Silver remained silent for long seconds.
He looked at the mark on the ground where the pillar had turned to dust.
He had seen fantastic gifts become deadly curses on the front lines, and he knew that my request wasn't born of vanity; it was the purest, rawest instinct of survival.
The master's eyes left my exhausted face and slowly descended to the pitted earth beneath my boots.
His analytical coldness faltered for a mere fraction of a second, his gaze seeming to pierce through the grass of the courtyard and through time itself, sinking into a distant, nostalgic, and violent memory.
The boy's posture. The irrational stubbornness of refusing to fall. The desperate hunger to grow solid roots when the sky tried to crush him.
He intimately knew that spark in those eyes, and the owner of that gaze had shattered the axis of entire continents in the past.
"Always so stubborn," Silver murmured, his voice low and hoarse, sounding more like a lost whisper to himself than an answer to me.
Before the platinum god could drown any deeper in that ancestral reverie, the soft rustle of fabric broke the trance.
Kânia let out a gentle sigh right behind him.
The goddess's perfectly attentive eyes dissected her own husband's profile.
"Where has your head gone off to now, Silver?" she asked, crossing her arms elegantly.
Her voice was sweet, but it carried the necessary firmness to anchor him back to the present.
"I know that nostalgic look of yours perfectly well. When you get lost in time like that... it's because you're going to do something crazy again."
Silver blinked, the old memory vanishing instantly from his green irises.
He didn't deny it.
The crooked, arrogant, and sadistic smile that slowly tore across his platinum face confirmed absolutely everything.
"Today's training is over," Silver declared suddenly, his voice cutting through the tension that had settled.
He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, never taking his eyes off the shattered ground.
"Go inside. Eat, rest, and try not to kill yourselves. Arthur, make sure everyone rests."
Arthur simply gave a contained nod.
Laura shrugged, gathering her things and already turning toward the mansion's door.
I followed them, dragging my legs and my spear, feeling every fiber of my body scream from pure exhaustion after the absurdity Silver had put me through.
When the heavy wooden door of the house closed behind us, the sound of the courtyard was muffled.
Outside, bathed in the warm, orange morning light of Lavinsk, Silver didn't move.
He merely raised his face to the sky, the daytime breeze playing with his silver hair.
"I'm going to need to reshape the geography of this lawn. Do I have your permission, my dear sunshine?"
He said it casually to his wife, as if talking about moving a piece of furniture in the living room.
"It's only for a while."
Kânia, who was still watching him, let out a long, soft sigh.
"You want to push his body to the limit again, I know what you're getting at, Silver," she noted, her voice serene but with an underlying tone of warning.
"But was all of this because the little one asked or... for you to clear up your own doubts?"
Silver's green eyes gleamed under the harsh light.
"I need to be sure, Kânia. I need to see with my own eyes if this capacity for mutation and adaptation of his is really that identical to his."
The pronoun didn't need a name.
Kânia knew perfectly well who he was talking about. The goddess shook her head from side to side, a mix of resignation and nostalgia crossing her sweet features.
"Just try not to break the boy into irreversible pieces in the process, Silver," she asked.
"No promises," the god replied.
They raised both of their hands.
And then, under the incandescent morning light, the very earth of Lavinsk began to groan and writhe.
The green grass darkened, the earth cracked, and the moisture was violently sucked from the air as the couple's raw energy tore at the foundations of that oasis to forge a custom-made hell.
Inside, oblivious to the geographical cataclysm happening in the backyard over the next few hours, the mood was one of almost comfortable exhaustion.
I was awkwardly sprawled in one of the plush armchairs in the living room, pressing an ice pack against the burns on my hand that were still throbbing.
Arthur was sitting cross-legged on the rug, silently polishing his arm guards with his usual apathy.
Laura, meanwhile, was lying upside down on the largest sofa, her legs thrown over the backrest, tossing a juicy red apple in her hands.
"I told you the old man would figure out real quick how that bizarre transformation of yours worked," Laura commented out of nowhere, throwing the apple in the air and catching it.
