Chapter 154—Revenge of Sorts

The next day was a bad one.

He pretended it was the same as any other. Deep down he knew it wasn’t and every minute of the day dragged. He spent the hours alternating as usual between real life and training in the trial, but somewhere and at some random point during the day, Corrine had packed up and left for her tour. She would collect her attribute per level titles, then go through various trials and then with a foundation that basically everyone in Existentia would be jealous of. After that she would start leveling and getting strong while he would be stuck here for another five years doing effectively nothing. It sucked, and not just for the lack of progress that would be occurring.

It felt like his safety blanket, that made every day tolerable, had been ripped away, turned sapient by an evil wizard and then sent off to adventure without him.

Between that and the tragedy that was Kang, his life had suddenly got a lot rougher. It was easy to forget about the everyday things, the critical touch points, which helped make the days bearable, that was until you lost them. Then you felt it.

He persisted and even progressed the Earth Shield spell that he was trying to earn back. He was taking it slowly and experimenting with the structure before going for a perfect cast in the hope that he could progress it with extra sideways evolutions.

As he was settling down for bed, like he had a sixth sense for it, the standard invitation came through from Kang. It was part of the routine they had established, and he happily accepted it.

They greeted each other, and then Tom looked at the ground. This was it. For the next few years, his life was really going to progress without meaningful human contact. He guessed that just meant he could sneak in more training.

“Wa…wa… ink.”

“What am I thinking?”

“Yah.”

Tom sighed. “Are you sure you want to listen to it? It’s a bit depressing.”

“Ya.”

He held up his hand and extended one finger. “First. Killing the trident. It troubles me the most. Because as much as I might wish otherwise it’s out of my control. I can only kill it if I meet it.”

Fate flooded out of Kang.

“Kill it. Ood.”

“Yes, killing it would be good.” He raised another finger. “Second, I’m always worried about the girls and third I’m wondering if I need to leverage a title I received better. I just can’t help but think that a culture of gifting would be beneficial for all and allow things to get to who could use them best.”

“Ard.”

“Yes hard and beyond my skill set. But I’m trying to work out how I can set it up. But enough doom and gloom, let’s talk about something funner.”

“Bree.”

“You said that beautifully.”

Kang nodded happily and Tom switched to his desired meaningless babble and just chattered until the ever present tiredness got to Kang and he started struggling to keep his eyes open.

“Let’s call it now.” He declared and then exited the room.

More days passed.

As always, as he fluffed his pillow the invitation came through.

He accepted it.

“K… k… tri… ent.”

“No, I haven’t killed it yet. I need to meet it first.”

Fate, as was often the case rushed out of his friend.

This time, Tom studied the boy.

A dopey, lopsided grin greeted him back.

The fate release might be hourly, but it wasn’t on the hour or at a specific time. It also wasn’t random as far as he could tell. There was some level of direction happening.

He sighed. “Hopefully it’ll happen soon.” He tapped his thigh thoughtfully, examining Kang once more weighing up the potential pros and cons. If he couldn’t answer, he would get distressed, but if he phrased things right, then a yes or no response should be easy enough to communicate. The risk actually wasn’t that high. “Mate, can you direct your bonus fate?”

“N… Ne.” He shook his head side to side.

“Are you telling me that it’s random.”

Kang nodded.

“Interesting.” He mused. If Kang couldn’t direct it consciously, why did it always feel like it responded to their conversation. “Ah, I see. That’s good to know. I had to ask because if you could, it would have been awesome.”

“Ya.”

“You know the ten-year-old tournament starts tomorrow. I’ve looked at the prizes and brackets and I’m going to aim for fifth and if I take a loss in the third round, I won’t even have to fight one of the girls. How good is that? I don’t want to give them bragging rights.”

Kang laughed joyously.

Eventually, he got tired.

Tom left and trained while his body pretended to sleep. Then at 1:30 am used his skill to reduce his need for sleep and then early in the morning departed for his bi-weekly fight to the death. With the others, he gathered in the lobby as the deadline to the next round of duels counted down.

