Dimensional Descent

Leonel exhaled a shaky breath, his body trembling. Pain directed at the soul was absolutely the worst thing he had ever experienced.

It wasn't just pain that was the problem; it almost felt as though some higher existence was taking control of your existence and slowly erasing it. It was an assault on the psyche and body, an existential crisis bottled up and stripped of all the middle-aged angst that could make it somewhat amusing.

It was the worst feeling he had ever experienced. He didn't want to admit it, but it had truly felt worse than watching his father and Aina die.

No, it was almost like that experience had taken the worst things he could imagine and forced him to experience them with a dose of heartrending pain to boot. It refused to stop at just pain and wanted to destroy everything it meant to be Leonel.

Leonel knew that it couldn't have just been the pain that did this to him; it was also what this pain was going toward accomplishing.

His soul wasn't just anchoring anything; it was anchoring a World of Destruction. Not only was there the pain of feeling his soul split, but it was also being seeped in the truest despair there was, the destruction of all that had ever been and would ever be.

Leonel exhaled another hollow breath. He had succeeded, and yet he didn't even feel happy. He felt like that weight was trying to take hold of him again, but he managed to hold it off, his gaze flashing with a frighteningly cold light.

He could remember the first time he had felt the pain of improvement.

He had only been 18 years old, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He knew nothing about this so-called Dimensional Verse and stupidly tried to awaken his Metal Synergy Lineage Factor much too early.

He had no qualifications to do so, not due to lack of talent, but lack of experience and fortitude. He had been a normal youth until that day. The worst pain he had experienced was probably getting his ribs broken in a meaningless football game.

But he had persevered.

His reasons back then were endlessly superficial and outrageously selfish. He just didn't want to lose out.

he was almost a decade older. He had experienced so much, lost

'Again...' he thought calmly.

pain after horrible, rending pain. It was

the first Node was the worst thing he had experienced, then so was the second, and then so was the

superseding experience. It was hard to tell if the pain was truly becoming worse or if

kept taking those

He thought of Mo''Lexi.

behalf, and yet completely unwilling to look at him like a real human regardless. Her own past, her own emotions were more important than his own. If she didn't have an experience that made her dislike Aina, it was likely

He thought of Vivak.

rage for the loss of his daughter, he could take in a much weaker woman like Matriarch Pyius simply for the sake of love, disregarding the opinions of others, he could even be furious at the

like an experimental lab rat, to toy with his cousin's life, with

He thought of Anselma.

to the Incomplete Worlds to kill his father, knowing the kind of backlash she would face, all to protect her

weeds, to rip away a caring father from a small family, to endlessly torture Aina's mother for the crime of falling in love

people all have in

all

didn't want to be

small ember of will that was constantly buffeted by the winds of the cruel

tenth Node began to take shape, and the