Part II - Steppencripple

"Confronted with death, the slave shrinks and the saint grows taller. Thus, death makes men's stature equal."

—War-Priest Kemenrang, writing on The Death Training in Here In The Cycle: Epilogue to a Philosophy of The Beyond

The Overdream.

Stage 48 of The All-Mother's Death Training, Bajing Variation, 2.9% pass rate.

Buffgh, buffgh, buffgh, the earth shook as a bear with rotting flesh scrambled up a hill, charging at a figure on top gathering a ball of blood and black-fire in his palm.

When the Plague Bear was about to reach Henry, three skeletons closed in on it. One of them ducked low, slashing its sword at the monster's hind leg and severing it. The beast stumbled. Skeleton number two shoved it, knocking it off balance, and the third sunk its blade through the bear's exposed armpit, into its heart.

Henry, completing his , aimed it behind him. The spell blasted a gaping hole through the head of a jaguar lunging at his back.

The two expiring monsters were added to another 64 whose corpses littered the proving grounds - draped over trees, broken in pits, prostrate on the grass without their heads. Additionally, there were four stained spots where Bloodmancer replicas that'd been competing with him had perished.

Henry, scanning the scene, silent in its bloodiness, blinked.

Barely an hour and a half had actually elapsed since the start of his Death Training climb, yet that right there had been the final stage. He'd sped through the entire gauntlet, the instant summoning feature of his Cap allowing him to progress through rounds without downtime.

And he hadn't been hit once. The sole pain inflicted to him had been the Bloodmancer spells, which kept exploding the veins of his arms – that was pretty annoying.

But these results weren't too unexpected. The Death Training catered to Tier-0 slave novices, while he was The Tyrant, a one-in-a-hundred-million commanding prodigy who'd overseen more battles than anyone else in human history before his 18th birthday. A little beyond the target group.

Again, though, the purpose of investigating The War-Priest's Duty and The Death Training wasn't to become a master of moving skeletons around. Participating in the gauntlet himself had merely been the beginning of his exploration of drill design, giving him a concrete sense of The Death Training, the main tool which he would be working with over these next years.

Instantaneously, he relocated himself to the proving ground's side, where a tent had been installed housing a four-thousand-book library.

This collection had belonged to War-Priest Kemenrang (1146 – 873 B.P.), a former magistrate of Abhaya who'd managed its Death Training program.

Having completed The Death Training herself, she'd been promoted from a slave, to a War-Priest, and then up the ranks of local government. Normally, this feat would have been impossible for one of her origin, but the era during which she'd obtained her position had been a period of cultural upheaval, following The All-Mother's untimely death. War-Priest Kemenrang had been a prominent member of Abhaya's dissenting, anti-Rangbitan, pro-polytheism faction, penning several blasphemous polemics attacking her former religion.

Her favourite target of criticism had been the concept of Cyclic Assignation.

In Rangbitan mythology, to Ascend to the cosmos, a person's soul needed to master a set of 574 Duties, War-Priest being one example. Each Cycle, one was Assigned a favoured Duty at birth. How far they would advance through their Duty in their current life was determined by how faithfully their past selves had adhered to their own Duties. Through every Duty, the reincarnating soul spiralled, becoming gradually more faithful and proficient with each passing until it achieved the Ascension promised to all.

Thus, all one's fortune and misfortune were a product of one's past actions, and all fortune and misfortune were transient.

This cosmology had been a shameless fabrication by The All-Mother, not corresponding in the slightest with Saana's rebirth mechanics. The purpose of her deceit was to justify the caste system that she created. The lower castes accepted their Assignation, keeping themselves weak but useful by sticking to single Classes. Meanwhile, they were controlled by a stronger, multi-Classing elite, who were 'taking their turn at the last Duty of combining the 574 Duties'.

The All-Mother also used the concept to steal worshippers from other Gods, claiming that she'd advanced further through The Cycle than them and they were fated to failure. Since she'd been the strongest God of her era, her lies had been difficult to refute until Karnon snuffed her.

Returning to War-Priest Kemenrang, her dissent was heavily tied with The Death Training. Through her management role, she'd watched first-hand how the number of slaves who perished fluctuated through her own tweaking of the program. Before such a visceral display of physical determinism, the fascade of a higher cosmic order was shattered.

Peculiarly, though, after The All-Mother's downfall, Kemenrang didn't abandon The Death Training as a sane non-believer might do. With one foot stuck in the old religious paradigm, she expanded the program and obsessively sought to refine it in order to disprove Assignation. The more prodigies she churned out, she reasoned, the more she showed that man today, not man in the past, controlled his fate.

