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Jun’s POV (7)
🕑 Added 2024-10-29 02:00:26 +0000 UTCGoro tore across the sandy arena like all the gates of hell were at his back.
Crossing hundreds of meters in the time it took for Jun to fire off a single beam, planting a massive fist into one fancily armored cuirass, and punching—who he was just going to assume was this Grand Duke—straight through the opposite wall.
Like, actually through the damned wall!
Going so far as to leave a comically person shaped impression. An unfinished snow angel stamped directly into the worn metal. From which the Grand Duke’s unmoving body pitifully clung and sparked. Seconds later, the shockwave of it impacted his chest like a hard slap, violently ruffling his hair.
“Well. I’d say he has things well in hand over on that end.”
Jun turned, releasing yet another series of beams on what few of the prison guards weren’t cowed by his earlier display.
A few neat holes drilled through the skulls of the leading guardsmen put an end to their short lived charge, and nearly had the added benefit of routing those he’d left alive. It was strange. He didn’t really want to kill these men. He took no pleasure in it, that much was for sure. But neither did he hesitate.
Perhaps it was the ordeal he’d suffered in recent months.
The act of dying so many times making it so that he didn’t see death in the same light as he once had. Conversely, it could simply be that he was always at least subconsciously aware that this was all a simulated world created for his express benefit, and once he reentered the real world at large he would likewise appreciate the sanctity of life with all the solemnity it was due.
Or maybe it was simply that these guys were assholes, and this world, simulated or otherwise, was better off without them.
Either way, he didn’t think he’d be losing much sleep over it. Indeed, after setting free the other of the two chained inmates, and letting them deal with the remaining guardsmen and women, he found himself more curious than anything. What a strange world he found himself in. With peoples and technologies he couldn’t have dreamed of back on his own world.
He wondered idly if this was based on any place in particular.
The sheer depth and breadth of detail, cultural background, and varied history seemed too extensive to have been generated wholesale. Indeed, wouldn’t it have been far more cost effective to base this entire simulation off of an actual place that’d existed at some point?
Then he wondered if it would be at all possible to take the secrets of this world's technology and somehow transport them. There was power to be had in the technological advances he’d witnessed in his short time here. And as the sole distributor of said knowledge, a great deal of capital to be had as well.
It was around then that one of the strangely armored swordsmen caught wind of his existence, the apparent cause of their prisoner’s impromptu jailbreak, and, along with his buddy, began to sprint in his direction.
There were ten of the swordsmen in total, and while the majority were currently occupied with protecting their Duke, protecting themselves, and otherwise keeping the bovine man at bay, two had apparently taken it into their heads to see that the threat at their rear be taken care of.
“Only two?” Jun wondered aloud. “I don’t know whether to feel insulted or relieved.”
The other inmate, a scaly, almost dragon-like humanoid—having just finished tearing the throats out of the remaining guardsmen—replied with a gruff, though unmistakably female, voice.
“Terrified would be the most appropriate response, stranger. Those are Sky Bright mercenaries, if you couldn’t tell. Spell-swords of the highest caliber. If there is a god for whom you routinely pray, I would suggest you do so now and with great speed. Although I suppose you’ll be meeting him face to face soon enough.”
Jun merely gave the woman a dismissive tsk—absentmindedly channeling Auntie Viri subconsciously. Something for which he’d have been mortified to learn, had he been made aware of it at the time.
“You can pray if you want. I’ll just occupy my time with poking a few choice holes in our guests in the meanwhile.”
And so saying, Jun silently intoned his mantra, feeling the telltale spike of pain burrow through his brain as he did so, which signaled to him that everything was basically on the up and up. Invisible bands of iron locked his limbs in place, leaving naught but his eyeballs with the capacity to move.
His vision was tinted a bright green hue seconds before, with a sudden, glorious release of mental pressure, a burst of manifest piercing speared toward the leading swordsman. Jun was already tracking towards the latter swordsman—having dismissed the first from his mind—when, to his utter shock, his concentrated beam of conceptual force skittered off harmlessly.
Leaving an inch deep furrow in the shining metal plate, but doing little else.
In any event, if he’d been surprised by the rather lackluster outcome, the two swordsman were equally caught off guard—skidding to a halt a couple hundred paces out and observing him with a wariness that’d been entirely absent previously—and the draconic woman to his side even more so.
She gasped. The sound that escaped her reptilian throat resembling the whisper of steel on steel.
“Merciful ancestors… To leave such a mark on sacred steel…? And here I’d thought the cleaving of Mythrilite to be the extent of its abilities-”
“Spearing, actually,” Jun cut in hurriedly, worried enough to drop his mantra momentarily. “You meant spearing right!” he loudly exclaimed. “Repeat after me, the spearing of Mythrilite?! After all, what else could that attack have been?!”
