B3 Chapter 362: Obstinance, pt. 10

Kaius took another plodding step. He was halfway to the next obstacle — what one was it again?

Seventy-first? Ninety-eighth? It was hard to remember exactly — buried beneath the knowledge of how to pass it as it was.

He felt distant — absorbed in awareness. An understanding of his own mind, and the world around him.

Memory had long become an abstract thing — layering again and again and again as each run was optimised; closed in on the point they may as well have been the same memory.

He took another step — two more.

It felt like he was watching over his own shoulder, thick wool wrapped around his brain.

It was time.

Kaius burst into motion, twisting to the side as he took another step. A red crackling lance the smelled of anger and passionate violence connected ceiling to floor — just skirting past his chest.

The beam ripped down the course, boring a clean slice through the stone floor as it went.

He bent again, taking another step. More cutting red magic missed him by a hair.

Every step he advanced, he twisted, jumped, and spun — dancing to a tune that had been carved into his bones.

Everything blurred together, mashed into some conglomerate where every death and every run became a singular whole — divergent only for the briefest flashes right at the end, when he encountered something new.

The novelty never lasted; every challenge mapped, remembered and bested.

Some memories lasted days, others only hours. It was hard to place each one — which went where, and what happened first.

It seemed inconsequential under the strain of Mentis. The awareness. The insight into every fleeting thought, every layered memory.

At least the time it took to get to something new was getting quicker — yet even that saving grace fell flat as he hopped upwards, a red beam slicing under his feet. It was overshadowed by the weight of memory — and the knowledge that every new obstacle was taking more and more from him to pass.

They just took so much of him to map out — were so much more detailed. Keeping it all in mind, when so many experiences were so similar, was stretching him — forcing him to push against the limits of his own mind.

It was a swamp. A mire that sapped at him.

Truly, each obstacle would be impossible for someone to survive without foreknowledge now. Complex, three dimensional tests of physicality, where anything less than perfect movement and adherence to a lone path of safety lead to him being annihilated faster than he could blink.

Ripping blades that swarmed like mayflies, flying so fast they were only a blur — leaving gaps strides wide that he somehow had to navigate. Pitchblack tunnels that erupted with poisoned spikes at random, forcing him to Shunt between isolated pockets of safety. Dangling threads so thin they cut him as easily as any blade, drifting in an ever changing breeze — something he had to navigate while desperately clinging to the ceiling on handholds no bigger than a pebble.

It was a tribulation from which he had no escape.

No escape other than true death, at least — his Will was not so weak. Not now, not ever.

For all of his fugue, for all of his exhaustion, Kaius continued to refine himself. Deep within him, The Veteran’s Edge shone like the sun. A burning pillar that revealed to him the way — cut him a path through the gloom.

That Authority — it seeped into everything. Him most of all. A truth. One less externalised than Corporus; a weight that bolstered him — his mind, his thought, his decisions. It was the guiding light; the concern he held for his motivations and actions; the demeanour with which he held himself; the Will.

The drive.

It wasn’t embodied. Not yet. He still had further to go before it sunk in fully — before he truly understood himself on a level that went beyond the implicit and explicit. Still, it grew brighter with every run, and with every death. His time would come soon.

Nor was that the only realisation he’d had. With time, and with death, he felt the way Mentis nestled within him; the way it was inseparably intertwined with Corporus. Both were incomplete, a fraction of a greater whole. Where their Authority blended and weaved into something greater, he was starting to brush up against something greater. Something…foundational.

Neither fire was independent, and with that realisation the flames within his soulspace bent. Each aspect curved towards the other, lending each other strength as they flickered and flared.

An incomplete union. One he knew would not be finished when he finally felt Mentis at its deepest levels. Animus, the final pillar — the one that still lay dark and cold — it was the key.

To what, he didn’t know. Kaius didn’t even know where these realisations came from — when he had first pondered them. His dissociative cloud was too complete — a fugue that only left Will and action unending.

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Kaius kept moving forward as he lost himself in thought, acting according to the instincts forged in a thousand rehearsals.

The fog wouldn’t break him; neither would the death, or the monotony, or the burden of memory.