Re: From Elf Mage to Overlord Slayer-Chapter 30: The Echo Chamber

Chapter 30: The Echo Chamber
The third and final discipline was The Echo Chamber.
Heh.
This was supposed to be the true heart of the training here.
This was where they tested your soul.
The room wasn’t some fancy arena or a maze.
It was just a circle of small, polished black stones on the floor.
There was no crystal.
There was no instructor barking orders at us.
Just this low, humming sound that seemed to come from the walls themselves.
It made the air feel all heavy and thick.
It felt like walking into a server room for ghosts.
The same boring-faced instructor stood before us, though he somehow looked even more tired today.
"Your body is a weapon," he droned, his voice totally flat.
"Your mind is a weapon."
"But your soul... your soul is the hand that wields them."
"If the hand shakes, the blade will miss its mark."
He waved a hand at the circle of stones.
"Here, you will face the echo of your own breaking."
"The moment that brought you to the Corps."
"The memory that fuels your fire."
He looked around at all of us, his eyes completely empty.
"You will not change it."
"You will not escape it."
"You will learn to stand in the heart of that fire and not be burned."
"You will learn control."
"Or you will be consumed by your own ghost, and we will sweep up the ashes."
Then he started calling out names.
One by one, some poor sucker would walk to a stone, sit down, and close their eyes.
Some of them would just sit there, completely still.
Others would start twitching like crazy.
Sweat would just pour down their faces.
A few of them whimpered.
One guy just started screaming, this raw, horrible sound that went on and on until two Sentinels came and dragged his unconscious body away.
So this was the real test.
This was where they figured out if you were a Slayer, or just another broken toy that needed to be thrown out.
Finally, my name was called.
I walked over to an empty stone and sat down.
I closed my eyes.
The world just dissolved.
And I was back.
I was back in the Great Hall.
The air smelled of wine and fear.
The screaming of the nobles was just a symphony of chaos all around me.
And I was completely frozen.
My body was a statue of my own uselessness, my <Glass Cannon> flaw locking me in place like a damn stun effect.
I just watched, helpless, as the red-haired Titan turned its attention toward me.
I watched as Yael, a blur of silver hair and green silk, threw herself right in front of me.
I heard her whisper, the words a perfect, painful echo in my memory.
"One last time, right? I pull aggro, you find the damn weak spot. Don’t screw this up, moron."
The Titan’s hand came down.
It touched her.
And she started to flicker, to dissolve, like a corrupted file being deleted from the world.
A scream of pure, animal rage tore right through me.
The cold control of the Slayer protocol shattered into a million pieces.
The crimson berserker energy exploded from my soul, a wildfire of pure, undiluted pain.
<ERROR! ERROR! CATASTROPHIC EMOTIONAL FEEDBACK DETECTED!>
The simulation just ended.
I was back on the stone, my heart hammering against my ribs, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
The instructor was staring at me.
"Again, Initiate Quinn," he said, his voice completely flat.
So that was the game.
They were going to make me loop this thing until I broke or until I learned.
I closed my eyes.
The Great Hall.
Her whisper.
The flicker of her soul being erased.
The explosion of rage.
<ERROR! ERROR!>
Back on the stone.
"Again."
The Great Hall.
Her smirk.
Her sacrifice.
My failure.
<ERROR!>
"Again."
Loop after loop after loop.
The memory wasn’t a memory anymore.
It was a cage.
And I was the rat, hitting the same electric fence over and over again.
The pain was still there.
The grief was still a raw, open wound.
But after the tenth loop, something else started to kick in.
My raid-leader brain.
The part of me that doesn’t feel, it just analyzes.
Okay.
This isn’t a memory.
This is a boss mechanic.
A repeatable pattern.
A puzzle that needs to be solved.
The objective isn’t to save her.
That’s impossible.
The objective is to survive the encounter without wiping my own emotional stability.
I closed my eyes for what felt like the hundredth time.
The Great Hall materialized around me again.
This time, I didn’t focus on her face.
I focused on the data.
I started a mental timer.
At 0.8 seconds from the start of the sequence, she was grabbed.
At 2.1 seconds, her back is to me.
At 3.4 seconds, the Titan’s hand makes contact.
At 3.5 seconds, the horror begins.
At 3.6 seconds, my berserker protocol triggers.
It was just a script.
A sequence of events.
I watched it again, but this time, I wasn’t watching a tragedy.
I was watching a cutscene I’d seen a hundred times.
I was speedrunning my own trauma.
I knew every line.
I knew every animation.
I knew exactly when the pain was supposed to hit.
And because I knew it was coming, I could brace for it.
I built a wall in my mind.
A cold, logical wall of data and timers.
The memory played out.
I felt the familiar surge of rage begin to build.
But this time, I met it with a cold, simple thought.
This is the mechanic. The rage is the debuff. Do not let it apply.
I focused on my breathing.
I focused on the numbers.
The Titan’s hand touched her.
She began to flicker.
I felt the fire of the berserker state trying to ignite.
And I just... let it.
I didn’t fight it.
I didn’t suppress it.
I just watched it, like a scientist observing a chemical reaction in a beaker.
I contained it.
I built a furnace of pure, cold will around the fire of my grief.
The simulation held.
For the first time, I made it past the 3.6 second mark without the system crashing.
I was still in the memory.
I was standing in the fire, and I was not burning.
And that’s when I saw him.
In the corner of the memory, half-hidden by a fallen pillar, was a ghostly, transparent figure.
It was Gandalf.
He wasn’t part of the original memory.
He was just standing there, silent and still.
An observer.
A glitch in my simulation.
He was just watching, his face a pale mask of horror.
He was seeing what I was seeing.
He was feeling what I was feeling.
The simulation was somehow connecting our trials.
My greatest pain was being broadcast directly into his soul.
The sight of him, this unwelcome ghost in my personal hell, was so jarring, so completely unexpected, that it broke my concentration.
The furnace wall cracked.
The rage exploded.
<ERROR!>
I was back on the stone.
My eyes snapped open.
Across the room, Gandalf was on his own stone.
His eyes were wide, his face was pale and slick with sweat.
He was staring at me.
He wasn’t looking at me with hatred anymore.
He was looking at me with a horrified, disturbed understanding.
He had seen it.
He had seen her die through my eyes.
He had felt the monstrous, world-breaking grief that I was trying to cage.
He now knew the truth.
I wasn’t just some arrogant monster who got his friend killed.
I was a walking apocalypse, powered by a pain so deep it could warp reality itself.
And he was terrified of me.
Just then, a loud, sobbing wail broke the silence.
One of the other initiates had just finished his trial.
He was on his knees, crying his eyes out.
"I saw her... I saw her face!" he wept.
Seraphina, looking bored as hell, walked over to him.
"What horror did you witness, initiate?" she asked, her voice laced with a faint, clinical curiosity.
The initiate looked up at her, his face a total mess of tears and snot.
"She... she left me on read!" he bawled. "She saw the message, but she never texted back!"
The room was silent for a beat.
I just stared.
My internal monologue, dry and cynical, provided the only commentary that made sense.
Some people really need a patch update.