Chapter 11: Rebroken, II
The sun appeared to have come to a halt at a 45-degree angle. It had been 5 hours since the fight, yet the sun remained intact. I looked at the corpse of the man beside me and wondered if I hadn't attacked first, maybe, just maybe, the fight wouldn't have had to happen. What was done was done. I could do nothing about it.
The sun put a strange sort of fear in me. I knew it wouldn't start moving until I moved. Knowing the fact didn't help. I didn't move because I needed rest. 5 hours was more than enough for that, yet somehow I was just as exhausted as I was before. Why? I had no clue.
I attempted to feel my stamina returning, like a spiritualist delving deeply within oneself. I felt like I was a try-hard Gautam Buddha. I got no enlightenment, nor did I feel anything regaining.
I finally gave up and stood up. I thought of trying to take the dead man's daggers for myself once again, but it vanished as soon as I picked it up.
"Should've known." I sighed.
I looked at the sun and started moving in that direction like before. I knew time and distance didn't matter here. Why though? 'Why?' "That is one question I'll never get an answer for."
"If time and distance don't matter—and my running didn't matter either—maybe it doesn't matter how I travel."
I stopped in my tracks and only thought of moving. The land seemed to zoom in. The entire desert started moving towards me. I was traveling without moving my legs. It felt like I were flying. The sand hit my legs like flowing water. It stung because sand, unlike water, was a solid form of matter. Maybe water would hurt as well, not like I had any experience with rivers or anything.
The sun started moving again. The faster I went, the faster it moved. I moved in reverse to test if my movement was truly proportional to the sun. It actually was! The sun started to move to the east. Satisfied with my discovery, I continued on my journey to the west. The setting sun before me made me squint and shade my vision with my palm.
Moving fast did the air to flow towards me and give some semblance of wind. Moving faster caused greater wind, and I needed wind to soothe my tiredness away. So I began moving faster and faster and faster. I moved like the winds of storm, and a wind just as devastating hit me by the law of Newton, I didn't know which, 1st, 2nd or 3rd. All I knew was that every stitch of the coat I was wearing wanted to dig through my flesh to fly with the wind. Every muscle in my body opposed my movement. The wind was so fierce that my head and both hands were flying backwards, twitching and twisting like a flag but never going forward. I imagined how others would see me.
"I must look like some cartoon." I thought.
Suddenly, I felt intense pain in my head and chest. I could feel the fractured bones. I realized I was no longer travelling. Rather, I was on the ground, gazing at the stars over the sky.
I struggled to wake up and looked at the wall in front of me. "A bloody wall! I am a fucking cartoon."
It stood approximately 500 metres tall. Not that I'd know. I can barely tell the correct length of something. The pain seemed to fade away in a minute or so and I was fine, as if nothing had happened. The bloody tiredness, on the other hand, was something else entirely.
"It doesn't go up, nor does it go down. Does stamina even work like that?", I grumbled. I felt at my pocket and found a phone! I took it out and examined it. It didn't seem to be my phone. It had a white-ish look about it. There were no buttons, however. I tapped the screen once, and it popped open.
I knew what it was the moment I saw the contents. When I tapped the green liquid, it gave me the prompt "Would you like to use 1 'Energy Drink'?" With "yes" or "no" as options. I tapped "yes". The drink picture vanished from the phone—not even deleted—vanished!
I reached into my other pocket and found the drink there. Physically manifested. I smiled a faint, yet satisfied smile. It was cold as ice and felt like every other energy drink out there, by which I mean it was atrocious. It seemed to bring my stamina back to normal. Energy drink actually giving energy? I never thought.
I stood up and went around the wall, trying to find a door. After a while of walking—I wanted no more travelling accidents—I found 2 gigantic doors enclosing twice the gigantic hole made in the wall.
"Must be a chore to move that. I hope they have some contraptions to do the job." Then again it was in the middle of a fucking desert, so I had no hope.
Two smaller doors were cut into the gigantic doors. There were 2 guards standing on each side. And 2 on each side of the gigantic ones. They looked at me without expression when I passed them. As I went for the door, however, they stopped me.
"You have to fight and defeat one of us in order to go inside."
"Why one? Will the rest of you just stand and stare? Why bother fighting at all? I come in peace." I hoped there were no bloodstains on me. "You can just check to see if I have any weapons or not." And what happens if they find out the vanishing daggers?
Something started buzzing in my ear. I looked for the sound everywhere but saw nothing that could have produced it. It was an odd sort of buzzing. Not insects. Not that. It was something akin to the buzzing you hear when you close your ears to any sound. My ears, however, were working fine.
"Do you hear the buzzing?" I asked the guards. They shook their head. That made sense. If it was a buzzing, you hear when you cover your ears to any sound, then there's no reason anyone other than you is going to hear it too.
I felt an urge to defeat the guards. <Maybe that'll help with the buzzing.>
"Huh?" It felt like I started thinking differently. But there was no discernible difference. I thought better than to waste my time thinking over thinking. I had work to do.
"Sure, I'll fight one of you. I choose…....", I chose at random. The guard pointed me to the space I would fight on. He faced me with his spear in one hand and a shield in another.
<That's weird. You need two hands to use the spear properly. What's he gonna do? Stab me with 1 hand? Or does he know how to swing a spear with 1 hand? > I took out my daggers. One of the other guards shouted "Begin". And so it began.
The guard I faced truly was a fool, thinking he'd take me out with one hand stabs. It was easier to evade than the guy I faced before. I closed in and attacked with slashes and stabs, dancing with the two blades. He blocked most of it with the shield. <So he's more competent with guarding. No wonder he's a guard.>
He didn't, however, deflect every strike. It took time, but he collapsed after my blade dance spamming. A spear isn't a short-range weapon, so it didn't do any damage. The shield was a different thing. I didn't know shields could hurt so much. He didn't hit much, but when he did, it was painful.
The gates swung open once the guard's defeat was declared by his fellow guards. The phone in my pocket rang with some message tune (I knew because it was short). I paid it no mind. The buzzing still continued. I moved towards the gate, then stopped at the entrance.
"I challenge every one of you." The three guards stared blankly at me.
"The condition was just one of us. Do you really want to face all of us after you've accomplished your goal?"
"Inded, I intend to defeat all of you. Not together, though. Never that. I'm not a moron. I challenge each of you to a duel."
They took some moment looking at each other and spoke in unison, "challenge accepted."
I faced them one by one. All of them had shitty skills with a spear, which was good for me. Some were persistent with the defence, some hit hard with the shield, but they weren't much good. I barely felt any pain as I took all of them down. What I did feel though was tiredness. I was panting, not heavy panting, just panting. I knew it wouldn't stop unless I drank it again.
I checked the phone. There were some notifications I ignored and searched for the drink. It wasn't there. <As expected. I literally finished it.>
I became aware of the silence. The buzzing had stopped. I felt like I had accomplished something again. Not completely, though. The air somehow felt cold. <In a fucking desert?> I tried making sense of it. Then gave up and went through the open doors, finally arriving at the Desert Kingdom of Osirath. Why did I know the name? I wish I had a bloody clue.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone