Adler's Grief

Syllian's weary mind drifted about, the comfort of a mother's gentle embrace swirling around his painless body.

'So nice...'

Aimlessly floating through the darkness, Syllian's eyes refused to open. It felt like a lock had sealed his dark eyes.

Syllian, who was oddly uncaring of what was about to occur, relished in this rare moment of blissful comfort as he allowed all his worries, doubts, and fears to melt into the darkness surrounding him.

He hadn't experienced such joy in over a year.

But all things must come to an end, one way or another.

Thus, after a few minutes, the lock began to release itself.

His fluttering eyelashes spread apart to reveal the eyes of a curious child.

There, Syllian lay witness to a sight he would never forget, a moment he could never forget.

Even if he could forget, he would fight through thick and thin to retain the memory.

Because before him was...

A web.

An endlessly vast web that stretched to the edges of what felt like the universe itself.

Each string, each interconnecting cross-section, and every major node and heart of the intricate webbing seemed to radiate with the light of Divinity.

Syllian may not know what a Divine being looked like, but if he had to apply that word to something...

The pristine lines which ran for an eternity and the unfathomably complex labyrinth of string that formed a network that no mere mortal could even dare to desecrate-

...It would be to this.

But, just as quickly as the webbing appeared before his eyes, it disappeared.

Returning Syllian to the darkness almost instantaneously.

That mere instant was enough to almost fry his brain to mush, and that was including the fact that a weird, hazy pane of 'glass' had separated his eyes and the webbing like a filter.

However, before Syllian could digest the view that had appeared for a split second, he suddenly felt like he was falling into the darkness, at first it was slow, but then his descent began to rapidly accelerate.

Then, his consciousness began merging with the descent into the unknown.

Moments before his consciousness disappeared, a rune appeared before his eyes.

Shimmering in the darkness with pale, holy radiance, the meaning of that rune entered his mind just as he lost consciousness.

It read:

[Net of Ruin]

-----

Searing pain rattled his mind awake.

"Ah!"

Shooting up, the pain increased with fervent glee for a moment before settling down as he stopped moving. Planting his hands on the left side of his abdomen, Syllian felt his hand plunge into a warm, thick, yet sticky substance.

Looking down Syllian found himself dressed in an ancient, worn-down brown tunic with sticky, coagulated blood on the side of his abdomen.

Lifting the tunic that now covered his body, he discovered bandages that were once white, now a dirty crimson red, wrapped around his abdomen.

'What?'

Raising his head in confusion, the boy looked around and found himself in a slightly large wooden room with a few beds and what looked like clinical items scattered about.

Waking up with a wound and in what was most likely an ancient hospital ward was the least of Syllian's worries though.

And that's because the floor was slick with blood and only a few patches of clear ground remained.

'What the!'

BOOM!

An extremely loud banging noise abruptly collided with the room, causing it to sway with extreme force.

'E-earthquake?'

Barely holding his body up, Syllian clung to a nearby table for dear life.

BOOM!

Syllian's grip slipped with the second collision, sending him flying across the room to the other side.

Thud-

Crashing into a table adorned with medicinal items, Syllian clenched his teeth as pain rushed through his wound.

He had crashed directly into his side.

"Fuck."

"Y-you good kid...?" a raspy, aged voice roused Syllian awake from the pain.

Turning his head to the right, a man wrapped in bandages stained in blood and pus with only his eyes and nose revealing themselves rested on one of the beds.

Straps wrapped around the man, keeping him stable on the bed.

"Yeah, I'm g-good." failing to conceal the pain he was in, Syllian let out his best attempt at a smile.

The man was stunned for a second, then spoke with a solemn voice.

"Kid, never smile again, please, for the sanity of the people around you."

"..."

The man was already blacklisted in Syllian's mind.

'Should I kill this bastard? It won't be hard, he's wounded and strapped to a bed, yeah, it'll be easy...'

Unaware of Syllian's vile thoughts, he continued talking:

"If you can- Cough! Cough!"

Taking a few deep breaths, he finished his sentence.

"-then you should go up, the Adler will be swallowed whole at this rate- Cough! Cough!"

'Adler?'

BOOM!

Smacking face-first into the ground, Syllian swore he had never been in a more pathetic situation before.

...Alright, that was a lie.

But still.

Now that the man was blacklisted, Syllian, although curious about what an 'Adler' was and why it would be swallowed whole, didn't bother responding.

Standing back up, the boy promptly made his way to the door and opened it.

As soon as it opened-

BOOM!

-Syllian was thrown face-first into the wall on the opposite side of the door.

'I swear, I'll die to a wall before a Mutant even gets to me!'

With a frustrated sigh, Syllian closed the door to the hospital ward, ignoring whatever words the bedridden man tried throwing at him.

Blacklisted meant blacklisted.

No takebacks.

But now, he was in a dark corridor.

Albeit there were a few sources of light seeping through the walls and below door frames that he assumed to be of the candle type.

'At least it's not true darkness.'

Smacking his cheeks to focus, Syllian eyed a large, intricately carved wooden door at the end of the corridor.

