Given everything that had happened in his life since waking up in this crypt, it was pretty on brand for Inanna’s training regimen to be filled with pain.

Lots of pain.

Every time Lukas took a breath, a searing burst of agony radiated from his chest. He staved off his next breath for as long as he could, but eventually his lungs gave up and he winced as a burning fire took root in his chest once more.

The cycle repeated every few moments, as his entire reality was consumed by the simple struggle to breathe and try avoiding the torment. The pain didn’t exactly lessen, but over time, it eventually became more bearable to him.

He idly wondered whether getting used to pain was a good thing.

“Certainly good, mortal.” Inanna’s melodious voice felt like a rasp to his tired ears. “Very good.”

Lukas managed to push himself over and onto his back. His arms and legs felt like someone had replaced his bones with lead, and his muscles and tendons simply couldn’t overcome the inertia to make a single movement.

He tried opening his mouth, but it just ended in a fit of coughs and jolts of pain surging down his spine.

It hurt, but at least it meant he was still alive.

“Get up!” the unrepentantly vicious goddess ordered. “This is your mind. The only pain you shall feel is what you are allowing yourself to feel. Pain, injury, fatigue— it is all nothing but sensory information fed to your mind. Refuse to let any of it in. Reject it.”

Lukas just groaned from where he lay. It was easier said than done, what she was saying, but he supposed she didn’t get to where she was by stopping to think about things.

Inanna had been teaching him a technique best described as Neural Suppression— a way to temporarily shut off pain receptors so he could function normally even with grave injuries. She had patiently and painstakingly tried the mental route at first, but his ability with psionics hadn’t progressed enough to let him modulate his receptors so freely.

So here he was. At the mercy of Plan B— sparring. Or, as Lukas liked to call it, getting beaten up until he looked like one giant bruise so he could practice willing the pain to go away.

And so far, the results were nonexistent.

“On the bright side,” she began brightly, “you are gaining experience fighting an opponent hilariously beyond your own proficiency in combat”

She spoke the truth. Over just the past week, Lukas had suffered through thirty such sessions. And as promised, Inanna had come up with all sorts of cruel, inventive, and pragmatic ways of breaking him down. Sometimes, she’d push him through an exhausting number of tasks. Singularly, each task was benign, but in tandem, the experience made him curse his own existence.

Other times, she’d give him an extraordinarily simple task to perform, but under impossibly ridiculous conditions.

Exhibit A.

Picking fresh leaves and roots from a thick underbrush while maintaining tachypsychia.

Before today, never had he imagined how terrifying it was to watch oneself perform a mindlessly effortless task with extreme slowness. Not only did he have to keep cardiac failure at bay from the exertion, but his patience was stretched so thin that Lukas felt like he’d snap at any moment.

But that was the tip of the iceberg.

There were sessions where she’d conjure an axe of all things and rush towards him, making him dodge, jump, leap, and perform all sorts of acrobatics to avoid being torn to shreds. It might’ve all been an illusion— something happening within his mind —but the pain of having the blade go through him was overwhelming. He wouldn’t put it past her to manipulate his pain receptors to crank them into overdrive.

In another, he’d found himself inside a large glass box filled with spiders, worms, and snakes of all shapes and sizes and colors. According to her, it was an exercise in controlling tension and responding to sudden spikes in fear and stress. It had taken him several sessions of suffering through spider bites and snake venom before he’d gotten the hang of maintaining his cool, even under such duress.

Most recently, he’d begun ‘sessions’ about improving Burst. The skill had already reached Level 2 during the second session, and he was gaining an increasing degree of familiarity with the skill. Seeing his burgeoning abilities, naturally Inanna had gotten creative about it.

By levitating him fifty feet into the air.

And letting him go.

Amid the girlish squeals, the desperate attempts at pushing lifeforce downward to cushion his fall, and the sounds of his bones shattering, he’d finally gotten the hang of ejecting lifeforce as a propellant in short bursts rather quickly.

Pain was an excellent motivator, much to his chagrin.

Of course, Inanna being Inanna, she’d used the entire event to underline the efficacy of this mental tortu— training. Healing bones in real life, according to her, would have been an excruciatingly painful and slow process that her sessions spared him of.

Lukas would’ve been amused if he didn’t feel like breaking down.

Inanna definitely would’ve made an excellent drill sergeant, but he could still smell the bullshit from a mile away. All the pain and fear and helplessness he’d suffered through during the sessions made one thing vividly clear.

This wasn’t training.

This was refinement. Through a furnace of pain.

“As it should be,” the goddess smiled facetiously. “Teaching is the part of planting a seed and nurturing it. I have seen your memories, human. Seen how you mortals prattle over feeding useless information in return for currency. Real education is the art of inculcating skills into the future generation— true abilities that will help with evolution. In front of such a reward, pain is no true cost.”

Really, what was he thinking, asking her of all people to train him?

I must’ve been high off of lifeforce or something when I decided that.

He clenched his impotent fists and willed the pain to vanish.

It only flooded his mind with more agony and a healthy dose of vengeance.

