Waking up alone in the infirmary was beginning to feel shockingly familiar to Micheal, more so than usual, that is. Waking up in said infirmary absent of any pain after being beaten unconscious by a stone ranker, on the other hand, was a feeling that was as unexpected as it was pleasant.

He wondered briefly at who had brought him this time around, as he doubted there was enough blood on the carpet to draw the attention of the local cleanliness-obsessed priest. He suspected it to be the work of some good samaritan or other and put it in his mind to thank them one day. Micheal had no love of the arrogant and petty first haller’s, but he wasn’t above basic kindness. When it suited him.

Deciding to make good on that plan, Micheal left the infirmary to find his mystery do-gooder. After praying, of course. He would need all the accumulated power he could get if he was to fight that mysterious stone ranker.

It was a short prayer, but one surprisingly earnest. Micheal finally was accepting of the power of the Gods, with the full knowledge that, when he was powerful enough, he would use what they had given him to destroy them. He felt a perverse anticipation at the thought of using their own gifts to kill them, and he used that to fuel his prayer. He wanted power, and the elder Gods had a use for him. It was mutually beneficial for them to help one another. For the time being.

Making his way down the wooden halls of the first hall dormitory, Micheal reached his room to stow what little he had on him after his fight. Most of it had been broken in the lightening fast attack of the stone ranker; that monster who’d dismissed his protection more easily than swatting a fly, but some of it still remained remarkably intact, if a little bloodied. What good was a notebook without some blood on it anyhow?

He also ate the food that the cooks left in his room thanks to him being particularly unconscious at the time of its being served.

Finally, he went out to explore the dorm and look for the person who had carried him to safety.

______________________________

Samantha skipped class once again. She didn’t need a bunch of earth-ranked priests telling her exactly how useless the lost were, and how they should be grateful that the priests do as much as they do for them as it. If a few of them died every now and then? Well, that was just the fate of those forsaken by the Gods. perhaps they should do better in the next life.

The fact that she had beaten another two groups of her fellow lost also had some impact on her decision. Among the lost she had always thought there to be some sense of solidarity. A sort of, ‘us vs them’ mentality, but there had been no such thing. In every group, there needs to be someone who was an outcast. In normal society that was the lost, but among the lost, that group was the weak or the powerful.

She seemed to be both, which made her a prime candidate for ridicule. To be dismissed not only by her supposed ‘betters,’ but her peers as well, weighed heavily on her. Micheal had always seemed immune to that sort of thinking, but Samantha couldn’t help wondering if he felt it as well.

The dark looks of the envious and the petty, or the hungry eyes of the strong, vying for their position. The muttered insults, or the thinly veiled threats, Samantha felt each and every one of them like a biting insect inside of her mind. She felt alone in a sea of people. Among the lost, the only people like her, she was without a single friend. Not even Micheal was lost anymore.

Samantha’s face took on a grim look as those dark thoughts occurred to her, one after another. She wouldn’t give into them today, as she hadn’t given into them the day before, or the week before that, or the year before that. She had not fallen to those thoughts since before she was lost, and she wouldn’t fall to them now.

It felt so much harder to tell herself that now than it had been all that time ago. She wondered if she had the strength to do it again, when next the time came.

___________________________________

Micheal did end up finding the girls, plural, who had taken him to the infirmary. In exchange for his thanks he was greeted with snide remarks and empty threats. It was nice to see such from them, as he had worried that things might be different among the first haller’s after all, but it seemed to be no different to the lower hall.

The hard stares and dark looks were refreshing to him as he wandered the halls, and he delighted in it. He was rare to smile, but the familiar atmosphere drew it out of him like dragons to a hoard. There was something refreshing about being hated by the first hallers as well. All this time he had been too below their notice to elicit any feelings aside from nonchalant dismissal and misplaced pity. To be hated in kind was gratifying in the sinister way that Micheal had grown so fond of in recent years. He briefly wondered what that said about his personality, but decided it wasn’t a good idea to unearth that particular can of worms.

With his quest to find the girls who had helped him complete, He started to get into the rhythm of life in the first hall. His first few days had been eventful, but now that he had the lay of the land he was content to let things calm down a small bit. That meant attending classes without picking fights with every briny bastard that looked his way, which was unfortunate for his need to beat them half to death, but necessary.

Micheal had seen firsthand just how large a gap there was between him and a stone rank, and the difference, while not entirely unexpected, cemented in him the need to improve. That meant that time was needed. He needed to pray and he needed practice. His one saving grace was his ability to pray for improvement at any time, unlike those chosen by the lesser Gods beneath Nero-Un and his pantheon. That allowed Micheal to improve at a truly disturbing rate compared to his contemporaries.

