Dimensional Descent by Awespec

"Leonel hadn't been one to lie to himself. He knew that he wasn't the hardest worker. He also knew that he didn't have the most resolute will.

These weren't things one was born with. The reason his father tried to ingrain those two values into him time and time again was to remind him the value of growth.

He was an 18 year old boy. He had hardly faced any hardships in his life. Though he lived on a Paradise Island, he had never truly felt restricted by it. And, even though he had lived in such a place, it wasn't as though they were slums. Each Paradise Island was well tended to and provided for.

Expecting him to have the will to trample the heavens and sunder the earth like some anime character was absolutely ridiculous. Let alone having such will, he wasn't even sure what he wanted to do with his life just yet. He was a kid. Though he had some talent, he was ultimately just that. A kid.

For a kid like him, such pain was absolutely unbearable. But somehow, whenever he thought of letting go and allowing these doors to slam shut, tears uncontrollably fell from his eyes.

Such a thing surprised even himself. He wasn't an emotional person. Though he had been worried about his father when the Paradise Islands fell, he didn't break down back then. When Simeon and the Junior Governor Duke decided to fire into the homes of innocents, he hadn't burst into tears. Even when his father mentioned that his mother was still alive… his emotions hardly fluctuated.

But, there were also many times he did inexplicable things outside the bounds of his calm and cold logic, things even he couldn't explain. He put his life on the line to save the lives of English and Frenchmen he didn't know. He wanted to be with Aina for reasons even he found difficult to put into words. And right now… he really, really, really didn't want to let go.

These were tears of frustration, pain, and conflict.

He could feel the doors making him buckle under their weight. It was as though they were enraged he had suddenly regained his senses and now wanted to make him pay the greatest price. They wanted nothing more than to shatter him to a pile of bone and flesh.

If he took a step back, they might still give him a chance at survival. But, if he dared to take another step forward…

They would go all out to kill him!

Sometimes in life, the different paths people follow can be decided in an instant.

That was what people who were pretending to be profound said, anyway. In reality, things weren't so simple. A single decision couldn't change anything. It was a continuous stream of decisions that would decide the path you would follow.

It might take ten or even a hundred correct decisions to take a single step on the path you wanted. Maybe along the way, you might make many incorrect decisions as well. But only by persisting would you eventually become the person you wanted to be.

Leonel was just a kid. A boy of barely 18 years old. Up to now, he had already made several incorrect decisions. However recently, he finally made his first correct one. That was to quell his arrogance and admit that he was wrong. And now… he would make his second. "