The third and final discipline was The Echo Chamber.
Heh.
This was supposed to be the true heart of the training here.
This was where they tested your soul.
The room wasn’t so fancy arena or a maze.
It was just a circle of small, polished black stones on the floor.
There was no crystal.
There was no instructor barking orders at us.
Just this low, humming sound that seed to co from the walls themselves.
It made the air feel all heavy and thick.
It felt like walking into a server room for ghosts.
The sa boring-faced instructor stood before us, though he sohow looked even more tired today.
"Your body is a weapon," he droned, his voice totally flat.
"Your mind is a weapon."
"But your soul... your soul is the hand that wields them."
"If the hand shakes, the blade will miss its mark."
He waved a hand at the circle of stones.
"Here, you will face the echo of your own breaking."
"The mont that brought you to the Corps."
"The mory that fuels your fire."
He looked around at all of us, his eyes completely empty.
"You will not change it."
"You will not escape it."
"You will learn to stand in the heart of that fire and not be burned."
"You will learn control."
"Or you will be consud by your own ghost, and we will sweep up the ashes."
Then he started calling out nas.
One by one, so poor sucker would walk to a stone, sit down, and close their eyes.
So of them would just sit there, completely still.
Others would start twitching like crazy.
Sweat would just pour down their faces.
A few of them whimpered.
One guy just started screaming, this raw, horrible sound that went on and on until two Sentinels ca and dragged his unconscious body away.
So this was the real test.
This was where they figured out if you were a Slayer, or just another broken toy that needed to be thrown out.
Finally, my na was called.
I walked over to an empty stone and sat down.
I closed my eyes.
The world just dissolved.
And I was back.
I was back in the Great Hall.
The air slled of wine and fear.
The screaming of the nobles was just a symphony of chaos all around .
And I was completely frozen.
My body was a statue of my own uselessness, my flaw locking in place like a damn stun effect.
I just watched, helpless, as the red-haired Titan turned its attention toward .
I watched as Yael, a blur of silver hair and green silk, threw herself right in front of .
I heard her whisper, the words a perfect, painful echo in my mory.
"One last ti, right? I pull aggro, you find the damn weak spot. Don’t screw this up, moron."
The Titan’s hand ca down.
It touched her.
And she started to flicker, to dissolve, like a corrupted file being deleted from the world.
A scream of pure, animal rage tore right through .
The cold control of the Slayer protocol shattered into a million pieces.
The crimson berserker energy exploded from my soul, a wildfire of pure, undiluted pain.
The simulation just ended.
I was back on the stone, my heart hamring against my ribs, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
The instructor was staring at .
"Again, Initiate Quinn," he said, his voice completely flat.
So that was the ga.
They were going to make loop this thing until I broke or until I learned.
I closed my eyes.
The Great Hall.
Her whisper.
The flicker of her soul being erased.
The explosion of rage.
Back on the stone.
"Again."
The Great Hall.
Her smirk.
Her sacrifice.
My failure.
"Again."
Loop after loop after loop.
The mory wasn’t a mory anymore.
It was a cage.
And I was the rat, hitting the sa electric fence over and over again.
The pain was still there.
The grief was still a raw, open wound.
But after the tenth loop, sothing else started to kick in.
My raid-leader brain.
The part of that doesn’t feel, it just analyzes.
Okay.
This isn’t a mory.
This is a boss chanic.
A repeatable pattern.
A puzzle that needs to be solved.
The objective isn’t to save her.
That’s impossible.
The objective is to survive the encounter without wiping my own emotional stability.
I closed my eyes for what felt like the hundredth ti.
The Great Hall materialized around again.
This ti, I didn’t focus on her face.
I focused on the data.
I started a ntal tir.
At 0.8 seconds from the start of the sequence, she was grabbed.
At 2.1 seconds, her back is to .
At 3.4 seconds, the Titan’s hand makes contact.
At 3.5 seconds, the horror begins.
At 3.6 seconds, my berserker protocol triggers.
It was just a script.
A sequence of events.
I watched it again, but this ti, I wasn’t watching a tragedy.
I was watching a cutscene I’d seen a hundred tis.
I was speedrunning my own trauma.
I knew every line.
I knew every animation.
I knew exactly when the pain was supposed to hit.
And because I knew it was coming, I could brace for it.
I built a wall in my mind.
A cold, logical wall of data and tirs.
The mory played out.
I felt the familiar surge of rage begin to build.
But this ti, I t it with a cold, simple thought.
This is the chanic. The rage is the debuff. Do not let it apply.
I focused on my breathing.
I focused on the numbers.
The Titan’s hand touched her.
She began to flicker.
I felt the fire of the berserker state trying to ignite.
And I just... let it.
I didn’t fight it.
I didn’t suppress it.
I just watched it, like a scientist observing a chemical reaction in a beaker.
I contained it.
I built a furnace of pure, cold will around the fire of my grief.
The simulation held.
For the first ti, I made it past the 3.6 second mark without the system crashing.
I was still in the mory.
I was standing in the fire, and I was not burning.
And that’s when I saw him.
In the corner of the mory, half-hidden by a fallen pillar, was a ghostly, transparent figure.
It was Gandalf.
He wasn’t part of the original mory.
He was just standing there, silent and still.
An observer.
A glitch in my simulation.
He was just watching, his face a pale mask of horror.
He was seeing what I was seeing.
He was feeling what I was feeling.
The simulation was sohow connecting our trials.
My greatest pain was being broadcast directly into his soul.
The sight of him, this unwelco ghost in my personal hell, was so jarring, so completely unexpected, that it broke my concentration.
The furnace wall cracked.
The rage exploded.
I was back on the stone.
My eyes snapped open.
Across the room, Gandalf was on his own stone.
His eyes were wide, his face was pale and slick with sweat.
He was staring at .
He wasn’t looking at with hatred anymore.
He was looking at with a horrified, disturbed understanding.
He had seen it.
He had seen her die through my eyes.
He had felt the monstrous, world-breaking grief that I was trying to cage.
He now knew the truth.
I wasn’t just so arrogant monster who got his friend killed.
I was a walking apocalypse, powered by a pain so deep it could warp reality itself.
And he was terrified of .
Just then, a loud, sobbing wail broke the silence.
One of the other initiates had just finished his trial.
He was on his knees, crying his eyes out.
"I saw her... I saw her face!" he wept.
Seraphina, looking bored as hell, walked over to him.
"What horror did you witness, initiate?" she asked, her voice laced with a faint, clinical curiosity.
The initiate looked up at her, his face a total ss of tears and snot.
"She... she left on read!" he bawled. "She saw the ssage, but she never texted back!"
The room was silent for a beat.
I just stared.
My internal monologue, dry and cynical, provided the only comntary that made sense.
So people really need a patch update.
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