Vigor Mortis

Chapter 140: Stronger

Training starts in an hour, so I rise from torpor and make my way to the courtyard, bringing along my armor but not yet putting it on. It’s still nighttime, the island overhead blotting out the light of the sky, but I have never and still don’t possess any issue seeing clearly regardless. Of course, not every human is asleep at this time of night, especially not in the barracks, but I still thankfully don’t run into anyone before I can get down on my hands and feet in the courtyard and start thrumming my quills as hard as I can. What little light there is in the courtyard all funnels itself into my quills, the temperature in the area rapidly dropping to match. I don’t need to come to the courtyard to do this, but it’s the only place large enough and outdoors enough in the barracks to both not cause me to accidentally blind someone and not freeze the inside of a building. It’s just less of a hassle for everyone if I do this outside.

As usual, I question why I’m doing it at all. I know the answer, of course. It feels great, and Lady Vesuvius told me that my frenzy was likely just as much of a general stress response as it was a survival instinct. I should, she says, be purposefully trying to relax and make myself more comfortable where possible. It just… it feels like a disgusting perversion of justice to sit here and do something I find enjoyable after everything I did. I nearly killed my own captain. Why am I still a trainee at all? I should be put down like the rabid animal I am.

But that’s not my fate, I guess. After only a day I was back to my usual routine, everything about my training the same as before I lost control, barring the absence of Gina in our classes. Gina, of all people, got punished for this while I did not. She broke the law, while I did what I did ‘under extreme duress’ and ‘in legitimately perceived self-defense’ and my supposedly-future Captain, the real victim in all of this, ‘has declined to press charges.’ But that doesn’t change anything. I still lost control. I still ate human flesh. I still almost killed people. I am at fault. I should be punished. I don’t understand.

Predictably, understanding doesn’t come before people do, and I’m forced to stop soaking my body in stolen warmth as more and more future-and-current Templars start to wake up around the base. I’m in the middle of putting my armor on in preparation for combat class when my fellow trainees arrive, Melik’s hateful glare contrasting Xavier and Bently’s warm greetings as usual. Today is the fifth day since that awful incident, and routine has been both my escape and a grating reminder of how much I don’t deserve to be here. I finish putting on my armor and getting into formation shortly before the instructor arrives, right at dayfall. We perform our usual stretches, go for our usual run, do our usual drills, entirely as expected. The only difference is how I’ve stopped holding back. I no longer try to keep pace with my fellow trainees, freely lapping them multiple times as I complete the tasks.

The instructor responded to this by significantly increasing the distance I’m supposed to travel compared to everyone else, but I don’t care. I don’t even know if my body benefits from these exercises the way human bodies do, but I still don’t care. It’s useful nonetheless, since ‘laps’ naturally involve turning. I can get a feel for how quickly I can accelerate, decelerate, and change direction while in my armor. I have far less traction wearing chitin boots than I do with my talons, since I can’t dig anything into the ground for better grip. It feels awkward, slippery, and slow. It’s another thing to practice, doing it over and over in a different way each time until I have the movements perfectly optimized. It keeps my mind off of things.

“We’re sparring today,” the instructor barks. “Sword and board. You can cast and use talents only if you can do it while you have your weapons in hand. I’m pairing you off: Xavier and Harvey, Melik and Lark, Bently and myself. Begin.”

I resist the urge to sigh. The instructor hasn’t had me spar with Melik or Gina since the incident, but I suppose this was inevitable. At least with our helmets on, I don’t have to look at his furious glower the entire time I beat him into the ground.

I don’t really see the point of including me in the spars. The goal of these things—which I finally got explained properly to me—is much like the game of tag, as I thought. Rather than predator-fleeing practice, however, it’s live combat practice. There are some basic rules to ensure no one takes permanent damage from it, but otherwise it’s open enough to give us legitimate experience in real fights, which I can’t deny is the best way to learn. Assuming, of course, there is anything to learn.

I feel like I’d be more helpful to my team if I fought them in my capacity as a vrothizo, utilizing my speed and strength in a straightforward way so that they can learn to fight my physically superior brethren using prediction, preparation, and cunning. Baiting my kind into traps is relatively easy, and in my experience it’s the best (and often only) way to kill a physically superior foe. And when my wounds pushed me to frenzy against Fulvia, when I tried to devour Captain Jelisaveta, that is how I fought. It’s all I was. A raging animal.

