The first step into the lake was agonizing. My foot passed into the water and pain poured into me. It rolled up my leg, into the pit in my stomach, but it left trails of broken glass dragging through me as it passed. It wasn’t the same as I suspected it would be on its own though. Pain, energy, all of that poured into the pit and sat there. I triggered Abomination Engine, and the power roared through me, pulsing in time with the beat of my racing heart.

Another step, and I was up to my knees, more contact and more pain, but it flooded me with strength as the consumed power fed back into my enhancement technique. My face stretched into a vicious grin as I continued moving.

Beside me, Elena was wading in, red eyes blazing as the boiling crimson water rose around her metallic red form. Her teeth were bared in a rictus of pain, a mockery of the kind smile she’d had earlier, but her eyes didn’t just blaze with power, they flared with determination. I tore my gaze away, focusing on the island completely, then I stepped forward again, submerging up to my chest.

The pit in my stomach pulled the pain through me like water down a drain. Not only was it emptying my body, it was increasing the rate of entry, making the agony hit me much faster. It was pretty much an even trade in terms of utility, so I ignored it, and without much preamble, I took my final step off into the lake and my head went under.

Madness. Liquid horror and torment pouring into my lungs, exploding into me like jet fuel that combusted as I inhaled, setting off mushroom clouds of torture in my lungs and flashes of agony behind my eyes.

I froze for a second, my body locked with fire and fury pouring through me. My instinct was to stop, to hold my breath and not let the water in, but that was the trick. We needed to breathe, even us, especially as we got deeper and the pressure redoubled. On a B-rank planet, we weren’t nearly as strong, and the constant crushing weight of the D-ranked lake around us made breathing a necessity.

My hand flexed around the rock I’d been given, a chalky red stone that I could crush without thinking. I had to be careful not to flex and powder the thing by mistake.

It took me a minute or two to adjust to the new dimension of horror, but I got there. I breathed through the pain, letting it flow through me and out of me into the pit. It was horrible, and I choked and gagged on the liquid agony in my lungs, cramping and spasming at the pain, but eventually I managed to get past it.

Once I could breathe without seizing up, I took another step, an experimental step. I was paying close attention to the sensations of entry, so I was well aware of the slight increase in the physical strain of moving forward. I felt…not weaker exactly, but like the water was denser. Like I was walking through jello, but jello that could affect a D-ranker. Admittedly, it was still pretty watery jello at this point, but I could feel it getting harder.

I turned my head, Eye of Revelation flaring, to try to see the people around me. I could, at the moment, though the deeper I got the more opaque the water became. How that worked in terms of actual fluid dynamics and water intermingling I had no clue, but I decided ‘Ascendant bullshit’ was as close to accurate as ever and decided to ignore it.

That proved to be a timely decision, because my casual glance around picked up a slight shift in the water. Danger Sense was screaming at me, mostly because I was being TORTURED and it was pretty much maximum dangerous to keep moving, and I was ignoring that like a dumbass. Which, you know, fair enough. But that meant I had no warning other than my eyes when one of the nearby walkers tried to perforate me with a spear.

Moving through weird superpressure water wasn’t as easy as he seemed to think though. The spear was sluggish, and I slipped aside with ease, my hands clamping around the shaft as it passed.

The other guy started jerking back, but his eyes widened when he realized his spear wasn’t moving. Every beat of my heart increased the power flooding my Abomination Engine, and it wasn’t just that either. Gluttony was a pseudo Domain, and that meant it was VERY effective at what it did.

The power flooding me kept rising, kept making me stronger, and I couldn’t feel it slowing down. No cap, no ceiling. I felt like I could keep getting stronger forever. I was guessing that WASN’T the case, but my limits were far more elastic than they were using the technique normally, and I was already ferociously powerful.

This was, however, a very niche technique. Having nonstop input to pump me like this was obviously not replicable. Sure, this would be useful in combat, but I wasn’t likely to find the circumstances to become a juggernaut like this again.

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I also realized that while something like grabbing a spear let me use my full strength, actual movement was restrained by the water, and a fight wasn’t likely to go well for me down here. So I didn’t have one.

Turning, I took a step, and then another, shoving myself against the pressure as the pain redoubled. Moving faster seemed to ramp the agony, which wasn’t ideal, but it was much worse than that for spear guy. I fucking DRAGGED him deeper, stepping implacably forward, pulling us both into the stygian depths as the torture rolled through my body.

