Chapter 6: Chapter 6: Consequences

All around were pedestals with items hovering above them, as if being carefully cradled by invisible hands. These pedestals extended out to fill what seemed to be a treasury. 

And in the center of this place was a raised stone platform with 5 pedestals atop it. 

Along with those 5 pedestals were two people. 

“Damn psion. You won’t leave this place alive. You think the royal guard won’t find you?!”

A man in golden armor cursed as he reached back and pulled a knife out of his back. 

The other man, the one he called psion, seemed to be an assassin. But like the man in golden armor, he seemed seriously injured with blood spilling from his stomach. There was also a glow coming from the wound, one that seemed to be burning him from the inside. 

They were both on the verge of collapse. 

Taking a step to the side, Hugo watched silently. 

“No royal guard can kill me. And pretty soon, I’ll have the head of the Captain. Hah!”

With a shout, the hooded man dashed in a blur, sending another flurry of attacks toward the Royal Guard Captain. 

The captain defended, but he couldn’t keep up with the speed. Another knife was plunged into his ribcage and leg. 

But he didn’t go down without a fight. With burning white flames that suddenly rose around his body, he let out a final shout.

“This is it! Be purified, dirty psion!”

Bringing up his sword, the Captain swung in a wide arc with speed faster than ever. The psion wasn’t able to dodge, getting struck by a wave of fire that clung to his body. 

But he didn’t back down. Even while engulfed in flame, the psion plunged one final knife into the man’s neck. 

With a flick, the Captain was beheaded. 

The psion took medical measures right after, grabbing a flask from somewhere and drinking its contents. With that, the flames died down, but his body also seemed to collapse. 

The psion kneeled in pain, letting out long groans of agony. 

That’s when something happened. 

Hugo, who had been standing to the side, saw a dark figure emerge from the shadows. 

It was one of the bodies thought to be dead. The psion and the Captain weren’t the only people inside this room. There were also lots of dead bodies. But one seemed to have been faking it. 

That figure took large steps toward the psion. The psion naturally noticed. 

“Ah, Fellor. Quick, go back and grab-”

*Slice!*

Fellor, the dark figure, didn’t even speak before waving a sword. The sword cut halfway into the psion’s neck, causing him to reach out in shock. 

Bringing the sword back, Fellor went to strike again. But against all odds, the psion grabbed something off his body and threw it. 

A small object collided with Fellor before expanding. It was a large spider, and it rapidly burrowed into Fellor’s chest. 

“Agh! Ahh!!”

Fellor began to scream before he could finish the job, the spider tearing into his body. It only took several seconds for Fellor to cough a pool of blood and collapse, totally dead. 

But the psion wasn’t any better. He also collapsed, seemingly dead. 

Curiously though, the spider that he threw dug around in Fellor’s body for a bit before coming back out with a red crystal. It carried this red crystal to the psion’s neck before inserting it. 

Then, the spider turned back into a small ball. The red crystal melted into the psion’s wound, and with that, everything became quiet. 

Hugo, who had witnessed everything, was baffled by the repeatedly twisting events. But when things settled, he took a step out of the shadows and up to the highest platform. 

He looked at the three bodies that lay dead, besides possibly the psion. Still, Hugo wasn’t about to mess with anything near the psion. He didn’t want to be burrowed by a spider. 

So Hugo stepped around before looking at the five different items. 

A sword, a bead, two books, and a large black crystal. 

It was the large black crystal whose container was competely broken, obviously the target of the psion. The others were completely sealed, meaning Hugo couldn’t even touch them. 

He walked over to the black crystal. Upon closer inspection, it actually seemed like a huge knife, though a very crude one given how jagged the crystal was. 

Hugo grabbed the crystal knife that was lying on the pedestal. 

At that moment, a window popped up in his vision beside the knife. 

 

Celestial Knife

Grade: ???

This item serves an unknown purpose. However, if one plunges this knife into their heart, its purpose shall be revealed.

Cannot be stored

 

Hugo read the contents of the window, his face twisting at the description. 

