Remembering the organization's supposed goal, he couldn't help but laugh out loud.
What a twisted joke!
Those very people who had caused so much death and horror, claiming to save the world?
It was utterly ridiculous.
He felt an overwhelming wave of disgust washing over him at the mere thought that such monsters could even entertain, let alone harbor, an ideal that noble.
Inwardly, however, and completely contrary to what he would have preferred, he couldn't entirely dismiss the underlying premise.
He didn't reject the idea that perhaps this world might genuinely be in genuine danger.
After all, if extraordinary abilities like Hector's, the others', and even his own existed, it proved they weren't unique anomalies.
Maybe out there, hidden somewhere completely out of sight, a real threat was rising.
But he refused to accept that this group, with its blood-stained hands, had a goal as noble as that. He refused with his entire being.
Sighing deeply and desperate to think about something else, his mind naturally drifted back to the concept of The Way that the shadow had revealed.
In truth, the shadow didn't know much about the concept of The Way.
Most of its existence had been spent dormant within the sea of blood, only occasionally waking to observe the miserable captives in the arena or spy on the high-ranking members of the organization.
However, by piecing together the fragments of information it had gathered over the years while spying, Gil was able to construct a rough blueprint of what The Way really was.
Fundamentally, it looked like something straight out of the novels he loved to read so much: a structured process of evolution, a path to constantly transcend, allowing an ordinary individual to become extraordinary.
According to what he gathered, it rested on two fundamental principles:
The Body: This meant training the physical shell until it completely surpassed its natural limits, unlocking a force like no other and allowing the manifestation of strength beyond human comprehension.
The Ether: This conversely consisted of drawing from the outside, seizing a strange matter or energy ever-present in the void, and manipulating it to produce devastating effects.
One aimed to achieve transcendence starting directly from the foundation a person possesses at birth—the body.
The other chose to use what was external to fill the gaps of what was internal.
According to the shadow, Hector—whom Gil absolutely loathed—was the strongest adept it had seen utilizing the Way of the Body, whereas Lucius, the man Gil had dubbed the thread-spinner, was a master of the Way of Energy.
Hearing this, Gil couldn't help but draw an immediate analogy between these two paths and the classic knights and mages whose stories he had read and whose games he had played a long time ago.
When he had posed this question to the shade, the creature had fallen silent for a moment before admitting it couldn't give a definitive answer.
But from what it had observed, training people on the path of energy seemed significantly harder than on the path of the body.
Their numbers were fewer too.
Learning this made Gil think that perhaps the prerequisites for the path of energy were far stricter than those of the body.
Indeed, this was a dilemma that was frequently depicted in the fiction he read: everyone has a body and can therefore strengthen it as long as there are enough resources and brutal methods, but a gift for magic is innate, making it far harder to encounter.
As for how to actually train in The Way, or how to unravel which path was better suited for oneself, the shade either didn't know or flatly refused to say.
Despite how careless and foolish it might seem to fantasize about supernatural cultivation given the life-or-death situation he was currently trapped in, Gil couldn't resist growing a bit curious and expectant.
His mind kept wandering back to the mysterious concept.
Endless questions filled his thoughts.
Which path is more suitable for me?
The physical path?
The energy path?
Wait... does what I do normally even count as a path? If so, which one?
Feeling a bit physically recovered now, he slowly sat up within the void and looked at the burning sphere floating quietly in front of him, his brow furrowing slightly in confusion.
After thinking it over for a long while, he couldn't form a clear judgment.
First, it certainly didn't look like the physical path; if it were, he wouldn't have been effortlessly played around with by Hector and almost killed by the phantom beast in the arena.
So, although he didn't know enough about the physical path, he temporarily shelved it until he could gather more data.
Then, was it the path of energy?
It was highly possible. After all, the vast majority of the abilities and faculties he had demonstrated were entirely out of the ordinary, perfectly matching the traditional image of a spellcaster or magician.
