Leonidas opened the third bout of isolated combat with initiative.

The spear he’d used to kill the net-wielding fourth goblin of the quartet he’d engaged was torn free with the wet nose of ruined flesh, and he didn’t even bother to do more than give it a cursory shake to remove the brain matter clinging to the iron spear-tip. He took the weapon in his left hand and, without more than a cursory estimation of range, hurled it like a javelin at the incoming band of goblins.

Three dodged, one didn’t.

The spear punched through the miserable creature’s right shoulder, and tore its arm from its socket.

Leonidas ignored the shrill screams that followed, and took advantage of the momentary and somewhat involuntary stumbles of shock that stifled the approach of the other three creatures. With only seconds left on his use of [Psikinetic Blade], he instinctively triggered [Chivalric Charge] again.

Momentum flared along his limbs while the System interpreted his command and sent energy into his muscles, and with the same unconscious thought as was used to move limbs for actions like walking; Leonidas exploded forward into the small trio of as-of-yet unharmed goblins.

His [Archon’s Psiblade] whined through the air when he swung it, and the distorted surface of his blade—rippled and hazed beneath the layered power of his psiforce—sliced downward through the lead goblin from the crown of its skull and out through the center of its groin.

The creature detonated with the transferred kinetic force of his momentum and striking blade, and the two halves of its body exploded outward to splatter the other goblins and Leonidas himself with gore and viscera. Shrieks of terror erupted from the creatures’ mouths, and they finally seemed to have had enough.

With one goblin insensate, one half-dead with part of its skull removed, and a third screaming itself hoarse with a dismembered arm; the two remaining hale and healthy creatures spun on their heels and scrambled away. There was no specific direction to their flight, per se, but instead a general sense of simply wanting to be elsewhere.

Leonidas didn’t pursue the two fleeing goblins immediately, and as they ran, the psiforce surrounding his sword died at last. The skill’s loss was immediately evident, and Leonidas felt a subtle wave of fatigue wash over him when it deactivated. It had not simply been manifested, he realized, but had been draining his Psi while it sustained itself.

He could feel the lack of it within his mind and Core, though it was—very slowly—already regenerating. He wanted to sit down, meditate and Cultivate, and let it recharge. He couldn’t, however. He needed to finish the fight before his scouring concluded. The combat meditation Miranda had taught him was immensely potent, and it had seemed absolutely perfect to limit-test the technique during a battle against possibly the weakest enemies he could imagine.

Its downsides, however, were vast if they came at the wrong moment, and even goblins could become lethal enemies in that circumstance. He didn’t have time to deal with those consequences, if they reared their head mid-battle.

Instead, he turned back to the three wounded creatures and made his way to the first one: the creature he’d skull-slammed into the manastone with his initial wave of seething anger. A crackle of scarlet lightning snapped along his left hand, but he ignored both it and the lance of pain that shot through his mana channels afterward.

He was reaching the limit of what was safe for an initial scouring session.

Keeping that in mind, he closed his left hand around the goblin’s throat and lifted it smoothly into the air. Wordlessly, he showed it to the crowd, and then—after moving his hand to the crown of its skull—decapitated the creature from behind, and along the middle of its mouth. Its upper and lower jaw separated, and the Goblin spasmed once before going still.

Leonidas dropped its bisected skull and moved to the next creature: the one writhing on the ground with its arm blown off.

This one Leonidas simply stared at coldly, and then raised his right foot to place on its screeching face. The goblin’s good hand scrabbled at his sabaton, and Leonidas lifted his gaze to the crowd in silence. The faces he saw were watching with rapt attention, and he sought out the human ones—or what he thought were the human ones—among them.

His heartbeat thundered in his ears, like a subtly ramping timebomb.

The clothing was the biggest indicator, as many of the locals had seemingly retained the rustic attire remote towns like the Twin Lakes had been known for. These people, he reminded himself, were what the creature below him had sought to destroy. Innocent, hard-working, and simple folk only looking to make their lot in life a little easier.

Leonidas’ jaw locked, and his sabaton pressed down on the Goblin’s head.

Another shrill scream left the creature’s mouth, and he paid it no heed. Instead, he lowered his [Archon’s Psiblade]’s point toward the ground, and then stabbed it down into the bicep of the screeching greenskin’s remaining arm. The arena was hauntingly silent while the monster wailed, and Leonidas surgically worked his blade back and forth until he felt the limb severed entirely.

Then, he resumed the downward pressure with his boot.

He felt the cartilage of its nose give way first, and its hooked shape broke and shattered under his sabaton. Its biting teeth were next, and his heel applied enough force to break several of them while it tried to get away.

Its legs kicked and flailed at him, and it started grinding its own hairless skull against the moonstone in an effort to escape. Blood lined the white arena surface where it writhed, and Leonidas paid it no more attention than he might a stepped-on ant.

The smell of feces and urine met his nostrils when the goblin soiled itself in terror, and still Leonidas applied inexorable pressure to its comparatively fragile skull. Bone cracked with a ringing, acoustic echo that told him something—or someone—was intentionally enhancing every moment of the creature’s pain.

