The whole ‘voyage to Earth’ thing was going fairly smoothly until we got a visitor.

Before that point, I would normally keep to the cabin I had been given, coming out to eat, stretch my legs, and check out the moderately sized yacht. I would also run into Joel every now and then. It’s a small ship after all. He kept asking annoying questions of me though, which got old really quickly. At one point, he asked about my Awakened form, and the different colored eyes. Seeing a chance to get back at him, I removed the glass eye that had replaced the one I lost, and thoroughly freaked him out with it. Hey—he wanted to know the answer, so I showed him with all my magnanimity.

However, things changed a little over a week into the journey. I felt the yacht slowly shudder to a stop in the middle of nowhere. I exited my cabin, to find Joel arguing with the captain of the vessel. Apparently, he had gotten a call from his superior, telling him to stop the ship and prepare for boarding. I ran to one of the small windows placed every so often on the ship, and saw that there were other vessels closing in on us.

Most of them had the distinctive look of military crafts, while the odd one out was a stark white and extremely sleek looking. Recalling the outside appearance of this yacht, I realized that the two of them were likely sister ships. Which means that our visitor is likely another member of the Al’Verath Family. Unfortunately, when I consider those who would be willing to take out another ship and meet us halfway due to impatience, only one person comes to mind.

This line of thinking was proven correct when the ships coupled together, and the airlock hissed open to reveal a beautiful woman with blue eyes and black hair. She was flanked by men in uniform carrying swords at their hips, and leveling plasma guns at me.

I quickly put my hands in the air, quirking an eyebrow at the woman.

“What?” She asked. “I have to take precautions you know. Who knows how bitter you are, or how much you want revenge.”

“But I’m weak?” I said, pointing out the overkill of this situation.

The woman snorted.

“Weak? Somehow, you managed to fool my sensors into thinking that your first Awakening failed. Anyone who can do that is not weak.”

I stayed silent.

“Wait, so you were the one that did her first…?”

“Shut up Joel. This isn’t about you right now.” She interrupted viciously. “How did you do it, Revian? How did you fool my sensors back then?”

I still didn’t say anything.

“I have ways to get you to tell me, as you should know all too well. It would be in your best interests to speak up.”

I sighed, and spoke up.

“Complicated. Need writing.”

The woman nodded acknowledgement, allowing me to go to my cabin, and grab a portable keyboard. I started typing on it, and the words were projected in holographic form above the keyboard. Over the years, my typing has gotten to the point where I write faster than some people think. Because of that, my message was finished before anyone had a chance to read it all through.

You really aren’t in a position to threaten me, bitch. Personal strength aside, I’ve been hacking into the Al’Verath databases for years now, and finding all sorts of incriminating evidence. Need I even mention the Cu’lan sector? Oh, and ask all your frigate captains about the ‘point one degree phenomena’. I’m sure that’ll be enlightening. If anything happens to me, the Al’Verath family is going down as well. Consider yourself carefully.

The woman’s face turned an entertaining shade of red as her rage mounted the further she read. By the end of my message, she was practically frothing at the mouth.

“You….you—Dare?! Guards, shoot her!”

Oops, I may have pushed her too far. The guards accompanying her immediately obeyed her directive, leveling those nasty plasma guns at me. They weren’t enough to kill, but would easily maim me.

 “Mother, calm down. Obviously, you want Revian in somewhat good condition, rather than in pieces. Additionally, combat inside of a yacht in the middle of space is never a good idea. There’s a reason space pirates were never a thing.” Said Joel, trying to placate the woman while stepping in front of me. 

That woman regained her composure annoyingly quickly, though she was still glaring at me nastily.

“Would you please,” she said, grinding her teeth painfully, “Go into Awakened form. I would like to see this eye of yours.”

I smirked, and did so. I felt a slight tingle as I Awakened. She walked closer to me, inspecting my eye. I didn’t back away, since that would be a sign of weakness, and I didn’t want to appear weak right now. Or rather, I want to appear the right sort of weak.

“Curious…This blue, should not be possible.” She said.

“What do you mean?” Asked Joel from the side.

Oh, oops. I quickly blinked.

“Wait—what the…? What did you just do, girl?” Snapped the woman.

I shook my head, staying silent.

“Did something happen?” Asked Joel, apparently eager to find out more.

“Her eye…Before she blinked, it seemed special somehow. Like the iris itself was moving slowly. Now though, it looks like any other blue eye. I don’t think I imagined that…”

I looked at her, confusion etched all over my face. Nope, don’t know what you’re talking about with the eye… Not at all.

