On the first day, the fight lasted for almost eight hours.
Ceres ran away far enough, giving the slovesa time to regain his arm.
The slovesa could integrate any material into its body, but it needed time to stabilize it and gain proper control, so the high-class slovesa felt a sense of honour from Ceres, assuming that Ceres wanted to beat it in one shot at its full strength.
Despite the intense energy consumption, Ceres drank melted ice and snow and could somehow feel that the temple was channelling a small amount of energy directly towards his stomach. “Looks like the temple does not want people to die of starvation or dehydration during their fights.”
During the second day, however, Ceres had managed to crush its arm and tail within six hours before running away again, allowing it to regenerate.
The weird behaviour made the high-class slovesa wary, but it used the nearby rocks to recover the lost limbs regardless.
On the third day, the high-class slovesa lost all of its limbs and a good part of its upper body in 5 hours – it’s core suspiciously untouched.
The high-class slovesa now was extremely confused and scared of Ceres, knowing that Ceres could have killed him during the fight, but did not.
“WHY WON’T THE ALIEN GIVE ME AN HONORABLE DEATH!”
Despite that, it’s survival instincts kicked in, regenerating its body and limbs, though it took a bit longer.
On the fifth day, Ceres came back to challenge the high-class slovesa again, this time dominating the fight and making quick work of it within a short three hours.
With only his core left behind, the high-class slovesa began to despair, finally realizing with extreme clarity that he was being used as a training tool.
On the seventh day, just as Ceres came to challenge him again, the high-class slovesa immediately begged.
“Please, no more! Have you not humiliated me enough? Let me die in honour!” The high-class slovesa knelt down and prostrated itself before Ceres.
At some point during the seven days, the slovesa realized that Ceres was sentient and could understand its words, but conversely, the slovesa could not understand Ceres’s words. Ceres wondered if the multi-terminal he had on him could translate for him, but it couldn’t.
Who would even want to converse with the slovesa in the Loeric Empire when they were viewed as walking bags of exotic metal?
However, through a lot of hand motions and gestures, the high-class slovesa finally began to teach how to write the slovesa’s language. It drew out a glyph at a time in the snow, before saying the meaning of the glyph.
Ceres quickly memorized it as though he was memorizing a blueprint for an exosuit. He treated it like a wiring diagram, connecting a particular glyph to a particular fixed meaning and making a table-like dictionary in his own head.
“Hey, looks like learning languages isn’t that hard. Well, at least the basic version. It’s just pictures and emojis in the end right?” It felt like he was belittling the language in some way, but he pushed it to the back of his mind.
Within a day, Ceres had achieved basic proficiency in writing slovesa glyphs in the snow, so Ceres began to establish a proper conversation. Naturally, he was not anywhere near good enough to start writing entire essays on the slovesa language, but good enough to ask a few simple questions.
“How long have you been here?” Ceres asked through the glyphs.
“What? I just entered the temple a week ago. I would have reached the top of the ranking by now if it was not for your foreign entry!” The high-class slovesa scoffed.
Ceres scratched his head. It entering the temple a week ago was very much impossible, unless there were multiple entrances to the same ranking area. Did the slovesa have their own entry point? With the amount of spatial control the temple had, he did not find it too unreasonable.
“Which planet did you enter from?”
“This is what I wanted to ask you as well. How did an alien like you get onto Xerros, the holy planet of our slovesa? Are you a figment of imagination created by the temple? Is this an illusion?”
Ceres tried to draw out a simple diagram of the Strathon system with reference to the supermassive black hole in the middle of their shared galaxy. He drew out the circular orbits of the planets and indicated which planet he entered from.
“That’s exactly the location of Xerros! How is that possible? The temple guards would have never let an alien like you in, and at the start, you could not even defeat me fully!” The high-class slovesa’s confusion began to skyrocket.
Ceres started to feel like he was definitely getting somewhere with this information. It seemed like they both entered through the same temple, but at different times. So how was it possible that the two of them met? Unless…
“What rank are you?” Ceres asked.
“I’m ranked 101! I started at the bottom of the list.”
“How many fights have you done?”
“This… this….” The high-class slovesa struggled to answer. Ceres could sense the slovesa core was in turmoil, unable to recall how many fights it has done. Theoretically, this should be its first fight.