Of course, there was a cost to that. In the beginning, Micheal guessed that he could have lifted a single spoonful of sand more than before he had gotten his apostle, but after only a single day dedicated to prayer, that amount tripled. The cost had manifested after only a few days worth of constant prayer, and was the supposed reason the Gods didn’t allow for prayer all day long, excepting the old Gods, that is.

Every single part of Micheal’s body hurt as if he’d been beaten to near death by an archpriest, revived with all of his pain intact, and beaten to near death once again. Over, and over again. It was complete agony all over.

It was the crystal inside of him that was the cause. Instead of coating his bones and organs, it had run out of room and begun to infuse them. Even his skin was becoming infused with the shadow of the crystal; its power and essence. That would mean that his muscles and organs would continue to grow at an even faster rate, but it would also mean each time he prayed, every single pain receptor in his body would be screaming at him.

All that did was force Micheal to dread his prayer more than he already did, so in the end, it was of no consequence. What was a little pain on the path to the killing of the Gods?

The other part of his improvement was training. He had never been taught to fight as one of the lost, but he had proven himself to be a natural at it when he had conquered the lower hall. Fighting was not what he needed training in. it was in the use of his apostle to augment his fighting that he needed help. Of course, there was no help to be found among the sea cucumbers of the first hall, so on the days that prayer became too tedious, he set himself to see what he could accomplish with his new apostle.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

_______________________________

The leader of the lower hall, Samantha Cald, cried silently in her dorm. The last few weeks had been a very neat kind of damnation. She had beaten everyone who had tried to challenge her with the same ease that she had at her last orphanage, although that vile place was only made up of the lost. It was only after she had bitten the lips off of one of her challengers that they had stopped coming, and she could still remember the metallic taste of her blood in her mouth. It had been the single most disgusting thing she had ever done, but it was necessary.

She didn’t think she could take the constant challenges as well as everything else. She still hadn’t seen Micheal since he had gone, and though she hated to admit it, she missed that moron. He had kept all of this from getting to her. She still saw the envious and hate-filled glares of the other lost, but with Micheal around, she never cared. It was like he was the light in the dark shithole that was her life. He had been the first one that had beaten her, but he was also her best friend.

Without someone else sharing the hatred, it was like it had become a huge weight. It was as if the atmosphere that had once been peacefully ignored, became solid. A wall of despair and hatred filled her every time she walked through the stone doorway and into the lower hall. Despair at her position in life, at the other lost, at Micheal being gone. But also hatred. She hated the Gods for forsaking her, she hated the others in the lower hall for being so full of jealousy and envy that they shunned her, and she even hated Micheal for leaving her. Most of all she hated herself.

She hated herself with a fierce and powerful hatred that can only ever be reserved for oneself. Directed at others it would be cruel and disproportionate but toward herself? She deserved it and much more.

________________________________

Micheal prayed dark thoughts to the elder Gods that day. The content of his prayer mattered little, in the end. He had grown tired of his desire for power being his defining method of prayer, despite it being more effective. It had been a short-lived goal, and it would remain his lesser ambition. What he wanted more than anything was the slow, painful death of the Gods. he wanted each and every one of them to writhe and suffer as they never had before. He wished upon them the evilest and horrid things that could come to mind.

He imagined great blazers of burning flesh, burning away at the invincible and indomitable. He thought of pots, to a one filled with oil and water and acids of all kinds. He thought of the way the Gods flesh would melt or burn and he smiled a predatory grin. White teeth were the only thing visible in the darkness of his room. Solitary among the miasma of disdain and hatred that permeated the room.

Grim thoughts filled the air of that room that night. Thoughts so vile and disgusting that Micheal, even so deep into his hate-filled state, grew wary of himself. He developed a twisted sense of joy at the disgusting images he conjured, but through that, he wondered if there was something wrong with that. Only briefly did thoughts like that trouble him. As with those ponderous vile thoughts came blessed nostalgia.

The familiar state of hatred and pleasure was its own reward to Micheal, who loved every moment of that familiarity. Thoughts born so shortly after his sister’s death emerged to the surface where his hatred could begin anew. It was a self-fulfilling cycle of hatred, a cycle that went round and round all night long and into the morning.

