“STOP RUNNING COWARD!”
“Oop, not a coward. You just gonna take that?”
“I’LL STOP RUNNING WHEN YOU STOP CHASING ME!”
“Solid logic, bad timing. Now he’s just gonna chase you harder.”
”I’M GONNA BREAK YOUR LEGS DICKHEAD!”
“See? Now he’s definitely gonna catch up to you. He’s got that sweet, sweet power up from his emotions… or something.”
Viran let out his inner reaction YouTuber as he watched the chase occur below him.
Viran had panicked, he wasn’t too proud to admit it. He’d panicked and done the first thing that popped into his head.
He climbed a tree. It was funny really, Viran didn’t even know he could still climb trees.
But adrenaline didn’t seem to care about limits, because the speed with which he hauled ass up that damn tree was awe-inspiring.
“PUSSY ASS LITTLE BITCH!”
”H-hey! Wait-!”
“Oh man, that’s blood.”
“That’s… that’s a lot of blood actually…”
“Isn’t this going a bit too far?”
”Why isn’t anyone stopping this?”
It seemed that boy was taking out his frustrations on that other poor guy. A bad day? Maybe first day jitters had gotten the better of him.
Viran grimaced, and yet he stayed in place.
At best he’d put himself in danger, at worst he’d get a concussion.
That’s what he told himself, anyway.
Truth was that he wasn’t like his mother or his brother, he wasn’t the kind of person who could sprint into danger for someone else.
He was a bystander.
WHACK!
SMACK!
WHAM!
CRUNCH!
Viran slammed the urge to help deep down inside himself and threw himself up the tree, climbing it with a maddened ferocity.
Viran had always hated fighting and yelling, as most normal 21 century people do.
So Viran practiced a skill long honed over a childhood fraught with fighting and yelling.
He ignored it.
Viran pretended that the screams were from some movie.
And that the sound of punching was some hero facing off with a villain.
And that the tears running down his face weren’t there.
And that this was something he could handle.
Why was he so emotional? He’d seen worse in the show.
His hands were scrapped and scratched but he didn’t care.
He kept climbing.
Something pounded under his skin as if searching for an exit.
Weird, but he kept climbing.
He’d seen so much worse then this, why was he so… afraid?
His body begged him to stop, to rest, to sleep, but he didn’t care.
He kept climbing. Viran didn’t stop climbing until he was all the way at the top.
There, stuck to the tallest branch of the tree, was a silver coin.
Using up the last of the adrenaline, he reached up high and plucked it off the branch.
Breathing heavily, he looked down at the coin.
It seemed to taunt him, laugh at his cowardice.
‘How could you leave that poor boy to die?’ It asked. ‘Only bad people do that, are you a bad person, Vee?’
Viran bit back a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh.
He begrudgingly took the coin and began to climb back down.
Viran took a deep breath, and resumed watching the beat down.
Eventually the attacker left, cursing and shouting all the while, leaving only the Viran and the boy.
With shaky hands Viran leaned over further to look at the unconscious boy.
Black hair, brown eyes, fair skin, an ordinary face in the crowd, one you wouldn’t glance twice at.
It- He looked like a corpse.
It triggered something in Viran. An image. Something he didn’t want to think about.
Something he shouldn’t think about.
So much blood.
How did he even store that much blood inside him.
It was everywhere. All over him.
A boy smashed apart.
Viran scrambled down the tree to check on the wounded boy.
He stopped just in front of the bod- the unconscious form, breathing hard.
“Dear god…”
“Is he dead?”
“He looks dead.”
“Is this how I looked?”
“I wonder who found my body.”
“I wonder if I got a funeral.”
“I wonder who bothered to show up…”
“Did Daniel come?”
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“Dad probably didn’t…”
“Did Mo-”
Viran puked, unable to stomach the sight of the would-be corpse as well as the thoughts rampaging through his head.
The tears fell harder as Viran turned away and ran away as fast as his legs could take him.
He was so upset that he didn’t even notice the pitch black mana motes that wrapped around the unconscious boy and teleported them away.
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Viran ran for half an hour before his legs began to give out.
That was… odd seeing as how Viran was 358 pounds and hadn’t been able to run longer then a couple minutes last he checked.
Viran finally stopped and looked down at himself.
