Chapter 32

  The clash came in a blur.

  Raime’s boots skidded on the slick forest floor, a grown centipede’s armoured bulk crashing past where he had been a heartbeat before. The air was full of their screeches, a metallic rasp that rattled in his chest. His lever whistled as it carved a defensive arc, the weight familiar, his grip steady even as his lungs burned with the stink of ichor.

  A little one lunged, pale eyes flashing violet. He twisted, weapon meeting chitin with a shriek like metal on stone. Sparks leapt into the dark. The beast recoiled, but a second was already upon him—fangs snapping, coils whipping through the underbrush.

  Too close—

  Raime ducked, jammed the lever upward, felt it sink between plates. The creature writhed, shrieking, its body convulsing around him. He tore the weapon free, ichor spraying across his chest, but before he could breathe, pain ripped through his side.

  A third centipede had found him, and the armour didn’t manage to stop the beast.

  Fangs punched into his ribs, crushing, tearing. His scream tore out with blood. His knees buckled, his vision flared white, and for one terrible instant he saw the world tilt and collapse.

  He saw his mother a few paces away, torn in two pieces. Eyes looking at nothing while blood pooled beneath her on the forest floor, his father scream pierced the haze for a moment, before he too was cut down by the monsters. That moment of distraction was all that was needed to take his life too.

  “No—” Raime choked, reaching, but his body didn’t answer. His weapon was gone. He was nothing but a ghost, watching as everything fell apart.

  He was standing in his granpa’ cabin. The smell of woodsmoke and pine filled the air, almost comforting—until the front door shattered inward. Shadows poured through, shapes too fast to see, claws glinting. His brothers shouted, his girlfriend’s scream cut through everything, she was dragged into the dark before he could move.

  Flames consumed the cabin, and his brothers while he could only watch in silent dread.

  And then he was alive again.

  The Rift’s canopy loomed overhead, branches twisted like claws. His body stood ready, lever in hand, lungs full of breath he hadn’t drawn. The centipedes circled him, eyes bright, waiting.

  “What—?” he stammered, voice trembling, but there was no time. The beasts lunged again.

  He swung, desperate, muscles burning with fear more than fatigue. The lever cleaved through one’s body, splitting its carapace in two. It fell thrashing, ichor pooling black. For a second he thought he had done it, thought he had won. A single purple eye filled the entirety of his vision while his body became unresponsive, he tried to resist the lethargy, Thunk slipped from his fingers…

  Then coils slammed around his chest.

  He was crushed against the ground, ribs snapping like twigs, blood spraying his lips. Fangs tore into his throat. His last sight was pale eyes, unblinking, endless.

  Death took him again.

  The Rift blinked out.

  A road this time. The small highway near home. Cars abandoned, lights flickering, the System’s message glowing overhead in alien script. His family ran down the center line, shadows chasing. His brothers fought with sticks, with rocks, hopeless against the shapes that closed in. His girlfriend’s hand was severed at the wrist leaving it in his mother’s own. Laura screamed while looking as claws raked, tearing into Alice’s body. While he stood helpless on the roadside, a phantom, watching them vanish into silence.

  “No! Stop!” Raime roared, but his voice was swallowed by the dark.

  He was back in the Rift again. His body whole. His weapon waiting. The centipedes circling. He was going to pay for what he did to their young.

  Terror coiled in his gut. His breath hitched. He struck wildly, all his training forgotten. His psionic Thread burning bright as he flung the second blade of the Tetra Unum into the nearest beast. It pierced clean through its skull, ichor fountaining as the body collapsed.

  For a moment he felt triumph—then something slammed into his leg, dragging him down. His knee shattered. He screamed, struck, but his lever was torn from his grip.

  Fangs plunged into his stomach. His vision blurred, blood flooding his mouth, and he knew he was dying again.

  The Rift vanished.

  The cabin returned, but this time it was quiet. Too quiet. His family lay scattered on the floor, eyes open but empty, mouths twisted in silent screams. He staggered among them, reaching, but his hands passed through their bodies as though he were made of smoke. His girlfriend’s face turned toward him, lips shaping words without sound. Accusation. Desperation.

  Then darkness swallowed them and then nothing. No Earth. No Rift. Only black.

  When he woke, it was with a violent jolt.

  Raime sat bolt upright, chest heaving, sweat soaking his armour. His hands clawed at the bed, nails scratching grooves into the stone beneath. The dream clung to him, every death still fresh, every scream still echoing.

  He pressed trembling fingers to his temples, forcing himself to breathe, to remember where he was. But the images wouldn’t leave: his girlfriend’s eyes, his brothers’ desperate faces, his parents’ screams. They burned behind his eyelids, seared into him.

  “It wasn’t real,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “It wasn’t real.”

  But the Rift had a way of making lies feel true.

  Doubt gnawed at him, insidious. What if the flashes were real? What if Earth truly was burning while he played warrior in a dead temple? What if his family had already been lost because he wasn’t there?

