Percival, either too confident or too eager, grinned and cracked his neck.
"So if I pluck the apple and bring it back, you'll admit I'm strong enough to join the Expedition?"
"Yes, I would acknowledge you." Kane nodded.
"And if I bring it back before Neo?" Percival questioned.
"You get a bigger slice of the tart."
"If that tart is as special as it sounds, I'd love a big portion." Percival laughed.
Neo remained silent, still staring at the farm.
He entered the farm with a jump over the fence.
His body blurred as he shot forward at breakneck speed.
He covered half of the distance in an instant—
Neo blinked, and everything had changed.
Percival's body was rolling through the farm.
A hole had been shot open in his head, and his eyes were lifeless.
Neo had not seen what or how killed him, but Percival was deader than dead.
"Hooo, it's been a long time since I saw a knockout that bad. He should've started at full power instead of trying to test the water with his Paragon rank speed," Kane chuckled.
"…Isn't it a problem that he is dead?" Neo questioned.
"It's not. Not here at least. This place is Tartarus. A prison, if you have forgotten," Kane said. "Look closely towards his corpse. You should be able to see it with your mastery of Death."
Neo wanted to point out he was blind.
But he guessed it wasn't the time for jokes, and did as he was told.
It was easy to notice what Kane was trying to show him.
Percival's soul floated above his corpse.
"How did I die?" the soul muttered, shocked.
"I might've forgotten to mention it, but the ostriches here are fast, and they love brain juice," Kane said from the side. "And no, you aren't dead. Wait for a few minutes."
Percival was stunned beyond measure.
It took him a moment to realize that they were currently under the rules of Tartarus, not Earth.
Here, the world of the living and the dead were the same.
Since the body died, the soul remained behind.
Percival's surprise only increased when his previous body disintegrated and disappeared, and he gained a new body.
His organs materialized out of thin air, his muscles regrew along with his bones, and he regained his hair and skin.
It took out a lot of his Divine Energy.
Instead of being happy or thrilled, Percival was confused.
"No, you aren't alive. You are dead. You just got a new body. Every time you die here in Tartarus, the same will happen."
"So everyone here is Immortal."
"Technically, yes. You are Immortal until you become an Immortal monster, your soul dies, or a Darkness devourer gets you."
The last two scenarios were easy to understand.
They would die truly if their soul died, and a Darkness User could devour their souls, which would result in the same.
Something was true as the Seed of Existence was often linked with the soul. Destruction of soul was near-irreversible, and led to destruction of the Seed of Existence.
Neo was an exception. He could easily regenerate his soul from scratch.
"Now that you guys know you can't die, get to it."
Neo felt there was a lot Kane was not telling them yet.
However, he decided to wait for it.
If Kane was holding information, it was probably for a reason.
"How do I get back to the starting point?" Percival asked. "Or should I start moving towards the tree from here itself?"
"The ostriches won't attack you if you walk. They only attack when they see something not similar to them, and it's moving fast.
"And if you want, you can resume your run from there itself."
Percival was no longer smiling.
He looked towards the tree that was only 500 meters away.
Shaking his head, he returned to the fence where Neo and Kane stood.
"Why did you come back?"
"No point in training if I cheat like that."
In other words, he wouldn't feel satisfied.
Neo entered the farm and stretched.
"How fast are those things?" he asked.
"Around as fast as a mid or high Grade 2 Exalted. If you guys can outrun them, then you won't have any trouble escaping if you encounter an enemy that's out of your league."
Neo wondered if he had misheard.
The gap between each Grade in the Exalted rank was gigantic.
The chasm was so big that a lower-rank Grade could never hope to defeat a higher-rank Grade.
"This training would also help in building your stamina. So do your best," Kane spoke, as if he had not just told them to outpace enemies that were way beyond their current limits.
The training was absurd, borderline madness.
Pitting them against monsters who were as fast as Grade 2 Exalted was too much.
But they had to participate in the Grand Expedition.
If they couldn't survive this, they would be the first to die in the Abyss of Nightmares.
Neo used Shadow Jump to move.
He moved only a few hundred meters when something stomped on the shadow he was moving through.
A powerful pulse drilled into his head, disorienting him.
It caused him to cancel his Spell involuntarily.
Suddenly, he felt a sense of danger.
Alarms rang in his mind.
It was soon followed by a stab to his head.
Although he had sensed it beforehand, the attack had been too quick, and he couldn't react on time.
Much to Percival and Kane's surprise.
It was nothing for Neo.
'Even if he can use Death to delay dying, there should be a slight delay in movements,' Kane thought. 'Looks like he is used to dying a lot of times.'
'There are a lot of people who can do something like that here.'
'If the training could be done just by doing that, I wouldn't have chosen it.'