Looking at the hovering sphere, which was currently drawing in ambient sustenance to alleviate its earlier consumption, one could easily believe he belonged to this discipline or was at least highly gifted in it.
Yet, just like with the physical path, he simply lacked the perspective to make a definitive judgment. It seemed far more plausible than the physical path, but something about it still didn't feel quite right. It didn't fully click with him.
He didn't know if he just hated the idea of being categorized in the same discipline as Lucius, or if he simply didn't feel like what he had done so far was inherently "magical" enough.
But once again, that was just his gut feeling talking.
He had no proof.
Then he wondered if that was all. If there were two Ways... were there others?
The shade itself admitted to not knowing much on the topic, so could there be more?
Sighing loudly, Gil decided to push all of those thoughts aside, if only for a moment.
Let's not forget the reality of his situation:
he had just finished a grueling, exhausting shift at work, gotten brutally beaten by Hector, kidnapped, thrown into a dark cell surrounded by terrified captives, suffered multiple agonizing backlashes while trying to master his awakening ability, survived a desperate life-or-death battle with bloodthirsty beasts, endured a mental onslaught from a horde of shadows, and just finished a tense psychological struggle with a deceitful spirit.
He had had completely enough.
He decided to take a little break, intuitively figuring that quiet moments like this—even though he didn't know why—were likely to become rarer and rarer from here on out.
So, clearing his mind and simply staring at the magnificent expanse of the Milky Way, he tried to temporarily forget his problems.
He had just started to relax and let the built-up tension fade away when his sphere suddenly began to glow brighter, as if alarmed.
An instant later, he was struck by a profound, suffocating sense of danger.
He knew that feeling all too well.
What's happening this time ?
he couldn't help but internally complain.
Before he could take a single action or command his form to move, darkness swallowed everything.
His ethereal body violently vanished from the mindscape, leaving only the abnormally shining miniature sphere floating and drifting slowly in the silence of the deserted, starry setting.
Upon waking up, Gil didn't have to search for the source of his unease this time.
He was instantly greeted by the terrifying sight of a massive, heavy fist completely filling his field of vision, threatening to blow his head clean off.
Shocked, he instinctively tried to throw his entire body out of the trajectory of the strike, but to his absolute dismay, he found himself firmly strapped to the bed—he couldn't even budge.
Doing the only thing he could, he violently jerked his head to the side, nearly breaking his own neck as the fist roared past his ear, slamming straight through the frame of the bed and shattering the solid wall behind it.
Seeing the casual devastation that single punch had caused, he broke out into a cold sweat.
Strangely, a random thought crossed his mind: I owe Greg a massive apology.
This realization was immediately followed by a wave of blinding anger, because he recognized that fist.
He knew it all too well.
"Hector!" he roared.
The massive man casually retracted his fist from the shattered masonry, nonchalantly brushing off the plaster dust clinging to his knuckles as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
He calmly walked back to a nearby chair and sat down, acting entirely as though he hadn't just tried to cold-bloodedly execute him.
After quietly examining the furious young man for a few moments, Hector gave a slow nod.
"Looks like you're feeling better," Hector said. "Before you start your little rant, you'd better take a close look at yourself."
Even though every fiber of his being screamed at Gil against it, he reined himself in and began to inspect his body.
Aside from an intensely bitter taste coating his tongue—undoubtedly from the heavy medications they had used to treat him—his internal organs felt fine.
But after examining himself for just a brief moment, he froze in sheer shock, immediately understanding exactly why Hector had told him to check his condition before reacting.
He hadn't realized it in the heat of his sudden awakening and because he was tightly strapped down, but he now noticed that his body felt unnaturally lighter than it should have.
More specifically, his left side felt completely weightless.
With a suffocating dread mounting by the second, he slowly lowered his gaze, even though his mind had already processed the mathematical horror of what he would find—or rather, what he wouldn't find.
Beneath the clean, unfamiliar clothes they had dressed him in, the left sleeve fell completely flat against the mattress.
His left arm was gone.
...
No.