Chapter 137—Expanded Training

AG. Two audio files. Decided for this one it was better to keep the chapter together

He smiled as he arrived back in DEUS’s main gathering area. Today’s duel had been fun. Not only had it been an interesting fight, the WADOR representative had been a good sport and had even gifted him weapons that would make him more powerful going forward.

He quickly checked what he had received and frowned. None of them had any things as useful as the eat magic ability which what had been imprinted on Baptiste’s spear. They were all related to using the oversized weapons more effectively. A couple of mass enchantments, a phasing ability, armour shattering, and one knife had a return functionality.

They were still however tier three and an upgrade to anything else he could use and even he had to admit that the various abilities would shine in niche encounters. He had just been spoiled by the bonus that Baptiste’s spear had received. He guessed it was the difference between the peak of a tier and the midpoint. It made sense that he wasn’t always going to hit the jackpot and have everything upgrade to the very peak of power. Mind you, the armour shattering ability by itself would increase his probability of winning duels by half a percent or so as he could now counter heavily armoured individuals.

He was stronger, so by definition it was a good day. Screams erupted behind him.

Surprised by the cacophony of noise, he spun to look at the commotion.

There was a widening gap as people moved away from a section of the room.

A bloody mess was revealed. Scattered body parts like a butcher had gone to town, veins, tendons and a foul smell. It was chaotic and for a moment he didn’t understand what he was looking at and then the mess of organic matter consolidated into the form of an ostrich like person.

Tom wasn’t particularly engaged with the community beyond his direct friends and tutors, but he recognised her. She was in his bracket and notable because of her lack of useful limbs beyond the legs she used to run. While he had little to do with her, the same could not be said about most of his cohort and they were the ones yelling.

Nausea swelled up from his guts, and he clenched his throat to hold in a vomit. It wasn’t only the smell. It was the state she had been left in. The fight she had come back from had left her barely recognisable as a living being. Not only had all of her feathers been plucked, but her organs had been extracted from her insides and were on display with pulsing delicate veins still linking them back into the body.

It was a horror show.

There was a swirl of motion as the ground next to the body broke apart to create a large barrel sized basin that contained Vturalta.  

A familiar potion was in her tentacles that she held out to the quivering mass of organs. The world glowed, which signalled acceptance and then Vturalta poured it onto the injuries. The impact of the restoration magic was immediate and disgusting. Organs started to get sucked into the physical body, helped along by Vturalta as she carefully shepherded them back.

The ostrich girl was being healed!

Hope blossomed, then Vturalta rotated the body to give her better access, and Tom saw the trident.

The optimism that had started to grow withered away to nothing.

There it was a trident tattooed on her skin, mocking all of them.

He found himself unable to speak or feel or do anything as he looked at that familiar calling card. The trident had struck again. The sobbing suddenly made a lot more sense.

Despair filled the room. With the physical damage that they could see, it was clear that a full GOD’s shield hadn’t been involved, which meant. He wanted to look away, but like watching a car wreck interview he had to know.

Mr Cricket appeared and began the formal assessment, but because she was branded, no one held out any hope for her. That mark had snuffed it out, and they all knew what the open competitor was going to discover. Physical wounds could be closed, but that would not help the soul and psychological damage.

Seconds, only a handful of them passed and then the many arms of Mr Cricket dipped toward the ground. The helpful translation service provided by the room told everyone that the gesture represented crushing sadness. “She’s gone,” Mr Cricket unnecessarily declared.

It was like a glass pane shattering. The brief, watchful stillness of the room fragmented into a thousand pieces.

There was a flurry of activity. A tiger person tucked its head under its belly while a fish with multiple arms vibrated violently. A bird the size of a condor leapt into the air its wings flapping so vigorously that from metres away it was a struggle for Tom to hold his feet against the downdraft. 

It didn’t take any special knowledge to interpret the meaning behind the reactions, but the faithful body language translator did so anyway.

Screaming grief.

The world collapsing, and I only want to climb into a dark cupboard and huddle.

Why is the world so unfair? She was everything to her people.

As more people realised what was happening, the reactions spread through the group. It was like when a wolf started howling, the rest followed. The whole room erupted, and it was devastating to watch the display of grief. He shut his eyes to fortify himself and to stop himself from joining them.

Succumbing to grief achieved exactly nothing.

 No one else shared that sentiment and apparently, the ostrich had been loved at an unusual level.

The reaction was humbling, but the death struck close to home for most gathered here. In her death, they saw their own mortality and the dooming of everyone they loved if they failed.

