Dante visibly recoiled as a bug the size of his head flew at his face. He swatted at it out of reflex, but it managed to dodge his hand at the last second. After a few more near-misses, it flew just out of reach and, surprisingly, began to curse and swear at him. It called him all sorts of strange names, forcing his startled mind to realise the truth.

“A talking bug?” Dante shouted, taking an unsteady step back. “How can you talk?”

“So rude!” The bug huffed, crossing its little arms as it frowned down at him. “You barbarians are always so uneducated. Have you never seen a Woodland Fairy before? We are grace and natural beauty rolled into a perfectly sized package!”

“What the fuck?” Dante swore, looking closely at its surprisingly human body. He stared at her with wide eyes, but when she started to frown, he realised he was being rude. “Ah, sorry. I didn’t mean to swat you. All I saw was a green flash of light flying at my face, and I just... reacted.”

The creature buzzing around him was about ten or fifteen centimetres tall. ‘It’, or more likely ‘She’, had a braid of chestnut brown hair thrown over her shoulder. She also wore a dress made out of emerald green leaves that ended at the middle of her thighs, which Dante admittedly thought was a carapace at first.

To his surprise, she also had a small pair of crystalline wings attached to her back, almost perfectly resembling a fairy from a kid’s movie.

No, Dante thought. She really was a fairy from a kid’s movie, basically a tiny human with butterfly wings that let off sparkling silver dust in her wake.

“It’s good that you can put your newly inflated ego aside long enough to apologise, little boy,” the fairy chirped, putting her hands on her hips. “You have no idea how many people let their newfound abilities get to their heads. Just because you’re more special than the average mortal doesn’t mean you’re a genius. I always tell them to learn some humility, but some of them don’t listen and end up dying any-.”

“Wait,” Dante said, cutting the little fairy off when he realised that she was a chatterbox. “What abilities are you talking about? And why would my ego get inflated?”

The fairy’s grin turned into a look of confusion. “You don’t have any powers?”

“Uh,” Dante muttered, looking down at his hands. “I don’t think so? Everything feels the same.”

“So, you didn’t go through the basic tutorial in the village?” The fairy questioned, putting her hand up to her chin when Dante furiously shook his head. “Maybe an error with the system, then? There are occasionally cases where people fall through the cracks if more than a billion enlightened beings are teleported at once.”

Dante felt his stomach drop. What had gone wrong? Was it because he tried to fight the teleportation? Or maybe it was because his hand phased through his door handle? There was nothing else that came to mind besides those two possibilities, but even then, he doubted that millions of people would casually sit around as the world began to twist and warp around them.

Dante shook his head, affirming to himself that it couldn’t have been that.

“Is it bad? The system said I’m pretty talented, so surely I’m not screwed, right? Please don’t tell me that I’m stuck in this cavern for the rest of my life.”

The fairy shook her head and giggled. “Well, since you missed the start, I’ll have to explain everything that you missed. So, nothing that bad. It just means that you start the practical portion of the tutorial that much-. WAIT! You teleported straight here after the system said you were talented?”

“Yeah, it said I’m a Peak-grade talent or somethi-.”

The tell-tale screech of a solitary hawk echoed throughout the cavern, making Dante’s heart stop in his chest. He looked up to the roof of the cavern and immediately spotted the culprit. It was a smaller hawk than the rest of the flock, but as it flapped its wings, he realised that its wingspan was over two metres, maybe even three.

“Oh no,” the fairy muttered, shouting something else soon after. But it was all Dante heard her say as the hawk began to dive down towards him with a terrifying momentum, turning into a blur that flew straight towards him. Adrenaline coursed through his body at the sight, but when he was about to move, his body locked up and his mind went blank.

Dante had never been in a situation like this before. Was he supposed to stand his ground and make a lot of noise to scare it away? Puff up his chest and wave his arms to look dangerously big? His mind glossed over ten different options, but there was no more time for second-guessing. Dante couldn’t see anything more than a blur, yet it was close enough that his eyes still found their way to the hawk’s razor-sharp talons.