Then in a quiet whisper he said.
“Quickly! Before it hears you! It’s actually a really important distinction. Some might even say it’s ‘a matter of ‘life and death,’ hint hint. Your words need to be very particular with regard to powers like mine. The optics here are very important.”
“Spearing? Cleaving? Boy… whatever it is, it’s one powerful arcana you got your hands on. Stronger than any I’ve seen,” she marveled.
“Spearing then! You know, if it’s all the same to you?! Or piercing, I suppose, if you suddenly find the mood takes you.”
“Boy, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve just done the impossible. I’m happy to call it whatever you wish. If nothing else, I can now die satisfied, knowing I’ve witnessed something few people will ever see in their lifetime.”
Jun frowned at the implication. Well, with his mantra once more invoked, it would be more accurate to say he would have frowned if he was able.
Arcana, huh? The workshop did say something about an “arcane metropolis.” Is arcana these peoples’ form of cultivation?
Either way, he didn’t appreciate the assertion that what he’d just done was the extent of his abilities.
He’d barely put any oomph into it dammit!
It was just that he’d assumed little present, if anything, could withstand even a weaker blast. He didn’t know what this sacred steel was, but apparently it was capable of withstanding quite a bit of punishment. Arrogant of him, he supposed. He would just have to take them seriously then.
Once more, Jun recalled his mantra, but this time he didn’t stop until his head felt sure to implode, and he could actually hear his bones creak.
The swordsmen, finally shaking off their brief hesitation, burst into motion at twice the speed they had shown previously. Now moving quite erratically, in an obvious attempt to throw off his aim—zigzagging this way and that, pirouetting through the air, and periodically rolling across the arena’s black sands—they proceeded to close the distance rapidly.
From two hundred paces to a hundred and fifty.
A hundred twenty paces to a bare seventy.
Only when they were approaching a stone's throw away, did Jun finally release the crippling pressure bearing down on his mind Unfortunately for these poor swordsmen, for all their acrobatics, all he really needed to do was track them with his eyes, and they weren’t moving so fast that he found that impossible.
Oh, and it probably didn’t help that, at this range, the beams traveled more or less instantaneously. The two beams ripped forth in quick, violent bursts, feeling like they tore something vital from him in their haste.
Jun staggered, blood fountaining from his nostrils. His vision was blurry and his ears were ringing something fierce. Still, he’d gotten off better than the other guy. The two armored swordsmen fell to the black sands, dead—a neat hole drilled into the spot between their brows.
Glancing to the side, his movements sluggish and uncoordinated, he studied the draconic woman. She gaped in blank astonishment. Looking to him, then the corpses, back to him, and then the corpses again. Jun cleared his throat, wincing at the stab of pain that evinced.
His head was killing him.
The female’s reptilian eyes locked onto him, an indecipherable gleam having entered her eyes. A feverish gaze he wasn’t entirely sure he liked the look of.
“Hey. Could you, uh, carry me closer to that group over there,” he gestured towards where Goro was fighting for his life, and barely hanging on by the looks of it. “I’m pretty sure I have a few more of those beams in me, but it’s kind of hard to walk at the moment, and I won’t be able to charge up and move at the same time anyway-!”
Before he’d even finished, the scaly woman had picked him up by his armpits, and had begun charging towards the ongoing battle, holding him before her like a charm to ward off evil spirits. Jun, for his part, sunk back into the painful depths of his mantra, charging up another few beams.
As the pain in his head mounted, they grew ever closer to the hectic conflict, until, with a series of rapid fire releases, he managed to pierce four out of the eight remaining swordsmen—taking them out of the fight if he didn’t kill them outright. Blood was gushing from his mouth and welling up in his eyes now. He was forced to cancel his mantra momentarily to rapidly blink them away.
Already, he could feel his life slipping further and further from him.
It was the cost of doing business.
He wouldn’t have been able to fashion the mantra in the way he had without some pretty major downsides. He had two, maybe three more fully charged beams in him before he met an untimely demise. Briefly, he wondered if there was a way he could measure and organize the exacting details of his abilities and their use case.
The number of uses before continued application became fatal, whether or not rest periods had any sizable effect on his body's longevity, etc. It was definitely something worth thinking about.
Snapping back to the present, he fired off a couple more beams at the remaining swordsmen, both going embarrassingly wide of their targets. Which, to be fair, given the fact that he couldn’t technically see at the moment, he thought it was a pretty decent achievement.
He was close, at least.
Thankfully, no one really appeared to take notice of his bad aim. It would seem his dramatic entrance had already left something of an impression. The armored swordsmen scrambled, shocked by the sudden downing of what he was only now beginning to suspect was their society's equivalent of an invincible soldier.
