Dimensional Descent

The current Aina didn't have the presence of maturity and elegance that a woman slowly reaching her prime should have. Her current mindset was quite infantile and she still hadn't quite grasped concepts of her own feminine wiles and charms. In addition, she had already learned to perfectly control her own mental coercion. After the shackles on her talent were released, she improved by leaps and bounds everyday. And yet…

None of it seemed to matter.

For those here, this was the greatest beauty they had ever laid eyes on. Despite her indifference to the world, it only added to her charms, making her seem as though she had descended from another world entirely.

The current Aina wore a flexible armor that wrapped around her curves almost too well, an enormous battle ax of red-gold hovering to her back. Her every step carried its own explosive power and the depth of black her armor and hair shared seemed to give her the tinge of a devilish vibe.

Leonel fell into silence when his gaze landed on her again for the second time in a month. His expression didn't flicker and his arms remained crossed about his chest. He could tell with a single glance that she had improved vastly since he last saw her, even after all his own improvements, he had next to no certainty of defeating her. In fact, he faintly felt that he might very well lose.

It was a surprising conclusion for Leonel to come to, but it hardly moved the needle for him one way or another.

After a month of rest, Leonel felt that he finally understood what bothered him so much about all of this.

Objectively, he knew how he had hurt Aina. She was in a vulnerable point in her life and she was heavily reliant on him. That moment hadn't been the first time she got mad at him for risking his life for the sake of others, he had lost count of the number of times she had insisted that he should put himself first.

He and Aina had been clashing in this way even long before they made their relationship official. That day, when Leonel excitedly left the Mayan Zone, eager to see her again, and she pierced a hand through Conrad's heart… Leonel knew that that had been her way of waking him up to reality.

girl he had known, but she was precisely the

died because he was too soft with how he used his blade, even so far

had? The answer was so obvious that Leonel felt that he had been running away from it as

wanted, how she wanted to do them. He never batted an eye, never complained, and always followed along, happy just to be

pretend like it had been would be nothing more than revisionist history. He had been happy to do it.

wanted to fight for himself, a goal he wanted to aspire toward and chase… Rather than receiving the same sort of support he had always given Aina, what he received in return

Aina about his dreams, about how he wanted to unite the Dimensional Verse and have her by his side as his queen, he didn't receive the eagerness and support he had been expecting. Instead, he received a questioning that he would have expected from a stranger or a person who didn't care about what his own hopes and

words of a person who

left him, it was just more of the same. Leonel understood how she felt, he truly did. She had gone through so much

opponent that didn't believe in him, he would just defeat them. When he met an enemy that didn't believe in him, he would just kill them. When he met a mountain no one believed he could climb, he would ignore

he was so good at following his father's mantras of Respect and Persistence was exactly because of this. This was such a core part of who he was that he exceled in everything he did, even when

this was Leonel's own brand of arrogance, that deep seeded belief in himself that couldn't

person who didn't believe in him was someone he had

ignore her? How could he defeat

know the answer

of his life wowed the crowd,