The Sixth School Book Ii Ch 009

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All Characters in the story are 18 years of age and above...

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Chapter Nine: Starting Over...

Alena's face remained calm even as she walked back toward her room. There was a lot on her mind, half of which she was trying to think through, and another half she didn't want to think about. Alena didn't think of herself as a particularly humble person. Unlike most prideful people out there, however, her pride didn't come about as a result of an overinflated sense of self. Rather, she had concrete achievements to back up her pride. She had been gifted with a rare mind that would relentlessly attack anything she set it to until she had either solved or overcome it. Despite all this, she'd be the first to confess that she had bitten off more than she could chew and in so doing, she'd almost been broken.

At first, giving up control was the worst part of it. From being a seventh-tier mage that had absolute control over every aspect of her body, to a crippled mage that only had some small control of her body to having to give it all up. That was how low she had fallen. As a seventh-tier mage, she had once been capable of getting almost any part of her body to open up down to the bone without any pain. That, after all, is how she'd managed to wear all her storage rings around her bones where most people wouldn't even think to look. After she took the wakeless nightmare potion, however, even blinking was beyond her. Despite fully understanding why she was paralyzed and that she had consciously chosen to do this to herself, Alena had found herself fighting to somehow get her body to move. But, like someone encased in stone, Alena had been completely immobile. Then came the pain.

This wasn't physical pain. At least with that kind of pain one could fight it off by making oneself numb or using any number of potions that could rob one of sensation. This was pain at the level of the soul. If you stub your toe, despite the general feeling of discomfort, one can at least localize the pain to the particular toe that was hurt. With her spirit body, however, there was no localizing the pain. Every bit of her, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, felt like it was one big mass of pain. The even bigger torture was the fact that her body was completely fine. Locked in her body as she had been, she could feel that everything was fine physically but at the same time was convinced that something had gone wrong as her brain had no other way of interpreting the pain she was feeling. It was a lot like feeling that your hand was burning and yet when you look at it, there are no flames on it, the skin isn't peeling, blackening, or blistering. Reality definitively tells you that you are wrong and yet the sensation of burning doesn't stop, if anything, it only gets worse with time.

For the first few days, Alena had been able to figuratively clench her teeth and bear it. Roka had kept talking to her all this time and even singing to her at times, a talent he'd never revealed he had before. It gave her something for her mind to focus on other than the pain. The more of her mana pathways he dissolved, however, the more the pain ratcheted up. Eventually, she was drowning in it. It got so bad that despite still being awake and being able to hear what Roka was saying, her mind simply couldn't process the sound. His words became an unintelligible noise that entered her ears but found no mind to make sense of them. But while she couldn't make heads or tails of what she was being told, his voice became like a golden thread in the dark depths of pain that she had sunk to. Even if she wasn't capable of swimming out of this hell, it reminded her that this was only temporary.

The lack of control she had been feeling at first was quickly superseded by the pain. Just because it was superseded, however, didn't mean that it was completely gone. If anything, it had just been bidding its time, giving her just a taste of the hell she was going to endure. The more time went by, the more the small animalistic part of her brain felt like she was a trapped animal. The paralysis merged with the pain to make an even more diabolical cocktail of torture. It got so bad that, when Roka had revealed to his familiar that he'd hit a wall, a part of her started hoping that Roka would just give up and let her die. There was a very big part of her that would have forgiven him, had he just chosen to kill her. She might have even been grateful to him for it. For better or worse, however, the boy didn't.

Alena didn't judge herself too harshly for what she thought while in the grip of the worst pain she had ever felt in her life. Still, she couldn't help but wince every time she remembered the dark thoughts she'd had concerning Roka at the time. Far from being grateful to him for not giving up, she had started to get angry at him. Rather than thinking of it as the consequences of the process, she'd started blaming him for the pain she was being subjected to. She started thinking that Roka actually wanted to cause her this pain. That he was actively torturing her instead of helping her. That, like Thane and Senna, her two former friends, Roka too had betrayed her. He had pretended to care just to get close to her. He'd used her just to get on to the path of being a mage. Now that he had no more use for her, he was using her weakness to get rid of her. She had gone down a deep and dark spiral of all the ways that she would get back at him for the betrayal.

