The Little Apprentice Learns And Grows

'No...' Blauw Ishikyy flew past Imperial Guards and enemy cultivators. Her body fluctuated in between as energy attacks descended upon her or flew right past her, sounding metal against metal-like noises. But she was only affected by a few of the dozens of energy attacks that landed on her. The Empire's soldier units were careful not to harm her, but the enemy went all-out in theirs, with their deviated energy attacks even landing on their comrades.

Whooooooooosh~! Blauw Ishikyy’s face was slightly contorted, and her lips breathed in raggedly as she headed towards an area where the Empire’s side had just suffered but was beginning to retake their foothold and push the enemy into the encirclement. She started descending when she was in under a minute before arriving, her left Colorful Claw extended forth, and her right hand held 3 polearms at once.

“Get away!!” Her voice roared into the air and shocked everyone under its vibrating waves. Her Neutral Energy exploded forth with her Spirit Image looming behind her, but its azure eyes squinted as if containing fury and exasperation intricately. Her right arm waved the polearms in her hand as they were sent flying downward. The paralyzed enemies couldn’t move as their hearts felt bloated, but before they felt pain form inside their bodies, energy blades, needles, and shafts impaled their heads and self-exploded when crossing through their bodies.

Pshift- pew pew pew!- Bang! Bang!... Whoooosh! While the Empire’s Imperial Guards were paralyzed again by the display of raw prowess, the royal princess hurried into the group of Imperial Guards’ corpses’ rear. The Imperial Guards were just trying to keep this spot safe from the enemy before they habitually stomped on their fallen comrades’ corpses and mutilated them out of disdain. When Blauw Ishikyy arrived there, she cautiously grabbed a few shoulders and lifted them, pulling them at the side before finding a fair hand that was reaching out as if to shake hands with the sky, limp.

“No!” Blauw Ishikyy cried in a whisper as she felt her hands and fingers becoming cold. Pulling onto that hand, she was already tearing up but couldn’t care as her little girlfriend’s closed eyes sent small heart attacks through her body, shocking and electrocuting her mind and Soul. After hugging her shoulders, feeling the tiniest heartbeats turn lighter and the warmth from her inner body rapidly leaving in swift twinges, Blauw Ishikyy pulled the rest of half her body from the litter of corpses and looked up, sobbing.

‘Imperial Teacher, please help! Where are you?!’ She didn’t know if he would be there if her personal teacher would be watching. But, right now, she hoped he was. To her increasing dismay, she felt her mind flicked by something, and a direction appeared in her head. She said nothing else and commenced flying there with her dear comrade in her arms. Blauw Ishikyy held the dying young woman’s body tight, but the grip was soft.

Whoooosh~! As the royal princess abandoned the battle, the Warrant Officer above her in status didn’t tell her anything, knowing she was aware of the consequences, and let her carry the dead body outside. Blauw Ishikyy’s flight speed only increased as she seemingly figured a way to make her tail enhance that speed, even though she only saw Heian Ciemnosc do that in his younger days. Blauw Ishikyy traveled 50 kilometers rapidly and met a floating dark figure farther away. Seeing this, she became more frantic and boosted her speed, expending blood essence in the process, which made Heian Ciemnosc shake his head slightly.

Blauw Ishikyy didn’t give much more attention to the pale young woman in her arms and rushed towards him as fucking fast as possible. Heian Ciemnosc’s body rapidly zoomed before her, and her eyes widened, knowing she had arrived. Without consideration for her image, she shouted until her lungs were done and her Neutral Energy in disarray. “Imperial Teacher! Please! You have to save her! I cannot let her die. Help her! Please!”

“...” Heian Ciemnosc kept silent as she looked at him, riddled with a wet face and scrunched-up nose as her eyebrows were damn low, and her lips twisted, forming waves of their own. Some snot was visible, looking dearly adorable in Heian Ciemnosc’s darkest eyes that slightly reflected her image. At last, he didn’t continue torturing her and said, extending and unfolding his left pale hand towards her, facing the sky. “Since I let you see me, what makes you think I wasn’t going to help you?”

