35 Determination

(General POV)

Nothing ran through his mind. No conscious thoughts, no stratagems nor even the recognition of the monster cores and drop items falling to the ground. All he was focused on was slicing apart everything that moved in his way.

From the the first floor all the way to the middle floors, little Pallum supporters and adventures found trails of loot littered across the ground as whoever killed the beasts cared not enough for the valuable items to pick them up. Some particularly poor adventurers found themselves carrying a heftier bag of Valis in their hands than they did in an entire month.

But that did not register nor did it matter to Lyze. His mind was amess, consumed by all the frustrations and emotions of the past few days. He'd believed that by leaving his master's wing would he find clarity of mind and a straight path towards his objective.

But there was no escaping his demons, nor his conscience. The only thing that seemed to ease the pressure off of him was the flow of blood from the hordes of monsters that swarmed him. And there was none of the usual elegance of his style.

Instead it was straightforward slashes imbued with magical energy. No beautiful and dramatic displays of the many elements. Just pure shockwaves of magical power that tore through his enemies like hot knifes through mounds of butter.

His attire which he'd only just bought the day before was caked with blood and his boots squelched with the corpse fluids of those he'd slain each time he took a step. He revelled in the power that the bloodshed afforded him. Even if it was slow, he could feel himself grow in power, his stats increasing in number as his attacks became more furious, almost madman-like.

Eventually even the minotaurs whom he'd once needed to guard himself against found themselves unable to even contend with him as he breezed past them. Some had their heads rolling while some found holes in their bodies before disappearing simply because his small body had ploughed right through them.

It was no question that Lyze was indeed stronger than the average adventurer of his level. His body functioned differently to the inhabitants of this world. Simply being himself had already broken the usual parameter placed on others had made his vessel capable of absorbing so much more Excelia than others.

If other adventurers were to look upon him now, even the highest of level 3 veterans would become nervous of engaging him because of how mindless he'd become and how indiscriminately he attacked each and every one of his foes. One minotaur managed to raise its stone sword just in time to block the longsword in the boy's hands.

But without a second thought, the boy gestured with his hands all of a sudden the minotaur's core was in his hand. As unintelligent as it was, the poor beast tried to figure out how that had happened before collapsing into a cloud of dust, deprived of the chance to ponder any further. Lyze simply tossed the core away and continued on his rampage.

Eventually he reached the seventeenth floor and it was there he paused as the memories of the battle with Goliath came rushing back. For someone so low in level to accomplish such an unimaginable feat, and to level up in a singular day. For certain, he'd not pushed his stats to the maximum like he'd wanted but he'd more than enough qualified for a level up.

Adventurers would be lucky that even one of their stats reach S rank at all, much less SSS rank, in their lifetimes. Most people would rank up to D in their stats, the minimum requirement to level up before they actually did so, all because they physically weren't able to push themselves further. He himself had broken all parameters, all understanding of consolidating power in this world, to the point where even his Falna behaved abnormally.

Anybody else in his shoes would be immensely proud of achievements like this. But Lyze was not, and because of a simple reason...it was not ENOUGH. He had seen truly powerful beings and everything he had right now, even if he could master Chaos and wield it to the fullest extent, would not measure up to these beings.

Disregarding those entities, the higher levelled adventurers alone would not have to try and take him out as he was simply too weak to them. The point was that for all the abnormal and magnificent powers he possessed, he still came up short against the top dogs.

And he couldn't afford to keep things like that!

All those adventurers chased dreams, or fought under a sense of obligations such as providing for family, serving vengeance or repaying debts back to someone that had saved them. If on those feelings alone they were able to grow so powerful, then what about him?

Someone that had everything torn away from him and left in a place unreachable to him. Someone who apparently had one of the greatest powers ever and yet he could not use it! Someone who fought to regain everything he'd loved. All those people had everything they needed, they still had their identities and their sense of belonging in this world.

He didn't belong here! He carried the name of two useless bastards that prioritized drugs and alcohol over the wellbeing of their own child. He carried a face that did not belong to him but was simply a mirror version of someone else's with the only difference being the colour of hair.

Not even his soul was his anymore apparently for God's sake! For now it served as a house for a fifth dimensional being that it itself desired nothing more than entertainment! You would think that being the Host of Chaos was something grand and glorious, yes? No!

He was merely a host, an anchor for this being in the physical world through which it could impose its will onto the normal world. Examples like this happened all over fictional universes, where 5th dimensional beings had no physical form of their own and so had to act through conduits in order to do as they pleased in the mortal realms.

His body merely served as a focus for Chaos magic from a different dimensional plane into the 3D world. And even though their wills were apparently aligned meaning he could do as he pleased with the power he'd been granted, he had nothing that he could call his anymore.

The only thing that remained of Alex Turner was the memories he carried. He wasn't even the same person anymore. And it hurt! Even if he did somehow find a way back to his mother, how could he convince her that it was him when he had nothing of his previous self to prove his identity to her.

WHAT WAS HIS PURPOSE?

Even as the walls spat out dozens of minotaurs at him, they all found themselves decapitated instantly if they even got near him. He roared in defiance and mockery at the dungeon.

