Chapter 40: Heavenly Instinct

-----------------------------------------------

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

 

 

War Expert Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Year ???

//

--POV: Ryuta Koichi—

--Place: Silent Forest/ Time: 03:12—

The fear is still there.

No matter how much I train. The fear doesn’t leave.

From recent experiences and occurences I have realized……I’m not immune.

I have been treating this shitshow like it’s some type of fantasy novel. I never thought about the possibility of actually dying.

If I were to have fought that Chamberlayne noble on the battlefield instead of the tournament, I would have either lost, or it would’ve been a draw.

There is no way I would have won that, even though I was going all out.

The more I think about it, the worse my situation seems.

There is a war coming.

Back then during the time of the tournament, if I were to have met an enemy even a bit stronger than the Chamberlayne girl, I would certainly not make it.

The title “Hero” means so little on the battlefield if there is no prowess behind it.

After I woke up from the unconsciousness of the battle in the tournament, I found new awareness.

New understanding. A new comprehension of reality.

I have come to know this as an instinct.

And this very instinct is screaming that the upcoming war will be dangerous towards me.

It will be life-threatening towards me.

This mostly means that my current strength is inadequate. It isn’t enough to survive whatever dangers I will face in the upcoming war.

So I tried.

And I tried.

To get stronger, with the quickest and most effective method I currently have.

“Y..AH!”

*GUG* *GUG* *GUG*

By killing monsters.

It feels really good, seeing the blood spilling out of the monsters I have defeated.

“haa….haa….haa…”

The trick is to not use the buffs.

But rather increase your own strength as much as possible without any special granted “heroic” powers.

Do not use STRENGTH, or MIGHT, or BOOST or whatever else buff that is combat-made.

Why am I doing such a brutal and hard training when I can simply use buffs to kill the enemies easier?

Because I have figured out how the buffs work.

The buffs don’t add a certain fixed value to my points, instead they act as a multiplier.

For example if my strength is value X, the STRENGTH buff would not add 15 points to the value of X.

My strength doesn’t become 15+X after the buff has been activated, instead the STRENGTH buff would multiply my strength by, for example, 1.5 as a multiplier.

So for example, if my strength is X, then the STRENGTH buff would multiply it by 1.5, so my new strength value would be 1.5X for as long as the buff is active.

The STRENGTH buff modifier is actually 1.5

It took me a lot of calculating to figure that out.

The experiment was simple.

My STRENGTH against gravity, and gravity is a constant force I learned at school, so there should be no unknown variables.

So in the experiment, I jump in the air from solid ground, without using any buffs, and record the highest height I reached during the jump.

I then activate the strength buff, jump as high as I can again, record the highest height I reached with my jump.

For every 1 metre I jumped without the buff, I jumped 1.5 metre with the buff.

A 1.5 multiplier.

The purpose of this experiment is to understand how much of a buff I have during battle when it’s activated.

These buffs are special.

To my knowledge, nobody else has them.

If my original strength is…….let’s say, equal to the strength of 5 average soldiers combined.

That’d mean that if I were to use the STRENGTH buff, my total strength would increase from that of 5 average soldiers to 7.5 average soldiers.

A basic 2.5 increase, which is half my original strength value that doesn’t have buffs.

However, if I trained really hard and increased my original strength to 10 average soldiers.

That’d mean that if I were to then use the STRENGTH buff again, my total strength would increase from 10 average soldiers to 15 average soldiers.

The buff has increased my strength by 5 soldiers when my original strength was 10 soldiers, but it only increased my strength by 2.5 soldiers, when I was weaker and only at 5 soldiers of strength.

This means that the more I grow, the more average soldiers the buff will add to my total strength when it is activated.

So the greater my original unbuffed strength is, the more strength the buff adds.

Simple math I learned at school.

Not to mention that when I kill monsters, not just is my strength increasing, but my speed is too. Similar to a level system where the death of monsters give exp that strengthens the player.

And ALL my buffs also grow stronger with my growth in original ability.

Which is why I’m here in this Silent Forest, killing monsters efficiently because of my new and honed instinct ability.

Instinct, the ability to subconsciously feel what will happen, even if the completely conscious and rational mind can’t calculate what is going to happen.

Using this, my chances of surviving increases in this world, assuming this instinct ability is 100% always correct and never just a false alarm.