"He always knows."
"Whether he figured out the logic of my power just by watching me fail, or if he already knew from the start, I really don't know," I murmured, staring at my own calloused palms.
"Of course he figured it out," she laughed, taking a loud bite of the fruit.
"Silver has fought everything and everyone in this universe, Suki. He is the best possible person to know how that works. If there's anyone capable of deciphering the secrets of anything, it's him."
Those words settled into my head.
I kept staring at the unlit logs in the fireplace, curiosity and frustration boiling inside my chest in equal proportions.
My mother was a powerful goddess; my heritage was a living force of pure mutation and adaptation that exploded to keep me alive.
*Has Silver fought my mother?* I thought.
Silver and Kânia knew my blood, they knew my lineage, and apparently, they knew very well who I had inherited all of this from.
*But they won't tell me anything...*
The thought echoed in my mind, heavy as lead.
*If I want to find out who I really am, I'll have to wring out the answer by making myself impossible to ignore.*
It was with this silent promise hammering in my bones that exhaustion collected its toll.
The tension yielded, and the weight on my eyes became unbearable.
Arthur had already stopped polishing his bracers, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed.
Laura was snoring softly on the sofa.
I didn't fight the lethargy; I passed out right there, curled up in the armchair.
Instead of the comfortable warmth of the living room armchair, the first thing I felt was a sharp, paralyzing cold biting at my spine.
I opened my eyes slowly, expecting to find the dim light of the fireplace, but my vision collided with an unfathomable pitch-blackness.
I was lying on my back.
Whatever supported my body was absurdly frigid and damp, sending involuntary shivers through every fiber of my muscles.
The air didn't smell of firewood or ordinary dust; it smelled of the void.
Stagnant, dense, and far too silent.
The kind of thick silence that makes your ears scream and crushes your chest.
I rested my palms on that invisible floor to sit up, the wet texture beneath my fingers and the sudden chill on the back of my neck alerting me.
The way gravity felt different and the harshness of the oxygen cutting my throat gave me certainty even before I could stand up.
I had been dragged back into the abyss of my own subconscious.
I raised my body slowly, scanning the space around me.
Still, the calm that settled in my chest was almost strange.
I stood there, motionless for long seconds, letting my mind align with the freezing scenery.
*It's been a long time since our last conversation...* I thought, clenching and unclenching my fists to shake off the numbness in my hands.
I took a deep breath, watching my own breath form a small ghost-like mist in the freezing air, and decided to break that sepulchral silence.
"Hey!" I called out, my voice echoing in a muffled way through the dark.
"Where are you?"
*Normally he was always already here waiting,* I thought.
I remained silent for a few seconds, waiting.
No black smoke, no whispers.
I had no idea what I was supposed to call that entity.
"Suki!" I yelled, finding it bizarre to scream my own name in the dark.
"Suki, show up!"
An instant, violent shiver shot up my spine.
A heavy hand, with absurdly cold fingers, touched the base of my left shoulder from behind.
I spun around in the exact same millisecond, stepping half a pace back.
There he was.
My adult version, his skin black as coal, cut by those brutal, red stripes of pure energy.
His empty eyes stared at me with the same dark quietness as before.
But, unlike the melancholy of our last encounter, the expression on his face now carried a strange satisfaction.
"You've finally opened your eyes to what we are," his voice reverberated smoothly through the darkness, sounding like a double echo.
He lowered his hand, crossing his broad arms.
"I'm proud, Suki. You've finally begun to understand how our family's genetics operate, the grandeur of forced adaptation, to not be erased from the world."
The ambient cold seemed to retreat a little with his words.
I took a deep breath, relaxing my posture.
"Adaptation," I murmured, repeating the word Silver had thrown in my face out there.
I frowned, irritation replacing caution.
"If you already knew this... if you already knew that our blood functioned like a force of nature that molds itself to any hell... why didn't you tell me this earlier?"
I pointed my finger directly at his chest.
