After only a few minutes of cleaning, Kayden came to realize the full scope of what she had been asked to do.
She started by clearing out the mess hall. She dragged a trash can with wheels on it behind her to throw away all the leftovers and trash, then grabbed a tote and loaded it up with all the dirty dishes to discard them into the sink.
Once all the tables were cleared, she scrubbed them clean, and moved onto the floor. It took a good two hours to accomplish all of this and her lower back and joints were starting to ache. It was almost more agonizing than the torturous exercises she had been put through that morning.
She was so hungry at this point that she could have eaten some of the leftovers off of someone’s plate if she still didn’t have some small amount of pride left--and the fact she had already thrown them all away.
She walked into the kitchen to start on the mountain of dishes waiting for her and groaned inwardly at how much work was left. She had only just got started when Corsin, the head chef who was in charge of all the initiates in the kitchen, roared from across the kitchen, “Where are all the dishes!”
Someone answered him and then he roared even more furiously. “What do you mean they haven’t been cleaned!? Lunch is in less than an hour! How do I serve lunch without any dishes?!”
Corsin lumbered over in her direction. He was the only non-human in the place, being an obese lizardfolk. His scales were a dull red and had begun flaking off at his knees and elbows. He wore a gray apron that was perpetually splattered with grease. He strode up behind her.
“What’s going on over here!” he yelled in her ear. He seemed to always talk in a yell.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Kayden grumbled. If they had a problem with how she was working then that was their own fault.
“That worthless Bog disrupting my kitchen to teach you initiates a lesson! I should flay him!” He looked around the kitchen as if any of the initiates would challenge him, but they all knew better than that. Corsin’s fire breath was infamous, and he wasn’t afraid to use it to make a point. Kayden had seen him spray gouts of it to heat up the ovens. All the initiates tried to look busy and didn’t meet his gaze.
Corsin turned back to her. “I don’t know what you did to deserve this punishment and I don’t care! Don’t slow down my kitchen!” Smoke was starting to rise from his nostrils.
“Yes, sir,” Kayden said with her head lowered and her arms buried up to the elbow in hot water and suds.
After grumbling angrily for a second, Corsin rolled up his sleeves and got to work cleaning dishes beside Kayden. She looked up in surprise at him.
“Did I say to stop!”
Kayden jerked and got back to scrubbing dishes. By the time she had cleaned one, Corsin had cleaned a whole pile. He worked so quickly that Kayden began to suspect he was using some supernatural means and turned on her aura sense to check, but nope, the only magic involved here was good ol’ elbow grease.
They worked silently and quickly. Kayden felt like every fiber of her being was on fire from the effort, but she wasn’t about to slow down when Corsin could burn her to a crisp if she did.
“This will have to do for now,” he said, and went back to directing the other initiates to get ready for lunch while Kayden kept cleaning.
While lunch began to be served with the dishes available, Bog stormed into the kitchen and went over to Corsin. Kayden couldn’t hear their discussion, but Bog gestured in her direction so she assumed Bog was reprimanding Corsin for helping her. Someone must have told him.
For all his talk about flaying Bog, Corsin didn’t put up any fight. He simply nodded obediently. Kayden supposed she shouldn’t have expected anything else. Corsin might be intimidating in the kitchen, but in the end he was only a cook in a criminal organization. He had to follow orders just like everyone else.
After he was done with Corsin, Bog came over to her. “You are expected to take care of your own tasks. If it is too hard for you, then leave. Nikiphero gives no one a free ride. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Kayden said with gritted teeth.
“What?” Bog growled and with his raspy voice it actually did sound like the growl of some beast.
“Yes, sir.”
Bog eyed her for a second longer before turning around and leaving the kitchen. From that point onward Corsin avoided her like the plague. She may as well have not existed. If she got behind with the dishes, he simply complained to anyone around him, but otherwise didn’t interact with her.
Kayden scrubbed dishes furiously all day long. Just as she was about to finish with all of the breakfast dishes, lunch came to an end and the whole process repeated itself.