I, unfortunately, don’t have sufficient information on this.

However, this training in the battlefield is where I’m planning to get information on this passive ability and understand it more.

As Sun Tzu previously said, you can’t win a battle if you don’t know yourself.

So given that I’m planning to live after this war, I need to understand my abilities and find the best method to use them to it’s maximum capabilities.

--Place: Silent Path/ Time: 05:45—

As dawn breaks, I exit the forest while covered in blood and make my way on the Silent Path, the path back to the city, where I can finally rest after this gruesome training.

Even though I’m making such gains with this training, the fear isn’t going away.

The fear created by the instinct ability.

I have learned that the instinct ability alerts me, it gives me more awareness, greater hearing and sensory abilities, and can subconsciously get my body to feel what is going to happen.

During the training in the forest just now, I could feel the monster approaching in the dark of the night.

That feeling was undoubtedly the instinct alerting me of an enemy.

However, it was a simple alert.

Like a “watch out!” message.

When I am in the place of an enemy, that is seeking to do me harm. I will most likely be alerted right before they try to harm me.

Why? Because I was sitting like a duck in the forest with monsters (That the instinct ability identified as “enemies”) all around me.

If I was sitting in the castle drinking tea and eating cupcakes at that same time, the instinct alert would have most likely not gone off.

So it shows that the place matters when the instinct gives it’s alert.

But it isn’t just place that affects the instinct ability.

It’s also time.

If I was sitting like a duck in the forest during daylight, where there is little to no enemies at that same place that I was sitting in during the training just now, the instinct would have not gone off.

Even though the place, which is in the middle of the Silent Forest, is the same, the time is different.

Which means that the instinct is affected by place, OR time, OR both.

And since Time magic is rumoured to not exist, being nothing more than folklore and mythical nonsense, it means I can’t change or manipulate time to see if it’s the one affecting my instinct.

I can only change one variable here, and that is place.

Which is why I have recently been taking so-called “strolls”, when what I’m really doing is experimenting.

Changing my place all around the Adion Kingdom, even changing cities to see if the fear goes away if I change my place.

But it doesn’t go away, it doesn’t change.

Leading to my frustration, I was nearly tempted to leave the Adion Kingdom for the first time, to see if the fear finally leaves me.

But it doesn’t.

This fear is so strong inside of me that I have even dreamt of it last week.

In my dreams, I was on a landscape.

On a landscape so large and vast that I couldn’t see the end of it, assuming this landscape had an end to begin with.

This black landscape, completely black in colour, with nothing it, like a clean black floor stretching infinitely.

Above this infinite floor was the sky, but it wasn’t normal either.

It was bright blue.

Bright, bright blue.

With no clouds, sun, moon, or anything actually.

Completely blank, just blue.

Black and blue.

Black being the floor, blue being the sky.

The floor doesn’t have any light reaching it, no reflection or anything, just as bright as the sky.

No difference at all.

This surreal plain made me immediately wary.

I became cautious, looking around everywhere.

Only when I turned around did I see it for the first time.

A person, a figure. What looked like 200 metres away, assuming the figure’s body was of the size of an adult human.

This figure, had an outline of what looked like a very tall, muscular man.

But that isn’t the real distinguishing quality about him.

What was weird was how he had no features on his body.

His body was as black as the floor, as he stands on the landscape that resembles him so much.

But that wasn’t all.

Looking away from his body, my eyes move upward. Until it reaches his.

Then the all too familiar sense of fear from the instinct ability came back.

His eyes, his eyes were as blue as the sky.

Bright blue, but even more than that, he didn’t have pupils.

He had slits.

It was at this moment I was utterly convinced the man…..no…..the creature, was not human at all.

With a crescent-shaped grin showing bright white teeth, he looked like he was having fun as he looked at me.

Like he was playing…..with a toy…

Forcing my body out of it’s frozen state of fear, I walk backwards, not daring to give this creature my back, not daring to break the eye contact.

I walked.

I walked.

I walked.

My feet wasn’t making any sound even though I was touching the landscape with every step backwards I took.

Yet his figure wasn’t growing smaller.

As if he was moving with me, even though I could clearly see his figure is still and unmoving.

I walked more.

And more.

And more.

Still no progress.

It’s like he’s in the background. Like a hologram. A greenscreen.