"Do you have any idea how much easier my fights would have been since the day of that tournament or during those months of carnage in the Sillys forest? I would have saved myself broken bones and near-deaths if I had known this!"
My dark reflection let out a low, humorless chuckle.
The crimson light pulsed in the lines of his body.
"I couldn't tell you," he answered calmly, his deep voice filling the void.
"Because sooner or later, the very pressure of the universe would crush your body until you figured it out on your own. If I had handed you the answer on a silver platter, you would have gotten lazy, you wouldn't have gone through the hell you did, and you wouldn't be as strong as you are now."
He took a slow step toward me, the emptiness in his eyes seeming to read my soul.
"Without the desperation of almost losing your life time and time again... you would never have forged the instinct, the resilience, and the scars that you did. Given power has no value without pain to anchor it."
I kept staring at his dark face.
The anger that had boiled in my throat vanished, crushed by the irrefutable logic of my own survival instinct.
I looked at my own calloused hands, remembering the sharp pain in the Lavinsk courtyard, and the blood flowing in the tournament.
I let out a heavy sigh, shaking my head.
"Yeah..." I admitted, lowering my shoulders.
"It really makes perfect sense."
The adult Suki uncrossed his arms and tilted his head slightly, as if about to reveal something deeper.
"You are about to enter a field where your nature will not be able to—"
Reality trembled.
The dark void around us simply shattered like a mirror struck by a stone.
The cold disappeared, and the distorted voice of my reflection was brutally cut off, replaced by a sound that hit me with the force of a punch to the chest.
"Wake up."
Silver's deep, authoritative voice ripped me out of my subconscious all at once.
I blinked, disoriented and panting, feeling the rough texture of the armchair under my fingers as my stiff muscles protested.
The light entering through the large living room windows was no longer morning light; the Lavinsk sky was darkening, taking on the heavy violet tones that heralded the late afternoon.
Silver was standing in the doorway leading to the back.
"Rest time is over," he announced, his silhouette cut out by the shadows, his relentless gaze shining in the gloom.
"Outside. Now."
I stumbled to my feet, leaning on the back of the armchair.
The frustration of being ejected from my own subconscious boiled under my skin for a moment.
*What was he going to say?*
My reflection's cut-off warning kept echoing in the dark of my mind, a half-alert I had no way to decipher.
I gritted my teeth, planting my boots firmly on the living room rug.
I couldn't keep relying on chance.
*The next time I get pulled into that abyss, I won't just ask questions; I'm going to find out if there's a way to summon him.*
*A way to open that channel and talk casually, on my own command, without needing my body to pass out from pure exhaustion or nearly die so I can access him.*
Laura rolled off the sofa cursing through clenched teeth, rubbing her creased face, and Arthur rose in a single, silent, fluid motion.
I grabbed the dark shaft of my spear, ignoring the leaden weight on my shoulders, and walked to the door.
When I crossed the heavy stone gate and stepped outside, the air simply fled my lungs.
The terrain before me, previously covered by impeccable grass, was now purely barren.
Cracked earth, irregular, thorny, dry rocks, and a gray, artificial dome blocking any glimpse of the Lavinsk sky.
There was no breeze, no loose leaves.
I tried to pull the wind instinctively, but the air around me felt dead, stagnant, and thick, impenetrable as mercury.
I took the first step.
My boots sank hard into the dry earth, and my shoulders immediately slumped forward.
The gravity here was not normal.
It wasn't just pulling me; it was crushing me.
It dragged my bones, my blood, and my organs down with a colossal force, multiplying my own weight countless times with every step.
Silver stood ten meters away in the center of that hell, his posture straight and unaltered, completely immune to the crushing pressure of the environment.
"You want resilience, don't you, boy?" his voice sounded hollow and muffled in the windless environment.
"In this field, the wind doesn't exist, the air won't embrace you to cushion your falls."
My knees trembled violently; the effort just to keep my neck straight and not be pinned against the ground made the veins throb dangerously under my skin.
