Getting Married to a Yandere Princess

"Yeah guys, you are close to the line. Just a little more, come on!"

The second day was no better than the first with every member of Claw Zamian greeting the misty morning by running thrice around the perimeter of the large field.

David wasn't faring any better. A full night's sleep had done nothing but only amplify the soreness of his muscles and accompanied by the marathon like training, it was akin to torturing a dead creature - both the dead creature and his legs were feeling nothing.

Once again the nameless girl was the first to complete three full laps around the grasslands followed by Aeris, an assassin whose main focus was on being fast and agile.

A whole minute later, David painfully crossed the line, his legs trembling from exhaustion.

"Water?" And just like the previous day, the nameless girl handed him a bottle which he gratefully accepted. As he was gulping down water down this throat, a question arose in his mind.

Putting the bottle aside, he said. "I have a question."

And added when the girl tilted her head. "How does one awaken a Pathway? You know like our Shogun and Lady Lysandra."

The girl looked at him with puffy eyes, a sign of something unraveling behind them.

"I know not. But...I hear tales of how our Lady had done it. A place of nothing. She travelled there, in the blank space and oh, oh, she fought like a brave woman." Shw puffed her chest, her body straight and her head raised high as if sharing in Lysandra's glory.

David smiled through his fatigue. Then he asked softly, "But do you know the process...or how she reached that land?"

He knew that his tribe members had rarely left their hunting place. So it's rather improbable that Lady Lysandra had travelled somewhere so far away from the Great Forest and awakened her Pathway.

The nameless girl shook her head in response. "No, big brother, that I know not."

"I see..." David sighed, not before correcting her, "By the way, the correct sentence is 'I do not know'. Repeat it."

As she corrected herself, Master Zamian approached them.

"I overheard something about pathway...did anyone of you awaken yours?"

"No. I was just asking her if she knew how to do that."

"So that's the case here. You see, awakening your pathway doesn't follow a specific path. Rather, it's quite spontaneous and is more like a trial that you need to pass. There are chances you might die in there as well. The only thing we are sure about is that we can only find ourselves in that trial if we had been thinking of being in it....A17, why are you closing your eyes?"

David opened up one of them. "Just testing if deeply concentrating on being in a Pathway trial can take me inside it."

Zamian's lips twitched in amusement. "If it was that simple, don't you think even toddlers out there would be having their own pathways?"

David replied lucidly, "Not everyone can enter a deep state of concentration... something I call as flow state. And I assume we need to think about it for long periods of time, which most of the people wouldn't be able to do."

Zamian's eyes perked up as he saw his disciple clsoe his eyes again. "There are conditions to be met for the pathways trial..."

The sentence alone snapped open David's eyes. "That's literally the first thing you should have said. I almost hoped for something..."

"And long hours pf concentration mean nothing here...just saying." Zamian added softly, causing David to look at him flatly.

"The only thing you need to make sure of is that you have a clear vision of the pathway you could unlock. And I am saying this from my own experience..."

"What is your pathway, Master?"

"Space pathway, A17." Zamian answered proudly. "But tell me, why are you getting so desperate about awakening your pathway?"

David scoffed internally. His rather impulsive desperation was a result of a lingering insecurity clawing at his chest. Without anyone to kill, he had no way to progress in his power tier. He had even asked Master Zamian when they would be able to surf some dungeon to which he was only told:

"It is not that time of the month."

With that out of the way, he had only two more possibilities to increase his strength - either by increasing his proficiency in his elements and classes or by unlocking his Pathway, after which he could have unlocked newer abilities.

And this thought hardened more inside his mind when for five consecutive times, he was defeated in the sparring sessions by five different clawmates.

Almost nobody had suffered such crushing defeats one after the other. That night, David had difficulties in falling asleep. Both from a physical pain - sore muscles, backpain, a rather throbbing hip and aching bones that felt like they had already broken , and from a mental discomfort.

On Earth, he was used to having any situation under his control. But here, he was already powerless from the very start.

'It has really been a long time since I have been in such a situation. The last time however, I hadn't tasted the sweet delicacy named victory. But now that I have already consumed it a plenty of times, it's rather hard to ignore this absence of that luxury in this second life.'

Sighing, he rose from his bed and threw on the robes the Isikolo has given him to wear. Coming out in the fields, he almost changed his mind to return back to his room as cold winds tickled and amplified the wounds beneath his robes.

"Maybe I am getting too much flustered over nothing."

Glancing around him, he crouched and readied himself as if ready to sprint.

"Let's start with the basics."

His feet sprung into motion as he made three complete rounds around the imaginary perimeter he had made in the wide field beside the dorms.