POV: Adam

I tilted my head upward and exhaled with my mouth and eyes wide open as I stared at the boring, gray roof of the maze. I heard nothing except my own breathing and the slight noises the blood made as it flowed all over the ground. My breath went in and out specifically through my mouth since I had no interest in smelling the corpses of my dead comrades or that monstrosity.

After a while of just sitting on my knees, getting my pants soaked in blood, I stood up and looked down at all the corpses for the last time before walking back to the place where all the passageways started without even checking if this path led to the exit. My footsteps echoed in the passageway, but I was hoping to hear something else. Some minotaur noises would've been nice.

It took a while to get back to the start of the pathway, but once I got there, I noticed that the pathways hadn't changed. Apparently, one needed to reach the end of a pathway to change the pathways.

It made perfect sense since if one didn't see the end, then there was no reason for the pathway to change since it did so only to make it impossible to apply the process of elimination to this maze, which would have made everything too easy. In essence, this ruin was a guessing game.

I wasn't going to play any games anymore, though. I was on the hunt for some minotaurs.

I picked a pathway at random and headed down the pathway while I swung my kusarigama around at waist level, so it scratched the ground lightly.

Fortunately, it didn't take long to meet one.

Upon encountering the beast, the ends of my lips curled up as my jaw tightened. The thing was just as ugly as the last one.

After killing the earlier minotaur, I realized something. It was that I had been making things more complicated than they needed to be. Now that I had all this space and a large target, all I needed to do was target a few tendons. The rest would be easy.

I deepened my focus and tapped into the state I had been gifted with. My kusarigama's red parts began to glow once again, and I took a single deep breath before I approached the minotaur.

Then the first strike came.

I dodged the swing easily by rolling to the side before swinging my kusarigama by its chain part at the elbow of the minotaur. I managed to inflict a deep-looking wound, and my strategy seemed to have worked since the minotaur seemed to be unable to pick up the battleaxe that he had shoved into the ground and had to switch arms.

The minotaur then tried hitting me with a horizontal swing, but as it was even slower than the last one, I simply side-flipped over the swing. The battleaxe found itself stuck once more, but the minotaur had bigger problems than that. For example, the blade of my kusarigama that was currently in its neck.

After having hit the minotair with perfect accuracy, I switched my stance to one that had my heels pointing towards the minotaur and ripped my kusarigama free, causing the minotaurs throat to be sliced wide open.

The minotaur collapsed onto the ground, bleeding all over the place, but all I could do was raise my brows and frown. "What a disappointment."

***

I leaned the back of my head against the wall and exhaled. 'Those monsters really are weak.'

It had been a few hours since I had started to hunt down the minotaurs and I had already made them extinct. I would now have to walk to the end of a pathway in order to get everything to reset, but I wanted to sit down for a few moments before I did.

I closed my eyes, and immediately my thoughts began to wander. I tried to silence them by focusing on my breathing, but it didn't work. Then some unpleasant memories assaulted me.

I didn't remember much about my childhood. It had all gotten a little foggy after I entered high school, but there were a couple images that had been imprinted in my mind and always came back to me when I was alone.

I was about ten years old at the time. There was a video I saw that made me have nightmares for a few months, which always made me wake up, and after I did, I walked from my own room into my parents' bedroom to sleep there for the rest of my night.

One night, however, I saw something on the way there. It was a man dressed in black who had just entered my home. He had gloves on, so the only skin that was left exposed was his face, which had some dried up blood on it. That man was my father.

He said something like, "Why are you still awake? Go to your room." and I rushed straight back where I came from.

I never knew much about my father. Only that he used to be an orphan and liked seclusion, which is why he worked lonely night shifts.

The other image that my subconscious assaulted me with was one of a plain graveyard surrounded by trees that swayed due to the wind. I was there with my mother, who held an umbrella above us while we stood in front of a bland gravestone. I remembered getting a little wet since my mother held the umbrella too high for it to shield me properly from the rain. However, I didn't mention it.

