Arran awoke in a small but clean bedroom, lying in a bed so hard it almost seemed like its owner had wanted to prove his toughness even when sleeping.
The room was furnished with simple but well-made furniture, and several ink drawings of battle scenes decorated the walls. At a glance, Arran thought it should be one of the commanders' quarters.
The first thing he did after waking was to examine his body, and when he did, he saw that it was covered in bruises. And not just that — with every breath he took he felt sharp stabs of pain in his chest. From this, he knew that at least some of his ribs had to be bruised or even broken.
His left shoulder and arm were covered in bandages, and when he looked underneath them, he found several deep wounds, still open even if they weren't bleeding anymore.
Moving his left arm was extremely painful, but he felt some relief at this — the mere fact that he was able to move the arm at all meant there likely wouldn't be any permanent damage.
Worse were the injuries he could feel within his body. Even if they were invisible to the eye, he could sense that they were more serious than his surface wounds.
His dire state made it clear that he had come within a hair's breadth of losing his life, and when he recalled the fight, he knew that it was a small miracle that he had survived at all.
Even with the borrowed Essence from the Realm Opening Pills, he had been no match for the Archmage.
His training in Body Refinement had allowed him to survive attacks that would have killed most others, but even then, just distracting the Archmage for a few minutes had ended with him very nearly stepping across the brink of death.
He shuddered when he thought about how the fight would have ended had Panurge not appeared at the last moment, and once more, he felt like an ant stuck in a war between giants.
The temporary power of the Realm Opening Pills allowed him to play at being a true mage, but only for a short while. And each time he tried, it had almost cost him his life.
Now, he had only three Realm Opening Pills left, but if the golden-haired warrior he freed from the prison was to be believed, taking even a single one of those would likely kill him.
Not that it mattered much — in his present state, even a mild breeze might well kill him.
He sat up in the bed with some effort. Trying to ignore the pain that seemed to be present in every fiber of his body, he closed his eyes, then began to perform Lord Jiang's circulation technique.
With how badly hurt he was, using Body Refinement to heal his injuries felt a lot like trying to repair a collapsed building using only straw and mud. There was just too much damage to be healed easily, and the only thing that could help him recover was time.
Nevertheless, he persisted. If healing completely would take a long time, then the sooner he got started, the better.
Hours passed, but if Arran's body saw any improvement at all, it was too small to be noticed.
"That was a very stupid thing you did."
Arran was shaken from his meditation by the voice, and when he looked up, he saw that Panurge was standing in front of him.
"Stupid?" Arran scowled in anger. The man, god, or whatever he might be had locked Arran in a cell, then sent him to a fight he had no chance of winning. And now, Panurge was berating him?
"I gave you a gift more precious than gold or magic treasures," Panurge replied, "and you squandered it. Although I will admit that you did so in a remarkable fashion."
"A Realm and some spells in exchange for my freedom? You call that a gift?!" Arran fumed with rage.
"Of course not," Panurge said calmly. "My gift was the cell."
Arran was dumbfounded. Even for Panurge, this sounded unusually mad.
"What I gave you was a few decades to practice in safety," Panurge continued. "Had you not used a foolish trick to break out long before you were supposed to, you would have eventually emerged with enough power to defend yourself."
"You expected me to stay there and slowly starve to death like the other prisoners?!"
"I provided you with food," Panurge pointed out. "Unlike the others, you would not have had to feed on your own Essence. A few short decades of training, and you would have been able to face Grandmasters and perhaps even Archmages on equal terms."
With a gesture at Arran's injured body, he added, "And just look at you now — one small fight, and you look like you've been ravaged by a pack of hellhounds."
"You had me fight an Archmage!" Arran's eyes were wide in disbelief at the man's bewildering words.
"I had you fight a beetle," Panurge replied flatly.
"A beetle?" Despite his anger, Arran found himself speechless at the sheer absurdity of the statement.
"The ant looks at the beetle and thinks it a giant. The bird looks at both and sees only food." Panurge nodded in satisfaction, seemingly impressed with his own sagacity.
"And I take it you're the bird?" Arran asked. Without asking, he already understood that he was the ant.
"Me?" A wide grin appeared on Panurge's face. "I'm the mighty dragon, able to eat a thousand birds in a single bite and still feel hungry afterward."
Although Arran knew it was a bad idea to provoke Panurge, he could not help but frown at the man's shameless boasting.