"You're going to learn what it means to stay standing," Silver finished, crossing his arms with an icy glare,
"...when the whole world is designed exclusively to bring you down."
I gritted my teeth so hard the sound scraped against my skull, and cold sweat dripped, burning my eyes.
Silver watched my shaky smile under the weight of invisible tons, but he didn't start the training with an attack.
"Yesterday, I told you that your transformation came from your need for adaptation," the master began, his voice cutting through the dense silence.
"But to forge a foundation that won't break, you need to actually understand what runs in your veins."
I raised my gaze, feeling my neck crack.
"Laura and Arthur, if you complain about today's training, thank Suki," Silver's voice cut the stagnant, oppressive air of the gray dome.
Kânia stepped forward, her golden hair swaying slightly despite the total absence of wind in that arid environment.
She snapped her delicate fingers, a simple gesture, but the sound echoed like a mountain cracking in half.
"Silver will take care of molding the boy," she announced, with a mild smile that bordered on absolute sadism.
"I will be the nightmare for you two; gravity won't be the only thing crushing you today."
The air vibrated.
From the invisible ceiling of the artificial dome, heavy pillars of solid granite began to materialize and plummet from the sky, wrapped in luminous runes that exponentially multiplied the weight of their fall.
"Begin."
My calf muscles tensed out of pure reflex.
I channeled energy to eject a blast of wind under my soles and slide out of the impact zone, just as my body had been conditioned to do in every battle.
But the atmosphere was dead.
My boots felt bolted to the cracked earth, and my invisible wings had been completely severed.
I couldn't even transform.
The crushing gravity of the environment pulled me back in a brutal jolt that nearly dislocated my hips.
The first pillar smashed into the ground mere inches from my face.
The shockwave blew out my eardrums, raising an asphyxiating cloud of dry dust and pebbles that cut my cheek like glass shards.
Before I could blink to clear the dirt from my eyes, the dense shadow of the second pillar swallowed me.
I threw my torso to the side in an emergency maneuver, but the heavy air and artificial gravity delayed my reaction time.
The colossal block of runic granite tore through the air and didn't miss me.
It scraped the side of my shoulder, tearing off the skin and the fabric of my tunic, and crashed down, pinning my left leg against the hard stone of the floor.
"AAAAAAARRGH!"
A sharp, ragged, and uncontrollable scream exploded from my throat, tearing through the silence of the courtyard.
The wet sound of bone cracking echoed in my own head, louder than the impact of the rock.
The pain was a white, blinding flash that wiped out my vision for a full second, burning my nerves as if searing iron had been injected straight into my pinned calf.
The ground kept shaking under the uninterrupted bombardment.
The roar of the collisions swallowed my agonized groans; dragging my injured leg through the dusty dirt with tearing eyes, I flipped onto my back, only to see a third colossal mass of granite plummeting in a straight line toward my chest.
There was no time to roll.
My crushed leg wouldn't obey.
Primal panic took control.
I clenched my right fist, pulling all the brute strength the carnage of the last year had forged into my muscle fibers, and punched the smooth base of the free-falling pillar with everything I had, in a desperate hope to shatter the rock or deflect its trajectory.
CRAAACK!
It wasn't the stone that gave way.
The impact reverberated up my arm like a lethal electric shock.
The bones in my index and middle fingers bent backward at unnatural, grotesque angles, shattering under the monstrous density of the granite.
The pillar didn't lose a millimeter of speed, and the glowing runes engraved on it weren't even scratched; they pulsed with a mocking, indestructible brilliance.
I screamed again, cradled by excruciating pain that shot from my broken fingers to the base of my neck.
The monumental weight of the pillar finished its descent, pressing my disfigured hand against the arid soil.
With my teeth gritted until my gums bled, panting in agony, I looked up.
The dim light of the dome darkened.
A fourth massive silhouette was already cutting through the gray sky, falling violently on the exact same axis where my body was pinned.
Death was a heartbeat away.
I couldn't pull my trapped arm out.