“I… no it’s not possible… I should have never fought before, but I can somehow sense that I have fought multiple times… I…” The high-class slovesa began to stutter more and more, while Ceres observed the slovesa core suddenly deforming into liquid before reforming back into a solid form through his H.T. mode.
Suddenly, a large external shockwave reverberated through the cave, passing by the high-class slovesa, causing the core to deform and reform in rapid cycles.
“NO…. I am of clan Uyelr… I will rise the ranks and reclaim our honour… I cannot lose here! Damn alien!” The high-class slovesa suddenly attacked, catching Ceres off-guard with its emotions swinging wildly.
“Fall, you insolent alien! Die and let me climb the ranks!” It roared as it threw punches at Ceres, but Ceres easily dodged all of them, having gotten used to it over the last few days.
Ceres quickly fought him, noticing that the high-class slovesa seemed to have lost all its memories of the last week – every trick Ceres pulled off landed easily on it as though it had seen it for the very first time. “What kind of weird temple shit is this?” Ceres asked himself.
This allowed Ceres to beat it in less than an hour, but Ceres did not finish the slovesa off, instead retreating away to allow it to regenerate.
“Why would I move on to the next stage without having the utmost confidence in smashing this specific slovesa? No doubt the next higher-ranked slovesa would be even stronger - I must train here as much as possible.” Yet another sinister grin appeared on his face, though the black mask hid it from the outside.
During the regeneration periods, Ceres meditated in his ‘hunger’ state, controlling its limits and fluctuating tendencies. He hoped to gain a controlled level of ‘hunger’ that allowed him to battle effectively, tapping into his body’s instinct.
No doubt the ‘hunger’ was a result of the black goo in his body – the sight of the Keeper’s spine being filled with the black goo made him aware that such a thing was living in his body right now. Was it sentient?
Ceres knew it fed off emotional energy, so he was surprised that he was also able to be invigorated by both his own emotions and the emotions of the high-class slovesa. The small amount of energy the temple sent to his stomach also alleviate his high energy consumption.
However, the reliance on emotional energy was far too dangerous for him during the fight. He had personally already experienced the drug-like high when killing someone earlier when he massacred the Chosen. He hypothesized that a person’s emotions were the strongest near death – hence the surge of energy and rush that he felt.
Did that mean in order for Ceres to gain substantial energy, he had to kill people or maybe even torture them?!
Ceres shook his head. He wasn’t about to let some mad scientist experiment dictate his personality. He needed to find another solution to the energy problem. If Ceres was ever alone on his own with zero humans or living beings around, he might just die from starvation or go feral completely. The galaxy and space were largely unpopulated empty spaces, so it was a very real possibility.
“The hunger can be alleviated by food as well, so emotional energy is not the only source, though it is the best one.” Even if he had an abundant food source, it may not be enough to supply his body. Was it possible to harvest some sort of alternative energy source to feed his body?
This sudden epiphany began to lead Ceres towards a new path of understanding his body. Luckily for him, there was another living being in this cave that did use an alternative energy source.
Ceres eyed the regenerating slovesa from afar, watching the core. “The slovesa core feeds off electromagnetic radiation. They literally thrive on radioactive sources. Maybe I could also absorb such energy? Or maybe I can run on electricity too?”
Ceres imagined his body having a power socket, but for some reason he recalled Ardan talking about the ‘anal’ nerval plug, causing him to imagine his power socket at the same location.
“No no no, not there. Maybe I’ll just soak in the star radiation or something.” Ceres even postulated that if he knew how to absorb and convert radiation into something useful, he might be able to even absorb energy attacks.
“Kinetic energy could be converted too, but one step at a time.” Would there come a point where Ceres was effectively a black hole of energy, absorbing every possible form of energy? He doubted it. The body enhancements were great and all, but they definitely had their limitations.
The problem now was there Ceres did not even know where to start. Did he have to dissect a slovesa core to figure it out? Even if he did, how would he even begin to modify himself? He tried changing the shape of the black-scale armour but failed to do so, so he did not have high hopes of being able to create brand-new functionalities for the black goo.
The next seven days passed the same, with Ceres getting even better at fighting the slovesa. Soon it became a trivial affair to easily dispatch the high-class slovesa within a short five minutes fight.
Ceres intended to continue training to perfect a one-hit kill but suddenly the high-class slovesa stabbed itself in the core, killing itself.
