Soulless Soul

Chapter 22: Training

The training room was entirely silent. Its reinforced, shock-absorbent walls were heavily scarred by countless past impacts, grooved with deep dents and scorch marks from upperclassmen. Rows of wooden dummies and metallic practice targets stood neatly arranged across the polished, synthetic floor. Bright, clinical white lights illuminated every single corner of the vast space, leaving absolutely nowhere for a mistake to hide. Sky stood completely alone at the dead center of the room.

Doctor Ronald had personally granted him special after-hours access to the eastern wing facilities following today’s grueling theoretical lessons. The eccentric old man had strongly encouraged him to become intimately familiar with his active and passive Attributes before the academy’s practical combat classes officially began. Ronald’s warning about the "brutes" in the other classes echoed in his mind—if he was going to survive, he needed to know his own body better than anyone else.

Sky rolled his tense shoulders, loosening his muscles before taking a slow, deep breath to steady his racing thoughts.

"Let’s start with the easier one," he muttered to the empty room.

His internal focus shifted inward, tapping into the newly altered pathways of his soul core.

[Danger Sense] Nothing happened. There was no flashy burst of light, no sudden change in the atmosphere, and no voice in his head. The training hall remained just as quiet and still as it had been a moment before. Sky frowned, looking down at his hands.

"...Is that it?"

After several long seconds of waiting for a sign, Sky walked toward one of the nearby training dummies and circled it slowly, waiting for a spark. Still, absolutely nothing changed. He scratched the back of his head, let out a dry sigh, and realized the glaringly obvious limitation of his new passive trait.

"Right. So it literally only reacts to actual danger..."

Stepping over to the weapon rack on the wall, he bypassed the heavy steel blades and picked up a standard wooden practice sword. He balanced the weighted oak in his palm for a moment before suddenly tossing it high into the air above him.

The wooden sword spun rapidly, circling several times overhead near the bright lights.

The exact instant the heavy wooden blade reached its apex and began falling directly toward his skull... Something inside him changed violently. A strange, freezing cold tingling sensation crawled rapidly across the back of his neck, making his skin gooseflesh. His heartbeat accelerated to a frantic pace in a microsecond. Without an ounce of conscious thought, before his brain could even process the trajectory of the weapon, his body shifted one clean step to the right.

Thwack!

The heavy wooden sword crashed harmlessly onto the polished floor, bouncing right where his head had been standing only moments earlier.

Sky blinked, staring at the vibrating piece of oak. "I... I moved before I even thought about it."

Curious, and feeling a sudden surge of adrenaline, he immediately repeated the experiment. He threw the sword higher. Again. And then again. Every single time the falling wooden weapon threatened to strike his physical form, that faint, electric warning appeared in his nervous system just a heartbeat before the impact. It wasn’t a voice screaming at him. It wasn’t a prophetic vision of the future. It was simply a primal instinct, sharpened entirely beyond human reason.

The feeling became significantly clearer with each subsequent attempt. Soon, he stopped relying on his eyes altogether to track the weapon.

Closing his eyes tightly, Sky tossed another practice sword upward into the blinding white light.

Absolute silence filled the room. The weapon descended through the air. There— His body leaned aside naturally, a fluid, effortless tilt of his torso.

Clack!

The sword bounced across the floorboards. A wide, dangerous grin slowly spread across Sky’s face as he opened his eyes.

"So this is [Danger Sense]."

It wasn’t a perfect, god-like cheat. The warning only arrived a mere heartbeat before the danger actually reached him, leaving almost no time for complex maneuvering or planning. Against slower, predictable attacks, it would be invaluable. But against an opponent who was overwhelmingly fast or a projectile he couldn’t outrun... he wasn’t entirely sure how much it would save him. Still, for a street rat used to being ambushed in the dark, it was an incredible, life-saving advantage.

After retrieving the scattered practice swords and placing them back on the rack, Sky decided it was time to test his second, far more exhausting Attribute. His casual expression instantly became dead serious.

[Clones]

The moment the words left his mind, a wave of warm, liquid energy flowed from somewhere deep within his soul core, rushing through his limbs. A translucent, smoky figure slowly stepped out of his own physical body, looking like a literal reflection climbing out of a silver mirror.

Within a matter of seconds, the smoke solidified, and another Sky stood perfectly formed before him. The clone looked completely identical in every single aesthetic detail—even its facial expression perfectly mirrored his own intense curiosity. Although it felt solid to the touch, Sky could sense that it wasn’t a true, biological body like his own.

Sky instinctively pulled up his runes status to check his current parameters.

Energy: 70/100

"So making a single clone costs exactly thirty energy points..." Sky murmured, analyzing the depletion. Interesting. That means my current maximum limit is three at a time before I’m running on empty.

The clone remained perfectly still, standing like a statue until Sky issued a direct mental command.

Attack me.

Without a shred of hesitation, the duplicate rushed forward, its boots slapping against the floor. Its combat movements matched Sky’s own physical abilities almost perfectly. The two identical teenagers immediately began exchanging brutal blows across the empty training room.

Punch. Block. Kick. Counter.

Neither of them gained any obvious advantage over the other since they both possessed the exact same physical strength, speed, reflexes, and foundational street-fighting skill.

Eventually, ducking under a wild swing, Sky managed to channel his focus and land a clean, heavy strike across the clone’s chest. The moment the impact connected, the duplicate’s body violently dissolved into countless glowing, white soul fragments before disappearing entirely into thin air.

The moment it vanished, Sky gasped as he felt a sudden rush of warmth. A portion of his drained energy reservoir immediately flooded back into his core.

"So destroying or dismissing a clone refunds some of the initial energy cost..." he noted, wiping sweat from his brow. "Not bad at all. That prevents me from wasting resources in a fluid fight."

After resting on the floor for several minutes, allowing his energy levels to naturally recover back to full capacity, Sky summoned another clone. Then he made another attempt. Again and again, he pushed the limits of the trait.

Rather than simply fighting it head-on every time, he began experimenting with different tactical commands to see how the link operated. "This time, instead of recreating his appearance, Sky deliberately condensed the clone into a shadow form." With this he could save more energy than before.

Guard.

The clone immediately dropped its shoulders and assumed a textbook defensive stance.

Dodge.

As Sky threw a punch, the duplicate slipped the blow flawlessly. Circle behind me. Without a single moment of hesitation, the clone moved exactly as instructed, shifting into his blind spot. Sky quickly realized that the clone possessed absolutely no independent thoughts, ego, or personality. It followed every single mental order with perfect, mechanical precision, making it less of a separate person and more like a literal extension of his own physical body.

It was useful. Extremely useful. If he could learn to command it efficiently in the heat of a real battle, he could pressure opponents from multiple directions simultaneously while remaining completely synchronized with his own attacks.

By the time he finally decided to stop the training session, heavy sweat completely soaked his clothes, his muscles burned with a fierce ache from the nonstop sparring, and every ounce of his mental concentration had been utterly drained.

Back in the quiet sanctuary of his dark dorm room, Sky let out a long, exhausted sigh as he collapsed onto the mattress, instantly sleeping off into the night.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!