It was strange to do so without either Corrine or Kang, but he guessed he was used to it even if he missed it. He gave Bri a thumbs up and right on cue he was teleported to the room with the three doors.

Without fuss, he did his standard coin flip routine. With his increasing strength, he was winning almost half of the fights and was not at all surprised by the result.

He walked through the door that didn’t provide a GOD’s shield.

The standard void greeted him with the usual single line of information about his opponent. He froze as he read the words hanging in the air in front of him.

His heart rate spiked.

This was it.

Then he saw its success count and some of the excitement faded.

You are fighting a representative of MAKROS. It has 10 confirmed incapacitations and zero kills.

He was not fighting the trident as it had more victims than that, but he was fighting a terror that had done to other what the trident had done to Kang. It wouldn’t be justice for his friend, but it would still be justice.

Suspended in the void, he smiled and, like whoever ran this, had been waiting for that expression of emotion. His body shifted, and he found himself in an arena.

Tom almost jumped up and down in excitement when he registered the nature of his surroundings.

It was a cave twice the size of a basketball court and shaped like a cross with their start positions in the middle. The twelve metres separating them was just less than the size of the central area. Two steps back and he would enter one of the wings and if he wanted, he could then retreat for another forty before reaching the far wall. The roof hung a consistent five metres above his head and there were no interior pillars, stalagmites or stalactites to worry about. It was perfect for him especially as the stone wasn’t part of the Underground. There was no permanency associated with it.

“Wow,” he whispered. It couldn’t have been better if it had been designed specifically for him.

He felt almost sorry for what he was fighting until he remembered its incapacitations and then any residual sympathy he might have held was crushed when he caught sight of it and recognised it from the dossier of reports that he regularly reviewed.

The creature was a millipede that was about three metres long, with a cylinder like body that was thicker than his shoulders. It had green, grey colouring and its pinchers were about the length of a short sword. 

Tom knew it for the depraved killer that it was.

He hadn’t raised a weapon or sent a sliver of magic at it, but he had reviewed everything that was important. All of its strengths and weaknesses. Its fighting style relied on its physical abilities to subdue its prey a process helped by it having a paralytic bite. Ultimately, it would beat them by constricting them or paralysing them and then once they were at its mercy it  would surgically use the strong acid it naturally produced to eat away at skin and contaminate but not kill organs while simultaneously striking with a brute force soul attack.

As a dedicated soul threat, it was relatively speaking terrible at its job with an estimated fifty percent of possible victims surviving. It was a poor man’s trident, which had a nearly hundred percent success rate when it met someone not covered by a full GOD’s shield. Not that it mattered. It had still incapacitated ten people and had to die for those crimes.

This monster’s strength was that it was a cockroach and powerful individuals had defeated it multiple times but had failed to kill it. The notes suggested it could grow back from nothing, but that wasn’t a consideration for Tom. No amount of regeneration could save you if your soul was torn to bits.

The countdown hit zero and Tom leapt into action.

Time slowed as it focused on killing him, and his traits activated in response. His attributes, supported by a Burst exploded in value to allow him to match its strength, agility and vitality.

Almost a hundred legs dipped down to propel it forward with devastating speed. It accelerated like it had been shot from a gun.

It was coming straight for him, but he didn’t care. It was already too late. It might not realise it but it had already lost.

He had already incorporated his three core tier zero skills into his domain. As he retreated at a pace that would have been impossible seconds before, it was child’s play to manipulate the earth ten metres away right through where it was about to pass.

A stone wall shot from the ground to halt its charge. Infused with his intent, it was magnitudes harder than the stone throughout the rest of the arena.

Its speed of thought was impressive because almost instantly, a translucent shield crackled into existence around Tom. From what he read, it was a one off ability that couldn’t be reused. It would last five seconds, which was an eternity against a physical opponent and prevent him from using any magic outside his body. It was particularly brutal on anyone sustaining a connection beyond the newly erected barrier, for someone using Earth Manipulation, it should have cut off the spell instantly and caused a severe backlash.

None of that happened.

