Lazy Salvation

"Pfft!"

"Khahahaha…!"

"Did you see his face?! That was priceless! Hehehe…"

Strange crackles and giggles echoed through the clearing as the Outer Gods spied on the poor human with open schadenfreude.

"Now, now, let us not be carried away." False Mercy spoke in that same grandfatherly tone, as if addressing his grandchildren. "Look at the dishonorable human. He is using the break we gave him to steal a march on us."

"What? Is he already running? How underhanded!" Love sighed with pity.

"I told you all, all humans are dirty and treacherous! They can't be trusted." Mandate spoke with righteous fury, though the face-splitting grin wasn't doing his tone any favors. "He is not playing by the rules, just like the other Sin Lords. Poor Fearless got done in by the same tricks!"

"Forget about that dead creature; what should we do about the running man?" Reshaping asked curiously.

"Of course, we will resume our little game. He has rested enough, has he not?" False Mercy answered benevolently.

"That is reasonable. With how energetically he runs, it's clear he's eager to play too. Hoho." Self-Consumption added in a sagely manner.

"Well said." False Mercy gestured. "Dear Love, would you do the honors?"

"Very well." Twisted Communion smiled a lovely smile that soon distorted into a hungry one. The flowers on her dress blackened as she shot forward.

***

A day passed. Then another. Soon a week went by, and Ashen was still stuck in the same endless grind of enemies.

"Gwaaagg…!"

CRACK—!

A horde of Narkals tried to launch themselves from beneath the earth, but he'd already sensed the ambush. What greeted them wasn't their prey, but a spell to the face.

Ashen had started relying on his Time Magician spells a while back, since his body couldn't take much more of the Twin Soul's interference.

Thankfully, the personality behind the seal hadn't found the current situation interesting enough to stir, so it stayed dormant, letting him tap into his spells without consequence.

Even so, time magic remained a trump card he saved for emergencies; it put too much strain on his brain, and unlike before, he no longer had a vampire's body to regrow a second head if it exploded from overuse.

A flying creature dove from the grey sky, but he was already braced for it. Steel and earth poles rose in a counterattack.

Two acceleration circles bloomed beneath his feet. He crouched, pushed off, and launched himself forward, clearing a swarm of Great Beasts below.

He came down spear-first on a Shaman mid-cast, one of the rare Narkal types that could strike from range and had given him real trouble in the past. He didn't linger, using its shoulder as a foothold to keep running.

By now, everything had become mechanical repetition. He'd seen every conceivable Narkal species, learned their attack patterns, and built a plan for every situation he could imagine.

The same was true for his other self. Since they were essentially the same person, it hadn't taken them long to fight in sync. Now they'd gone beyond that; they no longer needed words or gestures between them.

When the Outer Gods came to harass them, the body moved like it belonged to a single person, when in truth two souls were switching control a dozen times a minute.

Both had gone silent, focused solely on killing and running.

Maybe it was the situation. Maybe the two souls had simply intertwined too much. Or maybe it was just the long silence.

But Ashen started seeing visions he soon recognized as memories.

And they weren't his own.

↻⋄↻

Ashen didn't realize immediately that he was seeing his Twin Soul's memories.

...because what he was currently doing was almost identical to the memory.

His self from the first timeline was fighting Narkals. Judging by how he killed them, this was an old memory; the concepts coursing through him belonged to the seventh Step.

"Ahhh—! Ahhh!!! Die! Die! Diee!!!!"

He saw himself surrounded by a whole tribe. From the corner of his vision, he saw around a hundred human corpses.

Most likely his fellow soldiers.

The next thing he noticed was the insignia on his bloodied armor. It didn't belong to the Bloodwall, but to the territorial Regiment.

"Haaah... haaah... haaah..."

He felt his body drop, pain keeping him from even standing.

But every last Narkal had died.

The memory dissolved as another took hold.

...

Ashen found himself in front of a man he knew well. The same man who'd tried to poach him from Lucia's hands after his tutorial phase, the same man whose actions had led his sister to learn of Seravelle.

'Roland.'

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"You survived? How unexpected. Slaves like you usually don't last more than a couple of months." He looked at him like he was studying a curious animal.

"Then how about this. You'll join this brigade. They operate around the Great Wall. Let's see if you can stay alive there too."

The memory sped up after that, but he had no trouble following it.

Because it didn't differ much from what he was currently doing.

Killing, killing, and more killing.

Every day he was on the verge of death, and every day he was sent somewhere new.

The next brigade didn't last more than a couple of months before only a dozen survivors remained. They, and he along with them, were transferred to another unit, and the same scenario repeated.

From one place to another, Roland kept testing the resilience of his slave.

Somewhere along the way, he realized Ashen was different. That didn't make things easier; it made them worse.

He started throwing him into deadlier and deadlier situations, amassing merit for himself as the recruiter of this "prodigy."

Through it all, Ashen felt the emotions of his other self.

Fear, hate, anger, and finally an uncontrollable rage, directed at everyone and everything that had put him in this state, including himself.

He channeled all of it into getting stronger.

Whenever he wasn't sent to kill Narkal tribes, he was thrusting his spear at the air, imagining the face of every enemy at the other end of it.

He didn't care about his wrecked body. He barely ate and slept. Talking to people, having friends, those weren't even afterthoughts.

All he knew was kill the enemy. Go back to training.

Ashen frowned, watching his past self.

From where he stood now, the training could have been far more efficient. But he also recognized the emotion behind it; this wasn't training so much as venting.

That venting brought miraculous results anyway.

Bit by bit, that single thrust started felling enemies bigger and stronger than him, until eventually it cut down ones above his Step.

His missions began losing their deadliness, but Ashen disregarded the small mercy and started hunting monsters on his own.

He'd become an uncontrollable beast, leashed by nothing but a single contract.

