The air in the pocket dimension didn't just crackle; it screamed with the aftermath of violence. Molten obsidian wept around Merus's crumpled form, his cerulean blood a fading nebula on the dark stone. Daganu, the SpeedOff Monarch, stood over him, a statue carved from shadow and contempt. The memory of Kawabakomo – the vibrant light, the crushing failure, the erasure – had receded, leaving only the icy residue of absolute resentment. He raised his foot, a hammer poised to obliterate the reflection of his own buried weakness.
*After Lord Saganbo accepted the hollow shell that was Hayate, I wasn't granted power. I was granted an invitation to hell. A mere Trainee Monarch, weaker than the lowest void-scavenger. My speed, the only flicker of potential in the ashes of my failure, intrigued him. He saw not a survivor, but raw material.
The training wasn't exercise; it was annihilation. Saganbo cast me into pocket dimensions sculpted from pure agony
The Endless Acceleration Void where stillness meant dissolution. To exist, I had to move, perpetually, faster and faster, chased by spatial shears that peeled reality from my bones. Rest meant unmaking. I ran until my consciousness frayed, until time dissolved into a blur of screaming muscles and tearing sinew. Millions of years spent as a frantic mote fleeing entropy.
The Gravity Forges where Planets that compressed into singularities became my anvils. Saganbo would hurl me through their event horizons, forcing me to fold space just to avoid being crushed into a singularity myself. The pressure liquefied organs, shattered bones endlessly reforming only to shatter again. I learned to move within crushing gravity, to find paths where space bent like putty under desperation.
The Sensory Null Prisons, the absolute darkness. Absolute silence. Absolute zero. No sight, no sound, no touch, no up, no down. Only the awareness of my own failing body and the creeping madness. Here, speed wasn't physical. It was the frantic, desperate speed of thought, racing against insanity, learning to navigate by the echo of my own terrified heartbeat, by the subtle tremors in the fabric of nothingness. To slow down was to be consumed by the void within.
The Mirror Mazes of Failure with the illusions of Kawabakomo, vibrant and whole. My mother calling. Daganu – the real Daganu – laughing. Commander Soden praising my speed. And then Saganbo would force me to destroy them. Over and over. With my bare hands. With energy blasts. With the very speed I was honing. "Weakness clings to sentiment," he'd intone, his voice the only sound in the screaming silence of my soul. "Obliterate it." Each destruction scarred me deeper than any gravity well.
Eleven million years. Not of growth, but of erosion. Erosion of fear, of pain, of empathy, of the very concept of "Hayate." The nightmares ceased because feeling ceased. I became a vessel of motion, a will honed to a single, razor edge: Never be weak again. Never be that broken thing crying in the void. The training didn't make me strong; it made me empty. An emptiness Saganbo found useful.
The final test was simple. Escape a collapsing micro-universe designed to compress massively faster than light-speed travel. I didn't escape by outrunning it. I escaped by folding its collapsing space around me, riding the wave of its death throes like a surfer on a tsunami of entropy. I emerged, not breathing hard, not bleeding, feeling... nothing.
Saganbo materialized, a smile like a crack in reality on his face. "Congrats," his voice was a bored rumble. "You finished your Monarch Training. Efficiently hollowed. From this entropy, a new function arises. You are no longer 'Hayate,' nor 'Daganu the Failed.' You are the SpeedOff Monarch."
"SpeedOff?" My voice was flat, devoid of curiosity, merely processing data.
"The first half denotes the core vector," Saganbo explained, idly crushing a nascent star between his fingers. "Velocity, acceleration, the negation of stillness. The 'Off'... consider it a termination code. A state of being. Motion without purpose beyond its own execution. The 'Off' switch for anything that dares impede your vector. Sufficient?"
"Adequate designation," I responded. The name was a weapon, not an identity.
"So," Saganbo leaned forward, his purple eyes boring into mine, "how does it feel? To be unburdened? To be... fast?"
YOU ARE READING
Trascender : The Fourth Gust
FantasyWhat happens when death becomes impossible? Nineteen-year-old Shinji Kazuhiko's life shattered the night a masked killer invaded his home. Left for dead, he made a horrifying discovery: he cannot die. And with each death, something inside him grows...
