Discomfort is a word used only by those who have known comfort. Those who have never known what it means to be comfortable do not understand what it means to be uncomfortable. With no knowledge of luxury, no witness of its occurrence, there will be no envy. This is not to be mistaken for the inability to dream. People will forever dream. There will forever be the hope of something better. A chair to sit on that doesn’t hurt so much. A place to lie and wake without a sore back. Something to eat that will fill the belly. But if never witnessed, if one accepts the world as one without such things, there will be no dream of luxury truly believable. After all, the unsouled never envy the birds their ability to fly.

In the same way, Jabari did not envy the child struggling to stay alive his fate.

Seated on one of the branches of one of these leafless trees, he watched Seth fight for his life against five king spiders. They’d been doing this for more than a week now, and the boy was getting better at it. in the beginning he’d barely been able to swing Dainik and Varmei, but, eventually, he’d figured it out.

The hit and run tactic he’d been using in the earlier days had been discarded now so that he faced his opponents head on. Though inefficient, the tactic had helped ensure his survival many times, even if by the skin of his teeth. But now he was better. He used his skills less though. But only so much could be done with his reia constantly being drained, especially when he wasn’t even Iron.

He watched Seth evade a striking spider leg with a technique he must’ve learnt in the seminary and was displeased. It had been his hope in the beginning that the boy would not become so predictable, that he would not rely on fighting techniques fashioned by humans. But he could only have so much. So, for now, he would take his wins where he could get them, and that meant purifying the child’s core.

Seth deflected another blow with Dainik and countered with Varmei. It was the eight time he was slashing this specific spider leg, and it finally gave under the force of the blow, snapping off where Varmei struck it. The beast shrieked in pain as it tilted to the side, its balance skewed by the loss of the leg and Seth acted quickly, brought Varmei down and struck with his skill. The blow rocked the beast back but did not take its head. All the way from here, near a mile away, he heard the boy cuss.

Amongst the things he’d learned from their time on the boat, it seemed he’d been unable to let go of the cussing.

Jabari simply watched.

The boy was growing accustomed to fighting with both weapons now, using their characteristics to his advantage. He defended with Dainik, repelling any reia that came with whatever attack was thrown at him. While it worked, he soon learned it did nothing against their venomous spit. Varmei, he used for attacks, major blows. It gave him, to say the least, a fighting chance.

Jabari rose from the branch he sat on and dropped from the tree. He hit the ground below without sound. From there he strolled forward. By his calculations, at this pace the fight would be over by the time he got there. As for the barrier he had put over the place, he gave no thought to it. There was no being present capable of affecting it.

His stroll took him near thirty minutes, and when he arrived it was to the conclusion of the fight. Seth laid on the ground, his lower half pressed beneath the head of a dead king spider, Varmei embedded in the side of its head. His cassock had long since succumbed to the battery of his fights so that it was scattered all over the place in countless pieces.

Seth lay motionless, breathing like a child plagued with asthma, struggling with every breath. His left hand was a mess, broken at odd angles, wrinkled and leaking too much blood more green than red. His body was covered in green spit, enough to mask his purpling bruises, and was slowly beginning to go into shock. It was not the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. So Jabari stood and watched, waited for the boy’s body to fight away its own shock. And it did. In time, the growing tremors subsided.

He walked up to the boy and squatted beside him. Off in the distance to his left Dainik lay on the ground, abandoned. For the first time in a while, he sighed. The boy would have to struggle harder than this if he wanted to be truly strong.

With one hand he withdrew Varmei from the spider’s skull. With the other he took its head and tossed the entire spider off the child.

The moment Seth was free of the spider, his eye opened into slits. “Survived again,” he smirked. “I’m… not… that easy… to… get rid… of.”

Jabari definitely agreed. It meant he still had more struggle left in him.

“Good.”

……………………………………………

Seth stared up at Jabari, into the depths of the man’s grey eyes. The man was always there at the final moments of his fight. Early enough to keep him alive, but too late to save him if he didn’t win. Knowing the man’s cruelty yet logical necessity, he made sure he always won.

This was his sixth fissure in three weeks, and again, as was the case each time he fought a wave of monsters, Jabari was here at the end of the battle, standing, staring at the carnage he’d wrought.

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This fissure had brought forth reia beasts that looked like giant scorpions. However, they were without stingers. That assumption had been his mistake because it didn’t take long for one of them to pierce him with a stinger they were not supposed to have. He learnt very quickly that they had stingers, they simply kept it retracted into their bodies somehow. When they stung him, it left a wave of heat coursing through him. It made his reia channels burn each time he activated a skill. However, there were two skills that did not hurt him to use, so while clearing this particular fissure, he did not use [Quick Draw] or [Quick Step] instead he’d employed more of [Fractured Mind] and [Heart of Winter].