My teammates need to know how to put me down when I’m like that. They have to. If it ever happens again, I want them to kill me.

…But that’s not the purpose of a spar. I’m expected to fight as a Templar, not an animal. I am judged on my ability to take down my opponent as quickly and efficiently as possible. Which means that, the moment Melik takes his first step in my attack range, I move forward and smash the flat of my blade into his foot before it can touch the ground again. He starts to topple over, leaving him the option of either collapsing to the ground or hopping slightly to reorient his balance. He makes the mistake of choosing to hop, putting his entire body in the air for a split second and making it trivial to snatch up both of his legs with a kick and make his trip to the ground that much more painful. He strikes out with his sword in midair, but I deflect it with my shield as he crashes down, my own sword coming to rest on his neck.

This is normally where a spar would end, but Melik ignores the implied warning and tries to move. We’re only using blunted training swords, so to teach him what ‘sword to the neck’ means I jab mine into his windpipe, hard. He immediately starts to choke, which is finally enough to get him to stop fighting back. I step away in case I hit his throat hard enough to warrant biomantic intervention. It’s a little hard to tell with humans what is and isn’t a life-threatening bout of choking. The biomancer on standby does indeed quickly run up to treat him, but declares he has a clean bill of health once he catches his breath. Okay, good. I was fairly sure that level of force wouldn’t crush his windpipe, but it’s comforting to know for sure.

“Lark!” the instructor barks at me, looking up from where he’s rhythmically blocking strike after unrelenting strike from Bently. “No more blows to the throat! Melik, when someone has a sword on your throat, the spar is over. You lose. Understand?”

“Sir!” Melik and I both confirm, and the instructor returns his focus to Bently. We turn back to each other.

“I don’t have any fucking clue what I’m supposed to learn here, other than ‘don’t fight a monster one on one,'” Melik hisses.

“Well, that’s a good thing to learn,” I answer plainly. “In a fair fight, I’m always going to beat you.”

“Fuck you, Lark,” Melik snaps.

“Language,” I respond automatically. “And my point isn’t to establish dominance here, it’s to suggest that you should stop fighting fair. Use your metamancy stuff. Turn the battlefield to your advantage.”

“By the time I make a single glyph, you’ll already have won,” Melik points out.

“True,” I admit, eliciting an annoyed grunt. I don’t know why he’s so mad about things he said in the first place. “Let’s assume you prepared this area in advance, in that case. I’ll stay put until you’re ready.”

“You’re fast enough to avoid my glyphs by running directly over them,” he dismisses. “It’d be a waste of time.”

“Place them in spots I can’t bypass, then,” I suggest. “Or design them to activate preemptively. Or put them on your body so they retaliate when I strike you. Or fill them with non-offensive effects that limit my movement. Or—”

“Okay, okay, shut up,” Melik snaps. “Give me a moment.”

I nod and wait, letting Melik pull his metal dust out of the vial he carries it in to start shifting it into spell alignments. I watch carefully, making sure to get a good view on every metal configuration he uses in case the knowledge turns out to be useful later. I still can’t channel, which means I can’t look at spells with mana sight to memorize them yet, but Melik’s metal glyphs are at least visible. I’ll get as much of a head start as I can.

Of course, I’m also paying attention to where Melik puts each glyph, watching as various types are spread across the battlefield and others bloom to life on his armor. My senses can’t tell one magical glyph apart from any other; I can kind of feel where they are, but they all seem more or less the same regardless of what they do. The only difference I can determine is probably in how much mana each glyph contains, and since they’re all nearly identical in this regard I assume they’re all capped at the mana value Melik’s metal collection can hold.

I hear that Melik’s casting technique turns a lot of heads; shaping metal into glyphs that cast other, non-metal glyphs would be pointlessly redundant for anyone that didn’t have Melik’s talent. He apparently can use kineticism on metal and only metal, which is a bit oddly specific but I suppose it’s not much different from Xavier, whose talent lets him use kineticism exclusively on water. I glance over at him, watching my friend fight (and repeatedly lose) against Harvey, the latter of whom isn’t even using his talent. Xavier’s jerky, almost puppet-like movements indicate that he is using his talent, since he can move around the water inside his own body. It’s apparently very difficult for him to do without simply ripping his cells and blood vessels open from the inside, so it’s good that he’s getting a better handle on it.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Melik announces, returning most of my attention back to him. Our entire sparring area is now completely carpeted in glyphs, the spot I’m currently standing being the only exception. This means Melik himself is standing on glyphs, but they aren’t activating. Are his glyphs manually activated? No, he would have put one immediately below my feet, in that case. So his glyphs just don’t activate on him? Are they designed that way? Or… hmm. Maybe one of the glyphs on his body prevents the glyphs he touches from activating. There are two glyphs on the bottom of his boots that weren’t used anywhere else.