Bog had made everyone aware that she wasn’t to eat until she was done cleaning, so even when she tried to grab some lunch before getting started cleaning all of the new dirty dishes, one of the other initiates came over and threw all of the food away.
He stared challengingly at her, and Kayden briefly considered slamming a fist into his smug face, but she didn’t want to give Bog or Rem any excuse to get rid of her.
Luckily, she had much more time to clean between lunch and dinner, so even though it took four hours to get everything that she had just cleaned clean again, she still had an hour before dinner started.
Corsin may now have been avoiding her, but he graciously left a tray full of food to the side for her. She glanced at him to give him her thanks but he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She took the tray out to the empty mess hall and dug in with a moan. That combined with the fact that Kayden hadn’t been able to sit for such a long time left her feeling like her muscles might just melt off her bones. She dreaded that she still had another meal to make it through.
She was at the point where she was too exhausted to be angry, she just wanted to curl into a ball and die. It made her question every choice that had led to her being here, and whether any of it was worth it.
Wasn’t the reason she was here to train and grow stronger to find her father’s killer? How was any of this supposed to help her do that? Maybe she was better off doing this on her own like before. It would mean giving in and letting Rem and Bog get away with how they were treating her, but she was almost beyond caring.
She knew where her father’s killer was. She might not know exactly who had done it, but that was more information she had then before. She could work with that.
And she had learned her lesson with Mistech. She wouldn’t go running in like she had before.
But the truth was that she wouldn’t know where to start with investigating the police force. It wasn’t like any random civilian could start asking questions about them without anyone noticing. And they were sure to want to keep any word of what they had done from getting out. Kayden would most likely find herself at the end of one of those guns before long.
She might dislike it, but she needed the information that Cassius had. Even if she somehow managed to find the person that had killed her father, there were others involved. As soon as Kayden started digging, they would all disappear, and with them, her chances of avenging her father.
She couldn’t let that happen. Unfortunately, that meant sticking with Nikiphero and cleaning more dishes.
It was useless and naive to keep fantasizing that she could somehow take on all of the police force on her own. The only way to take them on was to use Nikiphero. There was nothing else she could do except accept that this was how it had to be.
Once she was done eating, she took a moment to rest her head on the table before heading back into the kitchen. The cool table helped ease her fevered mind.
When dinner arrived, each minute felt like an eternity, but eventually it came to an end and all the dishes were done.
Of course, she found that when she was done with the dishes she was also expected to clean up all the work stations too. By the time Kayden finished all the jobs, it was nighttime and everyone had long since left her alone in the kitchen.
It was one of the biggest reliefs Kayden had ever felt finishing the last job. It was even on par with surviving the abyss. She went into her closet and laid down on the bed in pure exhaustion.
She could hardly move and just wanted to sleep, but she forced herself to take a shower and then meditate, focusing on opening the speed gate as described in her book on gate magic. Only once she could hardly keep herself from falling asleep did she crawl into bed.
Thus began Kayden’s routine in Nikiphero. She got woken up early in the morning from the commotion of those preparing breakfast, quickly grabbed something to eat, got in some training before anyone else was in the gym, then came back to the kitchen to start her mountain of chores.
Cleaning usually took the whole day. There were brief periods when there was a lull and Kayden could squeeze in a meal.
She sometimes tried to go to the gym during this time but found that whenever she did, the other initiates would make it impossible for her to use any of the equipment. So, instead she found an area outside, away from everyone else in an alley between buildings.
Since she couldn’t use any equipment during this time, much of her training focused on the forms she learned from the gate book and her aura manipulation. Aura manipulation would allow her to expand her aura out to the rest of her body rather than just her arms.
Then when nighttime finally came she would focus on meditation and opening her gate. Although, she was beginning to suspect that gate magic might be some kind of hoax.
But she kept meditating because she found another benefit from it. Her aura sense was getting stronger. Pretty soon she was able to expand her aura sense outward further and further.
She could also delve into her own aura at a level she never had been able to before. This allowed her not only to get a better judgment of her own power levels, but also it helped detect that part of her aura that had become connected to her shadow dagger.
