Chapter 438: A new concept
(14 days before the fight, Leo’s POV)
Two weeks remained.
And with each passing hour, Leo’s patience thinned further, like a rope stretched near its breaking point, fraying at the edges no matter how hard he tried to stay composed.
He had been following Charles’s training routine religiously, but no matter how many times he circled back to the basics, no matter how many layers of red aura he dissected or how many drills he repeated under Charles’s watchful eye, the breakthrough he sought remained stubbornly out of reach.
And so, today, he made a decision.
Combat training would no longer dominate his schedule.
From now until the day of the fight, he would reduce sparring to no more than two hours a day, just enough to keep his instincts from dulling, while the rest of his time would be devoted to the one thing that still eluded him :
Mastering aura and finally unlocking the next stage for visualizing intent.
---
Every morning, his training began by sitting across from Charles in the combat chamber, where the commander then radiated a variety of bloodlust patterns for him to study, one after another, each subtly different in color yet similar in shape.
At first glance, all bloodlust looked red, an aura soaked in the color of violence, but as Leo stared longer, deeper, and began cataloging the shifting tones that danced within that red, he realized that the hue was not constant.
It pulsed. It fluctuated. It evolved.
Over time, an understandable pattern began to emerge, as Charles verbally spoke of the change in his internal thoughts, at the same time as the colors changed around his body, which contributed to Leo better understanding what was exactly happening.
As after observing Charles for the last month or so, Leo managed to make a few key conclusions :
Firstly, the broader the red aura extended around someone, the stronger their desire was to kill.
That much was simple.
A weak thought, like a vague inclination to strike, barely flickered around the body like a soft mist.
But when that same person entered a true killing mindset, when the action was not just contemplated but committed to, the aura swelled outward, growing wider and heavier, until the very air around one felt suffocating to those untrained in its presence.
Leo started recognizing these ranges quickly, assigning rough metrics in his mind. A foot-wide aura? Idle thought. Five feet? Genuine intent. Ten? A committed killer.
But it wasn’t just about size.
The shade mattered too.
Dark, muddy crimson appeared when someone fantasized about killing something that held no emotional weight to them— like stepping on a cockroach or wringing the neck of a chicken.
The energy in those cases felt cold, detached.
But when Charles simulated killing someone of significance, like a comrade or a former teacher, the red around him changed. It brightened. Became livelier, almost like fire, as if infused with something deeper like grief, rage, regret.
As it was only then that Leo understood that bloodlust was not simply shaped by the desire to kill, but was rather shaped by a variety of factors that included the emotion behind that kill.
And so he watched. He cataloged. He memorized.
Bright red, dull red, pinkish red, pale red.
The aura didn’t change based on the opponent’s strength. It changed based on what the kill meant to the owner.
The deeper the emotional weight behind the act, the more vibrant the red.
The more casual or insignificant the target, the duller it became.
It was no longer just about violence. It was about meaning.
And that was a very basic concept of aura that he only learned after spending days studying Charles and the changes in the aura that he projected.
---
Later that day, Leo crouched beside a patch of dry soil near the edge of the courtyard, elbows resting on his knees as he stared down at the ground with a strange intensity.
Two insects, one a beetle, the other a small mantis, clashed below him, locked in a miniature duel that seemed to carry the weight of the world for them, even if the world above barely acknowledged their existence.
Their legs scraped, their mandibles clashed, their bodies twisted and slammed into one another again and again, and it was halfway during this fight that Leo finally saw it.
Red.
A faint outline of it, barely more than a flicker at first, pooling around each insect in irregular bursts that grew stronger with every strike.
It stunned him.
Because up until now, he had only ever perceived bloodlust around humans, and this moment marked the first time he witnessed its presence in a beast.
And yet, rather than just shock, the sight served as an important confirmation for him, as it validated a theory he had long suspected but never fully embraced due to the absence of concrete proof:
The theory that bloodlust was not just a human trait.... but was rather something universal.
It did not belong to the wise or the wicked, the noble or the trained.
It was not a mark of intelligence or culture.
It was a fundamental truth of sentient life.
The desire to survive. To kill. To dominate.
It existed in every living being, regardless of form, regardless of thought.
And in that instant, as the beetle pierced the mantis through the neck and dragged its twitching body back toward a crack in the stone, Leo saw something deeper.
The beetle’s red shifted.
From dull to bright.
From routine to meaningful.
Because at that moment, the beetle wasn’t just killing.
It was feeding, it was living, it was winning.
And it was then that Leo truly understood—
Bloodlust was not just the desire to kill, but a reflection of what that kill meant.
For the beetle, this kill now meant that it and its family wouldn’t go hungry for the next few days.
However, if a human killed the same mantis, it would probably mean nothing to them.
’To truly understand the intention behind a kill, I need to grasp the reason behind why someone kills in the first place....’ Leo realized at that moment, as he finally uncovered the key ingredient he had been missing all along in his pursuit of understanding intent.
Charles had repeated time and again that understanding the reason behind an action was essential in his progress, yet only now, after observing two tiny insects battle for their life, did Leo finally comprehend what that advice truly meant.
For the beetle, the reason behind the action was survival. Hunger. Duty to its kin.
However, if he attempted the same kill, then the reason for him could be something as simple as killing out of casual annoyance, or just because he could do it without facing any consequence.
And so it became clear that unlocking intent was not just about the act of killing, but also the depth of meaning behind it.
"If meaning shapes aura... then I need to understand more than just colors," Leo whispered to himself, fingers curling into the dirt. "I need to understand what a kill costs. What it gives. What it takes away. Only then... will intent show itself."