Chapter 14: The last few lessons

Taking a few moments to come to his senses following the vision, Kira gradually looked up from the hearth, past the stone mantel and at the bard. However, he could not form the proper words in his throat to question him on what he had just experienced and, seeing his evident distress, the bard chuckled at him saying, "I only showed you what you needed to see." before exiting the room.

The man had only left at a leisurely pace, but by the time Kira had managed to climb to his unsteady feet and follow after him out of the room, he was gone from the Inn. Kira then stood, leaning against the doorway to catch his breath and watched as the other people, who had been sat before the fire, edged past in a similarly unsteady manner, evidently having had similar visions of their own.

This was when an utterly new certainty struck him that for whatever reason, after having had the vision, he was now absolutely sure that continuing to Krinestadt would be a terrible idea. He had now concluded that whilst he didn't exactly know where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do, he wanted to use his manipulations on his own terms and not have to place a condition upon himself to serve Krinestadt. This was a bit of an issue because it meant that he definitely would have to escape Thea and Sadis at some point along the road. He also knew that he would have to do it quickly as his companions had told him that the journey would last only slightly over another week.

The problem then was who would continue his training after leaving them? He didn't really know any other manipulators, so he decided that he would just have to train himself. This would be simple enough using the basic exercises they had taught him, but to become more advanced, he would have to get Thea and Sadis to show him how to do more complex manipulations. With his mind still racing over what he would need to get them to tell him in their last few days together, he was finally brought fully back to reality by a man knocking shoulders with him whilst passing through the doorway.

Telling himself that he would have more time to think about this before continuing on their journey, he walked back to where Thea and Sadis were sitting at the bar with three plates of food before them. When they saw him approach, Thea handed over the spare plate and Kira sat beside her, not meeting her eyes whilst wondering about how surprised she might be to wake up with him gone. After eating what he could from the plate, he pushed the leftovers away and responded to his companion's odd looks by saying, "I'm not that hungry." before heading upstairs to the room that Sadis had paid for.

It was definitely for three people, but it seemed that it was not quite how Sadis had imagined because it featured one double bed and a smaller single off to the side. Seeing this, Thea looked at him irritably and said, "So, I take it that you're so much of an idiot that you forgot to specify that we are not a couple and that we needed three separate beds." after a moment, she also added, "Separate rooms might have been nicer."

Not sure if something had happened between them to put them at such odds with each other, Kira kept quiet whilst Sadis explained how this was the cheaper option to an increasingly angry Thea. She later only stopped telling him what an idiot he was when the resident of the room adjacent to their own knocked on the door to politely ask them to shut up. This was how Kira found himself sharing a double bed with Sadis whilst Thea slept alone in the single bed. Once he had gotten over that escapade, he got back to thinking about what he would need from them before abandoning them sometime before reaching Krinestadt.

The main thing that stuck out to him before falling asleep was that he had no clue how to fight with aura, so some explanation about this would be nice before he had to go it alone.

In the morning, he couldn't think of anything else to ask them except, perhaps, if they had heard of the Progenitors, and so he simply resolved to wait for the right time to ask them about these two topics. However, this time did not come particularly quickly because he first had to wait for a begrudging Sadis to hand over the several coins demanded by the barman for their breakfast, an amount that Sadis insisted was way too much again to the displeasure of Thea. He then had to wait whilst they wandered out of Hawthorn and onto the road east; here he noted that, according to an old Marxan marker, they had now passed Ostermark and were heading further towards the heart of Krinestadt.

Seeing this, he did think about asking them exactly where they were heading, but he quickly supposed that that would be unnecessary as he was now certain that he wasn't going to be arriving there with them anyway. When the traffic finally had died down to an acceptable degree, he sprung his first question onto Thea and Sadis, guessing that they might be more willing to respond to this one, asking, "I've heard of the beings known as the Progenitors, or they might have been known as the seven, who actually were they?"

At this question, Sadis and Thea looked at each other and then back at him before Sadis responded, "We don't really know, they are probably just legends, and according to those legends they were some of the strongest manipulators to have ever lived. Their order is supposed to still exist in the form of four overseers. Of course, though, all legends do have a bit of truth at their heart, but I don't really see why some stories of some powerful manipulators are important here. Where did you even learn of them? The legends really aren't that common…."

Kira replied quickly, "I heard about them from some scholar in Illyria."

"Then you probably know more than we do," murmured Sadis reverting to his standard mildly irritating response to any questions that he didn't want to go into detail over.

The conversation fell silent again as the three of them moved to the side of the road to let a fast-moving black carriage past as the driver, sitting atop the cart's roof, lashed at the horses pulling it with a long whip. As it overtook them, Kira tried to get a look inside, but the windows were covered by curtains. Assuming that it was transporting someone important, he watched it for a while as it grew smaller on the horizon, forcing many other travellers and smaller carts and carriages from the road as it went. Fortunately, this carriage had done such an excellent job clearing the road that Kira now felt confident enough to try and ask his second question.

