Not only had Gabriel managed to bring his armor over to the spiritual world, but his bag and lance too.

"Well, they are only here as parts of your identity. You recognize them as yours; thus, they will act as their functions require, exactly as your panties were used to hide your nudity." The mayor explained to him once back into the memory of the battle.

"Good to know."

Gabriel was not feeling comfortable with his training anymore. Thinking about his new view on the value of life and how poor it was, confused him.

Really, he knew that what he had experienced was just a scenario built for him to train his psyche, but it felt real, vivid, and, more importantly, it had scarred him. It had brought changes to his view, changes from which it was difficult to back out of.

More than being worried about his new morale, though, he was concerned about how he would relate to his life once he was back to Alter, or more importantly, back to Earth.

Would he be the person he once was? Somehow, he doubted it.

Shaking the thoughts tormenting him away. Gabriel focused on his objective.

"What is it that I have to do here?" He asked the mayor.

"That is really simple, but let me explain some of this memory's qualities to you," the mayor took a breath, probably still a habit to him, or since as a Tyrant, he did not do such a thing, a sort of escape from his situation. "This is not the original memory anymore, or at least, it is but, not as it was handed to me." The mayor opened his arms wide.

"This was but a simple memory. Not something interactive as it is now. We were meant to simply look at it and learn what there was to learn. During my long stay, I… added something to it. Well, more than something."

"What do you mean?" Gabriel asked, suddenly intrigued.

"Follow me, and you'll see."

They traveled north, into the battlefield where the harsher battles were taking place.

Gabriel couldn't help but notice the change in scenery. The closer they headed, the more violent the battles. The bigger the 'demons,' the nastier their exchange with the troops.

The troops were separated in many different platoons, not that he could really distinguish them. What he could identify, though, were their roles; Heavy armor for those that put their bodies in the protection of their allies, lighter armor for those that moved around, assaulting the, at times Lovecraftian, enemies in droves. Robes, sometimes leather armor for the casters, could swear he saw some heavy armor wearing casters too. The same could be said to those dressed in pure white. There were quite a few of them, healers. They all dressed in the same manner, almost all with a fervent look in their eyes. They struck him as crazed believers for some reason. Yet they did their job well, and fast.

Though only the healers looked to belong all to the same organization, or almost all of them, there was something peculiar about them… maybe it was because they were all humans or because of the peculiar red tint in their eyes. He couldn't tell; it was as if he had already seen something of the like. Anyway, it was entirely the opposite for the fighters.

They were as different as it came. Different species, different armors, different dresses, different adornments, weapons. It was like all the species of worlds unknown to him had joined the war against the Plague. It was epic yet unreal.

There was one other thing that stood out immediately to him: the complete lack of Bond Spirit.

Or at least, he saw mounts, he saw pets, even giant pets. But he could now see the bond between a man and his Spirit with Spirit Sight. There was not even a single druid in the army.

Maybe they did not exist yet?

"You see," the mayor continued, "I had… a lot of time to waste in this place… and I can't hide that I really got bored. Really bored. So after I set up the Challenge that the dungeon forced me to. I started building, The Memory - version two, it sounds silly, but that's how I called it." The mayor launched what looked almost like an embarrassed smile.

"Not as silly as you think," Gabriel answered, sneering.

"Really? Anyway, what I did was... animate most of these soldiers, living their lives, giving them meaning, a new purpose, creating personalities. Most of the time, boring personalities, but once I got the hang of my scripts and some experience, it became better. Of course, of course... I did not go back to adjust them, I keep them as a reminder of my horrifying abilities, but you'll discover my work for your own, given time."

Gabriel stopped following midway. "You… animated them? Meaning, all this was just, like… a movie, and you gave them real personalities?"

"I don't know what a movie is, but yes, they are all alive. You'll notice how the start of the battle feels static and how it changes with time. Even the outcome is not always the same, or their experiences, their actions. I've breathed life in them. And I'm really proud of my work," the mayor nodded to himself while saying so, before continuing, "Yes, there is a major flaw. How could it not be? All their personalities stem from one and one only, mine. So it starts being obvious if one spends too much time inside of The Memory. But, that's all that I could do, though really, ten thousand or so years are not really enough to give life to a couple of million soldiers."

"Mi-millions!?" Holy shit.

"And what is my requirement to win this training? Please don't tell me that I have to beat them all because that's just not feasible. Not even remotely with my present abilities."