The very same talons that were reaching for his head.

Dante felt his body move before his brain could catch up, but as he dove under a crystal pillar for cover, he realised it was too late. One of the talons brushed against him, severing skin and flesh like it was made of tofu.

Searing pain exploded across his right shoulder as he bounced off the hard ground, causing him to slide across the floor without his control. Dante tried to turn the failed dive into a roll, but the pain was too much for him to react in time, ending with his back getting slammed against a crystal pillar.

Dante groaned as the air fled from his lungs, leaving him to curl up on the rocky floor as he held back tears. He tried to push the pain away and stand, but as his heart throbbed in his chest, so did the wound on his shoulder. It was long, spreading from the front of his shoulder all the way to the ridge of his spine. Every ounce of muscle between the two had been severed by a single talon.

Dante couldn’t imagine what he would look like if he hadn’t moved or got struck by all three talons, but that was all the thinking he could do as the pain began to cloud his mind. It was too much. He thought this was what he wanted, leaving nothing but adventure and chaos in his wake, but reality was often different to what one expected.

And that made him furious. Why couldn’t he excel at something for once in his miserable life? Even a simple act like diving out of the hawk’s way made him freeze up, locked in place until it was too late. He tried and tried and tried, but nothing ever went right for him.

Nothing.

He only had one real friend, his family dismissed him like he was still an idiotic child, and anything he attempted only ended in abject failure. Even the things he did succeed in didn’t warrant much of anything. He was never good enough, whether to his family, ‘friends’, or his peers.

Dante took a deep breath as the adrenaline started to numb the pain in his back and shoulder. If it wasn’t for the primordial terror he felt, the adrenaline flooding his system to the point that he was shaking, he might have passed out then and there. But he didn’t have time to think anymore as another screech echoed throughout the cavern, the hawk beginning its dive towards him.

He could hear the fairy shouting at him, telling him to do something, but everything she said was going in one ear and out the other. Instead, Dante tapped into the rage bubbling in his chest, using it as fuel to roll across the floor as a blur rocketed past him.

His shoulder released another burst of pain as a fresh line of blood dripped down his back, but no new sensations washed over him. Even after he stopped rolling, he failed to spot any severed limbs on the ground or extra cuts on his body.

He had done it. He had managed to move out of the way before the hawk shredded him to pieces.

Dante gingerly pushed himself off the ground with his left arm, standing up with a grunt. He could see the hawk circling around him to line up for another attempt. With a deep breath, he crouched down low to prepare for another dive, but as the hawk angled its body towards him, Dante was pulled out of his barely held focus by a screaming fairy buzzing around his head.

“USE YOUR ESSENCE!” The fairy screamed in his ear, waving her hands around to grab his attention. “Oh, you’re listening. Quick! Focus your mind and try to move your energy around. It’s your only chance at killing this thing.”

Dante’s mind couldn’t comprehend what she was saying. “Essence? What the hell are you on about?”

He wanted to ask for more details, but before they could continue their conversation, the hawk let out an enraged screech as it dived at him. It crossed the distance in less than a second, spreading its wings and stretching out its talons as it prepared to gore his face, but Dante was ready for it.

He dived to the floor as it swept past the spot he had been standing on, kicking up a wave of dust from its tremendous wake. A surge of relief flooded through him as he managed to extend his life that much longer, but when he pushed up off the ground to prepare for another assault, a flash of pain made him falter.

There was a deep slash in the back of his left thigh, maybe even severing the tendons of his hamstring.

It was a fluke. He hadn’t dodged the hawk. The thought of failure made his heart sink, but the realisation of what that failure meant filled him with dread. If his first evasion was a fluke, that meant…

Dante forced himself up off the ground by relying on his right leg, but even then, he struggled to put any weight on his other leg. His heart began to thunder in his chest. If he couldn’t even dodge the hawk when he had full use of his legs, then what chance did he have with an injured one?

