Of the twenty-seven students Egran had taught, all twenty-seven had cut their name into the mother tree before they stepped through the barrier, into the Tutorial, and vanished forever. The names sat there, silver scars on the crystalline bark. Beneath, the tree’s veins flowed with a gentle blue light, swirling into little whirlpools that broke apart into drifting motes. The glass leaves rattled. There was a sense of peace.

Pyrrhus was leaving today. If he could step past his old mentor.

It was just one step, one strike. Egran was an old man. Twenty-seven students gone, and the last of his wards was full grown now. Pyrrhus held almost a solid foot of height on the swordsman. His limbs were long and lanky, giving him a strong reach, and he’d been practicing for this moment since he could hold a wooden staff.

It didn’t matter. He still couldn’t see the old man’s stats.

Egran Vel Turan | Grandmaster of the Blade

This foe is beyond you, and Wisdom demands you to show caution. Do not test them without cause.

Pride grows brittle with age.

If he’d been able to close the gap, if years of training had gotten him even close to this fight, Pyrrhus would have been able to read Egran. Nothing. The gulf between them was as vast as the night sky. The old man held two wooden swords in a delicate grip, one ready to strike, one to guard.

So how did he win?

“If you want to meditate, meditate. But you called me out here to fight.” Egran was grinning. His thin lips bent into a determined smile, grey stubble coating his thin, mean face. The old man wasn’t just doing this to keep Pyrrhus from leaving, wasn’t fighting out of a sense of obligation.

Egran was a proud man and Egran liked to win.

The student was like the teacher.

Pyrrhus flung himself forward, tried to take the lead by brute aggression. His quarterstaff blurred into a sleek shadow, raw force making the heavy oak bend as it extended his already long reach into a furious crescent slice. Mana oozed from his muscles, building into small blue flames that danced atop his red skin.

Demonkin had the natural edge in Mana and pure muscle. His blood pounded with the need to fight, to win, to get free of this prison.

A light erupted from Egran’s left-hand sword as he reached up, lightly tapping the staff and making it fly overhead. All the momentum behind the strike vanished, a strange sensation that left Pyrrhus fighting not to fall.

He pulled the staff back in to defend just in time. The second sword lunged forward, and the light extended forward into a blazing lance that smashed into the demonkin’s guard with a bone-shattering force. His own, turned back against him.

The wind left his body as his feet skidded across the sand of the dueling ring. Egran was moving, using the moment where he was drawn in and on the defense to advance, flicking a casual blow at his left side. He caught it with the lower half of his stave, and twisted to bring the top side crashing down from above for another sweep.

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Not even trying to win. The thought of winning was gone the moment the fight began. Pyrrhus was fighting to own the ground he stood on, using the reach of his weapon to make wide, big strikes that forced the smaller foe to give way.

Egran twisted and let the blow run along his wooden sword with a thin rattling sound, and took the moment to step in. The world narrowed. His reach was no good, was a disadvantage, as the old man’s blades swept through the air in a blur. One-two, one-two. Pyrrhus was hopelessly outmatched and caught in his enemy’s momentum. The blows were so quick he followed with his instinct not his eyes, catching them with his staff and stumbling back, out towards the edge of the ring.

The old man followed, relentless. The rhythm shifted and sharp jabs entered the mix, punctuating the diagonal cuts that flurried against his raised guard.

The point of the wooden sword jabbed him in the shoulder. “Dead.” Egran called, and took his leg as well, whipping the blade against the back of his heel where the tendon was weakest. “Dead.” Before he could even turn, the swordsman had slipped around him, and a blade came to rest on his neck. “Dead three times before breakfast.”

“You won’t be leaving for another few years.” With a final pair of cuts delivered to the air, Egran tucked away his swords. One of the older students, Habral, had said it was a motion all swordsmen knew. A flick to get the blood off the blade so it wouldn’t rust.

Pyrrhus preferred staves for a reason.

“Come in and eat.” Egran asked, patting him on the arm. Flames flickered. They danced around his body in long crackling arcs, bleeding away the energy his racial passive fed into his veins. Pyrrhus just grunted, leaning against his staff and breathing hard.

Tyrant-Monarch | Racial Passive

Gain up to 300% Mana Regen while facing stronger foes. Scales with power difference.

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

How? How had his brothers all made it past Egran?

Pyrrhus had been chosen by the goddess Wisdom as a child, the ability to measure, judge, and learn from all things. He only had to look at something to be granted a small fraction of Wisdom’s infinite knowledge.

And it didn’t matter at all.

Before Egran’s tutelage, Pyrrhus wasn’t sure he’d lost a fight. He’d been a tyrant of the slums, a king among the dirty, flea-plagued orphans who brawled for scraps and broken trinkets. Fire magic came so easily he’d burned down houses in his sleep, a nightmare making him cover himself in fire like a blanket.

It was a fire that brought the law down, that had gotten him noticed. It was his talents that saved him from being one of the countless orphans whose dead bodies hung from the bridge, their bare toes being jumped for by the muddy fish below. He’d been spared. Selected to be trained.

And suddenly he wasn’t the strongest among street-rats, but the weakest among princes.

It felt like the world was pressing down on his shoulders. Like the earth was dragging him down. He felt his life run past him in a flurry of sharp, pungent bits of scattered memory, a tide that crashed over him and came to a halt-

Smashing to nothing against the walls that closed in the island.

A barrier of golden magic stretched up from the floating island’s edge. From a distance, it looked thin as a bubble, oily shades of rainbow drifting under the surface. The clouds in the sky beyond were strange drifting shadows. Everything he’d ever tried had failed to leave even a single mark. There was one way out.

Defeat the guardian.

Slowly, the bloodlust rose. It fed off how his pulse still raced from the fight and the humiliation that burned through his whole body. On the feeling of being a trapped animal. On the urge to break through and see the distant sky. He turned towards Egran’s exposed back, fingers grasping his staff with a strength that hurt. For one moment it seemed possible. The thought burned in his head, clawing at him.

The wind blew and the thoughts scattered. Pyrrhus sighed, leaned his weapon against the old mother tree, and followed his mentor inside.