Because, naturally, while I can’t tell the glyphs apart with my senses, I watched him cast them all. So I know how many different types of glyphs there are as well as where each type of glyph is, even if I don’t yet know what any of them do. I guess there’s only one way to find out.

“Let’s begin, then,” I say, lowering myself into a defensive stance and deciding to test what he chooses to do if I simply refuse to move from my safe spot.

Will he cast a projectile spell at me, or just make a glyph below me? He goes for the glyph, which is probably the better option. I respond by kicking a spray of dirt at him, hoping to disrupt his concentration and activate the glyphs in front of me with the projectile rather than my own body. Unfortunately, they ignore the dirt. What makes them activate? Do they detect living things? Pressure? Hmm, I smell bugs nearby. Probably pressure, or at least living things above a certain size. That’s tricky. I try to quickly smack my sword on the glyph in front of me to test this, and every single glyph surrounding me suddenly explodes.

I jump high into the air to avoid the blast. Remote activation? Really? But that’s the worst possible choice for dealing with my speed. It relies on Melik’s own reflexes, which are much slower than my ability to move. By the time he tries to blow something up, I won’t even be there anymore.

I’ve aimed my jump towards where he’s standing, though I had to take somewhat of a high arc to avoid the large blast radius of his glyphs. Wait a minute… is that what he’s going for? Forcing me into the air where I’m restricted by how fast I can fall? That normally wouldn’t be effective because I could use my webs to yank myself around, but I’m wearing gauntlets and naturally don’t have any webs set up in the courtyard. Jumping was a bad move on my part, a habit ingrained from a kind of fighting I can’t do right now.

Annoying, so annoying. Melik shouldn’t win using a trick that wouldn’t normally work. Can’t let him think I’m that easy to take down. He needs to be stronger.

I twist my body as the runes below me activate in another wide grouping, my shield down and sword up, aiming to smash Melik while blocking whatever attack he has coming from below. To my surprise, however, the glyphs don’t seem to strike me at all. Instead, their magic rapidly slows my fall, causing my swing to crest above Melik’s head as I’m suspended in midair.

“Gotcha, freak,” Melik declares triumphantly as I flail around, floating in midair. He points his shield at me, and I have no doubt the glyph attached to it is an offensive one.

“I guess in the context of the spar, you do,” I admit. “You win. Not bad.”

Melik seems annoyed, but he does lower his shield, not opting to attack after I’ve conceded. The instructor gets very angry whenever someone does that.

“The fuck does that mean?” Melik demands. “‘In the context of the spar?’ I have you dead to rights.”

“If this was a real fight I’d break my gauntlets,” I explain simply. “But I’m supposed to stay in uniform for spars.”

“Then what would you do?” he asks. “Throw them at me?”

I sigh, dropping my sword to the ground as I slowly rotate upside-down in the kineticism field. Properly undoing the straps on that hand’s gauntlet, I let it fall as well, then launch a thread from my hand onto Melik’s chestplate. With a quick yank of my finger, the two of us are pulled towards each other, and my claws meet his neck as he stumbles.

“I would do this,” I answer. “You’ve seen me making things with my webs, you should know I have them.”

Nonetheless, he still seems surprised. Do humans not think about this stuff? So strange. Before he can respond to me, though, his glyphs abruptly deactivate, causing me to fall face-first onto the ground.

“Well then I would do that,” Melik counters smugly.

“Ow,” I mumble into the dirt. I guess I deserved that.

“Why are you helping me?” Melik asks as I brush off the front of my helmet. “You know I hate you.”

“I mean, yeah, you’ve made that pretty clear,” I agree. “But I don’t hate you.”

“I know why Gina and the Captain aren’t around anymore,” Melik growls, and my memory answers him.

I’m there again. The fist comes down and I’m done taking it without answering. I warned her. I told her. She isn’t listening. She knows how dangerous I am. The loud one is louder than ever. Clearly she wants to return things to the way they were before. My teeth intercept her hand. Beautiful, delicious human blood pours onto my tongue. Yes. Yes! It’s been too long! This is the flavor I need! This is my reason for life! Why do I keep eating rats all day when I could be feasting on nearly endless swaths of incredible, unparalleled living human meat? Because it’s evil? Because it’s wrong? It sure doesn’t feel wrong. I watch Captain Jelisaveta throw the loud one off of me, and I want to laugh. Her too, then? I wonder how she’ll taste!

