“Who are you?” Relictus called out towards the figure in front of him.

The figure left the shadows. It was a girl. She stood tall, but not quite as tall as Relictus. She had long, platinum blonde hair that fell down over her shoulders. Her facial features were sharp, but not stern. Her face carried a friendly grin, as if she had known him for all of her life.

“I spend days trying to talk to you and yet you don’t recognize me?” She said, a hurt tone in her voice.

“I’m sorry about that, but…” Relictus responded, really not quite sure what he was supposed to say.

She laughed, evidently quite entertained by his response. “I was just kidding, relax. I’m the original leader of the Deathbringers, and the one to bring it to its greatest point in history. Today, they are simply legend, forgotten. I was the wearer of that White Deathbringer cloak that’s now in your possession. You aren’t yet prepared to don it in its truest sense, but it’d be best to… prepare you.”

“Prepare? Huh?” Relictus voiced his confusion. However, before he had even finished saying, “prepare,” a blade was pressed against his throat. He stumbled backward, and fell on his backside.

A cheerful smile grew on the girl’s face. “Yup! Prepare.” And then, within moments, her brow furrowed, her eyes narrowed. “I know I’m missing something…”

Then, a good 15 seconds later, her eyes widened and she jumped a bit. “Oh, right! Name! I know yours, Relictus. I’m Thalia Grace.”

“Yup, definitely an airhead, he mumbled under his breath, a thought that disappeared immediately as his eyes widened and he saw her once again pressing a blade to his throat. “I’MSOSORRYPLEASESPAREME!” He fumbled on his words, quite flustered, and the vein protruding from her forehead faded, followed by a “Hmph!” for good measure.

“So, I guess you’ll be here a while. Once you’re ready, I’ll send you back. Let’s get along!” Thalia spoke lightheartedly, as if she didn’t care about his prior circumstances.

Training went on for a seemingly endless amount of time, but Relictus never tired. They just sparred, and sparred, and sparred. For the first several hundred matches, Relictus was knocked to the ground within a second. Thalia was far too fast for him to even see her movement, despite his massive DEX and SPD.

Eventually, Relictus was able to at least see how she moved, but was too slow to react. Despite his best efforts, every single time he got up, he was just knocked down a few seconds later. Relictus felt no fatigue in whatever this place was, but he still felt the pain. His backside was pathetically sore from getting pushed down so many times, but he refused to give up. And so, he stood up again. He stood up again, and fell back down again. He fell back down and got back up too many times to count. It became more difficult for him to breathe as they went through it so many times.

However, Thalia just looked more and more perplexed every time she watched Relictus stand up again. “What keeps you from just staying down? You know that you’ll just fall down again. You can’t even land a hit on me, or block one of mine.”

Finally understanding her motive behind this, Relictus laughed. “I don’t know if you already know this much, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s this: if you can stand, you stand. You never know what will happen when you can’t anymore.”

Thalia tilted her head a bit, still far from understanding this enigma that was in front of her, before laughing. It was a contagious laugh, one as if she had just heard the funniest joke that had ever been told. “You’re an interesting person. Alright, I’ll teach you; I like that mentality a lot.”

Relictus’s eyes widened. “All of that was a TEST?” He exclaimed.

“Yes, a test. Problem?” Thalia responded in kind, the most smug grin Relictus had ever seen wiping across her face.

“Okay, let’s go!” Thalia interjected, and clapped her hands twice. Immediately, the surroundings disappeared. All that was there was a single plane, stretching infinitely. The land was a clear liquid, but was only a few centimeters deep. The liquid reflected the golden sky that was blemished only with a few pure white clouds.

“First, I will teach you about Instant Movement.” She announced, as if she had seen an entire dimension transform a thousand times.

Relictus immediately voiced his confusion. “Instant Movement?”

It was a technique he hadn’t heard of before. In all his research of the game, he hadn’t read a single thing that mentioned instant movement.

“It’s exactly as it sounds. With certain discipline of the body, you can move any limb instantaneously. Those who practice the technique enough can even move short distances faster than a human can process. It goes a little like this.” Thalia explained, wearing her usual poker-face smile, and Relictus hardly noticed her moving her right leg before she appeared less than a centimeter from his face. Startled and supremely embarrassed, he lurched backwards and fell, causing the surface to splash. Thalia simply giggled, entertained by Relictus’s awkwardness.

Then, she started to explain just what he needed to do before she taught him the technique. She did a simple action using her wrist – she put one hand out in front of her, palm facing herself, and put her other hand perpendicular to that, twisting the wrist and pushing her thumb down on the back of her slender ring finger. “Once you’ve done this 100 times on each hand, talk to me.”

Just like that, like paint flowing down a wall, pure black flowed down from the sky, all around him, covering everything around him. He reached out, but there was nothing. Sighing, he realized there was no way out until he did as he was told. He sat down cross-legged, and started contorting his hands in the way that he was instructed.

~–•–~

Relictus’s wrists felt like spaghetti, and his fingers were completely numb, and wouldn’t move. His forearms were deathly sore, as if some invisible force had been crushing them. He groaned in pain as he did his 198th round – his 98th on his left hand. He repeated the motion, wincing at the pain that shot through his arms, and then finished his final one. As if they were walls being demolished, the surrounding dimension fell outward, sinking into the ground. Within seconds, it was as if the dimension had never existed. All he saw was Thalia’s expectant gaze.

“Finally done, slowpoke?” She beamed at him, and Relictus mumbled something about her teasing him too much. “Try throwing a punch at that target,” Thalia ever so nonchalantly suggested, “I’m sure you’ll enjoy the results.”

Thus, he followed her command, walked over to the straw humanoid figure that had been conjured form nothing, bent his knees, lowered his waist, and turned his hips into the target as he punched. To his surprise, he didn’t even feel the target, and he looked up only to see his hand going completely through it in a perfect puncture. He shouldn’t have gone that far, he held back quite a bit so that he didn’t blow the target away completely.

“So? How is it?” Thalia asked, but Relictus never had a chance to respond. His surroundings were blurred, and he was looking at a clear blue sky, devoid of any clouds.

Author's Notes

Spoiler : It's the training arc! It's here! The fact that Relictus isn't OP at all! Anyway, this whole other dimension is gonna be a plot device I use a lot, just so that the story doesn't always stay as monotonous guy-kills-monsters-wao-so-stronk all the time. Be sure to leave any constructive criticism, ideas, or mistakes/typos I made in the comments! Thanks so much for reading.