There is no pain.
BAM!
“Er-Erind…?”
BAM!!
“Erind, that’s enough,” Myra said, her voice raised a notch.
BAM! BAM!!!
“Erind? Erind! Stop now!”
I held my punch mid-way and pulled back my hand close to my chest. “W-why?” I blurted. My breathing was harried, my vision blurry at the edges. I didn’t know why. “I can…I can still continue. I need to…practice—”
I noticed my hand was shuddering uncontrollably. Patches of discolored skin covered my arm, a camouflage pattern but in violet and red. My fingers looked like they were jammed inside a meat grinder, the skin shredded away revealing sore bleeding flesh—or what was left of it still clinging to my bones.
Huh? I could no longer clench my fist. I couldn’t even feel my hand…my arm…or the right side of my upper body.
Then I stared up at the column I was punching, and gasped. I did this?
I couldn’t believe the damage I caused, seeing it clearly only for the first time. Huge chunks of concrete, as large as my head or even bigger, had broken off the column as if a demolition team with sledgehammers were hired to dismantle it. There were places where the steel rebars reinforcing it were exposed, some of which were bent. It was like my fingers where the flesh had fallen off the bones.
“It’s fair then?” I mumbled while giggling, my woozy mind peculiarly giddy.
“Are you okay?” Myra whispered with worry. She cautiously approached me. “I mean, obviously you’re not. Your hand—”
“Is…is that all my blood?” The debris had crimson splattered all over, reminding of a school project I had in elementary where we made colorful pictures using a toothbrush to flick watercolor onto sheets of paper. “Just like a painting,” I mumbled, weakly grinning.
“What are you talking about? Erind, can you hear me?”
Due to tiredness, my head drooped down. I noticed the small puddle of red between my feet, slowly expanding as more blood dripped from my hand to the floor. “Look, my blood’s here too…hehehe.”
“You’re in shock! Erind!”
“Myra…my hand doesn’t look…correct.” The tsunami of agony came crushing down all at once. I fell on my knees, kneeling on my own blood, and bent my upper body down to instinctively hide my severely injured arm. “Ow, ow, owfssh—” I bit my tongue and continued inside my head. Shitfuckshitfuckinghell it hurts! It fucking hurts goddamnit! A couple drops of tears rolled down the sides of my eyes as I tightly closed it.
“Erind! Shi—what do I do?” Panic was evident in Myra’s voice. I felt her hands shaking me as if that was going to make things better. She gently pushed me to my side, away from the pool of blood. “Lie down, okay? Just, just lie down and rest.”
I curled up like a baby while hugging my arm. I breathed through my teeth as I forced myself to gradually get used to the pain. “Ow, ow, ow,” I continued saying to stop myself from cussing the world.
“Erind, I’m really sorry,” she said. “I should’ve stopped you before it got worse.” I felt her attempt to hug me, then she released me and ended up just patting my shoulder. “Just concentrate on healing, you hear me? Listen to my voice. Don’t think about it.”
“Ugh,” I moaned. “Painful…”
“Don’t bend it that way.” She pulled out my arm I was hiding and laid it straight over my side. “Just relax and wait for it to heal,” she said in a soothing voice.
“Okay…hurts so much.” And it did. But I was exaggerating my reaction. I could keep my mouth shut and suffer in silence even if someone cut off my arm even back when I was still a normal human—not that it had happened to me, but I was sure I could endure the pain. I did handle it pretty well when Myra skewered my stomach. I was dying, but I wasn’t squealing like a little bitch.
After becoming an Adumbrae, I also suffered much worse than this. I got beaten to a pulp by Mr. Ogre in the arena. As a giant werewolf, I squeezed myself through the tunnels, not minding chunks of my flesh getting ripped off because I was too huge. And I was barbequed while escaping the explosion caused by the BID agents, and crawled out of a cave-in in my human form.
This is nothing.
“A few minutes and it will start to get better,” said Myra. “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t do anything earlier. I should’ve stopped you. But I saw you were close to tapping your hysterical strength, that’s why I hesitated.”
“It’s...fine,” I said, each word punctuated by belabored coughs. The pain was starting to become more bearable, but I still acted like I was paralyzed by the agony. Such a drama queen.
“I’m checking your bones, okay?” She cautiously poked my arm. I winced. “Oops, sorry. Bear with me for a bit.” I groaned while she gingerly squeezed my arm. She kept on apologizing as she examined me. Satisfied with whatever she was checking, she said, “You fractured your forearm. These red bruises under your skin are signs of internal bleeding. I don’t think this happened because your form was bad; it was quite decent. You were punching straight, otherwise your injury would be with joints, like your elbow or shoulder. This is actually very good.”