I wonder if she’ll manage to kill me after all?

“I know you’re nothing but a monster, deep down,” Melik continues, and I barely hold back a laugh. “So while the Templars might be dumb enough to trust you, if I ever see anything like that happen? I will take that chance to end you once and for all.”

I take off my helmet, shaking my hair to try and get all the dirt out of it before giving Melik a thankful grin.

“And that’s why I’m helping you,” I tell him gratefully. “You get it. Now come on, that trick won’t work on me if I’m frenzying. What do you have in terms of raw firepower?”

I feel as though I’m missing out on something for not being able to see his expression behind his helmet. Melik is truly speechless. I grin wider, and almost cry.

“You forgot, didn’t you? Melik, like I told you before, if you think you can successfully kill me—actually kill me fast enough that I don’t have time to hurt anyone? Do it. Please. No one able to is willing to. So hurry up and get strong enough.”

He stares at me as I put my helmet back on, pick my sword back up, and settle back into a combat stance. His next words hold an uncomfortable mixture of fear and disbelief.

“…You really mean that,” he realizes.

“Of course I mean that,” I laugh. It’s not funny, but I can no longer help it. “Why do people keep thinking I say things I don’t mean? I barely even knew what lying was before I learned it was a sin. Trust me, Melik, I get that I’m a walking disaster waiting to happen. I live that. So quit wasting time threatening me and start fighting me again, because I already know that if you had the power to put me down you would have done it by now.”

My body thrums with stress-filled energy, so I don’t give him time to prepare the field after that. We simply spar over and over, and I beat him down over and over. Not trying to hurt him or anything, just… trying to show him. Teach him what he needs. He starts to figure out the tricks, learning to predict rather than react, but a creeping dread sinks in as I watch myself adapt to him faster than he can do the same to me. By the time the instructor calls off our sparring matches, tears are welling up inside my helmet. He’s too weak, and he grows too slowly. He probably won’t ever be able to do it, and certainly not before the next time I inevitably lose control. I shouldn’t have to live through having hurt people again. I already deserve to die. Why can’t the world just do it already? I hate this. I hate everything. The horrible temptation inside me wants to find Galdra and murder everyone around her until she has no choice but to turn me to ash. Mostly because I just want to eat, and some part of me will think of every excuse imaginable to do so.

I am truly tempted, this time. But it defeats the point of dying to prevent myself from hurting anyone if I hurt people in order to die. I want to scream. I want to kill. I want to curl up in a ball and never think about anything ever again. But I shove it all aside, trying to lose myself in duty and routine. Do what I’m told. Learn what I’m supposed to. Find what the Watcher made me for, so I can do it and be done already. Practice weaving in law class. Try not to burst into tears in ethics class. Continue attempting new ways to channel in magic class.

To my horrified delight, I finally succeed in the last of those three. Because that’s what I need right now, to have even more of a path to power. The instructor immediately stops me, telling me to hold the energy inside me as carefully as possible, and try to push it towards my fingers. Slowly, carefully, he guides me through the process, since the first time is the most important and most dangerous. I need to move the power in my body into my hands so I can perform the cancel command and safely get rid of it, but I struggle with that as well. Pushing the mana through my body feels sluggish and wrong, like I’m trying to suck an artery’s worth of blood out of a tiny scrape. But keeping my focus on holding it isn’t that much more difficult than keeping my focus on not killing everyone around me (though I admit that’s a slightly different skill) so I eventually manage it, perform a perfected cancel command, and feel the pressure in my belly disappear.

I did it. I’ve proven vrothizo can be learned mages. How awful. How terrifying. I wish the instructor wasn’t so congratulatory. It frightens and infuriates me. Doesn’t he get what this means, how dangerous this could be? The silver lining, at least, is the fact that my soul apparently can’t hold much mana at all, even by novice standards. As he watches me channel, the instructor notes that most people hold mana near the center of their soul, but I only seem to be able to keep it in the outer circumference of mine. It’s abnormal, but not entirely unexpected, he tells me. After all, a nonhuman likely doesn’t have the same soul structure as a human would.

