Cyn was troubled. He was in between a rock and a hard place. He didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to silence the girl in front of him and killing her would lead to a whole new slew of problems. That was, if he managed to hold his confused soul together long enough to land the final blow. Even then, he wasn’t sure he would survive the identity crisis that followed.

He took a relaxed posture, distributing more weight on the right foot, waiting for Ira’s move. The girl had a miniscule reserve of Aura and she was burning through it with the way she was flaring it. She would have to make her move soon or risk exhausting her Aura. Without it she wasn’t his match.

Newly awakened Aura users are all the same, they are overwhelmed by their new sense and end up relying on it too heavily. While this means that even the weakest scholar can fight on par with a trained soldier, after awakening, due to his unlocked instincts, these same instincts can become a fatal weakness in front of a master. He knew, he had been like that too until a bear had smacked some sense into him.

He had won, Ira just didn’t know it yet.

Slightly shifting his left elbow outwards, he revealed a chink in his defence and Ira immediately exploded forth, the ground spidering into cracks as her fist aimed at the rib which had just been revealed. For a second, she vanished from his vision. Unflustered, he crouched towards the right, muscles clenching beyond their limits as he slammed his upturned left palm upwards into her chin.

The thin layer of Aura shattered and her eyes rolled up into her head as the force of the blow nearly broke her neck and flipped her onto her back. The muscles in his arm spasmed as they transmitted the force up it, then down his shoulder, back, and leg, right into the ground, creating tiny fissures in the granite flagstones. Unfortunately, he couldn’t escape the fate of a shattered wrist.

His students back at the tribe used to call him the Chef. This fight was right out of ‘How to Cook your Enemies 101’. Ira’s dwindling Aura was the timer and the psychological pressure of his zero-weakness stance was the flame which prevented her from attacking and ratcheted up her irritability. Just as she reached her boiling point, he intentionally exposed a weakness. Then it was all a matter of pre-emptively attacking where he knew she would be if she were to strike at his ‘flaw’.

Exhausted, he sat down cross-legged beside Ira. Concentrating on his wrist, he powered through the pain with gritted teeth as his muscles wriggled, bringing shattered pieces of bone together. Cradling his temporarily stabilized hand in his lap, he tore off his sleeves and created a makeshift sling out of them.

He placed the pads of the index, middle and ring fingers of his right hand on Ira’s jugular, feeling the steady beat of her pulse, he looked at her blankly.

His fingers stiffened, the muscles at the base of his nails contracting so that they extended like claws. All it would take would be a twitch of his fingers to end her life. They stayed like that for a whole minute before he sighed and withdrew his hand and retracted his nails.

It seemed that for the sake of his continued mental health, he would have to take a gamble.

Sinking deep into his meditative state, he saw his soul. After repeated abuse, its gloss was dim and upon closer scrutiny, tiny fissures could be seen all over it. Tinkering with it so soon was asking for the damage to aggravate but considering that killing Ira would surely initiate another tussle between the older and newer parts of his soul, which would be fatal, he had no choice left.

His consciousness sank into his soul and merged with it. The two-tailed dark peacock came to life with a melodious cry which rippled through his being, exposing four other groups of energies to its keen gaze.

Three of them were concentrated in his brain while the other was spread all through his body. He recognized the one spread over his body as the physical energy created and consumed by his bodily Aspect. The reddish energy that was concentrated at the back of his brain and radiated out to cover the rest of his body belonged to the Aspect of emotion and probably had something to do with his hormones. He had used these two Aspects before but it was his first time detecting the other two.

The energy that seemed to crackle like electricity throughout his brain was identified as belonging to the Aspect of mind. Thus, by elimination, the final nebulous energy that occupied the front of his brain was that from his Aspect of memories.

When he invested his soul into this mess, his brain seemed to blast out and for a short time he blanked out. He regained awareness inside a hexagonal white room still in his soul form. Focusing on the walls caused the appearance of visions of his past on all the surfaces that started flashing past. The white room suddenly devolved into a riot of motion and colour and for a moment, he floated in the middle of the room, immersed in the kaleidoscope of memories. A huge spike of pain snapped him out of his reverie and he was alarmed to find that the fissures on his soul had expanded and deepened further.

