Stanis could hear the footsteps from outside the door getting louder. His eyes felt bloodied and his body felt weary; a full night of mana-warfare turned out to be not that good for relaxation. He had been losing for most the period but there had also been few moments when he had broken past Jen’s defences.

The instructor touched the door and it flung open, revealing the sorry sight Stanis had become. It would be wrong to say that the instructor was surprised by what he saw, instead it was more a mixture of disappointment and apathy.

“Go downstairs to the basement. Your group is going into the jungle,” After saying this, the instructor walked over to Jen’s room.

Stanis had nothing of his in the room and so he got up and left. He didn’t know where the darkness dagger was but he guessed it was still with Jen. As for his sword and cuirass, he hadn’t caught a sight of either of them. Neither of them were easily hideable so it was most likely that the two equipment had been left behind after he had been killed.

As Stanis reached the ground floor, he noticed Pete standing a few metres off in a room.

“You don’t look good,” Stanis commented.

“Ha. Look at yourself,” Pete responded.

The conversation dulled at this, Stanis stuck at what to say. He would have easily found words to talk to the old Pete, the one who seemed carefree all the time without a worry, except for booze, on his mind. But the current Pete, the one who had gone through three runs of the jungle now, was different. He was colder and seemed more calculative, more restrained of his actions, and god forbid, drinking. Perhaps this was what he had always been on the inside…

“I heard from the others,” Pete said. “They say she made you one of her zombies, how she can command you now. No wonder you look terrible,”

Stanis laughed, releasing a bit of tension from his body. “I guess so.”

“You’re going to leave it at this?” Pete asked surprised.

“I don’t know. I want to kill her, believe me. I want to kill her so badly. But I apparently die when she dies…”

“So?”

The question was like a hammer to Stanis’s heart; it was almost like it stopped moving in that moment. What was the point of living under someone else’s control? He couldn’t decide on anything and had to fight to just get his view across. It was an absolutely terrible life. Miserable.

She had killed him for simply taking back what was his. Well, no, she had killed him for his body. To hell with the miserable life awaiting him, it was better to pay her back in full for what she had done.

Pete moved from the table he was leaning on and stood straight. The very feeling Stanis gave off had transformed in a few seconds, to one absolutely cold and joyless.

“Whatever man, you make your own choices. I’m sure I’ll see you on the flipside anyways,” he said as he walked off, leaving Stanis all alone.

Stanis heard footsteps coming down the stairs and broke from his thought track. He turned around and saw the instructor walking ahead, followed by Jen. She looked bad, with red eyes and a lifeless face, but the glint within her eyes told Stanis exactly what he had wanted to hear.

He walked after her down into the basement. Berry, Johnny and Keiko were already there. They gave him weird looks but to Stanis, it was almost like they were just egging him on. The fact that she was stronger than him didn’t matter anymore. Without her zombies, her firepower went down massively, and he was no longer the same person he was yesterday; he know knew her fighting style.

The instructor looked at the five one last time. From the looks in two pairs of eyes, he already knew the outcome. They were ready to go to the second stage, they themselves had decided that.

He turned on the teleporter as he always did and watched them hop in. Then after, he closed the portal and walked away.

****

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Stanis hit the ground running and immediately moved, despite the sting from the teleportation. Jen, perhaps predicting his movement, had already prepared a mana-shield and stood proudly within, regal even.

She immediately cast a dark bolt. It was essentially saturated darkness and it shot through the air in a straight line.

Stanis grinned and merely sidestepped it.

On the side, Berry, Keiko and Johnny watched with wide eyes. Of course, they knew there would be friction between the two, but for them to all-out fight each other, it was basically a suicide wish in here.

“What are you doing? We will all die if you fight each other!” Keiko shouted.

Jen laughed in response. “I already killed him once, I can do it again easily. Besides, if I zombify him once more, I’m sure his rebelliousness will end—“

Stanis laughed at her. It was not a pretty thing, more as if he was proving he could still laugh. It was desperate and yet solid, quivering on the edge of madness and yet strong.

