At first, he didn't want to want to turn around and indulge in Raisen's games. But, something pulled him back. Whether it be fate, luck, or just a slight bit of chaos making it's way into Fen's life once again and manipulating his choices, something made him stop and turn.
Raisen wiped at his face with his two hands, audibly cursing his own greed that had nearly chased away what might possibly be his last chance to obtain a student. Carried away in the possibilities that a Vitul could bring to his own skills as a Vitality user, he had nearly pushed Fen away.
"I was lying, before." His voice suddenly became much more sincere, and there was much less energy in his habitual gestures while he spoke.
"I doubt you were able to notice because of what happened when you first arrived, but the Rift should have already cleared your pathways. One of the benefits of using Rift transportation, I suppose, is cleansing your body of any impurities. Whether that's on purpose or not isn't up to me to tell you."
Fen frowned.
"I noticed my body felt lighter, but I didn't notice anything else besides that." He stretched his palm out in front of him, squeezing it in the air. He didn't notice any changes in his body besides feeling inwardly cleaner. If he paid close attention to his body, he would have to say that he felt a lot less sluggish, although he had never thought that he felt sluggish before he entered the Rift.
He glanced back up from his palm to the old man, eyes narrowing. "I swear, if you're playing a trick on me after claiming to be sincere-"
Raisen's tired voice answered.
"I'm not. You don't have to trust me, but I hope that you can understand that I am truly sorry for my previous actions. I got greedy, even though I promised myself..." He mumbled the last part, as if he wasn't really speaking to Fen but to someone far beyond the Void.
The old man raised his hand, pointing at the walls, and continued speaking after collecting himself. As if answering his call, the arrays and inscriptions on the wall glowed even brighter, collecting the light around the area.
"Thanks to the VPF's efforts in constructing a facility capable of supporting the training of the Chosen and Opfer, this environment is probably the best place for you right now. Your body has grown for so many years, too many, while a part of you has cried out for the power of Mana and Vitality, demanding more power to flow through your unfulfilled veins.
"Now that it has that access, your body needs time to adapt to the changes. Romiera wasn't built in a day, and neither will your body. I don't know if the change will happen gradually over time, or if it'll all come at once, but when it completes you should be capable manipulating Vitality naturally, even without my training.
"But with me as your teacher, you can combine both your natural instincts as a Vitul and my experience at using that energy. I'm willing to give you the opportunity to learn, if you'd have me as your teacher."
Here came the choice that Fen had to make; either to trust Raisen's word and begin taking lessons, or leave and hope that he could find something better suited in different Lessons.
A grimace appeared on his face. There was very little evidence that supported the old man's words about Fen being a Vitul; it appeared extremely convenient that his body was supposed to experience a gradual change throughout his time in the Void.
However, it was true that he had felt some change in his body, although small. At the same time, that could just be the constant pump of adrenaline that hadn't stopped since he was taken into the Guardian Program.
A deep sigh came out of him, lasting for a couple moments. At the end of the day, the evil that he knew was a much better option than the unknown, a philosophy proven by the Void practically glaring at him. If he had to choose between facing a gun and being thrown into the Void, the decision was already made for him. His body would physically be incapable of stepping into that hellscape.
The choice between Raisen's Lesson and a different option was a much easier choice in comparison.
"Alright. There probably won't be many other people right?" A nod from Raisen prompted him to continue, "then I'll get more specialized teaching too... Fine. I'll keep my end of the deal."
The previously energy-depleted old man was gone, replaced again my crazily motivated Raisen, like an internal switch was flipped or some other drastic change had occurred in the old man's body.
"Yeah!" He roared, and chairs started to fly around the room, bouncing off the walls and floor. It didn't look like he was going to stop anytime soon either, and the muscles that Fen overlooked when he first met Raisen began to bulge as he applied more strength in his (joyful?) display of emotion.
In the middle of such a scene of destruction, or rather just a display of strength as none of the thrown objects broke for some reason (He assumed it was just because everything was made from stone in the Training Hall), was Fen, standing perfectly still so as to not disturb the excited Raisen.