[Winner: #102. New updated rank: #101]
The world swirled around him again, causing him to stagger before he realized he was back in the stone monument room. He could see the updated list - his name was now above another name. Reading the glyphs now was easier with the basic proficiency he had gained.
“Looks like the one I fought was Grisao of clan Uyelr…” Ceres looked around the base of the monument, which was a pile of the slovesa bodies. He finally noticed Grisao’s body lying there, the core dormant, confirming his suspicion about what the temple was doing.
He was fighting copies of those ranked on the list.
Somehow, the temple was able to create perfect copies along with their memories and personalities. He suspected that when he tried to ask the copy of Grisao about the truth, the temple forcibly reset the copy to purge its confusion.
“Does this mean that I have been copied too?” Ceres wondered.
Just as he was thinking, he suddenly saw a name glowing and shifting up through the ranks. He read the glyph of the name, frowning. “Paska… ranked 89.” Looks like Paska chose to fight the higher difficulty and managed to jump the ranks.
Ceres, however, was not in a hurry to do anything. Seeing that none of the other expedition members’ names was on the list, it meant none of them was teleported to this room.
“I’ve done my part in rescuing the expedition, most likely the supply convoy would have already taken care of them. Now I can take it easy and train my ass off. I need to fully integrate into my body.”
With the existence of cyborgs of Paska, Ceres was now well aware that he was nowhere near being ‘strong’ if he reached the surface.
He had to prepare for the potential event in which he had to fight the entire enforcer unit and Keepers alone.
“I’m not ready now, and even if I managed to find my friends, we’ll just be exploited or manipulated again. Strength – I need power!”
He had to get as much training and practice as he could.
[Select your next difficulty.]
“The easiest.”
***
Kitana walked with a fierce attitude, her eyes piercing through everyone as they dodged out of the way. Wearing her Keeper exosuit emblazoned with the number ‘23’, she briskly walked through the Keeper’s headquarters, with people avoiding her gaze as she passed.
The main command centre had a holographic three-dimensional sphere modelling the planet Athen, along with displayed markers above points of interest at locations all throughout the nearby space. The surface of the planet on the hologram was divided into zones, coloured by different shades denoting their current crime level for the past month.
A plethora of clerks and administrative officers worked around the clock, glued to their terminals that were positioned all over the walls of the spherical room, even the ceiling.
Kitana activated her magnetic boots as she walked through the command centre, with people hastily floating in every direction.
“Kitana, you’re back. Good work on subjugating the rebels in Zone 17, I doubt the rebellion would appear there again anytime soon.” A man with slick back hair and a proper formal suit floated around in mid-air, observing the holographic planet.
Kitana glared at the man, who chuckled. “Great to see all that rage being put to good use.”
“You said we would be reassigned to find Halyon, as well as the others. Why am I still being assigned to menial tasks in the outer zones!?” Kitana said softly, a wave of boiling anger seething beneath.
“We have not yet come to a full agreement with Rockhold City and Bee Strathon. You understand that both of them do not fall under the jurisdiction of the enforcers outside of the city. Things like this take time, we’re not a pirate gang.” The man calmly said.
“Then change it! For all, we know those are where the main nests of the rebellion are hiding! The last raid we did was very close to that area.” Kitana replied.
“Which we are. I’m assigning you as an undercover mission as promised before. You will pose as a freelance miner and collect information. If you find a lead on where our missing Keepers are, take it. Their exosuits contain highly classified technology, so you will need to retrieve them as well. If anyone outside of the Keepers catches wind…”
Kitana smiled for the first time in a long while. “I understand.”
“Most importantly, there are rumours of a ‘hero’ appearing underground. A few of our informants have spoken about interesting events occurring in Rockhold City. Start there first, but do not reveal yourself as a Keeper or enforcer in any way, shape or form. Even if you see a crime occurring, do not apprehend anyone.”
Kitana was taken aback. “Are you saying not to do my duty?”
The man sighed. “Kitana, you advocate too much for justice and retribution sometimes. I said not to apprehend but did not say that you could not keep a recording log of all the crimes you see being committed. If any of those recorded enter our city, you can guarantee they will be hunted down. Or when we take over Rockhold.”
“Now that’s more like it.” Kitana grinned. “When do I begin?”