Afterwards I quickly focus on perfecting the Essential Eight, a series of spells that all Templars must know how to cast before they graduate. They’re fairly basic, but versatile and generally useful for survival: creating flame, creating light, creating noise, moving small objects, mana sight, drawing water from things, and two different kinds of basic healing spells. I can cast them all by the end of class, if very weakly. It’s just memorization, which of course is my default.

“Everything okay, Lark?” Bently asks after class. “It’s super cool that you figured out how to cast spells! I’m still getting the cancel commands right. But, um, you don’t seem very happy about it.”

“I’ll be okay, Bently,” I sigh. “Thanks for asking.”

Instinctively, he almost reaches out to give me a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but he stops himself. Bently’s default form of affection is contact, usually hugs, but I’ve made it clear that touching people makes me very uncomfortable and he’s doing his best to accommodate that. Contact just brings up bad memories for me… and nasty temptations.

“Okay, well, I don’t know if I can help, but I can listen if you want to talk about it,” he offers.

I nod, about to supply the expected second thank-you when the world decides to go and make my day that much worse. My nose catches her scent. Captain Jelisaveta is back. She’s here. She’s back. No, no no no. I don’t want to see her again. I don’t want to know anything other than the fact that she’s alive. Nothing else. Please.

Naturally, of course, she’s walking right towards me. I’m not sure what Captain Jelisaveta’s talent is, if she even has one, but she’s certainly very perceptive and never seems to have trouble finding what she wants. Here it is, then. Time to brace myself for an onslaught of pain from the inside and the out. I’m already trying to get the memory of her taste out of my mouth when she finally shows up, waving what I know must be her freshly-grown arm in my direction.

“Trainee!” she greets me with confusing cheerfulness. “Hey there! The Lady finally let me out of bed. Are you doing okay? You need anything? You’ve been stuck in the barracks without me, right?”

I blink, finding myself speechless. She’s just… acting normal? Why? What? I can’t say anything, I only find myself staring at her arm. She notices, flexing the fingers as if to prove it works.

“Yeah, uh, First Lady Vesuvius does fast work. So as you can see, I’m A-okay. No harm done.”

“I… I ate your arm,” I blurt.

“And I got better,” Captain Jelisaveta dismisses. “And technically, I fed you my arm on purpose. Figured it might help.”

“Wait, you what?” Bently asks.

“You what?” I ask. “Are you crazy?”

My supposed future captain raises an incredulous eyebrow at me.

“Am I crazy? You’re the one that walked off alone and purposefully let a woman beat you half to death. It’s part of my job to keep you safe and healthy, Lark. So I did my job.”

“Captain, I… I tried to kill you,” I remind her, not understanding what’s going on here.

“And I forgive you for that,” Captain Jelisaveta answers frankly. “You have my permission to forgive yourself, too. Not that you need it.”

I stare at her, dumbfounded.

“That’s it?” I ask. “That’s all you have to say? You could have died! I ate you! I… I lost control, I could have killed dozens of people if things had gone a little differently.”

“Well, it didn’t,” Jelisaveta grunts. “And all that took me was an arm I’d already lost once anyway. Seems like a good deal to me. So if you’re sorry, don’t play martyr again and get yourself injured enough to lose your head, okay? You have an important role to play, Lark. The brass isn’t putting all this work in for you for no reason, understand?”

“No,” I admit. “Not really.”

She sighs, then jerks her head towards a side hallway.

“All right, follow me.”

She leads me off into an empty side room, turning to me with an expression of uncharacteristic seriousness.

“Okay, I want to start things off with an apology, Lark,” she tells me. “I should have never left you alone with Fulvia in the first place. That was my mistake.”

“That’s not your—”

“It is my responsibility, and my fault. I fucked up. I’m sorry. You can take or leave the apology, but it is my job to stop that kind of thing and I did fail you.”

“…Okay,” I allow. “Apology accepted. But what’s this about a reason?”

“Yeah, that’s the next thing. This is top secret, okay? You don’t have to lie to anybody about it, but if they ask you tell them you can’t answer. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Okay. Well, Lark, we need you because your teeth can bite through souls. And there are some very dangerous Liches we’re hoping you can protect the world from.”

“…Wait,” I say quietly. “You don’t mean…?”

“Vita and Ars,” Jelisaveta confirms. “Command wants you to eat them alive, because as far as I’m aware that’s the only way we have to take them out for good. Their hope is that the things that make you a monster will be the very things that save everyone in Valka.”