In a cream-white room, Walter stood near some sort of marble counter that was adorned in gold and glittering stones. He mixed a drink in his combat suit while his face remained as calm and composed as ever.
To his side was a display case holding several large bottles, each the size of an adult arm and their insides shimmered with a familiar golden hue.
On the opposite end of the luxurious room, the ivory walls slowly shifted into a deep maroon with some splattering of fresh glistening crimson near the end.
"And another one!" shouted a short-haired woman with a muscular frame, her arm coated in a crystalized layer of jagged reflective glass that sped towards Jin's face and instantly ruined his cheek with destructive force.
But there wasn't much to ruin since Jin was already beaten to a pitiful state; his face was heavily drenched in his own blood that kept pouring out of his mouth and bruises, his right eye was missing and his teeth were barely intact.
Jin drooled his own blood and coughed, his arms nailed to the wall with large bolts to keep him helplessly in place.
Another sharp jab to the stomach made him throw up more blood, his hazy eyes snapping open in reaction to the pain.
The woman pulled her fist back with a wide grin, her muscles flexing tightly, they were exposed beautifully since she only wore a tank top and green camo cargo pants.
"That's enough… My turn… I need the smell…" a man with several guns on his back, all of them tied to a leather bag, walked to Jin.
He wore a dirty moss-hued bodysuit that covered every inch of him tightly, including his entire head. He still had a black cloak on to keep him modestly hidden since the suit left nothing to the imagination.
The woman clicked her tongue and walked back to the center of the room, where another hooded figure sat sharpening a knife, wearing complete black rags that gave him the appearance of the grim reaper.
"I thought it was odd for the great War Devil himself to call us here… You're not the 'reunion' type. Heh, what a surprise to hear you wanted us to hurt some nameless goon," the hooded man said with a smokey voice, as if his vocal cords were burnt.
"Right, you're good at torturing others yourself, Walts. So why call us?" the woman added while sitting down and grabbing a nearby glass of water.
Several loud shots rang out behind them but none of them looked towards the source of the flashing light.
"A mission," Walter turned towards the display cabinet and unlocked it.
"Mission? We just did a chain of them for you, Walts! We're not your organization's grunts for you to just throw us around wherever you want. The Shadow's Grasp doesn't own us, don't forget that," the woman glared at Walter and gripped the glass hard enough to crack it.
Walter pulled out three of the large bottles and placed them on the counter.
"Five years worth of energy per bottle," Walter gestured towards them.
The hooded man's head snapped to Walter while the woman's eyes widened. Her surprise quickly faded into a joyful grin.
"Why didn't you start with that, Walts my buddy?" she laughed.
The hooded man slashed his own knee, causing sparks to fly and his leg to erupt in flames.
"What is the mission, Devil? Five years is a lot."
"Him," Walter pointed at Jin.
"Heh, he angered you that much, huh? Oh I'll break him so good…" the hooded man laughed and stood up while twirling his knife around his finger.
"Train him," Walter calmly added.
"Huh? Train him?" they both looked at Walter with tilted heads.
"Dealer said I would like him, and I misunderstood that as a command. But I've seen enough, I've seen how his eyes look," Walter walked past them and towards Jin.
"A boy scared of death, but take that away and his eyes show their true depth, their hate for humanity. An emotion that could be weaponized," Walter pushed the man in the bodysuit aside and glared at Jin.
Jin weakly looked up at him, and once he saw that it was Walter his eyes burned hatefully and his face scrunched with rage almost instantly. The blood on his face looked like war paint, giving him an even more vicious look.
"Train him harshly, he won't die from it. And if he breaks, that would still benefit us, so don't hold back," Walter turned around and walked away to the enchantingly decorated half of the room.
The trio nodded and walked to Jin.
***
It hasn't been long since then, yet Jin already found himself panting and standing with his shirt torn and his face bruised in a shattered world of a deep magenta.
"You're a joke!" the muscular woman laughed and ran closer to him.
Jin desperately managed to sidestep away from her sharp jab but she followed-up with a quick haymaker.
He still raised his arms up in time to block it, but her fist broke through his flimsy defense, smashing his face flat between his arms and sending him spinning and tumbling around like a ragdoll until he slid off the island.
Jin shouted until his voice disappeared and darkness consumed him for a few seconds before his eyes shot open again.
Jin sat up and quickly looked to his side at the blond man in green and the duct tape girl, both of them looking at him with a sorrowful look.
"It's okay… It's just us, buddy…" the man smiled.
Jin looked down with a crestfallen look. Nothing had changed, Jin still died all the same without a chance at fighting back or learning anything.
