Chapter 3: Divine Fire Awakens
Ren didn’t wait for an answer. He moved.
There was no warning, no shift in stance. One second he was standing across the glowing runes, the next his fist was buried in my solar plexus. The air evacuated my lungs in a shocked, silent rush. I doubled over, but his other hand grabbed the back of my neck, forcing me upright. His face was inches from mine, slate eyes empty of anything but cold assessment.
“Breathe through it,” he said, his voice flat. “Or don’t. It makes no difference to me.”
He released me, stepping back. I gasped, ragged, my world narrowed to the fire in my gut. The runes beneath our feet pulsed, a slow, silver heartbeat that felt like mockery.
“Again,” he commanded.
I raised my hands, a pathetic imitation of the guard stance Aria had shown me. He was a blur. His next strike wasn’t a fist but a shin cracking against my outer thigh. The muscle screamed, buckling instantly. I hit the cold, hard ground of the Iron Garden, the impact jolting up my spine. My cheek pressed against the etched metal, the hum vibrating into my skull.
“Get up.”
Every instinct screamed to stay down, to curl into a ball. But Borros’s words rang in my head. Worthless scrap. I pushed myself up, arms trembling. Ren watched, arms crossed, a statue of impatience.
The next hour dissolved into a symphony of pain.
Ren’s fist collided with my ribs in a brutal rhythm, each impact carving his contempt into my flesh. Left side. Right side. A sharp, precise knuckle drove into the soft space below my sternum. My vision started to spot, dancing with black flowers. The air was thick with the taste of my own blood from a split lip. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
“You’re dead,” he stated calmly after a combination that left me staggering. “Every time you flinch, you die. Every time you drop your guard, you die. Your enemies won’t stop because you’re tired.”
I spat blood onto the sigil-scarred ground. Rage, hot and clean, cut through the fog of pain. I’m not dead yet.
He came in low, a sweep aimed at my ankles. This time, I didn’t just try to block. I used the momentum of my stumble, throwing my weight sideways, letting my legs give way and then springing back, twisting my torso. His fist, meant for my kidneys, grazed my hipbone instead.
A miss. A near-complete miss.
Ren paused, his eyes narrowing a fraction.
He attacked again, faster. A jab at my face. I jerked my head back, feeling the wind of it brush my nose. A hook to my side. I pivoted, taking the brunt on my forearm instead of my ribs. It still hurt like hell, but it wasn’t a direct hit. I was moving, anticipating, using all of my strength just to stay upright and deflect.
For two minutes, I stood my ground. Two minutes of desperate, grinding defense. My lungs were torn cloth, my muscles liquid fire. But I was on my feet.
A flicker of something crossed his face. Not respect. Annoyance. Like I was a stubborn stain he couldn’t scrub off his boot.
He changed his tempo. He feinted high, and my exhausted eyes fell for it. I raised my guard. His real attack was a savage, rising uppercut that bypassed my arms entirely.
His fist slammed into my face.
The world snapped off, then back on in a burst of white noise and blinding agony. There was a wet, crunching sound I felt more than heard. My head snapped back, my feet left the ground, and I landed flat on my ass, skidding slightly on the smooth metal. Copper flooded my mouth. A tooth was loose on my tongue. The pain in my jaw was a nova, consuming every other thought. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt, a deep, structural wrongness that made my ears ring.
I lay there, spasming, one hand instinctively cradling my face. Tears of pure physiological shock blurred my vision.
Ren stood over me, looking down. He wasn’t sweaty. He wasn’t panting. He was pristine. A master inspecting a broken tool.
“Put some ice on that,” he said, his voice devoid of any concern. It was a statement of maintenance. “If you can’t deal with the pain, then you need to leave this academy. Lessons over.”
He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing softly until they were swallowed by the archway’s shadow. He left the garden without a scratch on him.
I stayed on the ground, cradling my ruined face. Slowly, I pushed myself up to a sitting position. I spat out the blood and the loose tooth. My jaw screamed with every tiny movement. I rubbed my sore jaw with trembling fingers, feeling the grotesque swelling already beginning.
Somehow, I got to my feet. The walk back to the dormitory was a fugue state. Cadets passed me in the dim hallways; their glances slid away from my battered face. I didn’t see them. All I saw was the empty, mocking darkness behind my own eyes.
I pushed open the door to my bunk. Tsubaki was sitting on her bed, cleaning a training pistol. She looked up, and her face shattered into horror. “Arisa! Holy shit, what—”
“Don’t,” I mumbled through my thick, aching jaw. It came out as a wet, slurred groan. I just shook my head, the movement sending fresh bolts of agony through my skull.
Aria was at the small desk. She turned, and her kind eyes hardened into chips of flint. She saw the story written in bruises and blood. She stood, but I waved her off with a limp hand.
I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t explain. The weight of the entire day—Borros’s public shaming, the haunting image of Clarissa, Ren’s systematic dismantling of my body—crushed down on me. I was so sore, so profoundly broken, that I didn’t even feel like telling them about it. Words were beyond me.
I just peeled off my sweat-soaked, bloodstained training gear, letting it fall to the floor. I crawled into my narrow bunk in my underwear, every muscle protesting, my jaw a throbbing, monstrous weight. I curled onto my side, facing the wall.
