The Goddess' Perspective:
The Child has progressed significantly.
I have no doubts that he would be a force to reckon with throughout the rest of Terra. I had been out of touch with the other Tribes, but I doubt the other Gods or Goddesses have cultivated a warrior like him.
I sighed; rage truly worked wonders.
I stared down at the Child's shape flying through the battlefield laid out below me.
He was truly impressive. He was close to mastering my hand-to-hand methods, and his swordsmanship was starting to become deadly to even my Ocean God summons.
Although they were not as powerful as the real thing, this was still a more than impressive feat for a human child.
I also believe the Child to be about sixteen or seventeen now. I attempted to calculate how long had passed inside this realm using the subject's concept of time, and it was very confusing.
However, eventually, I grasped the concept and boiled down that we had spent around four to five years inside this realm. The amount meant very little to me but seemed to cheer up the small Child I was training.
The Child had done his due diligence. He had trained hard and could most likely eliminate any threat he encountered. I was confident in this fact, except for when I thought about how the God Sources could have changed throughout the years.
After all, why wouldn't they be more powerful too?
We, however, hadn't even started on the Child's God Source training.
This training wasn't to be done in my realm, though.
"Why not?" pestered the Child.
"Because voltaic assimilation is very different and even more painful than the first assimilation you experienced. You will need the cavern." I stated boldly. Even with his Soulflame regenerating his body, he won't handle the pain in this realm. In the cavern, maybe.
"Once you are fully assimilated," I continued, "I want you to meditate and cultivate your now voltaic energy and become experienced with it before you begin on your journey."
The Child turned to look at me. He had been inspecting his energy pool and Soulflame before staring intensely towards me.
"Goddess, why are you helping me? I want to bring the demise of this world if I can. Why would you want that?" Cato asked sincerely.
"Well, Child," I briefly thought to myself, why did I want to help him? I quickly came up with an answer.
"What kind of Goddess would I be if I was not to avenge my children who so dearly looked up to me?" I replied with a hint of a smile.
The boy nodded and seemed easily pleased with my answer. I nodded back and said one last thing.
"If you ever need to communicate with me, send your thoughts while gripping the crystal. I will be able to hear them."
With that, I vanished.
~~~
Cato Emberson's Perspective:
I appeared back in the town square. Instead of bodies littering the floors, there were now just pools of blood without any corpses. I didn't think much of the scene and began to make my way towards where the cavern would be.
As I started walking towards the cavern, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a pool of blood on the ground. I rushed over to the clear water to inspect myself.
My clothes made for an eleven to twelve-year-old had ripped in multiple spots and were now excruciatingly too tight over my body.
My features had become scarily defined, and I could see both my mother and my father plastered across my face. My father's jawline, my mother's cheekbones, I could see everything they had given me before they passed.
I wiped my eyes and looked away from my reflection.
'Clothes come first,' I thought in exasperation as I realized I would have to pillage through some of my tribemate's homes.
It didn't take long for me to find comfortable clothes that more or less fit. The tunic I had grabbed was a little tight around my chest and biceps, while the pants I had snagged were baggy and bunched up so that I avoided tripping on them.
I noticed the dusty mirror on my way out, and as I stared at my reflection in the mirror, Blaze and Angelica appeared next to me. Blaze was on my right, about two heads shorter than me, and Angelica was on my left. The exact height she had always been.
Tears started to stream down my face as I looked at the smiling figures of my friends staring back at me. I gripped the door handle to exit the house, and an overwhelming feeling overcame me. My chest, head, arms, and legs all felt heavy. Heavier than when they were soaked in blood and overworked. The immense feeling of dread made me want to curl up and join my friends and family on the other side of that mirror.
'Why?' Flashed through my mind, 'Why me? Why am I the last survivor?'
Guilt, shame, anger, sadness all rushed through my mind. The emotions continued to hit my brain like raindrops, leaving me in a flurry of confusion as I tried to process my feelings.
I could process battle scenarios almost instantaneously, but my brain's inner workings were not something I was good at examining.
Still holding onto the door handle, more tears streamed down my face. I couldn't stop them as the faces of Blaze, Angelica, my mother, father, and all who I held dear throughout my tribe started to float to the surface of my mind.
I had pushed them down, and constantly piling on top of them was the pain I received training, but deep below these faces sat the embers to a rage.
When these memories started to resurface, that flame of rage started to eat up the space surrounding it and had begun to grow truly.
When the truth that Blaze would always be the same height in my mind, or that at some point, I would be taller than my father without knowing it—hell, maybe I already was—hit me, I exploded in a fury.
'Who had the right to take that away from me?' I almost screamed out loud.
I yelled profanities, insults and asked questions inside my head at our attackers until I had no more energy to cry or complain.
I pushed open the house door with one unconscious desire sitting in the pits of my soul:
Kill Everyone.
~~~
I walked gingerly down the tunnel I had once walked down five years ago. As the temperature cooled, I remembered why the Goddess had sent me outside of her realm in the first place.
'Right, this was going to be extremely painful,' I thought to myself, reflecting on the first assimilation process.
I arrived at the end of the winding tunnel and came out into the cavern. There were zero corpses left throughout the cavern.