So he asked, "How do manipulators actually fight? As in, when in a fight, what do you look for or…."

"Why do you need to know that? You'll learn all about it in Krinestadt," said Thea.

"I'm just interested," replied Kira, aware that he didn't really have any good reason, or leverage, to make them tell him if they didn't want to.

"Alright," Thea said, surprised him, "I'll tell you a bit. Basically, fights follow two main formats. Fighting using aura and using abilities, and you have to keep track of quite a few things. When fighting with aura, you have to keep track of fighting them just like normal. However, you also need to make sure to use your aura to defend yourself, preventing injury, and to guard your hand if you hit them, to make more of an impact."

"Doesn't that make the fights only into a competition of stamina?" interjected Kira.

"No, because there's a lot of skill involved in fighting using as little energy as possible and forcing the enemy to burn through there's so that you can smash their defences."

Then Sadis interrupted to talk about the other category, "To fight with abilities is more difficult. Abilities completely usurp normal aura guards. They are very difficult and very draining to defend against, but when fighting someone else with an ability, you still have to be careful when you use it. As in, you'll be trying to figure out there's, and they'll want to figure out yours and as well as fighting normally you'll be trying to see how you can use your ability to work around there own."

Kira later realized that this all meant that the exercises where he moved his aura to different places around his body had been training for fighting against a manipulator. At the end of the day, as well as doing the normal exercises, which Kira attacked now in more earnest, having learnt what they were for, Thea demonstrated the effect of hitting something whilst covering her fist with aura.

To do this, she led him over a boulder that stuck out of the ground to slightly above the height of a man, concentrated aura around her right fist and, with Kira watching, punched the rock. Normally, he would have expected her to break at least one bone in her hand with how hard she seemed to be punching it but, instead, she took her hand away from the rock as though nothing had happened whilst leaving small indents where her knuckles had been.

Seemingly not very impressed by this, Sadis said, "You're really holding back that much, and here I thought you liked showing off to people." which seemed to incentivize Thea to turn back around and hit it again much harder. This time, as her fist went towards the side of the rock, Kira could hardly see her move because of how fast the strike was. It penetrated straight through the stone coming out of the side off to her left and causing shards of rock to go flying out before her. She then turned back to Sadis as though to say, you might be next and then back to Kira, smiling sweetly towards him.

Again Kira wondered what had happened between them back at the Inn in Hawthorn. It seemed to fit the overall trend of behavior that he had seen them exhibiting over the trip. They seemed to become more uneasy and confrontational the closer they got back to Krinestadt. This went some way to maintain his newfound certainty that he could never work for Krinestadt himself.

Thea took his attention by asking him to do the same and hit the rock slightly to the right of where she had blown a hole through it. Nervously approached the rock face, which had returned to seeming very solid once more, he gathered aura around his right hand that he clenched in a fist. He then hit the rock with a cautious gentleness, slightly slowing his hand before the impact, and noted that when he hit the cold surface, despite feeling the contact, it didn't quite feel like the sort of impact that he would have expected.

Gaining in confidence, he struck the rock again, this time without slowing his fist, and noted with delight that his knuckles didn't seem to have been affected at all. Slightly irritatingly, he saw that he had not indented the rock, and he looked longingly over at the result of Thea's own attack. He then shuddered as he wondered what would have happened to a person if she had decided to strike their soft flesh instead of this hard boulder.

"You'll take a while to be able to be able to do that," she commented, looking rather pleased with herself, and Kira nodded in response before heading over to where his sleeping bag had been laid out on the floor under cover of the branches of a rare beech tree.

Despite the ground being made uneven by the roots, sleep quickly came to him, and he didn't dream at all. This came as a slight disappointment because he wanted to discover more about the seven and, just as importantly, what they had to do with him. The demi-human that had given him the vision had said that he had shown Kira what he needed to see, but why did he need to see the seven? If he was meant to commit to an act similar to their own to try and secure the universe's future, then he certainly didn't feel up to it because he doubted that his power, even if he trained for a hundred years, would not compare to a single member of the Progenitor's.

The following day, with Kira making progress on his basic manipulations, Sadis promised to start a sort of combat training with him, making Kira continually delay his plan to escape despite being aware of the encroaching deadline. He did not have to wait for long for this training to be put into action because that evening, instead of simply doing exercises to move his aura around his body, Sadis told him that he would now be putting it into practise. Rather than copying how Sadis was moving concentrations of aura around his body, he was made to stand across from Sadis whilst Thea searched around in the undergrowth and produced a rather thick fallen branch handing it over to Sadis.

Kira looked between the branch and Sadis and immediately grasped his intent, "That branch is a bit thick, isn't it?" he asked.

Thea quickly responded to him, saying, "Don't be a wuss," before adding, "It shouldn't hurt that badly."

