F.H. 51

“Cassius, you team up with Alexander.”

I wanted to groan at the instructor. Alfonso was a transmigrator who thought he knew best about everything, and had joined the burgeoning city of Winona only two months ago. He was one of those adults who seemed to think children who didn’t get along should just get over it by forcing them to work together, which never worked. Alfonso wouldn’t be a field instructor for long, since his class had a higher rate of incidents than any of the others.

I was pretty sure he did it on purpose, he seemed to feed on conflict, and even without knowing about my traits like the Progenitor of Peril, he kept putting me in uncomfortable situations. Most teachers didn’t let me spar with anyone, once word spread that I could inflict instant death randomly. Alfonso seemed to practically beg for that scenario to pop up every time he was our sparring instructor.

“Uhh, sir? Alexander can proc instant death ailments.” Cassius pointed out the problem.

“Well, then I suppose he’ll just have to dodge your attacks for the rest of the class, won’t he? Do you understand, Metanoia?” Cassius grinned at this turn of events, and the smug look on Alfonso’s face made me wish something bad would happen to him.

“Fine,” I agreed with a bored shrug.

“This is payback,” the bigger, older boy growled at me. I stretched my legs as the other kid formed orbs of flame in each hand.

“You’d have to be able to hit me first,” I said with a grin. Around me, the air flushed with a chill as I activated my cold Kinesis, and blue streaked through my aura. Cassius threw one of his fire bolts at me, and I dodged it easily. Now that I was level fourteen I had thirty-eight agility, which for all practical purposes was seventy-six thanks to Rainbow Rush doubling my movement speed. When I used my cold kinesis to snuff out the first fireball Cassius threw at me, Spectrum Surge gained a stack and added another five percent to my speed. Five percent wasn’t much, but it would keep stacking up to fifty percent, every time I used a kinesis.

I couldn’t get really crazy in this kind of a setting, though. To stack up my Malicious Tormentor buffs I had to afflict targets with ailments, and I wasn’t allowed to do that with the restrictions Alfonso placed on me. So I used Dragonfly Strike to blink away from the next firebolt, my fist hit the ground and I acrobatically spun through the air to land running. The evasion buff from Dragonfly Strike was twenty percent, and gave me an awareness of my body that felt amazing. I couldn’t fly like a dragonfly, but I sure could dodge and weave like one when that buff was on me.

I left rainbow trails behind me that were primarily blue. I had to be careful about which Kinesis I used, since anything that counted as an attack could trigger my afflictions. Impending Doom and other instant deaths were bad, but there were even worse things that could trigger off my attacks. Petrification, rotting flesh, magic severance, soul rot, were just a few of the awful things I’d seen my attacks spawn on enemies.

“Stop dodging!” Cassius cried in frustration, and cast an area of effect attack at me. I dodged via Dragonfly Strike. I technically didn’t even have to hit the ground when I used the ability, but it was good practice with acrobatic dodge and teleport transitions. Ever since Lilith gained the Strategic Reformation ability I’d been working on controlling my reactions to teleports.

I could tell Cassius was getting frustrated, based on his cries and the flush of embarrassment that filled his cheeks. If not for my Rainbow Rush cold trail dampening his spell, he would’ve clipped Aisha and her partner with that area of effect. Not that anyone seemed to care about that but me.

“I’ll get you with this one..” Cassius said with a cruel glint in his eyes. He conjured a globe of flame the size of his head, and threw it up into the air. It settled a foot or so above his head, and spun slowly. I could feel extra attention on me, as if some Efreet were peering at me through the ball of flames he’d summoned.

I flipped my Kinesis to Magenta, or Anti-Magic.

The orb of fire spun faster and faster, until it split into ten different arrows of fire, and they shot at me. I back peddled with Rainbow Rush to create a magenta trail, then teleported to behind Cassius with Dragonfly strike. Four of the arrows of flame hit my magenta trail and vanished. I darted away from Cassius, who turned to look at me as I ran away again. He didn’t even realize he was in the line of fire of his own spell until three of the flame arrows hit him in the back, and the last two shot past his head, singing his hair as they shot after me.

It was too late though, they’d already entered the trail behind me, and the Magenta trail canceled any magic that wasn’t mine.

“Oh man, Cassius hit himself! What an idiot.” I heard one of his classmates mumble.

“How are you supposed to even hit Alexander? Anything he doesn’t dodge he can cancel out.” Another of the older kids complained.

“You have to mix physical attacks with wide area attacks, I think,” a kid two years older than me said with a self-important nod. The only non-adult who’d ever managed to land a hit on me was Lilith, and she was even more overpowered than I was, so that didn’t really count.

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“Medic!” I called. Cassius didn’t look too hurt, but he was still lying on the ground.

When the dirt underneath me started to heat up, and a spellcasting circle appeared, shooting flames into the air like an inferno, I was surprised. Cassius had lulled me into taking a hit. Or would have if it weren’t for the fact I had Anti-Magic as my active Kinesis active. Not having to waste time swapping my active Kinesis, I pulsed the full anti-magic power around me. Cassius’ spell fell apart like a paper wall, and my anti-magic nova pulsed across the whole training yard. This resulted in a whole bunch of people getting annoyed at their own fights being interrupted and shooting dark glares my way, and Cassius going from being on the cusp of burning me, to being just another failure who’s best wasn’t good enough.