The shadow dagger was a dark spot on her aura, and took up a large portion of it. There was a reason why people didn’t have lots of different focuses. One’s aura could only be devoted to so many things at once.
Kayden suspected that if she really wanted, she could hold another focus at her current power levels, but that would mean she wouldn’t have anything left over to manipulate.
While sensing this portion of her aura, she gradually began to pull on it and try to use the shadow element which her focus gave her access to. She started with the basic cloud of darkness she was already familiar with, then began experimenting.
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From what she knew about focuses, it was relatively dangerous to guess at their powers. That was one thing Ernestine Academy had drilled into their students when preparing them to receive their focuses. They were not toys, and they should only be practiced under the supervision of someone trained in their use.
But Kayden didn’t have that benefit. There was no one she knew of that had a shadow dagger and even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to reach out to them. So she took her time with it and was extremely careful. This is where her aura sense came in handy. It allowed her to keep exact track of everything she was doing with her aura.
First she tried to manipulate it in ways she was familiar with, such as by incorporating it into her body. This was a huge mistake.
The second she tried to pull the cloud of darkness into her, she felt a chill so deep that her skin turned ashen gray and clouds of mist came from every breath. She had to crawl to the shower, turn it to its hottest setting, and lay on the ground shivering for hours before she felt herself recover enough to stand.
That experience left a deep impression on her and she swore not to be so reckless in the future. But she had discovered that she could weaponize this ability.
During lunchtime, while she was picking up some plates to take to the kitchen, she saw Spax eating. And despite the promise she had just made to herself about acting recklessly with her abilities, she summoned up the cloud of darkness.
Keeping it to the darkness beneath the tables, she moved it over to him and forced it to sink into his skin. There was a moment of resistance as his aura naturally tried to fight it off, but Kayden fought through it, although it required significant concentration to do so and left her with a splitting headache afterward.
But her efforts were rewarded and Spax began shivering just like she had experienced and collapsed. Kayden feared for a second that she had gone overboard and killed him--she had purposefully made it weaker than when she had used it on herself--but all that happened was that Spax ended up being bed-ridden for a few days.
She decided from that point on that it was too dangerous to test on human subjects, so her new subjects became the rats that shared her closet.
It was a lot harder killing them then she thought. Even rats’ auras naturally resisted any outside influence, and when her aura tried to force itself upon them, their auras tried to fight her influence off.
Aura’s were deeply linked to people’s bodies so it was understandable that when the body’s balance was messed with, it would try to restore itself. That is why not anyone could enhance their bodies with their auras like Kayden and the members of Nikiphero trained to do. Even when messing with your own body, it would resist you.
The more Kayden tried to throw that balance off in the rats, the harder it became. It was like she was a disease invading the body and her prey’s aura acted as an immune system.
She suspected that if anyone had awareness of what she was doing, it would be even more difficult to accomplish, especially if they were trained in aura manipulation.
But rats were not intelligent enough to know what she was doing and obviously had no training in manipulating their aura. So with practice, she was able to kill them with less and less effort.
At first, killing one left her with a splitting headache, but soon they were dropping without any mental effort on her part. After she was done with them, they were lifeless cubes of ice. Soon her room was bereft of vermin and she had to venture out to find rats in other places to experiment on.
Cleaning and training were at first difficult to juggle. Kayden hardly had any time to rest and sleep. She was exhausted all the time and felt like she was about to break into a million pieces.
The one benefit was that she was so busy that she didn’t have time to concentrate on anything else. So, for the first time since her father had died, she didn’t feel like she was carrying the weight of it on her shoulders all the time.
Gradually, her body became accustomed to the strain of her labor. Her feet and lower back no longer hurt so much from standing all day, and her muscles became leaner and harder. Any and all fat melted off her body.
She had been right about the food being mostly protein based. But there was a reason for that. The initiates needed it to build up the muscle they were constantly breaking down.
It was hard to become accustomed to the diet and Kayden had multiple emergency trips to the bathroom, but soon she couldn’t seem to get enough meat. The protein helped to rebuild her aching muscles so that she was stronger than ever before.
