POV - Tobias

[Three weeks later...]

Over the past three weeks, various minor events have happened. Mainly, the time consisted of waiting around for my arm to heal whilst avoiding exposing too much information to my past-self.

We set an impromptu camp in the clearing and, after I’d healed properly, my past-self tried to teach me various forms of combat.

To be honest, though, his techniques and usage of weapons was actually far worse than mine. I don’t know how that’s possible. Maybe an overreliance on the void flower and other supernatural powers?

He’d still win in a fight (The main reason that I’ve been forced to stick around). My past-self had absurd physical strength and his teleportation ability is apparently unlimited. His advantages combined with my currently lacking control of my physical body, I don’t stand much chance of winning.

*Sigh…* Regardless, that isn’t why I’ve begun summarizing the past few weeks events. Today’s the day my past-self is leaving, returning back to the main universe.

Over the past few weeks, despite my past-self attempts to hide it, the effect of the void flower has become increasing obvious on his body. Along with coughing up blood occasionally, black blisters (?) have been growing along his skin.

I had occasionally caught glimpses of the black skin before Past-Tobias physically cut it off. Each time, the black marks seemed to grow back at an exponentially faster pace.  

On a side-note, I checked the system battery and it had remained locked at 17 hours. My hypothesis for this abnormality is that it’s counting time in main universe. Although, I don’t really understand why the battery would work like that.

“Alright, well, you’ll probably be fine.” Past-Tobias said with levity and joked around, “Don’t suppose you want to profess your eternal love or something before I leave?”

…Did I mention my past-self was annoying? Isn’t he bloody married to Rin? Do I need to inform Rin about his cheating habits?

I kept up my personal act and decided to send him off with the kindest words that I could think of. “Go die in a fire.”

“Sorry, afraid I'm already fully booked.” Past-Tobias said and laughed it off, “Anyway, good luck on your trial. I ended up leaving after completing the first part of the trial, but maybe you’ll choose to stay longer?”

“I doubt it.” I shrugged, and sat down by the campfire.

If there’s an option to leave after completing the first part of this stupid trail, I’ll probably take it. The amount of time that has been wasted here is absurd enough already.

In hindsight, I wouldn’t choose to come here at all.

If past-Tobias hadn’t said to choose the spear as his only advice, I wouldn’t be here at all.

Past-Tobias summoned a teleportation portal, clearly preparing to leave. “Anything else before I leave?”

“… Can that portal end the trial early?” I suddenly asked, realizing I might actually have the option to leave earlier than I thought.

“Technically. It just designed to send the soul back to your body in the main universe.” Past-Tobias seemed surprised with my question, “Why? Do you want to leave already?”

I stared at the portal before shaking my head. “No, just wondering.”

Too risky. What if the teleportation portal sends me to his timeline instead of my own? Wouldn’t that effectively kill me? A soul cannot exist for long when the body disappears. At least, not in that universe.

“Personally, I wouldn’t choose to leave this place quickly.” Past-Tobias explained, “The loose connection to the main universe causes time to be accelerated extremely effectively. When combined with the unique power system of the world, you can vast improve your strength upon return.”

His words failed to impress, I just stared blankly at him.

Do you think I don’t know that? Although I’m rushing to gain power, this place seemed to be a little too dangerous with my soul's current state.

Meanwhile, I’ve basically determined the ability granted by my spear is remembering the death of past iterations of myself. Past-Tobias has provided a variety of monsters over the past few weeks for me to kill, each time my ability would activate.

Every time it activates, I’d remember a short scene from a past iteration. Almost every scene is shows the moments before my death. Thus, until it begins to show other scenes, I’m tentatively calling my ability ‘death vision’.

None of the deaths were nearly as epic or impressive as the first time. Nor did any other Tobias seem to address my presence whilst the vision was happening. Most scenes were just randomly dying for various mediocre reasons (An extremely depressing thought).

Some deaths were simply forgetting to pay attention in a forest, or simply failing to move quick enough in a fight. A decent amount of deaths were dying of massive abdominal pain in that mansion. There’s probably some kind of slow acting poison in the manor (maybe in the food provided?).

Considering I have no plans on going back to that mansion, it shouldn’t be a prediction type power. Those abilities tend to show a basically infinite number of futures; they are not nearly as focused and detailed as this ability is.

This ability could be useful, if it allow me to remember something over Rin’s resets… but I doubt it can. Regardless, this ‘death vision’ ability is useless in combat. It doesn’t increase my combat power even slightly.

I questioned past-Tobias about his own ability before, and it is that unlimited teleportation I talked about earlier. That’s why he can abuse short-distance teleportation to such an absurd degree without worrying about the void flower (Apparently, only when he’s traveling long distances does he utilize the void flower).

In the death visions, when I utilized abilities, each ability was different. Sometimes I had powerful abilities and, others times, extremely weak abilities.

Regardless, that basically means the ability granted by the weapons of power are completely random. This just happened to be one of the times I was unlucky. ‘Death vision’ ability will likely be completely useless outside this place.