Okay, so it was a bit of a mistake on my part. I forgot that my remaining eye’s a little special. Sue me. Unfortunately, it looked like that woman was willing to do worse. I could only cross my fingers, and hope that she lets it go. However, that’s not likely, knowing her. This was a woman who forced me into isolation for two years, to observe me after a ‘failed Awakening’. She was fastidious, unrelenting, and precise.

Her hand snaked out as she grabbed my chin, forcing me to look straight at her.

“What. Did. You. Do?”

“Let go. Did nothing.” I said. She tightened her grip further.

Damn it, damn it, damn it all! One little mistake! This wouldn’t have happened if I had remembered what happened with my eye in my Awakened form. If only…Ah, you know what. I think I’m getting annoyed. Mostly at myself, but a fair bit of it’s directed towards this woman.

I’m going to have to go for the power display now, aren’t I? But I really don’t want to. That would be giving away half my cards, since nobody has any measure on what I’m capable of so far. Most think I’m weak and venerable, but this damn woman probably thinks otherwise. After all, she knows that I falsified a failed awakening somehow, and more. In her mind, I’m more than capable of messing with the equipment used to measure stuff after an awakening. She thinks that the 1st divide ranking is wrong, and that I changed it somehow. This woman is really, really smart, after all. It’s her only plus point.

Besides, like Joel so aptly pointed out, fighting in a space ship is a very bad idea. It only takes one tear in the ship to suck us all out into the great void.

Ah, shit. She’s lifting me into the air now. I flailed my legs a little to make myself seem a little more helpless. Though, my size would normally do a good job of convincing people of that. This woman is not convinced.

“Tell me now. I’m not a very patient person you see, and don’t really believe you about the whole hacking thing. Besides, it wouldn’t do anything to me if the Al’Verath family goes under. Your threats are entirely useless—I would suggest you start explaining yourself, Revian Snow.” She said, biting out the last word like it should hurt me. It really didn’t, you know?

I still glared at her though. She slammed me into the floor with a heavy thud. The breath whooshed out of my lungs for a brief moment, leaving me gasping on the floor. She then punched me in the face, breaking my nose painfully, and leaving blood streaming from it.

“Take her back to my ship. I have all the necessary…equipment to make Revian talk.” Said the woman to the guards following her. They picked me up, and carried me to the other ship.

Not.

Joel was quite surprised to notice me sitting next to him, completely fine. He jumped comically high. From the other side of the airlock, I heard shocked yells, and the scrambling of people. The woman burst back into our ship, furious looking. Her eyes widened in surprise when she saw me sitting next to her son, without a sign of blood or violence on me.

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“You little…Are you a freaking teleporter? Fuck, this makes things complicated now.” She said under her breath, not intending for anyone to hear.

And so our little game began. She wanted to cause me pain oh so badly, but I wasn’t willing to feel it. She would attempt to capture me, only to have her prey slip away at the last possible second. I never actively taunted her, but the mere fact that I was seemingly untouchable infuriated the woman. Nothing she tried seemed to work. At first, she would think that the drugs slipped into my food got to me, but then I would disappear from her grasp right before she could capture me. And reappear somewhere else without a single thing wrong with me. She would try to get me with iridium handcuffs while asleep, only to have me vanish right before they clicked shut. Things like that, you know? There were dozens of iterations of such encounters over the week. I had to stay in my Awakened form all the time, lest she accidentally get me. 

Oh, I should mention that we were moving again. The two yachts stayed coupled together, but that was no issue in space travel. It just made the voyage a little bit longer. In fact, part of what was infuriating that woman so much, was the fact that we were getting closer and closer to the earth. And she could do nothing about the fact that I was still free. I don’t think she ever stopped to consider the fact that I was going to Earth in the first place. I wasn’t doing it because of fear. I was doing it to try and get these people to leave me alone.

There are a few ways I could do that, but I decided to go with the simplest and best route. This was actually part of that plan. I need to convince people that I am untouchable. That nothing they do will cause me any harm. The woman certainly is beginning to feel that way.

It also helps that she has no idea what’s going on. I heard her thinking aloud once, trying to figure me out.

“Teleportation, obviously. With Regeneration? Maybe even Auto-Resurrection? But there should be a limit, a weakness…there always is. She’s physically weak, and doesn’t have any firepower. Does she have magic abilities?”

