Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Sarah Avery Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 5

Tutorial Realm…Months Ago

The tenji on the skewers hissed and spit over the hot coals and Gammon was contentedly watching them and flipping them every once in a while. He had a bottle of beer in one hand—he preferred beer to tasp when grilling—and Sarah was standing in the middle of a little circle of stamped-down dirt in the backyard, her tunic soaked with sweat. She had a blindfold firmly tied to her face—also soaked with sweat—and she was covered in bruises. She’d been doing nothing but training like this for weeks and she went to bed every night looking like one giant, over-inflated bruise.

She was holding a stick that she’d created from her graft. Gammon wouldn’t let her make anything else yet. He said that she hadn’t earned it yet. She hadn’t been allowed to take off the blindfold for the past week and a half and every day, it was the same exercise. She’d stand in the dirt circle with her conjured stick and blindfold and Gammon would, at random intervals, throw an infused wooden ball at her at about two hundred kilometers an hour. She was expected to bat the thing away, preventing herself from getting hit.

She was pretty sure her left middle finger was broken. It was throbbing and she couldn’t close it completely around the stick. Every inch of her hurt more than she’d ever hurt before and frankly, she didn’t know how she was still standing.

Why am I doing this?! Why am I doing this?! Why am I doing this?! The thought kept repeating in her mind over and over.

Her hands trembled on the haft of the stick as she resisted the urge to take the blindfold off. That was the surest way to get a wooden ball flung directly at her head. Once had been more than enough for her.

She heard Gammon take a sip of beer. His footsteps receded indoors. She didn’t relax. She’d learned that even from indoors, he could fling the damn infused balls with unerring accuracy. Sarah took a shallow, shaky breath. Her ribs had almost completely healed and now they just itched like fire. If she got hit in the ribs again, sleep would be damn near impossible and she didn’t know if she could make it if she lost any more sleep. What is he even trying to teach me? She had no idea.

The most infuriating part of it was that sometimes she could deflect the ball. She could hear them coming if he was far enough away and every once in a great while, she could get her stick positioned just so and the ball would slam into the stick instead of her.

But Gammon never said anything when she managed to block a ball. He never said anything at all and any time she spoke, a ball would get flung at her. Any time she moved out of the circle, ball. At irregular intervals, she would be allowed to relieve herself, bathe, or eat; always with the blindfold firmly in place.

It had been two days since she’d last eaten and her stomach gurgled and cramped constantly. Gammon continued cooking his damn tenji eel skewers and Sarah’s mouth watered. She could practically taste the eel skewers now.

The slight char, the delicate flesh that had just the perfect amount of bite to it, the way it fell apart in her mouth… She could just see the skewers on the little grill. She could see the way the coals glowed in the darkness but emitted almost no smoke. The only smoke came from the fat and marinade that dripped from the skewers—they were nearly done.

How do I know that? She wondered absently. Her stomach groaned again. I can’t even smell them all that well from here. He’s fifteen meters away!

And then, all of a sudden, she saw something else. A glowing ball near those skewers. The ball floated all on its own, bobbing gently. Then, it whipped up in the air silently and Sarah followed it with vision that wasn’t coming from her eyes. She followed the ball as it was whipped through the air, going right for her face. She swayed out of the way, not bothering to use the stick—she didn’t have enough time. She heard the whistle of the infused ball’s passage as it passed by her right ear.

“Finally!” Gammon exclaimed, with real exasperation. “I was wondering when you were going to finally use your anima to do more than gather tensa you weren’t using.”

Sarah shakily raised a hand to her blindfold. She could still see the tenji eels smoking slightly on the hot coals. She saw another infused ball raise silently and then whip right at her chest. She whipped the stick around and hit it with all her strength right back at Gammon.

The ball flew threw the air like a bullet and hit the grill in front of Gammon causing it to explode with cooked eel and hot coals. She heard a surprised grunt, but her concentration was on the speck she could somehow track a hundred meters up in the air. It dropped and Sarah stuck out her left hand, catching a skewer that had miraculously survived her retribution as it fell from the sky. She dropped her stick and devoured the tenji eel, not bothering with the blindfold as she gorged herself.

