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Tap… Tap… Tap…
Days in purgatory did not stack neatly like coins. They stacked like scars. One on top of another, uneven, sometimes invisible until the moment you touched them and felt pain.
Sekhmet walked.
He fought.
He drank.
He trained.
He slept in places that were never meant to hold humans.
And the world kept trying to kill him with new ideas.
The first week after the lake incident, he learned a simple truth that made him hate himself and the system at the same time.
Water did not matter.
Not for the thirst that lived behind his tongue like a curse.
He could drink until his stomach sloshed, until his lips went numb from cold, until his throat felt swollen. The thirst would still remain, quiet but persistent, like a starving animal behind a locked door.
Only blood calmed it.
Not forever.
Not peacefully.
But enough that he could keep moving.
Enough that he could keep thinking.
Enough that he could keep surviving.
The first time he drank from a beast after the werewolf, he had tried to treat it like medicine. He told himself it was a tool. He told himself it was necessity. He told himself a thousand excuses.
His body still reacted with relief every time, and that relief always came with a sting of shame, like his soul was quietly keeping score.
Sekhmet stopped trying to be clean about it.
Not because he enjoyed it.
Because pretending it did not change him was worse.
So he accepted the rule.
If something tried to kill him, and he killed it instead, he drank what he needed and moved on.
His blood proficiency climbed.
Slow at first.
Then faster.
Not because the system gave pity, but because purgatory gave variety.
Every ridge, every ravine, every broken forest line carried different predators and different desperate people, each with different blood, different chaos signatures, different tastes that made Sekhmet's tongue and stomach react in ways he hated learning about.
Wolf blood was sharp and hot and animal.
Serpent blood was cold and bitter and made his teeth ache.
Insectoid blood was thick and strangely sweet, like rotten fruit.
Humanoid monster blood carried emotion. Rage. Fear. Hunger. Pride. It was as if their blood insisted on telling stories while he swallowed it.
The worst was the blood that tasted intelligent.
Blood that carried thoughts.
Blood that made his mind flicker with images he did not own.
Sekhmet learned to drink without letting those images take root.
He learned to clamp down his awareness and swallow only what he needed.
He learned to be brutal with himself before the world could be brutal for him.
Because in purgatory, hesitation was not a moral choice.
It was a death choice.
Tap… Tap… Tap…
He moved through a region of broken stone columns where wind screamed through gaps like a living thing.
Woooooo…
He moved through thorn fields where every step threatened to tear his boots and skin, and he blessed his nightmare gear silently every time the thorns failed to bite deep.
Scrape… Scrape…
He moved through a dead grove of trees where the branches hung like fingers and the ground was littered with old bones, and something in the shadows mimicked footsteps whenever he stopped moving.
Tap… Tap…
Sekhmet did not stop moving.
He fought when he had to.
He hid when it was smarter.
He learned the discipline of not proving himself to enemies that did not matter.
He avoided anything with battle power over five thousand.
Not because he feared everything.
Because he feared being stupid.
He had learned enough to understand that his displayed battle power was a lie.
A stable lie.
A controlled lie.
A lie forced by the training tool his father had placed on him years ago.
His status still reads the same.
[Overall Battle Power: 1500.]
Sekhmet had stared at that number many times in the last two months, each time feeling the same irritation.
He had killed creatures with two thousand battle powers.
He had survived attacks from beasts near four thousand.
He had outmaneuvered hunters who should have shredded him.
He had taken hits that would have broken a normal human at fifteen hundred power.
He had not died.
So the number was wrong.
Or rather, the number was correct only on paper.
The system confirmed it after Sekhmet asked one night, sitting on a cliff edge with his boots dangling over a drop that smelled like fog and death.
"Why can I fight stronger enemies," he had asked quietly. "Why does the system number say I am weak?"
The system had answered with the same calm tone it used for everything, even murder.
[System notification- Host combat output is suppressed by an external training tool. Displayed battle power reflects suppressed baseline. Host real combat capacity is higher. The training tool enforces balance and resistance progression.]
Sekhmet had stared at the dark valley below.
"So I do not know my real number," he had muttered.
[System: Confirmed. Real battle power fluctuates and cannot be precisely measured under suppression.]
Sekhmet had clenched his jaw.
That is why I am able to defeat people whose battle power is higher than mine.
He had hated how the sentence sounded.
It sounded like arrogance.
It was not arrogance.
It was survival math.
But he also understood the limit.
He still remembered the orcs.
Not Benimaru's followers. Not the stupid ones who argued about doors and boxes.
The other orcs.
The ones with true muscle and old scars.
The ones who had ambushed him while he fought a shadow beast.
They had moved fast. Too fast. They had hit hard. Too hard.
They had captured him easily.
Sekhmet's eyes had narrowed remembering that.
The orcs who captured me had nine or ten thousand battle powers.
That was not something he could just forget.
And even then…
They had beaten him.
They had punched him.
They had kicked him.
They had left him chained.
He had not died.