It was very, very weird to use aura without calling upon any Skill at all.

This felt…wrong! Despite the flowy nature of the Lyen-Chunst moves I was awkwardly performing, just the fact that I had a growing awareness of the aura now churning seemingly through my bloodstream threw everything off. I found it hard to concentrate on all the points Chora wanted me to remember, whether that was the proper way to swivel or the right metaphysical metaphor to use to “center myself.”

“You are a bird,” she said as I breathed in, spread my arms, and shut my eyes. “Arms wide, taking in the radiance of the sun…”

It felt like tingling up my forearm. Eeeeew.

At last, I just shook my head. I threw in the towel. Of the dozen attacks I’d performed, only three had actually released any aura. And of those three, none did much damage to the random tree branches their plasma bumps rocketed into. Come to think of it, why did the aura just come out as blobs, instead of a cool shape or even just the shape of my kicking leg?

While it was hard to gauge my SP usage with any kind of mathematical precision, given that I was also practicing in humanoid form, I had been checking enough to know that drawing upon my aura this way used SP. Kind of a lot of it.

HP 99% (849/855) SP 63% (515/820)

I estimated that about 150 had gone into all my attacks, and considering the fact they’d failed…

In general, Lyen-Chunst made me feel like a failure. And also that that was totally fine. I asked Chora how long she’d been training, and she said, “Since I was a kid. But I didn’t get consistent until high school.” I asked her what “inconsistent” meant, and she said, “Practicing three hours once a week.”

I practiced nothing for no hours no times a week.

There were two good things that’d come from this practice—besides the fact that it had shown me my limits. It gave me a strange new horizon to wonder about: a different skill ceiling. What would my arsenal be like if I trained in a martial art like this that actually gave me new techniques, new ways to use the energy already inside me? And what kind of dedication would it take?

The other good thing was, I had loosened up. To a degree I’d never felt before.

Swinging my arms idly, feeling a breeze pass over the roof as Chora simply watched the trees rustle from the railing, I realized that this tense training session had left me untense. Obviously I knew the pleasures of a good stretch, but this was so total it was new to me. I cracked my neck, but there was no crack.

I’d like to see the whole house do this, I thought. They super need it. From there my mind began to wander.

Come to think of it, they could all be a little more like the wind. Bayce was almost always cooped up in here, and while Reed liked to escape and hike, the danger I involuntarily brought here was making her feel like she had to stay, maybe even for my sake. But that was the last thing I wanted!

And then there was Chora herself. She must have been missing something about the Lyen-Chunst philosophy—that, or I knew it better. Because she was focused on forms and technique, but nothing about her felt free.

Combine her expertise and my impetuousness, and you’d have a sage for the ages.

I think I just want us to play, I thought. Somewhere far from here.

Beyond the woods. At least at the limits of the woods. In the unmarked territories still in the east.

I tapped on the spirit board to get Chora’s attention. “ANY COOL FUN PLACES NEARBY? NOT THE POND. COOLER PLACES?” I thought better of the word “cool.” “MORE RELAXING.”

Chora pondered this for several long seconds. Why did I get the feeling she was hesitating?

She said, “There’s a beach.”

I was thunderstruck. That’s exactly what I want!

A beach, with hot sand and cool water that I wouldn’t even mind (in context)!

“OK THAT SOUNDS GREAT! LETS ALL GO ASAP!”

Woah! Maybe I overwhelmed her with my enthusiasm. I was literally hunched over the board and moving so fast that the speed demanded I spell with my two thumbs. No wonder she backed off and squinched her brow.

But it was worse than that. Chora actually raised her voice back. “Why would we do that when we need to be training?!”

The breath went out of me again. I had heard Chora angry, but I’d never heard her angry at me. No one had ever been angry at me besides the distant, passive-aggressive Sierra. No one had cried out in my face.

Of course I’d been beaten and skewered loads of times in my life, but this was a kind of vulnerability I’d never experienced, and it felt like fight or flight. Either I run and hide or I don’t back down. And my gut reaction was, I don’t deserve to be screamed at!

I dug my heels in, furrowed my own brow, and said what I was really thinking.

“ACTUALLY, I WANT EVERYONE TO GO N RELAX TOGETHER BC U N BAYCE HATE EACH OTHER FOR NO REASON,” I told her. “WE ALL HATE IT! WE EVEN HATE YOU FOR IT!!! IM SO TIRED OF IT”

“Then be tired!” she said, even louder. I realized now that what she did before wasn’t even her shouting. This was shouting, and it seemed to shake my very core. “I need time to myself, you know this—I just told you—and I need to just focus on the things that actually matter to me. That matter right now, and not ten years ago.”

She did something else unthinkable: she pointed to the roof hatch.

“Get out.”

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“NO!” I punched up my words with a snarl. “WHAT R U SAYING?? BAYCE DOESNT MATTER TO U ARE U KIDDING?!?!”

This was Chora enraged. I almost felt a heat coming from her—an incredible tension again, a temper barely held in check. “For my own good and yours, get out.”

Meanwhile, I must have looked pathetic. I was crying, and must’ve been for a while now, with these trails down my cheeks. I could feel myself tremble, but unlike Chora and her slight earthquake-tremor, I felt like jelly. All I knew to do in this overwhelmed state was repeat, “NO!”

Chora sighed. It was harsh and quick, like a beat on a drum. “You don’t actually know why I’m afraid to have a partner.”

Afraid to have a partner? What? She hadn’t said that at all earlier, had she?

