I roared again, louder this time, and recklessly pulled in more and more Essence. The darkness pushed back, but I didn't care. I slammed my will harder and harder into the Essence swirling in the air, refusing to back down.
In my mind, I pictured it like a tug of war with a lion, both of us pulling, struggling to take control of the fire.
The sphere blazed, growing larger, hotter, wilder.
Flames danced along its surface, and I forced my will onto it again, compressing it, bending it, demanding it to obey.
The fire turned deeper, a dark crimson now. I could feel the heat licking against my skin. The air sizzled.
Then another beam tore through the dome, smashing into my shoulder. Pain ripped through me, and I winced but I held strong. At least, I thought I did.
That tiny drop in focus…
That brief flicker in my will…
It was all the darkness needed.
It came rushing in like a storm, snatching away the Essence in an instant.
The sphere froze, just for a second.
Then it unraveled, violently, like my will was nothing but paper caught in a storm.
It expanded—once, twice—then with a thunderous boom, it exploded right in front of my chest.
The shockwave ripped through the air. Fire and sound roared through the dome. I was thrown back, flying like a ragdoll, and crashed hard into the ground.
I coughed up blood from the impact, the metallic taste thick in my mouth.
Exhaling sharply, I pushed myself to my feet and wiped the blood off my lips with the back of my hand.
My t-shirt was completely shredded and gone. I was back to just burned-up shorts. And my brain felt like it was punching my skull to get out.
But honestly? That's the way I liked it.
My eyes lit up, not with fear, but with excitement.
The power behind that explosion… that was just fire. I couldn't help but wonder, what would happen if I detonated raw Essence like that?
I looked up, glaring at the dark dome that loomed around me, like it was challenging me to break again.
I grinned.
"Let's do it again."
*****
I lay flat on the ground.
Charred. Smoking. Shaking.
My chest rose and fell like a dying machine trying to keep going. Burn marks covered my arms, scattered across my chest, and traced up to my neck. My shorts were half-singed, barely holding together, and the air around me smelled like ash and sweat.
Dark circles sat heavy under my eyes, like bruises from a battle no one else could see. My face felt dry and tight but at the same time wet.
I blinked, slow and groggy, and felt something warm trickle down my cheeks.
Blood.
Not from a cut. But from my eyes.
I had cried blood.
I chuckled, a dry, cracked sound that rattled out of my throat like it had been cooked inside a furnace.
Of course I did.
My brain had been under so much pressure it was probably trying to escape through my skull.
I stared up at the dark dome above, the same one that had mocked me hours ago, and let the silence settle. My ears were ringing, like someone had left a kettle boiling inside my head.
Then, slowly, the memories of the past few hours flooded back in.
I had fought the darkness.
Over and over.
The darkness didn't give up.
It resisted like a living, breathing wall made of tar. Every time I tried to pull Essence, it tried to stop me. Drag me back. Smother me. I'd slam my will into it, and it would slam back harder.
But I didn't back down. Couldn't.
The goal was simple: build the Psynapse muscle.
My brain was the battlefield. And to get stronger, I had to force it to do what it didn't want to: process more Essence, faster, more precisely.
Like lifting heavier and heavier weights, except the weights were invisible and trying to crush me.
At first, forming the fireball took me nearly a full minute due to the darkness.
Concentrate. Shape. Shift. Focus.
Then I did it again. And again. Ten times. Twenty. Thirty.
Each time, I cut the time down. Condensed the process. Streamlined my will.
But I didn't stop there.
I made the fireball bigger. Denser. Hotter.
I wanted to see how far I could push it before it exploded again. How far I could bend Essence with my mind alone against the darkness.
I screamed. Roared. Pushed beyond my limits. Blood came out of my nose more than once. I almost collapsed twice. At one point, I was pretty sure I passed out mid-channel.
But I kept going.
Even the darkness kept evolving.
The dome had constricted four times during that period. The beams it lashed at me now carried enough force to pierce into my body, not all the way through, but enough to draw blood before fading out.
But even with my body screaming, my brain aching, and Essence fatigue eating at my bones…I grinned.
Because I felt it.
The Psynapse... it was stronger now, even without increasing the stat. My core had been working nonstop, and I hadn't used any of the Essence to boost my attributes. I simply channeled it straight into my brain and body.
My will held longer. My speed had increased. My control, still rough, but tighter than before.
And the system rewarded me for my relentless focus.
I checked the notifications.
[Skill Level Up!]
[Psynapse Boost - Level 4 → Level 5]
The moment it leveled, I felt it, like a ripple in my skull. My awareness snapped into sharper detail. It was subtle, but unmistakable. The world slowed down just enough. Particles I could barely sense a moment ago now shimmered at the edge of my perception.
My Psynapse had widened.
Before, it was like looking through a water curtain, only seeing what I focused on.
But now? It was like there was no more curtain.
I could feel more Essence streams at once, map them, separate them, tag them as fire or darkness instinctively.
The tension between fire and darkness no longer felt like chaos.
It felt like a pattern. Complex, but decipherable. The darkness wasn't just constricting, it was flowing, looping around the fire stream in a spiraled cage.
The kind of structure you could slip through… if you knew the gaps.
I grinned.
Level 5 didn't just boost perception, it added precision.
I moved on to the next notification.
[Skill Level Up!]
[Essence Shift – Level 1 → Level 2]
The change was small, but noticeable.
I felt it in the way the Essence responded to my will. The shift into fire didn't require as much brute focus now. There was a smoother glide, like the edges between raw and elemental had softened just a bit.
Before, it took a second or two, almost like my will had to scrape the surface, pushing the Essence into alignment.
Now, it happened a fraction faster. Less strain on my Psynapse. Less effort overall.
Not a breakthrough. But a step.
And right now, every bit helped.
But there wasn't any noticeable improvement in [Essence Shaping]. I figured it made sense, since I had only been working with a single form, the rotating sphere, there wasn't much variation in how I applied the skill.
Without experimenting with new shapes or different manipulations, the skill had no reason to evolve.
It was like lifting the same weight over and over, useful, but not enough to push the limits.
Suddenly, my perception flared like a siren in my mind.
Instinct kicked in, and I rolled to the side just as a beam came crashing down exactly where I'd been lying a second ago. The training ground where my head had been now smoked and hissed.
I let out a breathy chuckle, shaking off the shock, and pushed myself to my feet. My joints ached as I rolled my shoulder, muscles sore from hours of punishment.
"Looks like someone's getting impatient," I muttered with a grin, eyes narrowing at the dark dome around me. "Easy there, my friend. I was just catching my breath."