Reaching forward, Alena turned the handle to the door to her room. Her eyes immediately moved to the boy on the bed and the guilt within her turned into a thousand blades that stabbed into her heart. The boy had done the exact opposite of what she'd accused him of. Rather than torture her, Roka had tortured himself for her sake. He had gone far above and beyond anything she could have reasonably expected of him. He didn't just put in every bit of effort he could to help her, he even risked his own life and put his future as a mage on the line for her. After close to three months under the effects of the wakeless nightmare potion, Alena only had a few moments of lucidity before passing out when she was given the antidote. In those few moments of lucidity, she got to see the tortured look on his face after all that he'd put himself through.

Even worse than the pain she could see etched onto his every feature, Alena got to see the smile he'd had at the time. A smile that told her that he didn't care about his suffering. That, to him, the fact that she was alive and her mana pathways fully dissolved, made every bit of pain that he'd suffered worth it. Both of them had passed out shortly afterward. Alena, however, would never forget that smile. The purest expression of care anyone had shown her in a really long time. That she had been thinking the worst of him was a spike in her conscience that wouldn't go away any time soon.

"How is he coming along?" She questioned Olivia, the boy's familiar, who'd been attending to him without fail since he passed out roughly a month ago.

"The density of his mana has stopped going down," Olivia answered, not looking up at her.

Sixteen. That is the final number of drops of mana that Roka drew from her core. The first two drops of mana took the density of his mana from that of a peak second-tier mage to one in the third tier. By the sixth drop, he was knocking on the mana density of a fourth-tier mage. Another six drops of mana, and he could match a fifth-tier mage in terms of mana density. This was as far as Roka went in terms of trying to increase the density of his mana. His channels, after all, were only tempered enough to handle tier-four mana, pushing it to the fifth was a serious gamble that could have easily ended in disaster. Going past this would have been just begging for the worst to happen. While still two whole tiers below the seventh tier, fifth-tier mana proved dense enough to work on her pathways, if a bit slowly. Howbeit, an issue emerged from the most unexpected of directions.

Unlike common awakening methods, the new one that Alena had come up with was an open system. Some of the mana that flowed through one's channels would be spent reinforcing the areas around the channels, in this case, Roka's body. Three days into slowly working on what remained of her mana pathways, Roka noticed that the density of his mana had started to go down. Because the density of his mana was far higher than what he could naturally produce, it was slowly losing density as it reinforced his body. With a lower mana density, his speed at dissolving her mana pathways likewise slowed down. By the time a week had elapsed, Roka found himself having to absorb another drop of mana from her core just to keep from grinding to a halt in the procedure. Painful as it was for him, Roka was forced to do this another three more times before the procedure was finally finished. With him no longer absorbing new drops of mana from her core, the density of the boy's mana had been slowly going down, reverting to what it had been before he implemented his crazy idea.

"It, however, isn't back to where it was before he began taking in your mana," Olivia continued. "Unless it begins to drop again, Roka's mana density has climbed to match someone in the middle of the third tier. With him being passed out and me not being a healer, I have no way of telling what, if any, effect your mana has had on his body. His muscles feel firmer to the touch, but that's the much that I can tell," the familiar said

