Chapter 18.0: The Decisions That Make A Person.


    Hell was horrible, it was terrifying, blood curdling, sick and twisted. But like a lot of things, it had a routine, and with enough time, minutes blended into hours, hours into days, and days and into weeks.


    After being accepted, Nero had spent the next day training with his new Master. Cain was a cruel woman, as her name might have suggested, She eagerly showed him as much through the boulders he was forced to lift, and the distances he was forced to trek while carrying them.


    He climbed hills until his pores had no more sweat to give and nails no more space to accommodate additional dirt crustings, ran so many miles he wondered whether he might have encircled the earth before finishing were he to do it back home. Swung big, overly heavy rods of iron with such excessive speed and regularity that he started flaying his palms with the grip required to handle them.


    He wondered if she was just being cruel to him, after all with his supernatural might he figured he didn’t actually need to put his body through gruelling physical labour to be powerful.


    He kept his questions to himself however, so when night came he was a panting haggard mess and Cain a cackling witch.


    Nero had been able to needle out some bits of valuable information during the training sessions however. It seemed he was correct about Might being the root of his superhuman abilities and that it could be divided into Strength, Speed and Toughness. Cain had disgruntledly told him that he had an equal and unusually high amount of each for someone in Limbo, and that ‘Most idiots as strong as you would have already gathered some other idiots to help you slay a summoning beast, left for Luxuria to begin their descent towards the Paradise Key and then promptly gotten themselves killed along the way.’


    Luxuria was probably what they called the second Circle of Hell, so that much he had followed, but he found himself stumped by the other half of that sentence.


    Paradise Key?


    It seemed like perhaps one could somehow get to the heavens through the Nine Circles.


    Nero entertained the idea of perhaps descending through the circles himself, but the way Cain talked about it didn’t make it seem like something that would end with his heart still beating.


    He could barely handle all that Limbo had thrown at him so far and was not eager to up the difficulty on himself already.


    He had to grow stronger, and luckily Cain was just the right person to help him with that. That night while Nero could barely feel his legs and could hear nothing but his heartbeat, she had said. ‘There is only one way to improve Might, and that is to constantly push your body through horrible torture day in and day out to draw out your power through your vessel…’


    It had all left her lips with a smirk that seemed fueled by the agony that coursed through him.


    At the very least that gave him some appreciation of his current predicament.


    His strength was being trained by having him lift boulders, durability was honed by taking punches from Cain and speed was gained through his endless running.


    It was speed that Nero had decided he should focus on the most however, because he had very little intention of weathering blows from monsters or getting into strength matches with them either, if he saw something he didn’t like the look of, Nero wanted to be out of there as quickly as possible.


    When he had asked Cain for that, much to his relief, she had agreed to help him improve his speed without a second thought.


    He had gotten a small room for himself- half off as the innkeeper was a fan of him, and Nero wanted to do nothing but sleep in until his next training session with that evil, evil, woman.


    He couldn’t however, he had more training to do, and lots of it. Boris was able to perform ranged attacks, in fact it had been a defining feature of their fight, he didn’t know if he could replicate that but he wasn’t just going to sit back and never find out.


    So Nero enacted his plan. When it was bright outside, he ventured out of the town and beneath the hills of the region where he practised his Light Breathing.


    He worked on holding onto his light for longer. That, he found, was more a matter of focus than anything else, and so were his efforts to make his Light Breathing burn brighter.


    Both were successful, the former far more than the latter however.


    His major concern was in converting his Light Breathing into a projectile. His approach was simple, he would think really hard at it. It had worked before, so why not try it again?


    He summoned a light in his palm, pointed it at the side of a hill and willed the light towards it.


    Nothing happened, save from precious Light Breathing time being wasted and Ember ‘helpfully’ pointing out as much.


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    Nero persisted right up until the early hours of the afternoon when he began to feel a tingling in his fingers. “Wait, I think something’s happening-” The light exploded in a violent flash, blinding Nero for a moment and leaving him stumbling in the dark.


    “Fuck!” He cursed.


    “We did it!” Ember chirped. “Well not it… but something. We did something!” She clapped.


    She failed to infect him with her positivity, but even blinking away stars and tears Nero couldn’t deny that it was progress. Wild, chaotic progress, but progress nonetheless.


    He would continue tomorrow, it was time for him to go train with Cain.


    Nero went off in high spirits and found that spirit thoroughly beaten to a pulp after another day of gruelling torture.


    The next day he was off in the early morning again to work on his Light Breathing and in the afternoon he was back to Cain’s insane sadism.


    The routine lasted for four days only to be interrupted on the fifth.


    Nero woke up in the middle of the night to the sight of a figure sitting on his window.


    He screamed, fell off the bed and nearly pissed himself.


    “You’re loud, people are trying to sleep.” Selvas informed him from her perched position on his windowsill.


    “What the fuck are you doing here?” He hissed, finally recognising her.


