Clack!
The clashing of kendo sticks rang across the gymnasium. Sara felt the vibrations go through her gloves. She attacked again, aiming for her opponent’s face.
Clack!
The other kid deflected the blow. Before she could retaliate Sara was swinging again.
Clack!
Their sticks collided so hard Sara heard them splinter. She pushed, causing her opponent to step back, and pounced on each inch of ground.
Snap!
The other kid fell sprawling onto the mat. Sara raised her broken stick and swung for the kill, only to be stopped by her coach stepping in the way.
“Whoa, control yourself, Sara.”
Sara skidded to a halt, dropping her stick like it was a murder weapon.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” The other girl got up, yanked off her face shield and threw it at Sara. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“No,” Sara said, picking up the face shield and handing it back to the girl. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Crazy First-Years,” the girl said with a disgusted look on her face. She snatched her mask away and marched off the platform.
Sara felt the coach’s hand sliding over her shoulder. “You can’t keep breaking things, Sara,” he said, then leaned in so only she could hear him. “If something is happening at home and you want someone to talk to, I’m here.”
It was the third time this week he was physically touching Sara in public, surrounded by everyone in the kendo club.
“Everything’s fine,” Sara said, clamping down on the tightness around her throat. “I think I’ll call it quits early today.”
“I think so too,” said the coach. He gave Sara’s shoulder a squeeze before letting go.
By the time Sara made it outside, she felt sick. Tears chilled on her cheeks, frozen by the early winter. Though there was no snow yet, the air was cold enough to fog her gasping breaths.
She steadied herself against the side of the gymnasium and dug in her bag for her scarf. The coach was getting bolder with his moves, but she still wasn’t going to tell anyone what was happening. She didn’t want to face her demons so much as try to pretend they weren’t there. It was easier that way, for all of them. So, wrapping her scarf tight around her neck, she started down the path out of the school gates.
“Wait a minute, Sara.”
She almost made it. God damn, she almost made it.
Sara slowed but did not stop. She wanted to flee. She wanted to go back into the past and the day she first picked up a kendo stick.
“Do you want me to call your mother?”
Sara stopped. Fists clenched around her gym clothes and school bag, she waited for the coach to catch up.
He was still holding onto his clipboard. “Hey,” he said, stepping around to face Sara. “I just want to check in with you and see if everything is alright.”
“I said I was fine,” Sara replied, doing little to hide her annoyance.
The coach chuckled. “When people say something is fine, what they really mean is, it’s shit. See, I know for a fact your mother didn’t ask me to sign you onto my team so you could take your anger out on innocent kids.”
“She deserved it,” Sara said. “I wrote her damn social studies essay but she never paid me.”
“That so? Your mother won’t be very happy to know that," the coach said.
“Why would she care?” Sara asked before she knew what he was really talking about.
“Paired with your violent tendencies, a blatant disregard for plagiarism could get you suspended. And just three months from graduating from your first year? That’s not good, Sara.”
The coach folded his arms and grinned. Sara felt colder than the temperature should allow. “I was joking,” she said, backtracking. “I-it was just an excuse I made up.” She started walking, but the coach followed beside her.
“Listen. Your mother told me some things over dinner the other day.”
As he talked, he casually placed a hand on Sara’s back, gently guiding her as they walked like the two of them were good friends. “I heard your brother dropped out of high school late last year. Is that true?”
Sara kept her eyes on the gate. It seemed to far, but she didn’t want to start running. She didn’t want to offend the coach, even though she hated him.
“It must be hard on him to have the case dropped.”
“How do you know about the case?” Sara asked.
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“Honoka was a star athlete when she was here,” said the coach, a hint of pride in the way his shoulders raised. “We were all sad to see her go. Not that way, of course.”
Sara was about to tell him he better stick to students inside his school, but then she remembered she was one of those students, and whatever surface-level condolences she thought of saying disappeared when she felt the man’s hand lowering toward her waist. At the same time, the coach was applying pressure, getting her to change direction.
“She was bright, too. We all thought she had applied to go abroad for study.”
Sara was pushing against the coach’s fingers while still trying to not look like she was struggling. It wasn’t working. The gates were no longer in front of her. She was headed towards the classrooms on the outskirts of the school grounds.
“It’s a pity,” said the coach. “But these things, they tend to happen to the best of us.”
Sara reached forward, grasping the weeds growing out of the cracks in the stone. She pulled herself forward, inching ever closer to the end of the alleyway. People were walking past, their fleshy bodies blocking the light. She could almost hear her attribute table pinging with the addition of the souls passing in front of her.
She clawed for them, nails digging into filthy crevices. With every yard that brought her closer to salvation, she could hear the voices of the past ringing in her ears. She tried to drown them out, but the laughter of her bullies, the nasally voice of her disgusting coach, they curled around her until she wasn’t seeing people passing the alleyway, but faces she recognized.
Faces she hated.
People she wished to harm.
There were voices. She stopped and looked up. A man and woman were making their way over, their hands linked and heads close together.