  His stomach twisted. His chest ached. Raime buried his face in his hands. “I can’t fail them,” he whispered, raw. “I can’t.”

  Sleep was gone. All that was left was the certainty that the Rift had teeth—not just to tear flesh, but to sink deep into the mind and twist until the strongest resolve cracked.

  Raime stayed there, hunched over with his hands pressed against his face, until the harsh rhythm of his breathing slowed. His pulse thundered in his ears, but little by little, it faded into silence. He forced himself to unclench his jaw, to let his hands fall. He couldn’t afford to lose himself now, not when every moment mattered.

  The thought-knots had shown him a way—a method for gathering himself. A discipline of stillness. He dragged his legs beneath him and shifted into a cross-legged posture, the stone cool against his thighs, his palms resting lightly on his knees. His body trembled, but he forced it still.

  Breathe.

  Inhale through the nose, hold, exhale slow. His lungs filled with the metallic tang of the Rift’s air. The taste reminded him of blood, of ichor, of the nightmare that still clung to him. But he pushed that image away. Again—inhale, hold, exhale.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The knots had taught him that thoughts were like rivers. Left unchecked, they surged and tore, dragging everything with them. But if guided, shaped, they could become steady currents, navigable, controlled. Raime visualized it now: his panic, his fear, his grief—all torrents crashing against jagged stone. Slowly, he willed them to smooth out, to run calm and clear.

  His Threads stirred at the focus, faint but real. It pulsed in time with his breath, a quiet tether inside him. He leaned into it, letting it anchor him. The more he concentrated, the more the jagged edges dulled.

  The screams faded. His mother’s torn body. His girlfriend’s accusing eyes. His brothers’ desperate shouts. They were still there, faint shadows at the edge of his mind, but no longer sharp enough to cut.

  Minutes passed. Ten. Twenty.

  When Raime finally opened his eyes, the storm had broken. His body still remembered the horror, but his mind stood apart, distant and calm. It wasn’t peace—he doubted he would know peace until he returned home—but it was control, and for now, control was enough.

  He looked down at his hands, flexing them once. The tremor was gone. His breath came steady. His heart no longer threatened to burst from his chest.

  The nightmare had only hardened his resolve.

  “If that’s what this place wants to do—then it’ll have to try harder,” he muttered, voice steadier now.

  Every death he had endured, every scream he had heard, had hammered the same truth into him: he couldn’t waste time. Every hour he lingered in Ithural was another his family spent in danger. He didn’t know whether the visions of Earth were illusions, manipulations of the Rift, or a simple nightmare. But the possibility that they were real was enough.

  He clenched his fist, the knuckles whitening. “I need to move faster.”

  The tutorial wasn’t a game. Not a path to power for its own sake. It was a chain binding him, holding him here while the world outside burned. The only way forward was through.

  Resolve steeled, Raime rose to his feet. The basin still hummed faintly with residual energy, the temple’s heart whispering with the presence of the Rift. He drew it in—not with greed, but with focus. His mind reached out, brushing against the threads of psionic power that was his, and he fed it with will.

  He thought again of the thought-knots’ teachings: progress wasn’t about blind growth but about direction. And now, his direction was clearer then ever.

  He would push harder, train longer, forge more threads and master his weapons. Tear knowledge from the Rift’s whispers until it gave him what he needed.

  And when the System finally deemed his trial complete, he would walk back through the portal—not as prey, not as anomaly, but as someone strong enough to protect them all.

  He needed to move.

  The stone corridor outside the chamber welcomed him with its chill. Raime stripped down to the lighter layers of his armour and began running laps along the temple’s outer ring, boots striking in steady rhythm at first. Then he started to accelerate, faster and faster. At one point he started using the walls as jumping platforms to keep his momentum during turns. While normally this experience would be exhilarating, at the moment he could only think of going faster and pushing harder. His muscles started to ache, but the ache was welcome—clean, real, something he could control. He sprinted until his lungs burned, slowed to a more human pace, then forced himself forward again. Sweat slicked his brow, and went into his eyes, ran in rivers down his back. He made a new discovery in that his eyes were clearly much more resistant than what he thought. His sweat didn’t sting them, and the air too left them uneffected, even if his speed was pretty impressive.

  When his legs trembled, he shifted to drills. He started to lift boulders until his arms locked and his shoulders screamed. Squats until his thighs shook. The ground rising and falling beneath him like the pulse of the Rift itself. He then proceeded to train his weapons control. Until he could move no more, then when his vigor replenished his energy, he started again.

  It takes me just a few minutes of rest to get back to a condition in which I can train again, and I bet my muscles got already repaired… high attributes are no jokes.

  Each movement sharpened his focus, driving out the residue of fear.

  Hours passed in that rhythm of strain and recovery. By the time he dragged himself outside, his body felt carved raw, but his mind clear. Hunger gnawed at him, sharp as any blade. He found out that he was out of food, well, not really out. But the beast he hunted the other day was basically finished, and with the amount of food he was eating recently it won’t be enough for a good meal. So he went into the forest and hunted another one of the alien boar, the woods were still chock-full of beasts after the eruption.