"Haa. Haa, haaaa."
"...Are you done?" asked Fen.
"Not yet!" And with that, he grabbed a chair unfortunate enough to have landed close to the panting old man, and threw it across the room where it landed with an audible crash. Still unbroken however, causing him to inwardly appreciate their creator's skills.
"Now I'm done."
'Maybe I should've left when I had the chance. Crap, I've already lost the opportunity to decline.' Fen grieved in his heart for making a potentially terrible decision. Alas, this was the path he chose.
After the old man caught his breath, he gave him the directions for what to do after he used the Shop and received his Lesson. Surprisingly, there wasn't a whole lot he needed to do. After using the interface to connect to the VPF's shop, the only thing he had to do was hold the palm of his hand on the Lesson, and then the interface dissolved into a small sea of light and started circling around his hand.
When the lights were reabsorbed by the carved rock from which the interface originated, Fen noticed a glowing mark on his hand. There was a golden colored sapling on his wrist, but unlike a tattoo, the sapling glowed in the same light as the interface, passively pulsing and revealing itself in the darkness.
After observing the mark for a few moments, Fen left the Training Hall, saying farewell to Raisen inside.
Heading towards the room dedicated to Squad 42, he reviewed what he had gained overall from seeing Raisen, and what he learned.
From what he could recall, everything went something like this:
He was a Vitul, a being naturally attuned with Vitality, but because he was born on Earth while the natural Mana levels were horrendously low from the absence of higher presences such as the Virtues, he lost access to the abilities that he should have had. Traveling through the Rift had fixed the issues of his lost abilities, but he would need time to accumulate enough energy to make up for 17 years of growth without enough Vitality and until then, his abilities would not surface. Until then, by learning how to manipulate Vitality he could gain both the benefit of learning under Raisen as his student and the natural instincts of a Vitul.
Questions still floated around his mind whenever Fen thought about his status as a Vitul. 'Am I a race? Is my entire family like me, but are also locked away from their body's potential?' He could be considered lucky if you considered that if being a Vitul was genetic, he was given an easy way to regain his abilities.
If you ignored the death of Malique, that is.
However, at the same time, he suspected that Vitul's had a much more complex origin than simple genetics. Vitality itself was not like Mana, a simple energy, but a more complex power capable of being influenced by will. However, fully comprehending the nature of Vitality with such a brief description would require him to begin using the energy, which might not even begin until his body fully recovered from lacking the necessary 'nutrients' to grow. Only then could he begin to unravel the secrets around Vitality, or when Raisen decided to tell him (The former seemed much easier after getting a glimpse at Raisen's eccentric personality).
Other knowledge he gained was the basics of Mana, and although he didn't fully understand how such energy could be used to produce such effects such as shooting lightning, he would learn it eventually if he truly planned to survive the next Task. If he was matched against a Chosen...
Shaking his head, Fen cleared his head from such thoughts as they wouldn't help him. The only thing he could do was hope that such a thing would not happen, but prepare for such a scenario. Wise men prepared for the worst while lesser men would simply complain and then curse their luck when the worst happened to them. Although, some things couldn't be prepared against such as Fen's abduction and introduction to the Virtue Procural Foundation.
****
Terrence was having a terrible time. Assigned as a guard to Rift-178, he entered the Rift much earlier than Fen and the rest of the youths and had to help secure the facility for several months until they arrived.
During that time, he met many other guards in the same position as him with not much happening in life, joining the VPF's Guardian Program in the hopes of accruing enough money to afford a stable life after the Foundation changed the outside world. With the Guardians, they wouldn't have to worry about their safety nor would they have to put their lives on the line. However, in order to achieve those dreams, they first had to win the battle against the encroaching Void.
Contrary to what most Opfer believed (mostly from their own ignorance and not from any fault of their own) the Void was not a simple dimension. Its time axis spun much faster than the Earth's, but that was a side effect from the amount of energy resonating within the dimension, which spawned dangerous creatures capable of harnessing that energy for their own use. The uncountable amount of inscriptions carved into the walls within and surrounding the facility used the Void's own energy to hide from those creatures, but no system was perfect.
