— Unknown —

“Keepers dammit! How dare they!” I limped up the road, trying to heal my broken bones. It was going slow due to the poison. “How dare they interfere in the work of the keepers." We were a convoy transporting ancient artifacts once used by them. It was a job of utmost secrecy, we didn’t even know which vehicle the items were stashed.

I moved as fast as I could toward the truck, leaving a trail of sickly dark congealed blood. “Once I expel this poison I will be strong enough to take those slimy Shadow Cats.” The effort to expel the poison was slowing me down, but once it was out I would be able to heal and finish my job. Why are they always interfering with our work with the keepers? They know they can’t stop us. They can only delay us. We must awaken the sleepers, why don’t they understand that? My brain hit on something with that last thought and redoubled my pace. Fuck, the poison wasn’t meant to kill us. They must still be there.

The poison was slowly being expelled out through my skin when I crested the hill where the remains of our vehicles were strewn about. The trucks were beaten and destroyed from the damage during the fight. Looks like I'm the first one who made it back. I saw two indistinct clouds of shadows working to open the safe inside. The safe was secured in multiple layers of security, including invisible thieve's locks. Without the password the only way in was delicately and simultaneously unlocking everything, else it would send a shock wave out whilst re-securing itself. “Why are there two? They always work alone.” Their faces were hidden in the cloud of shadow. The only thing to be seen was their pupils, they glowed an unearthly green. The telltale sign of a cat. They were crawling all over the safe attempting to open the cargo. I was surprised that they had not triggered the shockwave. Must be blocking it somehow. They are much too prepared for this. I needed answers and two creatures could provide them right in front of me.

With the Shadow Cats in my grasp, I focused on speeding up my heart, circulating the poison faster. Using my mana and will I isolated the rest of the poison and with a burst of energy pushed it out through. The toxins shot out, creating craters in my skin. Damn that hurt. I felt the whole thing, not having enough time to block the initial burst of pain. The one positive though was that the process also brought with it a surge of adrenaline. My strength was back, however temporary. I'm gonna feel this after. I charged the thieves.

I was about halfway to them when one of them looked over to me. One of the shadows broke away from the safe, retreating a short distance leaving the other alone. Its form began to gather into a black focus. The other shadow slammed his fist down on the safe. “Dammit! I need more time.” The shadow looked over toward my quickly approaching form, jumping back slightly tripping over something unseen. Good, be scared.

“There is nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.” We were in the middle of the wilds in the open hills. It was supposed to be the safest route to the city, but we were caught off guard by the Cats. I had been hit with poison at the beginning of the fight and was the last one in the truck. When I noticed that I was the only one left, I activated our final contingency plan, blowing up the engine. Striking the detonator was my last act before I felt an arrow pierce my chest. Not sure how the truck made it this far from the detonation, but that didn’t matter. I had caught them, and would finally get some answers.

The Shadow that retreated back continued to gather darkness, causing it to come into a sharper darker focus. It was still pure darkness with no dimension. The other thief was still covered in a large cloud of shadow, but it appeared to be thinning out.

I threw a pair of throwing knives at the one who fell, pinning him to the ground. “How did you know where the shipment would be?”

The shadow stayed silent as I continued to approach. Enforcing my muscles, increasing my body's size until I was towering over the shadow.

“Not talking huh? Well, I got ways of finding things out.” I smiled, drawing my sword. I knew just the way to learn what I needed. I was about to swing when the shadows thinned just enough for me to see his face. He was wearing a black half-mask at the top of his face hovering over his eyes, his mouth showing. Flickering in and out of shadows. He was smiling.

My smile fell. “Shit."

The shadow spoke one word. “Now.” I looked over at the safe seeing the shockwave form, then I looked over to the other shadow. It was in almost perfect focus, like a photo negative without the color. It outstretched its arms. Simultaneously, the world went dark and I was struck by waves of force.

— James —

Darkness abruptly faded, I stared up at a stone ceiling with some type of odd metal arm off to the side. I tried to move but quickly found my body was completely numb. I could see something in my peripheral vision around my wrist. I also appeared to be strapped to a table.

I caught the figure of a person in the corner of my eye. “Buy a guy a drink first.”

“Morning James. You most likely can’t see what you are strapped to.” The lady talking was the same stern lady I met after waking up. She was called the Praeceptor. She was the one responsible for my training since I joined, one had to have a sponsor to join the owls, and after a few annoying tests, she became mine. She only ever introduced herself as Praeceptor, saying I needed to earn her name.

“No, it appears I can't move or feel anything." I may have sounded calm, but the inability to move sent a primal fear through my body.

“Yes. That is the poison.” She was observing me looking for any reaction. It took a lot of control to keep myself from screaming. This test was about absolute control, I couldn’t fail at the beginning giving into fear. I did not want to go through this again, not like last time.

“Poison makes sense. Am I also strapped down?” Always keep them talking to get information.

“In a sense. Today's test is absolute control. You will need to expel the poison, then expel the spikes.”

“Ah, so not strapped down.”

“No. The poison wears off after an hour. I would recommend expelling it before then. I would also recommend numbing the areas with the spikes.”

I had already started moving my internal energy attempting to isolate the poison. Poison was a double-edged sword for us. We could easily expel it, but the problem was we needed to locate it first before that. Poison never lasts long with our type and would eventually filter itself out, but until it did it hit so much harder in us than others. Now I just needed time. “How long do I have to get free?”

Praeceptor was now standing over me looking over my body. “As long as you want, but I wouldn’t recommend taking too long.” That was barely enough to go on. Praeceptor looked satisfied at something smiling. “Good luck James.” She then left the room.

I was now alone, spiked to a table, paralyzed. I closed my eyes now able to fully focus on finding the toxin. I quickly found it. It was an odd lattice shape that was building up around my nerves. That must be why I can’t feel anything.

