It's been a week.
A week since I last saw the command deck. A week since Anya's... since her kiss. A week of being dragged from a bed I don't sleep in to a place I can only describe as hell.
They call it the Training Deck. I call it the grave.
At 0600 every day, the klaxon sounds, and I am escorted by General Kaelen himself to the "Crucible." And there, he hands me over to him.
Jararu.
He's an old man, thin as a rail, with a shock of white hair that defies gravity and eyes the color of a welding arc. He wears a simple, gray training uniform, but the way Kaelen—a man who commands fleets—defers to him, you'd think he was the Emperor.
Apparently, he was. Or at least, he'd trained one. Kaelen told me with a chilling reverence, "Jararu trained your father."
I think Jararu is insane.
He is the king-maker. And his method of making a king is to drive me to the grave and bring me back to life, over and over, until I either become what he wants, or I shatter into a million pieces. He is breaking me and piecing me back together, and with every cycle, the "Mali" I was gets smaller, and the "Alkahest" he wants gets... stronger.
My System flashes warnings all day long.
[VIT: 10% - DANGER]
[STAMINA: 0% - COLLAPSE IMMINENT]
But my body... my body is handling it with a resilience that terrifies me. My mind cannot take this. But my blood, my damned Alkahest blood, just keeps rebuilding.
"Again."
The word cuts through the air, sharp and final.
I'm on the floor of the Crucible. The "floor" is a grid of hard-light plates over a three-hundred-meter drop. The air smells of ozone and my own sweat. I'm gasping, my new Novitiate Tunic plastered to my skin.
[STAMINA: 14%]
"I... I need a minute," I pant, my muscles screaming.
"The Corrupted Void does not give minutes," Jararu's voice snaps from the observation deck above. He's a small, gray silhouette against the blinding white lights. "The 'minute' you take is the minute your fleet burns. Your wife dies. Your legacy ends. Again."
He slams his hand on a console. "Sequence seven. Velocity, 50%."
The grid beneath my feet retracts, leaving me standing on a single, one-meter-wide pillar. The walls of the Crucible, a hundred meters away, slide open, revealing an arsenal of automated projectors.
"This is not a test of your power, boy," Jararu's voice echoes, laced with a cold disappointment. "Your POW is a useless, vulgar number. I am not impressed by the ocean. I am impressed by the man who can part it. I am testing your CTL. Your Control."
[NEW OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE]
"For this test," Jararu continues, "your 'Alkahest' power is forbidden. You will not dissolve, you will not absorb, you will not counter. You will do what that soft, weak world taught you to do. You will dodge."
The projectors hum to life, their barrels glowing a soft blue.
"This is a test of PER and VIT. A prince must first learn to survive. Your body is Alkahest. It can take the pain. The only question is... can you?"
The first projectile fires. It's not a laser. It's a hard-light "impact" round, a sphere of concussive force the size of my fist.
It moves at a speed I can barely track. I dive, rolling across the narrow pillar, the 'thwack' of the projectile exploding against the stone sending a shockwave up my arm.
THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.
Suddenly, a dozen are in the air. Then fifty. My PER (Perception): 350 stat is the only reason I'm not a red smear. My System is screaming, highlighting impact vectors in red light, but there are too many.
"You move like a porter!" Jararu roars. "You move like a boy hiding from Corrupted thugs! You are dodging, but you are not anticipating!"
A round clips my shoulder. The pain is a white-hot flash. My System flashes [HP: 145/150]. It's not lethal, but it hurts. It's designed to.
THWACK. THWACK. THWACK-THWACK-THWACK.
They are coming faster. I'm a rat in a box. I can't keep this up. I'm leaping, twisting, my muscles burning with lactic acid, my stamina plummeting.
"This is what your Imposter Syndrome looks like, boy!" Jararu shouts, his voice a scalpel. "This is you! All potential, no-confidence! You are reacting to the universe, letting it buffet you! You are not a prince! You are a victim!"
His words hit harder than the projectiles. The DEBUFF in my head flares, hot and shaming. [Imposter Syndrome: -50 CTL]
I stumble. My ankle twists.
A round hits me square in the chest.
The impact is breathtaking. It's like being kicked by a war-mech. The air leaves my lungs in a single, painful whoosh. I'm thrown backward, off the pillar, into the open air.
I fall.
The wind screams in my ears. I'm going to die.
A magnetic field catches me, a net of energy that halts my descent a meter above a new set of floor plates.
[OBJECTIVE FAILED]
[STAMINA: 2%]
[HP: 130/150]
I lie there, gasping like a fish, my chest a riot of agony.
"Pathetic," Jararu's voice is right beside me. He's on the floor now, looking down at me, his welding-arc eyes filled with a profound, almost gentle, disappointment.
"You... you... said..." I cough, "50%..."
"That was 50%," he says. "Your father cleared that sequence at 100% on his third try. He was fourteen."
That, more than the fall, more than the pain, breaks me. The shame is a physical weight, crushing me into the floor.
"I... I'm not him," I whisper, tears of failure and exhaustion streaming down my face. "I'm not. I told you. I'm not."
"No," Jararu agrees, his voice soft. "You're not."
He crouches beside me, his thin, wiry frame coiled like a spring. "You're not him. He was trained from birth. You were trained to carry fruit. So why does your body endure? Why are you not broken? Your muscles heal in an hour. Your bones are denser than Kaelen's. Your blood is a river of raw potential. Your body knows it's an Alkahest. It's your mind that is the imposter."
