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"Note to self," Kyro said. "Body’s strong, but organs are weak as hell. What a pain."

I coughed. "You could’ve warned me!"

"That skin of yours automatically hardens if threatened," Kyro said. "And your guardian acts independently. Catching you off guard was the only way. Otherwise, I wouldn’t. Trust me, I don’t get off on abusing little girls."

"Are you trying to piss me off?"

"No." He took another drink.

A dull throb of a headache made waves through my mind, and I pushed myself up. "Did that count? Or did the water nullify it?"

"Oh, it doesn’t matter how you heal most of the time. Only matters if it’s tempering your healing system. So we can do this all day."

"And it’s gonna help?"

"Yeah."

"Then hit me."

"Again?"

"Yeah."

"This soon?"

"Yeah. But I’m fighting back."

Kyro sighed and clutched his head as if he were hung over. Then said, "Well… I guest there’s no way around it. Drop Kira and we’ll get started."

I released Kira without complaints and told her to back off. Then, the training began.

Continuous skin peeling was the worst thing I had experienced, but that was the next worst. Even slowing down the world to a crawl, I could barely see him hit me, and with each blow, he ruptured my organs, treating my ribs and abs like a xylophone. The only organ he spared in our mock battles was my heart. But when Trant arrived to check in on us, Kyro then ruptured it because he knew Trant could heal me. That was the most terrifying experience of my life.

It was awful.

But.

What a trip.

Even in a single afternoon, his hits did less damage to my organs. By the end of the day, I could almost handle a full hit.

Or so I thought.

The next day, after shedding all the excess vira leaf tea in ways that I won’t explain, I drank more and went to training, only to learn he was holding back. My organs exploded all over again, and he didn’t hold back on anything but my brain.

I thought I was going to die, but—as was the case the day before—my organs got stronger until I remembered how excited I was about the progress—

Till the next day when I found out he was still holding back.

This happened for five days straight, but at the end of it, Trant and Reta watched Kyro send me flying so hard that I broke through a tree, and I didn’t cough out blood. It just felt like a normal impact, like the aftermath of a cartoon impact where the wall craters, but the superhero gets up just fine after some wheezing.

It was surreal.

"Got some renlock?" Kyro asked Trant as I was brushing myself off.

"She’s not ready," Trant answered. "Her cores are really something, but they can only do so much. I’d wait a couple years. Don’t want her body to explode."

"You got some?" Kyro asked Reta after getting rejected.

"She’s not ready," Reta said.

"She is ready," Kyro said. "This girl can handle just about anything."

"That might be so, but I don’t have it," Trant said. "Our leader’s benevolent like that."

Kyro took a swig. "Indeed she is."

"Can you stop talking about me when I’m right here?" I asked.

"Nope," Kyro said.

"Unfortunately not," Trant said.

I huffed and half-sat, half-leaned against a boulder. "So? What now?"

"Now, we’ll enhance your mind," Trant said.

"And I’ll continue beating your guts in." Kyro gulped down liquor. "Till you can keep up."

"Great…" I groaned.

That week, Trant pulled out a ton of elixirs, and we set to work. Or, rather, he created elixirs. They were beyond my skill level, but he still taught me what he was doing, and it was very informative.

Then, I drank them in the morning before practice—

—and found that they weren’t pleasant.

Some felt like I imagined meth would feel like, driving my brain into overdrive as I overanalyzed Kyro’s movements. I could follow his movements very well under Moxle Dilation, but my mind couldn’t process the information and would just freeze up as I watched him hit me.

The next day, I would take the opposite, drinking down an elixir that allowed me to think and analyze a battle with absolute clarity, but I couldn’t see his punches, even after pressing my acceleration spell.

It felt like a violent yo-yo, shooting up and down without ever finding a middle ground. But somehow, through the laws of entropy, muscle memory, and adaptive learning, I was able to capture his movements a little, or at least see him ball up aura before hitting me.

"How did you get this fast?" I asked after a particularly devastating attack. "I almost caught you the other day!"

"You almost caught me moving normally," Kyro said. "You don’t think you’re the only one with an acceleration technique, do you?"

"That’s just how fast you really are? What happened to being suppressed?"

"I am suppressed," Kyro said. "You’re just slow. Now you ready?"

I could tell he was hiding something, but I didn’t push it. So we continued to play this song and dance, boosting my mind—training it.

Since I never dreamt, Reta never taught me anything during that period, and I accepted that. I needed her extra time to train with Kira—my secret weapon. I couldn’t use her during the Harvest, but I figured I would need her in Misty Row. So I focused on that, fusing with her body and practicing drills with her so that I could counter Kyro with my "full strength."

I would practice Dreamscape or Tears of the Fallen next winter when I could focus on it. Right then, I needed power, so I just wrote her off.

And perhaps out of spite or because I learned some lesson I wasn’t aware of, she actually decided to teach me something one day.

It came out of the blue.