On the first day, the fight lasted for almost eight hours.
Ceres ran away far enough, giving the slovesa time to regain his arm.
The slovesa could integrate any material into its body, but it needed time to stabilize it and gain proper control, so the high-class slovesa felt a sense of honour from Ceres, assuming that Ceres wanted to beat it in one shot at its full strength.
Despite the intense energy consumption, Ceres drank melted ice and snow and could somehow feel that the temple was channelling a small amount of energy directly towards his stomach. “Looks like the temple does not want people to die of starvation or dehydration during their fights.”
During the second day, however, Ceres had managed to crush its arm and tail within six hours before running away again, allowing it to regenerate.
The weird behaviour made the high-class slovesa wary, but it used the nearby rocks to recover the lost limbs regardless.
On the third day, the high-class slovesa lost all of its limbs and a good part of its upper body in 5 hours – it’s core suspiciously untouched.
The high-class slovesa now was extremely confused and scared of Ceres, knowing that Ceres could have killed him during the fight, but did not.
“WHY WON’T THE ALIEN GIVE ME AN HONORABLE DEATH!”
Despite that, it’s survival instincts kicked in, regenerating its body and limbs, though it took a bit longer.
On the fifth day, Ceres came back to challenge the high-class slovesa again, this time dominating the fight and making quick work of it within a short three hours.
With only his core left behind, the high-class slovesa began to despair, finally realizing with extreme clarity that he was being used as a training tool.
On the seventh day, just as Ceres came to challenge him again, the high-class slovesa immediately begged.
“Please, no more! Have you not humiliated me enough? Let me die in honour!” The high-class slovesa knelt down and prostrated itself before Ceres.
At some point during the seven days, the slovesa realized that Ceres was sentient and could understand its words, but conversely, the slovesa could not understand Ceres’s words. Ceres wondered if the multi-terminal he had on him could translate for him, but it couldn’t.
Who would even want to converse with the slovesa in the Loeric Empire when they were viewed as walking bags of exotic metal?
However, through a lot of hand motions and gestures, the high-class slovesa finally began to teach how to write the slovesa’s language. It drew out a glyph at a time in the snow, before saying the meaning of the glyph.
Ceres quickly memorized it as though he was memorizing a blueprint for an exosuit. He treated it like a wiring diagram, connecting a particular glyph to a particular fixed meaning and making a table-like dictionary in his own head.
“Hey, looks like learning languages isn’t that hard. Well, at least the basic version. It’s just pictures and emojis in the end right?” It felt like he was belittling the language in some way, but he pushed it to the back of his mind.
Within a day, Ceres had achieved basic proficiency in writing slovesa glyphs in the snow, so Ceres began to establish a proper conversation. Naturally, he was not anywhere near good enough to start writing entire essays on the slovesa language, but good enough to ask a few simple questions.
“How long have you been here?” Ceres asked through the glyphs.
“What? I just entered the temple a week ago. I would have reached the top of the ranking by now if it was not for your foreign entry!” The high-class slovesa scoffed.
Ceres scratched his head. It entering the temple a week ago was very much impossible, unless there were multiple entrances to the same ranking area. Did the slovesa have their own entry point? With the amount of spatial control the temple had, he did not find it too unreasonable.
“Which planet did you enter from?”
“This is what I wanted to ask you as well. How did an alien like you get onto Xerros, the holy planet of our slovesa? Are you a figment of imagination created by the temple? Is this an illusion?”
Ceres tried to draw out a simple diagram of the Strathon system with reference to the supermassive black hole in the middle of their shared galaxy. He drew out the circular orbits of the planets and indicated which planet he entered from.
“That’s exactly the location of Xerros! How is that possible? The temple guards would have never let an alien like you in, and at the start, you could not even defeat me fully!” The high-class slovesa’s confusion began to skyrocket.
Ceres started to feel like he was definitely getting somewhere with this information. It seemed like they both entered through the same temple, but at different times. So how was it possible that the two of them met? Unless…
“What rank are you?” Ceres asked.
“I’m ranked 101! I started at the bottom of the list.”
“How many fights have you done?”
“This… this….” The high-class slovesa struggled to answer. Ceres could sense the slovesa core was in turmoil, unable to recall how many fights it has done. Theoretically, this should be its first fight.