Leonidas turned his gaze along the edge of the Arena wall and searched methodically for where the box housing the Dusk-Lord was, and found her only a few moments.

Ceruviel Latherian was standing with her hands clasped at the base of her spine, and her purple lips were set into a neutral line.

When his eyes met hers, her expression was unchanged.

She simply watched him, and seemed almost bored while she did.

The goblin’s jaw broke, and its orbitals shattered under the pressure. Blood pumped from its ruined face, and its writhing kicks grew slower and more lethargic. Blood covered him in visceral stains along his boot and shin, and his other foot was sprayed with a line of it where part of the creature’s skull had finally broken and ejected vital fluid and viscera.

His eyes narrowed faintly at the Dusk-Lord, and with a final push of his leg muscles, he crushed the goblin’s skull and brain matter into the manastone entirely. A wet and sticky mess of blood, gore, and gray matter absorbed his boot-heel; and Leonidas was forced to yank his armored foot from the remains of the dead creature’s head.

The silence of the arena continued while Leonidas walked toward the last remaining injured goblin, and after looking at it for a few moments in cold consideration; he stabbed the half-dead creature through the gut, and opened it up to the neck. Stomach, organs, and eviscerated intestines spilled from its torso, and Leonidas kicked it away to spray its offal across the arena floor.

Like unwanted garbage.

Someone in the crowd vomited noisily enough for him to hear, but he paid them no heed. His actions, he understood, would seem senseless or deranged to many. It would seem unhinged, perhaps, or even devoid of sense beyond the need to be as brutally violent as possible.

That was not the case.

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Leonidas, contrary to what anyone thought, was making a statement.

Not for the crowd, though, and not for Dusk-Lord Latherian.

He was making a statement to himself. He was acknowledging the new world he was in, where people died—not because of a summoned Demon and his legions of hell, but because of what he had done. He was acknowledging that he had caused all of it. He was acknowledging that, to protect his species, he had to be more than the righteous beacon of light that had led the forces of Elatra to common victory against a tangible evil.

Evil was not so cut and dry in the real world. Evil didn’t cower from the Light, or recoil from the power of Lumenkill Swordforce. Evil was a murderer in an alley, a rapist in a park, and a thief in a market with no desire to go to prison. Evil was mortal, and multi-faceted, and incarnated in the form of monsters both of the System’s making, and of mortal making as well.

Evil was in everyone, and everything, from the intelligent races like elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, and others; to the mutated flora and fauna, the unleashed monsters, and all things in-between.

Leonidas was a sheepdog in a world that had been given to the wolves.

If he wanted to protect the flock, there was only one real choice left to him.

He would build a lighthouse to guide the desperate home, and shelter them. But he would do it not just with benevolence, or kindness, or charity: he would shelter them with the pragmatic acknowledgement of what the post-Incursion Terra really was.

A world where the only authority that mattered was what could be enforced at the edge of a blade. Leonidas would be the one to hold that blade. He would be the requiem that they feared. In order to achieve that strength, he had to kill the Hero he had been, and evolve past the moral and ethical simplicities of an enlightened society.

Ambition was the mother of savagery, and the lover of the ruthless.

And in him lurked an Ambition that would accept no less than the World itself.

> “That doesn’t change the fact that we’re animals, Leonidas.” Miranda had said grimly. “We kill, and they kill. The only difference between demons and us is the motivation.”

He didn’t know when, between leaving the tunnel and engaging the goblins, he’d realized the need to grow beyond the simplicity of black and white good and evil. He couldn’t have identified the moment when his convictions, still strong even ten minutes prior, had eroded so rapidly that the idea of moral absolutism seemed suddenly short-sighted to him.

All Knights had a Code, so he’d been told. Yet, he’d never gotten his. The System had never provided him one, despite the clear implication that it was part of the Archetype’s core existence.

Leonidas’ eyes traced over the crowd again, and he felt his right leg spasm at the building pressure of his mana scouring. He had only minutes left, he realized suddenly, before the process began to cripple his ability to function temporarily. He had a plan to avoid that, of course, but it likely meant he needed to kill the remaining goblins for it to work.

His meditative focus was stoked more firmly, alongside his Core, and Leonidas searched for the goblins while part of his mind still worked away at the problem of his Knight’s Code. The energy from his Core filled him with destructive power, and he shuddered subtly at the pain—and the beauty of its ferocity. There was a kind of release within that power, he realized. The Cataclysm had been a brand he’d feared only moments earlier, but…

His eyes found the goblins, his thoughts trailed off, and he exploded into a sprint.

The first of the goblins was perhaps one hundred feet away, and was attempting to find a way to raise the nearest portcullis in order to exit the arena. Leonidas gave it no chance to do so, and instead narrowed his eyes—with the aided focus of his battle meditation—on the three-foot high green murder-gremlin.

When he closed in further, he spotted the ax it was wielding and an idea came to him. First, though, he had to kill the little bastard before anything else.

“Hey!” Leonidas shouted in a way that was distant to his own mind, and the thundering beat of his heart in his ears; its pace ratcheting up with steadily growing intensity. His time was running short.