He went from dodging speedy bullets from Walter to dodging powerful punches with the devastating strength of a truck and the rapid pace of a machine gun. It felt worse somehow.
Jin laid back down and stared at the dark violet skies with a sigh, letting his body relax until a thick boot stomped his stomach.
"Gnngh…" Jin gritted his teeth and glared up at the muscular woman who shook a container in her hand while pressing her sole against him.
"Combat session's over, now we replay it back and see where you went wrong. For example… I started the fight by…-"
However, the only plus was that, unlike Walter, the woman gave him tips and lessons over the fights and techniques he could've used instead, stimulating a mental combat for him to work through.
And after the discussion and lecture she suggested physical exercises to help him build some muscle, hone his footwork and solidify his muscle memory. Jin felt like he was in some ruthless gym class.
After he was done with her training for the day, the blond man took Jin and the girl to another island in a world of deep emerald skies.
A central hunting tower stood over a small chunk of earth, surrounded by other fractured junk and land, the scraps and items were incredibly numerous in this world, as if it was some landfill.
Here, Jin spent his hours next to the man in the bodysuit learning how different weapons and guns worked.
The masked man made Jin shoot the floating junk in the vicinity, and used a clay launcher to give Jin moving targets to practice on.
The training wasn't stressful at all and felt like being in a shooting range with a calm instructor.
While failing to defend against the woman resulted in Jin taking a harsh hit, there was no punishment with the sharpshooter. He only drew a notch on a bullet and handed it to the blond man then returned to instructing Jin.
The only downside was that every time Jin shot the weapons, the man grew more and more excited, visibly quivering and panting rapidly, until he reached a point where he snatched Jin's weapon and began rubbing the barrel against his hidden face.
"The mask… I hate how it's stopping me… I want to lick it…" the man muttered and squirmed.
Jin felt disgusted but he still grabbed another weapon and continued practicing on his own even though the man was too occupied with his strange interests.
After he was satisfied, Jin walked away but then the man stopped him.
"No, no… Every practice needs a test… and we…"
The world brightened completely into a blank ivory and then transformed to a jungle in the dead of the night.
"Huh?"
"I teleported us here… I always love to hunt creatures that are exotic and challenging… They make me shoot more… Ahh… Good luck…" the man jumped on a tree and slithered up to a branch in seconds.
Jin felt a shiver down his spine when he watched him move with inhuman flexibility like that.
But then a low growl drew his attention to an ashen creature with a large and smooth bulbous head which connected to its body seamlessly. Its large front legs were raised up like a mantis and the only visible thing on its face was its mouth, possessing several exposed rows of razor sharp teeth.
Jin's shoulder tensed and quickly shot the creature several times on instinct, but his bullets bounced off its thick skin.
His attack only aggravated the monster and made it rapidly bridge the gap to chomping Jin's head cleanly off.
His vision and sensation disappeared for a few seconds but then he woke up to something he didn't think he'd see again.
Another shattered world but it was ruled by a heavy downpour, its sky buried in endless dark clouds that rained and formed fractured rivers.
The currents of water flowed in strange directions without any visible logic to them, with rifts and splits in some of them like a torn curtain.
Some rivers just wrapped in a circle while other droplets formed a large sack of water that floated gently near them. Some of the rivers even circled around the lower islands, creating mesmerizing works of art.
Jin took a deep breath and stared at the rivers around him with awe.
"Here… He told me to give this to you?" the blond man spoke to the hooded man, pulling Jin's eyes to them.
Jin watched as the notched bullets traded hands.
"Ahh… These are a lot… Alright, go away or I'll kill you accidentally," the man threw the bullets on the ground and pulled out two crimson daggers while the blond man quickly ran with wide eyes to the girl who stood near the edge of the island fearfully.
Jin gulped and stood up.
"Ah, you're awake already? I was going to start until you woke up… See, every mistake you make will come back to haunt you. And with how badly you did… Heh… I guess I won't train you at all," the hooded man straightened up.
Jin exhaled, feeling a sense of relief after the last two…
…until a jade-hued sword flew out of the man's cloak, as if it was shot from a railgun, and impaled Jin's chest, instantly pushing him off the island before he could even blink.
A flash of darkness followed before Jin's eyes shot open and he gasped, returning to life just for the man to stab his stomach again. A tremendously agonizing sensation coursed through him , it was nowhere near when he was shot.
Jin couldn't hold his anguished screams in.
"Laced with pepper… that's creative, but this is something even worse, a special venom found in some nasty little bugs. Remember this the next time you're shooting like a child… If you're not perfect, then I will hurt you harder," the man laughed.
Jin tried to kick him off, but the man countered by slashing Jin's leg, spreading the unbearable pain while his laughter grated Jin's ears.
