Chapter 25: Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Tom’s cheeks were burning slightly, but Everlyn did not push him further.

They walked together in the middle of the group. While his enmity level was an impressive six, it was not quite sufficient for their setup. People on the peripheral were being stung and then required immediate healing. Without any discussion, the entire crowd shuffled to the right and Tom instead of being in centre was shuffled to the left. 

It meant he was closer to the dense wasps coming from the side. An occasional wasp would come from the other direction, but they were few and every one of them had made the top million. While a third were now crafters, they all knew how to fight. A single wasp against seven or eight fighters was a lopsided battle even if the humans were poorly matched against the insects.

There were further readjustments, and both magic and agility-based warriors shifted to the exposed side. After that, they were more than capable of taking out the regular wandering wasps from that direction.

The calls for healing dropped right off. 

It was an ingenious solution that played the geography. With their repositioning, very few wasps came from the left, so Tom wasn’t in need there. Then, on the right, having fewer people between him and denser wasps meant they were more likely to be caught by his aura before they targeted someone else.  

They reached the area where the ice bugs had brought his advances to a halt earlier. Around Tom everyone got to work, with Michael firmly positioning Tom in the centre. He was served food, with Harry and Sven remaining close by to keep him company. Evelyn was doing her job and had headed out to scout the surrounding wasps to ensure that there were no unexpected surprises. 

“Ouch.” Sven cursed and slapped his neck. “Stupid wasps.”

Healing magic from Clare hit him, but it did not seem to calm him down at all.

“I hate this. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” He stamped his foot in fury. “I don’t want to do this.”

“Sven.” Clare interrupted her voice sounded almost warningly.

“What?” Sven practically spat the words at her. “Are you happy with how this turned out?”

“None of us are…”

He laughed bitterly. “Sometimes I think we’ve been betrayed.” He kicked the ground. “Dumped here, tricked.”

“Sven.” Clare warned him again.

“I’ll control myself. I promised, but…” He struck his leg hard. “It’s unfair. It’s as if I’ve been sent to hell as opposed to be part of a competition. These,” he waved angrily out at mounds that surrounded them. “This hostile plain. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Tears were running down his face. “If I had known… I wouldn’t have.”

Clare walked up to him. “It’s okay we’re all in the same spot.”

He recoiled from her and stumbled away. “But we’re not. I would have made different choices if she hadn’t tricked me.”

“Sven.” Clare’s voice was scathing.

“No Fuck you and Fuck DEUS!”

Absolute silence deadened. Not just in their immediate circle, but the entire group.

“You shouldn’t have…” Harry stuttered. 

Tom looked around, wondering if anything was about to attack them. A scattering of people made the symbol of a cross, which, if DEUS cared could only make things worse.

Sven deflated. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that… I was angry… frustrated. And I know.” He peered at Tom. “that you’ll get us through this, but being stuck here by ourselves, I mean having to fight through the wasps is unfair. I imagined we would start off fighting a bunny rabbits or rats. Something tangible and then slowly build up to dragons.” Sven looked around worried.

Tom came to a decision. If there was a retaliation, there was nothing they could do about it. DEUS was not always a benevolent Goddess. The best thing they could do is to move on. His eyes still flickered, searching for a threat that he knew was there and then at Sven. The good natured man looked small and withdrawn. He did not look like someone who wanted to be alone in their thoughts. “Sven, you thought we would fight Bunnies?”

“Or equivalent.”

“Do you know the first thing that I fought was a bloody rabbit with a horn?”

Sven visibly forced himself to cheer up. “That’s actually funny Tom. You got one of the standard easy critters to begin with. Not me. I had to fight a boar. “

“Wait,” Harry interrupted, barely holding in a chuckle.

Tom’s ears picked up. Harry’s reaction, so close to what Sven had said that seemed incongruous.

“What colour was it again?” Harry asked with a smirk.

“Pink.” 

“And did it have any horns or tusks or claws?”

“No!”

“How about magic? Did it make the ground sizzle with every step? Was its fur aflame? Or super fast?”

“No.”

“Ahh, I guess it was a giant coming up to your shoulder.”

“No.”

“Your waist?”

“No.”

“Your knee.”

Sven hesitated. “Maybe.” 

“So we have a small pink, untusked, non-magical boar. I wonder if there’s a more common and descriptive name for an animal like that?”