I threw absolutely all the weight of my good shoulder and my back against the side of the pillar crushing my hand.
The veins in my neck bulged under my skin.
With a choked roar of animalistic effort, I pushed the stone column, using the very friction of the earth to roll it aside just enough to free my mangled, bloodstained fingers.
I dove through the dry dirt, rolling awkwardly and dragging myself over my torn leg.
BOOOOM!
The fourth pillar detonated exactly on the millimeter of earth where my skull had been a fraction of a second before.
The impact kicked up shards of rock that whipped my back, opening fresh cuts.
I lay fallen in the dust, gasping desperately, pulling in air that felt like lead.
I held my broken hand against my chest, feeling the blood run down my twisted fingers and drip onto the dry earth, while the throbbing agony in my leg kept pace with my racing heart.
In the center of that cataclysmic chaos, perfectly untouchable and immune to the dust, Silver sighed.
"If you want to resist..." the master reprimanded, his voice cutting cleanly through the roar of destruction as he watched my trembling, ruined body on the ground, "...stop running from everything that falls on you."
I raised my face, spitting out a clot of blood and cracked earth from my mouth.
My blurred vision focused on the god's unwavering figure, and frustration boiled in my chest.
"Then what do I do?!" I screamed, my hoarse, failing voice competing with the tectonic noise of the dome, holding my broken hand.
Silver's expression didn't change.
He merely pointed calmly at the cracked, bloody ground beneath my flayed boots.
"Stay."
That word became my personal hell.
And not just mine.
While I tried to pull the dust-laden air into my lungs, cradling my shattered right hand against my chest, a colossal roar, different from the free-falling pillars, caught my attention.
I twisted my neck, sweat and blood burning in my eyes, and looked through the thick curtain of gray smoke.
What I saw made me forget the excruciating pain in my leg for a fraction of a second.
Arthur wasn't trying to dodge the bombardment. The giant, his skin entirely ashen, snarled, thick veins popping from his broad neck.
When a titanic pillar threatened to crush his head, he didn't back down.
Arthur opened his massive arms and dug his bare hands into the rock in mid-fall.
The impact sank his boots half a meter into the cracked earth, but he halted the descent of the structure.
With a roar that made the dome shake, he lifted the multi-ton stone column and hurled it like a dart straight at Kânia.
On the other side, Laura was a scarlet blur.
The thick crimson aura exploded around her body as the red-eyed girl dove beneath a falling rock.
A pillar plummeted blindly into her path, and she simply crossed her arms in an "X" slash.
The lethal silver claws sliced the solid granite in half with an ear-shattering metallic screech, the two halves of the rock crashing down uselessly on either side of her.
She used the rock's own explosion to propel herself forward, joining Arthur's fulminating attack.
The two charged Kânia simultaneously, with enough force to obliterate an entire mountain.
But the goddess with golden hair... she was an absolute nightmare dressed in grace.
Kânia didn't use anything to blow up the pillar Arthur had thrown.
She simply leaned her torso back and took a side step in an absurdly lethargic and fluid motion.
The colossal rock scraped past millimeters from her serene face, shattering on the ground right behind her.
In the same millisecond, Laura arrived.
The silver claws descended in a brutal arc, aiming to slice the goddess's neck.
Kânia didn't blink.
She raised her bare hand and slapped the back of her fingers directly against the girl's wrist.
The dry snap of Laura's bone fracturing under the divine force cut through the air.
Before the assassin could scream in agony, Kânia grabbed her by the collar of her tunic, spun her own body using the inertia of the attack, and slammed Laura flat on her back against the hard earth with monstrous brutality.
The ground caved beneath the girl, forming a crater of blood and dust, and her crimson aura snuffed out instantly.
Arthur was already there, his ashen fists cocked like siege hammers to crush the goddess's skull while she was crouched holding Laura.
But Kânia didn't even look at him.
She used the girl's sunken body as a pivot for balance, raised her leg, and delivered a direct, devastating heel kick straight to Arthur's sternum.