Micheal had seen decent gains that night, though not so good as when he had prayed for power instead of hate. That mattered little to him, though. What mattered so much more was the stares he was receiving. Each one of the first haller’s was looking at him. They wanted to fight him. They looked down on him. He knew it. He could see through them and he could tell they wanted to teach him his place. It had always been like this. Even in the lower hall, they had stared at him like this. But that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter one little bit. Micheal had shown them in the lower hall. He had broken and twisted and cracked until each and every one of the looks went away. But that was simply not enough. So he had cut and slashed as well. It was never enough to make the looks go away for a time. They had to be put out permanently.

Micheal was proficient at that.

Micheal knew he was too weak in his current state to fight Aryth. He had grown by leaps and bound in the short few weeks he had in the first hall, but Aryth was a monster among the earth rankers, let alone someone like Micheal in the upper end of bone rank. He did suspect that if he went to be evaluated he may have entered the lower reaches of earth rank, putting him among the top five in the first hall, but he was unwilling to do that. Having to carry around an earth rank pin would tell everyone exactly how strong he was, and Micheal despised that thought.

Telling everyone his strength would be asking them for a fight, which Micheal would normally be happy to oblige, but not at a rate of ten times a day. They were scum one and all, but Micheal only had so much time to beat into them. Now that both his training and prayer had progressed enough, Micheal would need to make a few examples. Someone properly strong would be needed, he figured. Seeing someone respected picking up his teeth from the floor should be enough for everyone to second-guess an attempt at Micheal.

Perhaps he could even cripple one of them. He had shied away from that idea in the past, but it would be an effective deterrent. Only a seldom few were willing to become crippled for their ambitions. He had no qualms about doing something like that to the first haller’s either. They had been more than willing to let him die when he was lost, he was only returning the favor.

That was why Micheal was leaving his dorm room for the day. His body still ached completely and unceasingly thanks to his daily prayer, which caused him to move stiffly and painfully, but he was moving, and that was all he needed. Each step brought more pain than he had experienced being chopped into by Aryth’s scythe, but it was way off into the back of his mind..

At the forefront was his target. He considered taking on the tall girl, who looked to be quite strong, but he decided that someone else would have to do. Someone more likable. Strong was good, but likable was better. No one would question him when he took power if he too out all of the likable ones. That made him think of the small mousey little girl that had stopped him from beating the arrogant boy. She would be perfect.

Micheal suspected she was on the weaker side, but it was an excellent compromise. If he crippled her, he would attract all of the strong members of the first hall in one go. It was perfect. All he needed to do was find her and force a confrontation where he would savagely beat her. It was all going exactly as he wanted.

______________________________

Samantha stepped nervously through the wooden frame of the first hall’s gate. She had seen the briny thing a million times by now, whenever she went to the central hall for prayer instead of Micheal, but she had never gone inside. Just like one of the lost didn’t go into the first hall, one of the first haller’s didn’t just waltz right up to the third hall. It wasn’t done.

To do so at all was a desperate move, but to do so as one of the lost? It was likely she would be killed just attempting it. That didn’t really matter to Samantha, though. She couldn’t take it at this point. She had not given in to those dark thoughts yet. She didn’t really believe that she deserved all of this, but it was harder and harder to say that. She had cried for hours the night before her red and puffy eyes were like flares announcing just that. She decided that she might as well go and see Micheal.

She had only felt like this once before; back when she had only just been forsaken by the Gods and conquered her last orphanage. She had thought that embracing their hatred would work, but she had learned a hard lesson once she lost, and that was not a route that she was eager to repeat.

Being with Micheal had been what brought her out of it last time. He had a way of making everything seem alright in the end that she simply couldn’t explain. He was a stubborn idiot, but he was her stubborn idiot. He was her best friend, and right now, she needed him.

“Hey! You’re lost, right?”

Samantha felt her blood go cold at the sound of the girl's voice. It was like she had been injected with ice right into her veins. She practically stopped in her tracks. Would she have time to run? No. Of course, she wouldn’t. This girl was in the first hall, so she at least had one apostle. Samantha would be cut down before she could make it three steps.

“Excuse me, but you are lost, aren’t you?” the girl said in a much more gentle voice. “It can be pretty daunting the first time around, but you’ll find your way around eventually. It took me a full week before I learned how to get to my dorm room.”

Samantha turned around, relief flooding her immediately. “Yeah she said, I’m pretty lost,” she said, turning around to see the helpful girl shaking like a leaf. “Are you… Ok?” she asked.

The girl, shaking hard enough to be seen from the lost continent, simply nodded in affirmation. “I’m alright. Just not good with strangers.”

“Well,” Samatha said. “I’m Samatha. You are?” she asked carefully, trying not to scare the poor girl away.

“Catherine Mauser,” she said with a smile.