He stands up. "Get up."
"I can't," I groan.
[STAMINA: 1%]
"I said," Jararu's voice goes flat, "get up."
A small, painful jolt of energy from the floor zaps my back. I scream and scramble to my feet, every muscle protesting.
"Now," Jararu says, walking back to the observation console. "We do it again."
"No! I can't! I failed! You saw!"
"You failed the dodge test," Jararu says. "Now, we begin the real test. Sequence nine. All projectors. Velocity, 70%. Full 'Alkahest' protocol. Your objective is not to dodge, boy. Your objective is to stand still."
My blood runs cold. "What?"
The pillar retracts, leaving me in the center of the vast, open floor. All the walls, 360 degrees around me, slide open.
An army of projectors emerges. Hundreds of them.
"You cannot dodge this," Jararu's voice says, now calm. "You cannot outrun this. You will be hit. You will be pulverized. Your only hope of survival is to stop being 'Mali' and start being 'Alkahest.' Your POW is an ocean. Your CTL is a 2. Let's fix that."
"I... I don't know how!" I scream, backing away from the wall of glowing blue muzzles.
"You don't know how to beat your heart, do you, boy? You don't know how to heal a cut. Your body just does. Stop thinking. Stop trying. And just... be."
The projectors whine, the sound rising to a deafening shriek.
"This is the test, Mali Alkahest. Are you the porter who will be torn apart? Or the prince who will command the storm? Show me."
"I can't! Jararu, wait! Stop!"
"Fire."
The world explodes.
From every direction, a solid wall of blue light and concussive force slams into me. The first impact throws me off my feet. The second hits me in mid-air. The third, fourth, fifth, a dozen, a hundred—it's a relentless, world-ending barrage.
[HP: 110/150]
[HP: 90/150]
[HP: 70/150]
[WARNING: CRITICAL DAMAGE IMMINENT]
The pain is beyond anything I have ever known. I'm a leaf in a hurricane. I'm being shredded. My Imposter Syndrome is screaming, I TOLD YOU! YOU ARE NOTHING! YOU'RE DEAD!
"NO!"
I don't know if I scream it aloud or in my head. A new, primal terror rises up. It is the terror of annihilation. And beneath it, for the first time... anger.
A deep, cold, Alkahest rage.
I am the son of an Emperor. I am the heir of a bloodline that unmakes reality. I survived the Void. I will not be broken by a machine.
I stop trying to block. I stop trying to hide. I just... am.
I feel my POW: 9,876,543 stat, that useless, dormant number. I feel it like an ocean sleeping in my bones. I don't command it. I don't unleash it.
I just... let go.
The projectiles, the solid spheres of hard light, slam into my body... and vanish.
There is no explosion. No shield. No counter-attack. One moment, a sphere of concussive force is about to shatter my ribs. The next, it touches my skin and is simply... gone. Unmade. Dissolved.
THWACK. (gone.) THWACK. (gone.) THWACK-THWACK-THWACK. (gone, gone, gone.)
I stand there, in the center of the storm, and the storm cannot touch me. The energy of the impacts is flowing into me, not as pain, but as... food. My Karmic Absorption trait is flaring.
[ENERGY (EP): 110 / 10,000,000 (LOCKED)] [ENERGY (EP): 120 / 10,000,000 (LOCKED)] [HP: 75/150] [HP: 80/150]
The barrage continues for a full minute. I don't move. I just stand, my head bowed, dissolving the hurricane.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it stops.
The projectors retract. The walls close. The bright white lights of the deck return.
Silence.
I'm standing. Shaking, bruised, but standing.
My System flashes, a soft, pleasant chime.
[SKILL LEARNED: KINETIC DISSOLUTION (PASSIVE) - LVL 1]
> Description: Your Alkahest nature can now passively unmake low-level kinetic and energy-based attacks.
[+1500 XP]
[LEGACY INTEGRATION: 5%] [|||||----------------]
[CTL (Control): 2 -> 3]
A single point. All that pain, all that terror... for one point.
I finally collapse to my knees, the adrenaline leaving me in a rush.
Jararu is there. I don't know how he crossed the room so fast. He's standing in front of me, his arms crossed. His face is unreadable.
He looks at me for a long, long time. Then, he nods once.
"Good," he says. "You bled. You cried. You despaired. And then... you adapted. You stopped being a boy and became a solvent. One point. That is the hardest point you will ever earn."
He turns and walks away. "Medical drone is on its way. Be on this deck at 0600 tomorrow. We're going to work on active CTL. It's time you learned to dissolve something... on purpose."
I'm back in my room. The medical drone fixed my bruises and pumped me full of nutrients. My body feels... fine. Surprisingly fine.
But my mind...
I'm lying on the cold bed, staring at the fleet outside my window. It's been a week of this. A week of being driven to the grave and back. Breaking and being pieced together.
I do not know how much more of this I can take. My mind can't. But it seems my body is handling it surprisingly well.
I really wish I had someone who could run this empire for me. I wish Kaelen or Jararu or someone could just... do it. And maybe I could just be with Anya. She is so gentle. She explained the CTL stat as a "sledgehammer," but Jararu... he just hit me with one until I learned.
I close my eyes.
[CTL: 3]
It's not enough.