“You! What did you do to us?” A stocky man wearing what looked to be a suit of metal armor shouted across the room. Rather than answering, Sam took a deep breath and tossed the pile of contracts onto the ground, trying to stop himself from retaliating. With his new strength from his threshold, he could have ripped that man’s head off without blinking. Not that he would do such a thing of course, but it was admittedly tempting.
“Find the contract that corresponds with your name and accept the System prompt to dissolve it. Hopefully that will clear your minds. If not, then I guess that you were just assholes all along.” This proclamation was met with a storm of threats, and other forms of verbal assault, but Sam turned around and sat down. Eventually, a few people made their way out of the crowd and started to pick up the papers. With flashes of light, their contracts were dissolved and they all let out deep breaths of astonishment. All of them looked down at their hands in confusion and then towards Sam. He grinned at them and watched their expressions. Unexpectedly, they fell to the floor and started bowing to him.
“We are sorry that we ever doubted you. Please forgive us, as it was not our intention. It was like there was a fog over our minds,” One of them said as they bowed. Sam was horrified by the attention and ran over to lift them up.
“There's no need for that. As long as you all understand that I did not cause all of this mess, then I am satisfied. Now that you all can see what happened to you, I urge you to make the right choice.” The trickle of people turned into a flood and the blue light of the contracts being dissolved filled the room with an eerie hue. Then it dissipated, with everyone freed from the influence of Berrigious. Some of them sobbed in relief, and others sat down in shock at being free. A few, namely the strongest of them, were unaffected, seeing as they had not really been affected by the mind control in the first place. Then, it all started to go downhill.
It all started with Rodney Kane. The man had, for a brief moment, looked at Sam with something other than disdain, actually grateful for once about what Sam had done for him, but then his expression hardened and a shifty look took over his face. He whispered something to his companion, Andrew Munro, and the man looked over at Sam with a malicious look in his eyes. Without any warning, they charged Sam. What they had realized was with the dissolution of the contracts coupled with the universal reset, they were not bound by the laws of the arena any more and they could freely attack others. And of course, they targeted Sam.
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He gritted his teeth and started to expand his aura, filling it with the hot power of his rage.How could these people turn against him almost as soon as he had freed them? It defied belief. Nobody else tried to stop them, either too dazed from their ordeal or too afraid of the two men to do anything. It was just Sam against the two men, and he was far weaker than them without his Daos.
“So that’s how it's going to be then? You’re going to bite the hand that fed you?” Sam’s voice was laced with the thick, almost molten anger that was stirring within him at this display of ingratitude and pure evil. Not only were they going to attack him for no apparent reason, but they had capitalized on his gift to them to do so. That was too much for Sam to deal with and instead he prepared to give them the beating of their lives, unsure of how he was actually going to do that. Anger was a domineering force, and under its auspices, he felt as if he could not lose. Rodney sneered at him, his scarred face twisted with malice and glee.
“You damn fool! Why on Earth would we not use your gift to kill you? It makes it that much sweeter.” By then Sam was completely out of it, his mind aflame with anger. For the first time since he had been cut off form his Daos, the force that was protecting him from them started to crack and break. He was outputting such pure anger that it was resonating with the concept that he had been bound, calling out to it for an alliance. Against this conceptual resonance, the barrier that the strange being had placed in his was like a sheet of paper against the wrath of a dying star. With the sound of reality tearing, Sam’s body began to glow bright red, outputting the heat of a furnace. Before he could succumb to his anger forever, he heard a voice faintly, as if through water.
“Arbiter! SAM! You’re breaking apart!” It was the voice of Eduardo, and the use of Sam’s name shocked him so much that it dragged him out of his berserker state.
“What? What is happening?” Sam’s mind was beginning to fracture, the struggle between his Dao and his soul too much to bear. He felt a hand grab onto his own, and another one landed on his head. A strange force began to pulse through the hand and into his body. It felt like the conceptual ideal of a perfectly balanced system, the feeling of paying for something, or getting revenge for the death of your family. It was the force of Reciprocity. Drawing on the connections between himself and Sam, the owner of the hand started to pull away the torment that was ravaging his body, causing Sam to drift off into a dark and tortured sleep. As the last few drops of his awareness left him, he saw and heard a fight breaking out and the face of Profound Visionary standing over him, with a worried look on his wrinkled face. At least Sam had finally figured out what the man's Dao was. With one final futile grasp at consciousness, Sam was dragged under by the siren call of sleep.