Reality began to set in as the hawk screeched, circling a hundred metres overhead, its talons glistening with blood in the low light.

His blood.

“H-Help!” Dante shouted, locking eyes with the fairy as he limped towards her. Although it pained him to do something like this, it was better than being ripped to pieces by a hawk. Besides, anyone with half a brain would wound their own pride if they could avoid a painful death. “Please help me!”

It was the logical thing to do, he consoled himself.

“What?” The fairy muttered, clearly shocked at his change in demeanour. “I’m your guide. I can’t help you; only you can help yourself. Look inside your body and focus. Feel the energy coursing through your veins and take control of it using your mind! Use the desire you feel and the willpower in your mind to push the motes into your muscles and bones!”

“Huh?” Dante muttered, tripping on an uneven stone and scraping his chin on the ground. Then, with an embarrassing amount of scrambling, he quickly got back onto his feet. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m about to die, so please just help me.”

The fairy shook her head and gave him a pitying look. “It’s not that I don’t want to. This beast can’t even see me, let alone interact with me. You need to save yourself, little boy.”

A storm of emotions welled up inside his chest when the hawk began its descent the next moment, but he forced them down as he tried to search inside himself. And to his surprise, he actually did feel something coursing through him. Tiny motes of red energy moved around his body along with the rest of his blood.

Dante grabbed onto a mote and tried to push it into his muscles and bones like the fairy said, but it was too late once again. He fell more than he dived as the hawk flashed over his head, and three shallow scratches appeared from his left shoulder all the way down to his lower right back. They stung like hell, but they were pretty shallow, barely scraping a bone compared to the cuts on his shoulder and leg.

They were so deep that he could see his white bones between his bloody, shredded skin.

Dante forced himself back onto his feet and began to control the motes of energy in his blood, but no matter what he did, they refused to leave his veins and enter into his muscles and bones. Even when he forced them rather than guide, they still refused to cross over from his blood vessels and into his cells.

“Miss fairy,” Dante shouted, his voice quivering. “It isn’t working. What the hell do I do?”

“Damn,” the fairy muttered, biting her lip. “Quickly try and look into your astral body. All you need to do is pull on the area just beneath your navel and then gather the stream of energy into the palm of your hand.”

Dante tried just that. The energy from his astral body was drawn out of the area beneath his navel with surprising ease, pouring out as a stream of transparent blue liquid. It circulated around his body along with his blood, but as it reached the hand of his uninjured arm, nothing he did could make it stay. Instead, the stream moved back around to his navel and disappeared into it like the energy was never there.

“Not working?” The fairy asked when she saw his eyes widen, prompting Dante to weakly shake his head. “Okay, okay. Damn. There are no weapons here for you to use. The only thing you can do now is to gather as much focus as you can and push out the energy in your head. Pay attention to the spot between your eyebrows and-.”

But Dante had to stop listening as the hawk began its next dive. This time, he pushed off the ground, lunging more than diving, and luckily managed to reach a crystal pillar. He leaned against it as the hawk barrelled past, forcing it to turn at the last second and fly away without goring him, obviously worried about crashing into the solid pillar.

Dante celebrated for an instant before he began to focus on his head. He quickly found the energy the fairy was talking about, but unlike the red motes in his blood or the transparent blue liquid in his astral body, this was more like a cloud of invisible gas or a blanket of mist.

Dante pushed on the intangible energy, and an insignificant amount of it came pouring out of his glabella, the space between his eyebrows. He almost gave up when barely a hundredth of the mist in his head moved, but when it began to stream out into a cloud, he almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

The cloud had spread out almost three metres around him and was still rapidly growing.

His lifeline was here, and he was ready to grasp it with everything he had. But his body had other plans. A migraine began to blossom inside his skull, making him almost fall to his knees. It was like a headache, an ear infection, and a toothache all at once. The pain was so bad that he completely lost his grasp on his surroundings, barely managing to maintain his fading consciousness.

“Stop! You need to-.” The fairy continued to speak, but that was the only thing Dante heard before he collapsed.