His own area was not excluded from the flood of grief: Baptiste’s leaves curled around his leg, Corrine clutched his hand hard enough that it hurt, but all he could do was to witness the reaction. It was humbling and beautiful even if viewing it caused streams of water to run down his cheeks.

Her body lived. The physical healing was still continuing as the organs wriggled like worms to return to their spot in the large torso. But she was dead.

And they witnessed her failure, and they mourned for a bright light cut down to nothing all too soon.

The body quivered and shifted, and Tom’s eyes were caught by that tattoo. Suddenly it was all he could see, and he was overtaken by his own memories. His own brush with the evil.

Cute innocent teddy bear eyes. The clinical one-way discussion it had held with him. A running commentary like you would expect from an absent-minded, harmless scientist. Childishness that expressed itself as a desire to torture and kill. An evil that Tom struggled to comprehend.  

He didn’t know the name of this latest victim, but he didn’t have to. He knew why everyone was here and he could see what her peers thought of her, and he remembered that teddy bear.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Corrine whispered next to him.

“I couldn’t have expressed it better myself.” Tom answered, his voice flat.

He remembered the oath he had sworn. His gifts would let him beat this creature. He just needed to position himself to do so. It was time to learn how to destroy a soul in preparation for when he next faced the trident.

It had to die, or at least have its brain fully lobotomised.

Mr Cricket waved his hand, and the gruesome, mostly healed body vanished and less than a minute later the impromptu screaming grief at the heavens session broke up. People could only sustain that level of intensity for so long. 

Tom went straight up to Vturalta. “I need your help. Can you teach me to torture souls.”

All of her tentacles stilled. “That’s not what I expected you to ask.”

“Can you?”

“Is this to kill the trident? Because I would recommend caution.”

“No, I can take it. Teach me and I will remove it.”

“It’s never that simple.”

“It uses illusion magic and I have the ability to break it. Give me the tools and I’ll destroy it.”

“But.”

“There’s no buts,” Tom interrupted. “I can beat it. I just need to make sure when I do so that it’s permanent.”

“You know my time here is coming to an end.”

Tom said nothing. It was the unspoken truth everyone faced. Slots in the trials were precious, and they were continually being rotated in and out.

“And even if I wasn’t. I’m not the one to teach you.”

“Then who?”

She pronounced a name that he recognised but couldn’t pronounce.

Mr Cricket, he thought dismissively. Interacting with the ball of arms had always made him feel uneasy even if the person had never placed a hand wrong. Tom had no problems imagining him to be a master of soul torture.

“He’s the best you can get. Better still, he has another year here and if that’s not long enough he’ll be able to place you with someone else who can teach you.”

He shivered a little at that thought.

“Tom, you understand that soul torture is not easy for people like us. You realise that. Right”

He knew she was referring to those who followed DEUS. “I do.” He glanced at the ostrich and remembered the outpouring of grief that had gone with her incapacitations. “I do, but I need to stop it.”

“Then I wish you luck.”

Tom’s surrounding shattered and when they reformed, he was in a room he had never been in before. Across from him was Mr Cricket and all around them floated jelly like creatures. The open competitor radiated a smug happiness.

In the safety of his mind, Tom shivered. The joy he was picking up felt cruel and unnatural.

“So, I’m told you want torture souls. I’m going to ask a question, and I want you to answer truthfully. Do you, Tom, have the arms for this path?”

Tom’s lips twitched up. “Two of them.”

Mr Cricket stared him down. “Tom, this isn’t a laughing matter. Do you have the arms?”

“Yes, I’m committed. I won’t back down no matter what.”

“If you start and don’t finish, and then if I meet you in the real world, I will destroy you. I don’t tolerate failures.”

“I see things through to the end.”

“Good. And I note you learn by doing. Let’s do this. It’ll be fun.”

Pain lashed his soul.

All the work he had done developing skills let him know that the blow had been closer to the tickle of a feather than a whip, but it was still agonising.

“You are sensitive. That’s good. But don’t just weather the attack duplicate me,” Mr Cricket ordered. “Strike back.”

Tom shivered at how much the ball of arms was enjoying the training. If Mr Cricket was an evil, psychotic human, and capable of showing the body language, he would be licking his lips and rubbing his hands together. He sat up straight and glared at the other person. “I’m ready.”

Pain bloomed again, and he helplessly tried to duplicate the strike and failed. Again and again, his soul was tickled, and he flailed in response but got nowhere near touching his opponent, let alone hurting him.