And just like her aura was deeply connected to her body, her body was deeply connected to her aura. Therefore, by making her body stronger, she found that her ability to incorporate her aura into her body grew significantly as well.
After several weeks, she paused in front of the mirror and was surprised by what she saw. The girl staring back at her, hardly looked like someone she recognized. First of all, her eyes had dark circles from running herself ragged all the time. It gave her a sallow look and depressed cast.
Additionally, because she had lost so much body fat and put on so much muscle, her entire face shape had changed. Her cheekbones stuck out more, accompanied by a natural reddish flush--probably from all the red meat and exercise--her jawline was much cleaner and sharper, and her neck was more slender.
Her breasts had shrunk because of all the fat loss, which was unfortunate. She had always been self-conscious of them, but now they were practically nonexistent. On the bright side, her hips and butt had put on a lot of muscle, giving her some of the curves she had always lacked. All in all, she was transforming quite a bit.
After she was beginning to believe that Cassius had completely forgotten about her and she would spend the rest of her days as nothing more than a dishwasher, he finally made his appearance.
She was in the alleyway that had become her private training area when she spun around to kick at an imaginary opponent, practicing on expanding her aura into her legs the way she did with her arms, and saw him standing at the mouth of the alley, watching her. She came to a stop and stood up straight.
“It took me a while to find you. Nobody knew where you were.”
She shrugged. “I like to train alone.”
His hard to read expression didn’t reveal whether or not he was aware of what she had been going through here. And Kayden had already determined not to have him intervene on her behalf, so it didn’t matter either way.
It was a slight shock seeing him again, especially so unexpectedly when she was in the middle of training. He looked the exact same, and she knew she couldn’t say the same about herself. She saw his eyes flicker over her body to take all the changes in. It wasn’t a predatory glance, not like some of the looks she had received from the other initiates, just an observational one.
He gestured to her. “Show me what you’ve been practicing.”
Nervous at first, she stumbled through the first steps of the forms she had learned from her gate book that corresponded with the Gate of Speed. But after a moment she took a deep breath and her long hours of repetitive practice took over.
When she ran through all the motions, she paused and looked at Cassius. He wore a thoughtful expression.
“Who taught you that?” he asked.
“I learned it from a book.”
“Do you have a problem with Nikiphero’s style?”
Kayden shrugged.
“It is…different, foreign, not something you would see, Cliffside.”
He paused and Kayden feared he would tell her to stop. She had become attached to the style and didn’t want to feel like she had wasted all her time learning it.
“It suits you,” he eventually said to her relief. “However, I believe you are missing an important aspect. Those forms are not meant for powerful blows like you are attempting. This style is not street brawling like your father taught you. Summon your dagger and do it again.”
Kayden did as instructed, moving through the forms this time with dagger in hand. The small addition threw her off for a second, instead of lashing out to try to land a strong punch, the blade required more grace.
But as she became familiar with it, she understood what Cassius was talking about. The slow controlled movements mimed parrying and deflecting strikes from extremely close range, then finding an opening and striking with lightning fast precision, wasting time by drawing back for a punch defeated the whole purpose, which was speed over power.
“No,” Cassius interrupted, stepping in and grabbing her hand and lifting it to a higher position, “Here. The opponents you face will be bigger than you. You need to get used to striking upward.”
Kayden nodded and readjusted her position accordingly. Now when she struck, she jabbed her blade at a slightly upward angle.
Cassius circled her as she moved and he spoke as he did so. “What do you imagine when you practice?”
“Nothing,” she answered.
Most of the time, she found herself falling into a trance similar to what she experienced when meditating at night. She just let the movements of her body drive everything away. She was slightly proud of the strides she had made in her ability to clear everything from her mind. It was one of the reasons she hadn’t broken from all of the pressure. It allowed her to relax and center herself to take on another day.
“That is wrong,” Cassius said, shattering her illusions. “You are not mindlessly dancing. You are building up muscle memory with the intention of one day using it to land a killing blow.”
Cassius grabbed her hand roughly where she had paused in a strike and brought the blade around to his chest, directly in front of his heart.
