BlueShear
patreon
Jun’s POV (3)
🕑 Added 2024-10-29 01:36:34 +0000 UTCYou have been found lacking during the Stage of Gathering.
Thankfully, failure is admissible in those young and uninitiated. In that way, some amount of leniency is not only allowed, but encouraged.
BE WARNED!
The same can not be said for those whose ken has been recognized, deemed entirely sufficient. Whose actions engender grand consequence, far reaching in their scope.
Do You Wish to Restart the Trial?
YES/NO
(Note: Failure to accept will result in the total erasure of the Mantra in question. Physical and or spiritual backlash may or may not apply.)
Jun first read, then reread the notification.
He thought on its many implications while the misty void swirled all around him. Well, it wasn’t as if he liked the idea of incurring spiritual backlash. Whatever it was that entailed. And though he’d discovered something crucial in the unconventional way he died—something this grayish void allowed him to acknowledge with, what he would later recognize as, a frightening degree of separation—the fact still remained that he had no idea why it’d happened at all.
Or what exactly he was doing wrong. It required further study and investigation, in other words.
And with that in mind, Jun promptly selected yes. Immediately, the screen blinked out of existence, only to be replaced by the slowly rotating projection of the purple tinged fur ball he knew so very well.
Custom Mantra: [Cool Shooty Laser Eyes] (2nd Aspected)
Grade: (Trash Quality)
Conceptual Stability: 3%
Do you wish to spectate, assimilate, or edit?
Instinctually he could tell that the workshop would allow him an indefinite amount of time to fine tune the jumbled blueprint before once more attempting the trial. Rather lenient of it, he remarked to himself, more than a little surprised. It really did seem as if one of its primary goals was to teach, if in a somewhat roundabout manner.
Did that mean that if he remained “uninitiated,” whatever that entailed, that he’d effectively have an infinite number of redo’s? He didn’t know. And it was for that very reason that he promptly selected assimilate, jumping back into the fray—fickle and unreasonable iterative process be damned.
Within the blink of an eye, his surroundings changed. And suddenly, he was opening his eyes to the bitter cold, and a familiar rumbling baritone.
“You’ll be wanting to get up now, son.”
Without an ounce of hesitation, Jun leapt to obey.
***
“He tried to bite me! The fucking rat! Grubby son of an unwashed, two bit, penny grubbing-!”
With another grunt, and another expletive, the guardsman brought his cudgel whistling down. Connecting squarely with Jun’s temple this time, instead of his body, belly, or groin. It carried with it the full force of the grown man’s enhanced might, so that not even his forty odd points in resiliency were enough to resist the final blow.
The sound of his skull fracturing was so loud in his ears as to become a visceral sensation—a gnarled thumb jammed knuckle-deep into the exposed nerve endings of his rapidly dwindling consciousness.
One last firework to light up the abyssal night sky. Thankfully, the swelling of darkness took him long before the rising tide of nausea could swallow him whole.
A notification greeted him.
It was the same that’d arrived the last time he’d died. The last time he’d… died? Gods! He had died, hadn’t he? And not quickly this time around either. It was… well. It was rather anticlimactic, really. Honestly, given what he’d just been through, he’d expected to feel… well, something!
But aside from a faint memory of unpleasantness, the fading echoes of the terrible pain he’d endured, he was otherwise unbothered. It was actually pretty unsettling. Although he suspected this had a lot less to do with his impeccable levels of fortitude, and more to do with the gray mist that once more engulfed him.
Again, it was as if the mist itself were somehow blunting much of the impact that should’ve followed such a traumatic experience. Of literally being bludgeoned to death.
The sudden whiplash of it, the feeling of stark incongruity, leaving him rather numb to things in the interim. Even his thoughts began to feel hazy and inconsequential. It was all that he could do to maintain focus on the task at hand, in fact, lest he slip back into that all encompassing stupor. That place far removed from things like pain, or worry, or big men with long cudgels.
Right! So, what had he learned?
Well, for one thing, the prison guard were a lot stronger than they had any right to be. For another, they didn’t take kindly to one of their inmates being even marginally more comfortable than was absolutely necessary. Despite the bovine man’s firm insistence, he’d attempted to suborn the moth eaten blanket he’d awoken with.
To smuggle it further into the teeth chattering tundra that was the trial premises beyond. He’d quickly learned the hard way why that had been a very bad idea. Though it had to be said, the subsequent beating he received, administered on the trumped up charges of insubordination, didn’t actually become a lethal affair until he’d unwisely attempted to fight back.
Then…?
Well, then he learned his third lesson of the day. That his laser eyes, even if they didn’t work for shit, still took a gods awful amount of time to charge up to become even remotely useful. Plenty of time, in other words, for the irate guard to notice the telltale glow, land a half dozen more blows to… decidedly critical areas, and subsequently disrupt his already fraying concentration.