Sven shook his head vigorously. “Nope.”

Tom suddenly realised what Harry was getting at. “A piglet?” He asked in disbelief.

Harry bust out laughing and Sven refused to make eye contact with anyone. 

“Harry?” Sven inquired suddenly.

“What?”

“What was your first fight?”

“Frogs.”

“Giant ones,” Sven asked with a similar mock concern that Harry had possessed when grilling Sven about the boar.

Harry put his hands together to show a size slightly larger than a baseball. “Technically, I guess you could describe them as giant frogs.” He winked at Sven, who appeared to be annoyed that absolutely no one cared that Harry’s first battle had been against frogs.

They chatted, and the structure went up around them. Once the roof and most of the sides were set up, he was sent outside to ensure no wasps got accidentally caught within the walls and roofs they were putting up. 

In the distance, dark clouds were gathering. Tom glanced at the cloth construction then up at those clouds that looked like they had banked up kilometres into the sky. If that hit him, he was not sure the shelter would survive very well. 

Harry moved up next to him. “That came up fast. I hope this isn’t because of Sven’s blasphemy.”

Tom shivered violently. His mind sent back to the past.

 

He was sitting cross-legged at the lip of his cave and hating everything about the fucking trial. He had been thrust into this against his will and the brilliant sunshine that shone down on those three horned bunny rabbits made him feel worse. In his hand, Spark flared out. This attempt extended out almost a foot before it failed. 

It was progress, but never enough. 

He would not waste a question asking whether he was ready because he was only twenty-two days into the thirty days of training.

Fuck it. That question and answer had not left room for ambiguity. He would not let impatience waste any more of the precious resources.  

“If I train my hardest for thirty days, will I be able to defeat them?”

“No.” 

Dux, as beautiful as she was had said no. She had looked sad but sometimes no matter how gorgeous the delivery was the truth could hurt.

“Am I missing a trick that can help me improve my training significantly.” The significant was important because there were always slight improvements that could be made to increase efficiency by a couple of percent. Tom was not interested in wasting question on anything less than a twenty percent improvement.

He looked at DUX hopefully.

Her beautiful lips curled down slightly, and he knew the answer.

“No.”

It meant he had to put in the hours. This training, him slaving away for an entire month would not be sufficient by itself but it would get him closer to where he could kill those stupid bunnies. 

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It was only another eight days and then he would burn his questions and hopefully next time it would be a yes. It wasn’t like there was no progress. He was far stronger now than when he had started. Spark and Touch Heal were his only powers, and they were progressing, and he had successfully gained levels in both. The first had been assigned automatically and the second he had purchased because he figured if he was alone, being able to heal sounded vital. 

He wished he had taken a sword.  

Spark was supposed to have formed the crux of his offensive. Mastery of it was expected to have let him shine and kill everything around him.  

He had been an idiot.  

Zap.

With a frown, he got up and retreated into the long cave. He kept his neck bowed to avoid hitting his head. Then got down and crawled the last bit and exited out into the drab surrounds that was the extent of his existence. It was a little more than a cell. Cube like with rounded edges and large enough so that he jumped he could just touch the roof. Those dimensions were worse than a prison cell. Three medium-sized steps from end to end, that was it. If he lay diagonally, he could stretch out when sleeping.

It was his hell. His existence for the last two months and was where he did almost everything, eat, sleep and training. The only variance going to the toilet and that was straight out of the cave mouth.

Disgusting?

Yes.

But he wasn’t doing it in the cave and the waste would be washed away by the stream. Bioluminescent fungus flourished on the roof that while technically not poisonous it was so bitter he couldn’t force it down. The sad-looking mushrooms that left him cramping in agony grew in a small patch in the corner. Only the fact he could retreat into his system room for the duration of their effects allowed him to keep eating them. And then the crack at the back where the water infrequently dripped.

A spot if he positioned his head just right, he could catch the drips on his tongue at the cost of hours a day and a cricked neck.

The bare minimum to live that was all that was supplied in the safe zone.

If you were willing to endure hell.                                       

Especially the mushrooms and water conditions. It was too much. “Fuck you DEUS.” he screamed in the cramped confines of the cave. The words echoed back to him, sounding louder than he expected. Tears of frustrated impotence ran down his face. She could have given him a goddamn stream or a slightly less offensive mushroom or more room. “You stupid, vindictive evil bitch!” 