Realizing how stressful his current status was for his soul, he focused on his goal. All the walls seemed to fade to white while one turned black. There seemed to be a tiny pinprick of light in the black wall which came closer as he focused on it. The light expanded and filled up the black wall, where it looked like a foggy mass of chaotic colours.

The pain in his soul intensified as he tried to penetrate the fog covering the mass, yet he pushed through the agony and suddenly the events of the day were being played in reverse from Ira’s perspective. Racing against time in order to minimize the damage, he wished with all his mind for the memories to be erased.

Feeling as if someone was mixing up his brain with a red-hot poker, the pain too intense for him to maintain his concentration, his soul separated from his Aspect of memory.

Waking with a start, bleeding from his ears, eyes and nose, he collapsed on the ground, pulse erratic and breath shallow, as he dry-heaved with all his might. Curling up in a foetal position, the fingers of his right hand dug into his scalp as if to gouge out the splitting headache he was suffering from. He screamed as his writhing jarred his broken wrist and the bones ground against each other.

It was the final straw and the young Pavone sank gratefully into the embrace of oblivion.

---

The more Epione knew of the situation, the stranger it seemed.

When the girl had collapsed at the entrance of the infirmary with her broken and bleeding young master on her back, it had set all the staff abuzz. Soon, the Matron herself had rushed to take stock of the situation and sealed the news, taking the two to a private room. As the only resident medical mage, her aged bones had been disturbed. Grumbling under her breath about spoilt brats that should be allowed to heal the regular way to give them a lesson in vigilance, the grey-haired woman had made her way to them, heavily leaning on her gnarled staff.

Her electric blue eyes had shone as she gathered her Aura in them to Enhance her vision and detect disorders in her patient’s Aura. After some poking and prodding, she quickly diagnosed Ira with a cracked chin, loose teeth, failed strangulation and a concussion.

Cyn was diagnosed with large scale rupturing of capillaries in his brain as well as a shattered left wrist. On top of that, it seemed that a line of muscles from his left arm to his right foot had been overstrained.

Pumping her Aura into their bodies and Enhancing their healing factor by a large multiple, simultaneously using it to discharge the toxins produced in the process out of the body, was both mentally and physically tiring. After healing both the children, she sagged into an amply cushioned chair and sighed, she was getting too old for this. If only the fool of an apprentice would straighten out, she could retire and live out her old age in peace.

The Matron barged in on her retirement planning and asked, “So what do you think happened here?”

She stretched herself, producing alarming cracking noises from her spine, and answered, “He clocked her right on the chin, broke her Theca and his wrist in the process, all the while discharging the recoil through his muscles down to the ground. Then he probably started choking the girl. No idea why he gave up halfway.”

“From the traces on the shattered flagstones, Ira probably started it and he countered. But that brings up the question, when did our scholarly young master start training in the martial path and reach such impressive attainments?” Luxuria said, her eyes gleaming with curiosity.

Epione’s wrinkles grew deeper with her frown and the petite woman irately replied, “How am I supposed to know? Teaching children all these stupid mind-games and intrigues. Now look at them, fighting each other to the death. Can’t even do it properly and I have to do double the work. Humph.”

Luxuria helplessly watched the aged healer storm out of the room. Artemis walked from the shadow and looked at her reproachfully.

“I could have prevented this if ‘someone’ hadn’t tired me out yesterday, making me oversleep.”

Luxuria chuckled. “Oh? Don’t act like you didn’t enjoy it. Besides, think of it as a hurdle in their relationship. Ira carried him on her back to the infirmary even in her injured state, so it can’t be that serious. Let them work it out on their own.”

She got up and made to leave. At the door, she turned back and ordered Artemis, “Monitor them and give me daily reports. Try to find out where the young master learnt his art.”

After she left, Artemis walked up to Cyn’s bed and pinched his sleeping face a few times playfully. She had been monitoring and guarding both of the kids for four years. Somehow the little brat had given her the slip and trained his martial arts on the sly.

Leaning down, she whispered softly into his ear, “He he. Looks like this little boy has grown into a little man under Elder sister’s nose. But, now that you’ve gotten Elder sister interested, give up any idea of keeping your secrets.”

With a soft chuckle, her sensuous body slowly desalinated as it sank into the shadow of the bed.

After that, it was silent in the room except for the soft breath of the two patients.