Kira nodded, remembering how when he had punched the boulder, it had only given him a dull pain, and he was taken by surprise when Sadis stepped forward and swung the branch at him without giving any warning. Seeing that it was going to contact his head and guessing that he wasn't meant to dodge, Kira concentrated his aura on the right side of his head and braced for the impact. When it made contact, it certainly didn't hurt as much being hit with a log might typically, but its momentum made him fall onto his side, and his head still rang.

"Are you actually stupid?" questioned Sadis, "You're aware that you can try dodging too."

Unable to properly form a reply, and with his head still vibrating, Kira stumbled to his feet, noting that the impact didn't even seem to have left a bruise when he gingerly prodded at his scalp. The next time that Sadis swung the branch at him, he stepped back and Sadis simply moved forward to prod him with the end of it.

The rest of the training session continued the same way, with Kira repeatedly getting hit by an opponent that seemingly wasn't bothering to dampen their strikes and finding himself on the floor, having barely had the time to guard himself against them. After half an hour of this beating, and with the only solace being that he wasn't bleeding or bruised, meaning that he seemed to have been guarding himself properly, he ended up being pretty fed up with Sadis and looked pleadingly over at Thea, who had not involved herself in the training.

"What?" she asked rhetorically, "I wouldn't dull my strikes any more than he's doing – a real opponent wouldn't."

"He's dulling his strikes?"

"Of course I am!" interjected Sadis, "If I struck you properly, you would be dead; this is just to toughen you up a bit." before going right back to beating Kira.

Trying to lessen the number of times he was getting hit, Kira started putting more effort into actively avoiding strikes. Still, it seemed that Sadis could predict his every move, and he only ended up pushing himself harder upon Sadis' branch. Eventually, creating and maintaining so many concentrations of aura took its toll on him, and he stopped dodging altogether expecting Sadis to stop battering him. He had no such luck, and the strikes only stopped coming when, after a particularly tough strike against Kira's side, the branch sheared in half.

Not bothering to get a new log and taking account of Kira's look of absolute despair, Sadis called an end to the session. This led to an awkward hour at the end of the day where Kira tried to find a comfortable way to sleep with seemingly every part of his body aching and in some degree of pain. When he woke up the next morning, he was again stiff all over and he was beginning to notice a distinct trend with training to be a manipulator, that you had to be ok with getting hit and getting stiff; very, very stiff! Over the next couple of days, Kira was afforded no respite because Sadis insisted on doing the same exercise with him each night until the particular stick he had found that night broke.

This meant that Kira had hardly any energy left to plan an escape despite his encroaching proximity to his destination that now was only a couple of days away. As a result of this, Kira promised himself that he would escape on that very day, two nights out from their destination in Krinestadt, as this literally would be his second to last chance to do so. The problem then would be getting away from Sadis and Thea because he struggled to predict how eager they would be to get him back, and he could guess that if they really wanted him back, then they probably wouldn't have too much of an issue finding him based off his aura. This meant that he would have to escape as early in the night as possible so that he would be as far away as possible before they woke up.

When they settled down to sleep, all in their individual sleeping bags, Kira lay awake whilst pretending to be sleeping, with his eyes closed. After what felt like a ridiculously long time, he opened his eyes to see that the moon had hardly risen above the horizon and that it was still quite bright. Provided that his companions were asleep, this would be the perfect time to run, so he looked around at them. Both were lying motionless on their backs in their respective sleeping bags, with the tops of the bags slowly rising and lowering in time with their breathing.

Assuming that this meant that they were soundly asleep, he sat up and jolted with surprise when Thea's voice rang out, asking him, "What are you doing up?" in a slightly accusatory manner. With his mind racing, he tried to calm his panic by telling himself that, as it would be irrational for him to try and escape into the unknown darkness with literally nothing to his name, she wouldn't realize what he was planning to do.

"Oh, I was just struggling to sleep," he mumbled in reply as an excuse, and she seemed to buy it because she didn't ask any follow-up questions as he settled back down into his sleeping bag with relief filling him. What seemed like a few moments later, he noticed that the moon had risen to be a hand's breadth above the horizon, and he cursed himself for having drifted off to sleep. This time, when he sat up, no voice rang out to chastise him, and it seemed that Thea and Sadis indeed were sleeping.

It was now time for his escape as, whilst he regretted not being able to learn more from them, he knew that he couldn't continue to Krinestadt. Getting to his feet, he slung his bag over his shoulder, realizing that he wouldn't be able to take his sleeping bag with him because of the risk of waking his sleeping companions when packing it. This meant that not only would he be leaving them without food, water or any money, but he also would be leaving behind the one item that allowed him to sleep comfortably in the wild.

The night was silent and hung heavily on his shoulders as if it was trying to make him stay and stop this folly, but he could not listen to it and, taking one last look over his shoulder at the people that had taught him the basics of manipulations, he left them.