Dante stopped pushing the energy out of his mind, the relief coming an instant later. But when he opened his eyes, the cloud of near-invisible energy began to disperse, merging with the air around it like steam from a pot of boiling water. Dante could do nothing as more and more of it began to blend into his surroundings.

His only solace was that the longer he waited, the weaker his headache became.

“Reach out with your mind and grab onto as much of it as you can, then throw it at the hawk!”

Dante took a deep breath as he focussed on the cloud in front of him, grabbing onto a boulder-sized chunk of energy. Only for it to start falling through his fingers like water from a tap. The more he scooped up, the more it slipped through his fingers, frustrating him to no end.

By the time it stopped leaking out of his mental grasp, he was only able to keep hold of a fraction of the original cloud, barely the size of his head.

Not letting his failure get to him, Dante kept the clump of energy between him and the hawk while it circled him from above. He was starting to feel the weight of it on his mind when the hawk banked towards him, swooping down and weaving between the pillars of crystal. With no time to spare, he raised the sphere until it floated a metre above his head. It was diffuse and even leaking wisps of energy, but it was the best he could do. Moments later, the creature was upon him, its wings spread and its talons stretching for him once more.

Dante rolled behind the closest pillar of crystal a second before the hawk reached him, only just managing to avoid its talons. He even felt the wind kick up against his skin as the tips barely missed his flesh, but he pushed the sensations to the back of his mind as he focussed on the ball of energy floating above the hawk.

With all of his concentration, he slammed the ball onto its back a second before he lost control of it. Maintaining a hold over his energy for so long took its toll, but it was all worth it as he imagined the hawk getting thrown against the ground.

The clump of energy slammed into the hawk’s back, exploding into a wave of uncontrolled force as it flew over the forest of crystal pillars. Its chest brushed against the tip of a crystal it happened to be flying over, ruffling its feathers a little before it flapped its wings and began to circle him again.

Dante slumped against the crystal behind him, his mouth agape. His attempt was so feeble that the hawk didn’t even react, likely thinking it had flown into a small air pocket.

As Dante refocussed after his shocking failure, the mental strain fading away, he realised that he was out in the open. He tried to stand up and move as quickly as he could, but the hawk was too fast.

The hawk crashed into him as he raised his arms in front of his face, bowling him over onto his back. He protected his head with his right arm as he tried to push the hawk away with his left, but it grabbed onto both of them with its talons. He pushed it off of him when its head thrust forward, barely managing to keep it from pecking his eye out by leveraging his weight.

Only for it to furiously beat its wings and rip out a chunk of his left bicep with its beak.

As its flapping wings kicked up enough dust to force his eyes closed, Dante realised that he was trapped. He had no idea what he could do to save himself. Its screeches were dizzyingly loud, and the dust it was kicking up was starting to choke him. A hundred panicked thoughts flashed through his mind before he realised that he could only do one thing.

Dante tried to free his arms from the grasp of the overly large bird, but it only squeezed tighter. He pushed and thrashed against its hold on him, only stopping when its talons clamped down, shattering the bones in his forearm like a child snapping a twig.

The pain emptied his mind of all thought, forcing him to act only on instinct.

A burst of invisible energy exploded out of the space between his eyebrows and slammed into the hawk. It squawked in surprise when it was thrown back, but it refused to let go of Dante’s shattered forearms. With the hawk flapping its wings, it managed to reduce the impact significantly, only getting the feather’s on its chest ruffled.

Pushing himself onto his knees, Dante turned to face the crystal pillar and shoved the hawk into it, blasting it back with another burst of force for good measure. Once he managed to hold it against the wall of crystal despite it nearly biting his finger off, he blasted it with another shot of energy. It beat its wings and extended its neck to peck him, but it was slammed back again as he threw another clump at its chest.

As the energy exploded out of his mind all at once, Dante felt his migraine flair up with more ferocity than he thought possible. His instincts were screaming for him to stop, but he refused to back down. Only death awaited if he passed out now. The creature would slash him to shreds and feast on his body the moment it got the chance.

As streams of warm blood poured out of his nose and eyes, Dante continued to hold it in place with his arms as he threw blasts of force at it. The hawk was thrown back against the pillar again and again, but he soon realised he was going to collapse before he killed it.

In fact, he hadn’t even injured the hawk at all.

Biting onto his lip, Dante forced even more energy out of his mind than before, causing something ethereal in his brain to scream out in pain. But he didn’t stop as something finally started to happen. Splashes of crimson fluid burst out of the hawk’s chest as a bloody line appeared on its body.

