The Walker Of Voids

*Swoosh*

*Swoosh*

*Swoosh*

The sounds of pebbled ripping through the air as the blindfolded Lloyd dodged them with grace echoed throughout the forest.

While Lloyd was in no way close to Felix's reaction time, over a week's worth of sessions, he began to get the hang of it as every his sense of touch, hearing, and smell improved drastically, allowing Lloyd to dodge Felix's lightning fast attacks by the skin of his teeth.

"I have to say, you've really improved over the last week." Felix complimented, yet before Lloyd could thank him for the compliment, a disdainful smile appeared on Felix's face as he hurled another pebble toward Lloyd, this one being much faster than the others.

However, unlike the pained scream followed by Lloyd falling onto his ass that Felix expected to see, he saw something else.

A shadow slowly covered Lloyd's hand before catching the speeding pebble with the same hand a letting out a soft chuckle.

"You really thought I would fall for that one again?" Lloyd chuckled, yet when he heard the sound of the wind being split by a speeding person, he instantly became guarded again, not that it helped.

Trying to block Felix's attack, Lloyd paused for a moment and picked up on every single little movement, sound, and even smell in the air. Felix always wore the stinkiest of perfumes, so Lloyd expected to at least smell it coming.

Everything told Lloyd that Felix would be to his right, yet when Lloyd tried to strike in that direction, he felt something hit the back of his knee before a painful uppercut sent him into the air.

"Again?!" Lloyd grunted.

"You gotta concentrate you dumbass."

"I am!" Lloyd complained.

"Ugh. We have no idea how long it will take to find the dungeon boss, so since the time ranges from 2 days or more, I think teaching you mana sense would be the correct decision..." Felix explained with his hand to his chin while Lloyd slowly took his blindfold off.

"Are you sure? You kept insisting that I should train my basic senses before doing anything else." Lloyd raised a brow.

"Well, we are pretty time sensitive now that Hime thinks that we are close to the boss of this dungeon, so I might as well take you to the next level." Felix shrugged before tapping on his wristwatch and taking out a white blindfold.

"I already have one." Lloyd tried to argue, yet when he felt like Felix was about to scold him, he stopped saying anything and just took the blindfold without any complaints.

"Wearing it will close off all your senses, including hearing. The goal of this exercise is to teach you how to sense mana." Felix explained.

"I already know how to sense mana though..." Lloyd argued.

"If you could sense mana, you would have realized that Veronica has been staring at you with her optical ability for a while... To be honest, even I'm kind of creeped out." Felix shuddered while pointing at her.

"Ugh..." Lloyd's face scrunched up in cringe while goosebumps traveled up and down his spine.

"Anyway, wear that blindfold, and I'm going to throw mana-infused pebbles at you. Is that understood?"

"..."

"What?"

"I'm assuming you're blocking out all my senses to improve the only sense I have left, that being my mana sense. However, if you're blocking out all my senses, wouldn't I not be able to feel the pebbles when they hit me?" Lloyd asked.

"Well, the feeling suppressed, but you'll definitely know when something hits you." Felix explained before forcing the blindfold onto Lloyd and beginning his training.

The hours flew past as Lloyd quickly finished his training with Felix before going on to train with Hime for another 6 hours.

Her training mostly remained the same ever since the first week. The only difference now was that Lloyd would lose consciousness less, and she would take him out to the forest for the last 2 hours of each session to train him on killing actual monsters rather than spar with her.

Over the week, Lloyd had slowly learned how to let his instincts take over. Of course, bad habits die hard, so the overplanning problem continued, but Lloyd understood why it was better for him to rely on his instincts instead of calculating every single one of the opponent's moves, since a single miscalculation could complete his plan, especially when fighting with thing unpredictable creatures like the monsters of the forest.

However, beast fighting also showed promise in fighting against intelligent beings since it was unpredictable and hard to fight against.

Movements without flow or patterns would drive anyone crazy, and that's an advantage Lloyd wouldn't mind having over other people in the future.

Hime's session ended with Lloyd killing several monsters; however, unlike how the monster's energies usually pooled into him and increased his power, now it simply healed his wounds, rejuvenated his stamina, and refilled his mana while also increasing his mana pool by a small margin.

"I need you to focus your shadow upon one singular point in your body." A blue-haired man commanded.

"I'm trying my best..." Lloyd grunted while trying his best to focus on his arm, yet the most he could do was reduce it to 70% of one side of his body. This means that the shadow covered his entire arm, past his shoulder, and trickled into tendrils reaching his spinal cord and down to his pelvis.

However, after a previous failed attempt, Lloyd had learned not to completely take away from all his limbs.

Imagine a bodybuilder who doesn't take care of his bottom half trying to deadlift the same amount of weight he bench-presses. That is the equivalent of putting all his shadow into one side of his body, as not only does it have a chance to harden anything touching the enhanced limbs, but it also makes it hard for the rest of his body to support whatever he is doing.

The body works in unison, so taking away that unison leaves you with a single limb, being forced to do the work that is usually done by the entire body.

Anyway, Lachlan's training consisted of comprehension, shadow control, and sparring, each of them being split equally into 2-hour segments. It was consistent, and even a little therapeutic since Lloyd always knew what he would do in Lachlan's training session.