"No, that would be absurd. Believe me, I tried while coming here in my… other form. Once it's clear that I'm a superior threat to even the strongest of the Plague creatures, I die in five minutes. So, no. What you have to do is drive them to win this war, subtly, openly or however, you desire. Bend their mind and spirits to your will and win. You will have unlimited Mana and all your abilities. This time though, the Mana you'll be using won't be real, imprint cleansed Mana. I don't have enough time or power to cleanse all the Mana you'll need to reach your objective. So you won't be Tiering up your Skill, but you'll be shifting your Synchronization to fit our objective. One more thing, you will be susceptible to damage, not this first run, you should at least experience it once without dying, like every adept, but I suggest you be in the backlines, all the same. Now that I've said all I needed to say. Have fun, Gabriel!"

After that, the mayor disappeared, not even giving the young man a chance to ask something or tell him that he was a crazy motherfucker.

Is this for real?

Liz, which stood by his side, looked between the man and the army, confused. Then came a voice.

"Move aside!" What looked like a blue elf shouted at him, elbowing him to move. It wasn't enough. After Gabriel tumbled to the ground, a considerable goblet of what looked like violet spit washed over them. Submerging them in its acid, and melting them to the bones, and those too after a few more seconds.

"Fuck!" Shouted Gabriel. He was back, once more in the backlines of the army.

He looked around. The scenery had slightly changed. Maybe it was the start of The Memory; he had yet to witness it.

Soldiers marched toward the not so distant lands, above which the sky started taking a pale green color, lightning discharging crazily, both in the atmosphere and slamming the ground. He could feel their vibrations shaking the ground even from there.

As he stood taking in the spectacle, once, twice, thrice, soldiers barged onto him, shoving the man left and right.

"Move."

"Get out of the way."

"Why aren't you moving, soldier?"

Voices of unknown faces kept pushing him to move, or continue, or asking him why he wasn't advancing, telling him that desertion was punished by death. But he did not care… he didn't listen to them. Gabriel just stared at them leave, heading to the portals. There were so fucking many of them.

The dumbfounded man kept advancing, staying behind every single one of them. Looking like an outsider both by his looks and by his behavior.

He studied the unfolding of the battle.

It was surreal.

The Plague creature dropped from the sky in hordes.

From giant beasts to minuscule creatures, they all advanced toward them, fearless.

The biggest ones were always in front, absorbing the damage or diverting the attention toward them. Some of them looked and were effectively deadly. Other times the dangerous, mortal ones were those on the back lines.

Yet monsters of all kinds were among the Plague. In each wave, rarely, a monster looked like another. Of course, Gabriel had barely the chance to look at the battlefield from his position, so he couldn't know if, from another of the many portals in the sky, the horde presented differently. What he saw was that each of the Plague monsters was, mostly, each their own individual. Each one probably filling a specific role. Or so he thought.

After a couple of hours, Gabriel couldn't but focus on the details. Staring was all he could do, staring and trying to survive.

He launched Analyze after Analyze, but ninety-nine percent were utterly useless. The level was different, far too vast.

Sometimes he noticed that when he looked at their levels, Gabe saw two question marks most of the time, but many others still, he could see three.

At a certain point, the battle took a turn for the worse for the sentients' alliance.

The monster's number did not grow. It remained constant. The problem was in the dwindling number of the defending army.

They just do not stop. How many can there be?

Yet, after five hours of constant battling, he had no idea how he had still remained alive, probably just luck or 'divine intervention', since many times he could see monsters targeting him changing course at the last moment, the battlefield took entirely another beat.

With a deafening rumble, which caught each soldier's attention, the circles in the sky started moving. They grew closer and closer until they finally joined after a dozen or so minutes since the roar.

They exploded in a green light. It washed mighty waves of something the man could not define, maybe plasma, over the center of the battlefield.

In the end, the circle disappeared in a discharge of gigantic and innumerable green-tainted bolts of lightning, which assaulted the defending army's every battalion and spread over the sky, investing those that flew.

At the end of the devastating attack, the battlefields wept with tens of thousands of soldiers' unexpected death. But if it only was for that… though it wasn't.

The center of the army had been the place that suffered more casualties if slowly, the green waves of plasma annihilated the place where most of the strongest, the leaders, probably champions of the army, had gathered. Now only great clouds of sickly looking smoke emanated from the battlefield's once lively center, and it wasn't all.

When the chaos settled, something was clear.

The remaining monster's power had increased quite substantially.