Ten minutes passed, and it left him as a sweaty mess. “Stop,” Mr Cricket ordered. “Don’t try to attack me. My soul is too condensed for you to touch. Hit the jelly fish that’s why they’re there.”

Tom glared. After the pain of the last ten minutes, that was too much. “And you didn’t think to tell me that earlier.”

“I could, but that wouldn’t have been as fun.”

Before he could respond, it was like an ice pick was being driven through his skull. He tried to lash out at a jellyfish and missed as completely as he had been when trying to hit Mr Cricket.

The arms waved in a pattern that proclaimed both joy and mockery, and then another strike occurred. The taste of copper filled his mouth, and he wasn’t sure if he had bitten his tongue or cheek. It didn’t matter. Flesh and blood pain receptors couldn’t hold a candle to the brilliance of the sun, and that was what the attacks on his soul evoked.  

An hour later, when they finished, he felt like he had been put through a blender. He was suffering a permanent hangover that no amount of healing could fix.

“Tom. Are you sure you have the arms for this path?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Yes I do. You don’t know me.”

“I saw your lack of discipline with the ritual disks.”

“I have to kill the trident.” He snarled, raising to his feet and leaning forward aggressively.

“Spectacular. That’s the response I was after. Unabridged passion. Cling to that rage, because how you feel now, that wrung out sensation where everything hurts, that’s what your future is destined to be. You’re going to have to do hundreds of these sessions before you develop the abilities good enough to stop the trident. Are you sure you can survive that?”

“I’m not giving up!”

“Excellent. Now I understand in your real life you’re pretending to be an ordinary child.”

He studied the ball of arms suspiciously. “I am. But why do you care?”

“I don’t. But I have responsibilities to fulfill, and one of them is to protect the child bracket participants, hence the concern. You humans are a species beholden to a sleep cycle, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And as you requested this, I assume DEUS has encouraged you to buy some form of time-based sleep or meditative healing.”

Inside, Tom whistled at that observation. “Yes. I’ve already bought it. I can use it every second day.”

“Then that’s when we do these sessions. It’ll give you the most chance to hide the symptoms of the training.”

Tom swallowed and then nodded. He had thought the sleep ability was just to aid his training, but as usual DEUS was a step ahead and that level he had gotten to unlock the threshold bonus had been planned for months before he had even considered it as being required. “It’ll be available tonight.” He volunteered.

“Then our next session is in three days’ time. Three hours after dark.”

“I’ll be there.” Tom said, bowing his head.

All the arms shifted in unison, an expression of glee. “I’ll look forward to it.”

Tom left and spent the entire day in the pseudo system room unable to even think about leaving the space, not even to do basic training. Even in his safe space it hurt, and he was very glad to be able to make use of the time dilation aspect of the first iteration of the system room. Using the room had been a negative until he got into the divine champions trial because of the lost training hours it represented, but for right this instant it was a god’s send.

That night, the moment he crawled into bed he triggered his sleep skill and when he woke, it was like he had managed eighty hours of recovery time.

The impact of Mr Cricket’s training was just a bad memory. He was not looking forward to the next session, but he would turn up and get his soul flayed if it would allow him to destroy the trident. It was the least he could do.

Corrine did as promised and the flags in the main room briefly switched to a caution setting, but a day later they returned to their business as usual positioning. He guessed Dimitri had worked out that what Tom had seen was a known person sneaking through the corridors and it had been a genuine false alarm.

That night before triggering his special sleep he had another training session.

In the jellyfish room, he vomited three times, and the palms of his hands bled multiple times due to how hard he was squeezing his fists. After he was released, he had never been so eager to trigger a sleep ability.

When he woke up after his two and a half hours’ sleep, it was clear he was not fixed. His stomach roiled and everything to his senses was rough. The small amount of light was too bright, his sheets too scratchy, his blood beating too loudly. While the sum of the effects was noticeable, it wasn’t enough to stop him from functioning and there was plenty of time left in the night and he didn’t need sleep.

He snuck out of the dorms and then hurried down to the isolation room.

It was time to add to his resistance titles.

He had long since re-earned his venom title, though its rewards had been distorted by how he had gained it.

Title: Venom Resistance (V): All venoms are 25% less potent and spread 50% slower in you than others. 

Awarded for: Overcoming thirty-two different types of venom with potency sufficient to kill you thirty-two times in a single day. 

