After the fight with Pseudonym, Helial had been brought back to life and had spent a period of rehabilitation short enough, by the standards of a normal person.
Helial had not been able to train for several weeks and this had made him feel helpless as he had not felt for some time: he felt perhaps worse than when, due to his almost non-existent Statistics, he hadn't been able to erect stable walls for the houses he tried to build during the night on the edge of his village.
Luckily Lumia had been by his side the whole time he had stayed in bed and had given him loving care. Obviously, he had tried several times to kiss him, without ever succeeding.
Now that Helial had recovered, he felt more regenerated than ever, full of strength and fighting spirit, but he wanted more. The boy was now circling in the air, closely followed by countless white flames. On his way, along with the bonfires, several runic frameworks formed; they seemed to come out of nowhere, as if they were hidden before activating them.
Jump after jump, Helial got higher and higher, up to the clouds. He was really a Qilin who dominating the sky.
But it was not enough.
He looked at his Mental Energy.
Mental Energy
2.853/210.324
"Shit."
He let himself fall at full speed, ignoring the wind that lashed at his face.
He was several thousand meters high in the sky and was now plummeting straight down to the ground. If he hadn't slowed down, he would have hit the ground like an insect on the glass of a closed window.
While in free fall, he felt unconstrained and in control. He fully enjoyed that feeling. He wouldn't have wasted even one of the last seconds before stopping his dangerous descent.
Helial was fully enjoying all those sensations, now amplified tenfold. After the clash with Pseudonym, there was something new inside his soul. It looked like that the warrior in black armour was unreachable for everyone, but Helial had danced in the sky with him, in a legendary clash. Their duel would have been told and retold for centuries by the few who had seen it, remembered as the first in a long series.
The young man hoped he could meet Pseudonym as soon as possible in order to fight him again; at the mere thought, the adrenaline began to flow into his body and to cross every blood vessel. But now that Pseudonym was far away, nobody knew in which remote corner of the planet, it would have been difficult for Helial to find him: he did not know his features and the only one who had the honor of seeing his face was Iblis. However, the Devil had promised to help him.
Helial got lost many times retracing the memories of that clash, searching every detail of their struggle with impressive precision, the precise and lethal movements of his enemy, even his smell of steel and blood.
Helial remembered the smell of Pseudonym's blood.
However little he had lost, the idea of being able to hurt him gave him a strange feeling.
While training, developing new skills and strategies, he had never met someone who could shock him so much.
Sometimes he even stopped to think that if Pseudonym had been a woman, he probably would have already fallen in love. Unfortunately, Helial wasn't in the dick fan club.
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On the other hand, Circe had begun to move his heart, and some other bits too.
The Witch of Orma had been able to enchant him first with her handsome figure, then with her aggressive ways.
Still, Helial knew well how much Circe hated to be in Orma at the time.
Within the walls of Orma, Circe was a goddess. Still, she was a prisoner of a golden cage.
And even in there, this goddess always had someone to clash with.
Without middle ground, who was weaker was too weak for her, who was stronger was too strong.
As strong as her desire to grow and improve could be, Circe's future had been practically sabotaged by Orma's political condition; although the Goblins did not control a large territory and had many enemies, if the Witch had gone too far and entered the radar of her father's opponents, she would have risked a lot.
That was why Big and Roxy had stopped her from traveling alone.
Helial had decided that once the matter of the Prince of Darkness and the war had been settled, he would end her golden captivity and take her with him to explore the nation of Fiercelake, and then the whole continent.
Finally close to the ground, a few meters high, a long ramp of flames appeared above Helial's feet. As if he had a snowboard under his soles, he drifted and made another jump, which cushioned the fall after a series of daring somersaults.
Now his Mental Energy was practically gone.
He had used Perfect Background in mid-air, trying to find its full potential. The effective range was ten meters. Further than that, several imperfections began to arise. Furthermore, Mana consumption was tremendously high.
Helial got up, cleaned his clothes from dust, and then, speaking to clean air, said, "Master."
Srrrrrrrrr
The noisy sucking of a straw broke the pleasant silence of the forest.
Turning around, the young man saw in front of him a boy, lying on a beach bed with a coconut in his hands and a plate with pineapple floating beside him.
After so long, Helial had learned that it was better for his mental health to ignore the weird behaviours of that thousands-year-old Devil with the appearance of a harmless child.
"I want to take the path we have already talked about," he began.
Without paying much attention to his disciple, Iblis continued to enjoy his cocktail and bathe in the sun rays.
You're always so pale, why don't you tan a bit? These words kept echoing in his head.
"I've been sunbathing for a whole era, why don't I ever tan?" muttered Iblis, completely ignoring that he was an incorporeal soul.
Helial's master seemed to have a strange fixation for sunglasses and suntan. Yet, since Helial had known him, his skin had remained the same pale shade as ever.
"If you want your foundations to surpass those of every living and not living thing, including the great monsters that marked the Ages of this shitty universe, you must be ready for sacrifices," said Iblis.
"I'm ready," nodded Helial.
Millions of images suddenly passed into the eyes of the Devil. His parted lips evoked a power beyond the limit of human understanding. After a couple of minutes of silence, the boy shook his head.
“If you intend to proceed on this path, the blood of your enemies will continuously wet your every path, but it will not be just that. If you chose to continue on a normal path, to accept everyone's foundations, even the same ones I had, it will be different; you will live a full life and your loved ones will always be with you. You will have everything you need, but absolute power will always be too far from you, an opportunity lost forever."
"I don't care to live as I have lived before knowing you and be forgotten after a wave of violence," said Helial firmly.
“You don't even know what you're saying. If you want to chase perfection, you won't be the only one to pay for it. I can't say anything specific, because of some universal rules. Still, I can tell you that if you chose the Perfect Foundations, you better get ready, because there will be much to suffer. Once you have made this choice, you cannot go back.
“Glory, power, greatness. Become the strongest: they are all things at hand, but the other side of the coin is a sea of blood and suffering. If instead you chose the path of all the other people, you will become strong much faster. Right, here's what I was forgetting. If you were to go down this path, your progress would be much slower. In the beginning, it would be much more difficult to protect your loved ones. Although the Perfect Foundations can allow you to become stronger than anyone within your own Phase, there are physical limits imposed by the various Phases. With Second Phase Meridians, you would soon reach a bottleneck."
"Will Lumia die if I make this choice?" Helial focused his dark blue eyes on Iblis's pitch black ones.
Iblis shook his head and remained silent.
It was not a real answer, but it was enough for Helial, who removed the upper part of his tunic, showing the toned muscles underneath.
"We can start then."
Thousands of black needles appeared all around Iblis, while the Devil watched the starry night above them.