She heard a gurgle escape the man and her eyes widened. In her introspection and struggle to resolve herself, she hadn’t been thinking straight. This was not a quick and painless death like she wanted! She panicked, frantically looking around, trying to find something to end it quickly. Her thoughts flew too fast, not settling on an object quick enough to identify what might work. After several seconds passed without a solution, she rushed up to him, swung around him, and tried to break his neck. His squirming made it harder, causing her to fail on her first attempt, but on her second try, she felt it snap and he stilled.
“Fuck.” She stopped where she was, her breath ragged. She briefly wondered why she was panting so hard. She was in great shape, the best she’d ever been in her life, that shouldn’t have made her breathe like this. She took a moment to slow her breathing and noticed that she was also shaking. Trying to calm herself, she backed up against the wall and sat down. Before she could collect herself, the voice of her instructor knocked her out of her thoughts.
“Well you certainly took your time, but better late than never.”
“Uh, I - I’m sorry?” she stammered.
“I have one final question for you. Will you take this job, or will you go back to cooking your whole life?” He spoke the word ‘cooking’ with such disgust that she almost flinched, but she was still panicking internally, resulting in an incredibly eloquent response.
“What?”
“Hello? Jowy to Helianna, you in there?” After a moment of gaping like a fish, she nodded.
“So will you take the job or not?”
“I will.” He smiled, an action she’d never witnessed coming from the man. It unnerved her, making her try to lean away from him, but the wall behind her prevented her retreat.
“Then let’s get started.” Before she had a chance to react, he grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet.
“Wait, wait, wait. What about him?” she demanded.
“What about him?”
“What about his death rights?!” she exclaimed.
“He won’t be getting them.” She gasped in horror. “This is our job. We stop people who will go against us and work to do irreparable damage to the world, through any means necessary. Now I repeat, can you do this?” She numbly nodded and he rolled his eyes. He continued dragging her out and she didn’t even get a chance to recover her mental state before they started training, which was relentless.
The next few months went by in a blur and she felt that they trained her in anything and everything. Much of what they taught her seemed to be completely useless, but when she asked, her instructor had simply told her that ‘you’ll be glad you learned it later, trust me’. When she had asked again a few days later while learning how to read and enchant runes, something she couldn’t even do as a null, he had simply given her a glare that seemed to pin her in place with its fierceness. She hadn’t asked again.
The training was incredibly rigorous and she wished her days were as simple as her first year. She had thought that it was near impossible to be worse than the schedule they’d been forced to keep at the time. Well, now she’d found the impossible. While the unpredictableness of the first year was gone, the increased rigor more than made up for it. The average amount of sleep she’d managed to get was two to four hours, not enough for anyone, much less a teenager. That’s when people are supposed to sleep more cause they’re growing! Instead, she found herself fighting exhaustion everyday while in class and stumbling through combat.
Although she did find herself drastically improving in combat. Nearly doubling the amount of practice she put into it each day would do that. The morning classes with the rest of the nulls got much easier for her and before long, she found herself winning some of the standard spars, providing great satisfaction for Helianna despite her exhaustion.
It was also the only time she interacted with the other students. If there were any other students being trained as an assassin, she never saw them. As such, most of her training was done alone with her instructor, who was not much of a conversationalist. At first, this was a relief for Helianna, who had been forced to do way too much socialization recently. After several months, her perspective started to change. Her disinterest faded and she started to enjoy the daily interactions. It could still sometimes get too much, but after months with no social gatherings draining her social energy, she could start enjoying the people.
It was in this time period that she realized something. She had turned seventeen a couple months ago. If she were at home, she would have had her gugachadokk by now, an event celebrating her coming of age. That night, she sat at her bed and took out the diamond necklace her mom had given her before she left. She sang a quiet song to herself. It was normally a beautiful song that would have been sung at the ceremony as she slowly lifted the necklace over her head. She pictured her mother’s face and the smile she knew would have been on it as she handed Helianna the necklace.
Helianna had done everything she could to avoid thinking about her family, knowing it would only bring pain and in this moment, she knew she had been right. Tears poured down her face as loneliness crashed over her like a wave, making her hands shake as she slowly lowered the necklace around her neck. She covered her mouth, trying to be silent as she cried, desperately missing her family and friends. Laying down on the bed, she held up the large diamond at the base of her necklace, turning it this way and that as it refracted the light. For the first time in many years, she cried herself to sleep as she held onto her necklace like a lifeline.
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Time seemed to pass incredibly slowly and yet incredibly quickly at the same time. Every day seemed to last forever, her lack of freetime combined with the grueling training never providing her a chance to truly rest. However, whenever she did have alone time and was awake, a key distinction, she found herself surprised at how long it had been since she’d started training. It didn’t make sense to her, but she never had the energy to think about, choosing to either practice her magic or go to sleep.