I was a bit older at the time, so I remembered it better than the last one. I didn't really want to remember it, though. That moment in which we were both completely silent, the backround noise of rain and wind being the only sound that made it into our ears.

I had wished that she would've held my hand and that she would've told me that everything would be okay, but she didn't. She was likely as lost as I was, and she had forgotten that she had a child who needed her now more than ever. Well, how could I blame her? I hadn't gone through such a thing myself. I had never lost anything and had to be strong immediately afterward for the sake of someone else.

I understood her, but that didn't stop me from being angry.

'Why did you even have me if you couldn't even take care of me?' I remembered having thought right before my father's grave.

I opened my eyes after the images surfaced and shook my head before standing up and beginning to walk. Trying to rest had been a mistake. It was better to keep moving.

It only took a bit of walking and a few turns before I reached the end of the pathway, after which I proceeded to make my way to the beginning of the passageways.

As expected, the passageways had changed.

Then I once again picked one of the passageways at random. I licked my dried up lips as I walked down the passageways and noted that I couldn't stay here for too long.

Before turning the corner, I once again deepened my focus and effortlessly entered that sensational state. There was nothing behind the corner; however, I stayed in that state as I walked up to the next corner, where a battleaxe came at high speed at my waist.

I breathed in before jumping up, intending to land on the axe after it got stuck to the wall. Jumping in this state honestly felt like floating. It was a relaxing sensation to simply wait for the world to do what you expected of it.

The battleaxe viciously dug into the wall of the passageway, and not long after, gravity pulled me down to stand on the axe.

The minotaur showed itself from behind the wall, and just for a moment, the beast seemed almost human as it looked at me with its bull-like eyes riddled with confusion.

I then bent my knees a little and lowered myself before exploding straight towards the minotaurs head with my kusarigama tightly in my grip. It wasn't the most optimal strategy, but it was good enough to dispose of the minotaur quickly.

I aimed to take out the minotaur's eyes and finish the rest easily. However, as I was airborne, the minotaur was quick enough to try swatting me, but I was sure he wasn't going to hit me. The minotaur's were all the same. They never expected anything they met to be faster than them. Such simple, arrogant creatures.

I darted past the minotaur's hand and tried to slice the minotaur's hand while in the air before rotating, going past the thing, and landing behind it.

'Did I miss?' I questioned myself as I saw the minotaur turning without making a sound.

Even with my enhanced senses, I hadn't clearly seen my kusarigama hit the thing's eyes, since I had been more focused on a safe landing and had trusted the attack to my memory of the targets' placement.

I frowned in disappointment when I saw that I had made a cut right below the minotaur's eyes instead of actually hitting its eyes. It would have at least been better to have the wound above his eyes so that the blood would hinder his vision.

'Did I make an error?' I thought as I wondered about what could have made me miss.

After it turned completely and saw me, it didn't attack like it normally did. Instead, it licked its V-shaped, overgrown nails. The nails were dirty with blood.

'My blood!'

I inspected my body, and there it was. A wound on my left thigh that was leaking blood. The wound didn't seem deep, but it was large.

I gritted my teeth before looking back at the minotaur that had once again had its battleaxe in hand.

I started to spin my kusarigama as I approached the minotaur and when I determined the distance to be adequate, I threw it at the beast, which predictably blocked it with its battleaxe.

Right when the minotaur brought the battleaxe up to block my attack and, as a consequence, simultaneously blocked its vision, I leaped up and pulled on the chain of my kusarigama in order to retrieve my weapon. Then, with my weapon in hand, I made my way over to the battleaxe and surprised the minotaur by shoving my kusarigama right between its eyes.

I saw as the life drained out of the minotaurs eyes, and it fell onto the ground with a loud thump, with me standing on its forehead.

Then I got an idea and started walking down the body of the minotaur. After having made my way to its left thigh, I cut off a piece.

'Now, let's see how this tastes.'