Now that I had located the poison I circulated my blood faster, using it as a medium to pummel the poison breaking it down and filtering it out through my organs. I was reinforcing my organs to ensure no damage would occur during the filtering process.

The process was working slowly but kept getting interrupted by small uncontrollable bouts of panic when I tried to move. These kept scattering my focus, but each time I controlled my panic I found the focus return easier than before.

Finally, the paralytic started to wear off. This was both a blessing and a curse. Once the poison’s effects started to fade, I felt everything. I now knew where all five spikes were. They were in my arms, legs, and chest. With the feeling returning, I felt something next to the pain, something wet. I was still bleeding. That's not right. That's when I realized there was more than just the paralytic. My hour was up, and the metal arm moved, re-injecting me with the paralyzing poison. “This is crazy.”

Now newly paralyzed, I had a new problem. I was about to bleed out, with that knowledge I knew I must not have too much longer before I passed out from blood loss. At that point, there wouldn’t be anything I could do. I switched my priorities, instead of attempting to expel the poison, I worked on stimulating my bone marrow to produce more blood. I found one of my pathways was circling through the marrow already creating a circuit in my bones. The movement of the energy was almost natural.

The only good thing about this entire situation, was at least I wasn’t plagued by that wrong feeling. Like last time in the pain tolerance or regeneration lessons. Those were almost sadistic. In pain tolerance, they essentially tortured me until I could turn my nerves on and off similar to this. Then the second day they had me do the same thing but while fighting. This required me to learn to turn on or off different areas of my body while in combat. The body needs feedback to fight without damaging itself. You can turn it all off for a short time but your body might fall apart at any point. The fight was more like getting beat mercilessly.

Learning regeneration was weird. They had me walk through a room full of booby traps, that shot out small knives constantly cutting my skin. I would be struck with 1 knife at first, given a minute to heal. Then two were fired, and another minute. Then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, this continued for hours as more and more knives flew at me, taking long minutes to slice me. I would dodge as much as I could but there were only so many before it became impossible. I didn't even have time to rest and recover. I had to learn to regenerate while being sliced up in a storm of knives. So many knives cut me they even sliced off a finger or two. I didn’t have time to heal my finger back until the storm was over. Even then I was only able to heal over it till I could fully regenerate later. It was a good thing I learned pain tolerance before that day, otherwise, I would never have been able to heal in that storm.

My mind came back to the present, focusing on producing more blood in order to survive. The new batch of blood cells also helped to highlight both poisons. The paralytic poison was much larger, while the anticoagulant was similar to my white blood cells. No wonder I couldn't find it earlier. When I found the second poison I found something that made me a little afraid. It was also in my marrow, producing more of itself. I need to clean that out or it would just keep bleeding, never clotting.

I moved my attention from circulating the mana through my marrow to surrounding the bones instead. I had to concentrate my mana senses fully on my marrow. The poison highlighted like glowing grains of sand to my senses once I saturated them with energy. The anticoagulant had fully invaded the cells themselves. I needed to remove the whole cells, breaking chunks off the marrow itself. With my bones fully saturated, I removed the mana from the cells containing the toxin, isolating and encapsulating it. Once completely surrounded I squeezed. I needed to squeeze all the poison out at once, and keep a small barrier around the marrow until the poison is filtered out.

The whole process was like trying to lift a large odd-shaped object. Whether or not it was heavy didn’t matter; due to its shape, it was hard to lift on your own. Slowly, too slowly, the poison squeezed out in small black red rivulets through my skin. Some were so large they left small craters that needed to be healed.

I had used most of my hour on the marrow poison, now I needed to get the rest of the paralysis poison out. Luckily, I had left my circuit going at a trickle striking the poison while I expelled the second toxin. Most of the paralytic had been purged or filtered through my organs. It only needed one big push to finish removing it. I couldn't even expel the spikes till it was gone. The toxin was interfering with sensing large things not part of my body. I needed to focus on both healing and squeezing the spikes out at the same time else risk losing too much blood again.

The paralytic finally expelled from my system, I felt the pulsing pain of spikes inside me. Once I could feel again, I dulled the pain around the spikes to a manageable level.

It was time to remove the spikes. I surrounded a spike with a field of mana, making it slick and smooth, separating the meat from the spike. I began to heal and contract the muscles hard, forcing a spike to shoot out of my wrist.

Laying on the table, healing the rest of the internal damage, I did one final scan inside for poison. Finding nothing I stopped the field surrounding in my marrow, no longer needing it. I might be filled with blood now, but I still felt drained.

Seeing the process work correctly I repeated this four more times till I was free. I ran out of time on the second spike and got another injection of the paralytic. Thankfully, I was now familiar with the process of expelling the poison quickly. With the last spike flying from my chest I saw the arm begin to move again. “Not again.” I rolled falling off the table just barely dodging the injector.

“six hours. Not too bad. ” Leaning against the table I looked up and over toward the Praeceptor.

“That could have killed me.” I was annoyed at this whole process.

“Anything can kill you, given the right circumstances. Do you have any questions or would like clarification?”

“How common are those types of poisons?”

“Paralysis is very common, in fact, it is a seasoning. It only has the paralytic effect in high doses and is directly injected. The other, it's not too hard to get. But every poisoning tends to be slightly different. It really has to do with the situation.”

“Are the rest of the lessons like these?”

“One more is like this. The rest is what you would expect. Training. Now get some sleep.”

“Where’s the bed?” They were always pushing us to go to bed right after one or two questions. I know I’m tired but why do I immediately do this?

She pointed. The question faded from my mind as I made my way to the bed. I finished healing the internal damage leftover from the spikes and poison. Shuffling over to the bed I fell into it and passed out before hitting the bed.