"COME THEN YOU FILTH RIDDEN CREVICE IN THE EARTH! IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE TO OFFER ME?"

His voice penetrated the walls of the dungeon, filled with the authority of Chaos who was known as the progenitor of monsters alongside the mortal races. His voice spread throughout its body, unknown to him as it reached all the way down to the Covenant.

The seventeenth floor seemed to shake and rumble as a groaning sound echoed through the giant hallway. It almost seemed the dungeon was returning his sentiments, and trying to defy this mysterious authority emanating from the boy. In that moments, whatever counted as the dungeon's sentience recognized a unique threat of the child in its belly, and marked him in a way where the dungeon would definitely remember him.

Immediately the walls exploded and out came another few minotaurs. But these were much bigger, and their fur was red in colour. Their red eyes gleamed with mad rage as drool and slobbered splashed out of their maws and onto the stone floor. Lyze recognised them as Variants, monsters of a particular type that sometimes stronger than their usual counter parts.

He wasted no time in launching towards them with the sword in his hands drawn. He clashed with the first ones, and found to his surprise and pleasure that the brute had much more brains and brawn than his weaker brothers. This one actually had decent combat skills. As did the others that spawned with him.

Lyze spent minutes dancing and darting around them, swinging earnestly with the longsword in his hand. And it was in this fight that he realized how reliant he'd been on Libur. The holy sword was a blade that never dulled and always remained sharp as the strength of will of it's wielder. With such a weapon in hand, he never need that it would break or it would blunt

But with a normal sword like this? He discovered the essence of adventuring, and the fear that accompanied the loss of a weapon and one less means of defence. This was further driven home when one of the minotaur variants landed a particularly well timed blow against a certain point on the long sword, causing it to shatter the blade into fragments.

Lyze only took a moment to register this before he dove forwards and dug a fist right into the monster's stomach. Hid hand reached deep into the monsters gut, and the minotaur coughed up blood from its mouth as the air was knocked out of him. Another minotaur eager to save his brother kicked the little boy away.

Lyze felt the pain but it did not deter him, even as he went skidding across the ground. The laws of physics could not be defied, and his body weight was simply too little to not be thrown away like that with much more weight behind an attack like that. But it was not enough to keep him away for as soon as he came to a halt, he charged forwards again, leapt up and kneed the beast in the face.

From a contest of sword play to a brawling fisticuff as he smashed all their stone swords with his strength and proceeded to beat the daylights out of them while receiving an equal measure of suffering. But the difference between them was that one side was more animal like at the moment...and it wasn't the minotaurs.

And just as it happened in the animal kingdom, it was usually the one more persistent that won in the end. The first minotaur Lyze had attacked was the last to learn this lesson as Lyze's strength grew again to the point where he could thrust his hand through it's hide and rip out its beating heart. The monster faded away in a puff of white smoke.

Lyze stood before the Wall of Grief, panting and covered in blood with minotaur horns and cores all around him. He clenched his fist, as he still felt that he had more fight left in him. On his last run, he'd run out of most of his stamina by this point in time but now that he was levelled up, he found that he had lot more energy left.

Enough to repeat the same brazen thing that everybody accused him of but this time, he simply didn't care. More challenge meant more power for him to achieve.

"Why don't you let him out then!?" Lyze shouted up at the dungeon as his gaze ran over the Wall of Grief. "You can't fool me with the interval crap that you've managed to sell to every other loser up there! I know for a fact you can send a monster rex whenever you want! I know because I've seen it!"

The wall trembled before him but it didn't seem like anything would come out. This only served to infuriate him.

"GO ON THEN! IF YOU THINK YOUR'E SO TOUGH FOR SOMETING THAT COUNTS AS LITTLE MORE THAN A MERE SCRATCH IN THE PLANET'S CRUST, THEN SPIT THE BASTARD OUT AND LET ME KILL HIM! I WILL ASCEND ABOVE YOU, ABOVE ALL OF YOU!"

The wall exploded outwards, and true to his demand, Goliath was spat out right at him. And although the monster seemed a little disorientated the first time around, this time it was ready to grab the boy even before its feet touched the ground.

---

Back on the surface, in the hidden throne room within Babel, there sat a seemingly old man with his eyes closed in constant prayers as he tried to keep hold over the dungeon. His eyes flew open as he sensed the anomaly and worry gripped his heart. In his long time spent sitting on this seat, he'd encountered many of these strange and spontaneous decisions the dungeon seemed to make.

But now he could sense a sinister fury emanating from the dungeon as it swelled in power on a particular floor, the way it did before it would birth a monster rex.

But a monster rex had already spawned there two days prior and from the reports had been slain by a lone adventurer that was quickly rising in fame as the quickest record breaker in history.

It was his misfortune that his secret and trusted aide was not next to him at the moment for him to send down there and see what was going on. Unfortunately, Fels had taken the communications stones with him on his current assignment.

So Ouranos, also known as Uranus the Primordial of the Sky in one reality, the Primordial Elder of this reality, was left with no option but to wait until one of his agents came to him so that he could put them to use in investigating this phenomenon.

