Once you had learned to get past the fear and claustrophobia of the crushing depths of the mines, not many things would bother you. Plus, he had noticed that his will was stronger than most thanks to the beasts, and that might earn him some reward.
There were only a few others on the willpower testing stairs when Karl arrived. Hawk, plus the female cleric student and one mage.
Karl set foot on the first step, and a sense of doubt began to set in. What if the test rewards were only for the first trial? Surely, it would have been better to go to the other stairwells first in that case.
But Karl kept to his decision, and took another step.
The more that he thought about it, the more likely it was that this was also a test of character. Would the temple think that he had nothing else going for him but pure determination? He had met dozens of students like that in the accuracy training sessions.
They had remarkable willpower to keep going, keep training and grinding away every single day, but where did that get them? It got them to the bottom of the class, that was where.
Because willpower was all that they had.
Karl had talent. He had magic, he had strength. If he had tested those first, the temple would still see his determination, his willpower to keep going. Why had he chosen this staircase?
Another step and another, as the self-doubt crept in and the world around him faded until Karl could only sense what was around him. He barely noticed as he passed the mage, who was on the fifth step and in the middle of an existential crisis, or when he passed Hawk on the seventh step, who had stopped to have a little snack before he continued.
The Golem hadn’t said anything about being timed. Perhaps Hawk had the right of it, and you should save your strength and keep refreshed.
No, if he stopped, it would be that much harder to get going again.
Karl made it past the tenth step, and the world completely vanished around him, leaving him in a vision of the mines. He was trapped in a collapse, his legs pinned, but ahead of him was another miner, closer to the emergency bell, and gasping for breath.
The man’s rebreather was broken, but he could get to the button.
Karl took off the miner’s mask he was wearing and threw it to his struggling coworker, then held his breath against the toxic fumes as the faceless man scrambled for the button, and the emergency supplies locker beside it.
Ten more seconds, that was all he needed. Ten seconds and the man would be coming back to throw him a new mask.
Nine, eight, Karl struggled to hold on. If he passed out, he would start breathing again, and the toxic fumes would linger in his lungs, adding a bit more permanent damage to the lifetime of injuries that a miner would suffer.
In his mind, Karl was still young, he hadn’t taken the Divine Serum yet, and he knew that childhood lung injuries could ruin a man before he even became a man, leaving him useless underground. He would hold on, he had to.
Then the miner was back and slapping the mask over his face with a blast of fresh, compressed air and Karl was back in the real world, looking at the staircase in front of him.
“What was that?” He muttered as he looked at the steps in front of him.
The Golem had said that it would test his willpower, but it didn’t say anything about that.
Another step forward and the reluctance built. This was an impossible task, There was no way that anyone was going to make it to the top with that sort of horror in their minds. No wonder the mage had stopped, and the cleric girl was moving so slowly, this was torture.
Worse, it was self-inflicted torture, with no promise of rewards.
There was no reason for him to keep going, he could just go back down and relax for the rest of the day. Maybe the warriors would be able to use the strength wall as a training event. He could go there tomorrow and try it as a gym day, building some muscle strength as he tried to move his physique toward Ascended.
But even with the doubts in his mind, Karl forced himself forward another step.
There was definitely a reason he picked this side. He couldn’t remember what it was right now, but he was certain that this was the right side for him to test himself on first.
That thought got him through two more steps before he realized that you were unable to see the other stairs once you were on one. How would anyone even know if he did well? He could just slack off and wait here for hours and then tell everyone that he did well.
It was just the cleric and one mage here, and they were both lost in their own minds already. They wouldn’t say anything against him.
But another step reminded Karl that he had work to do, he would make it to the top and find out what sort of recognition he could get from the temple.
If it was impressed with his determination, his willpower, maybe it would grant him a boon of some sort, a bit of magic that would help him in his training.
Training the beasts. That was his ultimate goal, to help them grow and let them pull him up to the top with them. He couldn’t be less determined than they were. Even Rae was out in the sunshine, testing her strength on the stairs, he could feel the pressure that she was under, as if a mountain was trying to crush her to the stone steps, but her spindly little legs were still holding strong and pushing her upward.
That was determination, that was willpower. He would keep going. Even Hawk was moving again, now that he had realized that the cake was a lie, and that whatever delicacy he had seen was just a way that the temple used to convince him to stop, to give up and not progress any further.
The sun began to set over them when Karl forced himself to the forty-first stair, pulling his mind out of a nightmare of desperation, where he had lost everything, even his pets while trapped and starving here in this broken relic with no way out.
“Well, that one hit a bit too close to home. I’ve got this, one more step.” Karl mumbled to himself, unconcerned if anyone thought that he was a madman.
Then the sun settled below the horizon, and Karl, along with everyone else who was still undergoing the trials, found himself standing in the grass near the second Golem who had spoken to them.
[The trials last one day at the most.] The Golem informed them, then went back to its silent judgment of their efforts.
“Perhaps we should have waited until morning to start our first attempt, but I think that we did pretty well.” Dana mumbled as she lay on the grass, staring at the darkening sky.
“I’m not sure if we would survive a whole day of that. Even with these few hours, I had to back down two steps near the end because the weight was becoming too much to bear.” One of the warriors replied.
“Well, there’s always tomorrow. But first, we should make some dinner and set up camp.” Karl reminded them.
He was not going anywhere near the willpower steps again, tomorrow or ever. He had done enough of that.