“Plunge into my own heart? To hell with that. How much would that hurt? Wait…”

Hugo’s eyes suddenly narrowed. 

“Status.”

He shouted into the air. He had heard players saying this, and it was no doubt a trigger for opening the status page. 

Sure enough, Hugo saw a screen. 

 

Name: Hugo	Level: 0
Class: None	Essence: 0/100
Skills: None	Gear: [Expand]
Health: 110/110	(Energy type undecided)
Vitality: 22	Intelligence: 10
Strength: 28	Agility: 29
Endurance: 36

 

It was nice seeing all his stats. One of the things Lahng mentioned was that not all people started with the same stats. Since the real world was a factor, people started with applicable stats based on their real body. 10 strength, for example, was apparently the average for an adult man who didn’t workout. And with 10 being the average, Hugo was naturally far above that. But since stats didn’t scale linearly, not even these stats truly represented his traits. 

But Hugo wasn’t looking for his stats. 

“Settings.”

There was another page he wanted, and before long, Hugo found it. 

“Turn down pain sensitivity all the way.”

[Pain sensitivity reduced. Note, the minimum pain sensitivity is 10%.]

“Alright.”

Hugo nodded. However, in a few moments, he began to feel odd. 

It was almost like he couldn’t feel his own body. Like his limbs were numb, moving felt like operating a foreign body part. It felt weird even to clench his fist. 

This was the reason pain sensitivity could only be reduced so much. Pain wasn’t much different from one’s sense of touch. Turning one down naturally affected the other. Now Hugo understood why he would want to keep pain sensitivity up. 

But nobody could convince him to keep it up in this situation. Hugo looked down at the knife in his hands. 

“Plunge into my heart. Well, I guess this is an interesting opportunity, though I don’t like the way it wants to go about giving it to me. Oh well.”

With a shrug, Hugo pointed the knife towards his chest. He had a great grasp on human anatomy, especially after undergoing the Child’s training to enter the Focus Step in martial arts. 

Hugo looked at the knife, which, despite being jagged, was actually terrifyingly sharp. It didn’t seem like it would have any issues breaking through bone. 

Still, Hugo felt nervous. No matter how much he reminded himself that this was a game, stabbing oneself in the heart wasn’t normal by any stretch of the word. 

But, whatever this knife was, Hugo wanted the opportunity it represented. It was interesting, and he was in this game for the fantastical experiences it entailed. 

Plus, he wasn’t one to sit around while everyone else got strong. He had given everyone a years head start. It was time for him to catch up. 

With those determined thoughts, Hugo gritted his teeth through a smile, bringing the knife back. 

The blade easily slid through his body.

*Slice!*

“Arghh!! Hah!!”

With a surge of adrenaline, Hugo forced the knife in deeper. He could feel everything in his body, from the sliding blade to the way his breastplate broke. 

It was a horrible feeling that felt so vivid despite his pain receptors being down at the very minimum. 

And naturally, his consciousness began to twist not long after. 

With a knife in his heart, Hugo’s body began to rapidly shut down. He became dizzy, his head throbbing, lungs unable to breath. He could feel a good amount of agony, which made him shudder at what it must feel like at full sensitivity. 

What about that man who had the spider burrow in his chest? That must’ve felt even worse. 

Hugo didn’t even want to imagine that pain. 

Thankfully, his small taste of agony ended quickly as his mind faded into darkness. 

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Before he fell asleep though, he saw a prompt in his vision. 

[Alert! Unable to obtain class before Level 50!]

………

……

“Ugh…”

Hugo groaned as he regained consciousness. There was a horrible pain coming from his chest, and his arms were unbelievably sore and stiff. 

He quickly found out why. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a dark dungeon. He was hanging from the ceiling by his arms, chains around his wrists and his feet unable to touch the ground. 

“Boss! He’s awake!”

“Agh! A little quieter please…”

Hugo groaned when a guard shouted out, making his ears ring. 

Not long after, the gate to the dungeon Hugo was in opened with a creak, revealing three men who walked in with scowls on their faces. 

Hugo looked at each of them. One was actually Lahng, and the other two were people Hugo didn’t know. 

One man took a step forward, standing in front of Hugo. Despite Hugo being lifted off the floor, this man could still look down on him. 

The two looked each other in the eyes for a bit before the man spoke. 

“I have a few questions to ask you.”

“Okay?”

Hugo asked oddly. He apparently did something wrong, and he had a feeling he knew what. 

The man narrowed his eyes, talking in a deep, raspy voice. 

“You were inside the royal vault. I won’t ask how you got there. What I want to know are the events that transpired inside. Speak truthfully, for your own sake.”

“Oh. That’s easy. It was quite the show.”

Hugo recounted the events casually. How he walked in on a battle, saw the guard captain get killed, watched a subordinate rebel against their leader, and the deal with the creepy spider. 

Getting to that point, the man glanced to his side. The third man nodded slightly. 

“Alright. Seems like you speak the truth.”

“Oh! Are you that psion? I’m impressed you made it out. You almost got done in by a guy playing dead.”

Hugo nodded impressively toward the third man, receiving a raspy response. 

“We all have our trump cards.”

Hugo could see a small smile on the hooded man’s face. But the leader wasn’t having any small talk. 

“Enough. Now, you need to tell me what happened to a certain item. You were found unconscious on the top platform around the artifacts, and our target item was missing. It was called the Celestial Knife, a black crystal knife.”

The man stepped forward, grabbing Hugo’s neck and pulling him in. 

“What did you do with it?”

“...”

Hugo was silent simply staring at the man and thinking about how his breath smelled. 

Eventually though, he tilted his head. 

“Knife? I didn’t see a black crystal knife.”

“...I see.”

Sighing, the man took a step back. He then walked over to a table, pulling open a cloth and revealing rows of blades and tools. 

Hugo’s eyes widened a bit. 

“Ah, torture. But what will you torture out of me?”

“I want to know what happened to that crystal knife.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t happen to see a crystal knife anywhere on my body. What exactly could I have done with it? I just got in this world.”

“...”

The man who was fumbling around with torture tools stopped for a moment, glancing back at Hugo. 

He scanned his body. As Hugo said, he had nothing on him. His shirt was stripped, revealing a beautifully sculpted body, but that was it. Hugo had no items and was still level 0, having just entered the game. He couldn’t get weaker and more bare than this. 

Hugo contitnued. 

“All I know is that Lahng over here discussed the world with me before running me over to your little looting spree when the sirens went off. After grabbing my sack I started wandering and got lost, ending up at that plaza. Granted, I wanted to take some of the expensive looking items in that vault, but I couldn’t break open those containers. And I couldn’t hide anything from you guys even if I got my hands on something. So what do you want from me?”

“...There’s two fallacies in your story.”

The man walked over with a knife, poking the tip against Hugo’s chest. In that moment, Hugo also realized something. 

His pain sensitivity was at 100%.

The man frowned. 

“The knife disappeared, which doesn’t just happen. And you were unconscious. How did you pass out, if there was nobody to attack you?”

“Two questions I don’t have the answer to. How am I supposed to know who knocked me out? Maybe it was another one of your people who was playing dead. As for the knife, maybe it was taken by them too.”

Hugo spoke directly, without any hesitation or stuttering. He looked like he was merely stating the facts. 

But the man still wasn’t buying it.

“We did counts on everybody on that operation. Everyone who went into that vault died besides the man to my left. There are no missing people who may have run away. Don’t worry, we did thorough checks. The only anomaly is you. So…”

The man pushed the knife into Hugo’s chest, making it dig deep into his skin. Hugo shook a bit at the pain. 

He smiled. 

“I think you’re hiding something. I’m not going to believe anything you say until I dig out all your secrets personally. If I get through with you and you still haven’t given me anything useful, then maybe I’ll let you go.”

“Well… Isn’t that a kick in the balls.”