I opened my eyes, blinking away the haziness. Then I raised a brow at her. She still looked very blurry to me.
“Ah, no! It’s not good,” she corrected herself. “You’re injured and…that’s bad. I mean it’s good because you were able to push past your limits and use your hysterical strength.”
“I…I did it?” My arm was healing, the red parts were fading. Flesh and skin had mostly covered the bones on my hands.
“I think so, yep. Fracturing your forearm bones is the sign of that; Dario explained it to me before. Breaking the bones of your fingers is natural because you’re punching something very hard, way harder than you. The forearm is different. If you put your forearm on the table and hit it with a hammer, then yeah, you’ll break the bones. But if you apply pressure from the ends, like punching, then it takes a lot of force to break it. And since you were able to break it, that means you were able to tap your hysterical strength.”
“Hurray,” I muttered, giving her a weak smile.
“I can’t believe you were able to do it this fast. Really impressive. You were like laser-focused punching the column that I was honestly kind of scared to stop you. None of us were able to do it in—” She checked her watch. “That took like fifteen minutes. And for the last five minutes, you were just non-stop punching the column. How did you do that, just turning off feeling pain like a switch?”
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That got my attention. Not the attaining hysterical strength part, although that was cool and all, but the part that I progressed differently from them. “I don’t know. I just thought really hard…to punch really hard.”
“It can’t be as easy as that,” she said. “I needed several practice sessions to be comfortable, not sure if that’s the right word, with breaking my fingers with each punch. And it took me double that time, probably even longer, to break my forearm bones because I couldn’t accept the thought of intentionally injuring myself. I didn’t try it anymore after managing to do it once. You, on the other hand…your focus is insane.”
My left cheek twitched. “Must be because of law school. Need to really focus studying and all that.”
“Eh? I study very hard at Melchor too. Maybe you’re the type of person who zones out everything when doing a specific thing? I think I can do that when studying if I pushed myself, nothing to it. But it’s very different with this training. I suppose we are breaking a psychological barrier, that’s why it’s so unsettling to do it. But you’re different. Just wow.”
Different is bad.
Erind, a first-year law student at the prestigious Cresthorne College of Law, was just a normal person. She didn’t make any waves besides the occasional ripple on the social pond, she didn’t stand out in a crowd, and was a bit on the timid side. Very far from different.
Still, I wasn’t concerned I may violate Rule #7— Don’t do anything that would break the character of the face I have on—because I already took into account that I might act differently in this situation. This was my first time knowing about hysterical strength and the psychological barrier connected to it, and I had no idea how others behaved when it came to this, so I already prepared a sort of “catch-all” excuse to explain any deviation from the norm.
There was an Adumbrae inside of me. Simple as that.
I learned to do this even before Rule #7 was established. When I was a little girl, I didn’t attend birthday parties of other kids because kids were irrational selfish little shits. I much prefer the parties and other social gatherings of adults because I was entertained watching them interact with each other. This hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Mom was eventually able to force me to go to the birthday party of Callie. I knew I was different from other kids and, even though my kiddie brain couldn’t form a concrete explanation yet, I also knew being different was bad. So, I made an excuse that I was really nervous. Any weird shit I did during that party I’d just chuck to being nervous.
Rule #7 was made soon after that, and since then, whenever I knew I was getting into a situation where I didn’t know how people would normally react, I have an explanation already prepared.
“I…I didn’t know what came over me.” I held up my still shaking right arm. “After some point, I couldn’t feel any pain. It’s like something inside me took over.”
“What did you say?” Myra said, her brows furrowed in concern as she understood what I implied. “I'm not sure if we should continue this.”
“I’m not afraid of getting hurt. I already told you I’m prep—”
“That’s not what I mean,” she cut in. “I was thinking that maybe…maybe…” She scratched the back of her head while glancing to the side. “I’m not sure how to say—”
“The Adumbrae is taking root inside me and changing how I act.”
“That’s not—! I-I mean, yeah, kinda like that. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing? You’re probably right.” There was a small chance she could be, but it was likelier she wasn’t. SpookyErind didn’t seem to want to directly influence me but rather enjoy the show as I struggled; she could be having fun right now.
“Maybe we should stop trying this.”
“No! This just means I have to fight back the Adumbrae inside me. I have to do this. I have to get stronger and learn how to fight to survive. I don’t have anyone protecting me like the 2Ms protect their clients. I’m all alone.”