KRAKOOOM!
Arthur's unbreakable chest caved with the sound of pulverized rock.
The warrior's body was ejected from the ground and sent flying across the gray dome, tearing through curtains of smoke and smashing through two falling pillars before crashing into the horizon of cracked earth, kicking up an avalanche of dead dust.
In less than three seconds, the goddess had swallowed and obliterated the two deadliest warriors I knew, without missing the tranquil cadence of her breathing.
I lay there, sprawled in the dirt, my fingers mangled and my leg bleeding, staring at that woman who, with a gentle smile, always placed large bowls of fruit on our table.
The disparity was grotesque.
That was the true abyss of the gods' power.
If I continued to be just a boy who dodges and runs away from the weight of the world, I would be crushed into nothing.
The throbbing agony in my hand was no longer a warning to retreat; it was an order.
I could no longer just try to resist or hide. I needed to become something even more brutal and unshakeable than the earth itself if I wanted to keep breathing.
The sharp sound of rock tearing the atmosphere served as our relentless alarm clock under the artificial, gray dome.
When the first session finally ended, there was no relief; only the weight of bodies pushed far beyond their breaking point.
I was on the ground, vomiting bile and dust onto the cracked earth, the fingers of my right hand hanging twisted and useless after punching the base of a massive pillar.
A few meters away from me, Arthur collapsed onto one knee.
The giant, with his entirely ashen skin, panted heavily.
His body's resistance was insane, but that didn't erase the neural memory of the impact.
I saw him clench his jaw, the muscles in his thick neck trembling as he forced his own flesh-and-blood body to endure the absurd punishment, groaning lowly between gritted teeth.
The walk back inside the house was a funeral march of walking corpses.
Bath time became the single true mercy in Lavinsk.
It was our thin line between sanity and madness. When the thick, nearly boiling stream touched my skin, washing away the dry mud, the stone dust, and the clotted blood, a long, involuntary groan escaped my throat.
The dense steam was the only thing capable of loosening my locked muscles and melting the chronic pain embedded in my joints, helping my divine side regenerate me.
In the neighboring bathrooms, the routine was identical.
Laura would stand for hours under the scalding water, scrubbing the soot and other people's blood from beneath her lethal silver claws, while the water ran in shades of red and gray down the drain.
Arthur remained perfectly still under the heaviest waterfall, letting the jets punish his broad shoulders, eyes closed, enjoying the only minutes of the day when gravity wasn't trying to press him into the planet's core.
Meals, once filled with contained chaos and pillows Laura used to throw at Arthur's head, became silent graveyards.
Kânia would slide the steaming cast-iron platters down the center of the long oak table, but the three of us ate mechanically.
We chewed the exotic meat driven only by the primitive instinct of survival and cellular recovery.
No one exchanged looks.
No one had spare oxygen to waste on words.
And then came the time for our rooms.
The bed was a black hole.
We didn't sleep; we simply unplugged from reality. Sleep was dark, heavy, and dreamless, the resting hours slipping through our fingers far too fast before the hell restarted.
With each new cycle that the sun bloomed outside, the punishment restarted, more brutal than before.
The skin on my back and arms no longer existed uniformly.
It was raw flesh, a grotesque mixture of clotted blood, sweat, and dry mud that pulled tight with every movement.
Silver didn't give me a single moment's truce.
A block of stone plummeted, and the moment exhaustion made me give in to the old habit of trying to slide my hips to dodge, a second rock, twice as heavy, struck my flank and buried me in the ground.
"Your mind is still in the air," Silver's voice echoed, cold and mechanical from high up, while I thrashed under the rubble.
"You want to be untouchable; the Earth demands that you suffer the friction."
Gradually, time lost its meaning, and my body finally stopped trying to run away.
The panic of being crushed was replaced by a dumb, lethargic, and rooted resistance.
When a new pillar collapsed toward my chest, I didn't roll back. I dug the soles of my boots into the dead earth, raised my unprotected forearms, and took the impact head-on.
