Zen suddenly found himself in a completely different place. He found himself in a picturesque forest with vibrant trees and clear rivers. The very sight of such calming environment would immediately put anyone at ease but it had no such effect for Zen.
He looked down at the ground and his vision began to flicker between the picturesque scene and another where everywhere was covered in blood and death.
Zen all of a sudden seemed a lot less....stable.
He shook it off and started running through the familiar forest towards a certain place.
After a few seconds, Zen found himself at the edge of the forest, looking down at what looked like a small settlement with multiple buildings, some large, some small. It looked like any other small city, but the truth was the military would kill for this place's location...or at least would have.
Zen looked behind him back at the forest. The thought of just leaving crossed his mind for less than a second before he forgot about it.
Zen decided to test if he could still manipulate the realm. He stretched out his hand and tried to create something, but nothing happened.
"Not surprising"
He tried something else as he closed his eyes. A few seconds later he reopened them.
"I can't sense anything"
It was almost like he was in the real world.
"Hi Azzy"
"Aaah!" Zen shrieked and jumped when he heard that name. He didn't notice, but something was off about his reaction,it almost seemed forced,stiff. Perhaps being aged down had had more of an effect on Zen than he originally thought.
Zen turned around to see a girl around his age with black and vibrant purple hair and large heterochromic eyes,in a black tracksuit.
"Haha,i got you!"
The girl laughed out loud in a soothing sonorous voice.
"Raven?" Zen asked.
The girl stopped laughing and tilted her head and looked at him with a confused expression.
"Hmm? Who's Raven?"
"No one"
Zen replied
"Hehe,are you feeling okay, Azzy? You look tired"
Zen didn't reply.
"Come on"
She suddenly took his hand, putting her fingers in between his and started running towards the small city.
Zen didn't resist and let her take him with her. A sense of nostalgia passed through him for a few seconds, but it lasted for no longer than a few seconds before Zen shrugged it off. Nostalgia meant nothing in this place.
Lilith suddenly appeared out of a bloody mist where Zen and the girl were previously standing.
She looked up at the beautiful blue sky and saw it flicker between the original and a bloody nightmare. Something similar to what was happening with Neo but much more bizarre.
"The trial is unstable" Lilith was shocked, but for a being like her it was easy to steady herself so she could think properly.
After thinking for a while, she felt it made sense, at least a little bit.
The very size of Zen's soul was the issue. Awakening artifacts themselves weren't meant to hold ridiculous amounts of power, simply because they generally weren't meant to grant power, but to simply start the spark for something more. Another important fact was that they were mostly used by people of low soul power. So for someone with such a grand soul and a will so powerful it was twisted,to use such an old artifact would definitely cause some problems.
If Lilith knew that something like this was happening not just with Zen, but Neo as well, she would hardly believe it.
She thought for a while before disappearing back into a crimson mist.
Zen allowed the girl to take him wherever she was going and didn't bother stopping her.
He looked around the base, recognizing a few familiar faces he would have been better off forgetting. While looking around,
The place seemed happy and safe, and the streets were filled with children of all ages running around having fun. Zen suddenly saw a little girl with red hair dash past.
Zen immediately felt like the girl reminded him of someone. Almost immediately he tried to call out to her, but stopped himself.
Another forced response.
That little girl had reminded Zen of his adoptive little sister. One day when he was around the age of ten, she had asked him to help her dye her hair to resemble that of Riley,who was her favorite,a fact that always made Freya grumble.
Zen was pretty naive at the time and thought nothing of it. Luckily Freya and Riley were out when they decided to do it, and so, one night they did it.
Freya and Riley were shocked to come home and find his sister,a brunette with long hair to have cut and styled her hair short, and dyed it a bright red.
Although they were surprised, there was nothing they could do, and they couldn't exactly get mad, so they simply told them not to try something like that without their permission again.
"Hey, what's wrong? What are you thinking about?" The girl pulling him asked, snapping him out of his thoughts.
Zen looked at the bright smiling expression on the girl's face and felt like he knew where this whole thing was going.