In short, she'd been another of Saana's deranged villains.

Anyway, for Henry, her mad research was a supreme resource on drill exercise design.

In the tradition of the bookworm, he chose a random manuscript of hers, Dawn of The Gods, or How to be Nursed without a Mother.

"That's a rather long-winded title," he said, flicking to the introduction and beginning the time-honoured, time-defying conversation between reader and author.

"Her grip on these lands loosens – this is undeniable. But the blame lies with Her, not us. Having witnessed the outcome of The Karnonian Incident, we are faithfully abiding by Her instruction, venerating the Glory-Assigned and abandoning the Glory-Waiting.

Assignation, this Western bugaboo, is a tool for the feeble to maintain the feeble. I have already, in Immortal Unto Death, exposed the Rangbitan religion, together with its deformed Central bastard, as forms of psychological castration.

To summarise in brief: for a people to combat decay, they must exhibit a craving, a will to action, a drive which is Fate-rejecting to the point of irrationality: a craving for the new, for growth, for the eternal possibility of change, for the hammer-destruction of the chastity belt of Assignation which was fitted by Her. If this craving is present, people gather and rise into such powers as Great Maalundi, such as Neeshif, which retains its vivacity, which can collect and adapt, which can evolve into something in The Here – Neeshif, the antithesis of that wheezing Rangbitan caste rigidity and wilful ignorance which with our Abhaya has entered its finale. Through Assignation, we have been deprived of the essential craving by which power is seized, out of which brilliance blossoms – nothing terrified Her so much as our potential. We were encouraged to live for foreign traditions, to live sluggishly, to live while starving - it is this Fate-acceptance which Her preachers call 'Duty'.

With how fanatically the old saints continue to spread Her doctrine, we have to wonder. Could it be possible? Might they not have heard in their temples that The All-Mother is dead?"

"Oh, that's cool."

"By means of data, the heart and soul divulge their secrets."

Kemenrang's collection included survival statistics from the many Death Training programs conducted over the centuries during which The Old Rangibitans were present in the Central Continent.

Hundreds of variations of each stage had been created by adjusting numbers of monsters, rearranging positions around the proving ground's grid formation, and substituting in alternative monster types. A magistrate playing with these variations could finetune The Death Training's difficulty, upping or reducing the challenge according to their needs.

Henry tested these variations on himself.

"Suffering unearths our ignoble and hidden qualities - our violent and stubborn traits. It thus exposes our most splendid beauty."

Stage 28, Lelaki Variation, 0.0% pass rate.

Thicker than a hive covered in wasps, the proving ground was carpeted by hundreds of hyenas with black fluid dripped from their gnashing fangs. Trampling the carcasses of their fallen pack, they focused their attacks on Henry, who jostled amongst them like a man drowning in the rapids of a river.

He slipped through the thick of their fur, knocking them aside, diving beneath them, evading their deadly bites. With his skeletons destroyed and no room to pause, he was limited to firing off weak 1-syllable to whittle the beasts down at a painstakingly-slow pace. His clothes were heavy with hours of sweat.

Overcome by a moment of exhaustion, his defence was penetrated by a hyena, which leapt for his throat.

Panicking, he stoppered its mouth with his fist.

He then grimaced as the skin of his hand melted upon contact with beast's acidic black saliva.

His face contorted further when the entire hand was severed at the wrist by the hyena's clamping teeth.

Ducking under the monster, he shoved it with his wrist stump, directing the beast's body into the way of two other hyenas attacking from behind, whose bites sank into their companion's hide.

Refocusing, he resumed the tiring dance.

"Raging, wailing, and even laughing are natural when dying; silence, that is inhuman."

Stage 35, Api variation, 0.0% pass rate.

Henry was contending with a flame golem, the creature's burning limbs swinging over his head causing his hair to ignite. Simultaneously, a platoon of Earthfriend replicas were shooting at him with , their spells converging upon him like rays being sucked back into the sun.

A he failed to dodge struck his thigh. Two more hit his torso.

The next moment, he was surrounded by flickering orange and red, the golem having embraced him into its chest of flames.

His eyes, flaring in anguish, turned opaque as the water inside them boiled.

"The deceits employed by Her saints: denials of man, appeals to Fate, reminders to "love one's Duty", and bedtime stories about Cyclic Assignation, whereby the child's hunger in The Here is soothed by a promise of nourishment in a never-reached Beyond."