His body seemed the same, all the disgusting flaps and curves in place.
Body Forging.
The answer popped into his head, followed by the image of Zack Flameclaw being able to lift boulders like they were weightless (Episode 3 of season 2; The Midnight Harvester), and every episode this strength was displayed in.
Which was… a lot, at least 82%. He’d never been one for clever magic, just raw power.
There had been some way they’d used to check, but some mystic force told him it hadn’t been properly explained in any canon scene. This force told Viran that while the imagery for this method had been vivid, the details were not.
“Definitely more than just a memory jog. God powers are kinda cool.”
Fortunately, the over-saturation of isekai anime gave Viran an idea.
The tried and true; Meditation, perfect for your soon-to-be op harem master.
And Viran, hopefully.
The boy, utterly transfixed by this concept and having almost completely forgotten about the danger (thanks to his newly unmedicated ADHD), immediately sat down and tried his best to meditate.
10 minutes passed with frustrated nothingness.
It was only when Viran had gotten bored and started to daydream about sexy bara men did something finally change.
He had just taken a long, contented breath as he imagined burying his face in some jock’s pecs, truly relaxed, when his daydream ended and his consciousness was shunted elsewhere.
Viran open his eyes(?) and found himself in a grassy field draped in night.
This felt far more solid then a daydream, but he instinctively knew that he could end this weirdness by focusing on his place in reality.
Once again, god powers were handy.
Viran wandered around the field for what felt like both hours and milliseconds before he happened upon a river.
And he quite literally happened upon it.
He crouched down and found the river suddenly started from nowhere, as if the water were being generated from nothing.
It split into two, and those two channels had branchs extending at even distances into perfectly circular pools.
The channels were mirrored in shape, but not in makeup.
The beginning river just seemed to be regular water, but the moment the river split, the left half’s water changed to resemble a starry sky, with pinpricks of light breaking up inky black.
The right became blood. Well… the color of blood, at least. But it was still eerie.
The right channel had the first of its pools lit up, its radiance piercing the darkness of the field, though Li felt that it should be much brighter.
All of the left’s pools were dark.
He wanted to move forward to take a closer look, but those odd instincts told him that he was meant to be positioned at the base of the river.
As he focused harder on the strange channels, words popped into his mind.
Magical Cultivation (All)
Bronze (0/3)
Silver
Gold
Platinum
Diamond
Master
Grandmaster
Divine
Physical Cultivation (Resonant - ??? (???))
Bronze (1/3)
Silver
Gold
Platinum
Diamond
Resplendent
Demigod
Divine
Viran sighed, unsure how to feel about this situation.
On one hand, it was amazing that Viran had the physical prowess of someone a few hundred pounds lighter then him.
On the other, when he’d daydream about being in this world, he’d always imagined that Body Forging would’ve made him thin.
But no, of course not, that’d be too easy. He was still an obese slob even in another world.
God, if only his mother could see him now, what would she think? She probably only remembered the younger, thinner, handsomer version of Viran.
She’d always been a health nut, and taught Viran all the tricks of the trade. And he’d squandered all that time and effort.
Viran brought up the word again and noticed that there was additional text next to Physical Cultivation.
“Resonant? But the actual thing resonating is hidden… perhaps it’s because my magical cultivation is dormant?”
Viran looked around the strange world again.
Hadn’t Zack’s looked different?
Viran felt the godly instincts in him shift, and he reached out to something…
----------------------------------------
Floating in the air,
the child of fire looks down from his throne.
Volcanos; The dormant and the flaming…
the lava whispers of power accrued.
Look upon this sullied world
the wasteland of his soul.
The young man looks down upon the fiery landscape. 2 rows of volcanos dotted the land, unnaturally even, as if placed by dexterous hands.
The left side’s volcanos were bigger, stronger, more destructive. They would burn everything to ash if he let them.
The right’s volcanos were smaller, but instead had lush forests and jungles surrounding them.
The ground was stronger, healthier, lasted longer against the coming fire.
The first of these volcanoes was active, but not in the way one would assume.
It’s heat created hot springs that had enriching minerals and it’s ash renewed the soil. The volcano served the land, empowered it.
Was the young man the volcano or the ground around it?