Once she finished the eel, she ripped the blindfold off, her bloodshot eyes squinting in the darkness. She found Gammon right where she thought he’d be. The remains of the grill were still smoking and he was patting out some hair that had caught fire from one of the coals and started smoking.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” She screamed, her voice cracking at the end.

Gammon finished patting out his hair and looked at her. She couldn’t interpret the look he gave her and she was beyond caring at that point. “Do you think my methods are too harsh?” He asked calmly.

“Uh, yeah, I think a bit,” Sarah said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m pretty sure what you did is a form of torture!”

Gammon mulled it over, stroking his strong chin as he considered her words. After a long moment, he said, “You think what I did was torture?” He shrugged. “Perhaps. And yet, this is the most effective training method for this particular lesson.”

“What lesson could I possibly have learned from that abuse?!” Sarah yelled back.

“You learned how to perceive your surroundings with your anima, then you used that knowledge to successfully defend yourself from attack. Twice.” He reached behind his head and picked out a strip of grilled eel. He popped it in his mouth and chewed meditatively, spitting out a bit of ash.

Sarah stood there, battered and bruised, still holding onto the cleaned-off skewer. “And how the hell am I supposed to do that again?” She demanded. “Unless you missed it, I was out of my mind with stress, starved and beaten. You isolated me for days, Gammon. That’s fucked! The only reason I’ve stuck around with it this far is because I wasn’t going to let you beat me.

“Now here’s the way it’s going to go from here on out. You agreed to teach me. Not to torture me. You’re never going to put me through hell like this again.” Sarah’s eyes flashed with fury, “And before you think the ends justify the means, just be aware that traumatizing someone is never okay, no matter the goal. If the training is going to be tough, then we fucking TALK about it.”

Gammon was quiet for a long time. Finally, he nodded. “I can see that I have made a mistake. Please accept my apology.” He held out his hand.

She walked over to him, limping slightly, glaring the entire way. She looked at his hand for a moment before she took it and shook it once. “I’m going inside now. To take a bath. I’ll come out when I’m ready.” Then she turned away from him and left, limping slowly into the house.

When she sunk into the hot bath fifteen minutes later, hissing through clenched teeth when she saw just how covered in bruises she was. She felt numb and tender at the same time.

Why did I let him do that to me? She thought as she sank below the water level, blowing bubbles out through her nose. Why…? NO. The familiar anger boiled up. No. I learned something here. I’m not going to let it slip away. If today or the past few days are going to mean anything, then it’ll be because I decide that’s how it’s going to go.

She closed her eyes under the water, concentrating on her anima, sending it out as far as she could. But unlike any other time she’d done this exercise, she felt a new depth to her anima. Sarah focused on that depth—a new texture—and suddenly, sight flooded her consciousness, blooming from the dark like ink dropped into water. She could see everything within the small bubble of her anima—right now, that meant she could see herself, naked in the bath and a rainbow of purples, greens, and yellows soaking in a dingy old tub full of steaming hot water.

If she projected her anima outward, extending it like an eye on a stalk, she could focus her sight and “move” up to twenty meters away from her core but the view was narrow and the focus was tenuous at best. The closer she was to herself, the better. She wasn’t able to achieve the same clarity she had when she was waiting for another infused ball to bean her in the head in the backyard, but it was still very gratifying. Gammon was right about one thing at least: she’d never forget this lesson.

Skyland

“I can’t believe I forgot that lesson!” Sarah screamed as azure slimes dropped from the low ceiling all around her in the chaotic darkness. Sunspot had half a dozen slimes all over him and he was barking and spinning, biting at the slimes as they dug into him; Kimi-Lim was casting something while they shot lasers at the occasional slime that they noticed; and Sarah had, up to now, been blindly flailing in the darkness with the Master Sword.

Sarah snapped her sword out and let the weaponform dissolve. She closed her eyes, shutting out distractions and letting her anima blossom out from her core. It was years since that early lesson with Gammon. Her awareness blossomed out in an expanding cloud almost three meters in diameter.