Behind me, I heard Tsubaki’s whispered, furious exchange with Aria. I heard the clink of a med kit being opened. I didn’t move. Sleep was a black tide that pulled me under, a merciful escape from the pain.
I woke to the grey pre-dawn light seeping through our small window. The first thing I did was probe my jaw with my tongue. The loose tooth was firm again. The blinding, structural agony had receded to a deep, brutal ache. It wasn’t broken anymore. Thank God. We’d learned very early on that injuries healed quickly in the Shadow Realm. Aria had mumbled something about the electrical frequency in the mortal realm slowing cellular regeneration, but I hadn’t really cared about the why. Only the result.
By morning, my jaw was merely fractured. The rest of me was a canvas of punishment. My face in the steel mirror was a mess: one eye was a swollen, purple slit, the other just puffy. Bruises in spectacular shades of plum and mustard spanned my rib cage, arms, and legs. I dressed in the stiff grey uniform for morning drills, each movement a sharp reminder of Ren’s tutorial.
Tsubaki watched me, her expression grim. “You’re not going.”
“I have to,” I said, my voice husky and strained.
She didn’t argue. She just fell into step beside me as we headed to the training yard. Aria had a different schedule, a higher-level combat seminar. I was glad. I couldn’t bear her protective fury right now.
Drills were a special kind of hell. Borros paced before our ranks, his voice a drill bit in my throbbing skull. Planks. My core, already savaged, screamed and trembled. I held on, my arms shaking, sweat dripping into my bruised eye. Wall squats. My legs burned, the abused muscles threatening to buckle. Tsubaki, beside me, held steady, a rock of silent support.
Then came the deadlifts. The weights weren’t heavy by Protector standards, but as I bent, the strain lit a fire along my battered back. My vision tunneled. I managed the lift, the set, but as I straightened from the final repetition, a white-hot spike shot from my tailbone to my shoulders. I dropped the bar with a clang that echoed too loudly in the yard.
Borros’s eyes found me. He said nothing. His contemptuous silence was worse than a shout.
I barely made it through the rest of the session. When the dismissal horn blew, I stood there, swaying slightly, my body one solid pulse of pain.
Aria was waiting at the edge of the yard. She must have finished early. She took one look at me—the way I held myself, the grimace I couldn’t hide—and her mouth set into a thin line.
“Come on,” she said, no-nonsense. She didn’t ask. She just hooked her arm under mine and started walking, pulling me along.
“Where are we going?” Tsubaki asked, falling in on my other side.
“Mark’s,” Aria stated.
Mark’s lab was in a quieter wing of the academy, a clutter of humming crystalline consoles, holographic displays scrolling with endless data, and the faint, sharp scent of ozone and herbs. Mark himself was bent over a workbench, studying a shimmering, chaotic anomaly twisting in a data sequence above a slate. He was older than us, maybe mid-twenties, with messy brown hair and glasses that reflected the blue light of his screens.
He looked up as we entered, his gaze landing on me with an analytical, almost clinical stare. “Ah. The recipient of a Kurogane-style motivational seminar.”
Aria guided me to a stool. “She needs the good serum, Mark. The one you compounded for muscle trauma.”
“Mmm,” Mark said, turning to rummage in a refrigerated cabinet. He pulled out a small, opaque gel vial. “Topical analgesic and anti-inflammatory. Cellular accelerator. Rub it into the bruised areas. Thoroughly.”
He tossed the vial to me. I fumbled it, my fingers numb and clumsy. It clattered on the floor. Aria picked it up and pressed it into my hand.
Mark glanced back at his data anomaly, then at my battered face. “You’ll probably want to strip down to apply it. Efficiency and all that.” He said it with the detached tone of someone stating a fact about chemical absorption rates.
Aria’s hand moved in a blur. She didn’t even look away from me as she backhanded Mark hard across the shoulder. The slap was sharp, startling in the quiet lab.
“Ow! What was that for?” he protested, rubbing his arm, his clinical demeanor cracking into genuine annoyance.
“For being a creep,” Aria said, her voice low. “Now go back to your numbers.”
Mark muttered something under his breath and turned back to his console, the ghost of his data anomaly casting a pale light over his sulking profile.
Aria pried the vial from my stiff fingers, broke the seal, and squeezed a measure of cool, clear gel onto her palm. “Here,” she said, her voice softening for the first time all day. “Let me get the ones you can’t see.”
She started gently working the serum into the side of my neck, where the deep ache from the uppercut had settled. Her hands were surprisingly skilled, firm but careful. The gel tingled, then a soothing numbness began to bleed through the pain, a cold fire that pushed back the ache.
I closed my eyes. In the darkness, I didn’t see the lab or my friends. I saw Ren’s impassive face as his fist connected. I heard his final, dismissive words. If you can’t deal with the pain, leave.
The serum spread its relief, but underneath it, in the marrow of my bruised bones, a new resolve began to harden, cold and sharp as the iron in the Garden. He wanted me gone. He hated my very existence.
Fine.
I’d just have to become someone he couldn’t ignore.