HATED
Leonel exhaled a shaky breath, his body trembling. Pain directed at the soul was absolutely the worst thing he had ever experienced.
It wasn't just pain that was the problem; it almost felt as though some higher existence was taking control of your existence and slowly erasing it. It was an assault on the psyche and body, an existential crisis bottled up and stripped of all the middle-aged angst that could make it somewhat amusing.
It was the worst feeling he had ever experienced. He didn't want to admit it, but it had truly felt worse than watching his father and Aina die.
No, it was almost like that experience had taken the worst things he could imagine and forced him to experience them with a dose of heartrending pain to boot. It refused to stop at just pain and wanted to destroy everything it meant to be Leonel.
Leonel knew that it couldn't have just been the pain that did this to him; it was also what this pain was going toward accomplishing.
His soul wasn't just anchoring anything; it was anchoring a World of Destruction. Not only was there the pain of feeling his soul split, but it was also being seeped in the truest despair there was, the destruction of all that had ever been and would ever be.
Leonel exhaled another hollow breath. He had succeeded, and yet he didn't even feel happy. He felt like that weight was trying to take hold of him again, but he managed to hold it off, his gaze flashing with a frighteningly cold light.
He could remember the first time he had felt the pain of improvement.
He had only been 18 years old, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He knew nothing about this so-called Dimensional Verse and stupidly tried to awaken his Metal Synergy Lineage Factor much too early.
He had no qualifications to do so, not due to lack of talent, but lack of experience and fortitude. He had been a normal youth until that day. The worst pain he had experienced was probably getting his ribs broken in a meaningless football game.
But he had persevered.
His reasons back then were endlessly superficial and outrageously selfish. He just didn't want to lose out.
But now, he was almost a decade older. He had experienced so much, lost so much. He had different things to fight for other than just himself.
'Again...' he thought calmly.
And so he did so. Step after step, horrible, rending pain after horrible, rending pain. It was like every time he took a single step forward, he would lose another large part of himself.
If the formation of the first Node was the worst thing he had experienced, then so was the second, and then so was the third.
Every new Node he formed was like yet another superseding experience. It was hard to tell if the pain was truly becoming worse or if the experience itself was just so horrible and omnipresent that remembering anything that came before it was impossible.
Even so, Leonel kept taking those steps.
He thought of Mo''Lexi.
That woman was caring enough to dislike Aina on his behalf, and yet completely unwilling to look at him like a real human regardless. Her own past, her own emotions were more important than his own. If she didn't have an experience that made her dislike Aina, it was likely that even given the same circumstances, she wouldn't have been moved at all.
He thought of Vivak.
That man could feel rage for the loss of his daughter, he could take in a much weaker woman like Matriarch Pyius simply for the sake of love, disregarding the opinions of others, he could even be furious at the thought that many of his citizens had been killed by Leonel's hands... Material © .
And yet he was willing to treat Leonel like an experimental lab rat, to toy with his cousin's life, with Amery's life.
He thought of Anselma.
That cruel, vile woman... she was willing to come down to the Incomplete Worlds to kill his father, knowing the kind of backlash she would face, all to protect her Brazinger family.
And yet, she was willing to treat lives like weeds, to rip away a caring father from a small family, to endlessly torture Aina's mother for the crime of falling in love with the wrong man.
What did these people all have in common?
They were all selfish bastards.
And he didn't want to be like them.
That became his anchor, his small ember of will that was constantly buffeted by the winds of the cruel world.
The tenth Node began to take shape, and the world seemed to roar.
At that moment, a large amount of Anarchic Force pooled into Leonel, peeling away at the layers of his soul.
By this point, he was huddled into a corner, his body shivering uncontrollably. The room around him had been completely destroyed, and he was lying in a pile of ash. The only reason there wasn't more was that what had already been destroyed couldn't possibly be destroyed again.
He trembled fiercer and fiercer, feeling his Destruction World greedily soaking up this Anarchic Force without a care in the world.
It lashed at his soul, and he barely managed to keep himself together. It looked more like he was huddled to try to protect the final dying embers of his will than anything else.
That feeling of helplessness and despair was as strong as it could possibly be, but he didn't waver even a single time. In fact, even as the situation got worse, he seemed to feel that his mind was only getting sharper and sharper.
Under this constant assault of his character, he could feel his true self with much greater clarity than he ever had.
If the first thing he learned about himself was that he was selfish, the second thing was more of a confirmation of something he already knew.
He really, really, really...
Didn't like to lose.
In fact...
He hated losing more than he loved winning.