Chapter 5 : The might of the fallen

Royal Military College, South East Asia.

The hot morning sun beat down on the expansive parade grounds as the newest crop of freshmen cadets assembled in precise formations. Raza stood rigidly at attention, sweat already beading on his brow beneath the peaked cap as he listened to the grizzled principal's opening address bark out over the loudspeakers.

"...You few, proud souls have been deemed worthy to carry on the legacy of this Royal Military College," the old warhorse growled, his chest laden with rows of medals and commendations. "The path set before you shall be one of unrelenting hardship and tribulation. You will be broken down to your core essence, then reforged into elite instruments of warfare and defenders of sovereignty!"

From the corner of his eye, Raza caught the unmistakable slouched posture and eyeroll of his best friend and childhood brother, Loman. He risked a subtle sideways glance and hissed under his breath, "Pssst. Loman."

The young man of the cloth quirked an eyebrow but remained obstinately facing forward at the principal's dais. Raza pressed on in an urgent whisper.

"You really did it, you stubborn monkey."

That earned him the slightest of headshakes, though he could sense the amusement flickering behind Loman's eyes. "A bet is a bet," the robed cadet murmured in an undertone. "Don't try chickening out now. You challenged me to join this militaristic madhouse - well, here I am standing right beside you."

Loman's lips twitched in a brief smirk. "So make sure you pay your due when it comes calling. Don't you dare renounce on our pact."

Raza grimaced, reminded of the unfortunate wager that had set these events into motion. He and Loman had been best friends since childhood - brothers in all but blood, despite their wildly divergent upbringings.

While Raza hailed from a long, decorated line of career military officers and soldiers, Loman's lineage traced back to a prestigious family of traveling reverends and religious preachers. In their younger days, they had dreamed of one day following in their respective families' footsteps - Raza to the battlefields, and Loman to the pulpit as a fire-and-brimstone FAITH television celebrity.

But in a bout of masculine posturing and overconfidence, Raza had arrogantly challenged his friend to put his convictions to the ultimate test...by joining him at the notoriously hardcore academy. To the cadet's everlasting surprise and chagrin, the stubborn aspirant preacher had not only accepted the dare, but followed through to the letter.

And now here they stood, bound to the rigid discipline and spartan lifestyle by the sacrament of a mutually-agreed upon wager, neither willing to be the first to buckle under the strain.

"Your dream was to preach around the world on tv, right?" Raza couldn't resist one last rationalization in an undertone, knowing the words were useless even as he spoke them. "Is throwing that ambition away for some juvenile bet really worth it?"

Loman's eyes remained locked forward, But Raza could see the wry curl at the corners of his lips.

"Please," he scoffed with a hint of his trademark rapier wit. "The chance to literally spend years stepping all over you and watching that overinflated military ego get relentlessly battered into humility? It'll be more than worth the ordeal, trust me."

The principal's address reached a fever pitch, and Loman snapped to razor-sharp attention as the grizzled old soldier bellowed the Academy's motto.

"For there is no higher calling, no greater sacrifice, than to give one's life and sacred honor for the eternal preservation of sovereignty! Who among you has such fortitude? Such unshakable strength of body, mind, and spirit?"

Loman's hand snapped up in a crisp salute, his spine straight as a rod of steel. Yet Raza caught the merest ghost of a roguish wink flickering across his friend's features as their destinies became irrevocably intertwined.

"This fresh-faced idiot, sir!"

.........…

The broad training hall echoed with Raza's solitary footfalls as he entered. Sunken pits and obstacles dotted the gargantuan chamber, alongside racks of wicked-looking blades and other archaic weaponry lining the walls. In the center was a simple circular carpet of sumptuous fur, clearly meant for meditation and spiritual practices.

Raza crossed to the carpet and lowered himself into a cross-legged seated position. His eyes shone with determined focus as he awaited Sinar's arrival to begin unlocking the path to true 'might.'

As if summoned by his mere thought, the demoness queen coalesced from the surrounding shadows like a tendril of living smoke. Sinar's dark lips quirked in an approving smile as she circled the waiting warrior.