Alena had been so dreading the dissolving of her mana pathways that she hadn't paused to consider what it would be like after they were fully dissolved. For the first time in several hundred cycles, she was once again a mundane human without access to mana and it was driving her up a wall. It was a bit unsettling to be so weak, Alena couldn't lie. The worst part for her, however, was the fact that she was now blind in ways she hadn't been in a really long time. As a healer, a simple scan of Roka's body with her mana senses would have been enough to tell her all she needed to know about what changes were taking place within him. Right now, the most that she could do was take a wild guess based on past experiences. The table she'd had back in the infirmary in Roka's hometown had also been treated with her mana. Now unlike the boy, the table only got small doses over a long period of time. The effect, however, seems to be largely the same with the table, the wood that made it up grew stronger and tougher over time to the point that even the strongest man in town wouldn't have been able to split it even with a sharp ax. Going by the familiar's observation, her mana seems to have had the same reinforcing effect on Roka. How far this effect went, Alena had no idea.

"So, I take it that everything went well with your test?" Olivia asked, finally turning to look at her. While not exactly cold, there was a detached neutrality to her gaze that hadn't been there before.

Returning an equally neutral gaze, Alena nodded. "I left the protection of the shroud and moved about in the city for about six hours and nothing out of the ordinary happened. It is as we feared. It's not me they are tracking," Alena reported with a glance at Roka.

Olivia turned to look at her master once more. "We should have killed them when we had the chance," she said coldly.

Alena couldn't help but think back to six months prior as they were making preparations for their escape. That many of the women in the town were pregnant by Roka wasn't all that surprising given how many of them he'd been fucking in the room she'd given him. This was something that wasn't a problem when it happened but proved to be one later on. It wasn't like Roka had any way of knowing that seventh-tier mages would be coming after them in the not-too-distant future. Alena herself didn't care all that much that Roka wanted to fuck a bunch of mundane women. Long-lived as she was, she had seen all manner of debaucheries and was rather indifferent to them all. If the boy wanted to indulge, then that was his prerogative. So long as it didn't harm her goals, he was free to do whatever he wanted. But then, her old alliance came into the picture and the whole dynamic of the situation changed.

She'd immediately known what needed to be done. Those women were the only remaining thing that could have tied them to the town. Cold and cruel as it might have seemed, they needed to die. Alena could have easily done it without first consulting Roka. Part of her, however, recognized that if she did this in secret and he somehow found out, it would irrevocably fracture their relationship. She had been the one to put so much emphasis on trusting each other and telling no lies. If she turned around and broke his trust, she'd lose him forever. Alena knew that it was irrational but, losing Roka's friendship, to her, was a worse outcome than even being chased by her former alliance. The latter she could do something about, the former, she'd be unable to recover from.

Alena could still clearly remember the look of horror that had crossed Roka's face when she told him what she was thinking. It had stung to have him look at her like she was some monster. She, however, had made sure to hold his gaze and not hide from his judgment. After all, only a monster would think to do what she had been planning to do. Alena had never tried to hide or shield the boy from the fact that she had a dark side to her that he only got brief glimpses of. This was the world he was walking into. A world that she had introduced him to. A world full of monsters. If she coddled and left him naïve to its harsh realities, she wouldn't be helping him, instead she'd be hurting the boy. If he was going to survive and even thrive as a mage, he'd need to become a monster himself, or at the very least, learn to face them and survive the encounter.

The boy had argued that they couldn't kill the women just because it was convenient for them. That there had to be another way to cover up their trail. But unlike him, she had been in the world of mages long enough to fully understand how callously the powerful treated the lives of those weaker than them. She had no malice against the women when she suggested that they give them a quick end. Rather, it was her being merciful, cold, but merciful all the same. To Alena, it wasn't a question of if but when. People didn't get to the seventh tier by being the kind to give up easily. Whoever would be sent after them probably wouldn't stop until they had turned the whole town upside down chasing after every last clue to their existence and where they'd gone. If they didn't find anything the first time, they would go over everything a second and third time. Eventually, they'd figure out that all these women were pregnant by the same man, and that the father had gone missing without a trace. Once the ones after them caught onto this thread, those women would be at their mercy. Was it in the realm of possibility that the one coming after them wouldn't harm the women? It was. Was Alena holding out hope for this? Not even for a second.