"Screw it." muttering beneath his breath, Syllian worked up his courage and carefully proceeded through the dark corridor.

He especially avoided the other doors, who knew what horrors might lie behind them.

This was the Trial of Ruin after all.

After a few violent thrashings thrown at him by the world, and extremely violent swaying, Syllian arrived before the door.

'No Mutants, no Mutants, no Mutants.'

Praying to whatever god that might exist in the world, not that he believed in any in the first place, Syllian gripped the handle and twisted it open.

A cacophony of noise shattered the eery silence, torrential, blistering cold winds blasting across the wooden tiling ahead of him, and even at him. And from above, flood-like showers poured upon them like the tears of a goddess, the clouds invisible beneath the darkness of the stormy night sky.

Then, his eyes turned to the sails above him.

'A ship...'

And that was his final moment of respite.

"Finch! You're awake! Get to the sails! Pull 'em down!"

The man's scar-ridden face flashed for a brief moment as thunder sizzled above them.

"Got it!"

Before he could even ask which side he had to go to, the man disappeared to the other side of the ship, pulling on a line that ran on the outskirts of the deck.

'How do I even pull down sails?!'

Forget sails, he had only heard of ships in fairy tails, even the ocean or the sea, whatever the difference between the two was, was the stuff of legends!

Syllian raised his shirt and adjusted the bandages around his abdomen, he tightened them enough to prevent any accident from occurring.

That man had given him a little bit of advice.

Trust and don't trust.

And survive.

Syllian had to admit that this advice was inadequate and poorly conveyed.

But he got the gist of it, 'At least I think I do.'

Gritting his teeth, Syllian scurried to the left side of the ship, he dashed and weaved through the swarm of sailors and put himself next to a set of sailors who were pulling on a line that reached the sails.

"One! Two! Pull!"

Syllian planted himself behind the leader, right in front of another young boy, perhaps one or two years younger than he was. Syllian didn't miss the fear blossoming in the child's brown eyes.

"One! Two! Pull!"

Tightening his non-existent muscles, Syllian clasped the aged rope that was impossible to wrap around with a single hand and pulled on command.

Unaccustomed to activities on a ship, his feet slid on the water and through pure bad luck...

BOOM!

That powerful collision thundered through the night sky, this time a dozen times louder with vibrations powerful enough to rattle the twigs in his flesh.

Having just slipped, the impact threw him into the air.

'Bad! Really bad!'

His body was aimed at the dark waters of the ocean.

"Finch!" another young hand gripped his tunic, pulling him back to the safety of the deck.

"Thanks!" thanking the heavens for saving his life, or in this scenario, the child, Syllian who now noticed that his new name was 'Finch' returned to pulling on the sails.

"One! Two! Pu-"

A disgusting squelching noise rang through the air, and Syllian's face froze as he stared at the scenery in front of him.

The scenery blossomed from the leader.

Intestines spilt over from the man's empty waist, blood spewing out ferociously from the lower half of the corpse.

The upper half-

'The upper...'

Was gone.

Splat.

The corpse fell over, graffitiing the ground like the splodge of a rotten tomato.

Its legs twitched slightly, still receiving the commands that had been sent by the man's brain mere moments ago.

Holding back the acid rising up his throat, Syllian stepped forward, avoided the corpse, and repeated:

"One! Two! Pull!"

'Fuck, I couldn't even see what killed him!'

"F-Finch!" the boy behind him pulled religiously, but the grief tainting the child's voice was palpable.

"Yeah?!"

Pulling with every last droplet of his stamina, Syllian hid the fear within him and spoke through his burning lungs and crying limbs

"Why are you port side?! Shouldn't you be on the right?!"

'Port side? What does that mean? The left side maybe?'

"Well, I'm here now!"

Sensing the line behind him beginning to grow dull, Syllian knew he had to raise their morale somehow.

Their leader had just died.

"One! Two! Pull! Don't lose to the other side!"

There was no response, but his job grew physically easier so he knew it was a success.

Using that moment of brief respite, Syllian looked to the other side of the ship, where he was apparently meant to be.

BOOM!

The sudden impact threw shards of broken wood flying through the air, the hull on the right side of the ship torn into mashed artificial potato.

From the depths of the lightless ocean, Syllian finally saw what it was that was constantly battering the ship.

A tentacle over a meter thick and unimaginably long swayed through the hull, piercing in with frightening speed.

And the victims of the tentacle...

Bone and blood littered the sky, the right side, where Syllian was meant to be, was no more.

All dead.

At that same moment, a dreadful whisper entered his ear.

Like the Devil himself.

It's tone...

Was almost as if it enjoyed the sight.

[First Trial]

[Return that which does not belong to you.]

But, it wasn't over.

[Second Trial]

[A gift of mutiny plagues the ship, unravel the source.]

The ship was silent for a moment.

As though they were admiring the sight of a dozen dead people.

Syllian similarly admired the sight as the scar-ridden man's decapitated flying head rushed past his face.

Disappearing into the dark ocean with a gentle splash.