"I trust you have rested well and recovered sufficiently from our...previous exertions?" Her tone held a subtle edge of sadistic amusement. "You'll need your full stamina for the grueling trials ahead."

Raza offered a terse nod, his jaw tensing. Despite the lingering aches from Sinar's 'tests' of his physical conditioning, his eyes burned with determination.

"Good." Sinar paced around him with languid, predatory strides. "Then let us begin properly opening your eyes to the true nature of might. Tell me, ape-child - what is your understanding of ultimate physical power?"

The warrior frowned in thought. "From my experience, the pinnacle of a human's strength and physical abilities is achieved through rigorous training - honing one's body to its maximum potential through resistance and endurance."

"A reductionist view, but not inaccurate on a fundamental level," Sinar purred in approval. "Indeed, your kind's vaunted Olympic weightlifters and such could be considered exemplars of your limited biological ceiling, having refined their musculature and fortitude to the utmost limits."

Her black lips split in a cruel smile, revealing a hint of dagger-like fangs. "But might...true, boundless might is so much more than simply whatever paltry maximum your physical forms can achieve through training alone."

Raza arched an inquisitive eyebrow, intrigued despite himself. Sinar's smile widened a fraction as she sensed his yearning interest.

"Might is the ability to systematically shatter and transcend those fragile limitations - both internal and external. It is the path to quite literally rewriting your body's fundamental rules of maximum strain, force generation, and resilience."

She spread her hands, causing purple-black flames to blossom forth in roiling, hypnotic contortions between her palms.

"There are 7 levels of might. The first 3 levels of cultivation merely fortify your physical vessel - granting tremendous but finite enhancements to strength, speed, durability and suchlike. Elevating you to beyond body physics of mass and hardness." One taloned finger rose to waggle in a chiding fashion. "But the more advanced might allow you to obliterate even those ballooned parameters into infinite realms of potential."

Raza's eyes widened slightly at the implications, his mind roiling. To become powerful enough to shrug off any mortal weapon, endure ground zero of explosive detonations, crush solid steel with one's bare hands.

 "At the 4th masteries of might, you can even externalize your physical potency as a tangible force," Sinar explained, dark eyes glittering with sadistic delight. "Willing into existence all-encompassing defensive veils of brute force to render you immune to whatever paltry arms and ordnance your kind can conjure." Bulletproof. Every child dreams of achieving.

One clawed hand closed into a fist, extinguishing the eldritch flames as

effortlessly as snuffing a candle. When it opened once more, a single vortex of distorted space shimmered above her palm, exerting a detectable gravitational force that caused the fur beneath Raza's feet to stir and rustle.

The air practically crackled with tangible potential as Sinar leveled her unholy gaze upon Raza in an unmistakable challenge.

"So tell me, slave - are you prepared to be unmade and remolded into something transcendent of your pitiful human frailties? Your path to ascension begins here..."

The cavernous training chamber seemed to contract around Raza as Sinar idly waved one taloned hand. A small glass vial appeared in her upturned palm, containing a viscous purple liquid that seemed to almost pulse with an inner phosphorescence.

"Consume this alchemic potion," the demoness queen commanded, her obsidian eyes glittering with keen anticipation. "And prepare yourself for the exquisite raptures of agony that shall herald your ascension."

Raza eyed the ominous concoction warily as Sinar unstoppered the vial and extended it towards him with a flourish. He could sense the inherent power and peril roiling within that seemingly innocuous draft.

"The prime fundamentals underpinning one's mastery of might are an indomitable force of will...and the focused projection of immutable intent." Sinar's full lips curved in a cruel smile that failed to warm her fathomless eyes even fractionally. "You must be unmade, rent asunder to your core essence, before that kernel can be reforged into something transcendent of your mortal human weaknesses."

The warrior's jaw tensed, but he accepted the vial from Sinar's outstretched hand with grim resolution. If overcoming his frail human limits and achieving true power meant subjecting himself to unimaginable torments.

...so be it.

Raza knocked back the potion in one defiant gulp. The moment the viscous liquid hit the back of his throat, he bent double with an anguished bellow of purest torment. White-hot tendrils of agony suffused his entire body in searing excruciation, as if every individual vein, muscle fiber, and cell had become a molten filament of unholy flame.