“I… no it’s not possible… I should have never fought before, but I can somehow sense that I have fought multiple times… I…” The high-class slovesa began to stutter more and more, while Ceres observed the slovesa core suddenly deforming into liquid before reforming back into a solid form through his H.T. mode.
Suddenly, a large external shockwave reverberated through the cave, passing by the high-class slovesa, causing the core to deform and reform in rapid cycles.
“NO…. I am of clan Uyelr… I will rise the ranks and reclaim our honour… I cannot lose here! Damn alien!” The high-class slovesa suddenly attacked, catching Ceres off-guard with its emotions swinging wildly.
“Fall, you insolent alien! Die and let me climb the ranks!” It roared as it threw punches at Ceres, but Ceres easily dodged all of them, having gotten used to it over the last few days.
Ceres quickly fought him, noticing that the high-class slovesa seemed to have lost all its memories of the last week – every trick Ceres pulled off landed easily on it as though it had seen it for the very first time. “What kind of weird temple shit is this?” Ceres asked himself.
This allowed Ceres to beat it in less than an hour, but Ceres did not finish the slovesa off, instead retreating away to allow it to regenerate.
“Why would I move on to the next stage without having the utmost confidence in smashing this specific slovesa? No doubt the next higher-ranked slovesa would be even stronger - I must train here as much as possible.” Yet another sinister grin appeared on his face, though the black mask hid it from the outside.
During the regeneration periods, Ceres meditated in his ‘hunger’ state, controlling its limits and fluctuating tendencies. He hoped to gain a controlled level of ‘hunger’ that allowed him to battle effectively, tapping into his body’s instinct.
No doubt the ‘hunger’ was a result of the black goo in his body – the sight of the Keeper’s spine being filled with the black goo made him aware that such a thing was living in his body right now. Was it sentient?
Ceres knew it fed off emotional energy, so he was surprised that he was also able to be invigorated by both his own emotions and the emotions of the high-class slovesa. The small amount of energy the temple sent to his stomach also alleviate his high energy consumption.
However, the reliance on emotional energy was far too dangerous for him during the fight. He had personally already experienced the drug-like high when killing someone earlier when he massacred the Chosen. He hypothesized that a person’s emotions were the strongest near death – hence the surge of energy and rush that he felt.
Did that mean in order for Ceres to gain substantial energy, he had to kill people or maybe even torture them?!
Ceres shook his head. He wasn’t about to let some mad scientist experiment dictate his personality. He needed to find another solution to the energy problem. If Ceres was ever alone on his own with zero humans or living beings around, he might just die from starvation or go feral completely. The galaxy and space were largely unpopulated empty spaces, so it was a very real possibility.
“The hunger can be alleviated by food as well, so emotional energy is not the only source, though it is the best one.” Even if he had an abundant food source, it may not be enough to supply his body. Was it possible to harvest some sort of alternative energy source to feed his body?
This sudden epiphany began to lead Ceres towards a new path of understanding his body. Luckily for him, there was another living being in this cave that did use an alternative energy source.
Ceres eyed the regenerating slovesa from afar, watching the core. “The slovesa core feeds off electromagnetic radiation. They literally thrive on radioactive sources. Maybe I could also absorb such energy? Or maybe I can run on electricity too?”
Ceres imagined his body having a power socket, but for some reason he recalled Ardan talking about the ‘anal’ nerval plug, causing him to imagine his power socket at the same location.
“No no no, not there. Maybe I’ll just soak in the star radiation or something.” Ceres even postulated that if he knew how to absorb and convert radiation into something useful, he might be able to even absorb energy attacks.
“Kinetic energy could be converted too, but one step at a time.” Would there come a point where Ceres was effectively a black hole of energy, absorbing every possible form of energy? He doubted it. The body enhancements were great and all, but they definitely had their limitations.
The problem now was there Ceres did not even know where to start. Did he have to dissect a slovesa core to figure it out? Even if he did, how would he even begin to modify himself? He tried changing the shape of the black-scale armour but failed to do so, so he did not have high hopes of being able to create brand-new functionalities for the black goo.
The next seven days passed the same, with Ceres getting even better at fighting the slovesa. Soon it became a trivial affair to easily dispatch the high-class slovesa within a short five minutes fight.
Ceres intended to continue training to perfect a one-hit kill but suddenly the high-class slovesa stabbed itself in the core, killing itself.