It was during one of these times that she was practicing her magic where she made her first major discovery. Her magic had the same color as sovereign magic, but it didn’t behave the same. Sovereign magic gave the users command over themselves, others, and eventually the world itself if they could be strong enough. Whatever she had was different. She had been making various attempts at providing boons herself or commanding small animals like mice over the past couple of years, but she had little luck. She couldn’t even boost her own voice, something she had expected to be easy.
In frustration at her lack of progress, she let her anger overtake her. She punched her pillow before she had finished releasing her magic, some of it still clinging to her hand. She felt it release and after only a few seconds, the pillow started shifting as if alive. Seeing her pillow animated, she panicked and focused on her magic once again, noticing that she could feel something in the pillow. It felt different from her magic, as if it wasn’t fully hers, which she’d never experienced before. Cautiously, she poked the pillow and immediately felt her magic reconnect with whatever she had left in the pillow. Startled, she recoiled, taking her magic and whatever had animated the pillow with her.
After taking a few minutes to let her heartbeat return to a more normal speed, she decided to look inward at her own mana. She knew that most people had to spend time becoming familiar with their internal mana. Each person had both attuned and unattuned mana and that without practice, it was easy to accidentally use both, therefore diluting the useful mana. Ithrax however, had no mana whatsoever, so she had never put much thought into it. She hadn’t completely disregarded the knowledge and had spent some time trying to meditate and view mana. Seeing no unattuned mana like most ithrax, she had stopped fairly quickly. Confident that there was nothing else she could accomplish by looking inward, she had stopped.
However, she now realized that was a new factor at play. There was something else within her that she could impart in an object. She had no clue what it was or what it did, but she had placed it in the pillow, albeit unintentionally, and then pulled it back out. Considering she had used her mana to do it, perhaps she could find it in the same way. She sat down on her bed to try and meditate. Meditating wasn’t required, but made it much easier as everything else could make it hard to notice. It’s like trying to see something softly glowing in the middle of the day. Meditating helped turn it to night, where it could be seen easier.
Like last time she tried, it took her quite a while to be able to feel it, and this time was no different. After a long time, she finally managed to hone in and feel her mana, but didn’t stop there. She tried to look elsewhere within herself to try to find whatever it was she imparted into the pillow. After a few moments, she noticed something subtle, and it took all her concentration to prevent herself from jolting out of her meditation when she noticed it. It wasn’t what she was looking for, but it was certainly interesting. It had the same shape as her own mana, but there was nothing there, pure emptiness. After a few minutes, it came to her. This is where her unattuned mana would be if she had any. Interesting, but not helpful.
After several more minutes, she hadn’t found anything, but she felt as if she were close. Something seemed to be on the edge of her perception, but she couldn’t quite find it. It took an agonizingly long time for her to realize that she was looking in the wrong place. Or rather, she was looking too hard. She took a mental step back and that’s when she noticed it. There was a presence within her, far larger than her mana pool that she hadn’t noticed because she’d been looking for the fine details instead of something big. With her attention now on it, she tried to identify what it was and that’s when the presence responded. There was no voice, but it seemed to address her and a single foreign thought rang through her head. ‘Hello.”
She jolted out of her meditation, her heart instantly pounding. This thing inside her was conscious and separate from her, but it didn’t seem to be able to do anything, at least for now. Terrified, she decided to put it on hold for now and see if anything changed now that she’d interacted with it. Besides, it would probably be best to wait until she had more time to experiment before interacting with it again.
Despite her own discoveries, her training continued the next day and she stopped practicing her magic. The presence within Helianna never changed, at least as far as she could tell. She never meditated as she was too afraid to interact with it again, but it never manifested in any way. After a few months, she relaxed a bit, confident that if the presence would do something, it would have done it by now. Shortly after this decision however, things changed. She had spent over three years at the academy and was now in her fourth year.
She was no longer solely training all day for every day. She actually worked some days. She still never went out on missions with her instructor, who she still didn’t know the name of, but she did start doing the easy stuff that could be done off-mission. This included a wide variety of things, and now being on the job instead of just training, it made things much more interesting.
She now helped to create many of their different consumables, including their own darts. Her instructor insisted they were hand-made, including their poisons and antidotes, which were very important to have. Her instructor had told her of another assassin who had nicked himself with his own poison arrow. Not having an antidote, he was then paralyzed for many hours before being found and killed by the very person he was supposed to be assassinating. He’d died from his own laziness.
Aside from the new respite from constant training, her schedule hardly changed. She worked or trained constantly, with Oblo and Mera constantly needling her about hanging out with the group. Her response never changed however, being as busy as she was and still needing at least some sleep to function. She trained and learned from her instructor, but at least she got a break now. As much as creating deadly toxins can be called a break anyways. It was during this year that she finally got to utilize some of her non-lethal training in spars. She would fight against other ithrax.