Sara saw something else, though. The longer she stared, the more she saw her coach in the man and her own self in the woman. She didn’t want to see that. She didn’t want to imagine a future in which the sick man had finally cracked that last line of defense she had tried so desperately for the last two years to keep up.
But the truth was, some people spend so long dreading a certain possibility that on some level of consciousness, the dread made it real.
That was why, in Sara’s pain-induced delirium, what she saw in front of her was in indeed an older version of herself, being led down the dark alleyway by the man she despised most in all the world.
She pushed herself up and staggered towards the couple.
The woman spotted her first. “Goodness,” she gasped. “Are you alright?”
“Let’s get out of here, love,” the man said and began pulling the woman away. “I don’t like the look of her.”
“No.” Sara reached for them. “I don't like the look of me either.”
Twin icicles formed on either side of her arms. With a thought, Sara sent them hurtling into the man’s neck. The force launched him across the alleyway, his body pinballing against the walls to land just behind the line where light separated from darkness.
The woman clutched her throat and started to scream, but Sara shut her up quickly.
“It’s too late,” she said as tiny ice crystals speared the woman through. “You don’t deserve to ask for help.”
When the bodies stopped twitching, Sara's table opened on its own.
> Chaos gained: 2.
>
> Chaos 100/100.
>
>
>
> Chaos control increased to: 2
>
> Total chaos: 98/100
Stepping past the dead, Sara stumbled towards the end of the alleyway. She needed more points. She could do this. She had the right to live because she was taking her life into her own hands now. Yes, she wasn’t the old Sara anymore. She would never again be her.
Sara’s back hit the wall of the classroom. Surrounded by rows of bare sakura trees, no one could spot them from the courtyard. She was alone.
“You’ve caused a lot of pain for a lot of people,” the coach said, leaning in so close his breath was brushing her face. “Parents of the kids you beat up are asking for you to be kicked from the team.”
Sara edged herself as far away as possible but there just wasn’t anywhere to go. The coach had both arms pressed on either side of her and his fat frame took up two of hers.
“I don’t want to do kendo anyway,” she replied, managing to sound something other than terrified. “I’m busy enough with schoolwork. I also have a callback to a modeling agency next week.”
She should have stopped at the schoolwork part, because now the coach was eyeing her in a way that made her skin crawl. She looked away, wishing for this, whatever the hell it was, to stop.
“I understand. I’ll tell your mother what you said.”
Sara let out a breath. “That’d be great, actually.”
“She did give the school’s Young Athlete program a very generous donation a couple of weeks ago, though,” the coach said, acting like he was thinking hard. “I wonder if the news her prized daughter won’t even be in the program will come as a nasty shock to her.”
Seeing Sara freeze, the man resumed his easy smile. He leaned in a little more, making her cringe. Then, he pushed away.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at training,” he said, patting Sara on the shoulder, almost friendly in its casualness. “And it should go without saying that I expect better of you from now on.”
Sara said nothing. She stood there, shaking, the place on her shoulder feeling so cold even after the coach was long gone.
The street opened up into a square. Shops bordered the sides, though foot traffic was light. Sara stepped out into freedom. No one looked at her. She placed her hands on the ground and whispered,
“Stone Touch.”
The ground quivered, then quaked. Slabs of earth rose from under the paved cobblestone, stretching to the sky as they encased the entire square. People cried out as they lost their footing. Some of the smarter ones got up and started racing towards the slabs to try and squeeze their way out.
There was no way out. Sara trapped them like ants under a glass cup, leaving only a sliver open in her direction.
Keeping her hands on the ground, she injected poison into the ground and evaporated it. Crevices spread toward the charging bodies, covering them in clouds of green and blue.
The air filled with the sounds of sizzling flesh and dying screams. Amidst the noise, Sara also heard guards shouting for help. She saw figures standing in the clouds, their hands raised and glowing. Sara waved over the top of the cone, encasing it before anyone could send anything.
Trapped in darkness, the people inside screamed louder.
Sara stood up. She pointed at the cone. A ball of lava began spinning on her fingertip, growing from the size of a basketball before blooming into something larger than the surrounding buildings. The heat melted the metal structures around it and when Sara flicked it, the molten ball tumbled across the street, consuming everything in a blazing inferno.
The cone disappeared like someone ripped it from existence. Sara forced herself to stare into the explosion, burning into her mind the image of her crimes.
This is your doing, she told herself. This is how you live.
Fire spewed from the massive crater, eating through the surrounding buildings. More people began streaming from inside, some too slow to escape the heat. Black smoke bellowed into the sky, twisting in on itself like some horrifying beanstalk.
A glass bottle smashed onto the ground.
Sara turned.
Taiga stood by her door, a wealth of food scattered by her feet. A beaker lay beside her, gushing red liquid across buns and oil-wrapped packages.
Sara opened her mouth opening to say… something, but Taiga stepped back.
“Stay away from us,” she said, shaking her head from side to side. “Don’t you ever come back to the orphanage. If I see you again, I’ll kill you.”
Sara watched the cat-girl leave. There was nothing she could say to justify what she had just done, but as she stepped back into the darkness of the alleyway, she realized she didn’t want to.