On the specific style of The War-Priest's Duty:

War-Priests were Necromancer-spec Bloodmancers. In exchange for some of the long-distance and plague spells of the base Class, Necromancers were able to summon a greater variety of skeleton types, like archers, spearmen, and shieldmen rather than the default's swordsmen. (Incidentally, Apostle Bian Han had been the same specialisation, although he'd practised a Suchi-native martial art.)

War-Priests commanded up to a maximum of 250 skeletons - Necromancers could amass more undead than that, but Old Rangbitans restricted control of more sizeable units to separate Duties reserved for nobility. Thus, War-Priests were roughly analogous to real-life army captains. Their ideals skills were frontline command, raising and training skeletons, and coordinating missions with the higher-ups.

"Suffering unearths our cowardice: our honesty."

Stage 5, Tidak variation, 0.0% pass rate.

Henry, scorching zipping past him, vaulted over a boulder and crouched for cover on the other side.

There was a sudden quiet, the three dozen Bloodmancers who'd been shooting at him pausing their spellcasting.

A squelching of feet in mud followed. His attackers were rearranging themselves to assault his hiding spot, spreading wide to minimise his retaliation.

His chest heaving and his gaze wild, he unsheathed a dagger from his belt, the sole weapon given to The Death Training's slaves. Rain-droplets hitting the blade dribbled down its length. Staring at it, he consoled his nerves with the thought that this would be over soon.

At the creaking of bones a few metres away, their skeletons splitting apart to envelop him, the dagger began to shake.

"Not this time!" he shouted at himself. "Face it!"

Weapon drawn, he charged out.

And what met him was an empty, rain-drenched field.

His cowardly mind had taken the easy route of deleting his opponents yet again.

"$#*%!"

"The volume of the saint's voice is proportionate to the blindness of the saint's eyes."

The 'Priest' component of the War-Priest title referred to the holy stature of Necromancers in Old Rangbitan society. For an example of their reverence, dying Rangbitans had often preserved their bodies in order to be used in the undead armies. This was considered a genuine honour, with Necromancer sons from noble families going to war alongside the multi-century-old skeletons of their ancestors.

Linguistic, anthropological, and archaeological research indicated that this adoration of Bloodmancy had originated from one of the hundreds of ancient tribes indigenous to the Western continent. The feature had then been imported by the Old Rangbitans when, led by The All-Mother, they'd conquered the region in 3471 B.P. and assimilated the natives into their fold.

The God's epithet stemmed from that event, the conquest being whitewashed as a mother reuniting with her lost children.

"When he is beaten, the slave cowers to avoid being beaten further. This is short-sighted. He thereby guarantees that he is beaten forever. To quote The All-Mother: today's faith is eternity's reward."

Stage 1, Gelap variation, 0.3% pass rate.

Hundreds of shadow monkeys stood around, motionless and thoughtless.

Henry, frozen at the starting position, scanned the configuration for the fourteenth time, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, the seventeenth...

"From observing the praise-worthy qualities of the slaves, from admiring in them such things as their Fate-acceptance, their Duty-faith, their Glory-Assignation – from this 'Glory-Assignation', a Rangbitan astigmatism when all is said and done, I was saved by my untainted eyes. I see the slave's noblest trait, the craving for life, I see them fighting to survive – I see the fragmentation of all the falsities into which they've been indoctrinated by Her seeking to outshout the starvation screaming inside them. The violent collapse of faith awakens from in them an animalian and bloody rejection of The Beyond: just to cling to The Here for a few more hours, they dismember their beloved brothers and cherished sisters. They instinctually shrink back from The Beyond. It terrifies them. When death hovers so close, one smells its putrid breath."

Stage 5, 49.2% pass rate, participants: NB-17 and BH-3.

Two Bloodmancer replicas were duelling alone in the proving ground. Expressionless as the skeletons under their command, each replica was dodging spell projectiles from their opponent while rushing to collect spell constellations for their own. At the centre point between them, their skeletons meanwhile were locked in a melee, their swordblows dislodging shards of bone from each other.

One replica, BH-3, was a tall, red-skinned fellow, a replica of The Primordial Path's deceased leader, Apostle Bian Han. The opponent, NB-17, was another member of the cult, a curly-haired, owl-eyed teen who'd been a Tier-1 Bloodmancer. This cultist had been unrecognisable to Henry when he'd slain them, one of the many nameless faces.

Both replica's stats and spells had been downgraded and equalised to Tier-0. Nevertheless, BH-3 had its former life's experience as an advantage over NB-17. Its better-trained and controlled skeletons soon won the skirmish, half the troop being traded to eliminate the opponent's full force.

