Persephone leaned over my dying form. She’d shapeshifted into a man and, with no warning, had fatally stabbed me in the back with a spear. At first, I thought she was going to tell me something. Perhaps gloat about what a terrible student I was and how she was glad to be rid of me. Instead, she stamped her boot down onto my weak body and wrenched the spear out of my chest.

I cried out and doubled over in pain. Somehow, it felt even worse being ripped out of me. The pain was awful, but the hardest part about all this was accepting that there was nothing that I could do. My limbs would not respond to my commands and my brain was screaming at me from all the pain signals it was receiving. I felt utterly powerless as my body started to bleed out. It wouldn’t be long now.

Samara folded her arms and said, “you enjoyed that a little too much.”

Persephone grinned and nodded. “I don’t deny it.”

“Well, I’ll leave you two to it, but remember the deadline,” she warned. “It is vital that we meet it. Make sure Lucas is ready.”

I heard her footsteps trail off. I wanted to say something to make her stop, but she’d vanished through another portal.

Persephone whistled a cheerful tune as the spear disappeared into her inventory. A large potion bottle containing a dark liquid appeared in its place, the contents of which were then dumped directly onto my face. I sputtered and coughed before throwing up an arm to shield myself. The blood was stinging my eyes, but the pain in other parts of my body was retreating.

My eyes widened when I recognized what it was. “Is this beetle blood?”

“Correct,” Persephone said.

So that’s why she’d been looting all those beetle corpses. They were my kills, which meant that she’d collected a very large amount of blood that could heal me. This had been her plan right from the start. To keep attacking me and then use the blood to bring me back.

Persephone waited until I was fully healed and could get back up onto my feet.

“This is ludicrous,” I said. “I can’t learn like this. There must be a better way.”

While wearing the man’s face, she smiled and said, “you have five minutes before I begin hunting you. There is nowhere that you can run where I won’t find you. You possess no weapon or technique that could beat me in a fight. But best of all, there is nowhere that you can hide since you cannot shroud your aura. I will find you and push you to the brink of death as many times as it takes for you to give up and declare yourself unworthy of my mistress’s attention. The sooner you do that, the sooner she can move on to better candidates. Of course, you’ll still have to die. We can’t have someone publicly spurn her gifts and just walk away, but your suffering would end quickly.”

“Come on, there must be some understanding we can come to?” I pleaded.

A watch appeared on her wrist and she checked it. “Four minutes and twenty seconds remaining. I think I’ll try a mace this time,” she said with enthusiasm.

It was the most excited and animated I’d seen her since I got here, so naturally I ran for the exit and didn’t look back.

Four minutes wasn’t enough time to learn aura shrouding. Especially when I still lacked the ability to see auras at all. Hell, I needed ten minutes of peace and quiet meditation before I’m able to activate my Crimson Domain. She was right when she said I couldn’t fight her or hide, but she was wrong about running away. What I needed most right now was distance.

I burst through the outside doors and left the manor house behind. I ran until my lungs burned and kept going until I reached the transportation warehouse. Even Persephone wasn’t capable of just popping into existence in space. At least I hoped she wasn’t. Once I was out of here and orbiting space, I could set a course for Earth and practice my aura shrouding on the ship. There was no way that ships as advanced as these didn’t have some kind of autopilot system.

The warehouse featured a human sized door entrance to the side and a giant pair of sliding doors that allowed ships to fly in and out of the warehouse. Both were locked when I tried them and with only thirty seconds left, I pulled some blood out of my inventory and fashioned it into a sword.

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Hacking and slashing at the metal doors with my sword did very little damage. I paused, leaned closer, and groaned. I stand corrected. They did no damage. My attacks couldn’t even scratch the metal that these doors were made out of.

“Trying to steal a ship and fly away? Smart,” Persephone said, behind me.

I turned around with my blood sword in hand. True to her word, she had summoned a spiked mace from out of her inventory and was testing the weight of it with a few experimental swings.

“Well it would’ve been smart…” she continued. “Had the entire place not been put on lockdown since your arrival. Nobody can open the warehouse except myself and the mistress. Good luck breaking in there too. That’s Dwarven Spire metal. Even I’d struggle to get through it.”