Once he was safe in the isolation room, he built his platform to gain access and pulled out the final jar of acid that he needed to survive. While gaining the resistance titles, seemed masochist, being able to suspend pain for free negated that. Instead, it was just time consuming and boring. He prepared for the couple of hours of being stationary and manaless by collecting reading material to entertain himself.

Tonight, he discovered was going to be a good experience because Dimitri had added more books on internal mana manipulation. That would mean today would be a positive contrast to most of his sessions, where he had been so stretched for actual things to do that he had spent the time investigating spells and abilities that were available for alternative builds, that and studying monster lore which was almost as boring.

Finally, before settling down and starting the body conditioning proper, he added his electricity and earth spike machine to ‘massage’ his foot while he worked. It was basically a continuous attack at the lowest power setting possible, so his magic wouldn’t have to heal it. It was necessary because His research and discussions with April had confirmed his suspicions. Continual exposure, even at a low level, would build toward him gaining both resistance and mana manipulation type skills.

Finally, fully prepared he sat down with his back against the healing crystal.

With a thought, a dagger permanently borrowed from the lair armoury appeared in his hand. Without fuss, he split both thighs open, taking care to cut only through skin and muscle, through the slice was deep enough, so, that for just a moment the white of bone was revealed before blood filled the gap.

Touch Heal instantly cut off the majority of the blood loss and then with everything prepared to his satisfaction he used the dropper to release a single drop of acid into each leg. The wound sizzled with an acrid stench and made him wrinkle his nose.

It was disgusting.

He carefully put everything out of his mind and just focused on the self-inflicted injury. Clinically, he measured his mana reserves as he fought the acid’s advancement to a standstill. Ten seconds later he relaxed. The healing crystal plus his mana generation was enough to keep pace. If it hadn’t been, it would have just been an annoyance. He had plenty of water available to clean the wound if two drops simultaneously had been too much.

Fixing the ongoing damage was not as straightforward a process as usual. Unlike most of the acids he had used, this one was being sucked into the bloodstream. Instead of localised magic defence he had to launch active fixes in several spots but the time dilation that came with Touch Heal made that manageable and after a minute even that complexity reduced. The only longer-term consequence relative to a normal run was that the free casts of Replenish Blood got multiple uses because the acid rampaging in his blood vessels destroyed far more blood than what usually occurred.

Comfortable with the situation, he delved into the new books while regularly re-administering the acid both into the wound he had created and on the skin of his upper leg. That, due to his existing titles was less effective than it should have been.

It was not pleasant study conditions as there was a continuous disturbing sizzling noise and the fumes from his bubbling skin both made him choke and want to empty his stomach. Every time his pain spell ran out he reinstated it and then applied more of the acid. The volume in the glass vial decreased to about half. Under his estimates, this was about the point he should technically be able to stop, but like always he would overshoot that mark by fifty percent in case his calculations were wrong.

He returned to reading and less than thirty seconds later there was a ding, and Tom couldn’t help but smile. The title was his and his calculation on the amount required had been dead on. While he wanted to get up immediately and check the ritual screen to confirm the titles acquisition that wasn’t possible.

His flesh was still bubbling, but he had a partial solution for that. From his soul storage, he produced a waterskin and rinsed out the gaping hole. Water mixed with blood sloshed out of the wound, taking most of the acid with it. Thankfully, the floorboards were high tier and were not damaged by the diluted acid. A piece of cloth allowed him to soak up most of the liquid and he frowned as smoke curled upwards from the fabric. He stored it in his inventory while grabbing more cloth to finish the cleanup.

After he was finished, the wound was still sizzling, so he splashed it with another flood of water. The hole in his right leg took three cleans while the one on his left a full five.

He was motivated and efficient, and within two minutes, he was done.

With the acid cleared away, the injury healed almost instantly thanks to the crystal’s power that he was borrowing, and he hurried over to the ritual status screen to confirm his success.

He manipulated the controls and focused on seeing his latest title and with a ding it appeared.

Title: Acid Resistance (V): All acids are 25% less potent and have a 35% chance of being completely neutralised after they burn through the skin and reach the tissue underneath. 

Awarded for: Overcoming thirty-two different types of acid administered at quantities capable of killing you thirty-two times over in a single day.

The title had only upgraded, so he had known the benefits it was giving already. That 35% chance of neutralising might seem to be a mixed bonus, but experience had taught Tom how powerful it was, which was why his routine included cutting his legs.

Well, that was it for acid. His next target was a general curse resistance, and he wasn’t looking forward to how that was going to play out.