NB-17, struggling to the end, fled while flinging back in futility. BH-3's skeletons soon cornered it and chopped it down.

Around this duo's proving ground were hundreds of identical proving grounds, arranged in a giant block that stretched kilometres in every direction. In each of these, other replicas were paired up, duelling and dying.

High above the scene, Henry was flying around with a pair of binoculars, his body not technically constrained by gravity in The Overdream. Beside him, a levitating quill rapidly scribbled down results on a notepad, 'NB-17 fail, BH-3 pass, 2:17; JH-8 fail, KN-14 pass 2:19, MC-30 fail...'

To gain a deeper, more objective understanding of The Death Training, he'd paired his own experience of it with using The Overdream's replicas for test dummies.

The Pendant of a Thousand Minds gave them limited learning abilities. Exploiting what they had, he made them challenge the gauntlet repeatedly, resetting their memory at the start of each attempt. Thereby, he could monitor which War-Priest skills they acquired progressing through stages and identify common bottlenecks that killed them.

A diverse array of subjects also offered insight into how The Death Training was experienced by people of varying talents. He'd performed a Gaming Quotient exam on each replica, so he could statistically map out the relationship between performance and traits like reaction speed, spatial IQ, and, in the case of those replicas he recognised, history.

In the future, this data should help him adapt A Thousand Tool's exercise drills to a broader audience.

By the way, the majority of the replicas weren't NPCs he'd killed. Most were copied from the living. He didn't know whether that made the research more or less creepy/ethically-dubious. For him at least, he'd never had qualms with slaughtering the replicas because he didn't consider mindless automatons people - that was his limit, whether something had a personality, a feeling and experiencing mind.

Fun fact, though, if he were an Old Rangbitan, this would be wildly sacrilegious because their concept of social identity encompassed one's physical appearance. Considering this belief, one might understand why the Rangbitans were happy for Necromancers to animate their corpses. It was a form of pseudo-immortality.

"The All-Mother says to you tortured ones: I have also endured your Duty! Love your Duty, as I love you, my children! What suffering you bear today you free yourself of for eternity!

And Her saints say to you tortured ones: You are Assigned to wait to Glory because you have not loved your Duties! We are Assigned to Glory because we have loved our Duties!

I say to you tortured ones: There are no Glory-Assigned, no Glory-Waiting! There are only Glory-Made and Glory-Unmade! Degradation, nepotism, deception, and exploitation, by love for these Duties alone do they make their Glory and unmake yours!"

Henry's statistical analyses of The Death Training's bottlenecks corroborated War-Priest Kemenrang's criticisms. The program, at its very core, contradicted the philosophy of Assignation. At the Tier-0 that slaves had been, the default skeletons lacked the complexity to express one's full unit control capabilities - akin to playing a symphony on a child's recorder. Thus, success was often influenced by skills unrelated to the Duty of a War-Priest, favouring the 'Undutiful'.

"Agility, athleticism, speed of arm and a martial background contribute greatly to survival. In conclusion, the Dutiful War-Priest is a foot soldier."

Stage 8, Tahan variation, 5.4% pass rate, participant: BH-3.

BH-3's skeletons were entangled with two prisoners in slave sarongs. A third prisoner, a Bowman, having slipped past the defence, chasing after BH-3 and sprinkling the fleeing replica's back with arrows until it expired.

"Younger slaves are rarely victorious. Growing a beard: The War-Priest's secret Duty."

Stage 17, Rasul variation, 8.2% pass rate, participant: BH-3.

Middle-aged BH-3 was sprinting while lobbing behind it at a tiger giving chase. Whenever the beast neared, it was intercepted by skeletons, which brought it down by slashing at its legs. The tiger tripped again and again until it died.

In an adjacent proving ground, the teenage NB-17 was lying pinned to the grass, stabbing its dagger without success at the head of its own tiger munching on its intestines.

"Another predictor of success: when one has better aim, when one doesn't rely on their sacred troops. The War-Priest is an archer."

Stage 5, 49.2% pass rate, participants: JA-5 and BH-3.

Two Bloodmancer replicas were duelling alone in the proving ground. Expressionless as the skeletons under their command, each replica was dodging spell projectiles from their opponent while rushing to collect spell constellations for their own. At the centre point between them, their skeletons meanwhile were locked in a melee, their swordblows dislodging shards of bone from each other.

