"As usual, your first response to every single problem is running away," The purple shadow said and then jumped to attack Luke.

Luke raised his guard to fight back, but he got caught by surprise when his body was too heavy and his response too slow. In the end, Luke still punched the stomach of the shadow, but he still got a good straight on his face that made him fall from the platform. He began to fall for quite a while, but he eventually landed his back on another platform. Weirdly enough, that didn’t hurt much... However, the punches of the purple shadow sure hurt, and that wasn’t everything.

Suddenly, Luke’s vision blurred, and he saw himself back in his house in Miami. He felt like he was seeing a movie while using special lenses... he couldn’t move his body, but he could see the memories like he was reliving them. It was almost six in the evening, and he was playing with a portable console on his bed when his parents opened the room after knocking.

"Luke, aren’t you supposed to be preparing for your school trip?" Mark asked.

"Sorry, but I am not going," Luke said while still playing with his portable console. "It will be just a waste of time and money."

"Money isn’t the problem, and you should use your time in your youth for events like this," Mark said.

"It will be fun, Luke," Julia said. "Go and make some memories. It is your last year in middle school."

"And I thank God for that," Luke said. "I can make better memories whenever I want, I wouldn’t mind going if I could do my own thing, but the teachers want to split us in groups and do everything as a group. That is so retarded..."

"Choose your words more carefully, Luke," Mark said.

"I am sorry if I said something wrong, but I am not interested in going," Luke said.

Luke’s parents looked at each other and then sighed before they closed the room. Once that happened, Luke’s vision returned to where he was just in time to see a punch coming to his face. Luke reacted on time to grab it and stop, but then the shadow kicked his balls, making him gasp for air.

"Did you know what they thought when they sighed?" The purple shadow asked. "How pathetic can our son be? Because of a single setback and losing a group of friends, he became like that... That is so embarrassing."

Luke used all the strength in his legs to make the shadow fall from the platform. In the end, the creature disappeared after approaching that weird sky. Still, Luke had a feeling that it wasn’t over yet. Luke thought that he had put those kinds of thoughts aside, but the shadow words struck where it hurts. He doubted that the creature could read his mind, but the purple shadow said the same things that he thought on that day... he didn’t know how that was possible, but it sure was annoying. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Luke cleaned himself a bit and then realized that his mouth was bleeding. He was suffering physical damage for whatever reason, even though he was fighting shadows and he couldn’t feel any mana around. Still, from what he could tell, his strength and the strength of the shadow were the same.

"It seems some asshole wants to play with my head..." Luke said.

Luke turned around to see if he could find something there, and he found the purple shadow approaching on another platform. It seemed that things would last like that for a while longer, and there wasn’t much he could do to prevent it.

"What is the point of this? I don’t need to have a talk with a psychiatrist," Luke said. "I can say in order all the moments of my life that I was pathetic. Let’s see... in elementary school, I threw some cucumbers in the face of a classmate and made her cry. In the next year, I called a male teacher stupid because he always looked at me like I was lost cause just because I didn’t know the multiplication table well, There was also the issue with that group of friends, and then... and then... I guess the last one was that I stayed three days in a row in the college’s dormitory after I asked Amanda out and she said no and I got too depressed. There are also the times when I let my hormones get the better of me when I see some hot girls, but I can’t give you the details or I would die of cringe."

Even after saying all that, Luke didn’t see anything happening to the purple shadow. It just attacked him again... In the end, that whole situation wasn’t for him to face the problems that he had ignored, but just to annoy him with emotional damage.

"If you are here just to annoy me, then go to hell!" Luke said and then grabbed the neck of the shadow and snapped with all his might.

Luke might not have his powers, but he still had his knowledge. Thanks to that, his attack worked, and the purple shadow actually fell and stopped moving. Weirdly enough, the shadow got absorbed by his body, and he felt himself getting a bit stronger... But his head got a bit fuzzy.

"Something is wrong here..." Luke thought.

Since Luke messed with mana for so long, he knew that what he just witnessed was similar to what happens when he gains experience... he didn’t get a notification, but that was just a minor detail at this point. In any case, while he was trying to understand that... Luke felt two presences approaching, and when he turned around, he found two shadows on a bigger platform coming.

"Being pitied by your parents..." The first purple shadow said.

"Not having a single real friend..." The second purple shadow said.

It was only natural that those would annoy the shit out of him, but Luke felt more enraged than expected...