Around Jen’s barrier formed a moat filled with the darkness. Stanis couldn’t waste another second and so he moved. He shot to the left and slipped past a dark shot, and then sidestepped another.

He could feel the adrenaline coursing through his veins, he felt alive as he moved.

Stop came an order.

Stanis found his legs stuck and looked up to see a dark bolt coming his way, quickly striking him and throwing him back. He got up and looked at the wound; the skin had peeled away and blood was leaking out, and yet the wound was somehow cold.

He jumped to his feet and barely dodged another bolt. It seemed she was going to use orders to break his momentum, but that was fine, after all, he was used to splitting up his mind in two.

He forced a part of his mind to form a barrier around itself. The orders would still hurt as he resisted them but at least she wouldn’t be able to stop his momentum in one word.

“Hey, help me kill him,” Jen said. She wouldn’t usually stoop so low to ask for help but she got a bad feeling from Stanis. Her main combative ability came from her zombies, and having only a single rebellious one took much out of her power.

Stanis merely grinned in return. As he ran forward, he snarled out, “I will kill all who help her. I’ll make sure you all fucking die if that’s what it comes to,”

Johnny was still on the fence but it was clear Berry had already come to a decision. She moved towards Stanis with her hammer out. “We’ll all die if you kill Jen,” she said in an attempt to rally the others as she moved.

This seemed to work as Keiko followed her, and finally Johnny who merely trailed on behind.

Stanis ignored these three and reached the barrier. He felt another order to stop on the puddle but resisted, instead breaking another piece of his mind to cast Destructive mana recharge by it. It ripped through the barrier and even through the puddles as it spread out.

To break his mind any further was to potentially do permanent damage but Stanis didn’t have much of a choice as the three were almost on him. He shattered himself one more time and cast Blueshot spitfire towards the three.

It didn’t have nearly enough punch to stop them but it did distract them, enough for Stanis to cut a whole section of Jen’s barrier out. She had been forming 3 dark bolts in the time and cast them simultaneously. Right afterwards, she sent a mana-reinforced order for Stanis to hold his ground.

At this, Stanis switched his mind’s focus from Destructive mana recharge and Blueshot spitfire towards a mana shield of his own and Layman’s rush. The order broke through his mental barrier and the dark bolts broke through his physical one, both attacks hitting him at once. They downed him and he should have screamed in pain, but instead he instantly got up and ran through Jen’s barrier, towards her.

The three tried to catch up and stop him but they were already too far back to do so. Instead it was simply Jen versus him. Excited, Stanis used half his mana to create lightning inside of himself, releasing it all as he was a metre away from her.

She was hurt by this but not enough to drop her dagger as she stabbed out. His body was already contaminated with darkness but the power within the dagger was more than just that and so Stanis recoiled. Stop Jen commanded; at such close proximity with an open wound, her order was hard to resist and so he stood still.

She cast another skill and the ground itself responded, the slab of ground he stood on popping out with such a speed that it sent Stanis flying. Stanis landed far away, and immediately began casting Light healings over his wounds.

“Beat him and throw him in my puddle already,” Jen said as another deep puddle formed beside her.

From outside the foliage sounded a war-horn. The tension in the atmosphere immediately rose as clothed false-humans stepped out from the trees. The instructor hadn’t mentioned but this run was meant to be harder than the last two…

“No, actually go and stop them and I’ll deal with Stanis myself,” she said. She invested close to a half of her total mana into an order.

Walk into the puddle.

And for the first time, for many reasons, Stanis found himself following the order to the t. This time, there was not even a single bit of doubt in his mind, no desire to resist at all. Instead he just felt a warmth from his link to Jen. But all of a sudden, that warmth became something else and Stanis quickly looked at it with his mind’s eye.

The link between them was the same as before, but only this time there was an extra feeling of familiarity in it.

You have found a path to the Origin.

…