  The eruption… and the mountain, I have to go and check before crossing the sea of grass.

  He went back to the ruins of the temple and cooked his new prey, he ate the meal without ceremony, fuelling the machine of flesh and will he had decided to become.

  When the last scraps were gone, Raime knelt again in the meditation chamber. This time it wasn’t about recovery—it was discipline. He drew the thread of thought into its knot, tightened, released, tightened again. His heartbeat slowed, his breath deepened. The image of his family still lingered, but it no longer wrenched his chest open. Instead it hardened into something else: a reminder of why he had no right to falter.

  Only after this did he return to the open hall at the temple’s heart. The basin shimmered faintly, the energy of Ithural still curling like mist against the edges of perception. Raime stood before it, lever resting nearby, and extended a hand.

  Levitation.

  The concept alone made his pulse quicken. He had moved the lever before, nudged it, even guided its flight. What he wanted now was more. He had to move himself against the shackles of gravity.

  No thought-knot had shown him how. No instruction waited to be plucked. This was uncharted ground, and the System wanted him to figure it out alone.

  He exhaled through his nose and turned inward. His Thread pulsed faintly at the edge of his awareness, its reservoir of energy like a candle flame waiting to be stoked. He had learned to push that energy into objects—the lever, the stones,. He had learned to bond with things outside himself.

  But what if he suffused his own body with it? A different approach of the minor telekinesis he was capable to use.

  The thought left a coil of unease in his stomach, but hesitation would get him nowhere. Slowly, carefully, he drew on the Thread. Energy bled outward, not into some object this time, but into his chest, his arms, his legs. A strange tingling ran through him, buzzing in his bones, as though his blood itself had grown restless.

  He mentally pressed down against the floor. He willed the energy to push against the stone the way he had hurled a blade into the centipede’s skull.

  For a moment, nothing. Then—lightness. His stomach lurched as if the ground beneath him had dropped away. His body rose a finger’s breadth from the stone, wobbling like a leaf in a draft.

  Raime gritted his teeth. The moment stretched thin. Then the energy wavered. His balance faltered. He fell back onto the floor with a sharp grunt, more surprised than pain, his body now would not get hurt for something so little.

  He spat out a curse under his breath, but there was a spark of triumph in his chest. It worked. For an instant, it had worked.

  So he tried again.

  Again he filled himself with the Thread’s energy. Again he pressed, imagining his weight peeling free from the ground. He rose higher this time, nearly half a foot, his body trembling with the effort. His arms pinwheeled instinctively to balance, and that broke his concentration—he toppled sideways, landing on his shoulder.

  “Damn it.” He rolled to a sit, but laughter bubbled up with his breath. Not bitter—joyful. Because what he was doing right now, was incredible.

  The next attempts came with greater care. He closed his eyes, shut out the fear of falling, he wasn’t going to get hurt anyway, and focused only on the steady, inward flow of energy. He realized then—it wasn’t just about lifting. Gravity wasn’t a single wall to push against; it was a pull in every part of him. He had to meet it with equal precision, channelling the energy through his entire body, not just his chest or limbs.

  When he did, his body steadied. He floated a full decimetre above the floor, wobbling like a drunk at first, then smoothing into a gentle hover. His legs dangled, his spine straightened, and for the first time, he felt in control.

  Raime shifted the energy. Tentatively. To the left—his body drifted, barely an inch. To the right—he stumbled mid-air, almost crashing down, but recovered with a startled laugh. Forward. Backward. Slowly, awkwardly, like a child’s first steps.

  Every movement cost him. Sweat poured down his face even if he wasn’t exerting himself physically. His breath came ragged. His muscles ached though they weren’t doing the lifting. But beneath the exhaustion was a dawning understanding. This was no trick of force. It was balance. Pressure meeting pull. A constant conversation between his mind, his body, and the unseen weight of the world.

  At least Ithural’s gravity is less than earth, at home all of this will be much harder.

  When at last he let the energy go, he landed softly on his feet instead of crashing. His legs shook beneath him, but his eyes were alight.

  He had floated. He had moved

  Raime stood in the silence of the chamber, chest still heaving, sweat dripping down his brow, but his grin refused to fade. The memory of that fragile weightlessness—the moment his body had defied the Rift’s gravity—was burned into him like fire.

  He laughed, breathless, the sound echoing against the stone. Not mockery, not madness—pure, raw exhilaration. For the first time since the nightmare, his heart felt light.

  The Rift had bared its teeth, but he would sharpen his own. Every stumble, every bruise, every failure—he would turn them into fuel. He would train until floating was as natural as breathing, until nothing in this place could keep him earthbound.

  Exhilaration surged again, carrying him past the exhaustion, past the echoes of fear.

  He clenched his fists, lifted his chin, and let the joy settle into iron resolve. Tomorrow he would train harder. In the days to come, he would bend his powers to his will. And when the System demanded mastery, he would be ready—ready to finish this trial, ready to go home.