Dante was confused for a moment before he remembered his first attack. He thought that the hawk had flown over the pillar unscathed, but it looked like it had gotten cut by the tip of the sharp crystal.

Seeing a chance appear, Dante pushed harder despite his instincts screaming at him to stop, throwing out another burst almost twice the size of the last. But as he kept straining his mind, his body started to take on the toll. Streams of warm blood tickled his skin as they poured out of his ears, eyes, and nose.

The edges of Dante’s consciousness began to fade, terrifying him to no end. He didn’t want to die. He had so much that he wanted to do and so many people to prove wrong.

Dante pushed the energy out of his head, throwing another burst of force against the wounded chest of the hawk. A wave of blood splashed everything in his surroundings as the hawk bounced off the crystal wall. The wound on its chest was nearly ripped open, but the damage to his body was more than he could handle.

His vision and sense of touch soon left him, the hawk’s painful screeches being the only thing he could still perceive. He was out of time. He could feel it now, the weakness and pain spreading throughout every inch of his mind and body as the adrenaline faded.

Dante’s mind blanked out as he took hold of the energy in his head once more. Then, his consciousness fading, he managed to release one final burst into the hawk’s chest before he collapsed.

***

A wave of aches and pains washed over Dante as he opened his eyes.

“I-I’m alive?” He whispered, sitting up and looking down at his hands. “I’m alive! I-I did it! I survived!”

Dante chuckled for a moment, but it soon became a maniacal laugh that echoed throughout the cavern. His body throbbed with every beat of his heart, and his head felt like it was full of molten metal, but he was a lot better off than he thought he would be after being mauled by a wild animal. In fact, he was surprised that he could open his eyes at all since he expected to be well and truly dead by now.

“Good, you’re awake,” the fairy muttered with relief, buzzing over the top of his head. “How do your wounds feel?”

Dante froze when he locked eyes with the fairy, realising that she had heard him, and quickly coughed to cover up his embarrassment. “Still sore, but clearly not that bad if I’m still alive.”

“That’s good,” The fairy said, fluttering around him to look at his wounds. “This place is safe for now, so just rest here for the time being. I’ll answer your questions as they come, but I’ll give you a proper introduction later.”

If the cavern wasn’t safe, he would be up and searching for a way out in seconds. He didn’t know what happened after he passed out, but he assumed the hawk fled since he couldn’t see its body anywhere, which meant the horde of other hawks were probably coming to search for him.

Dante nodded and began to check on his injuries, starting off by tearing away his shredded sleeves. He glanced at his shoulder and was shocked to see a scab covering the bone-deep wound. It was now a sensitive patch of nearly healed skin, which was logically impossible. An injury of that severity would usually need stitches and surgery, but now it was almost finished healing without any kind of intervention.

Dante wanted to think he had misjudged his injuries, but as he scraped off the layers of dried up blood covering his arm, he realised that he couldn’t have misjudged. His entire sleeve was now dark red, and the dried puddle of blood on the rocky floor only served to support that.

And that wasn’t even mentioning the broken bones in his forearms, which were now completely healed.

“Did you heal me, Miss… uh, fairy?” Dante asked, looking up at her as she hovered in place. “Sorry, I have no idea what to call you.”

The fairy landed on the ground before gracefully curtsying. “My name is Laurelai Presbalar, and I will be your guide for the foreseeable future… If you survive, that is.”

Dante waited for something else, but nothing happened after that. Laurelai just stood mid-curtsey, waiting for something to happen beyond Dante’s knowledge. Was he supposed to bow in return?

“This is the part where you introduce yourself…”

“Oh. Uh, it’s nice to meet you, Laurelai,” Dante blushed, eventually deciding to give her a slight bow. “My name is Dante, but-.”

“Please just call me Laura.”

Dante winced in annoyance. “But that isn’t important. How did you manage to heal me so quickly? Did you use those… energies that you helped me during the fight?”

He expected her to tell him about how she healed him, but to his surprise, she shook her head.

“I can’t intervene in your introduction in any capacity, and that includes saving your life. Your wounds healed on their own. Besides, do you see any bandages or stitches? I’m a fairy, not a nurse.”

Dante raised his brow at that last line, wondering how she thought jokes were appropriate. Although he understood that she couldn’t help him, he still felt a bit irritated with how calm she was. It was more like she was on holiday, making him wonder how much suffering he could have avoided if she was a little more competent.