“I mean, I know I’m not that good, but I’m not dead in the brain, you know? I can still respect someone’s beloved ones and their aspirations,” Heian Ciemnosc said as he returned his left pale hand to one of his dark coat pockets. The royal princess looked at him, gulped continuously with her widened eyes, and teared up a little more before responding. “Then why are you doing nothing yet? Imperial Teacher, please! She’s in danger! Her life is!”

“Who said I didn’t save her already? Oh, just look,” Heian Ciemnosc said as he nudged at the young woman’s face below Blauw Ishikyy’s. She looked down, only for her chin to slightly bump into someone else’s forehead and then to look at a face munching on something as if being fed while in a deep slumber. “Eh?”

“Nom, slosh, slosh~... nomm~...”

“...” Blauw Ishikyy watched as her girlfriend chewed on that pill, and its medicinal effect began spreading everywhere when the latter finally swallowed it. It wasn’t gum, so it bounced from her teeth repeatedly before her subconscious reminded her what she always does to pills, downing them down her throat. Soon after, it traveled down, and Blauw Ishikyy realized there was more than one medicinal effect in her girlfriend’s tummy, working their magic to save her.

“She is fine! Ahh!” Blauw Ishikyy became relieved, sighing and admonishing her dear comrade for scaring the shit out of her before looking up at her savior. “Imperial Teacher, thank you. Thank you so much!”

Thud. Blauw Ishikyy’s body moved forwards and leaned on Heian Ciemnosc’s torso while her left arm hugged around his back. Heian Ciemnosc let the young girl hug him, understanding she was still herself. If everyone was like Heian Ciemnosc, knowing how to kill his enemies by striking the jugular, it would be a terrifying world everywhere. Looking down at the face whose chin was buried into his solar plexus, Heian Ciemnosc moved her exquisitely smooth, aquamarine, azure hair to the side to reveal her pretty face.

She smiled, not appearing like the crazed killing machine he made of her amidst the battle. However, a tiny sound surprised them as she looked down to see a satisfied face. “Mmf~.”

“...” Blauw Ishikyy pouted as she realized she had shared her personal Imperial Teacher’s strange warmth and coldness with someone else. She rapidly took 3 steps back, accommodated her dear comrade to hold her like a doll with her right arm, and returned to rub her chin on Heian Ciemnosc’s abdomen, fit and comfy. Then, she said while looking straight into his eyes, hers shining beautifully. “Teacher, thank you. I’ll let Fernanda know I saved her by getting punished. Maybe she’ll take better care of herself.”

“Mn, you won’t be pardoned. Besides, you also abandoned a battlefield as a commander. If I was your superior, you would be cleaning corpses of their clothes all week. Blauw Ishikyy didn’t even blink as she listened to him, silently acquiescing to anything this young man said to her. Blinking them again, this time with intention, she softly whispered. “Well, don’t give them ideas. I can’t wait for your spanks- gasp!!”

“...?” Heian Ciemnosc’s startled face said it all as he looked down at the self-shocked young girl. Her widened eyes showed a lot of sclera with a tiny dot in the middle. It could barely be distinguished due to their brightness, but it was still aquamarine and azure. Heian Ciemnosc placed his right pale hand on her left cheek. It was burning. After the pale skin caught some of the azure blood, he retracted it and reminded this young girl, who committed insubordination, to return to where she came from.

“Stop wasting time. The battle is still going. According to the comms I’m hearing from here, the First Fleet’s Frigates are already arriving. Don’t you want to eliminate them for being weak?” Heian Ciemnosc booped her nose at last and waited for her response. Blauw Ishikyy recomposed a little and asked, “What about the naval battle? How is it going? The last we heard was that many enemy Fleets were coming, no?”

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“Mn, but the expert Fighters from the First fleet dealt with them. They’re only around 8,000, but they can do what a Battleship can in less time. Stop dawdling,” Heian Ciemnosc said, blowing some air into her face, which she only closed her eyes from not expecting it— but didn’t shake her head away. Heian Ciemnosc failed to shoo her away like an insect, which made him tilt his head to the right.

“I’ll just leave her here, teach. I need to return,” Blauw Ishikyy stuck her tongue out and shut her eyes tight, knowing she wouldn’t live if she kept pushing her luck. She placed the sleeping Fernanda before Heian Ciemnosc’s feet and ensured Heian Ciemnosc would take care of her in her absence. Blauw Ishikyy rushed back into the battle, looking as if she could gnaw on the enemy’s limbs until getting to the bones, crush them, and use them as killing weapons against their living comrades.