In the end, they settled on a compromise. They'd put in a failsafe. If the women were left alone then they'd come to no harm. If, however, someone directed any spells at the children in their wombs, the women would die in a matter of seconds. Alena could see that even this had been a struggle for the boy to accept. The stark reality of what they were facing was something not even he had a way of disregarding. At least this way, he could have peace in the knowledge that they didn't kill for no reason. The women had indeed been discovered and would have been at the mercy of their pursuers if they hadn't intervened to prevent this. The familiar's words, however, weren't without merit. Despite the strength of the spell she'd cast to keep their pursuers from getting anything from the pregnant women, it seemed that they had somehow gotten something that had allowed them to track them all the way here from three continents away!

Coming to a stop by the bedside, Alena regarded him for a while before speaking. "We would have lost him," she quietly said. "You and I, we are familiar with the darkness in the mage world. We've had hundreds, if not thousands, of cycles to come to terms with the ugliness in it. He hasn't. He hasn't yet become a monster like you or me. I'm not as yet sure if it's a strength or a weakness of his, but when Roka cares about someone, he does so fully. I'm only standing here because he has that kind of unreasonable care for those close to him. Care that will push him to do what anyone else would consider crazy just to protect the ones lucky enough to receive it. If we had killed those women, it would have turned him against us. Our pursuers may have caught up to us because of our decision, but, I don't think I'd do anything differently," Alena said with a small smile.

It was easy to forget sometimes since she was born into this world and had already been part for hundreds of cycles, but the mage world was a cold and cruel place. Sometimes it took someone who hadn't already been tainted by its darkness to open the eyes of those who have. What to her would be a simple logical step for the sake of self-preservation, to Roka was a monstrous act that even their very safety couldn't justify. Had she been by herself and the pregnant women somehow posed such a danger to her, she would have killed them and not even thought twice about it. This was the mage world, the strong had their way and the weak could only pray they stayed beneath the notice of the strong. Roka's horror at what she'd been suggesting had been like a bucket of cold water thrown over her head forcing her to truly confront what it is she wanted to do. It might have been the smart and expedient thing to do in the situation, but that didn't make it any less monstrous.

Alena turned from the boy to find the familiar looking intently at her. "And are you planning to turn him against me?" She asked in a deceptively calm voice.

Alena regarded her for a while before turning and moving toward the foot of the bed. "I think it's time for the evening infusion," she said instead of answering Olivia's question.

Olivia was quiet for a while before following her to the area just past the foot of the bed, the same place where Alena had had her mana pathways dissolved. Not wasting time with words, Olivia activated her storage ring and pulled the item out. If the floor wasn't so thickly carpeted, the large slab would have made a lot more noise as it fell flat on the floor. During his ascension to the first tier, the entity attached to Roka had drained all the mana from a purple mana crystal. He, however, didn't do so directly. Olivia had retained the presence of mind to place the crystal on the sigil. This forced the entity to draw on the mana from the crystal with the sigil as an intermediary. This led to the unexpected side effect of turning the the sigil and about a finger's length of stone around it to crystal. Destroying her cave abode and everything inside that she couldn't take away had naturally been part of Alena's exit strategy. When it came to the sigil, however, all they had to do was cut it out of the ground.

Despite the innate spells that Roka had gained from assimilating beast cores, he was still very new to earth magic. His control wasn't as yet refined enough for them to be confident that he wouldn't bend, break, or warp it in some way, so they had to do it using magical items that Alena had him buy from his magical store in exchange for a ring she'd inscribed with a healing spell. If he channeled his mana through the ring, it would help him recover from mild to moderate injuries. Severe ones would still require a more experienced healer to help. Despite the hassle it was to get the sigil out of the ground, it was more than worth it. Rather than have to redraw it whenever they moved to a new place, only to erase it again when she had to leave, they now had the sigil in a crystalized form.