The goblin spun around at the sound of his voice, and its beady little eyes widened in fear. A quick glance around its surroundings showed that it was trapped and, with a surprisingly defiant scream, it chose fight over further flight and tried to charge at him.

Leonidas met the creature head on, parried away its ax, and then kicked it in the head hard enough to slam its skull into the manastone arena floor. His [Archon’s Psiblade] descended a moment later, and he pierced the creature’s brains through its ears in a splatter of viscera, and reached down to retrieve its ax.

His left hand spasmed when he did, and he very nearly failed to grab the haft of the weapon.

“Fuck,” he whispered under his breath, and then forced his fingers to tighten around the ax. He just needed a little longer, if what he suspected was true. If it wasn’t, he was in not just for a world of pain—but an extremely dangerous experimentation with healing potions, and a lot of wasted Aetherium.

If his plan, concocted after his experience in the preparation room, worked?

Well, he’d have found an incredibly painful, but incredibly rapid way of increasing the potency of his mana flow and the future development of his [Cataclysm Core].

Leonidas’ eyes sought after the last goblin, and he found it rushing toward its fallen comrades and the weapons lying around their bodies. “Not a terrible idea, actually, if not for how overmatched the little shithead was.” Leonidas muttered through the cracks in his battle meditation. His heartbeat was a drum in his ears, and he could feel a subtle unsteadiness entering his limbs.

He needed to close distance with the last goblin fast.

A low growl escaped his lips, and he felt his battle meditation starting to fray at the edges. He’d spent too long enjoying the misery of the goblins he’d killed, and too long immersed in the bloodlust he’d started developing in the arena. Even then he could feel it, like a raging tide of building need for violence, for destruction, for carnage.

It was a feeling of pure and primordial rage. He wanted to destroy the goblins, not just end them. He wanted to shatter them to pieces, crush them under heel, blow them apart, and burn them to a crisp. The vehemence of it shocked him to some degree, but he didn’t think too hard about it.

He had no time to think too hard about it.

The moment Leonidas came within fifty feet of the remaining creature, he reared back the ax in his left hand, braced himself to a momentary stop, and then hurled the ax with every bit of remembered muscle memory he had.

It flew, blade over shaft, across the distance with every iota of his enhanced strength…

…and cut off the top of one of the creature’s ears.

Leonidas cursed at the same time as the goblin spun around with a scream of pain, and was already running while its eyes frantically searched for and eventually spotted him. Twenty feet from the goblin, the creature shrieked at him with a dagger in each hand, and bravely—or perhaps foolishly—gestured at him, and the crowd, in a last defiance of fate.

In response, Leonidas triggered [Chivalric Charge].

The Knightly ability filled his limbs with the same surge of System-enhanced power, and he exploded forward into an on-rushing velocity that closed distance with the goblin at speeds that would have made Usain Bolt look average.

The goblin’s beady eyes widened in shock, as if Leonidas hadn’t done the same thing twice before, and Leonidas barely had time to lament how dissatisfying the goblins’ clear collective stupidity made the whole ordeal before his [Archon’s Psiblade] cut horizontally through the creature’s torso with enough force to blow the top half of its body away from its legs and waist.

Distantly, Leonidas realized that his Charge skill seemed to always take him several feet past his target, or at least propelled him with enough force that he ended up there. He distractedly wondered if that was something he could control, and then his arms spasmed and he dropped his sword.

His battle meditation started to fail at the same moment, and the intentionally deafened noise of the announcer and arena flooded in immediately.

“{...BRUTAL DEMONSTRATION OF TERRAN FEROCITY, THE DUSK-LORD’S ERSTWHILE CHAMPION APPEARS TO HAVE EXHAUSTED HIMSELF!}”

Leonidas barely paid any heed to the obviously ruffled Haelfenn blowhard, and instead worked at suppressing and pushing back the destructive power of his [Cataclysm Core] where it raged within his mana channels and, he realized with momentary alarm, his body at large.

He hadn’t even noticed the energy seeping across the rest of his anatomy.

Every ounce of his upgraded Willpower was spent toward curtailing the raging energy, and Leonidas let out an agonized snarl of pain as he slowly, and agonizingly shoved the energy back like he were trying to bottle a hurricane. The more he fought it, the more it seemed to resist, and yet he was making headway.

Slowly, desperately, and with mere moments left before it felt like his heart would explode; Leonidas succeeded. The energy of his Core snapped back into its nascent, barely-formed translucent shell within his solar plexus, and he collapsed in the blood, gore, and viscera which remained of the goblins he’d slain.

His limbs spasmed, his mana channels seared like he’d ignited them, and still he waited for what he hoped would come.

“Come on…” he rasped with suddenly-raw vocal chords. “I know you won’t hold it against me, you over-exaggerated fucking computer…”

Then blessedly, suddenly, and almost begrudgingly: a System screen appeared before him, and when it did, Leonidas’ face lit up in a triumphant grin.

image [https://i.imgur.com/nQNdlL2.png]