Chapter 17 - breaking down

3rd pov

Hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting are the human basic senses.The term "sense" is derived from the word "sensor."

losing the five senses or some of them when someone had already has them would torment the said person both physically and mentally, as people say.

"You never know what you have until you've lost it."

Although Leo did not permanently lose them, he deeply comperhanded this sentence after his recent experience.

He was first blindfolded, with this his vision sense was turned off as a result. That excluded the darkness behind the eyelids because that is still vision as he was only blindfolded and not completely blind.

This caused him several problems, including adjusting to his surroundings. Another major issue was his distorted concept of time, which was distorted due to the loss of vision some time fast others slow.

He wouldn't feel time clearly unless he was in the middle of a fight, and most of the time his concept of time became slow, giving him plenty of time to think.

But his thoughts at the time were pessimistic, even so he tried to fight them by remembering sentence Epictetus said:

"Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and invoke our own inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths."

So he endured as best he could, and as a result of that mentality, he adjusted quickly to the loss of vision enough that he is no longer waiting for his opponents to come to him, but rather he is coming at them.

But that victory over his heart demon, as Chinese novels called it, was only temporary as his real crisis came when he lost his hearing as well.

His already distorted time concept became even more distorted, and his negative emotions became more rampant

now all that is left to him is only touch, smell, and taste. Taste wouldn't help him in anything while fighting, so he tried to rely on touch and smell.

But, as he later realised, his sense of smell was also useless in his condition because all he could smell was the scent of his blood.

Sometimes his blood would fall on his opponents, which helped him to know their location, but as soon as others realised this, they used it against him, throwing the clothes that were filled with his blood in another part of the stage and sneaking up on him from behind.

if it hadn't been for his intuition and the wind touching his skin that warned him when the weapon was close to him, He would have been knocked down or even killed so his sense of smell was more of a burden than a help in his case,so he sealed it off using his ability(body control) .

From then on, he only depended on his sense of touch; for a full ten days, he could only dodge incoming attacks when they were close to or already touched his skin; there were also a time when he couldn't dodge a sword but instead only protected his vitals points as the sword stabbed through his body until only the hilt could be seen; then he smacked the spear in his hand in the opponent's wrist, sending him flying but he held back as to not kill him ,even as he was angry that time

human mind is resilient. We think we can't take this any longer but we can. we possess strengths to endure struggles

This sentence accurately describes him at this time. because As the days passed, he was not only relying on his touch alone, but also on a new sensation that he developed after his almost three months of suffering, that is intuition.

This intuition, although not very strong and often didn't work, but when it did, he always dodged attacks without fail, and as he fought, this intuition became more acute.

rachid and his classmates didn't call leo a training manic for nothing, despite the fact that he was suffering greatly.

but seeing as his training was bearing fruit even though it's more of torturing than training he endure it

But even though he endured very hard, he reached the limit of his willpower and patience in the next accident when his neck was cut by the torturers .

at that time he reached his limits as he was about to use his ability to stop his bleeding then go against everything he had planned before .

at that time he was mentally unstable he forgot about what would happen to the prisoners if he did anything wrong .

He also forgot about the unseen threats that this world has to offer if he killed the mayor, even if he was a sinner, and he forgot about the mission he came to this world to complete, but luckily, there was someone who could stop him from making that stupid mistake.

Looking back, Leo is still grateful that Doom stopped him at that time, even though he was angry that he was stopped at the time. Leo was not in a good state even after healing him physically, mentally he was still unstable, so Doom took him to his room instead of the prison with the excuse that his wounds were not healed yet, then closed the door at him to let him think a bit.

leo at that time had several questions on his mind

"why is this happening to me?"

"Why do I have to put up with this?"

"Is what I am doing even worthwhile?"

and several other pessimistic questions begin to appear in his mind, questions he would never ask himself in normal times. As Leo was surrounded by the four walls of the room,

he began to think about his past.

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back in earth I've had my fair share of struggles through life. I've been broken. I've also been broke, unemployed, heartbroken i had many failures in my life .

there were a lot of periods in which I felt hopeless and overwhelmed. But I've learned that with time almost all those problem goes in other words they were only temporary

And at the time when I was having these problems, I thought of them as world-ending problems from my perspective, when they were actually just some hardships that most people on the planet were going through in my generation.

In my case, I went through a lot of hardships small and large, but even so, I couldn't go through the hardship called unemployed, before the first accident of the world colliding, I completed my studies and took my papers, but because my grades were not good enough, I was not accepted in several jobs for more than 1 year and half if not for the accident i might have still looking for work and i can't even became a NEET or "Nothing in Education, Employment, or Training."

As the Japanese anime called it.

those they call neet at least would have money to live while I don't.

so the accident was both a disaster and a saver for me as it brought me a chance to work that I would not have been able to find with the world's booming population of more than 7 billions at the time.

in short as a Philosopher said before:

"What really frights and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance."

in short that means that what might be a nightmare to someone might be good for me, As Shakespeare also said: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

The difference is only in our perspective.

Thinking about all of this, I remembered my goals, the duty that is on my shoulder, and the moral I'm trying to protect.

at the moment my torture started I could have simply run away at some point, which would have been easy, or I could have killed the mayor and those who would torture me, but I did not do so for several reasons.

The first is that if I did go and escape, I might be able to escape easily from this city, but because there is magic in this world.

so there may be a searching magic in this world as well that can find me even if I run away, which makes my running or even in the case of killing the mayor very risky.

running risk is in that my location can be found, but the most important reason for not running is that the mayor may kill all those innocent prisoners if i run in rage, Even if he didn't, those prisoners would be killed by the next fighters who will came later .to take my place in the colosseum.

the question now is Why do I have to save those prisoners? what drives me to go this far for peaple i don't even know well ?

to be continued