Die To Grow

Asher was currently walking through the halls of a futuristic cuboid shaped building. After treading around for a couple of minutes, he arrived at his destination.

"This is it right?" He muttered, now standing in front of a large door 3 meter wide and 7 meters tall.

At the center of the door was a glowing green circle about the diameter of a coin.

Pulling a transparent card Lucius had given him, he touched it to the green circle and it soon glowed red, making the door slide from right to left.

As Asher walked into the room, he found it was a plain white room. The interior of the room looked a lot more bigger than the already ridiculous size of it's exterior, endless even. Asher suspected it too be some sort of illusion, but he really wasn't sure.

Suddenly blue lines started appearing in mid air, overlapping against each other till a star shape was made. The big blue star floated from above, down to Asher's face.

"Hello!"

A feminine voice came out of the object as a thin white line at its center vibrated when it spoke.

"I am the operator for this special training room. You can call me STAR."

Asher stared at the star shaped object with indifference. Artificially intelligent beings were nothing special in the fortieth century.

"Where you are now is called an Ability Enhancement Time Chamber.

There is only one of such a place in the world, and training in them could give up to 300% more results than in the actual world.

Time flow in the chambers can be relatively slow compared to world's time. And the current ratio set is 1:3."

STAR stopped. But after a while, it was like, she/ it and Asher where engaged in a staring contest. She had even formed two white circles as eyes as she was expecting he would at least have something to ask her about the strange functions of the room. But he didn't say anything.

"I don't have any questions." Asher confirmed. "This room increases the physical, chemical and psychological reactions of a living being while maintaining the balance from the disorder the change in the time variable has caused.

In other words, you're rapidly increasing my cells' manufacturing and dying speed so I age faster and also boost my brain so it keeps up.

It's like this is a sick mental torture room. After all, there's no way your programming allows you to actually control time. The universe is big, and I doubt the energy of a couple of solar powered generators could cover the entire expanse of space."

STAR blinked in surprise.

Asher's rambling was actually the precise operation of the training room. And he had found that out from just a few sentences from her.

"Umm... I should go on then." She stuttered, to which Asher shrugged to. Rearranging the info in her memory bank, she continued.

"Okay. To start, all you need to do is take an energy scan and decide what requirement of your ability you would like to work on. If it's a requirement the room can help with, then we can begin."

"Woah, now that's strange."

From this new information, it seemed like the room could get access to the information of a person's system.

Even Asher didn't know how that worked, but it didn't mean he wouldn't later on. So for now it was just intriguing.

"Well, let's hope this is one of those technologies that can work on me." He said.

"Yeah. Because if not, either this whole building blows up, or you do." The man in his head, having kept silent for a while, finally spoke again.

"It sounds like you're praying for that possibility. But if my body explodes you might die too you know?" Asher shook his head.

There were some human gadgets that didn't work for animats, just like there were animat gadgets that didn't work for humans.

And as a complicated mix of both species, Asher had to make most of his medical tools and equipments he used by himself. Modern technology, more often than not, had no effect on him.

He activated one of his most useful abilities and the one closest to evolving.

Soon an eerie purple light encased his form, and white dots started to float around from the room into his body and back out.

The feeling he got was quite irritating. It felt as if the white dots were tiny balls burrowing into the pores of his skin and going out, taking some parts of him with them.

But soon the balls all flew away from his body and disappeared without a trace.

"Energy identified.

[A-rank: Amethyst spectre - level 5

Final Requirement – A spectre without a soul: Get revived after dying for 1 minute.]

"What the heck!" The Old Man exclaimed as he scanned through the words.

Asher frowned in response. If he hadn't come to this chamber, he would have never guessed that this was the absurd requirement his system wanted him to fulfill. It only said the number of requirements needed, and told what those requirements were, only when they were done.

Nevertheless, what was more important now, was how this room was going to help him fulfill that requirement. How would it resurrect him after it killed him.

The whole environment was suddenly starting to feel more like a death trap than actual training.

Training commences in twenty seconds."

At STAR's last sentence, the floor started to break off into tiny white cubes, forming a sea of such objects for as far as he could see. Slowly the room's interior was changing as the cubes stack up on themselves, forming a completely new environment.

Then the lighting changed, and the cubes took shape.

The plain white room was now a cityscape with a dark sky, no clouds, moons or stars. There were also no lights from any of the buildings around so it was incredibly spooky and had a ghost town vibe.

"Can't I just dip myself in cold water and enter suspended animation?" Asher's question received no response however. Truth being, he was starting to rethink this training session.

"Oh scat." Suddenly, he felt something rushing from behind, trying to punch a bullet sized hole through his chest.

But the fast bullet was moving relatively slow compared to Asher's speed, so he figured he could move away fairly easy. 

But as he pulled his body to turn, he soon realized that he couldn't even move a single muscle. Not only that, but all of his abilities weren't working. All except for one that is.

BOOM!

Asher stared, wide eyed at the crater 10 meters away in front of him.

Thinking back to the attack, he realized that the power at which the bullet hit the ground was absurdly more powerful, than what it's speed portrayed.

The bullet was the size of a marble but Asher predicted that his upper body would have burst apart completely had it gone through his chest.

'This is a messed up training room.' Asher thought, if this was how regular training in the chamber went, then he couldn't even imagine how many people had died here. Or maybe it was just him that this place wanted dead.

He wasn't given much time to think though, as he suddenly heard a robotic voice sounding from all around him.

Ability reaction speed time, 0.15 seconds. Increasing regular attack speed by a hundred percent.

"!!!"

BOOM!!!!