He was looking at the sad brown mushrooms, and in front of his eyes they warped and changed colour to have a tinge of blue to them.

The fury that had been possessing him fell away instantly.

His mouth went drier than normal. 

That was bad.

He had been. He remembered the words he had been screaming and the change to the mushrooms. Realisation spiked through him. 

He had been cursing DEUS. 

Committing blasphemy. In that first meeting, Dux had warned him and now the mushrooms had changed colour. Not by much, and if he hadn’t been watching, he might not have noticed.

Would she kill him for this?

Were they now poisonous?

He shut his eyes and appeared in the system room. The couches were gone, taking the usual relaxed atmosphere with them. Instead, Dux was standing in the demurest suit he had ever seen her wearing. She shook her head in disappointment.

A head mistress telling off her charge.

Tom swallowed.

“Are you here to ask me a question?” Dux asked.

Tom licked his lips and nodded. “Will the mushrooms kill me?”

“No.”

Relief flooded through him. That was the answer he had expected, but he had been worried that it would be different. 

At least his stupid outburst, had not earnt a death sentence.

“Tom?”

He looked up at Dux.

She smiled sadly at him. “Are you sure you asked the right question?”

What? Her question shook him. Had he asked the right question. Yes. The mushrooms would not kill him. That was what he had wanted to be reassured about that and he had got it. Then he examined his own feeling a bit more. 

What happens if that answer had been yes? And now it was a no did that do anything? There were a lot of outcomes that were not death. 

Dux was right.

Mentally, Tom kicked himself for wasting a question. The real question was whether there was a way to dodge consuming it. But he couldn’t afford to ask something careless like “Can I avoid eating the mushrooms?” the answer to that was clearly a yes. 

It was be a choice to eat them as alternatively he could fight the horned bunnies and risk that one in five thousand chance of dying or whatever the correct number was. But avoiding eating the small mushroom did not mean DEUS would not punish him, anyway. For blasphemy there were other pathways she could use.

“Is there…” he stopped the question he had intended to ask constricting his throat.

“Yes, Tom.” Dux asked. She sounded normal once more.

“Is there a way to avoid the consequences of my blasphemy?”

Dux smiled at him. “Did you really need to ask this question? You know the answer already.”

“I did?”

“Of course.”

“No.” Tom supplied for her.

Of course, he couldn’t avoid it.

Actions had consequences.

Dux nodded sadly. “Correct. The answer is No. There is no way to escape the repercussions of blasphemy.”

Tom swallowed and reappeared in the real world. The mushrooms, now with a hint of blue in them, remained. His hand was trembling, but he picked them. All eight of the sad fungi. It was barely enough to fill his two cupped hands but the energy they contained would sustain him for a day. 

Even if it came at the cost of over an hour of stomach cramps.

He held one mushroom up. They were definitely different. There were rings of blue around them and it was not because of the lighting. 

Tom remembered his question and its answer. There was no way to avoid the consequences.

Do it. He commanded himself.

He shoved the first one in the mouth and then chewed before swallowing as quickly as he could. His mind registering that the taste had not altered. The fear that the mushrooms had become ghost peppers had not materialised but there was an infinite amount of other things DEUS could do. The only thing that comforted him was that he could retreat to his system room to wait it out.

In moments, all eight had been swallowed, and he felt normal. 

Tom smiled and stood up. Maybe the consequences had been the anticipation. His blasphemy had not been that bad. Possibly that was enough. He usually had a minute before the convulsions kicked in, so as to not waste his training time he commenced doing burpees. On his fourteenth, the cramps started.

They were worse than usual.

His face hit the ground.

Tom analyzed what he was feeling. Not only was his stomach cramping the pain radiated down into his bowels. 

Tom shut his eyes to retreat to the system room and escape the torment.

Nothing happened.

What?

He tried again. 

Still nothing.

“It’s dangerous to commit blasphemy.” Dux’s smooth tones addressed him in the cave. 

While she was speaking and for a moment afterwards, there was no pain allowing his brain to fully register what she had said. Then it came back two-fold. He folded over. He groaned, twisted, stood, then lay prone on the ground and screamed. All the frantic movements was an attempt to elevate the symptoms. 

Nothing worked. 

The torment was exquisite.

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