Just like this, indecision caused one of the brightest minds humanity has to offer to go round in circles. She knows too little about me, and my abilities. And she knows it too. Hell, she can’t even get a gauge of how powerful I am, since all I’ve been doing is avoiding her. And what she does see terrifies her even more.

You have to understand her Awakened form to know what I’m talking about. She becomes a will-o-the-wisp, able to see the true forms of whatever she gazes upon. However, when she looks at me, all she sees is a girl with an Awakening at the first step of the 1st divide. Something that obviously isn’t possible, given the way I can elude her so easily. Even worse, she can’t see anything beyond that. Normally, she would be able to see a person’s affinities, preferred style of combat, tells, etcetera, etcetera.

Not knowing something fills the woman up with indecision, and causes her to subconsciously fear me, even if she keeps telling herself that it’ll be easy to get what she wants after capturing me. Though, she’s had a bit of a problem with the capturing bit so far.

Our little game, however, ended when Earth came into view.

It was just as I had remembered it, with verdant blue oceans covering most the world, and the occasional large swath of green land breaking through the waters. The sun glowed a bright and healthy yellow, providing large amounts of light to the planet’s surface. I had unfortunately never seen too much of the sun when on Earth, though. I’ve also never seen a rainbow.

Our ships soon breached the atmosphere, shaking somewhat violently as they did so. I was strapped into a seat in my cabin, to ensure that nothing important got scrambled about.

After we reached a good height, the ships evened out and entered atmospheric flight, carrying us to our destination. Given that these ships are capable of going slightly faster than light, we got there in about a minute even with the speed vastly reduced, which gave me very little time to watch the ocean and occasional landmass pass by. Too quickly, the landing gears were going down, and we slowed to a halt on a smooth surface. I sighed, and got up, grabbing my two suitcases as well. I left the cabin, and saw that the door on the side of the craft had already opened. Presumably, Joel already left through it.

I manhandled the suitcases down the stairway that had been wheeled up to the ship, and wasn’t surprised to find myself surrounded at the bottom of them. It was a bunch of men in suits, leaving sophisticated looking guns at me. That woman was standing behind them, an ugly smirk on her normally beautiful face. Oh crap—her ship landed before ours.

“Fire.” She said, and a bullet ripped through my abdomen. My blood splashed onto the pavement. I immediately got out of there, reappearing back on my chair inside the space yacht with my wound closed back up.

Unfortunately, I felt a knife prick my neck. Ah—damn it.

“Don’t move. Else, you will die.” Said Joel from behind me. His mother recruited him. Of course that would happen. The she-devil walked up the stairs, boarding the craft with that annoying smirk on her face.

“I knew it! You really threw me for a loop there, Revian. I kept wondering about your abilities—Teleportation, with all injuries sustained mysteriously closed back up afterwards. I kept thinking that you had teleportation and one other ability that healed you. But no—you only have one. The penny dropped when I realized that you’re only reappearing in places and positions you’d been in before.” She laughed at this point.

“I figured that out halfway through the week, and spent the rest of the time verifying my hypothesis, and getting you to let your guard down. Your single ability is a minor touch of time manipulation, returning your body to the state it had been at previously. You can turn back at most an hour, with the minimum being only a few seconds.”

Is this an evil villain’s speech or something? She’s going on and on, like she wants someone to be proud of her. I mean, bravo for coming to that conclusion. It would explain the low strength that she observed of me, and the fact that I’m not past the 1st divide, since this ability would only be able to work in certain situations. For instance, if I get taken by surprise, then it’s useless, right? If I die in one hit, it also wouldn’t work.

So, she probably set up a trap for when I got off the yacht. She had someone shoot me in order to force the ability, then had Joel lie in wait at the place I had spent the most time recently—the chair inside my cabin.

I’ll admit it. She played well, and set a good trap for me.

It’s just too bad that she’s completely wrong about my abilities, then.

Time?

Pffft! I can’t believe that I actually got her to arrive at that conclusion! I mean, yeah, I was trying to, but for her to be so gullible, simply because she thinks she arrived at that conclusion herself… She puts too much stock in the power of her mind.

And with that, she was quite confused when I up and disappeared from her perfect trap. Joel’s knife ended up embedding itself into the chair’s cushions, as he tried to make good on his threat, and plunged it into my neck as I vanished.

He would swear that he hit bone, but given the fact that I ended up in front of the yacht, outside the circle of men with guns, and perfectly fine, I’d say otherwise.