Although, unlike the first of their kind to be faced with such a world shattering revelation, these four were given no time to pick up the pieces of their previous paradigm.
For instance, absorbed by the crumpled form of his late companion, one such swordsman, who’d been dancing circles around Goro until just recently—flaying the poor giant one playful cut at a time—was just a smidge too slow to move out of the way.
When walking a field of bear traps, you could navigate it perfectly from end to end, and yet, be it the first time or the hundredth, it only ever took one false move to lose a leg. When Goro’s fist connected with the guy's armored chest, everyone on the arena floor felt it.
And, as the man went winging up high into the stands, the rest apparently decided they’d had quite enough.
They scattered like rodents, one choice soldier having the right of mind to retrieve their still unconscious employer, the Grand Duke what’s his name, before they fled. And yet flee they still did, leaving the black sands free of all but his fellow inmates.
There were words exchanged between Goro, the chain of prisoners, and his scaly means of transportation, but by then the world was already fading to black.
There was the rush of movement.
The sound of a female guard.
The voice striking enough to actually pierce through the thick haze slowly draping itself over his mind.
He knew that voice. It’d been one of three to greet him every time he began this bothersome trial. He spared a thought for the peculiarity, especially since, by the sound of it, Goro and this woman appeared to be on good terms.
Even that curiosity soon faded into the background however. Until the last thought he had before everything faded to black, was how unfair it was he fail the trial now of all times, after everything he’d done to see it through.
Seriously…? After all that? You’ve gotta be kidding me with this…
***
Ding!
Congratulations!
You have successfully completed a |3 Stars| ranked trial.
OBJECTIVE CLEARS
Main Objective: Show moderate proficiency with the Custom Mantra [Piercing Gaze].
Complete.
Main Objective: Show that you can competently wield the Custom Mantra [Piercing Gaze] in live combat.
Complete.
Hidden Objective: Aid the half-blood rebellion in their time of need, freeing one of their greatest generals from his unlawful imprisonment.
Complete.
Hidden Objective: Betray the trust of the halfbreed rebellion and aid the Grand Duke in his righteous crusade.
Incomplete.
Hidden Objective: Kill the Grand Duke Maximilian Alexander De Campos.
Incomplete.
Hidden Objective: Kill the rebel general Gorothy the Red.
Incomplete.
Secret Objective: Make yourself invaluable to the leaders of the rebellion.
Complete.
TITLES OBTAINED
Ding!
A temporary title has been awarded due to your performance within the trial world.
|Free Thinker| (Limited)
Earned by iterating in a direction previously unexplored in all the multiverse. Unstable, malfunctional, and more likely to harm your person than the enemy, let it never be said a free thinker does not deserve points for originality.
+1 celestial essence to body, mind, and soul.
There is now a fifty percent chance for you to receive a “Great Job!” sticker upon awakening.
Ding!
A temporary title has been awarded due to your performance within the trial world.
|Death Strider| (Limited)
Earned not only by courting death’s embrace time and time again, but by coming out the other side with most of your sanity intact.
+500 celestial essence to mind.
Should you wish it, you are now less likely to die from what would otherwise be a fatal injury. Conversely, should you will it, you are now more likely to die a quick and painless death, even should the wound you receive be less than fatal.
(Note: These effects are only applicable whilst within a simulated trial.)
(Note: by completing a sufficiently high ranked trial, it is possible to transform a temporary title into one that is functional outside of a simulated space.)
RENOWN BONUSES
Your footprint within the niche world of blood sport—the casual pastime enjoyed by many an Arcane Metropolis citizen—is as widely felt as it’s implications are far reaching. By rendering aid to the imprisoned leaders of a failing rebellion, you place yourself squarely in the camp of half-blood’s everywhere. Conversely, by sticking your hand where it did not belong, you place yourself at odds with Grand Duke Maximillian Alexander De Campos. A man whose fame and influence span entire planetary systems. A man who never forgets an insult. Whose vast wealth and powerful connections are spoken about in hushed tones of awe. A man who will go to great lengths to redress any perceived wrong. Rest assured that, should you ever fall within his jurisdiction, he will do everything in his power to erase your name from existence.
You are now more likely to find yourself within a friendly rebel base.
Acclaim Bonus: The Half-blood Rebellion
Notoriety Bonus: Fallen Iron Fist Sect, Maximilian Alexander De Campos
GREATER ALIGNMENTS
You have yet to commune with either heaven or hell. Your soul remains pure and untainted.
Heavenly Alignments: NOT APPLICABLE
Demonic Alignments: NOT APPLICABLE
Complete Further Trials to Discover your Star Ranking.
(Note: the more difficult the trial, the higher your overall ranking will be.)
Trials Completed: [2 of 100]
Overall Performance Rating: C+
