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He attacked Ingram, and the two went at it again, exchanging kicks and punches while the audience cheered them on. The winged fighters were throwing everything they had at each other, with adrenaline flooding their veins and the blood steaming as it flowed from their wounds. Every lesson they had ever learned, every technique they had acquired, every spark of experience they had, they directed into their moves, punching and kicking as hard as they could, with mana roaring around their limbs.

Chuckling and spitting up blood, Abner slowly got to his feet. “You’ll think you’ll win this just because you’re strong? You don’t know what real strength is, the strength of having friends at your side, cheering for you! As long as I have them and hope in my heart, I can never die!”

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.