Gabriel couldn't believe what he was seeing. So he analyzed one for the monsters whose power was still in the double question marks before the mighty attack. A monster defined 'Plague Reaper of the Desolate Wastes' whose main strength lay in its mind-blowingly fast mighty scythes, maybe fast for his Alacrity, still… he judged that he would end up dead in less than a second if he ever fought one of them. When the analysis answered him, the monster levels showed three question marks.

Thinking it was just an isolated case, he analyzed another, and another and yet again.

The same result each time. The monsters had gained levels many levels, and for that reason, their advance started crippling the alliance's army.

It became a matter of minutes when the massacre began to have serious repercussions over the possibility of a recovery for the defending army.

When it was clear that the enemy had won, the army's morale died down.

The monsters kept falling, but the army did so faster.

From his gut feeling, Gabriel thought the two armies had roughly the same chance of victory at that moment. It might all have been related to the conviction, desire for victory, morale.

But there were still a couple hundred thousand men and women battling the monsters. There was no way he could learn how to bend all those many people into pushing themselves to the brim and overcome the walls of the many fewer monsters remaining.

Letting that be for the moment, he focused on the battle still raging in front of him.

So much more contained now, he could actually see real powers and some of the most terrifying monsters raging over the battlefield.

If there was something he would never wish to encounter, it was one of those monsters with an upside-down, bleeding crown over their heads. Its body was the color of blood, long, frail-looking, and thin. It reminded him of the word 'sickness.' Its limbs long, its digits scarily stretched. They head shoulders length hair of a desolating white, and they were dressed in nothing. They had empty black eye-sockets, they were devoid of the nose and had one colossal mouth which they never seemed to open.

It was called 'Glory of Kings of the Desolate Wastes.' At this point, he had figured out that the wording 'Desolate Wastes' was tied to the location in which they had spawned, and at this now, he was sure they did not come from the green circles. They spawned from those.

From what he understood of the monster's intricate attack patterns, he gathered that it could immobilize its prey just by looking at it or in some cases pointing at it with its long pointy nails, then it proceeded in making its target kill himself or herself by skinning themselves alive, starting from their faces and digging deeper from there.

Gabriel thought it was about mind control or… Maybe that's some form of mind-bending or spiritual-bending? Absurd...

Inflicting paralysis, fear, agony, mind-control, emotion-control. The monster had access to most of those forms of bending, and it felt almost unstoppable.

Gabriel noticed how it took many white tunic-wearing individuals to stop it or interrupt its abilities. At least they had a semblance of power over its mind-controlling capabilities, seemingly immune to it. Sadly, what they weren't immune from was the attack the Kings launched when they finally opened their mouths.

The movements were slow, or at least that was how he registered it, probably feeling, in part, the intensity of the agony which it released. The mayor's blessing had saved him already a couple of hundred times during the last few hours.

When the Glory of Kings finally opened its mouth wide, which meant for roughly an unnatural three feet wide, something happened, something that could not be seen, but its result was always the same. The white tunic interloper exploded in gore.

The Skill had, fortunately, a singular use and targeted only one individual at a time.

There were many other terrifying creatures out there, some of them dealt in malady and other disgusting things, but the Glory of Kings scared him shitless; Gabriel didn't know why it just did.

He thought almost six hours had gone by since the start of the battle. Gabriel walked among corpses, bloody remains, and mountainous cadavers of monsters. The thinning forces were fighting a few overly buffed creatures, but they were on the losing end of the conflict.

The remaining creatures, among them a Glory of Kings, were overwhelming them.

Those remaining were by far the strongest monsters the Plague could offer. What remained of the alliance instead… were lucky survivors and barely a handful of healers.

In the end, the monsters overwhelmed them, and the few thousand survivors started streaming out of the battlefield, running away for their lives. They had seen something that took away all of their hopes.

In the sky another, the enormous green circle began manifesting.

No… The man thought.

Thunders rumbled, lightning shot everywhere, the sky split, the clouds parted.

Once more, it got released. The flares hit the ground, descending from up, over the clouds.

Gabriel was almost in the middle of it. The green flares expanded once they hit the ground, flashing over him. He could see them sweep over the corpses, like waves of the sea. When they backed away, the flares brought something back with them, something… almost ethereal, ghastly, immoral...

Those are the Spirits of the dead!

He couldn't believe it. The green flares collected the souls of the fallen, bringing them over to the circles, while at the same time, it scorched the living to death.

My god…

When it surged up in the sky once again, the flares turned into lightning, descending down, but now that he was closer, now that there was no chaos, he could thoroughly see the effects of the lightning.

They were not targeting the alliance members. They focused on the center of the battlefield, investing the monsters.

What?

The monster's stopped in their tracks then, with renewed vigor and a new incredible air about them, they, fast as lightning themselves, passed over the survivors, over those that were still escaping, and like bloody damn angels of death, ripped their lives.

Unstoppable like death itself, they became monstrously strong and eradicated the few thousand soldiers remaining alive. They did not manage to offer any kind of resistance.

The remaining monsters disemboweled, bisected, blew, and ripped the soldiers' lives in less than a minute.

Not a sentient's soul remained walking the battlefield.

Once the monsters had done, they regrouped in the center of the field, looking among themselves then, with Gabriel's great surprise, they raged war among them.

The battle escalated in a matter of minutes. They demonstrated powers far too troublesome.

In the end, only four remained alive of those creatures, four monsters of unequivocal might, their powers going far, far above all those he had seen during the war.

One of them was the Glory of Kings.

Another was called Vengeance of Fallen. The monster in question was pale azure. His body could phase through things, shifting to a transparent, ghostly appearance while it did so.

His shape was that of a humanoid, but it clearly wasn't. If Gabriel didn't know better, he would call it a… banshee. Long hair that reached its calves, huge eyes the color of pure gold. It floated in the air, its feet never touching the ground. Its arms were capable of extending to seemingly unending lengths. Its power concerned curses, slow hitting, yet unfathomably powerful curses.

It was able to seal everything about its target, from their movements to their organs, their very breath. It could hex them to death through disgusting curses capable of every sort of thing.

The third monster was gigantic, one of the biggest creatures generated by the green circles, it was called Fury of Saints.

It easily reached the size of a four stories building. It had skins and fur of a white so shiny that it was hard to look at. It stood on six paws, a crest adorned its neck, and it had a fluffy tail, almost making it look cute if one didn't take into consideration the myriads of bone horns jutting out from its body. Those coming out of its head were by far the most intricate and beautiful Gabriel had ever seen. But as stunning to look at, this fusion of a lion and a stag was, its corruption abilities could melt bodies and turn enemies into allies with but a look.

Gabriel had already noticed the monster, it's beauty hard not to gaze upon. This type of creature was so powerful that they were always among the last to fall even though their mass made them an easy target for every ranged attacker, but rarely such attacks affected it. Most of them were eroded in mid-air, never reaching their target.

Gabriel could swear that he had never seen the creature so much as raise a paw to attack. Its passive might was already so great that it hardly needed physical contact with its enemy.

The Dream of Slaves was the last of the four types of creature left alive.

Dream of Slaves was… savage. It was carnage incarnate. That was the only way in which Gabriel could describe the creature.

The monster was… obscene.

Still, mostly humanoid, the creature was small. Its form was resistant, but if that was not enough, it was, simply put, immortal, never-ending.

It was utterly black; looking at it almost seemed as looking at the absence of light caused by black holes.

Its frame was small, the smallest among the four creatures. As small as a child, its body looked exactly like that of a child, though hermaphrodite, and with a hole in the center of its flat head.

The creature attacked with its arms and legs. It frequently changed shape to adapt to its enemies or needs, though it always returned to its original form when it took care of its enemy.

Its physical power was incalculable. Gabriel had seen it whip its elongated arm on a platoon of enemies, utterly not caring of any magical or physical defenses, its arm passing through their barriers and bodies and digging a perfectly symmetrical gash in the red terrain. It shattered everything in its path with but a fist, generating power and speed above any physical law it won every duel. Always among the last remaining alive in a Plague spawn batch.

The four remaining survivors face each other, unwilling to continue, probably recognizing the threat they posed to each other. Finally, as they had reached something that looked like a tacit agreement. Their heads shot up, toward the sky,

After a few seconds, another wave of plasma passed over the lands, collecting all the deceased's souls, people, and monsters alike.

No! Don't! Gabriel said, knowing that what would happen simply shouldn't. But it did.

Gigantic lightning bolts, so massive that they looked like immense highways descending from the skies, invested the four champions of nightmare.

When the light had finally dissipated, Gabriel knew there was only one thing he could do.

He cast Analyze on them.

The last thing he thought about before, somehow the Dream of Slaves noticed him and whipped his arm at him even though the distance was easily a mile between them and he was faking death, was that now the question marks on them were made of four digits.