The object (bullet) was shot out again from 60 degrees to his right, aiming at his neck. But even though Asher couldn't really see it, he could sense it's momentum, and at the right time, he activated his skill.

Increasing regular attack speed by a hundred and fifty percent.

BOOM!!!!!!!

Increasing regular attack speed by two hundred percent.

BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!

"No way kid, are you sweating? You can regenerate right?"

"I could also move my limbs, so what's your point?!"

So far, he had dodged three of the weird and monstrously heavy bullets, and Asher had to admit that the situation the room put him in was intense.

Withal, he was now seeing a whole new part of abilities that he didn't really focus on before, the activation speed.

Asher was fast, very fast. In fact he was sure that if given his movement speed, he would be able to dodge those bullets even if they were ten times faster. But to activate his powers as fast as he could move? That was simply impossible.

He hadn't worked on improving his activation speed, nor did had he ever felt the need to. The fact that the training session showed him how difficult of a position he would have been in if placed in conditions in the real world opened up a new road of growth and challenge for him.

Assuming he made it out alive that is. It was quite possible that if things went wrong, only his legs would be leaving this place.

He continued to blink on and off the purple colour, with the room turning his powers off and him doing the opposite when he needed to dodge a bullet. It was strange and frightening how much control the chamber had over his own body.

But soon the situation turned even worse.

Before he knew what had happened, Asher was no longer in the same spot he was before and was now falling from the very top of a high rise building.

BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An even louder sound than any of the previous ones, echoed throughout the ghost city. A bullet punched through one of the buildings in the area, breaking it into two halves. A show of how much mass that bullet had.

And to add to that terror, two more shots of the same bang rang in his ears.

The timing of the bullets was such that, one would hit Asher at a very negligible difference in time compared to the other two, making the only way out for him being activating his ability three consecutive times to dodge them.

If the room let him keep his ability on, then dodging those three things would be easy, but since it always turned off his ability immediately after one object passed through him, then Asher had to think of some other way out, or he was going to die in this murderous training room.

He didn't think he could dodge the objects like how the room wanted since his ability activation speed was still relatively slow; the reaction speed that would take was a lot less than he could pull off.

'If this room can really cancel my powers then it wouldn't be wrong to rule out my regeneration.'

In the middle of his thoughts, Asher could feel the wind wrapping around one of the bullets twist his right kidney. It hadn't even reached his body, yet Asher was already coming apart from the wind force alone.

"Shi~" Asher couldn't even curse, as his mind soon started to go blank. He couldn't feel his legs, arms or heck, anything at all.

All he could sense was his very existence fading away.

That baldy did it, I'm really going to die.

Asher's eyes turned blank and lost their shine.

....

"Hey, wake up! Wake up!"

*Gasp*

His body was shaken as he heard the voice of a man. When he finally woke up, he saw himself sitting on the ground.

The place he was staying in, he didn't know where it was; it was completely dark. There was a black floor, sky and no walls, but what hit the man the most was not that he couldn't recognize this place, but that he couldn't even remember who he was.

"Where is this place?" He asked as he looked around. But soon, he realized that the voice of the person who woke him up was gone, he was all alone in the room.

Huh? What's that?

He hadn't notice it before, but not everywhere was black. There was a large wall in front of him, depicting an image.

His eyes glittered as he stared at the screen. At least there was entertainment in this boring place.

In the screen, he saw a man, falling from a great height. The man's face was covered by a face mask and a round collar; his blank eyes showing that he was most definitely dead. However, he somehow knew that it wasn't true.

He looked at the man's body closely, and the image of a black marble came into view. It was only when he looked closer that he realized that the marble was actually moving, albeit very slowly.

The man's clothes were getting ripped apart for some reason, and soon his flesh would be too. But he didn't want that.

"Dodge you idiot!" As he yelled, the man's body lit up purple.

BOOM!

The marble suddenly went faster through his stomach, without causing any harm.

Another marble showed, moving into the man's chest. However, just like last time, at his command, the man's body lit up purple and the marble went through. This was the same for the final one going for his heart.

"Hm mh!" He nodded with pride like he had just saved his game character from being killed. Yearning for more action, he yelled, next.

But this time nothing happened.

"Next! Is this thing broken?!" However, his body soon started to disintegrate. His arms disappeared, but a living sensation overcame it. His legs vanished, and he could wiggle them, when his body fully disappeared, he opened his eyes.

"What... What just happened?" Asher muttered dazedly as he fell on the floor.

[Time before resurrection: 0.6 seconds. Time left: 59.4]

The robotic voice rang in his confused mind and the buildings started to collapse into tiny blocks while the sky started turning white again.

"Kid..." The Old Man sounded a bit worried.

At his voice, Asher finally blinked. "A... That was freaking awesome!!" He shot up and landed on his feet.

What was that state? Where was that place? Asher didn't know.

But what he did know was that while he was like that, he had perfect control over his body. He was his perfect puppeteer, and even the constraints of time where faint in that black dimension, as he could make things go fast if he wanted to, or slow if otherwise. He felt like a god!

Whatever that state of being was, Asher didn't care much. But how to get there, that was a different story.

"STAR, let's do that again." He called out.

Are you sure? Your human body shouldn't be able to take more than 30 minutes of this.

"Oh, you don't have to worry about that. I'm not human anyway."

Forget his soft skin, Asher's stats were twice the amount of a regular level 69. This meant his stamina could definitely handle one more.

***

But Asher later ended up spending more time than he had anticipated. How long Approximately ten days in the real world, which was equivalent to thirty in the room.

But during that amount of time, Asher wasn't the only one who would encounter death, as strange phenomenons randomly started to spring up all over Ansel.