One replica, BH-3, was a tall, red-skinned fellow, a replica of The Primordial Path's deceased leader, Apostle Bian Han. The opponent, JA-5, was another member of the cult, a swarthy, Murdnonic teen who'd been Juthatan Alakil before Henry'd slain him.

Although BH-3 had superior experience and minion control, JA-5 out traded it with its prodigious spell-accuracy. BH-3's skeletons were soon blown apart.

BH-3, struggling to the end, fled while flinging back in futility. JA-5's skeletons soon cornered it, and JA-5 blasted a hole in BH-3's chest.

"And most curious that when they are the same, when I shorten the rests between stages, the cosmos reduces the number Assigned Glory."

Stage 17, Rasul variation, 8.2% pass rate, participant: BH-3.

Sleep-deprived BH-3 was sprinting while lobbing behind it at a tiger giving chase. Whenever the beast neared, it was intercepted by skeletons, which brought it down by slashing at its legs. The tiger, slipping past a mistimed swing, pounced on BH-3's back and crushed its skull in its jaws.

"Why do rulers keep their subjects naked? The man who knows he can wear one outfit knows he can wear many, the king's included."

Four months into The Death Training, Henry began to suspect that the program's selection and educational functions, although real, were subordinate to that of terrorising the local populations. Alternatively, the mass human sacrifice could have been a secret method for The All-Mother to obtain power - such schemes were commonplace amongst Saana's Big Bads.

"When I exult their suffering, I do not celebrate their sacrifice but rather the sacrifice that I did not have to make myself. Thus spoke the saint to his heart."

He also became suspicious about the general utility of pain for assisting with learning. It didn't appear to be helping him. In fact, it'd started to spoil his recuperation between practice sessions and messed with his daily writing for his riveting literature conquest. He now had a constant, twisting pain in his gut, as though the packs of monsters were still inside his stomach, gnawing on his entrails.

If he were being frank, although he'd tried to be composed with Floating Leaf, this had been the most horrible ordeal of his life by far. Bored in the snow? That hadn't been a tenth as traumatic as feeling himself being killed. The two were not comparable. Dying just once was worse...so much worse. He was nearing his thousandth raw death, and he hadn't acclimatised one iota to the level of pain. It sucked every single time. And, worst of all, he hadn't gained any discernible benefit!

"Ignore the intuitionists, who encourage you to trust your gut. They admit themselves to being less wise than the digestion system."

He was uncertain, however, whether this scepticism of his was itself a result of the pain, chronic misery tending to distort one's thinking processes by making one hyper-critical. Moreover, his mind could be reaching for any excuse to prematurely end his body's torture.

"I worship the tireless scholars, because they are unblinded by Assignation and can name their stomach's pain."

Therefore, trying to maintaining objectivity so he didn't preemptively discard potentially-valuable research, he designed a quick experiment to test the hypothesis that pain is utterly worthless.

First, he selected 60 random techniques from the martial arts he'd learned thus far. Splitting these into five groups of twelve, he then trained one group at 100% pain sensation, another at 75%, another at 50%, another at 25%, and the last at 0%.

An impartial measure of the learning speed under each pain condition was provided by the change of his mastery score according to The Cap's performance rating system. Henry averaged the percentage change across the twelve techniques of each group to mitigate technique-specific variability in difficulty.

"I worship those who seek a reason in The Here, for The Here is The Past's Beyond."

After a few weeks of experimentation, his hypothesis was supported. Not only was pain not demonstrated to assist with learning, it'd actually been negatively correlated with improvement speed. In proportion to the severity of pain, he'd become increasingly risk-averse. He'd hesitated before dangerous, deadly situations, the very situations most ripe with learning opportunities. The singular advantage of the pain conditions seemed to be that, through the increased deliberation invoked by his terror, he learned more on a per fight basis; for the thrifty trainer, concerned with expenses, it could still be valuable. Further research was needed.

But Henry would leave that pursuit for other mad climbers. Satisfied with the evidence he'd gathered himself, he concluded his exploration of suffering. Pain was, by his reckoning, useless for education, and the Bloodmancer LARPers who insisted on studying under these atrocious conditions were just mentally-ill masochists, as all roleplayers are.

He really should have predicted this outcome at the start...

"I worship those who are unbeholden to Fate, and blaspheme Fate by saying to Fate: you are The All-Mother's shroud, who disguises Her unjust moving."

Discarding the profitless tool of anguish from his rucksack, he lightened his load, re-disabled his pain sensation, and continued with the climb. Not far up ahead on the slopes of The Death Training, he glimpsed where War-Priest Kemenrang had fallen, where he would surpass her.