Stragglers still managed to find their way through the concealment barriers, and leading to the creation of Terrence's job as a guard. His role was not to keep the Opfer and Chosen inside the facility, but to keep the Void Spawn out and away from interfering in the program.
"Disgusting creatures." Around the time that Fen was exiting from the Training Hall, Terrence was wiping a spawn's unique black blood from his axe. At his feet laid a creature that emanated such a terrifying pressure in death that imagining its strength in life would cause uncontrollable goosebumps to arise on any bystanders skin.
The spawn had no eyes, most of them didn't. They generally had leather-like skin capable of stopping a blade before it could even penetrate their skin, with long limbs that were thin enough to give the illusion that they were weak, but the muscles packed within were dense enough to deliver lethal blows to unsuspecting prey. Some Void spawn were humanoid with two limbs and legs and a skeletal appearance; they were weaker, but made up for it in intelligence. The majority of Void spawn were much more animalistic, with varying shapes and sizes and strengths.
The one at Terrence's feet had eight limbs, four on each side to support a massive pale and skeletal body compacted with dense muscles. Each of it's legs ended with large foot pads, with painfully white claws poking out of each foot. It's skeletal structure appeared to be in fierce competition with its body, threatening to tear of it's own skin and forming deformed lumps over its limbs. Tall spires erupted from its backside as pieces of it's spine successfully tore out and formed blades that crushed any threat from above. A heavy tail came from it's rear, with fins forming along its shape. Why such a creature carried fins was unknown, and Terrence didn't care enough to investigate.
Even in death, its wrinkled skin showed the black blood pumping through its body, coming out of the toothy maw on the front of it's eyeless head. If the body was dissected, the 'head' would be found to be almost completely empty, with the maw taking up almost all of the space and thick muscles taking up the rest of the bony structure to give strength to the spawn's jaw. There was no brain inside the creature's anatomy, leaving a mystery as to how the creature functioned and acted.
"I got one down here!" yelled Terrence, drawing the attention of the other guards assigned to this shift.
The rustling of their armor made soft clinks as they hurried over to his position, eyeing the still twitching corpse of the Void spawn.
One guard, ironically named Giant despite his small size, made an appreciative whistle as he appraised the size of the creature.
"Damn. That skin looks plenty tough. Wonder if I could get a couple of swings with that axe of yours?" Giant asked, greedily looking at the battle axe carried on Terrence's shoulder.
"No," he grunted.
"Too expensive to replace if you break it, if you can even carry it." Giant's tiny arms quivered in mock outrage, this one of several attempts to snag his treasured axe. Each time he tried a different method, offering money, flattery, ect, but none worked. That did not stop him from trying again each time though.
Not that he would ever succeed . The glowing inscriptions carved into the axe were a testimony of its value, and the large bleeding corpse the group of guards gathered around was proof of its effectiveness. In Terrence's hands, the axe had served the group of guards well in removing any pests that managed to sneak into the grounds around the facility.
He squatted down on his knees before he started picking at the bone spikes protruding from the spawn's back, appreciating their sharpness.
"How much longer until shift ends?"
A woman, Delila, answered his question.
"About another couple hours."
The group of five collectively groaned when they heard the answer to his question; there wasn't much to do on the job when there was no Void spawn to remove besides staring into the empty Void, knowing that various creatures were hidden in its dark depths.
'Hidden everywhere, really. Hell, there could be a whole swarm a couple meters ahead of me and I wouldn't even know because of the damned Void,' he mused, popping a sweet lollipop into his mouth so he would something sweet to taste while roaming around.
Standing back up, he stretched his tired muscles and tapped the group to follow him around to inspect other sections of the facility grounds.
Thankfully, or perhaps unfortunately, the group didn't encounter other spawn while on patrol and the only thing the shift accomplished was nudging the guards a step closer to death via boredom. Even that was better than dying inside of the Void, however.