Chương 151: Complications

June ran towards the flying Castellan. His shell moved at startling speed; his legs struck the sandstone with a quickening rhythm, and his feet crushed the floor beneath him as they fell and kicked up debris as they rose. Within his final bounds, he reached for the hem of Marcel's shirt when a sharp, sudden, tinny ring cut through the colosseum's stunned silence, and Marcel's body jerked to a dead stop mid-air, hovering a foot off the sand as though caught by an invisible hand.

Tensile threads of pale light wound around him like a cocoon, holding him somewhat rigid. June's outstretched arm caught nothing but air. He turned his body to avoid the cocoon of light, and his unrelenting stride broke into a slide as his hefty momentum carried him with an aggressive force, smashing him into the colosseum's wall and rattling him within his shell.

His ears rang, his eyes saw two, a steady stream of blood ran down his nose, and a taste of iron graced his tongue as his woven organs wrenched before he threw up a torrent of blood against the internal walls of his shell and over himself. He swayed back and forth, trying to steady himself.

'I should get into the habit of reinforcing my body with Will…' He shut his eyes and focused on recovering his internal wounds. Inside the shell, he had created himself some space to separate himself from his grown flesh, but the sudden force of his stop, without using Will to reinforce his body or aura to soften the blow, caused his head and body to slam against the shell's internal walls without being able to brace his real body.

June opened his eyes and traced back the visible threads of light to the Branchmaster, who stood atop the bleacher railing, one hand thrust forward, his fatigued composure gone entirely. Gone too was the stammering man who couldn't finish a sentence in his own office; in his place stood someone whose voice carried the flat, absolute certainty of a person who expected to be obeyed.

"WARDEN, STOP!" For a moment, all June could do was stare, first at the threads of light holding his opponent aloft, then at the man who'd conjured them. How could a man who wasn't even a Dreamer speak in such a way that it shook him to his core?

'I wasn't— I was just trying to—' The thought died before it reached his mouth. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Of course this looked wrong. He'd shattered the man's ribs, thrown him twenty feet, and was now sprinting at his unconscious body with his arms out. From where the Branchmaster stood, there was exactly one story that made sense, and June was the villain in it.

The crowd noise had gone from a low murmur to something sharper — gasps, a few scattered shouts, someone already yelling for a healer. June's helm swiveled from Marcel to the Branchmaster and back again, and he found himself, for possibly the first time in longer than he could remember, genuinely frustrated rather than merely confused. He stammered. Was he in a position to explain himself? He opened his mouth to explain and immediately remembered whose voice would come out of it. Not his, but Warden's voice.

He wasn't good at explaining things either; he was the type to dig himself deeper by trying to explain himself, and he knew that well. He felt scared, overwhelmed, worried, and began to wish in that very moment that he had never had such a power. Everyone he had hurt so far had a justifiable reason to be hurt, but Marcel was just overzealous; he simply challenged June to a spar, a simple duel to gauge his ability.

It never occurred to June how powerful he truly was; he felt like the simulation was his exaggerated peak, and that itself was a fantasy, but now he was beginning to understand, not just see, his cruel reality. What the simulation imposed on him felt like an unnoticeable handicap. For most of it, he never even knew of the simulation's handicap — even after he learned of such a handicap, he assumed it was a negligible one.

He didn't even use Will when he hit Marcel; it was a reaction that he managed to subdue before using the force had gotten used to. Even though he held back more than he did within the simulation, the shell shattered… the distance Marcel flew and the feeling of his bones crushing against the shell's arm as it plowed through undisturbed startled him. If he didn't stop himself midway, Marcel would have died, and the body itself would have torn apart.

The devastating force of a Dreamer was something June never understood, but now that the gap between Dreamer and Aspirant had been shown to him. If a fraction of his strength could nearly kill a powerful Aspirant, what would happen if he accidentally used force against a mundane? What would happen if he stopped holding back?

'Am I even human anymore?'