Reta suggested a hike, so I took her up on it, but she spent the whole time sleeping on my shoulder. But on the way back, she woke and gave me the most impactful lesson of my life.

It came when the symphony bugs reached their crescendo around six p.m., their most active time of activity during the springtime.

Reta rubbed her eyes and sat up as if in a trance, waving her head back and forth.

"Tell me, Mira," she said sleepily. "When you hear the dreena, what do you imagine?"

"You mean these bugs?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Musicians," I said.

"Yes… musicians…" She lifted her hands like a conductor, and an ensemble of Drokai with strange stringed instruments appeared all around us, playing the melody I was hearing. It matched perfectly.

"In Drokna, we have this saying: ’Gaelea iasa, skela trask ah.’ Those told the truth lie to themselves. It means that people hear what they want to hear, and look away from the things that they don’t want to see. And it’s the job of an illusionist to make them hear what they want to hear, and turn away from the things they don’t."

Suddenly, wolves howled in the distance. I immediately shot into action, activating Wood Wide Web, and saw nothing there. I sighed a breath of relief but then heard a bug near my foot. I looked down to pull my foot away, and when I did, I found a plant highlighted neon purple under the ground cover.

"Ah!" I screamed, stumbling back and hitting the ground. I scrambled up and looked into the ground cover and found the plant missing. "What…?"

"See?" Reta said with a protracted yawn. "You’ve lied to yourself, convincing yourself that no one can see this highlighting but you. Why? Because if you didn’t, you would have to question not only your surroundings but also your tools of survival. You wouldn’t be able to function. So you lie and lie and lie, and the moment that someone challenges that, you fall victim to it."

"But…" I muttered in a daze, lost and confused. "How? Can you actually see the highlighting?"

"Of course not," Reta said.

"Then how’d you know what color to highlight it? It was perfect."

"Was it? Covered in ground cover, peeking out, shaded by shadows. Was it perfect?"

I searched for a retort but found none.

"It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough," Reta said. "Part of that was the story I told you. I stopped us, spiked your blood to distract you, then startled you with a bug, making you see a very poisonous plant that was hiding in a plausible location. You would’ve had that reaction no matter what, as you’re conditioned to fear purple plants, even if they’re not highlighted."

I took a sharp breath, speechless.

"But I know what your highlighting looks like…" she waved her hand, and the entire forest turned into a sea of purples that looked eerily accurate. "Because I asked you about your highlighting early on, then painted plants purple throughout our hikes. Some caught your interest; some made you avoid them. I painted hundreds to figure out what the highlighting looked like, masking them behind barriers to route you away from questioning them. Now, I can route you into any trap I want. It is this tactic that has allowed the Drokai to win large-scale wars for countless generations."

I swallowed. "That’s… super impressive. And I see the value in… battles and assassinations. But that wouldn’t help me in a normal fight, right?"

"You have books at your disposal. You should never move anywhere without having knowledge about your enemies. Besides, I did tell you about storytelling, right?"

I heard a rustle and saw Kline in his invisible form, glowing with soul aura as usual, but he vanished abruptly.

"Everyone sees soul force," Reta said.

"Leave the poor girl alone," Kyro said drunkenly.

I didn’t believe he was real, but I still felt intense anxiety that he might be behind me, so I still turned around. To my shock and dismay, instead of seeing an illusion of a fairy, I saw a tree talking with a huge, jagged mouth. "What the hell did you—"

A sharp blade suddenly pressed against my neck from behind, and I swallowed slowly, cold sweat pouring down my back.

"You’re dead," Reta said.

"This is disgraceful," I said, rubbing my throat after she released me. "Three for three, one after the other. Even when I knew it was an illusion, I looked anyway."

"Mira… you’re not listening to me," Reta said.

I groaned and looked at her. "I am listening."

"But you’re not learning. Mira… you’re not falling for the sights and sounds. You’re falling for the story. Kline stalking us to protect you. Lithco showing spurts of concern—as he does. All of them are believable, so when they happen, you’d rather suggest I’m tricking you by saying they’re not there than accept that they’re fake. What if they are there? What then? That’s why you looked, even though you knew it was an illusion. You fear the day it is real, and Kyro thinks you hate him, fluttering off to drown himself in booze."

I stared at my palms absentmindedly, lost in a prison of self-reflection. Then I whispered, "Those told the truth lie to themselves."

"Those told the truth lie to themselves," Reta said. "The job of an illusionist is to match images to a person’s narratives. Do that, and you can control just about anyone."

I stared at her in awe, and she yawned, sitting on my shoulder and leaning on my head to sleep.

"Does this mean that you’re going to teach me?" I asked.

"No… You’re still not dreaming. But…" She yawned again. "I’ll go with you to Misty Row. If you won’t dream at night, we’ll dream… when you’re awake."

I watched her lay her head down and drift off into sleep. Then, I stared into dead space, thinking of the implications of leaving months ahead of schedule. But if I were ready, it would change everything.