“...” Seeing his apprentice’s eagerness to return to her first ground battle, Heian Ciemnosc shook his head again, already feeling like a parent whose child was helplessly reckless but was proud of it anyway. Placing a layer of darkness on Fernanda’s body, like a blanket that seeped the coldness away, he focused on the battlefield ahead and didn’t plan to intervene in anything these Second Step cultivators in the lower realms intended to do to win, and afterwards.

He still felt weary of commanding, despite teaching many what he knew to the letter, or so, Heian Ciemnosc wasn’t yet at the right time to return to that life.

… The battle continued for a little longer, extending for a quarter of an hour, when the First fleet’s separate troops finally landed on the shore, behind the energy barriers, still firing their anti-missile turrets at the enemy missiles and resisting the barrage from the same. This was from smallish enemy cliques carrying machine guns and faraway missiles directed this way from the enemy’s individual territory.

They didn’t use the Fighters to transport them and could only use a speed-based array formation to join the battlefield. But after half an hour of traveling with their utmost speed and being told by communications to hurry up to the battlefield without being clarified of anything, they arrived on a snowy plain with only enemy corpses rotting at the side and their fallen comrades being picked up by the soldier units.

The First fleet’s ground troops were underwhelmed but couldn’t compare. They were the slowest, even though their Fleet arrived an hour earlier, and the landing was practically 100% safe, without losing any of their numbers, and even receiving a few more to make more than 1,000,000 Imperial guards and citizens disembarking inland besides the remaining 300,000+ Imperial guards from the more than 600,000 at the beginning. It wasn’t a small number. Nobody thought so.

Among one of the spots of people picking their Empire’s soldier units’ corpses, one was singled by a young girl whose injuries slowly healed with probably the help of some medicinal pills and beverages. Her shoulders carried with incenses that drifted everywhere in the area, keeping the corpses intact and only letting their pure energy dissipate as naturally as always. This was naturally the royal princess.

She had a couple large gashes on her front and a stabbing wound on her lower right back. This clearly showcased the struggles not just the royal princess experienced in the battle but the entire 637,000-big army that had been halved as well, whether it was believable to the always-high morale Empire army. This, and the fall of a Battleship that should’ve brought sadness and decreased their spirits, served in making these well-trained soldier units realize more than they had thought.

Blauw Ishikyy brought the corpses into a special Covert Space bag only the official commanding officials had stored as an extra after the outcome of any action. In any case, Blauw Ishikyy rapidly gathered as many corpses as she could, and whenever she found those that belonged to her unit, she knelt and muttered under her breath shortly before continuing. She knew who died and when. She wasn’t a citizen, and their medallion offered this much information to a cultivator, but she treated each of them she found the same. Whether they died before or after, she abandoned them in the battle to save her comrade.

After she was done reuniting a few thousand corpses at the gathering point, right in time with the others who went in groups as normal, the sun started coming out from the east, and the light started shining onto the bloody snow again. The enemy corpses started becoming icy-cold and stiff and gained an icy layer, but their bodies wouldn’t be preserved. They will no longer form part of a body soon enough.

“... Blauw Ishikyy!” The Warrant Officer above Blauw Ishikyy’s status walked towards her after she took 5 minutes standing still and looking at the light coming down on the snowy ground. She looked far into the south, where only plains were visible, when the Warrant Officer took her attention away, and she turned around to face him. He walked to him with a few other official leading figures and looked at her strictly before elaborating. “Enough punishment has fallen on you. There won’t be more activities, but the Admiral has spoken.”

“Instead of becoming a Sergeant, you are now Corporeal. Go and rest. The war hasn’t ended, and the information is that hundreds of thousands more are being mobilized from every Grotto and hideout from the worms and traitors.” The Warrant Officer said, looking at the royal princess in pity that she did that one act that stained a nearly perfect beginning to a possibly perfect military career.