“It’s because I was so bad to my last one!” She almost laughed. “I wasn’t even angry at him! But I hit him. And if it had continued, I would have beat him. Now, go.”

What?! How could she expect me to make a move after she dumped that on me?! I couldn’t even process it. She hit someone and now she was going to hit me, and somehow against her will—was that seriously it? But how? Why?! If you don’t want to, just decide not to!

It didn’t make any sense to me. Neither did the way I was feeling. I had no right to be feeling this weak and torn-up over nothing but words—and words from a friend. I felt on the verge of collapse.

But maybe that was what she was feeling. On the verge of a different kind of collapse.

I didn’t think most of this in any coherent form. But I did think, Okay, this is awful for both of us…and then I returned to the fight-or-flight drive and engaged in total flight. Yet I was not going through the downstairs walk of shame so that Reed could ask me what was wrong, or Bayce could ask me what was wrong. I just didn’t want to talk at all. Ha, that was a first.

So I just went back to cat form and jumped off the railing.

It was no trouble landing safe from here. The escape was so simple that it felt wrong, and suddenly the world felt too quiet. I hit the ground but soon felt my legs wobbling. I looked back, up at Chora, but she wasn’t looking at me. Then I remembered that I wanted to fly, and galloped away. Preferably far, far away.

***

A modest watering hole sat choked with dragonflies. Instead of dashing through them and swatting all I could, I watched them listlessly from the bushes, dwelling on, and circling back to, the breakaway from Chora.

Where I was and how far I’d gone, I didn’t know and I didn’t check. I liked imagining that I had ended up in some totally new yet humdrum place. A place in the Vencian Wood I both had never found and would never find again.

…I still didn’t understand it. If I knew how to hold back my rage, surely someone as disciplined as Chora was smart enough to do the same.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t about smarts, the same way I would never “choose” to get a headache. She said it wasn’t even anger that set her off. Maybe it just happened when she felt the way I’d felt: overwhelmed. And maybe I didn’t need to find a reason just to figure out what to do…maybe I just had to trust what Chora was saying about herself, because she knew herself?

But it was so hard when our selves didn’t make sense! I still felt weak. My HP was in top shape and my SP wasn’t even half-empty, yet I felt as if I couldn’t raise my paw. Minutes ago I’d been running at a top sprint, but that quickly petered out. I’d stumbled, and I didn’t even feel upset about that. Almost like I wanted to be hurt.

So here and now, I fell on my back and writhed around.

Writhing around in the dirt, taking a dirt bath like the sparrows did…

I hadn’t done anything wrong, had I? How was I supposed to know Chora would hate the idea of relaxing so much? Wasn’t I still right that she was too strict?

Or maybe I was wrong, and she stayed strict because a day out forcing Chora and Bayce together was a landmine waiting to blow.

But I had no way of knowing, I thought, and I couldn’t refute that. So it still felt unfair that Chora had yelled at me.

But…I guess I snarled at her, I thought.

But I did it for a reason!

Something landed on my nose. A dragonfly? It was too blurry…

I stared. A human would have squinted, but cats don’t have the same facial technology—while squinting is possible, it just doesn’t look as cool. So to look as menacing as possible yet also expend the least energy possible, I kept my eyes wide open. A gaze that said, Don’t mess with me.

Or, rather, It’s been like a minute. Stop messing with me!

Okay, my eyes are dry. Please, please just get off.

When I blinked, it felt like a Herculean loss. And wouldn’t you know it, when I opened my eyes, that insect had disappeared.

Ugh… You did that on purpose.

I rolled onto my feet, roused to action by another injustice. This time, it wasn’t a two-way clueless injustice like what I’d just gone through earlier. I was being actively antagonized by something that was probably extremely weak. According to the law of the wild, the weak troubling the strong was a grave injustice…

But when the weak, fast and crafty did it, it was just cheating.

It took a while for me to realize that insect had landed on a nearby flower, very gently flapping its wings. As if specifically to grab my attention.

I thought you’d be more excited to see me

Or nervous. They’re basically the same thing

Ah, great.

Hello, Logy, I thought with as much hate in my heart as I could summon. Which wasn’t much. Heck, I didn’t even hate her anymore. She was just weird. Like everyone else here.

What’s up

I gave her a long, vicious side-eye.

Probably the last words I ever expected out of her would have been what’s up. Goodness.

This is the first time I’ve seen you lying around. Probably need to sleep more

Yeah. Right.

How do you expect to train like this

Well, little do you know I just did. Not that it helped!

You’re even less smart than I realized

That roused me—a little. I jumped to my feet, and by that I mean “shook back and forth like a train car until my front paws found their way onto the ground.” In charitable terms, I looked like a proud lion, restful yet perturbed.

And by “perturbed” I do mean “pretty indignant.” Look at this thing around my neck! It’s raising my Intelligence by a whole…like…point…or two! NOT THAT IT HELPS! But it’s the principle of the thing!!

…Wait, but it really did help. Dimly I remembered the point of Logy even coming here. She was here to train me, likely in some way that involved the sword. And now there was a chance I could actually use the sword without infinite suffering!

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. It would be a diversion, at least. And Logy didn’t seem ready to slaughter me. Only verbally slaughter me, with horrific disdain…but a kind of horrific disdain I could manage. After all, what hurt right now was people like me caring too much, and being too emotional.

I sat a little more upright, changed forms, and allowed the golden blade into my hands. For the first time, this thing felt a little like a normal blade. I mean, my INT was certainly plummeting, but I started in this world with 1 point, didn’t I? And Logy, my coach, would compensate.

Don’t fall over

I hoped.