Panurge laughed loudly. "If you don't want to believe me, I suppose I'll just have to show you."
At once, Arran felt panic. He understood very well that whenever Panurge wanted to do something — anything — bad things were bound to happen.
Ignoring Arran's fearful face, Panurge snapped his fingers. A moment later, Arran found himself in the air, several thousands of feet from the ground. He was about to scream in panic when he realized he wasn't falling, instead simply floating in mid-air.
"Look beneath you," Panurge said.
After Arran calmed his nerves, he glanced downward, doing his best to ignore the nauseous feeling the distance from the ground caused him. As he looked, he saw two vast armies facing each other, one twice the size of the other, with barely a mile between them.
"Now look closer," Panurge said.
Arran was surprised to find his eyesight suddenly sharpening, to the point that he could now make out the individual soldiers of each army even from miles away.
Studying the two armies, he could see that the larger one consisted of tens of thousands of knights in magnificent silver-colored armor, each wielding a sword and holding a large white shield.
The smaller army, meanwhile, was made up of what looked to be monks in simple gray robes, their heads all shaved. Some of them wielded staves or swords, but most were barehanded.
"What is this?" Arran asked. Despite himself, he was intrigued at the scene below him.
"The start of a battle," Panurge replied. "Those fools in shining armor are part of the Brotherhood of Radiant Light — forces of Order, like the Academy. Even the weakest of them is a thousand times stronger than the beetle who came so close to crushing you."
"And the others?" Although the knights were the first to catch his eye, the monks were the more interesting group to Arran, if only because they seemed so ill-prepared for battle.
"The others," Panurge continued, "are part of a small society of monks who decided to side with neither Order nor Chaos."
Arran furrowed his brow on hearing this. The idea that there were powerful groups who rejected both sides opened possibilities he had not previously considered.
"Now look at that handsome fellow over there," Panurge said, pointing toward a lone figure who had just emerged from the smaller army.
The man was wielding a simple wooden staff, and with a start, Arran realized that he strongly resembled a bald Panurge — only instead of Panurge's maniacal grin, he bore an expression of calm resolve.
Before Arran could ask any questions, the lone figure started to move toward the large army, first at a jog, then at full sprint.
When the figure had almost reached the knights' lines, he suddenly shot forward, almost faster than Arran's eyes could follow. In an instant, knights began to fall one after the other, struck down by the wooden staff.
While Arran could not see the lone figure use magic, his movements suggested that he practiced Body Refinement, but at a level far beyond anything Arran had thought possible.
The fight went on for some time, and it was starting to look as if the lone figure was going to defeat the entire army by himself. Hundreds of the knights had already fallen, and although they fought desperately, nothing they did even slowed the lone figure in the slightest.
Yet then, a giant white-robed man arose among the ranks of the knights. Surrounded by a bright glow, he rapidly increased in size, standing at least a hundred feet tall after just a moment.
Ignoring the lone figure who was fighting the knights, the giant man pointed his right hand toward the monks' army. A massive stream of white light burst forth from his hand, and it struck in the middle of the army.
Instantly, the ground exploded where the stream of light hit it, and before Arran could even register what was happening, the entire stretch of land where the army had stood was turned into a lake of boiling rock.
Before Arran could see what happened next, Panurge snapped his fingers again, and Arran found that he was back in the small bedroom.
"Was that real?" he asked, voice subdued as he tried to understand what he just witnessed.
"Perhaps," Panurge replied, although, for the first time since Arran had met him, his eyes seemed to lack their normal exuberant madness.
"What happened next?" The scene had ended abruptly, and although Arran knew it could all just have been a product of Panurge's imagination, he did not believe that to be true.
"A dragon had a feast," Panurge answered cryptically, his voice emotionless.
"Why did you show me this?" Even if the man seemed mad at the best of times, Arran could not believe that it was all just a simple coincidence. There had to be something more to his sudden interference in Arran's life.
"To help you understand," Panurge said. "That the monsters you fear are insects to others. That the strength of your enemies will not match your own. That at any moment, a dragon can step out of the shadows and swallow all the birds in this world."
"But why me?" Arran asked. Whatever it was that Panurge was trying to tell him, he understood little of it. Yet what truly baffled him was that Panurge had chosen to target him of all people.
"Why not?" Panurge asked in return. "Should I have a reason for making a young man's life a little more interesting than it would be otherwise?"
When Arran saw that the manic twinkle had returned to Panurge's eyes, he knew there was no point in asking further questions.