“This is a killing blow. Even though you are not facing a real opponent yet, each time you make this strike, you have to mean it. Picture it in your mind and hold it there firmly”
His eyes dug into hers.
“Mean it. Imagine I am your father’s killer.”
His hand clenched around hers and the blade began to dig into his flesh. Kayden reflexively drew upon her aura, the part divested to shadow, in the way she had learned to do while killing rats.
Cassius was no rat, and his aura immediately lashed out in response to fight off her invasive presence. Even so, she had never used her dagger to do this before, and found that as it punctured his flesh, even if only from a shallow cut, it was enough to allow her to worm some of her aura in.
His skin around the blade began to turn ashen with the invasive shadow magic. And still Cassius didn’t relinquish his hold on her. He kept forcing the blade deeper. Kayden fought against him, trying to pull the blade free.
Then, with a gasp she let go, her eyes wide and breathing heavily. Her shadow dagger remained firmly in his grasp, sticking out of his chest for a moment longer before vanishing in a cloud of black smoke.
“This is not a game, Uptown girl,” Cassius said. “It’s time you stopped treating it like one. Are you one of us or not?”
“I am,” Kayden said, calming her racing heart.
“Then I never want to see you mindlessly dancing again.”
He lashed out with a fist. Kayden reflexively deflected it.
“You are a fighter.”
He lashed out again. Kayden blocked. He was strong, and without using her aura to strengthen herself, she would have been blown off her feet. Even still, she lost some of her balance. Cassius pressed his advantage, but Kayden recovered enough to continue blocking.
“If you want to be a dancer, you don’t belong here!”
He kept coming at her ruthlessly, keeping her on the defensive.
“Are you a fighter or not!?” Cassius growled as he broke through her defense and backhanded her across the face.
She flew back and hit the wall. The blow was meant to be an insult. If he really wanted to hurt her, he would have used a closed fist. She supposed she could have assumed he had done it to spare her from injury, but this was Cassius, he wanted to teach her a lesson. A backhanded slap told her that he didn’t see her as a threat.
It took her back to that moment in his office when he had forced himself on her. She had felt powerless and scared. She wouldn’t let that happen again.
With a scream, Kayden pushed herself off the wall and attacked Cassius with all her might. She didn’t think, using a mixture of what her father had taught her and what the gate book had. It was like falling into the trance she was familiar with, but different. Instead of clearing her mind of everything, she cleared her mind of everything except one thing, killing.
Her attacks were awkward and sloppy. It was one thing to go from practicing on empty air and facing an actual opponent. But she was fast, especially with her muscles enhanced by her aura, and it may have been a trick of her mind in the heat of battle, but she felt something else from deep within her, something spurring her onward. Faster. Go faster.
Blow after blow was deflected, each one failed to land. Failure, Kayden realized, is where opportunity lay. The movements to the Gate of Speed were about turning failures into opportunities.
With this enlightening moment, Kayden stopped flailing about as much, and fell into the familiar forms. Her blow was deflected? She pivoted the motion and turned it into an attack on a new opening.
Her attacks flowed and blended together. Cassius may have said it wasn’t a dance, but it was, kind of; a deadly dance.
Now that Kayden was fighting with intention and not just trying to land a blow, Cassius began to take her more seriously. Sweat began to collect on his forehead.
Faster. She had to go faster. Each additional failure to break his defense was a step toward a singular destination.
Arrive before you have taken the first step. Was that not the main philosophical tenet of the Gate of Speed? She had to envision it, the strike that would bring this deadly dance to its only conclusion.
With this state of mind, Kayden’s failures were no longer that, they were something she could direct toward the desired outcome. She began expecting her failures, which freed her to think about her next attack. Without being hung up on every deflected blow, her mind expanded outward, planning two steps ahead.
It was just as much to her surprise as it was to Cassius’s when her fist broke through his defense and landed directly on his chest where his heart lay. The blow was weak, more like a tap than anything, but if she had been holding a blade, that tap would have been enough. Kayden had landed a killing blow.