And the torturous cycle of "training" under these three repeated over and over again, with time eluding Jin once more and blurring between eternity.
For what felt like years, Jin turned into a punching bag for the combat-hungry woman. No matter how much he worked on his body and exercised, even with all the techniques he learned from her, she always beat him to a pulp. It didn't matter if he was able to avoid a punch or five.
After her, the shooting practice was supposed to be the least stressful of the three, yet with the constant dread of missing and the way his errors changed the third man's arsenal and fighting style, Jin was anxious the entire time and it made aiming even harder.
Not only that but the creatures the weird man hunted with Jin were nothing like anything he saw on earth. From small critters with a cube-shaped head to large limbless abominations, and an entire endless list in-between.
Jin was never able to fully learn a creature's behavior, attack pattern or anything about it since the masked man always took him to a different world with different monsters after every session. Jin never encountered the same thing twice and all he did was shoot desperately and die trying to figure out how to kill them.
Initially, Jin was afraid of missing his shots because of the torment it brought, which made him tense up and fail to hit his targets, and in turn that amplified his fear further and it looped back.
But with enough time, deaths and punishment, his fear turned to irritation and anger.
Jin used Tres' advice to calm himself down and gradually lessen the mistakes he made, but he couldn't wash away the deep burning rage that was growing within him every day.
The third man irked Jin the most since he sadistically enjoyed watching him suffer. His training was also ambiguous, it had no purpose Jin could think of and seemed to just exist so the man could torture him in different ways.
Based on the number of notched bullets, the man turned to a fearsome mad demon with different painful weapons every fight. And unlike the muscular woman that Jin slowly started to predict and understand, the hooded man's fighting style was unpredictable and flexible.
Over several rounds, Jin was lit up and skewered with a flaming spear, sliced and diced using incandescent whips, slashed by a whirlwind of poison-coated daggers, frozen and shattered with a hoarfrosted snow launcher, all while the dreaded man slid, jumped, twirled, danced and sat in random sequences that always threw Jin off.
Jin knew the other two's powers - a jagged glass shroud for the powerful woman and teleportation for the freaky man - but he was never able to pinpoint the hooded man's ability, he felt like a wild card that seemed to dish out all elements.
The lessons were long and torturous, Jin would've broken down from the amount of pain that easily made Walter's training feel nostalgically pleasant, but Tres' simple words and the pauses between each training allowed him to regenerate his mental state and soak in each piece of information to build on.
After several long unmarked years, Jin stood in the magenta world shirtless, his well-defined body embracing the gentle winds while his wavy dark hair flowed in the breeze, now long enough to reach his upper back.
The muscular woman cracked her knuckles with a grin.
"Sorry about your shirt, heheh. Last time you avoided thirteen of my attacks in a row and I kind of lost it. Try to avoid fourteen this time or maybe… just hit me? You've been doing alright lately. Come on!" the woman curled her fingers at Jin, beckoning him tauntingly.
"Right," Jin's eyes narrowed with focus.
He was the first to move, quickly dashing within her range of attack but he didn't go on the offensive. He knew she'd always start her fights with a quick punch followed by a haymaker.
Jin jumped to the side to avoid her left jab then ducked down away from her right swing, using the opening to slide between her legs and end up behind her.
"Ha!" she quickly swept her leg back to trip him, but her foot glided on the ground without making contact with anything.
She quickly glanced behind her and saw Jin jumping in the air, both of his hands gripping a knife that he forced down into her skull with all of his weight.
The blond man and the duct tape girl stretched their eyes in surprise.
Jin fell down on her and pulled the knife out then stabbed her again.
"How does it feel!? How does dying feel!?"
The sickening squelch of the knife tearing through her flesh almost echoed within the empty space.
"You think I was paying attention to your lessons so I could go back like a good little boy!? I listened and worked hard so I could kill you!"
Jin tossed the knife away and punched her face repeatedly.
"You're dead! A loser! Tell me! Is it fun!? Are you having fun!? Go ahead and hurt me! Laugh at me! Have fun! Go ahead and have fun!"
Jin's fists were fueled by rage, hitting hard enough to crack his own skin and splatter his blood on her with every solid hit.
"H-He lost it…" the girl shook and looked up at the blond man whose face paled.
"Next! The next one!" Jin's scowling eyes gutted both of them with his growing disdain.
They both yelped and tensed up.
***
The masked man in the bodysuit clawed at his cheek.
"Aaahh… Rip it off me… Why did he force me to wear this outfit… Training that boy is unfair… The smell of gunpowder is so good… Just let me do it once…"
A sudden flash made him look towards Jin who he walked away from the blond man and made his way up to the tower.