The same could be said about Rex's training session, which remained consistent throughout. Rex would teach Lloyd as much as he could about martial arts for the first 4 hours of the session, before meditating in a way that slowly but surely taught Lloyd to control his spiritual aura, such as his presence and his killing intent, as well as his passive ability [Monarch's Aura].

The main reason Rex was teaching Lloyd about aura control was not only to train Lloyd in the ability to concentrate his aura on a single person, thing, or monster, but Rex found it to be a really good thing for someone at the same level as Lloyd to know since it would drastically improve his will, concentration, and even talent in the future.

While Lloyd's ability to control his aura was still at a level where he could barely restrict the area to 270 degrees, aura control is an ability that has infinite potential.

According to Rex, there have even been awakeners who have reached such a mastery that they could literally create an entire reality marble out of their spiritual aura alone.

Veronica's training, on the other hand, was both consistent and inconsistent. The only consistency was pain, yet that only created a scenario where Lloyd lived in fear every day, worrying about what kind of sick torture method Veronica would bring out this time.

While at first, she had chosen to go the traditional route of simply throwing pain into his body, she began to get a little creative over time, finding newer and newer ways to inflict damage and pain upon Lloyd.

It took quite the mental burden on Lloyd's mind, but instead of complaining about every little thing he found wrong, he found comfort in cursing at Veronica for several minutes before he slept.

However, despite all this torture, the most confusing part of it all was the fact that she would always take the last hour of the session to nurse Lloyd back to health by feeding him, taking him to his bed, caressing his hair, and slowly allowing him to fall into a slumber.

To end the week off, she had chosen to disguise her new method of torture with the veil of a lesson on sword fighting.

'Wow... Did she always look that good.' Lloyd inwardly asked himself while checking out her new black and red outfit.

She wore a long black one-piece dress with patterns of red all over it.

The dress did her justice, showing off her hourglass figure and complimenting her pale skin.

Her slender arms and waist made her look almost fragile, while the warm smile on her face would have made anyone fall for her despite its clear contrast with her icy-cold skin.

However, in contrast to her fragile-looking body and the innocent look on her face, her dainty slender arms held an enormous sword just a little shorter than her in size, and half her size in width.

"Ooo. Have you finally fallen for me." She asked with a loving yet slightly mocking tone.

"Shut up, bitch." Lloyd sneered before shooting toward her with everything he had.

"Did you know that the average peak first commandment can barely destroy a town with their strongest attack?" Veronica commented while gracefully parrying Lloyd's attack with her magnificently large, almost brutish sword.

"I already know that." Lloyd sneered while swinging his katana at her head.

"When I was at the peak of the first commandment, I could very easily destroy a city, a medium-sized city, if I wanted to..." Veronica spoke, yet her voice seemed almost deadly serious, something Lloyd had never seen from her ever since his first encounter with her, where she showed off her cold and distant personality.

However, despite his being slightly taken off guard due to the change in tone, he did not stop attacking her with his blade.

"Bragging much?" Lloyd chuckled mockingly, yet her facial expression did not change one bit.

"Me and you..." She spoke after disappearing from where she stood and appearing right behind Lloyd before whispering into his ear.

Lloyd's eyes widened as he tried to turn around, yet the iron-clad grip on his shoulder, paired with the blood-red eyes that stared into his soul, Lloyd found himself frozen in place with his whole body not daring to move an inch as it knew it was under the gaze of an apex predator.

"We are different from these humans... From these mortals... Don't you think?" She whispered as her hot breath trickled into his ear, sending the most nerve-wracking and horrible sensation down his back.

If he had sweat glands, he would have found himself standing in a cold sweat, yet there was nothing to indicate his stress in that situation.

Fear gripped his heart, and the words he was about to say were stuck in his throat.

"Look how much they have to work to mimic a fraction of our talent." Veronica placed her hand upon Lloyd's shirt, yet the cold sensation traveled right through.

His blade shuddered ever-so-slightly while his eyes shook in primal fear.

He was a Void Walker... A celestial race with every single one of their kind capable of shaking the entire universe on their own through talent, power, and an unbreakable will that was the cause of the war in the first place.

1 versus billions upon billions of soldiers, each and every one of them willing to sacrifice their lives for what they believed to be the greater good.

Lloyd's race was supposed to symbolize fear... So how could he... He, a void walker, be scared of a mere vampire?

"We can be so much more." Her icy cold hands gripped around Lloyd's neck, yet instead of thinking of how he felt like he was about to die, or the fact that Veronica was acting horribly creepy, a voice at the back of his mind also spoke...

'She's right...'

'...'

'Why waste so much time on the humans when they hate us?'

'Shut up.'

'The woman of our dreams is asking us to run away with her...'

'...'

Lloyd felt his face being turned towards Veronica's, causing both of them to be merely an inch away from each other, but that's what she wanted.

A teasing smile stretched across her lips, and before Lloyd could even move, no matter what his intentions were, her grip over him tightened before she flipped away with the grace of a ballerina.

"Just kidding..." She smiled teasingly. On the other hand, Lloyd had an enraged expression on his face for the remaining time of the session.

Yet, despite the session ending with Lloyd laying half-dead with his head on Veronica's lap as he was slowly being nursed back to health, one question ran through his mind the entire time.

'What the hell... Was that voice...'