---

Lyze darted out of its grip and flew out of it's reach. Throwing his hands out, he hurled a fireball at the beast. The magical attack exploded against its skin, showing that it burst with more power than a grenade. Goliath howled as it felt the sting of fire burn its back.

Lyze charged up another fireball in hand before pausing as suddenly amidst the chaos of battle and the adrenaline of facing a boss monster, he was struck with an epiphany.

On this floor he believed, he'd told Riveria how he envisioned fire magic. He'd told her that when envisioning fire, he imagined a campfire burning on wood as fuel, and the more wood was put in, the hotter the fire burnt. But what if he were to replace the wood as fuel with something more powerful? What if instead he used...

"Envision methane." He said with his eyes closed as he removed the image of firewood from his mind and replaced it with a gas tank.

The orange flame in his hand suddenly roared ferociously to life as it turned a pale blue with flickers of violet near the top. The sound it made sounded exactly like stove except maybe a dozen times louder and it looked as if he were carrying a blue flamethrower in his hands. The heat intensified ballistically as nearly burned his blindfold off.

"So science and magic can be intertwined at times." Lyze grinned. He condensed the fire down to a blue fireball before hurling that at Goliath.

The giant had by this point gotten to his feet and was staring up at him, frustrated that he was flying out of its reach. This made the new fireball hit him the chest, and if the previous explosion could be compared to a grenade, this new one could probably be compared to a Panzerfaust as the force of the explosion knocked Goliath off his feet onto its injured back.

When the smoke cleared, it showed Goliath screaming madly as most of its skin was missing from its torso area, revealing the muscles, fat and and organs beneath which were crumbling apart. Lyze felt that the spell had taken a much larger chunk out of his Mind pool than a normal Fireball. And in accordance with that he named it...

"Greater Fireball." He said sadistically as another one released from his palm towards the hole in Goliath's chest. And like this, the boy toyed around with the monster rex for a bit before divebombing superman style with a punch. Flying, weaving and gliding out of its reach continuously, he bombarded it with melee attacks.

The Goliath at times managed to land some of its own when Lyze drew too close to its reach but unlike the last time, Lyze didn't even register the pain as he was overcome with the sensation of adrenaline, and although he knew he was tiring, he didn't let that discourage him as he stuck to dishing out as many as he could give.

---

It was few hours later that he showed up at Loki's bedroom door and she opened it only to freak out at his appearance.

"Lyzie! What happened?"

"I went into the dungeon and killed a bunch of monsters, what do you think happened?" He said as he walked into her room.

Not even bothering to let her retort, he pulled out the stool, whipped off his upper clothing and presented his scarred back to her. Reluctantly, she took a pin out of her dresser and conducted her usual ritual when updating a status.

Her eyes widened as the flow of Excelia relayed to her the outlines of what had happened down there. Numbly, she plastered a piece of parchment to his back unable to formulate sentences as the hurricane of emotions he'd been feeling fell upon her. Anger, sadness, hatred, despair, longing , nostalgia and yearning all bundled together and thrown in her face.

He took the paper from her hands and stared won at it, his eyes tightening at the stats. He nodded firmly as he drank in his progress. While it lacked compared to his growth on his first status update, it was still pleasing nonetheless. He held it to Loki and stated firmly.

"I am not levelling up until all of these are at minimum S rank. If I can find a way to push it to SSS rank, the I will do so but I will not level up at anything else."

"B-but Lyzie...what-"

"You can feel how important it is to me Loki." He said. Then in a softer tone of voice he pleaded with her. "Please Loki, just help me with this."

She gaped at him, seeing the same crack in him that she'd seen the previous night. The flurry of negative emotions that had hit her told her of one thing definite above all else...the boy before had been built upon a bedrock of suffering and desolation, in both the physical and emotional sense.

It was an Ais situation all over gain, yet from the turbulent feelings she'd just been hit with, it seemed like the obsession with power was a whole lot worse. Yet in that very same yearning for power lay a degree of caution, a sense of rationale behind his actions. Unbefitting and contradictory to the norm, so much so to the point where her mind was buzzing.

And it was in that numbness of mind, she could only acquiesce to his plea as she tried to wrap her head around it all. Lyze gripped the paper tighter as he muttered a quiet thanks before leaving the status sheet with her. Loki had a habit of collecting and storing the status sheets of promising adventurers and she'd already filed away his previous two in one of her drawers.

Lyze marched down the hallway of the manor, passing by many of his fellow adventurers in his Familia whom he barely pad attention to but certainly was not missed by any of them. His jaw tightened, his fists clenched, his teeth gritted and his heart firm, he settled upon one vow that he projected up to heaven itself.

'No matter what may come...no matter what obstacle comes between me and my objective...I will have my adventure, and I will reach the end of it!'

---

Lyzof Keele

LEVEL: 2

STR: I0 - 113 H

END: I0 -127 H

DEX: I0 - 31 I

AGI: I0 - 104 H

MAG: I0 - 258 G

SKILLS;

{Xenia Khaos}

{Overdraft}

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(A.N. End of Volume One)

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