“This isn’t working!” he yelled back. “All you’re doing is torturing me at this point!”

Inanna crouched down beside his fallen form, arching a single elegant eyebrow towards him. “A pity,” she drawled. “And to think you once showed a glimmer of potential.”

A very familiar war-axe materialized right in front of her, and her fingers easily found their way around the handle into a firm grip within seconds.

“Fear not, mortal. We shall not stop until we find it once more.”

With a graceful, gravity-defying swing, Inanna hefted the axe until it was well above her head and brought it straight down.

Onto him.

The moment Lukas saw the axe coming down at him, his body blurred into action. Before his mind could even register what had happened, he was already flinging himself aside into a swift roll, just in time to avoid the axe as it slammed against where he was, its sharp edge gouging into the surface.

With a fine sweep of his right leg, he slammed into the weapon’s handle with his knee, pure kinetic force erupting out of his lower extremities and layering them like a protective envelope. Somewhere along the line, his brain caught up with the act and strongly pointed out to him how the handle hadn’t fractured despite multiple lifeforce-enhanced punches in the past.

His knee couldn’t possibly fare any better.

Before his instinct could catch back up, his leg was already in motion, smashing into the bar with enough force that, by all means, should be impossible even in his best state. When he first noticed the hairline fracture slowly spreading through the handle’s surface, he realized he’d instinctively activated tachypsychia as well.

His leg moved a little further.

And something cracked. Whether it was his bone or something else, he didn’t know.

Another thin fracture appeared.

Followed by another crack.

And then it exploded with the force of a small bomb. The handle imploded in its center, blasting out small pieces of incomprehensibly hard metal as his leg passed through the area where the handle had been. The dangerous metallic head of the axe, meanwhile, remained stuck to the ground.

Completing his sweeping motion, Lukas flipped back and pulled himself up into a cautious position— half-crouched, hands up and ready to deflect anything that approached.

Inanna let out a delighted, silvery laugh as she clapped her hands like a little girl who’d just been told she was getting a pony. “Beautiful,” she intoned. “Brutal. Vicious. Beautiful.”

But Lukas was far less amused. “Next time you try something like that,” he snarled, “I won’t stop at the axe.”

Really, he should’ve known better by now.

Before he knew it, her body was spinning, her light leg swerving in a clean sweep towards his head. Fortunately for him, tachypsychia was something he’d learned to activate with instinct by now— no conscious thought required.

Thump!

He crouched lower, Her leg was still sweeping across the air. There was simply not enough time to evade such a hit.

Thump! Thump!

His left hand moved up to block. But it wouldn’t matter. Surviving a hit from Inanna at such close proximity was a pipe dream. At best, he’d be left with a broken arm.

No, the real issue was what would happen after she broke his arm.

He recognized her posture. Her leg was arriving in a single sweep as her other foot remained perfectly perched on the floor. Completely still. Unmoving. Functioning as a fulcrum, one that maintained her balance during the attack.

And in a perfectly stable position to pull off a second, consecutive hit to his head as soon as this foot touched the ground.

Thump!

His left hand was now right in front of his left ear. A hit this close would literally kill him. Dreamland or not, he didn’t want to take any chances. The arm would shatter— that much was a given by now. What he needed to do now was ignore the pain, which, ironically enough, was the purpose of this session in the first place.

Lifeforce surged through him, and his body reacted out of pure instinct.

The leg met his arm.

His ulna shattered.

But Lukas was well past thinking about the pain.

Thump! Thump!

Her foot touched the ground.

And her other foot was already in motion.

Lukas did the only thing he had available to him.

“BURST!” he cried out in the deepest echelons of his mind.

An attack like Burst wouldn’t do jack shit to the goddess. Nothing that he was capable of would even come close to fazing her. But luckily for him, that wasn’t what he intended to do.

In a battle of force versus unyielding strength, the solution you looked for need not be to over power it.. There was a third possibility— To escape her reach.. Just because the force of his Burst wasn’t strong enough to push the goddess’s leg away, it didn’t mean it wasn’t strong enough to push himself away.

And that’s exactly what he did, allowing her push to send him skidding across the floor— completely out of her reach.

Inanna planted both feet firmly on the ground with perfect poise. “Care to repeat your statement, mortal?”

There was no mirth in her demand. If he didn’t answer appropriately this time, this could very well be his end. But fortunately for Lukas, he was an incredibly reasonable and rational individual.

Except for when he wasn’t.

“I said, I’m not willing to roll over and be fucked on a whim. You might be a reflection of a goddess, but that doesn’t guarantee my obedience.”

Inanna’s inhuman eyes practically shimmered. “I expected no less of you, mortal. Were you not strong enough to cast such defiance into my teeth, you would be useless to my purpose.” Her smile widened. “To our purpose.”

Lukas let out a low, deep, angry growl.

“Look at you,” the goddess practically purred, as if the raw murderous desire he was exuding was nothing out of the ordinary. “It seems like even weaklings can bite if you push them far enough.”

She took a step back and cracked her neck.

"How fun.”