He finally couldn’t take it anymore, letting go and crushing his rock. I looked down at the reasonably pricey D-ranked spear in my hands and shrugged, stashing it in my ring before resuming my underwater trek. I looked around for any others, but it seemed like I’d pulled ahead of most. I saw others close to my depth, but they were all a ways away, in different parts of the lake leaving their own nearby candidates in the dust.

The opacity of the water was climbing, making it hard to see more than a few feet away, the deeper I got the darker it became. The pain, the pressure, it was unbearable. Except it wasn’t. I could bear it, could hold up, and I did. One foot in front of the other, all I needed was another step, and another, and another. One more step, on repeat.

I could have reached for Callie, could have pulled on her resolve, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to get through this myself. This was my trial, and it was only the first. If I couldn’t hack it with all my cheats at number three of seven, I wasn’t going to get through this, and that wasn’t fucking acceptable. I owed this to my family.

Which was a weird thought, given all the resentment and regret involved in my situation, but there it was. I wanted this for them. I wanted to give my mom a hug in public without worrying about being hunted down, I wanted to introduce my sister to my new friends, I wanted to visit my grandparents at the home where Chelsea had grown up and see for myself what that side of the family was like.

And that spurred me onward. It gave me strength, and purpose. Contrary to what most people will tell you, pain isn’t actually the end of the world. Pain is a response to stimuli, a consequence of damage, and the reason we fear it so much is the primal understanding that every time we feel pain, damage might be occurring that we can never recover from.

But as Ascendants, the rules for what can and can’t be recovered from are wildly different. Pain is, in some ways, a vestige of our mortality. An outdated fear response that is so ingrained in who we are that it’s hard coded into the human psyche, even when we’ve left our old bodies far behind.

I reached a state of equilibrium. Agony pouring in, power poring out. My muscles started to strain under the pressure, bones creaking. Even my domain enhanced body wasn’t going to hold out forever. I had no clue how anyone else was keeping up with me, or if they even were, because the water was pitch black as I sunk deeper and deeper into the endless abyss. My mind reached a sort of…peace. The peace of complete and utter satiation of sensation, of feeling too much and not being able to process any of it.

Then I hit the wall. Not metaphorically, I literally walked right into a rock face. Surprisingly it kind of hurt. I ignored that, my fingers skimming over the rock until I found purchase, and then I started to climb.

I really hoped this wasn’t just some random outcropping I was wasting time with, but I’d run across literally no debris on the floor of the lake as I descended, so somehow I doubted it. I hauled on the rock, pulling myself up, and it took all the strength I had in my body. When I found balance, my other hand reached up, searching, and then I did it again.

If I’d thought the steps were hard, the climb was IMPOSSIBLE. Every single movement was more effort than I was physically capable of. Each time I stopped, I was sure I’d never start again, that this would be the movement that would kill me. Each time I reached up, my arm was shaking with the effort and when my fingers dug into the cliff, I was barely in time to latch on before my muscles gave out forever and I fell back into the dark, hungry water.

I lost track of time, of light, of space and thought and anything but pain and struggle, and when my hand finally broke the water, the lack of agony in that part of my body nearly made me let go of the rock and fall back into the lake, because I was convinced someone had cut my fucking arm off. The sensation of not hurting was so alien to me at this point I thought my fucking LIMB was missing.

Once I realized what it was, I scrambled to find a handhold, and with all the strength left in me, I HAULED, my muscles tearing under the sheer effort, even with the power from my domain and technique flooding me.

When I slumped down on the rock, exhausted, I let my technique fall away, let Gluttony recede, and felt the pounding of soul strain wrack my head as all the power debt I’d been deferring hit me at once. That had been the most exhausting thing I’d done with my soul since F-rank, and from what I could tell I was fucking MICRONS away from cracking it in a way I couldn’t undo.

But I didn’t have time to mope around. Now the soul strain was gone, and it was just bodily exhaustion. That was nothing compared to what I’d just been through. I staggered to my feet, knowing that I had to keep going. I didn’t see anyone else, and that meant I was first.

I scrabbled up the incline of the rock, slipping and staggering until I reached the top, where I found a small, intricate nest woven of black brambles. When I reached down to pick up the nest, I hissed as the thorns somehow slid through my armor without breaching it, tearing into my flesh, and my blood dripped between the joints to spill onto the egg.

Stashing it away without time to look at it, I turned to leave, only to find Bernadette there waiting. I slipped and tumbled forward, and she caught me without effort. “Easy there, new brother,” she chuckled. “Your journey is done. Let me take you back across. You earned it.” And that was the last thing I heard before I blacked out. Damn it. I thought I’d broken that habit.