“Uh, you got me and Johann. We don’t really count much, but we’ll help you.”
“Thanks.” I smiled at her. How sweet, I thought sarcastically. “Can you tell me how it went for you? Practicing for hysterical strength I mean.”
“Sure, but there’s nothing much to say.” Myra deflated with a relieved sigh when I changed the topic. “Just a whole lot of punching. We may have these superhuman bodies, but it feels so weird, not to mention painful as hell, to practice tapping our hysterical strength.”
While Myra shared her story, I thought about how normal people processed pain. I may be way off the mark here, but I think my kind had higher tolerance for pain. Or perhaps we processed pain differently and therefore had an easier time ignoring it than others.
My mind wandered back to after I escaped the burning Sanders mall and went home to my condo. I didn’t have any hesitation trying to dig out the crystal on my palm with a knife even if I didn’t have any idea about my regeneration ability at that time.
I also remembered when I was cheerleading in highschool that I had my fair share of injuries too. I had an especially nasty fall because the dumb bitch Janiza was talking to her boyfriend on the stands while we were practicing a pyramid. I fell from the top of the stack, tried to break my fall, and ended up with a severely dislocated shoulder—my loose shoulder joints made it worse. I was so angry at her, and so focused on controlling myself that I wouldn’t strangle her neck, that I seriously forgot about the pain until the nurse reminded me I was injured.
Maybe there’s really something to this?
“And you see,” Myra said, “that’s why it’s so difficult to do this. Everett took way longer than me to tap his hysterical strength."
I went on auto-pilot mode, giving appropriate responses to Myra’s story as I kept on thinking how I should react to pain.
I knew there were women—probably my kind—who had no problem injuring themselves, sometimes severely, to frame guys for this shit or that. I did look up stuff about it when I was dangerously close to doing something like that myself—during my undergrad days, a guy pissed me off because he was a useless piece of shit in a project that was a huge chunk of our grade in a major subject that I seriously contemplated framing him as a violent stalker.
Thankfully, I thought about it for a week, and promptly forgot about being angry at that guy. I just anonymously reported him to the professor that he wasn't doing any work, and that was the end of that. Getting him arrested was probably not covered by Rule #4 and would take a huge amount of effort to pull off.
“And Reo just sucks,” said Myra, heartily laughing. I laughed along with her even though I was barely listening to what she was talking about. “Reo, that big baby, gave up after breaking his fingers a couple of times. He did make a good point that he’ll just be hiding and summoning, so we didn’t pressure him to keep on practicing.”
“So…” I looked over my arm. “I’m ready to go again. Should we continue?”
“What? You want to continue?” She shook her head. “That’s enough for the day. It must be mentally exhausting to do this for you, to just like turn off feeling pain.”
“Oh, okay then. Enough of hysterical strength. How about evading or throwing stuff? When do I get to practice those?”
“Some other day. You should take a rest now.” She nodded down at my body. “Maybe next time, you can bring extra clothes.”
“Ugh, yeah.” My clothes were dirty. There were also red spots from my blood flying everywhere each time I punched. Blood were on my jeans from when I knelt down. “I should go back to Deen’s house before she returns so I can wash this off.”
“Good idea.”
“Maybe we can return here tomorrow?” I was genuinely having fun with this. “Practice those other things you mentioned.”
“We’ll see. We still have our mission later, and we might all be in jail by tomorrow if it doesn’t work out well.”
“Oh right, that. I don’t really have a part in it besides keeping an eye on the activities of the protesters. Good luck to you guys though, I hope nothing bad happens.”
“Thanks. Deen will be with us, and that makes everything so much safer. If all goes as planned, then we can practice tomorrow. I’m not sure what to teach you though.”
“How about those martial arts stuff Dario did when you sparred with each other? I know you said to evade, but maybe I could do something like it?”
“He wasn’t blocking my attacks but redirecting it. I don’t know how to do that. Even if I did, I still advise against doing it in actual combat. Same thing that I taught you applies: you don’t know how much stronger your enemy is. Fancy karate moves won’t work against Stella or Bob. Anyway, I’ll think about what we’ll do tomorrow, but for now let’s focus on our mission."
"Okay then."
"Want me to drive you home? You might get funny stares on the train wearing clothes covered with dust and blood.”
“Yes, please,” I said, feeling a tiny bit of excitement to go home and search up martial arts videos online to study. And I rarely get excited. Learning new things is fun.