No, it was the forest. The footsteps could be heard in the distance.

They ran again. They even tried using Built to Fly, Burst Attack. But they had no access to Skills. They would have to do it by themselves, and for some reason, their pursuers showed not being affected by their magnified speed or resistance. They were equal to Gabriel and Liz in terms of Attributes. All the advantages they would have had been erased. They would have to deal with it by themselves.

And so they ran and died amid worse screams than before.

Again, they ran, were caught, briefly tortured, and killed.

Fighting back felt useless as there were too many of them, and all Gabriel and Liz really had to fight them with was a pair of pants.

Time passed, and the best thing they managed to do was kill one of the assaulters a couple of times and lengthen the time the pursuer took to reach them.

It wasn't enough.

We could sling poop at them. Thought Gabriel once in a sick burst of laughter after they had been shot in the back, and the people were preparing to torture them.

After their first death, there was no more visit to the clearing.

Every process of mouse and cat playing initially lasted around 5 minutes. Gabriel and Liz managed to bring that to almost 25 minutes in their first 3 days long session with time and training. Which meant that they had been killed…

I don't wanna know. I don't want to know how many times I died. Gabriel thought while on the ground in a fetal position. They had long since left the soulscape, and he had not managed to sleep. He didn't even have the mental strength to get up and take a piss.

Liz unhappily munched on the remains of the arm, out of necessity, and they knew that soon they would need something else to feed on. Tragedy was piling on top of tragedy.

He was overwhelmed. There was nothing that he could do about his situation.

The options were just two: follow the crazy fucker's directions or don't, and face whatever that would get him.

Why the hell did I follow that fucking silver wind? That's all on you, grandpa! You and your damn forest-dwelling…

Suddenly, and for the first time, realization dawned on Gabriel.

He hadn't connected until now but, were his grandparents somehow related to Alter, and was his mother too? With her absurd physical abilities and… and Enhances Senses! He realized, shooting up.

Oh god… I was destined to come here sooner or later, wasn't I?

His mother. The thought that had kept powering him up at the start and that had slowly being eroded by the necessity of saving his own hide crept up once again. He needed to tell her that he was fine; he needed to survive; he couldn't make her worry.

A lot of questions about how she and her parents could be related to Alter overflowed in his mind, but they were all put aside.

What he realized was that he had an internal source of strength now, something beyond survival, something beyond gaining power.

So Gabriel stood up. Liz straightened and whipped her tongue at him. She realized that he was heading back to the immobile armored entity at the center of the empty chambers.

"You are back so soon? I expected you to linger a few days to accept your new… situation. Are you sure you are ready to continue, right now?"

"Enough with the tear-jerking. Let's deal with this."

The Tyrant grinned, this time wickedly.

***

They blocked the machete, receiving the blow with their left arm, the machete embedded in their forearm.

Most of the time, there were a handful of forerunners in their pursuit. The big black man with a bald head was one of them, his face too, they knew they had seen somewhere before but just couldn't place.

Liz tackled the man's left leg, always making him sway. At which point, Gabriel used the unbalance created to strike forth with a movement from the Kata of the Tide, successfully hitting the much bigger man in the abdomen and making him fall forward. That was the point in which Gabriel gripped the man's arm and rotated, freeing the grip he had on the machete.

The next thing was easy, yet once again, painful. Gabriel smashed the machete on a close tree, dislodging it from their left forearm and gripping the handle in mid-air with their right, more functioning hand.

At which point in a direct follow-up, they would slash down on the man's head, splitting his face and killing it.

Gabriel, once again, felt nothing from it. They knew those men were not real living beings but just a byproduct of the soulscape. But deep down, something had started creeping up during the previous days of this torture.

What if they were not? Would they allow the enemies to kill them? Or would Gabriel and Liz kill them first? That was a question most easily answerable.

So Gabriel just allowed no other emotions but the desire to live and a sort of bridled rage to drive them forward.

The forerunners were six, the same six that most of the time tortured them before killing them. Aside from that, the people were two dozen. They had managed to barely count them all in one of his longer escapes.

One other thing was clear, there were no guns. If they were, would they have half a chance at even getting so far?

They shook that thought away. They wouldn't allow anything more to cripple their willpower.

Of the six, two others reached them. By now, through repetition, they had almost managed to kill five of the enemies, getting hit in the eye by the crossbow woman before landing the last blow on the fifth enemy. At least that had been a clean death, there had been no torture, and they had respawned at the start of the trial. Realizing that, they had started walking on a new previously unthreaded path, something which they had not yet tried, something dangerous to rely on, but something which they would probably have to try soon anyway.

Gabriel successfully managed to get rid of the second assaulter, one armed with a gladius-like sword. Reaching this point, Liz's body always became unusable, as she was killed to distract the second attacker, he had an ax, allowing Gabriel to end his life as well, but fusing back into his Core-soul whatever thing that was.

Weezing, Gabriel waited for the other two, he could already see them, and the woman was right behind them. She meant real trouble. Her aim, always perfect.

If only we could have full use of our left arm...they realized. Not only were they barely using it, but it got weaker by the second, bringing with it dizziness given by the blood loss. They had tried it all to retain their forearm and disarm the man, but they didn't make any progress. The only scenario in which they did indeed disarm him was the one in which they sacrificed their left arm. Yet, in the long run, even that scenario was useless, they knew. They couldn't even afford the time to bandage the arm had they the means to, given that their current possession was only a pair of pants.

Maybe with one of their belts…

No distraction! They reminded themselves as the man with a katana attacked.

Gabriel now knew all he had to do was simply intercept the blow. The machete was heavier. The katana would break upon a powerful blow from it, though they had to act very fast because the katana user was much better than them at melee. It was something he had tested and tried many times now.

And the katana broke.

They whirled around the man, with a now useless blade, to escape from the other man with a gladius coming at their left.

They had not studied any form of weapon combat with the Kata that Olive had taught them. They were thus improvising the application now.

The Kata of the Tide allowed them to gain on their swirl around the man and finish it up with a chop to the neck, but the man with the broken kata always defended in the nick of time by raising his left arm to intercept the blow, only this time he wasn't fast enough. The slashing attack cut straight to his neck, not enough strength behind it to bisect the head, but leaving Gabriel to marvel for a second.

Had they been faster? More confident? They knew the scenarios did never repeat in the same way, but the people's characteristics stayed the same, and so did their abilities, which probably meant that they had gotten lucky, or maybe, they had improved enough to overpower the man in front of them. Was it possible? But once again, that was something they could not worry about for the moment, Gabriel knew that they would soon have to duck to evade the first arrow, but they did not know precisely when. It always changed.

Dealing with the man with the machete was easy, now that they had the body of the katana man to use as a shield. Hell, maybe it would shield them from the arrow as well.

Gabriel defended from the second attacker by intercepting his slash by using the katana man as a shield.

Had they had better use of their left arm, they could have done much more than that, but sad-

Pain.

Darkness.

And the forest paved once again in front of him.

"Fuck!" They said. They had lost too much time in thinking or being surprised, they had lost focus, and now hurried footsteps could be heard in the distance.

Once again, Gabriel started running toward the safer place, and the one without too many roots sticking out of the ground and stones that would hurt their feet, making them lose focus.

The scenario repeated again, but this time the katana man correctly stopped the blow, and soon later, they got killed, not by an arrow this time but by the man accompanying the one with the katana.

Once again, they ran through the forest.

Think Gabriel, think! How do we retain the use of our arm? How!? How!?

That was when something happened, something that they had not ever experienced yet. Epiphany triggered.