It wasn’t any brighter in that cloud of awareness but to her anima, the slimes lit up like little blue flames. They were easy to see. Sarah smiled and diverted a portion of her anima into a very familiar weaponform: a simple meter-long stick.

With her awareness expanded so completely, it became at least possible to fight off the slimes but it was by no means easy. Slimes clung to her, weighing her down. They had half-centimeter-long claws and teeth floating around their amorphous forms and wherever they clung, they stuck like they were glued on with superglue and then they just started chewing. Blood streamed from the puncture wounds the slimes were inflicting on her, but Sarah was too involved to notice.

She batted at the slimes with her stick and with her newly-acquired Dominion Attribute, her hits were many times harder than the time she’d batted the infused ball back at Gammon. The slimes that she hit didn’t just sail away, they exploded into bits of ammonia-smelling jelly.

She was aware of the large hole in the floor now in a way she hadn’t been before because there were a lot more slimes below them. They were all stuck to one another, pressed together as tightly as they could be until they were all just like pressurized little blue bubbles. She couldn’t make out what they were all trying to get close to, but they were focused on something below their feet. Sarah had to do some fancy footwork to avoid tripping or slipping on the slick and crumbling floor so that she could get close to Kimi-Lim.

They’d become separated in the confusion and Kimi-Lim was now as covered in slimes as Sarah was, but the elf didn’t seem to be in any distress. Sarah’s footsteps were now labored due to the sheer number of slimes that had attached themselves to her. The pain ate through her focus.

The slimes’ teeth were sharp and persistent and dug ever inward. Their blue glow had become suffused with red around their disgusting little mouths. She found it terrifying and hilarious that even in her anima perception ability, she could see their googly eyes waggling around on the little bumps that acted as their heads. In desperation, she reached for a graft she hadn’t had a chance to try yet: her new Electrify graft.

Electrify [Lightning] – Speed 6

Next Rank: 1 Uncommon ethershard of Plasma; 1 Uncommon ethershard of Bow

Cost: 2.5 ks

Cooldown: 5 seconds

Description: Use Electrify to cause one inanimate object of your choice in your hand to become suffused with Lightning. The next thing that touches the item will be subject to a Lightning Bolt spell.

Lightning Bolt: With a crack of thunder, a bolt of lightning strikes dealing damage and granting the Shock condition to your target.

Shock condition: With electricity coursing through your body, your muscles seize and jerk, causing you to become utterly paralyzed at worst or have spasmodic jerks at best.

Crackling sparks danced around the outside of her crystalline stick weaponform as she pulled tensa into the weapon through her graft. More sparks coalesced until the stick was crawling in strobing arcs of blue and white energy. She gritted her teeth and swung at the pile of slimes on Kimi-Lim, hoping that she wouldn’t hurt her friend with her power. Thunder BOOMED in the tiny room, tossing slimes everywhere.

An arm-thick bar of plasma arced from the end of Sarah’s conjured stick into the slimes and dispersed through them in webs of crackling sparks. Electricity coursed through the slimes and they jittered and spasmed until they exploded. It happened in less than a second and when Sarah blinked her eyes again, all the slimes in a two-meter circle around her and Kimi-Lim had been reduced to quivering piles of smoking jelly.

They both coughed and choked on the acrid smoke pouring from the burning remnants of the slimes but at least they’d been freed from the awful monsters for the moment. Kimi-Lim looked slightly dazed and Sarah had a feeling that her electrical attack had more of an effect than she had hoped on her friend, but the elf was already working on constructing the spell that had been interrupted by the slimes. Sarah circled Kimi-Lim batting away the slimes that dropped from the ceiling out of the air as she spotted them with her anima-enhanced perception.

She couldn’t just blast away with her Lightning graft; each blast of Lightning cost nearly forty percent of her total tensa pool and she thought she might need to save her tensa for her Oni-Blooded graft. Since she was relying on her anima for perception, she couldn’t refill her spent resources with the Ten Star Vortex technique yet. Instead, she decided to wait as long as she could for them to stack themselves together again so she could get as many as she could with her next use of Electrify.