I rubbed my eyes and stared, almost thinking I had imagined the scene years ago.
I frantically reached for the crystal in my pocket before grabbing it and thinking;
'Did you get rid of the corpses?'
A familiar voice rang through my head; 'No, I did not do anything besides make the rock house accessible, Child."
"Where did the bodies go?" I asked aloud as I let go of the crystal and started walking forward.
I had almost forgotten how beautiful the cavern was, and walking through it without the sight that I had seen the last time, I could take in its glory. I was too nervous the first time; this time, I would appreciate my surroundings.
As I crossed the bridge and entered the rock house, I took one last look around and decided to get the assimilation over with first.
This time, the hut had a door on the far wall leading to a set of stairs. I walked around the table in the middle of the shed and headed to the next floor.
When I started up the stairs, the temperature drastically decreased, and as I reached the top, my teeth were chattering, and I was shivering violently.
'Alright, you've arrived, time to begin.' A familiar voice boomed inside my head.
After the Goddess said that, a sudden zap of electricity started at my toes. It slowly crawled up through my legs and past my knees. Through my hips and continued to my shoulders until it ended at my hands and head.
Just as the almost pleasant sensation ended, I let out a deep breath, and another feeling arrived. This time it felt as if I was melting onto the cold floor. Or as if my insides were boiling while my skin kept them trapped to heat up even more.
I sat down on the floor as the feeling continued to spread. It was painful, but it wasn't much worse than the price of regrowing a limb or injury.
Having nothing to do but wait, I decided to attempt to cultivate.
As I started to meditate, I witnessed these little packets of lightning floating throughout my energy pool. They were trying to reach the bottom of my energy pool, but they dispersed and made the energy pool reach even deeper depths when they did.
Witnessing my energy pool, it started to turn into a hallucination. I was standing atop the Soulflame in the middle of my lake of energy inside me. At the edges of my lake, I could see thousands of small silhouettes standing in rows behind each other.
The silhouettes were stationary as the electricity continued to dance throughout the clear water in the lake. When the last electric tendril hit the bottom of the pool, an enormous lightning bolt struck the Soulflame I was standing inside.
The strike made a thundering noise that shook the entire lake. I pressed my hands to my ears in an attempt to drown out the noise but was unsuccessful. Once the booming had subsided and silence filled the area, the silhouettes began marching into the lake. They had lined the entire perimeter of the lake and were now steadily streaming into it.
As the silhouettes marched, the lighting would strike to the rhythm of their stomps and grow louder as they progressed.
I could only assume the silhouettes were people, and as they advanced into my energy pool, they evaporated as if it were a vat of lava eating away at their skin and bones.
I stood in horror as the countless people walked mindlessly to their demise in the beautiful pool of acidic liquid.
As the silhouettes continued to march into my energy pool, my Soulflame grew to staggering proportions. When I had first begun standing in the flame, it was as tall as me. But now, my white Soulflame, with electricity running through it, stood at almost double my height.
The vines of electricity now were a constant that danced throughout the pool, occasionally bumping into a silhouette and evaporating it even faster than the liquid.
As I stared at the people marching to their doom, I felt a pang of guilt throughout my chest.
I wasn't sure why I felt guilty; I couldn't talk to the silhouettes if I tried.
Why should I feel guilty? They're marching of their own accord.
'Guess that won't work,' I thought to myself as the guilt increased.
'Let's go with the old-reliable.' I thought as I watched some of the lines of silhouettes begin to end.
I opened my eyes and was back inside the painfully cold room in the cavern's rock hut.
I gripped the crystal and sent out a message,
'Did it work?' I thought.
'Test it out.' The Goddess flatly replied.
I extended my index finger towards the ceiling on each hand.
At the tip of my right finger, I condensed source energy and ignited a flame. It grew a charming red and flickered in the cold room.
Next, I condensed source energy, and much like fire attempted to ignite some electricity. A tiny tendril of electricity began to flop out the tip of my finger, trying to find something to latch on to and distribute its energy.
I decided to play around with the electricity a little more as I started down the stairs back towards the cavern.
I quickly realized with electricity that, for starters, I could enhance my movement speed and reaction time by spreading it throughout my body. Secondly, I was able to choose a location where a bolt of lightning could strike. Then I would need to provide the precise amount of source energy to make it as far as I needed to, and the lightning would strike from my palm to wherever.
I immediately came up with an idea and would need to try it as soon as possible. However, putting the idea that could destroy my body aside, I decided it would be best to test the possibilities of a God Source.
Immediately thinking of my time finding clothes, I brandished my sword and attempted to coat it in Soulflame source energy. I was able to access an incredible amount of source energy through my newly acquired God Source, and it made covering my sword easy. As I ignited the source energy, my purified Soulflame condensed around the blade. The once pitch-black blade now held blinding white edges with a jet-black midsection. As I swung the sword through the air atop the bridge of the cavern, the white edges painted beautiful lines through the air. I felt like a painter finally receiving the inspiration he had been waiting his whole life to obtain.
Dispersing the energy and sheathing my sword, I continued to test how much electricity I could control and to what extent.
Concluding that the possibilities were almost endless, I set my first goal to expanding the electrical current through my body.