Or is the landscape moving with me, so even though it feels like I’m moving, I’m actually not moving at all?

Or is the entire world keeping me locked in place, while giving the illusion I’m walking?

Is he doing this?

Distracted by these thoughts, my right foot hit the ankle of my left as I was walking and…..

I tripped.

I fell.

*TICK*

And that’s when I head that sound, the first sound I heard on this plain, the sound of clock, as it ticks a single second.

Just a single second tick, is all I hear as my back hits the ground.

Scared of the creature, I immediately remake eye contact with him, not willing to take him out of my sight.

Yet I find, he has moved.

Not his figure, his limbs, or his completely void-black body…..but his eyes.

His eyes that were previously making eye contact with me when I was standing, slowly move downward and remake the eye contact as I lay on the ground, staring at him.

Suddenly, he turn his head to the side slightly, just so his head is tilted as that eerie grin remains on his face.

And then his eyes squint slightly, as if he likes the toy he has found.

Such a simple movement of tilting his head, yet it left me overcome with shock, fear, surprise and anxiety.

*TICK*

And that’s when another sound occurred, that same  tick of the second on the clock noised out through the world, as the bright blue sky turns black, as black as the landscape.

Making me feel like I’m in the void, a black infinite stretching space of nothingness with no beginning and no end.

Nothing in this space is visible except the bright blue eyes of the creature and the eerie smile.

*TICK*

And that’s when the third tick happened, as the blue eyes and grin disappears, leaving me in the void.

Worrying if that creature is hiding in this unknown space, going to kill me, to destroy me, to erase me.

I waited.

And waited.

And then waited some more.

But nothing happened.

Just as I was contemplating how long I would be stuck in dreaded place, blinding light comes into view, and after the light has settled down, do I finally see the familiar room that makes up my quarters in the royal place.

Me, shivering in cold sweat as I take a couple of seconds to understand what was going on.

That is what happened last week.

This experience, this horror, wasn’t any nightmare.

It was a vision, a message, by the instinct ability.

The familiar fear when my eyes met his, is all I need to prove this.

The fear I have right now, as I walk back in the dark, on this muddy path.

That same fear.

That fear symbolizes the gap between me and him, the power gap.

The instinct ability works in that the amount of “alertness” I get depends on how much danger I am in.

The more danger I am in, the more the instinct ability reacts.

Let’s say, I have 10 points of power, or power points for short.

If a wild monkey were to try to jump on me in the middle of the forest, and the monkey had 7 power points, the instinct would give me a simple alert.

If a huge raging grizzly bear tried to jump on me, and the bear had 9 power points, the alert would be greater as I am in greater danger than I was in with the monkey.

However, if my opponent had 10 million power points, the instinct wouldn’t be an alert, it would be a fullblown freakout, not because the opponent is strong in general, but because the opponent is strong compared to me.

The gap is huge between my 10 power points and his 10 million.

However, if I had 15 million power points and my opponent had 10 million, the instinct would be just on alert.

The instinct response isn’t dependent on how powerful the opponent is in general, but on how powerful the opponent is compared to me.

And this is the problem I have.

The blue-eyed eerily smiling man that the instinct is warning me about, is creating a such a reaction from the instinct, that the instinct is acting like a crazy alarm clock that is ringing out of control and is refusing to stop ringing.

By creating this fear in me.

And no matter how much I train, no matter if my buffs are activated or not, the fear isn’t decreasing, which means the gap of power between me and him is so huge, so vast, that training and buffs doesn’t even scratch the gap, let alone making a dent and closing it even slightly.

The upcoming war is the worrisome part.

The blue-eyed creature could be in it.

Could be attracted to all the war and bloodshed and come here, to our doorstep.

And that could be what the instinct is warning me about.

This instinct, one of my divine powers, could be a message from heaven.

Could be heaven warning me against the enemies of the God of Hope.

It could be what the pope has been saying……

I honestly don’t know.

But what I do know, is that if this fear doesn’t leave me, this warning from the instinct doesn’t leave me, by the time the inevitable war arrives.

I’m going to have to bail out of this war.

Taking heed of heaven’s warning is more important than defending some shitty royal family and their politics.

Sorry pope.

Sorry princess

Sorry royal family of Adion.

Sorry citizens of Adion.

But my life is more important than all of yours’.