"Are you out of your mind?"
The words echoed through Atlas, strangely, without the slightest trace of insult. Hercles hadn't spat them out as a provocation. He had simply set them down, the way one might ask a question they genuinely expect an answer to.
Am I out of my mind?
The question settled into him with a certain unease, because it matched, more closely than he would have liked to admit, what he'd just felt. During that fraction of a second when the world had shrunk around him, he hadn't felt a single consciousness occupying his body, but several, layered, competing in near silence for the driver's seat. He'd already caught glimpses of this sensation before, in the snow, facing the mutant, and later in the arena, but those moments had still been blurry, undefined. Never as clearly as in this instant, when his consciousness had nearly tipped over entirely, ready to hand control to someone he felt he had never met, and yet, strangely, had always known, like a brother forgotten before he was even born.
Hercles, seeing the color drain from Atlas's face, the boy nearly choking under the weight of the unexplained, let out a long sigh and came to sit beside him, right there on the ground where he'd thrown him. He placed a hand on his shoulder, a hand that could, on its own, have broken an ordinary man, and yet the gesture remained almost embarrassingly gentle for someone his size.
"I understand what you're feeling," he said simply, his gaze fixed straight ahead rather than on Atlas, as though he needed that distance to keep talking. "That feeling of being disoriented. Of drifting. Of not quite feeling like yourself anymore."
Atlas stared at him, wide eyed, still unable to reconcile this unexpected kindness with the image of the giant who, only minutes earlier, had sent him flying clean across the training hall with a single punch.
"You... you feel the same thing?"
"Not quite." Hercles gave a bitter smile, the kind that doesn't really try to reassure anyone. "I don't think any Awakened shares the exact same experience. Isn't that the whole principle behind the Qualia? Everyone perceives the world differently, and expresses it in a way that's foreign to everyone else. In the end, nobody ever really understands anybody."
He said this with his eyes still lost somewhere far away, an emptiness Atlas couldn't quite interpret. He had trouble pinning this man down, at once colossal and, in this exact moment, strangely philosophical.
I think he might be the crazy one, actually, Atlas thought. Or maybe we all are, simply, in the eyes of whoever fails to understand us.
"You think?" he finally asked.
Hercles looked at him, baffled, then let out a short, dry laugh. "How the hell would I know something like that? On top of being crazy, are you also stupid? Look where we are."
Atlas realized, a beat too late, that he'd probably just asked the most pointless question of the entire conversation.
Hercles, for his part, seemed to allow himself a longer silence than usual, as though deciding, almost against his own will, to go a little further than he normally would.
"I told you you'd get answers. You want to know how it happened, for me?" He didn't really give Atlas time to respond. "My first real fight in this arena. I hadn't even turned fifteen yet. A guy far more experienced than me, far better trained, who broke my arm in the first minute. Just for the pleasure of seeing how I'd react."
His voice had changed. It no longer carried the slightest trace of the lightness Atlas knew him for, nor even the measured gravity of a man recounting an old memory. It was something rawer, closer, as though the distance of all those years had suddenly collapsed entirely.
"I looked at my own arm, hanging there, completely useless, his knee already coming up toward my throat, and I understood something." His breathing had quickened, almost imperceptibly, his fists clenching against his own knees. "Not understood with my head. Understood with everything else. That man had no right to do that to me." A primal tension began radiating off him.
His voice rose, suddenly, loud enough to make Atlas jump.
"No right! No right to decide I was going to lose, that I was going to die right there, on that packed dirt, just because he'd shown up in this godforsaken world before I did!" Hercles had stood up without Atlas ever quite seeing him do it, his entire frame trembling with a rage that seemed to surge directly from the memory itself, as though fifteen years had changed nothing about its intensity. "I refused it. With everything I had, every single thing inside me, I refused to let him be the one who decided, and the world..."
He stopped dead, breathless, like a man who'd just sprinted a race he hadn't planned on running.
When he spoke again, his voice had gone almost calm, but something in his eyes had never quite come back down.
"The world gave way. It bent toward me instead of toward him."
"What happened?" Atlas asked, his own voice reduced to a whisper.
"I killed him. Bare handed. With only one good arm." Hercles looked down at his own hand again, and for a fraction of a second, something that looked almost like hunger crossed his face, before vanishing as quickly as it had come. "And I never had to ask anyone's permission again, after that day."
Hercles sat back down slowly beside Atlas, his entire body still radiating something raw, almost animal, that only receded gradually, like a tide that takes its time pulling back after a storm. When he spoke again, his voice was cold, almost clinical, but it warmed, degree by degree, as he went on, as though the words themselves needed time to become human again.
"The truth is, I don't know much. " He paused. "All I know is what Isaac let slip, once, without meaning to. So yes. I know why you feel empty. Because you too, one day, became one of the Awakened."
"But you just said no one experiences the same thing."
"That's true. Which is why I can't help you understand exactly what you're feeling. That part, you'll have to figure out on your own, whether you like it or not." Hercles turned slightly toward him. "But there's one thing that seems to hold true for everyone, no matter what they carry. Your Qualia grows in the direction of your raw will. Or sometimes, simply, in the direction of whatever keeps you alive. The two aren't always different."
Atlas stayed quiet for a moment, taking that in, before circling back to the question that had been gnawing at him since the start of this conversation.
"And the speed?" he asked. "This way I have of learning, of seeing everything, of anticipating everything. Is that my Qualia too?"
Hercles let out a short laugh, joyless.
"You want to know what I really think? I think most people spend their whole lives holding themselves back without even realizing it. Politeness. The fear of being wrong. The fear of accidentally hurting someone. All these little hesitations we pile up since childhood, slowing down every move, every decision, without us ever really noticing." He shrugged, a gesture almost too light for what he'd just said. "Your Qualia might not have added anything at all, Atlas. Maybe it just tore away everything that used to hold you back. And whatever's left underneath was always that fast. You just never let it run before."
Hercles got up, holding out a hand to help Atlas to his feet as well. Atlas took it firmly, and stood, his legs still a little unsteady.
"You know," Hercles said, not letting go of his hand right away, his gaze just as calm as it had been before this confession that had nonetheless changed everything between them.
"No one here chose to become a gladiator. Not a single man in this room." He finally released his grip. "But you and I, we might be the first ones to choose, despite everything, what we become, once we've been forced into it. That doesn't make us free. But it counts, I think. More than you realize."
Atlas stayed silent, the weight of that sentence settling slowly into him, far heavier than any blow he'd taken that day.
"Round two?" he finally asked, almost against his own will, his own voice surprising him with its eagerness.
Hercles smiled, a real smile this time, stripped of all the emptiness that had occupied his gaze only minutes before.
"This time," he said, "I attack first."