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 had experienced so much, lost so much. He

'Again...' he thought calmly.

he did so. Step after step, horrible, rending pain after horrible, rending pain. It was like every time he took a single step

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

was like yet another superseding experience. It was hard to tell if the pain was truly becoming worse or if the experience itself was

kept taking those

He thought of Mo''Lexi.

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 that even given the same circumstances, she wouldn't

He thought of Vivak.

the sake of

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

He thought of Anselma.

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

like weeds, to rip away a caring father from a small family, to endlessly torture Aina's

did these people all

all

didn't want to be

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

began to take shape, and the world seemed to