I readied my sword and stood my ground. No matter what, I wasn’t going to make this easy for her.

Persephone tilted her head slightly to the side. “That’s cute…”

She suddenly appeared next to me in a blur. Before I could react, the mace struck my knee. I heard a sickening crack, and I fell to the floor, screaming.

“Thinking that you had a chance.”

I swung my sword out blindly. It bounced harmlessly off of her mace and slipped back into its liquid blood form.

I have to concentrate. Have to reform it.

Another swing took out the arm that was holding me up. I fell on my stomach, but she rolled me over and raised the mace up high before pausing. “On second thought, head trauma from weapons can be tricky.”

The mace disappeared back into her inventory, and she punched with her fist instead. It was like getting hit by a sledgehammer. My head bounced off the ground and I lost consciousness.

After an indeterminate amount of time, I awoke stained with fresh beetle blood. Persephone was gone, but there was a note pinned to my chest that I read aloud.

“Be seeing you soon.”

It was signed with a smiley face.

I crumpled the note into a ball and tossed it aside. The fact that she was enjoying all of this somehow made it more infuriating. Samara was gone for who knows how long, and I was stuck with a psychopathic shapeshifter.

I sat up. I’ve got to get out of here. Got to find somewhere to hide. I know she said that she could find me with Aura Sense, but what if I was around more people? What if it became harder to pick me out of a crowd?

I decided to head back to the manor. Back into the lion’s den.

There were a lot of staff there who cooked, cleaned, but there were also residents who did none of those things. Alien residents with the same orange and blue complexion who sat by the pool drinking or were in the kitchens ordering a meal. Just like the uniformed staff who worked here, they also refused to speak with me. But prior encounters had shown that they could tolerate my presence, which was all I needed.

I hurried inside the manor and went down one of its labyrinthian hallways. There was no way of knowing how much of a head start Persephone would give me. I had to get next to people fast in order to test my theory.

I checked every room that I came across, only to find most of them empty. The entire time, I kept looking over my shoulder, certain that she’d suddenly appear. Which, if she had the same portal powers that Samara had, wasn’t an insane notion. Time was against me as well. It had already been more than five minutes and I couldn’t rely on her giving me more time.

I came across a set of double doors and flung them open.

Inside was a large library that contained orange aliens who were sat reading or browsing the shelves. They looked up at me in surprise at my dramatic entrance. One of them said muttered in their alien language and a couple of others laughed while some smiled before returning to their books.

Okay, rude. Don’t need a translator to understand the tone of that message. But now wasn’t the time to be offended.

I sat down at a table and closed my eyes. If I could get my Crimson Domain up, then I’d be safe, and I’d have all the time I’d need to practice.

Slowing my breathing was the first step. Calm the body and then the mind. Once that was achieved, I reached inside for the blood and darkness. Felt its caress as it accepted my call. My domain started expanding around me. Chairs squeaked from being scraped across the floor as nearby aliens scrambled to get away from me. Then suddenly everything grew quiet as I felt my extra dimensional space stabilize and its invisible walls solidify.

Good. I was safe. Now to figure out Aura Sense.

According to Persephone, unlocking the ability to see Auras begins with seeing your own. So I imagined myself leaving my body behind. Imagined my consciousness floating in front of it until I saw myself sitting in a pool of blood surrounded by infinite darkness.

It seemed so real, but the problem was I couldn’t tell if I was magically extending my senses or if this was all just happening in my imagination.

I stared down at myself, looking for some kind of inner light or glow that would represent an aura. Annoyingly, this was the one part that Persephone wouldn’t tell me about. She just said that I’d know an aura when I saw one.

After a few more minutes of staring, I felt something hit my domain. The walls of my domain suddenly fractured and then exploded into glass-like shards. Through the hole in my domain, Persephone was there in her cat form. She pointed up. I looked and only had a moment to see that something big and heavy was falling fast towards me.

Damn it, she’d used her own inventory as a weapon and summoned something heavy enough to break through my domain.

The object hurtled towards me as my domain fully collapsed and then everything went black.