And worst of all, he hadn’t even managed to accomplish the singular goal he’d initially set out for. Establish a reliable data point. The exact how of his spontaneous, instability-fueled demise while inside the trial, so that he might compare it to the seemingly scripted one outside. Baby steps, effectively. And yet he was finding even that much was easier said than done.
Nothing for it, he supposed… And so, without further ado, Jun once more selected assimilate.
***
This time, he nearly made it to the other end of the massive prison yard before once more being accosted by one seedy element of dubious intent.
When the serpentine man bumped into him this time around, however, it found an antsy, somewhat compromised, but most definitely traumatized Jun all too ready to play ball. More than willing to give as good as he got. He spun on his heel, blurring to face the other inmate. Eyes flashing emerald green—brimming over with black promise and bloody intent.
“Are you okay, little one?” the snake man hissed. “My apologies. It was not my intent to jostle you about. Big crowds and all that. What can you do, am I right? Anyway, it was good meeting you. I’d best be on my way. Cheers Goro. I’ll be rooting for you in the upcoming match!”
And with a final cheery wave goodbye, just like that, the amiable snake man swiftly disappeared into the milling throng.
That… that was the same snake man, correct?
He could’ve sworn they were identical. And anyway, didn’t it… you know… have to be? Same guards, same Goro, same pugnacious snake man. Or so he’d thought. That had been the prevailing theory at least. But what if…?
There came another shove, this one far more intentional than the last.
“Hey!” the wolf man growled. “Watch where you’re-!”
Jun turned, releasing the dual beams of spearing force he’d just so happened to have in reserve. Sheering two fist sized holes through the back of his own skull in that very same instant, and emptying the rest of its steaming contents onto the slick flagstones below.
He then toppled, like a puppet with its strings cut—unmistakably deceased and already cooling to the touch—leaving naught but a decidedly bewildered wolf man standing over an awfully defiant looking corpse.
***
It took him five more deaths before he manage to cobble together the what, if not the how, of his mantra’s single point of failure. A revelation which ultimately left him at something of an impasse. More specifically…
“Well. What the hell do I do now?”
Currently, he found himself at the far end of the prison courtyard—a quiet little out of the way nook, just as Goro had indicated—doing push-ups in the vain attempt to ward away the cold.
He’d learned a few things whilst ramming his forehead against the unending crucible he now found himself in, though pitifully little when one considered the exorbitant cost. His many many excruciating deaths.
Lacking the glorious gray mists of the in-between space to dull his sensations, emotions, and everything in between, he was finding each subsequent death harder and harder to simply shrug off. It was only a minor issue right now—he was a bit more touchy perhaps, and far more likely to lash out—but he could see the writing on the wall.
The likelihood of it becoming a serious problem as he racked up more and more traumatic experiences.
Happy thoughts Jun. Happy thoughts.
The first thing he’d discovered was the existence of what he liked to call the inciting “wandering shoulder,” incident. This was essentially where some lug head or another got it into their thick skull that ragging on the new guy was a truly inspired idea. Often resulting in the leading shoulder of our leading man or woman, rocketing toward one scrupulous, downright blameless young man as if by gravitational pull—colliding with the slow inevitability of neighboring neutron stars.
Only, in this instance, one was actually a hell of a lot tougher than the other. Said bruiser was often variable, indeed, rarely was he confronted by the same face twice. And while it was true that, whether it happened early or late was entirely dependent on the choices he made, ultimately, it would happen eventually, no matter what he did.
The second thing he’d learned was that it was shockingly easy to side step the whole “wandering shoulder” thing entirely.
Basically, he’d found that, by simply leaning into his close proximity to Goro, effectively bringing his assailant to the bovine giant’s attention, anyone raring for a fight was almost immediately deterred, and otherwise disabused of that very silly notion. Wouldn’t you know it? Fifteen foot giants with the heads of bulls could be pretty damn scary when they wanted to be.
Go figure.
Which only left him with one problem. He needed a way to alter the effect of his mantra, so that it activated in a fashion that didn’t instantly kill him. For that to happen, he’d probably have to die.
Likely a bunch of times, if he had the right of it, considering he now knew for a fact that he couldn’t trust the spectate option to give him accurate information.
The thing was? He didn’t want to die.
He honestly would much rather avoid it, if at all possible. Being killed was kind of the worst, and killing himself even more so. Worse than that was when you knew it was coming. To say it was daunting would be the understatement of the century, and he was finding it more and more difficult to willingly pull that trigger.
Still, if this was the price he had to pay…
Jun grit his teeth, fully aware that he was stalling. Rising to his knees, if only to give his numb fingers a break, he recognized that this was the furthest he’d gotten into the trial thus far. That he still hadn’t the faintest clue what, if any, objective was in play was, if anything, a blessing in disguise.
Because, for whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to shake the idea that the second he did get a handle on things, his wealth of free restarts would suddenly dry up. Bracing himself, Jun recited his fiendish mantra, flinching at the sharp, though ultimately brief burst of pain that preempted the overwhelming darkness.