"He's covered in blood…?" the man tilted his head.
Jin walked closer and grabbed a handgun.
"I want to do a full training today. Start it and grade me."
"You're enthusiastic… Alright… On my mark…"
The man pressed a large button on the orange plate dispenser next to him.
Jin took a deep breath and waited.
The machine chucked a disc into the air.
"Rubber duck, stop sign, bicycle helmet, lightbulb, golden coin…" the man listed out Jin's targets in tandem with the discs' release.
Jin quickly shot the plate then pivoted to the side and rapidly scanned the floating junk for the duck. In less than a second he shot it and turned back to the second plate, his bullet piercing through it before he rotated towards the floating junk for the second item.
He repeated this with quick snappy turns and a consistent beat, like a fast metronome.
"Assault!" the man yelled and Jin quickly threw the gun out of the tower and picked up an automated rifle, repeating the same motions while making sure to fire in three bursts to control his accuracy.
"Sniper!"
Jin tossed the weapon away from the tower and picked up the bolt-action sniper.
While the other weapons were fast and easier to handle, the sniper was slower and required Jin to manually eject the casing after every shot.
"Coffee mug, car door, pillow."
So rather than rapidly shooting as fast as he could, Jin scoped in with one eye while his other one carefully looked at the direction of the discs, waiting until the third one left the machine while keeping note of the items the man listed.
Jin stopped breathing and waited for the discs to align in the air.
'A little more… A bit more… There!' the sniper heavily reverberated in his hand when Jin shot.
The man quivered instantly in response and gripped his own arm, his chest heavily shaking from his shallow breaths.
Jin quickly raised the sniper's bolt up to unlock it and pulled it back to eject the casing, his eyes darting to the man while he primed the next bullet.
Jin turned to his side and quickly shot the items the man mentioned with one bullet, penetrating them all at once. When it came to snipers, the masked man always made sure the items were in close proximity.
"G-Good enough… It's beating so fast… hah… hah…" the man reached out for Jin's sniper but Jin moved it away while glaring at him.
"Did I make a mistake?" Jin asked with a deep scowl.
"N-No… Ooh… Yes… A mistake… Why did you throw the weapons out? I need them… I need that scent… This suit is so unbearable…"
"Let me help you with that," Jin pressed the barrel against the man's face.
The masked man let out an uncanny moan and grabbed the heated barrel to press it against his nose.
With a click of the trigger, the sniper rocked back and blasted a hole through his head, ripping chunks off that were far greater in size than the barrel that exploded them.
Jin watched the man's body fall down lifelessly then grimaced with disgust.
"Freak…"
Jin walked to the edge of the tower's balcony and glared at the blond man and the girl who both looked up at him with fear in their eyes.
"Mhm… You two are up next!" Jin shouted down with a glare.
The girl gasped and fainted while the man trembled.
***
Deep within the rainy realm of ruin, The hooded man looked up at the ominous clouds then slowly turned around towards Jin.
The heavy shower had washed the blood off of Jin, leaving his slick hair sticking to his cheek and giving him a wild and dangerous look, akin to a warrior from a broken clan.
"Heh… Hehehahah! This is rich! That anger and confidence on your face… it tells me you think you can kill me, huh? And since that bonehead and gunfreak aren't here to tell me about your progress, that means you killed them, didn't you?" the man pulled out two black daggers and spun them around.
"You think you're undying and that means anything goes? Did you know? Your types have an extra barrier around your cores, so whether you're eaten by a monster, blown to bits, burnt completely to nothing… the core will survive with enough meat on it to regenerate…"
The man slowly walked towards Jin while pressing the daggers against his own forearms.
"But these black knives break right through it," the man slashed his arms, setting his daggers and limbs on azure fire.
"That's good to know," Jin's eyes remained steadfast without a hint of fear.
"Heh… Cocky kid… Walter told me not to kill you, but there's only so much one can do for an old friend… Tsk… That irritating dog… He should've died in the war."
The man flickered and with one simple dash he was in front of Jin, already swinging his daggers towards his chest without pause.
Jin squeezed the cylindrical device he held, activating an orange glow that radiated brighter within his chest until it blew them both up, burning a crater into the ground while rubble and chunks of dirt mixed in with the falling rain, the explosion leaving dust and smoke behind.
Far away, near the cusp of the island, stood the blond man with a concerned look as he watched the destruction, his eyes carefully scanning through the dark fog for anything.
"Did he do it…? I can't believe he made me stick a bomb inside of his chest for this... What would the Second say now...? Is he going to kill us? But I was threatened!" the man teared up.