Lioren - Hell Difficulty Tutorial

Opening 1 - The Labyrinth

The air in the room tasted of old dust and the faint, electrical hum of barriers that refused to budge. Around fifty of us endured this gray hell of stone and red light. Some sat apathetically in the corners, others desperately tried to scratch the massive, sealed wooden door with brute force.

No one was making any progress. The tension in the room was so palpable that one wrong word would have been enough to trigger panic.

And then, suddenly, he was there.

No flash, no rift in the room, no dramatic entrance. He simply stood there, as if he had always been there. Noname.

A cold shiver ran down my spine immediately. Everyone knew Noname. In the last few rounds, this guy had built a reputation that even made the other Hell difficulty attendees freeze in their tracks. We had seen him carve his way through avatars, his mana bursts devastate entire areas, and his seemingly unstoppable survival through sheer, stubborn tenacity. He was a walking disaster simulator—chaotic, unpredictable, and brutally strong.

But this... this wasn't Nathaniel.

At first glance, absolutely nothing was right. His usually wild, untamed black hair had turned completely white at the roots, a luminous, unnatural contrast to his face. His eyes—normally a gray and a brown one—burned a vibrant, eerie red.

It took me a moment to understand why my instinct screamed for immediate escape.

With the real Nathaniel, you could always sense the restless, painful struggle of his body with the immense amounts of mana he was pumping through himself. His presence was immense, but chaotic, a fire that nearly consumed him.

This guy here? He radiated no mana at all. Zero.

Instead, there was something else. Every heartbeat audible from his chest sounded like a heavy sledgehammer slamming against the floor. The air in the room vibrated in time.

A malicious, almost diabolical grin played on his lips, so completely out of place with Nathaniel's usual stoic or annoyed demeanor.

One of the more experienced fighters was about to take a step forward, mouth open to speak to him—but he didn't even get a chance to put his foot down.

The sheer, subtle presence emanating from this white-haired stranger swept through the room like a shockwave. The guy casually tapped the floor once with the toe of his shoe. No magic spell, no complex circle, no mana inscription.

Just a kick.

The massive, locked wooden gate in front of us shattered into a thousand pieces in a millisecond.

Opening 2 - A Demonic Feast

The air in the gas station tasted of dusty asphalt and burnt plastic. I stood in the shadowy aisle of the deserted store while, next to me, the guy with the wild white hair, red eyes, and dark horns was doing exactly the same thing as me: stuffing anything that looked even remotely edible into a plastic bag. Outside, the sun beat down on the empty street like an open stovepipe, and the cicadas screamed at a deafening volume. No mana, no skills—just the two of us, reduced to pathetic human values, drenched in sweat and wearing Crocs.

"Get in, loser," I threw at him as I climbed behind the wheel of the rusty Toyota Camry and unlatched the sunroof, letting the keys jingle from the sun visor.

Lioren stared at me for a moment, probably desperately trying to decipher what kind of stupid plan I'd come up with this time in my blocked mind, and then threw his bag at my head so that my eye twitched in pain. He got in, slammed the door, and stared straight ahead.

I hit the gas. The air conditioning, of course, only spewed out more heat, so we rolled down the windows while a distorted road trip song blared from the speakers in the background, instantly devolving into unintelligible gibberish the moment you tried to understand the lyrics. As if the oppressive heat wasn't enough, Lioren started munching chips in the passenger seat, scattering crumbs all over the car and wiping his greasy fingers on the dashboard.

"You're eating chips? In my car?" I snapped in disgust.

His response was to gleefully open a can of soda and spill a mouthful of it on the ground. I jerked the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes. Without a seatbelt, he crashed forward, slamming his head into the dashboard and leaving a small, bloody scale on his forehead.

"You miserable son of a bitch," he said, deadly calm, before punching me and sending the car into a spin. Halfway down the slope, we fought like a pair of idiotic teenagers as the car skidded across the dry gravel until, panting and covered in bloody scrapes, we finally made our way to the clunky, sunburnt white space shuttle perched in the dust not far away. There, the NPC messenger waited with her pizza box—the perfect target for our pent-up aggression before we headed uphill. We walked towards her and I took the pizza from her hand while Lioren was throwing random insults at her head.

As we left the NPC behind with the pizza box balanced on its helmet, we climbed the rusted metal stairs toward the elevator. Whitey let out a single, dry laugh before returning to stuffing his mouth with pizza. The elevator groaned upward, revealing a sweeping view of the barren, reddish-dust landscape stretching out below.

Stepping inside the shuttle felt like walking into a relic of a bygone era—pure, unadulterated NASA punk. The interior was a chaotic mess of worn, leathery white panels, buzzing green CRT screens, and dangling wires hastily patched together with silver tape.

Yellow sticky notes with frantic warnings like “Don’t press” or “Maybe press” cluttered the dashboard. I locked the hatch behind us with an actual physical key, because... why not? We made our way to the cockpit and reclined horizontally in the oversized pre-launch chairs, completely ignoring the lack of seatbelts. Suddenly, a voice echoed from the speakers, completely butchering the sequence:

(Ten.) (Eight.) (Nine.) (Seven.) (Four.) (Six.) (Five.) (Three.) (Three.) (Two.) (One.)

The next second, the shuttle roared to life, shaking violently as it defied every law of physics, pressing us deep into our chairs as we blasted off into the black.

The launch was a jarring, visceral nightmare of NASA punk charm and outdated technology. No seatbelts, no hesitation. The loudspeakers crackled the countdown, and in what felt like thirty seconds, we'd left the blue atmosphere behind. The Earth shrank in the window as we drifted weightlessly in the shuttle's buoyancy, stuffing ourselves with pizza until the fuselage finally slammed into the dusty surface of the moon.

Outside—without spacesuits, of course—we walked past an old US flag and yet another NPC messenger balancing a pizza box on her helmet.

Finally, far from all the noise, we found a quiet slope. Lioren paused, brushed some moon dust aside with a boot, and spread a simple white sheet on the ground. Above us, Earth glowed like a lonely, blue-white jewel in the absolute darkness of space.

He sat down, looked at me with those bright red eyes, and gestured toward the makeshift picnic.

"Would you eat with me?" he asked softly.

Opening 3 - Konfrontation

The air in the room crackled, charged with a tension that made every breath difficult. No clever remarks, no cynical grins to soften the edges. Just the two of us.

I had crossed the line, dared to do something anyone else would have called sheer suicide—and Lioren hadn't hesitated for a second to react.

In the fraction of a second that would have taken a normal person not even to blink, he was there. No waiting, no warning. His hand closed around my throat with a raw, merciless force as the floor beneath our feet shattered under an invisible shockwave. The impact hurled me backward against the hard stone wall, and my breath came out of my lungs with a choked gasp.

He pushed me upward until my feet lost their grip on the ground. His red eyes burned with a cold, bone-chilling intensity, and the dark, curved horn-like tips in his wild, white hair seemed to gleam almost menacingly in the fading light. Every fiber of his being vibrated with kinetic energy—a destructive, perfect perfection burning to be unleashed.

"You think you can play, eh?" his voice hissed, deep, dangerous, and right in my ear, the force of his grip nearly choking me. The strain pounded in my head, and for a brief moment, I felt the merciless weight of a being created for absolute greatness and condemned to a frail body.

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