The Strongest Thief

" H-Hurts! It hurts!"

It felt like every inch of his body was slowly torn off, no matter how much time had passed this hellish feeling seemed to last forever. He kept screaming and screaming but nothing came out. The screams were just in his head. Everything was white, no sounds, no other colors but a whole world made of white seemed to stretch out endlessly. He couldn't even feel his body. He couldn't move, he couldn't breathe.

" Please! Please! Please! Make it stop! "

Nothing could hear him, nothing could make the pain stop, but soon he realized the worst thing that happened to him was not the pain. Times passed, one second, two seconds, to a year and it kept going on. Time made the searing pain become a sweet sensation. His body was no longer in pain or rather… used to it. He was so used to it to the point he began to cherish it. Now it was the only thing that made him feel like he was alive. Time went by there, in front of him nothing but endless white. ' When would it end?' He asked. When could he get out of this place?

" ... Shi..z .. Shi..u"

He tried to call a name, of a person he missed, someone he once chased after. Her face, her smile, they were still vivid in his memory. After a long… long time the only thing stuck in his mind was her.

" She ... left ..."

She left him, those thoughts kept screaming in his head.

" No! She —She had to do it, otherwise, everything would have ended. Haha... That...That's right... it was necessary. She had no other choices."

He told himself that although he was just an inferior man, he tried his best, he chose to sacrifice for the world, he saved two people. He should made her proud.

" Yes yes. It was only natural for her to choose him. Without him nobody could go home, he was the most important person. AHaha..ha."

He recalled when she came to visit, he noticed a necklace around her neck, a necklace with a very beautiful glittering stone, it very well matched her figure. Was it a gift from that guy? It was a very rare gem, which is only used to propose. Once while walking in the black market of the city, he saw a smuggler selling it. He tried not to think too much about the necklace back then but now he couldn't get those thoughts out of his mind. Maybe she and that guy were ... If not, why did she wear it?

" No no, she had no choice, no choice ..."

He kept convincing himself, but the jealousy, the anger, and the feeling of betrayal, they didn't go away. Normally they could have been controlled by what called reason. But in this dimension, where time passed almost infinitely. How long had he been there? A month? A year? No, it took a lot longer. It took so long to drive a person crazy. This was the scariest thing in the world. No living creature could bear what he was bearing without going crazy. It was much more terrifying than pain, more terrifying than death. He never thought that the fact that he was conscious, the fact that he existed was so scary. It passed almost indefinitely. A creature could have taken it for the first few days but after a month? A year? A thousand years? A million years? A billion years? A billion upon billion years…. could any mind survive that endless time? The answer was almost impossible. They would turn into that of plants and all thoughts would eventually shattered. In his case, a miracle happened, out of billions upon billions upon billions… of creatures, only a few fell into this state, and out of billions and billions of billions ... of the organism that fell into this state had only one, adapted, be one with it.

Didn't know what this place was called? He called it his 'dream'. Was it just in his head or was it a whole new dimension? That kind of thing didn't matter anymore. In fact, nothing mattered anymore. Nearly all of his arguments and all of his senses were killed by the infinity. He couldn't even remember who he was, all his memories faded and almost completely vanished. He knew he existed, he knew he must find a way out of this place, he knew there was growing anger and hatred, It kept growing until it became boundless.

After an almost endless amount of time, he found a way. It was just like a long sleep. It was not a parallel line but like a line asymptotic to reality, it cannot be measured, all we knew was that it would eventually reach a point. He found a way to wake up at that point, the amount of time he slept could not be measured and could not be calculated because it was almost endless. It was an infinite amount of time, but it also had an end.

So he closed his eyes, after many, many years he trained to sleep and woke up as he wanted. He found a way to regain consciousness under certain conditions. His condition was to only wake up when this 'dream' was over.

Finally after a long time over billions… of years he finally woke up from the dream, but the reality of his lasted less than a millisecond divided by billions… Thus he continued to sink into the 'dream', then he decided to sleep again then woke up, then slept then woke up…. Just like that, he fell into a state of continuous awakening and sleeping. Each sleep was almost infinite and each awakens lasted only a moment, repeating like that over and over again. He could finally return to reality.

He was in a dark dark place, he was naked. He could feel a sharp pain all over his body but now these pains, they were nothing. Something was in his sight. It took a lot of time to rummage through his memories to learn that it was a monster. It looked like a giant lizard with many heads, porcupine-like spikes, and long sharp teeth. It immediately rushed to him.

" How? How could I kill this… I don't have anything. "

In his dream, the image of this monster was everywhere. He could clearly see every outline of its body. It was too big, he couldn't be stronger than it, his body was too slow to avoid its attack, so what should he do? He couldn't think of an answer at that moment but it didn't matter, since time was his ally, he had almost endless time to think.

Before the monster could touch him, it suddenly stopped. Its whole body twitched and stopped functioning, it was dead. Its eyes opened up as if surprised because it didn't understand how such a weak enemy could kill it. He walked past the monster's corpse and limpingly walked toward the darkness.