    “To talk to you. I thought that would be obvious.” She noted, actually having the nerve to sound irritated at his questioning.


    “I mean, why didn’t you knock, like a normal fucking pers-”


    “There’s something scary terrorising the farmers.” She interrupted, as if bored. “And I know between paying for Cain’s lessons and finding yourself a room, you’re getting low on crystals.”


    Nero groundhis teeth. The woman was right.


    “You and I are going to kill it.” She told him and without another word leapt out of the window and into the street below.


    “Best you get dressed.” Ember said, actually looking excited at the prospect of heading out. Well of course she did, she wasn’t going to be the one fighting the damn thing.


    Nero packed his things and went off hunting.


    It would have been a lie to say the hunt was uneventful, simply due to the fact that nothing in this place had the luxury of being called that. However it was not necessarily divergent enough from the norm to be noteworthy.


    Something ugly, terrifying and probably diseased needed killing and after a few days of work and several acts of violence, he and Selvas were able to kill it.


    The most notable thing wasn’t actually the monster but the changes Nero observed during the whole ordeal. He was faster, not by much, barely even noticeable, but faster nonetheless, and that was only from five days of training.


    After that, there was a trip back home and a sadistic old hag waiting there for him. Then of course came the daily Light Breathing training.


    Every several days, Selvas would find a new way to break into Nero’s home and inform him of an excitingly inventive new way he could get killed.


    A few times they had even ended up visiting the other towns over. They were horrible, just like Stradale. Nero didn’t know why he was disappointed by that, maybe he had expected Stradale to be better, or perhaps worse than the norm. Either way those dreams were soon dashed.


    At the end of the second month of his routine, Nero had learnt how to keep his Light Breathing going for longer, from ten seconds to thirty to be exact, although that varied based on how intensely he made it burn. But all efforts to project it outwards as a ranged offence had only won him disappointment.


    However, he did achieve something.


    “Ow!” Cain grunted, stumbling backwards and clutching her face. Her bruised face.


    “Nero!” Ember chirped. “You did it!”


    He looked at the practice sword responsible for landing the hit. It was a properly weighted thing, as Cain had begrudgingly admitted that he had learned enough to graduate from sticks on week number two.


    “I… I hit you.” He whispered, barely able to believe it himself. He’d grown to think it would never actually happen.


    “Yeah, yeah, it only took you twice the amount of time it should have.” Cain huffed.


    Nero glared. “That’s because I spent half the days I could have used to learn hunting twenty eyed horrors just to afford your fucking lessons.”


    Cain smiled brightly as if she were some sage sitting high atop a mountain. “And for that you are welcome.”


    Nero growled, he actually heard himself growl. Then he drew in a sharp long breath and rolled his neck. “You know what, this is a good day, and you can’t take that away from me, despite how much you’re clearly trying to.”


    He turned and without another word walked towards the town.


    “She’s funny.” Ember hummed.


    “I seem to notice a pattern of you having quite a fondness for people I find utterly infuriating.” Nero observed.


    Ember only grinned, zipping about his head like some firefly. “What can I say, I have great taste and you… well, don’t.”


    Nero sniffed, suppressing a grin.


    The walk back gave him quite a lot of time to think, and he used that well, to reflect on what he’d been able to achieve today and what he’d been able to achieve since.


    Cain was not half as horrible a teacher as she was a person, and it turned out her vigorous physical training was not put in place with the sole intent of torturing him.


    He was stronger and tougher now, significantly so, though not exponentially, speed however, that one he could feel the marked increase in it and was certain it wasn’t just all in his head given that he had begun tracking his speed increase since the moment he began noticing a difference.


    Before it took him two minutes to run a mile, and now he could do so in just under one and a half. It wasn’t a maddening increase like he would have hoped, but it was still something, and something, however little could mean the difference between Life and Death in this place.


    On top of that, the increase in movement speed it seemed had also improved his reaction time. Those two things weren’t exactly linked back on earth, but it seemed they were in terms of Might.


    The same way speed, toughness and strength are linked in physics, but they aren’t in terms of Might.


    He’d also gained muscles on top of his Might and while his observations told him it was an insignificant additive boost to his Might, he still liked the physique it got him; he now very much appreciated the tone and definition that his body was gaining.


    It wasn’t long before his walk brought him to Stradale, it hadn’t changed much in two months and Nero found himself actually relieved at that. Knowing who was in charge and how much worse they could make it on a whim, in some sick twisted way, made him appreciate the maintenance of the baseline horror he had come to expect in the town.


    What did that say of him? Probably nothing nice.


    It was still in the earliest moments of the morning, and most people hadn’t even gotten up yet. In fact the only reason why he was in the town was to get something to eat before he went back out to practise his Light Breathing.


    There was a crash, the sound of breaking glass, and it came from a building Nero recognised well. Gunther’s. He heard the man’s voice, but it was subdued, shouted over by what sounded like a roar.