----------------------------------------
Viran blinked as the vision faded.
He was right, Zack’s…
“Soulscape” His divine power informed him.
Zack’s soulscape was different from Viran’s, but what factors influenced it?
His power had no answer, or just refused to give one.
Viran looked around the forest.
The moonlight shone down upon him like a spotlight. The rivers flowed on, the right raging, the left peaceful. The grass flowed with the wind, but also didn’t in some spots as if they were a paused video.
Viran jolted as the answer came to him.
“Wait… is this-”
“So what’s a farm boy like you doing in a place like this? How did you even afford the ride here? Good harvest?”
No.
No no no no no!
Viran immediately focused on going back to the real world.
He knew that voice.
----------------------------------------
The two men circled each other, muscles tight and eyes focused.
Apathy laughed at the way the red haired man’s teeth gritted.
”What’s the matter farm boy, didn’t you learn to speak in that hick town of yours?”
The man’s hands clenched hard enough to draw blood.
“Where I come from doesn’t matter. All that matters in life is the strength of your heart! That’s what my dad always taught me!”
He declared with a fervent light in his eyes, the radiance of his goodness annoying Apathy to no end.
The two men stared each other down, their respective yellow and black eyes glowing with dislike.
Apathy drew his blade. No one else seemed to have a weapon, but it wasn’t his fault they were all useless.
“The strength of your heart? Give me a break. All that matters is the strength of your arm and your magic, everything else is meaningless. Come, let me steal those tokens off of you so I never have to see your filthy face ever again.”
Zack growled and fell into a combat stance, his body, unnaturally honed from years of field work, at the ready.
The soon-to-be rivals smirked at each other, itching to test the other’s limits.
The seconds passed and they were both about to launch, and then…!
A boy burst through the bushes.
Apathy faltered alongside his opponent, throughly confused as the small boy coughed, spitting up leaves.
Apathy recognized him as the last arrival to the exam, aside from the red-haired man.
The weak looking one who seemed completely unprepared.
He sighed and held up a gleaming silver token.
“Who… huff… the hell puts snakes in an entrance exam? Ugh, that fuckin’ lunatic…”
Apathy couldn’t place the accent, which worried him a smidge, not that his massive ego would ever let him admit it.
This weakling could easily be from far off places, his odd appearance supported it.
What if the boy had techniques Apathy didn’t know about.
What if the body fat were for a reason? What if he had some blood affinity techniques to utilize it? It’d probably be considered a physical technique.
That was the one blind spot of this exam, pure magic users were at a sizable disadvantage. Anybody who had an ounce of combat training or a single physical technique would dominate.
Apathy himself was only able to keep up because his dark magic wasn’t counted as magic if he only used it to fuel the sword’s enchantments.
But against a true physical threat? He should’ve been eliminated easily.
That’s why the redhead was pissing him off, the man should be in the Blessed hall by now but he had only just reached 4 tokens!
Why would someone with such an advantage not utilize it?!
Shit! The short one!
Apathy focused back on the fat kid, who was still complaining to himself about the unfairness of it all.
It was easy to forget the boy were there, despite his loud complaining.
No matter the tricks he had to have up his sleeve, Apathy couldn’t bring himself to be intimidated by the soft eyes and innocent face.
It was as if the boy lacked any sort of edge at all and sucked up all the tension in the room, leaving Apathy feeling rather awkward about his earlier behavior.
He felt weirdly self conscious in that moment.
“Did I just call that guy a hick? Gods, am I 40? Who talks like that?”
The farmer, who seemed to have the same problem, cleared his throat.
“Yo… um… you okay?”
The boy flinched and looked up at the two fighters.
His eyes shifted from Apathy to his dirt covered rival, and the boy seemed much more scared of the latter, which stung Apathy’s pride a bit.
The fat one stared at the redhead as if he were looking upon a god. His breaths quickening and his eyes widening.
The big guy seemed uncomfortable with the fear, used to being seen as a good guy who rescued cats from trees or whatever.
The boy ran away soon after, running as if his life depended on it.
Apathy and the farmer turned back to each other.
“So…”
“Uh…”
Even with the boy gone, both men felt as if the moment were ruined.
Apathy sighed.
“Let’s just… get this over with.”
The man nodded, and the two lunged at each other.