The domain was part of him and the probable tier five ability couldn’t match against a tier eight domain. Something that had probably been effective against everything else it had faced in the duels failed completely. Its trump card was not just insufficient it failed completely.

The rock remained reinforced, and it crashed into it at full speed having fully expected to blast through it. Magically reinforced it was almost certainly harder than anything else the creature had ever crashed into. One razor sharp pincer broke, and the other was torn from its cheek. It smacked into the solid stone with the distinctive crack of critical protective chitin shattering.

As it reeled backwards Tom descended upon it.

His rage threatened to bubble up, the artificial emotion demanding expression but Tom fought to suppress it.

Spark sent lightning crackling through it.

There’s no injustice here, he growled to himself. No great wrong to fight against. This is the opposite, he told the anger. The complete opposite, it was going to get its just desserts today. Justice would be served on the back of a clinical execution.

The stone still under his control flowed over its massive body and restricted it with the unbreakable grasp of solid rock. For good measure, tendrils wormed into joints and started to sever legs. It spasmed as he kept the electricity flowing through it. Touch Heal was used at range to keep tabs on its health status, as Tom was reluctant to approach closer than the two metres distance he had settled on.

The fight had been going for less than five seconds. Winning was never in question. It was whether he could destroy it and the key to that was dragging out the duel as long as possible. Spark and Earth Manipulation kept it distracted while he initiated the ponderously slow soul magic. Tom was aware of every twitch of its body both external via his connection to the stone that encased it and internally with his diagnosis magic.

A foreign substance flooded into its circulatory system. Before he consciously registered the threat, he was already quarantining it.

The centipede resisted his efforts, partially thwarting his attempts. It was able to stop him from magically burning away what was clearly a massive dose of poison, but it could do nothing about his secondary defensive attempts. He successfully shunted a majority of the liquid out of the circulatory system into a nearby muscle that immediately started experiencing mass cellular death.

Tom was not surprised in the slightest by the development and it was one he had, in fact been looking for. It was obvious that it would have a method like this because everyone knew about Soul Threats and killing yourself was the best way to escape them.

Unfortunately for the centipede, its reaction speed was too slow. If it had triggered the fatal dose even two seconds earlier, it would have worried him. As it was, his preparations were complete.

He unleashed Soul Stun and separated the soul from the body. It only happened for a moment, but for that half a second its ability to defend its body from hostile magic was non existent. Not that his magic could be classed as hostile, he thought to himself wryly. He was just being a good Samaritan and healing it. The poison was burned away in the half of a second; he had to act. The crisis was averted, and he could go through with the plan to bring it to a final justice. It had clearly been a dead man’s switch to let it escape any overwhelming threats it encountered; it was a common technique of those who fought under a partial GOD’s shields but surprisingly effective. He guessed that having a healing spell powerful enough to remove the poison and a method to strip away magical defences for a few brief moments were rare.

Against most, that massive dose might have been enough to let it escape.

But not this time.

This time, it had failed.

Tom didn’t bother taunting it, or launching into a victor’s monologue. Instead, he got straight down to business.

Soul Rend activated and slammed into it.

It was the first time he had used it and landed the attack with the intent to hurt again a sapient creature, and he felt the difference compared to the experiments he had run in the lairs beneath the orphanage. There, the strike was barely acceptable as a single target attack spell, and Soul Stun had done more damage than its higher tiered supposably damage focused counterpart.

All that went out the window against a sapient.

The claws that the skill created dug into the creature’ soul, a construct that loosely mirrored its body at least in terms of volume filled. Those deadly sharp creations each tore a few inches deep. The attack left no visible marks on the monster, but for the first time it started screaming.

Tom smiled and prepared another attack. It took five critical seconds, and then he targeted the same spot to allow the claws to dig deeper.

Earth Manipulation kept it constrained. Spark stopped its body from functioning and Touch Heal kept it from dying on him. Every time it came off cooldown he struck. Gaping wounds were left in its soul, but Tom ignored that and kept going.

Scalpel could hurt stronger people, but the damage he could have inflicted over minutes was done in seconds with the new ability. It was about getting the right tools for the job. The Scalpel ability was undoubtedly stronger but against weak souls Rend was better just because it could do damage faster.