“The information?” Blauw Ishikyy asked, frowning at the meaning of those words. Did this mean she would still command soldier units like before? To respond to her doubts, the Warrant Officer nodded and said while Blauw Ishikyy’s emblem flashed a pristine azure light. “Even with the abandoning from the battle, no matter if it was late and didn’t influence too much, what you did before in leading your troops while within the enemy ranks, ground or air, and resisting so many attacks… Do I need to say more?”

“No, I understand,” Blauw Ishikyy shook her head and bowed, letting the Warrant Officer feel relaxed as the situation didn’t end as complicatedly as he thought. But, just as he was about to walk away after turning around, he stopped and glared at the royal princess again. How could he not remember she was just 14 this year? Thus, with a wave of his hand, a few dining plates and empty mugs. “If you still feel guilty and the heaviness of your actions, you can clean the banquet’s dishes after feasting.”

“Sure,” Blauw Ishikyy looked at the plates and mugs surprisedly before nodding and feeling a bit back into the same level as these soldier units and officials. Warming up to the occasion, she grabbed one empty mug. The Warrant Officer nodded and walked away. She followed, and as others walked to her, with familiar faces from the Frigate she commanded before, she felt warm.

“Royal princess, is Fernanda alright? She brought me to the battle, but I couldn’t leave the field like you did. I was incapable…” Someone asked Blauw Ishikyy. She turned to face him and said while lightly smiling, with someone’s dark figure in her mind. “Yes. She is alright. She was saved, fortunately. I don’t think she’ll fight here… but I don’t think they will feel bad I didn’t return. Hehe. I’m glad to know I have more chances.”

“Oof! You have no idea how majestic you looked, royal princess!” - “Mn! Those moves… did your teacher teach you them?” - “Duuuh, who else? The little black monster might very well be the Wrath Nihility Academy’s black monster. If it wasn’t because of the Headmaster’s old nickname, he would’ve already been named as monster instead!”

“Don’t worry, princess, we will keep food for you. After these injuries, we only have 3 days of rest before moving out if no enemy force attacks us. As our innate leader, you ought to lead the massacre of these bastards, right?” Someone else said, speaking everyone’s hearts and brains as the Warrant Officer turned a deaf ear at the front. Blauw Ishikyy smiled cutely and cruelly said, “It won’t be enough even if we sell the prisoners to our jungle friends, right? We also have to ensure these lands gain their fertility back after nature was disrupted.”

“Mn, so true!” - “That’s how it is~.” - “That’s what I’m talking about!” - “Sigh, so bloody. I like it!” - “I love it!” - “I wonder if we’ll ever see the venerate assigned supervisor in battle? Like, in the ‘big leagues’ and all that. You know?” - “Ugh, can you use more titles? Please?” - “Heheh.” - “Surely! One day… Maybe when things are at their most intense moments? Like… when the war is coming to an end?”

“...” Blauw Ishikyy shook her head, looking at the light blue sky with her brightest, cutest aquamarine, azure eyes. When she returned her eyes down, she saw those around her look at her as if expecting to know something from her. She blinked thrice in quick succession before mysteriously saying, “This isn’t a vacation activity. If you enlisted to serve the Empire with your life, prepare to do so. This is our Region, but we are an Empire and have the Wrath Nihility Academy’s backing to flaunt. What can’t we do? Besides, aren’t pals supposed to share things?”

“... … … …” The little crowd around her became silent, seemingly understanding something, but the silence the royal princess provided served to pull them back to reality and not lose themselves in the future. Like this, a small dinner commenced and finished as a banquet where 300,000+ soldier units rested while a million more worked hard to treat the injured and built mobile strongholds to protect themselves from enemy bombarding.

They couldn’t always be on the move, and their Craftsmaking allowed them to set mini-cities worth of protective barriers and illusory screens. Not doing so would be asking to be attacked 25/7. During the dinner, Blauw Ishikyy ate 5 times more than anyone else. When it became a gigantic banquet, she ate 20 times more than anyone else, including the Demons and Titans in the Empire.

In the end, Blauw Ishikyy cleaned a stupid amount of dishes with some others from the First fleet’s ground troops. However, only she knew how tranquil it was to cultivate and meditate while repassing her recent experiences while doing something as cute as washing dishes. Being used to being beaten up and forced to keep her concentration on such while her ass took the pale hands’ smacking noises, this was child’s play!

…