“So, how am I alive then? How did the bleeding stop if no one sutured my wounds?” Dante had a cut on his shoulder, a few chunks ripped out of his arm, a slash on the back of his leg, and broken forearms. All of those injuries were almost completely gone, even his broken forearms. He didn’t dare put pressure on them, but they had regained shape, meaning that the bones were back together in one piece.

At least they felt like they were in one piece when he touched them through his skin.

“The kill saved you, silly,” Laurelai said, turning and pointing at a bloody ball of ruffled feathers hanging halfway down a crystal pillar. “After you ripped open the little cut on its belly, the hawk freaked out and tried to fly away. Little did it know that its intestines were hanging out…”

Dante stood up and walked over to the pillar that Laurelai pointed to. It was the colour of the ocean, standing straight up to the sky in defiance of where nature intended it to be. If anything, it looked like an obscurely shaped aquarium without any fish. An aquarium from a murder scene. He would’ve called it calming if it wasn’t covered in splashes of dried blood, making it look like an art piece by a serial killer.

The hawk hung upside down from the pillar with its wings limply spread out, its body being held roughly halfway up off the ground. It slowly twisted and turned with the slight breeze in the cavern, held up by a cord of its intestines that somehow managed to wrap themselves around the pillar like some kind of devilish Christmas tree.

Dante felt relief at the death of his fated enemies, but he was still confused about how it ended up healing him.

He must have been making a face because Laurelai began to explain. “When the hawk died, you received the energy it had been nurturing inside its mind, body, and spirit. That energy would normally give you a level or two, but as a punishment for your lacking performance, almost all of it went to healing your wounds.”

“Punishment? Performance?” Dante muttered, turning away from the dead hawk.

Laurelai rolled her eyes like she was explaining something obvious. “That’s right. All the hawks were meant to leave the cavern for their ritual thing, but one little runt stayed behind. Don’t you think that’s odd? The system, or better yet the tutorial, kept it in the cavern somehow. Almost like it was setting up a deathmatch, don’t you think?”

“Wait,” Dante mumbled, all sorts of thoughts flashing through his mind. “What would have happened if I lost? And why would the system orchestrate this?”

“Death. You would have died. As for why? I’m not sure of the specifics, but the system is there to help people get stronger by supporting their journey into the arts. If you couldn’t rise up to the challenge, then that meant you weren’t worthy to sup on the gifts that the system could provide.”

“But I won, didn’t I? The hawk is dead while I live, and yet I was punished?”

“You technically won since the injury you caused led to its death, but you almost lost. Besides, you should be thankful that the system healed you in exchange for the levels you were supposed to get. I can tell you right now that you would have died from them.”

Dante winced at the cruelty of it all, but when she began to talk about levels and a system, he remembered that his superpower wielding fight with the hawk wasn’t a dream. He had taken control of three separate energies he never knew existed and used one of them to kill a monstrous hawk.

He struggled to organise everything in his head. How did he even use magic energy without touching a magic crystal or awakening his magic with the help of a master?

“Wait, you just mentioned levels? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The system’s representation of a ‘minor step’,” Laurelai growled, huffing in anger like she was explaining addition and subtraction to an adult. “At least that’s what they called it before the inception of the system. You break through a minor step by gaining enough energy, cleansing your existence in the process, then you eventually reach a bottleneck of rank. That means you have to advance to continue improving.”

Dante raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, Laurelai. Just take a step back for a second and elaborate for me, please. I have no idea what you mean by levels.”

As though to mock him, a screen appeared in front of his face.

Name: Dante Alighieri

Race: Primal (Human)

Level: 0

Titles: Prime, Apex Talent, Primal Elite

Strength: 0

Agility: 0

Endurance: 0

Vitality: 0

Perception: 0

Wisdom: 0

Intelligence: 0

Willpower: 0

His logical mind denied that it was real, that everything was a hallucination from being sick or something… but a small part of him desperately wanted to believe. It called out for him to learn more about the multiverse and himself in equal measure, the powers he now wielded being the bridge to a bright future overflowing with adventure and exploration.

A future with purpose…

Dante shrugged away the screen and extracted a single strand of transparent energy from his head as quickly as he could, wincing at the stinging pain between his eyebrows. But he refused to stop or slow down for a second. He had to know the truth, and he had to know right now.

With a point of his finger, he shot the loose strand at a random rock the size of a fist, blasting it away with an explosion of force that reminded him of a balloon popping. It flew over twenty metres away like someone had kicked it, only to bounce harmlessly off a purple crystal with a thud.