"Ennnnnndure it, reveled in the raptureeeee," Sinar's voice seemed to drift in from some remote, muffled abyss amidst the tumult ravaging Raza's senses. "Your feeble human mind has been conditioned to interpret such sensations solely as afflictions to be resisted. You must overcome, transcend that base conditioning! Lean into the pain, let it scour away your mortal frailties and limitations!"

Raza's jaw was clenched so tightly he could feel his teeth grinding against each other in his molars. His eyeballs seemed ready to burst from their sockets, every nerve ending screaming in spiritual torment unlike anything he could have conceived.

Yet with a supreme force of will - honed by a lifetime of military conditioning - he managed to segregate some infinitesimal shard of his consciousness from the tempest of torment.

Almost against his will, he found himself following Sinar's blasphemous directives, struggling to perceive this incalculable suffering not as agony to endured...but as a separate, novel experience wholly divorced from such mortal concepts as pain or pleasure.

Like a blind man having his other senses recompensed to hypersensitivity, Raza focused the whole of his attentions inward, acknowledging yet detaching from the tidal forces of affliction wracking his corporeal shell. And in the midst of that churning furnace, he became aware of a different undercurrent - a tranquil, azure trickle of refreshing vitalic energy winding through his newly-heightened spiritual sensibilities like a balm of reaffirming vigor and crystalline lucidity.

"Channel that flow, that gestalt and cohesion," Sinar's words seemed to materialize directly within his consciousness, sidestepping the impotent distractions of his bodily torment. "Envision it accumulating in your core, compressing and coalescing like a rippling whirlpool of limitless force potential just waiting to be unleashed..."

With his last lingering dregs of concentration, Raza immersed himself fully within the soothing currents of that inner vitalic tide. He could feel it ebbing and pulsing in synchronous harmony with his every exhalation, gradually clarifying into a lambent nimbus of blue-white energy swirling within the core of his abdomen.

The eddies of power tightened and compressed, solidifying into an orb of scintillating quintessence spinning with steadily increasing revolutions until it approached a tangible state of plasma-like density and solidity. Raza's vision whited out in blinding exultation as the sphere seemed to burst outward, only to coalesce into an ironclad funnel of incomprehensible energy spiraling up and down the full length of his body in a continuous vortex of scouring tumult.

When his senses finally realigned, Sinar's beatific cry rang out in triumphant elation.

"You have taken your first step, dear slave! Rejoice...as the path to true, unbridled might beckons you into its rapturous embrace!"

Through vision obscured by haze, sweat, and the scorched rictus of his own exertion, Raza somehow sensed the demoness queen's silent anticipation for his response. With protesting vocal cords rasped nearly raw by his own tortured bellows and shrieks, he managed to choke out a single, existential query.

"H-how...long..." He swallowed compulsively, mouth dry as sand. "How many..more of these..."

Sinar's unholy laughter was a rapturous cackle that seemed to make the very air reverberate.

"Why, this trial was merely the foremost footstep through the gateway to your harsh metamorphosis," she purred once her macabre mirth had subsided. "We shall continue refining your induction into the chrysalis of might tomorrow...and the next day after...and the day after that still, for as long as it takes to render your apotheosis complete and indelible."

Raza felt an icy frission insinuate itself down his spine like the chill of the grave itself.

"The most transcendently gifted amongst my warriors have required ten days of continuous, unrelenting agony to be reborn into their final, exalted forms," Sinar said with sadistic relish, clearly delighting in Raza's sudden dawning horror. "While for the...less fortuitous...well, let us merely say that their ordeals have endured for years untold before achieving even a semblance of indelible power."

Despair welled up inside the warrior like an impacted vambrace as he realized the unfathomable depths of torment and unmaking that yet lay ahead on the path to his profane ascension. But he knew there could be no turning back now - not if he wished to obtain the might required to defy and overcome his ignominious enslavement.

There could be no retreat, no surrender. Only the unyielding, indomitable projection of his stalwart will...and the embracing of every degrading torture fate contrived to unmake him anew.