MIGHT AS WELL BE OP

"Now, we begin the most basic of training"

Corporal Samuel's voice was sharp, the words cutting through the air like a blade.

"Strength training"

Without another word, he reached into his pack and pulled out a military-grade training vest, tossing one to each recruit with practiced precision.

"Put it on"

He commanded, his tone leaving no room for hesitation.

Instinctively, the recruits obeyed, each of them quickly donning the heavy, cumbersome vest.

As soon as the fabric touched their skin, the familiar force that had sealed their mana during the trials surged once more, flowing through their bodies like an invisible chain.

The once thrumming pulses of their mana came to an abrupt halt.

It was as if their very essence was locked away, a cage within their veins.

Their physical strength, once their greatest asset, began to fade, leaving them feeling sluggish, weaker, and less capable with every passing second.

But it was the weight of the vests that struck them the hardest.

Each one of them felt the oppressive pressure bearing down on their shoulders, their backs, their chests.

The heavy vest clung to them like an anchor, its mass a constant reminder of their limitations.

The air seemed to grow heavier, each recruit feeling the weight of their own bodies more acutely than ever before.

Corporal Samuel's voice cut through the silence again, unwavering and cold.

"See that mountain over there?"

His gaze, sharp, swept over the recruits.

"At my signal, you will begin climbing. Do not stop. Do not slow down. You will not rest until the time is up"

The command hung in the air like a tangible force.

The recruits, still adjusting to the weight of the vests, turned their gazes toward the mountain in the distance.

The mountain stood like a jagged colossus, a sentinel carved by time itself.

Its vertical face loomed impossibly high, a wall of unmoving stone streaked with veins of ice and shadow, mocking the hundred souls gathered beneath it.

Ninety nine recruits.

No ropes.

No harnesses.

No tools.

Only flesh, bone, and willpower, the essence of strength distilled.

A sharp whistle signaled the beginning.

Without a word, the recruits surged forward like insects drawn to ruin.

The first impact of their fingers against cold rock sent shockwaves through their bones.

The cliff face was cruel, its surface unforgiving, its holds irregular and deceptive.

Every grip was a gamble.

Every ledge, a lie.

Their bare hands blistered within moments.

Jagged stone sliced through palms, drawing blood with indifferent ease.

Fingertips screamed with each pull, but there was no room for hesitation.

Feet scrambled for purchase, toes gripping minuscule cracks and slivers of ledge, sometimes failing, sometimes finding fragile salvation.

They climbed not in graceful rhythm but in desperate, primal bursts, raw, instinctive, hungry.

The air grew thinner with every meter.

Breaths came in ragged shudders, not from fear, that had been burned away by pain, but from exhaustion.

Muscles roared in protest.

Shoulders quaked.

Biceps screamed.

Back and core strained beneath the burden of suspended flesh, limbs trembling under the weight of every decision made on stone.

The mountain did not allow rest.

There were no flat surfaces.

Only the sheer wall and the wind, a howling force that slapped them with cold fingers and tried to pry them free.

Those who faltered were met with the pitiless consequence of gravity.

A slip, a scream, and silence.

Some fell a few meters, others plummeted the length of a tree, their bodies striking the rock in sickening echoes before being retrieved or left behind as warnings.

And yet they climbed.

Pain became rhythm. Blood became warmth. Suffering became momentum.

The mountain stripped them of identity, there were no noble bloodlines here, no mage prodigies, no famed swordsmen.

Only bodies, tested to their core.

Flesh tearing.

Muscles shredding.

Souls weathering.

The higher they climbed, the less they spoke.

There was no breath to spare for words.

The climb demanded complete devotion, a meditative trance born of agony.

The only sounds were labored breathing, the scrape of skin on stone, the occasional grunt of exertion… and the wind, ever roaring, ever watching.

Time melted.

Minutes bled into hours.

The sun marched across the sky like a dispassionate overseer, casting long shadows that danced along the cliff face.

Sweat poured down their bodies, mixing with blood, smearing onto the mountain in streaks of crimson and salt.

Some recruits began to hallucinate, seeing handholds that weren't there, imagining voices whispering promises of rest.

Still, they climbed.

When fingers could no longer grip, they used wrists.

When wrists failed, they bit their lips and pressed on with elbows and chests, clawing upward like beasts ascending out of hell.

Tears welled, not from weakness, but from rage, a silent, burning fury that they had been reduced to crawling fragments, that their strength had been found so pitifully lacking.

They despised the mountain.

And yet, paradoxically, it became their measure.

Their crucible.

Their enemy.

Their mirror.

Every inch conquered whispered a silent truth, 'you are not the same as you were below'

With each meter scaled, something intangible bloomed within them, not pride, but defiance.

The refusal to be broken.

The summit was not visible.

The cliff face stretched on into mist, disappearing like a cruel illusion.

But some refused to look up. Looking up was despair.

The only direction that mattered was forward.

One grip.

One pull.

One breath.

One more.

As dusk began to drape the world in purples and blues, fewer than sixty recruits remained in motion.

The rest were slumped on narrow ledges, passed out or trembling in defeat.

Their hands dangled limp.

Their eyes stared at the stone in silence. Some had broken fingers.

Others had joints swollen to twice their size.

None had made it halfway.

But still, a stubborn few, those whose minds had snapped into something darker, deeper, pressed on.

Their muscles had long since failed.

It was no longer muscle that moved them, it was resolve wearing the mask of madness.

An untamed force that bypassed pain, that ignored logic, that scoffed at self preservation.

This wasn't physical anymore. It was spiritual.

Higher still.

One recruit, a wiry youth with bloodied forearms and a cracked jaw, let out a guttural roar as he hauled himself up a sharp ridge.

The scream wasn't of pain.

It was warcry.

He had climbed into a place where pain no longer registered, where exhaustion was a distant echo.

His eyes were unfocused, but burning.

Another, a girl with torn nails and a dislocated shoulder, used her teeth to anchor her cloth sash to a jagged outcrop while she repositioned her legs.

Her face was soaked in sweat and blood, but her movements were precise, surgical, unshaken.

Her ascent was not fast, it was inevitable.

The mountain began to respect them.

The wind, once hostile, seemed to pause in reverence.

The stone, once cruel, offered tiny holds not previously seen, perhaps not because they weren't there, but because the climbers had evolved enough to notice them.

A lesson, quiet but profound: 'The world bends only to those who refuse to break'

By nightfall, the final stage of the climb began.

The stone grew colder. Slicker.

The wind turned icy, threatening to freeze fingers to the very surface they gripped.

But those who remained, fewer than twenty, showed no hesitation.

Their bodies were past shivering.

Their minds no longer registered chill.

They had entered the realm where the flesh was irrelevant, and only spirit endured.

One by one, in silence, the final few crested a ridge near the mountain's shoulder, not the peak, but a sacred plateau where the air was thinner and the stars seemed close enough to touch.

They collapsed, not from defeat, but from triumph.

Their hands were ruined, torn and shredded like old leather.

Their backs were bent, their eyes bloodshot, their lungs wheezing.

And yet… their hearts were iron.

Their will was steel.

In the silence of the summit, under the cold gaze of the stars, they lay motionless, not because they couldn't move, but because they didn't need to.

They had conquered something greater than a mountain.

They had conquered themselves although barely.