My bones cracked, microscopic fissures opened in my arms, and the force of the shock drove my knees into the dirt.
But I didn't fall.
The bones that fractured by day were physically forced to calcify and harden during the meager hours of sleep, becoming denser and heavier with every dawn.
The sound of Kânia's private slaughterhouse punctuated my own hell.
The training was an ecosystem of synchronized torture.
Out of the corner of my swollen eye, I watched Laura, the red-eyed girl, being systematically ripped apart.
The absurd speed she had used in the sky meant nothing there; Kânia wouldn't let her run.
The goddess confined the assassin to a three-meter radius and rained down blasts of pure, crushing pressure on her.
Laura snarled, her thick crimson aura exploding as her silver claws sparked hysterically against Kânia's invisible defense.
I saw her get thrown against the ground dozens of times.
Arthur wasn't faring any better.
With his entirely ashen skin, he was being reduced to dust.
Kânia crushed the boy with a relentless gravity focused exclusively on his hypertrophied musculature.
The ground beneath Arthur's feet was permanently shaped like a crater.
I saw him grit his teeth, the veins bulging in his thick, gray neck as he tried to lift and endure a single pillar hurled by the goddess's power.
And at the exact moment he stabilized the titanic weight, balancing tons on his back, Kânia would appear in a silent blur and sink her bare heel into the warrior's chest, shattering his base of support and sending him rolling violently across the arid earth.
The days dragged on, turning into uninterrupted weeks where chronic pain became our only loyal companion.
The weeks fused into a single continuous blur of pitted earth, cold sweat, and muscular agony.
My mind, beaten to total exhaustion, began to become incredibly sharp.
The subtle hum of the wind and the desperate urge to levitate vanished completely from my subconscious.
They were ground down and replaced by the deep, dense sound of that planet's collisions.
Every time I felt my muscles falter and my instinct begged me to use the little wind I had left to escape the weight, Silver's non-negotiable command pierced my sanity from atop his pillar:
"You will never withstand the world if you keep trying to fly over it."
I was standing.
My body was scarcely covered in gray dust and hardened crusts of dried blood.
My legs shook violently, my torn muscles crying out for a rest that wouldn't come, and my irregular breathing sounded hoarse and heavy, like the broken wheezing of a wounded animal.
Arthur and Laura watched from a distance.
The giant panted heavily, propped up against a shattered boulder, his skin scratched and marked by the uninterrupted pressure as it regenerated.
Laura sat on the rock with her knees drawn up, dark circles hollowing her dirt-streaked face, exhausted just from existing and watching that daily carnage.
I raised my face.
A new, titanic pillar plummeted from the ceiling, focused exclusively on me.
Directly above my head, wide and heavy enough to flatten me against the barren soil and end my life.
The weight of the atmosphere crushed my lungs.
I closed my eyes.
I didn't reach for oxygen to relieve the tension; I sent my senses downward, through the thick soles of my boots, sinking into the dead rock and the cracked earth.
The ground vibrated beneath my feet.
And in the depths of my soul, at the blind edge where pain and exhaustion give way to the absolute void, a voice whispered.
It was a very ancient memory, steeped in the roots of my own blood, an ancestral instinct—distant, but incredibly imposing and powerful, like the pulse of the universe itself:
*"Stand by Lavinsk, Suki."*
The air trapped in my throat was released in a single searing gust. The silence of the courtyard was obliterated by an internal, animalistic roar that tore through my vocal cords.
I screamed.
And the ground answered.
A seismic fissure cracked open instantly beneath my torn feet, the telluric energy trapped in the depths of the earth rocketing upward in an overwhelming shockwave.
The entire field gave way, shaking with the violence of an earthquake.
The small fragments of stone and dust around me lost their gravity, floating upward not by the action of the wind, but by the raw, magnetic repulsion of the earth's pure energy.
The colossal pillar falling from the sky met my clenched fist.
But the energy that erupted beneath my skin wasn't white, translucent, or stellar.
