Dimensional Descent

Leonel gasped for breath, something he had suddenly become very used to doing. He didn't think that he would enter such a state for a long while thanks to how much vitality he had pumped into himself using his Metal Body, but here he was, suffering.

After a while, Leonel stopped being pissed off and even became a bit languid. Emotion could only really get you so far, eventually you would tire of it. Being enraged all the time was exhausting, people weren't designed to be that way.

The lows only hurt because they were the lows, not the baseline. And highs were only so satisfying because they were such a change from the norm, not a constant.

By the same token, drudging up will power just because you were angry wasn't good enough. Even the most vindictive person couldn't be angry forever, there would always be a time where it faded into the background and you were forced to feel different emotions.

But that was also precisely why Leonel never wanted to rely on emotion.

Leonel rose up again.

By now the gap between the stairs was far too large to rely on nothing other than his physical prowess, it simply wasn't enough. But Leonel had already realized that this wasn't a trial of his body, so obviously the solution to jumping across these enormous barriers was in his mind.

He would either have to force these stairs to come closer or he would have to get more powerful and larger.

Leonel roared, his height increasing by an entire foot.

This was nothing more than a projection of himself, a representation of his body in the form of Dream Force. In that case, he would just make himself larger. But in doing so…

Leonel leapt forward again, his body practically undergoing a shuddering seizure as he leapt through the air.

He landed and rolled across the platform, his body spasming.

It was about what he expected. The larger he made his body here, the more Dream Force he would have to flood in, and the more Dream Force he flooded in, the deeper the hooks of this tablet would be able to sink into his real body, and the deeper those hooks entered, the more real and terrible the backlash would be.

It was getting to the point where the fear was becoming crippling. In the beginning, he only had to shake his head to recover, but as he climbed, he was beginning to take several seconds, but the time he crossed the thousandth step, it took him several minutes.

The real world effects were becoming more devastating as well.

Having his body enter a constant state of fight or flight didn't seem like a big deal at first, but it was frying his neurons and pushing his body to the limit.

His heart rate was constantly above an allowable threshold even given his body, the less "immediately important" functions of his body like digestion and the like. More and more stores of energy were being flooded directly into his muscles and the amount of calories he was burning a second just maintaining the obscene heat he was giving off, not to mention his constantly shivering body, would very quickly put him at the brink of death.

The truth was that time was dilated between the tablet and the real world. It was all too easy to fool the mind.

Leonel felt that he had been climbing for months, years even, but his real body had only experienced a few hours.

Even so, because his mind was going through so many terrible effects again and again, he was quickly losing muscle mass and the walls of his heart were growing thinner as his body started to eat itself to maintain.

The brain simply had too much power of the body, even illusions when taken to an extreme could cause real and deadly consequences.

However, disregarding this entirely, Leonel continued forward.

Aina could only watch as Leonel's skin became more sunken, his muscles deflating and his skin beginning to stick to his body. It wasn't long before his breathing became nothing more than his ribcage moving up and down while his bronzed skin lost all color and became an unhealthy and pasty greenish grey color.

Within the tablet world, Leonel could still not see the end of the staircase. When he looked back, he could no longer even see where he had started, and that was despite now being over 10 meters tall.

He was relentless in his pursuit and his mind had stopped thinking. Everything outside of calculating how hard he needed to jump to reach the next platform was already thrown out of his mind.

Again and again, he would jump, stumble, fall and roll, only to pick himself up several minutes later after he was finished foaming at the mouth to do it again.

The worry on Aina's face grew with every passing mind but she could only continue to dab at his forehead, her golden irises flickering with a somewhat fearful light. It really looked as though Leonel would push himself too far and die.

Leonel, however, had no intention of stopping. He didn't know it consciously, but he had already reached a state where he would rather die than give in. Maybe had he known this consciously, he would have snapped out of it and thought it to be ridiculous. This matter wasn't worth dying over, he had too many things to do now.

But in that moment, with his mind focused on one thing and one thing only, he was relentless in his pursuit.

Leonel jumped again, his body reaching over a hundred meters as he landed on the ten thousandth step.

Just like always, he slipped and fell, his body beginning to convulse once again.

But this time was different. In the real world, the walls of his heart had become far too thin. This time when it tried to pump too fast beyond its limits, it ruptured and a spray of blood came from Leonel's mouth.

Aina went pale but she suddenly felt a hand on her wrist. Despite the state of his body, his hand seemed to have a great amount of strength.

Within the platform world, Leonel slowly stood to his feet again, his projection rippling like an image cast on water.

'Again.'

…

At that moment, while Leonel was pushing himself beyond normal bounds of reason, a fleet of ships had come to a stop near the borders of Earth's territory. But for some odd reason, the flagship that they were waiting on to pass through this area was nowhere to be seen.

Of course, this flagship they were waiting on was none other than the very one Leonel had stolen.