“Don’t worry. This will be much worse.”

The man started dragging the knife with those words, causing Hugo to grunt as a red line appeared under the blade. 

At the same time, he was yelling at the system in his mind. 

‘Hey! Turn down the pain sensitivity!’

[Warning: Pain sensitivity cannot be turned down due to the nature of your situation.]

‘What nature?! Dammit, is there some kind of reset button? Can I just kill myself and respawn?’

[Warning: Death before you reach Level 50 will result in the Celestial Knife being unbound from your heart and dropping from your body.]

‘...’

Hugo was suddenly at an impasse. He wanted the Celestial Knife. He wasn’t about to do all this for nothing. 

[Note: Live with the consequences of your own actions.]

‘Shut up.’

Snarling at the snarky system, Hugo continued to bear the torture. 

It seemed like Hugo’s circumstances with the Celestial Knife demanded that he get through this torture, meaning he couldn’t avoid the pain. That would be no different from cheating. 

If Hugo didn’t know the nature of the system, which was actually the AGI, then he might find it eye opening that it could make those judgements. Surely many players have had those eye opening moments. 

None of that helped him now though. 

For the next hour, the man continued to take out other tools of pain and inflict unreasonable hell on Hugo’s body. However, Hugo did one thing that perhaps spared him from the worst.

“AHHH!!! OH LORD! SAVE ME! AHHH!!!”

Screaming and thrashing as loud as he could, Hugo sought to both distract himself from the pain and make the man think that he was in more pain than he was. Hugo’s violent reactions made it seem like he had horribly low pain tolerance. And, well, such knowledge wasn’t exactly out of the man’s expectations. 

The natives of the game world naturally did their own studies on the players who were dubbed anomalies. And they found out a few things. 

One, players followed the money. Give them a suitable reward and they would do just about anything. 

Two, they were bloodthirsty fighters. They always sought out enemies to kill, constantly hunting for Essence to break through Life Barriers. Most of them were determined fighters, and those who weren’t were the minority. 

Three, despite being bloodthirsty, they were also cowards. Though they could seemingly avoid all kinds of pain, when they encountered situations of unavoidable pain, they made sure to shy away from it. A vast majority hated being uncomfortable in any way. This also limited a vast majority of players from getting more powerful, as there were many situations that demanded they bear the pain of their actions. 

These were basically the three cardinal rules for navigating players. Of course, players were far more dynamic in this game world because of how close to reality it was. Some players were really devoted to cooking, or art. This world was a place to do what you couldn’t in the real world. Players were naturally explorers in this regard, and many treated npc’s as real people, thanks to how realistic they acted.

Regardless…

Hugo’s violent reaction to even the tiniest pin prick made the man think he was a bigger coward than normal. But still, that didn’t mean Hugo could avoid everything.

In fact, he felt just about everything. Since he could thrash around in the air, Hugo was eventually tied to a table, and there he had to undergo all kinds of exotic techniques. 

From branding with hot iron to having his body mutilated, Hugo was really truly tortured. 

But his mouth was sealed. He would scream and try to reason with them, but he would never spill the secret. He basically convinced himself that he didn’t know what happened, and so everything he said and did pointed to that conclusion as well. 

And, as Hugo found, bearing the torture actually wasn’t as bad as he thought it was, contrary to his screams and begging. 

As he had gone through the hell that was the Child’s training, Hugo had an incredibly high pain tolerance. And he had long figured out that the thought of pain was worse than the actual pain. 

So at some point when the pain got really bad, Hugo turned his brain off, taking everything that was thrown at him. He was good at silent resignation. It was how he managed to run a 3 hour marathon. 

Like that, the first day of torture lasted around 7 hours. After that, Hugo was chained to the ceiling again, being forced to hang there and feel his arms go numb as blood streamed through the wounds. 

The man who tormented him sighed as he walked out.

“He’s either tougher than we thought or he really doesn’t know anything. Keep torturing him every day. If he doesn’t give us anything after a month, then kill him.”

“Yes sir.”

 

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