Even his fellow soldiers started fearing him. To them, he was the maniac who never let go of his spear, the one always soaked in blood, the crazy fucker who strapped a boulder to his shoulder every waking hour.

Before long, they stopped calling him slave.

A new name started going around.

Demon.

Because he was more demonic than any human they'd encountered, in how he treated himself, and more beastly than any Narkal, in how he tore them apart at any cost, going as far as using his teeth.

Even his own slaver grew afraid, feeling the single most raging intent radiating off him. Fear won out, and the man sold him to the highest bidder.

The Bloodwall of the Wrath Domain.

It was there that the bound beast was finally tamed.

Not by force, but by the gentle touch of a Saintess he'd yearned to see for so long.

↻⋄↻

Ashen snapped out of the memory fragment as his body moved on autopilot, killing the next Narkal and jumping the next horde.

'How long…?'

{It's been two months.}

'So much time passed…’ Ashen looked around with a dead look. ‘But it’s still the same scenery.'

Ashen's spear found a throat, and his feet never stopped pushing as the corpse dropped behind him.

The scenery blurred; corpse, dust, another corpse. He'd long stopped counting.

{You're doing well.} The Twin Soul's voice drifted through him distantly.

'I don't feel like I'm doing anything.' Ashen ducked under a claw, drove his spear up through a Narkal's jaw, and kept going. 'Feels like being in a perpetual loop.'

{Aren’t you experienced with those?}

Ashen wanted to retort to the cheeky comment but the world tilted.

↻⋄↻

The first thing he noticed was the silence.

The Bloodwall was never supposed to be silent, but the absence of screaming wasn’t a bad thing in this case.

His younger self stood at the edge of a barracks, spear resting against his shoulder, and for the first time in longer than he could remember in these memories, he felt nothing in him that wanted to kill.

A woman knelt beside a wounded soldier a few feet away, hands glowing faint green. She hummed while she worked, off-key and unbothered by it.

'Seraphine.'

Even in memory, even secondhand, he felt his chest loosen at the sight of her.

She looked up eventually, caught him staring, and smiled like he wasn't the man everyone called a demon.

"You're bleeding?" she asked.

"I'm always bleeding."

"That's not an excuse. Come here." She patted the ground beside her, and he could only obey, seeing that sweet smile.

He sat.

The memory softened after that, images blurring together the way happy things always seemed to. Training beside her instead of alone. Sharing rations he used to skip entirely. Even laughing at small things.

He found reasons to fight that weren't rage.

And somehow, it made him stronger.

A commander, grey-haired and missing an eye, once watched him spar and shook his head slowly.

"You know what the difference is between you and all the corpses I've buried?" the old man asked, not looking for an answer. "Talent's cheap here. I've buried geniuses and buried prodigies who could've outpaced you if they stayed alive."

Ashen said nothing.

"Alas… these things don't care how gifted you are." The commander nodded toward the wall, toward the dark beyond it. "If you are dead, it doesn't matter how talented you were on the way there. But you never seem to quite die..."

The old man studied him for a long moment.

"Your will to live is above any I have ever seen," he said. "I don't know what happened to you before you got here, son, but whatever it was, it made something in you that doesn't bend. That's rarer than talent.”

“That's rarer than most things…”

↻⋄↻

Ashen's spear cracked through bone, and he barely registered it.

'Rarer than talent.'

‘That old man did not know how true his words are… because no amount of talent would have kept me going in this hell if my will did not hold.’

CRASH—Boom—!

'How long…?.'

{Four months.}

↻⋄↻

He had finally found the love of his life, Alice, and the first thing he heard was…

"You look like shit," which was somehow the exact thing he expected her to say.

Either way, he felt like he was in paradise from that moment on. The only missing piece was his family.

But that did not make him lose focus on what was before him. Alice and Seraphine…

He held them both like they might disappear if he stopped paying attention.

He should have known better.

↻⋄↻

Ashen felt his stomach drop before the memory even fully formed, already bracing for what came next since he had already seen it once.

The memory pulled him under anyway.

↻⋄↻

The sky split first.

The first thing he saw was a heartless Alice in his arms, followed by a smiling Euphoric Misery.

"Ashen—" Alice's grip tightened on his hand.

He would remember, forever, the exact pressure of her fingers.

He would remember the exact moment they went slack.

He didn't remember drawing his spear or the scream that tore out of him. He remembered kneeling in the dust afterward, Alice's body in his arms while the Wrath Domain burned around him, its walls, its people, everything he'd rebuilt himself around…

Gone.

The rage he thought he'd buried came back all at once, and it never went dormant again.

Neither did the demon.

↻⋄↻

Ashen came back to himself mid-strike, spear going through a Narkal's skull, and realized he was screaming.

His hands were shaking, and not from exhaustion. But he was not allowed to stop.

The memories kept playing in the back of his mind, driving him wilder.

.

.

.

.

{Don’t lose focus.}

He only snapped out of it when Old Ashen called.

“haah…”

‘I can’t believe I’m still going… how long?’

{Eight months.}

‘How are we not dead yet?’

It wasn’t Old Ashen that answered, but an echo of another memory.

Someone was speaking… he didn’t know who exactly, but the contents were clear enough.

If we speak objectively, many are actually more talented than the godkiller.

But talent had never been an obstacle for these devils. They target Will after all… they erode it… corrupt it… and let it rot until one stops moving.

When you drop your weapons, and your knees hit the ground… no matter how talented you are, you will be the same as the trashiest, dimmest human being.

The Godkiller is different. His will is unshakable, and his conviction to end them all is ironclad.

Ashen pulled his spear free and kept running, the scenery around him blurring into dust and grey sky once more.

He thought of everyone, waiting for him somewhere past the horizon.

He ran faster.