A few minutes later they arrived.
"Hey guys" The girl waved to her friends.
Zen immediately knew he was right about his earlier suspicion as he was surrounded with the familiar faces of his "friends", though Zen hadn't used that word in years.
Zen looked at each of them but didn't glance at any of them twice, until his gaze fell on a specific person.
A little girl around his current age with glasses, brown eyes, and long lustrous golden blonde hair. She was in a floral blouse and jeans. She had a holographic screen opened in front of her and constantly seemed to be tweaking and tapping on the screen.
Her eyes briefly moved from the screen to Zen, and a smile adorned her face.
She spoke,a slight british accent in her voice, just like how Zen remembered it all those years ago,though it was unknown where she had picked it up.
"Hello there, took you two long enough to arrive. What was the delay anyway?"
Zen kept quiet, seemingly contemplating something
"Anyway ,it doesn't matter,you guys are gonna love this. I-"
She suddenly stopped talking,her voice slightly cracking like she was choking and unable to speak. All the rest of Zen's "friends" suddenly gasped and some even burst into tears.
"Zen! Why?!"
The blonde girl slowly looked down to see a small hand having pierced right through her throat, and looking up, she saw it was Zen's
Zen slowly pulled out his bloody hand out of her throat and looked at the lifeless body that fell to the ground.
Ignoring the cries and screams of his "friends" who surrounded the girl that was either bleeding out or already dead, Zen walked to a random house and opened the door, seeing that the inside looked like a completely different place.
Why.
Zen suddenly frowned. This wasn't his thought. Nevertheless he decided to answer.
"Jenny died a long time ago"
With that,he walked through the door, appearing in a completely different place.
Zen opened his eyes and found himself in what looked like a busy city in the dead of night. Looking ahead, Zen saw a building that looked like it was about to crumble. It was on fire,and looked like it was about to explode.
He heard the sound of a helicopter overhead and looked up to see one.
You saved them, and they abandon you
"That was my own choice, besides, they didn't abandon me, Raven saved me, she came back"
Perhaps seeing that it wouldn't be able to mess with Zen's psyche easily, the voice skipped to the fighting.
Let's see how you do when no one is coming back for you
Zen was suddenly surrounded by multiple men in black suits and sunglasses.
"These guys again?"
Zen took a fighting stance, although it wasn't exactly threatening for a ten year old boy to take a fighting position while surrounded by multiple full grown men, and it seemed the men approved of this as they started laughing out.
Zen wasn't intimidated and just waited for them to make the first move. He had done this before, he would do it again.
One of them managed to stop laughing for a second and charged at Zen, readying a punch in advance.
Zen waited till the last moment, and just at the right time, sidestepped, causing his attacker to miss him and keep moving.
Zen aimed for a specific location on his opponent's back and while he was still in range,threw a punch .
"Sting"
The attack landed squarely on his opponents spine, sending him to the ground. Zen was sure he wouldn't be getting up.
His opponents finally seemed to be taking him seriously as a group headed for him this time from behind.
Zen closed his eyes and sighed without moving. Once they were close enough he suddenly did a backflip over their heads, escaping the encirclement all together,God knows where he got the kinetic energy for that!!!!
He immediately aimed at the back of another one, targeting a specific area on the spine, paralysing them.
A few minutes later
Zen dodged another attack, escaping encirclement. He would have liked to say he'd forgotten how many he'd knocked down, but his incredible memory made sure that wasn't true. The point was, he'd taken down a large number, and it still didn't look like there was any end to the invading force, even worse,he was starting to tire. It seemed this body didn't have the stamina of his actual form.
Zen suddenly started to wonder: what exactly is the objective of this trial? How does he pass? Because it didn't seem like it was combat.
He was still thinking when he suddenly noticed a pair of lights from up ahead. He suddenly realized that he was actually fighting on the street.
He was about to move out of the way when he was once again cornered, and unable to move in time, he watched as a large vehicle approached him at top speed, managing to notice a familiar fully armoured silhouette in the driver's seat.
The vehicle brutally slammed into Zen sending him to the ground .