It was struggling and trying to kill itself. There was another flood of poison but a quick Soul Stun and he countered it effortlessly. With his mana storage abilities, he had the mana to match it, and its resistance fell away as he caused more and more damage to his soul.

What he was doing on a fundamental level was both repulsive and sickening. Destroying a soul could not be described otherwise but despite that knowledge Tom smiled grimly.

This was necessary.

Sometimes good men had to execute the bad. Sometimes they had to get their hands bloody and on rare, horrible occasions they had to take responsibility to destroy an immortal soul.

He was not afraid of accepting responsibility.

The duel abruptly ended and when it did the body had been very much alive.

Elation flooded through him.

A menace, a creature with a soul so black it shouldn’t have been allowed to live had been dealt with, permanently.

“What happened?” Briana demanded the instant she saw him. “What’s with that deranged look?”

“It’s not deranged.”

“Yeah it is. You look creepy.”

“I’m simultaneously happy and disturbed. I just incapacitated my first Soul Threat.”

He had seen the state Kang had been left in. That monster had been torn up just as much as Kang had, if not more. It was finished.

“The trident?” Baptiste asked in sudden excitement.

“Unfortunately, not. It was the acid centipede. Not as impressive of a success.”

“Oh… that’s…. that’s still really, really good,” Baptiste whispered. “It tortured Shello. And now it’s dead. Holy oath, encroaching saltwater that’s brilliant. Are you sure?”

“Oh yes, positive.” Tom assured him. “There’s no surviving what I just did to it.”

As everyone said, good deeds just cause more work. The open competitors made sure he recorded everything that he did, which took almost an hour to do. It didn’t matter he was buzzing. This was proof of concept, both of his strength and his method to deal with Soul Threats.

That night during their usual session Kang laughed in delight when he heard what he had done.

“Tri… Tri.”

“Yes I still need to meet the trident.”

Fate flooded out of the damaged man and the smile as he did so grew broader.

His cohort’s first tournament start date arrive and Tom dreaded participating in it.

He watched a few matches and saw exactly what he expected. The difference between him, the reincarnators and the girls versus the rest was stark. In his first fight, his opponent moved like a child. There was no supernatural acceleration and the abilities he had mastered, basic martial arts and a couple of minor sword skills as a package deal were underwhelming. The strongest ability Swift Strike wasn’t enough to trouble him in the slightest. Fateful Earth Body by itself would have been sufficient to tank it, but Tom dutifully blocked the potentially dangerous strike with his hammer while making it look more like luck than a good plan.

Eventually, after getting tagged a few times he landed a Power Blow on his opponent’s chest. There was a boom and the other boy lit up signalling that it was a death blow. It didn’t phase Adrian at all. His opponent chuckled while they shook hands. “Good fight, good fight. I can’t believe you blocked my swift strike. None of my friends can do that.”

“And I personally can’t believe you stood still while I hit you with a power blow.”

Adrian doubled over laughing. “Yeah, not my proudest moment.”

Tom grinned. Adrian was shaping to be a good person, and he wasn’t taking the fights seriously because he was not someone who was ever going to be an adventurer.

The remaining fights were similarly mind numbing and everything went as planned and he dutifully was awarded fifth place.

All of the contribution points he received went towards his eventual tour. Given he intended to be mediocre he had no choice but to save them. The small money pouch that would keep him and the girls swimming in sweets for half a year, likewise was put aside as useful.

The remainder was not so good.

There was a misshapen piece of metal that acted as a training item for hammer abilities. According to the label that came with it, the object could help solidify concepts around weight and force. Tom placed it aside. It was not something he needed to use and while he didn’t think it would block credit of future hammer skills toward his titles, it was not something he wanted to risk.

Then there was a training vest that would change weight and the tightness of the fabric in response to explosive movements. It was supposed to help develop a skill tree designed to counter control abilities like Thick Air or Restrictive Dust. It was a quality product and the entirety of the top ten got it but Tom wasn’t interested. He would prefer to train Fateful Earth Body to be better rather than get a new skill line like the artefact offered.