“Winner, Alexander.” Alphonso ruled in my favor, since Cassius would need to see a healer.

“Idiot,” Lilith muttered at me as she stepped up from behind me. Still, she gave me a tight hug. “You are hopeless at holding back. You aren’t as clever as you think you are, and you should quit doing these things halfway. Either go befriend Cassius, or cement him as our nemesis, quit being so wishy-washy.” Lilith talked about it like I was Argarg the Barbarian, the Warlord of the Northern Steppes who rode a hydra, striding about putting skulls on pikes left right and center.

I mumbled under my breath and strode over to pat Cassius on the shoulder. I swapped my active Kinesis to Life and healed the jerk’s back.

“Look, you almost got me at the end there. It was only luck I still had my anti-magic stance already active. That’s closer than anyone else has come to hitting me, so that was pretty good.” I offered the olive branch to Cassius.

“Why the hell are you handing me a piece of wood, Metanoia?” Cassis asked befuddled as the flesh on his back knit back together with no sign of burns at all. “And quit touching me.”

Cassius rolled his shoulders to force my hand off him. I didn’t fight it, if he wanted to be a jerk about it he could be a jerk about it, here I was healing him, and he couldn’t accept the gesture. Or maybe, I realized a little too late, he couldn’t deal with me putting him into a subservient position of being healed by me after I hit him with his own spell. Not that hardly anyone would have noticed me healing him. Most of our class hated looking at me and Lilith when they had any kind of enhanced senses active, our prismatic presence always distracted or interrupted people at just the wrong time.

“Fine, and it’s an olive branch. My mom says it’s a symbol of peace and friendship.” I smiled. I’d cut it myself, when Momma mentioned they were useful for showing friendship. I’d thought Lilith and me giving a wreath of branches to Aisha and Derrick would’ve been a great symbol, and wasting one of the branches from my inventory wasn’t a huge loss.

Crack. The green wood cracked with deliberate effort in Cassius’ hand, and after a couple of more cracks and pops, the olive branch continued to burn after Cassius tossed it to the side to smolder. I hadn’t expected this outcome.

When I looked back up, Cassius had walked off.

No one had ever said no to me quite so boldly before. A tsunami of emotions exploded within. How could that stuck up brat turn down being my friend? I shouldn’t have healed him after he hurt himself. He had been trying to hurt me, after all, why did I even bother to try and be his friend?

“What hurts more?” Lilith inquired.

“Being rebuked, of course.” I grumbled.

“Then it’s time to let me help you train.” Lilith said with only slightly less haughtiness than someone jumping up and down and screaming you suck at the top of their lungs.

“Fine, but you have to follow Momma’s rules on training, or we’ll both get grounded.” I wasn’t about to get grounded over this.

“That’s fine. Mommy can help me train you. I can’t move fast enough to counter you, so I’ll need her help anyway. “Lilith’s smile still scared me a little. She wasn’t going to go easy on me, I knew. I’d seen her own spell training regimen, and I wanted no part of that.

That night was awful. If Momma were a brutal instructor on her own, Lilith was utterly devoid of mercy and would capitalize on any and every weakness she found in my actions. As an instinctual fighter, most of my choice of Kinesis boiled down to gut feeling. Lilith drilled the strengths and weaknesses of my powers into my memory every few minutes. Unfortunately, with so many colors at my disposal the list of things to memorize was long. When I told her the System didn’t give me a list of all ailments and afflictions my abilities could cast, she huffed and puffed, but even her making me share every bit of my status screens didn’t lead to any break throughs in knowledge about the more esoteric parts of my abilities.

Momma kept singing some song I’d never heard about a feline’s eye from a world I’d never been to, and it got bad enough she even conjured a jukebox from her inventory. High Intensity Training, or HIT as Lilith called it, sucked. Every point in strength roughly equaled being able to easily handle 5kg of mass. At sixteen strength I could toss around eighty kilograms pretty easily. But most adults were over level twenty, at least, and probably had a strength score in the twenties, so it wasn’t that massive of an accomplishment. Except when compared to my peers. But compare me to Uncle Arkaziel or momma, and I might as well be a worm.

None of my afflictions could touch either of them. Momma outright was immune. Arkaziel resisted everything. And with effectively almost one hundred agility, I couldn’t even follow when the two of them moved when they were being serious. How ludicrous were they, that the system only said Telos - ?????? and Arkaziel - ??????. Well, Mommy and Aunt Bobbi had the same display from the system too, but nothing else we’d ever run into was just big red question marks like that. If you let your eyes unfocus, just a little bit on the system menu, the question marks warped into laughing skulls.

Or, I’d made the joke so many times that it’s what I convinced myself to see.

Ω

F.H. 53

“Run faster, soldier!” Momma said, as she chased me around the yard. We were playing tag. I hadn’t managed to touch her once yet, but she’d already scored five points on me.

“You’d better run, you’ve got a big day tomorrow.” Make it six points against me. Her cold hand made me aware of another loss.

“Mom!” I cried. “You have to at least give me a chance! You can’t keep grinding me with high intensity workouts every day for two years!”

Oddly, after that she let me finish the night without anymore losses, and Lilith didn’t even scold me. I didn’t know what kind of awful hell of a ‘big day’ I’d experience tomorrow, but I was afraid.