That woman ran out of the yacht, pointing at me and yelling at the men to shoot me. However, she also held enough presence of mind to order then to go for non-lethal rounds. She still wants me alive, after all. She wants to see if that experiment had truly been a failure or not. Because, if it hadn’t been….

The men ran towards me, firing what seemed to be stunning rounds. They would easily knock out a fully-grown whale if hit. I dodged each round, sometimes teleporting off to the side so I could avoid a cluster of them.

Unfortunately though, my legs are a little short, and I have trouble running fast enough to get away from the men, and the woman who was screaming like a banshee behind them.

Finally, I stopped, and huffed in deep breaths with my hands on my knees. I held up my open palm towards the group running after me, asking for a bit of a break. It should go without saying that I was shot at again. I naturally teleported out of the way. I don’t want to get hit by a stunner, no way. I’m too small for something like that.

It didn’t look like the others were stopping, so I started running again, idly wondering when he would arrive. Then, the party could really start.

While I was wondering that though, something rather tragic happened.

I tripped. And fell face first onto the pavement.

I didn’t trip for no reason though. I tripped because of the dragon. It roared, and distracted me from the task of running. No, really!

The dragon, a glittering red behemoth of a beast, landed right in front of me, cutting off the path I was running in. I hurriedly got up, dusting off my clothes. The dragon leveled an awe-inspiring eye to me, and spoke in a rumbling bass of a voice.

“This is what you needed help with? Dear, she’s tiny. Not even a toothpick.”

“She teleports! Just eat her already!” Yelled the woman from behind me.

The dragon seemed to nod, and struck quickly. He regrettably chomped down on air though, as I suddenly appeared behind him.

“Not nice. Bad overgrown lizard.” I said, admonishing the thing.

He roared, and swiped his tail through my position. I shouldn’t even have to say that I wasn’t there at this point, right?

Now, I was in front of him again.

And it finally looks like I can have a little fun for once. As much as I love living normally, it does take quite a bit out of you. A release is needed. Ashenload used to be mine, before it got boringly easy for me. I guess this’ll be my outlet for today.

“Bad dragon.” I said. “Needs punishment.”

His massive head swung around again, looking mildly annoyed. I walked up to him before he could react, and slapped him.

Of course, nothing happened. His eyes widened in shock though. I don’t think the dragon expected that at all—when he got over the shock though, the dragon was completely enraged. The back of his throat started glowing a bright red, and I quickly got out of the way as he unleashed a wave of fire in my direction.

Shouldn’t have done that, you know~.

Screams rose from the plume of fire, as the dragon cooked his wife’s men alive, easily catching them in the crossfire. Though, is it crossfire if I intended for that to happen?

The woman’s shrieks could be heard quite clearly, and the dragon hastily cut off the fire, revealing a group of charred corpses, and a singed looking will-o-the-wisp floating in midair, throwing out verbal abuse to the dragon so bad, that I almost felt my ears melting off. I’m still better off then the roasted men though.

“Father, Mother—Quit fighting! Can’t you see that the girl is laughing her ass off?” Yelled Joel, who had finally caught up to the chaos.

“Our boy’s right. Let’s wipe this stain off the Earth first, and we can argue later.” Grumbled the dragon.

“For once, we agree.” Said the woman, magic circles appearing around her, heralding the activation of siege-grade magic.

Joel wisely decided to stand a good distance away, while I stood in the center of it all.

I held up a hand.

“Why am I stain?”

“Because you turned out to be powerless! Weak! A failure! You should be thankful that we let you live until now, with your piddling human form Awakening!” Yelled out the woman.

“Human? Weak? False Assumptions.” I said, trying to clarify.

“You lie—We’ve been tricked by you too many times!” Yelled the woman again, though with a little less conviction this time. I assume she’s talking about how I falsified the data from my first Awakening, pretended to be weak, kept a low profile, falsified the data from my second Awakening, played a game with her for a full week, and toyed with them in combat.

Yeah, I could see why they’d be a little angry.

But, you know, I also have reason to be angry?

“Family used me. No good.” I said.

“It was your duty!” Shrieked the woman. Ah, she’s angrier now. I guess I can’t convince them through my broken words, especially now that they’re so riled up.

So, I simply played with them until they fell asleep, reverting back to their human forms from exhaustion.

Or, in laymen terms, I knocked them out. Rather viciously, might I add.

Really now. Those two have certainly tried to mistreat their eldest daughter, haven’t they?