The number of iterations of myself far exceeds five that I’d previous thought, though. I’ve seen around twenty different non-repeating scenes at this point.

When I’d awakened from my thoughts, past-Tobias had already walked through the portal and disappeared.

Standing up, I stared around the clearing before deciding to just leave this place. My injury on my arm has healed, waiting around here was a waste of time.

I sighed to myself as I gazed into the forest and I began taking the first steps in what would probably be a very long journey. It might take months or years to actually kill so many monsters.

Pulling out the notebook from the medical pack. I began to tally my current number of kills. Considering there’s no other system for keeping track, if I don’t keep physical count, I’ll never have any idea how close I am.

[Three months later…]

Winter had arrived, a cold blanket of snow covered the trees and floor. The white snow had taken over the majority of the forest, whilst various animals had entered into hibernation.

Traveling through the woods had never been an easy task, but with experience and precaution, it was doable. Attempting to travel during the winter, though, was miserable.

(The clothing that I currently wore was extremely thin and as I mentioned before, basilisks tend to have a weakness to extremely cold. My desire to change back into a male during this period was eventually abandoned as the clothing I’d made from skinning monsters wouldn’t be enough to keep me warm by itself.)

In this cold winter, I found the absolute jackpot. An easy area to harvest lives animal with little difficult or danger.

More commonly known as… a snake pit.

The hard part about completing this challenge is the sheer quantity of life that need to be taken, however, I quickly learned that challenging the stronger monsters was completely unnecessary. Learn who you can and cannot provoke was an important part of survival.

Killing twenty rabbits was far easier than five monkeys.

Standing on the edge of a pit, my mouth curled into a massive smile as I stared down toward the massive pit of snakes. I couldn’t even begin to count the amount of snakes inside.

The pit was massive, at least 50 meters in diameter. There are at least several thousand snakes in there… potentially far more if the pit is deep enough.

Throughout this entire time I’ve been here, I’ve only managed to kill approximately 1600 range of valid animals and monsters. I stopped keeping track of the exact digit and have only kept track of the hundreds place.

The whole ‘death vision’ ability has gotten extremely old and tiring. Once the number of deaths reached one hundred, the visions just began repeating from the beginning. Each time a scene repeated, it becomes slightly clearer and feels more solid…

The most annoying part is that ‘death vision’ activates whenever I kill anything, as long as I’m holding my spear.

The first time I watched the various deaths, they were interesting and new. When they began to repeat and I saw the deaths a second time, I paid close attention and it was a memorable learning experience. After the third repeat, though, there was no other words besides ‘annoying to the point of insanity’ that could describe this worthless ability.

Imagine being forced to watch a cringe complication of all your stupid past mistakes, without any ability to look away or avoid it. At this point, I want to bloody smack the vast majority of my past iterations across the head with a metal hammer and scream at them for being dumb.

The only death vision that remains interesting is the initial one. When I was surrounded by countless monsters and managed to kill a large portion of them before dying to the plant monster. The skillful movements and short dodges, they are beyond impressive.

At this point, I just mark down another tally whenever I reach that initial vision. That helps keep the kill count accurate to the hundreds range.

Regardless, this ‘death vision’ ability is a freaking hindrance. Whether I kill anything, I get distracted by these bloody death visions. They mentally take up approximately ten minutes to complete and end with no warning, leaving me to jump back into actual combat unprepared.

The only good news is that no actual time passes by while death visions are underway… still, the ability is extremely distracting in the middle of combat.

Can you imagine being forced to watch a scene you’ve already seen (at least) sixteen times before being thrust into combat?

I’ve had to learn the hard way not to kill anything whilst another attack is incoming, otherwise the mental anguish of preparing to dodge for ten minutes during the death vision is bloody tortuous.

So… massive snake pit.

I glanced down toward the massive quantity of snakes in the pit. It was impossible to know exactly how deep the pit was because snakes completely covered the bottom and hid its true height.

Regardless, this should be the easiest possible way to gain a massive quantity of kills. Preparing to unleash a piercing strike with my spear, I aimed downward into the massive pit of snakes and struck outward.

An invisible supernatural power shot outward and passed through a small portion of the snakes. Blood splatted everywhere and a massive hissing sound, before disappearing as the death visions began.

I watched for the seventeen time as my idiotic past incarnation walked along ignorantly for several minutes. He completely ignored the sudden lack bird calls and other animals noises before getting mauled by a tiger monster.

The next death vision began to play without pause, and I mentally settled in for this annoying process... This was going to take awhile.

From the brief glance before the death visions began, there seemed to be at least sixty to seventy snakes stacked atop each other in that single location of the snake pit. That meant approximately seventy death visions were going to play.

Judging by the size of that pit, I’ve killed less than .1% of the overall total.

While it might take awhile to kill them all, the appearance of this snake pit has taken the time required to finish this task down from years (at my previous rate) to a couple of days. It should be able to completely finish off this retarded task.