He discretely placed it in his inventory, hoping for an upgrade, but nothing happened. The prizes were deemed to have been earned and weren’t a gift, so his title didn’t activate.

The final item was a consumable to improve his strength by four. There were warning associated with it that elites should not consume it and instead rely on their own power..

That’s incompetent, he thought and then, frowning he triggered his title to call everyone to a meeting. If you used too many of these, there would be no feasible way to earn the title rewards that were clearly associated with the tours.

Briana, Eloise and Kang immediately appeared in his plain metal adorned system room with the latter appearing on his bed. “Don’t use the consumables.” He cautioned.

“I’m not an idiot.” Eloise spluttered. “You’ve only told me a thousand times that it’s bad.”

“Barely ten.”

“Nine times too many. Plus, the label warned that true elites should not use it.” She puffed out her chest. “And I’m an elite. I got first.”

He pretended to glare at her and then couldn’t sustain it. A grin broke out. As much as her attitude and arrogance might offend some people, he loved it when either of them acted like kids. The whole darkhole trial, while gifting them with power had robbed them of some of their innocence. “You’re right. You’re an elite and elites don’t cheat.”

“Then what should we do with them?” Briana asked. “I got plus four to all physical attributes.”

“Wow, that’s three times better than what I got.” Then he shook his head. That was irrelevant. “You can cash them in for contribution points, but I feel that’s wasteful.” They were only a problem for people going on the tour. In Corrine’s larger cohort, only four went. Basically, anyone in the lower half of the class would benefit from using them without risking future gains. “You know what. Why don’t we give them away. Not to elites or potential adventurers, but to the group below them.”

“For nothing?” Eloise challenged, horrified.

“Yep. All the prizes. Help out those without our advantages.”

“But,” Briana protested. “Keeping the vest should be okay.”

Tom hesitated. He wasn’t sure whether skills acquired with the vests aid would count towards their titles, but what April was doing was fine so a training aid shouldn’t cross the line. The lump of smushed metal he got was different. The degree of inspiration they gave could invalidate the acquisition of a skill. “Yes, definitely keep the vest. It’s not for me, but you two should absolutely use the ones you got.”

Because he had established the meeting and not Kang the one-minute limit ran out and he found himself unceremoniously thrust back into his body. Eloise continued chatting with Briana and the party was kicking off around them. There was a band playing music and a dedicated illusionist creating lights and mythical monsters to dance to the tunes being played.

Adrian was the first person he ran into and without hesitation Tom gave away his strength boost. His other prizes both the vest and the lumpy metal he held onto intending to give them to a more tailored recipient who would actually get use out of the skills that they would grant.

Next to him Eloise started jumping up and down in excitement. “Mum and Dad.”

“They’re not that,” Briana teased her with a big grin. “They’re not parents.”

“Mum,” Eloise yelled while dragging them over.

The not mum hugged her daughter tightly. “I’m so proud. You won, your first tournament. Your speed was incredible. Tom, Briana,” she said briefly focusing on them. “You both did amazing as well, but where’s Kang? I didn’t see him.”

Their devastated expression caused the cheer to fall from her face.

“What happened to him?”

Kang’s status as a reincarnator meant that they were restricted in what they could say, and from previous observation the girls struggled to navigate around the restrictions.

“There was an accident,” Tom said carefully. “The official investigation concluded he hurt his soul while carrying out a summoning.”

“Oh, his soul? That’s bad.”

“Yes,” Tom agreed.

The not mum smiled brightly. The fake one, adults did to pretend everything is alright. Leaning on false politeness as a social lubricant. “Well, I’m sure he’ll get better soon.”

“He won’t.” Briana stated firmly. “He can barely talk, and the doctors say he won’t ever get better.” She started crying.

So did Eloise.

“Don’t cry,” the not mum begged, flustered. “I didn’t mean it. I had no idea. Wait, I brought gifts.” Four objects appeared in her hands. “If you want, you can each have one.”

AG. This chapter's words got a little out of hand so I had to cut the last thousand words or so from it... hence the mini cliff hangar.