[Fracture Mind] and [Heart of Winter] were his least used skills for two reasons. They were not active skills with damage dealing effects and he didn’t know how to activate them. [Fractured Mind] he’d learned and accepted required a certain necessity, a level of focus of his minds he never knew when they would fall into, especially now that their silence was deafening with Dainik and Varmei in his hands. And [Heart of Winter] though he was beginning to understand, was still much of a mystery.

However, he had learned how to activate [Fractured Mind] on command and found he liked its impact. It was a mental skill that put all his minds to good use, making his need to consciously delegate their usage unnecessary. With it, his minds were in nigh perfect harmony. His eyes saw what they needed to, his ears heard what they needed to. He was aware of everything around him within a certain radius and absorbed what was necessary. It guided his attacks and defenses, lent them greater precision and power. He came to think of it as an unholy focus.

As for [Heart of Winter], it was a powerful and terrifying skill. It led him to a state of disregard. In it, his brothers never crossed his mind, even Jabari’s presence was disregarded. Whether the man deemed him worthy of being saved or not was unnecessary. In fact, the man had no place here, had no authority in the very act of saving him. The thought of being saved was in and of itself hubris. If it was his fate to die in battle then it would be proof of his weakness, and he would accept it with bloody hands and the necessary companions to guide him.

Its influence on him sharpened his battle sense, but left him with a bitter after taste.

Powerful as both skills were, they cost far too much reia to use, draining his core almost as fast as Varmei.

This last wave of monster had left him nigh useless, burning from the inside and bleeding all over. Breathing in was easy, but breathing out felt like dying. Above him, Jabari squatted, and he waited for what would follow. The priest placed a hand on his chest then flooded him with a burst of power.

For a moment as long as the blink of an eye, he felt powerful, invincible. Then it was gone. His bones healed, mending where they were broken, regardless of how bad. His breathing became easy again. His blood flowed naturally and the soreness in his reia channels reduced. He gasped in the wake of the relief, sucking in as deep a breath as his lungs could contain.

And that was the end of it.

Later that evening they sat over a meal of fruits and roast meat he was fairly certain were poisoned, yet he chewed away without question.

“Why do we continue to do this?” he asked Jabari. “Why do I keep fighting only poisonous and venomous reia beasts?”

Jabari had taken the liberty of closing the giant scorpion fissure after its eight wave. Seth did not know exactly how he did it, but he had long since learned the beast waves played no part in it. Whether they came crawling out or not did not matter, the man was capable of closing the fissure whenever he wished. Therefore, he let them escape simply to train him. And the number of waves was likely until he was satisfied with whatever outcome he was searching for.

Jabari took a bite of what looked like an apple. “Every evolution to Iron has a pattern. The seminary, along with the rest of most of the world, use the convergence evolution only.”

“Is there another type?” Seth asked.

“No. But there are different ways to prepare. The evolution to Iron gives you a stronger body, but there are ways to pick what type of strength you want.”

“And that’s what you’re doing? Picking a type of strength for me with all these poisons.”

“I am growing the type of body you have unwittingly picked. You see, the moment you first got poisoned by the Guda Snake you’d already chosen your path. In some lands, a person poisoned by it is said to have come down with iron blood. Their blood was stronger and thicker, harder to move…”

“…Like iron.”

“Yes. Like iron. You spent enough time with its poison in you and your body functioning on overdrive that by the time you were cured of it all—both Guda poison and the poison of reia meat—your body had already adapted to it for the purpose of survival. So that is your new normal. Your blood is thicker, your reia is thicker, and your core cycles stronger and your heart beats stronger. All I am doing is building on it.”

“And where does all the poison go when you heal me?”

“Nowhere.”

Seth rubbed a tired hand across his face. So he had a pool of poison growing in his body. “Alright. I get the poisoning. But doesn’t that mean we have to continue strengthening my heart and core as well? Or are they already strong enough.”

“We are doing that equally.”

“How?”

Jabari looked from the fire between them to the piece of meat entering Seth’s mouth and Seth froze.

“You have got to be kidding me!” he spat. “Reia beast meat! I thought you said this thing was poisonous!” Then to his mind, he added: “Why am I not getting any warnings?”

No idea, one answered weakly.

“If you weren’t eating it, you’d be dead by now,” Jabari pointed out. “But we’re almost done. All that’s left is to get your convergence.”

“And that’s the hard part?” he asked.

“Not entirely. The convergence is born from a touch of enlightenment, and you have proven to be partially stupid.”

Seth didn’t like the insult but held his tongue. If the man was going to take him to Iron, he would endure it.

“But we have one more week before you are to return,” he continued, oblivious or uncaring of Seth’s discomfort. “I believe it should be more than enough to push you through.”

Seth got up, tired and baleful. He’d known combat would be the path to evolution, but this… He picked Dainik and the air thinned. Three weeks of using the weapon and he still couldn’t get used to this. He hesitated as he reached for Varmei and frowned. Turning a glance to Jabari, he found the man watching him patiently, almost curiously. His frown deepened to a scowl as he braced himself then picked it up. He felt reia reserves he still couldn’t envision cut down in half, sucked from him like a vacuum.

Here we go again.