[Winner: #102. New updated rank: #101]
The world swirled around him again, causing him to stagger before he realized he was back in the stone monument room. He could see the updated list - his name was now above another name. Reading the glyphs now was easier with the basic proficiency he had gained.
“Looks like the one I fought was Grisao of clan Uyelr…” Ceres looked around the base of the monument, which was a pile of the slovesa bodies. He finally noticed Grisao’s body lying there, the core dormant, confirming his suspicion about what the temple was doing.
He was fighting copies of those ranked on the list.
Somehow, the temple was able to create perfect copies along with their memories and personalities. He suspected that when he tried to ask the copy of Grisao about the truth, the temple forcibly reset the copy to purge its confusion.
“Does this mean that I have been copied too?” Ceres wondered.
Just as he was thinking, he suddenly saw a name glowing and shifting up through the ranks. He read the glyph of the name, frowning. “Paska… ranked 89.” Looks like Paska chose to fight the higher difficulty and managed to jump the ranks.
Ceres, however, was not in a hurry to do anything. Seeing that none of the other expedition members’ names was on the list, it meant none of them was teleported to this room.
“I’ve done my part in rescuing the expedition, most likely the supply convoy would have already taken care of them. Now I can take it easy and train my ass off. I need to fully integrate into my body.”
With the existence of cyborgs of Paska, Ceres was now well aware that he was nowhere near being ‘strong’ if he reached the surface.
He had to prepare for the potential event in which he had to fight the entire enforcer unit and Keepers alone.
“I’m not ready now, and even if I managed to find my friends, we’ll just be exploited or manipulated again. Strength – I need power!”
He had to get as much training and practice as he could.
[Select your next difficulty.]
“The easiest.”
***
Kitana walked with a fierce attitude, her eyes piercing through everyone as they dodged out of the way. Wearing her Keeper exosuit emblazoned with the number ‘23’, she briskly walked through the Keeper’s headquarters, with people avoiding her gaze as she passed.
The main command centre had a holographic three-dimensional sphere modelling the planet Athen, along with displayed markers above points of interest at locations all throughout the nearby space. The surface of the planet on the hologram was divided into zones, coloured by different shades denoting their current crime level for the past month.
A plethora of clerks and administrative officers worked around the clock, glued to their terminals that were positioned all over the walls of the spherical room, even the ceiling.
Kitana activated her magnetic boots as she walked through the command centre, with people hastily floating in every direction.
“Kitana, you’re back. Good work on subjugating the rebels in Zone 17, I doubt the rebellion would appear there again anytime soon.” A man with slick back hair and a proper formal suit floated around in mid-air, observing the holographic planet.
Kitana glared at the man, who chuckled. “Great to see all that rage being put to good use.”
“You said we would be reassigned to find Halyon, as well as the others. Why am I still being assigned to menial tasks in the outer zones!?” Kitana said softly, a wave of boiling anger seething beneath.
“We have not yet come to a full agreement with Rockhold City and Bee Strathon. You understand that both of them do not fall under the jurisdiction of the enforcers outside of the city. Things like this take time, we’re not a pirate gang.” The man calmly said.
“Then change it! For all, we know those are where the main nests of the rebellion are hiding! The last raid we did was very close to that area.” Kitana replied.
“Which we are. I’m assigning you as an undercover mission as promised before. You will pose as a freelance miner and collect information. If you find a lead on where our missing Keepers are, take it. Their exosuits contain highly classified technology, so you will need to retrieve them as well. If anyone outside of the Keepers catches wind…”
Kitana smiled for the first time in a long while. “I understand.”
“Most importantly, there are rumours of a ‘hero’ appearing underground. A few of our informants have spoken about interesting events occurring in Rockhold City. Start there first, but do not reveal yourself as a Keeper or enforcer in any way, shape or form. Even if you see a crime occurring, do not apprehend anyone.”
Kitana was taken aback. “Are you saying not to do my duty?”
The man sighed. “Kitana, you advocate too much for justice and retribution sometimes. I said not to apprehend but did not say that you could not keep a recording log of all the crimes you see being committed. If any of those recorded enter our city, you can guarantee they will be hunted down. Or when we take over Rockhold.”
“Now that’s more like it.” Kitana grinned. “When do I begin?”