Thick, dark-green stripes tore across my arms, my chest, and my back.
They weren't smooth like invisible currents of air; they were rustic and aggressive, looking like veins of cooled magma and ancient roots pulsing with a dense, crushing, primordial energy.
My feet sank and anchored into the rocky soil like indestructible steel stakes.
My body became a mountain. My gaze, now glowing in a massive emerald tone beneath the dust, found the exact center of the deadly, plummeting rock.
I simply absorbed the crushing weight of the world... and gave it back.
BOOOM!
The impact echoed like the end of an era. The colossal pillar crashed against my knuckles, now armored by dense, dark-green energy.
From the exact point of contact, the raw fury of the earth erupted upward—a titanic spiral of living, solid, and untamed rock rose from the ground, following the motion of my arm.
It swallowed and shattered Silver's pillar from bottom to top, turning tons of granite into thousands of sterile pieces.
The earth spiral and the seismic shockwave continued their violent ascent, tearing through the stagnant air like a pillar of pure destruction until they collided directly against the arena's invisible ceiling.
KRAAAASH!
The oppressive gray dome, forged by Silver to confine us, couldn't withstand the colossal pressure from below.
It cracked with a sharp sound and shattered completely, like a gigantic glass vault breaking into millions of glowing fragments that vanished before even touching the ground.
The ceiling of our hell collapsed, and the true sky of Lavinsk finally opened above us.
The thick, asphyxiating curtain of dust that had choked us for weeks was swept away in a single millisecond by the blast's displacement.
Fresh, clean, and absurdly light open air invaded the barren field all at once.
The current of pure wind hit my face, filling my burning lungs with sweet oxygen that I had almost forgotten how to breathe.
High above, the warm, golden rays of Lavinsk's incandescent sun pierced the remaining smoke.
The light poured over the destroyed battlefield, dispelling the shadows and bathing my exhausted body and the shattered stones in a vibrant, sacred, and comforting glow.
The dust settled slowly in the daylight. The deadly pillar had been obliterated; the very prison that was crushing us had been torn to pieces by my own bare hands.
Silver, standing on what was left of his stone vantage point, took a step forward, uncrossing his arms.
The platinum god's eyes, always narrowed in boredom or cold calculation, were wide with pure shock for the first time in a long while.
"So I was right..." he murmured, his voice failing to hide the absolute respect and bewilderment at the magnitude of that awakening.
Kânia, on the other side, smiled when she saw her husband satisfied.
The moment the word left his lips, the lethal order of gravity was deactivated in the environment.
The crushing pressure simply vanished from the air.
The dark-green energy receded into my pores like magma returning to the crater.
I stumbled forward, my legs finally giving out under the weight of weeks of continuous torture.
My entire body shut down before I could even register the ground approaching.
But before my face could kiss the hard rock, a quick, exhausted silhouette slid through the dust.
Laura grabbed my chest, holding my dead weight with a groan of effort and pain, since her own back was mangled from Kânia's training.
The girl's dirty face was very close to mine, her red eyes shining with a mix of genuine worry and the purest predatory pride.
"You're completely insane, Suki," she said, panting, a wide, torn smile showing her silver fangs through the dirt on her face.
I took a deep breath, feeling cold sweat run down my tired eyelids, and let out a hoarse, failing laugh, the metallic taste of blood flooding my tongue.
"And you love it."
The girl laughed along, shaking her head in denial, but adjusting me better and more protectively over her shoulder.
Silver raised his face solemnly, looking far beyond the gray dome that had imprisoned us, up to the infinite and untouchable sky of Lavinsk, where the clouds followed their routes in silence.
The wind that had returned caressed the master's silver strands, but the god's mind was orbiting realms far beyond that destroyed training ground.
Slowly, the god lowered his gaze back to the shattered field, fixing it on the spiraling rock that I had raised and pulverized with my own bare hands.
He murmured, his voice sounding so low, dense, and satisfied that it sounded almost like a dangerous prayer:
"Now, boy... Now you've begun to understand."