The Great

Lila Fairheart: The break was cool, both figuratively and literally..

The chilly air cut deep into my bones and the ice cold winds tore away at my face. The only thing that made it all bearable was the fact that we were on vacation. I walked around the house as I stared at the vast plains of land covered with huge blankets of snow. The trees and their branches had been stripped of their leaves and were instead covered with frost and snow—giving them an ethereal white glow. I could see my breath in the air and my fur coat felt nice and warm on my skin. As I walked back inside the good-old family barn-house came fully into view as its white walls blended in with the snowy surroundings.

It wasn’t anything too special, but it was home.

It had white walls and a big circular window at the very top. It had slanted roofs with a large curled overhang and a front porch with a rocking chair that sat besides the door. I walked in and immediately felt the warmth of the indoors. There was a large fireplace in the middle of the living room, and a staircase leading upstairs to where all our rooms were. The kitchen had one large marble island and several mahogany cabinets, as well as a large rectangular dining table.

But the best part about the house was my family.

“Lila! You’re back again!” A little boy with dark skin and long curly black hair ran towards me and gave me a hug. He couldn’t reach my torso and so he gave me the usual knee-hug, which made me smile.

“Hi Manny, I’ve been really busy. Sorry I couldn’t come visit more often”. Manny looked up and gave me a big smile.

“No worries! You’re here now so it’s ok. Mom and the rest of us miss you a lot though, and so does dad. But he’s been having a lot of trouble with Chi-Chi recently. Did you bring me any presents?”. I smiled absently and reached into my bag.

Manny was just about five. He was smart for his age, he could speak like a teenager, and was much smarter than one too. He wouldn’t live the life of a warrior, he wasn’t a fighter, but he had a good brain. And I was grateful. He wouldn’t have to fight, and that’s all I could ever ask for.

He was so small and cute, just like when he was a baby. He had big round eyes and was missing a tooth, but he was still always smiling. It was hard for me to not baby him, and I usually couldn’t help myself. But what he had said concerned me. “Here, these are from a…..friend of mine. Do you like it?” I handed him a yo-yo I had gotten from Geon. He always played with it but when he heard that I needed a present for my brother he gave it to me.

Manny started to fiddle with it and he gave me a satisfactory grin. “Yeah it’s cool. I bet I can get really good with it. Is this from the same guy again?” I stood up and gave him a pat on the head.

“Yeah it is. If you ever meet him you should say thank you”.

“Ok! Is he the one that’s your boyfriend?” I blushed and let out a small laugh.

“Yeah, I guess.” He shrugged and skipped away to go play. I smiled softly but the feeling of joy was short-lived.

I walked up the stairs and saw my other two siblings standing outside the door of my sister’s room. Ash and Helen saw me and for a second their faces lightened up. “Lila!”. Helen, my older sister and the eldest child of the family, tackled me in a hug. I embraced her and she smiled weakly. She was shorter than me but looked a lot older. She was more mature, her eyes looked wiser, and her hair was a little shorter. But other than that she looked similar to me. It wasn’t hard to tell we were sisters and it was the same way with Ash—my other younger brother. He was eleven and was still smaller than me, but I expected him to outgrow me soon. He looked a lot like my father, lengthy, lean, and handsome. He had a serious face and short hair. But he ran forward and gave me a hug as well. Ash nodded and led me to my father. He was so focused on listening and speaking through my sister’s door that he didn’t notice me.

“Dad.” My soft words seemed to get his attention as his eyes went wide. He walked towards me and gave me a hug. He looked into my face and fixed my hair. He held my face and smiled. “My daughter, you look as beautiful as ever”. I gave him a hug and we embraced for a while.

Then I heard a voice from my sister’s room.

“Lila?”

Her voice was faint and weak. It sounded as if she had just got done crying and I heard soft footsteps come to the door. “Yes, it’s me, Cherry. Come out.” I heard the door open and Cherry showed her face.

Out of our family, she was easily the most beautiful. She had a picture perfect face with skin the color of chocolate. Her long black hair flowed down her back as her crystal gray eyes shined. She was slim and pretty, but she was filled with sadness. She looked at me with red eyes and gave me a big hug. Tears started to fall down her face as she began to fall to the ground.

“Lila….I—I, I keep thinking about him.” Her words were choked by her sobbing and her body began to tremble. “Every time I think about you and your school, he—he pops into my head..He—he promised me—promised me..He wouldn’t..he..” She began to cry even harder and I held her tight.My heart began to light on fire. Hate, anger, malice, words couldn’t describe how I felt. Ren…..Ren did this to her. It was him….he had broken my sister. I still remembered him from that day we had met on campus. What he did to my sister…he deserved death, no, a thousand painful deaths couldn’t even repay Cherry or my family.

“I didn’t even say hi to you…I’m sorry Lila, I can’t even think of just you anymore…I’m such a terrible sister..I’m—I’m sorry.” My family watched on with solemn faces. My father held his face in his hands and my sister comforted him. Ash blocked the stairs and led Manny to a different room.

“No, no, don't ever say that. You’re a great sister. The best one that anyone could ask for. You’ve done nothing but good. No one can take that away from you, ok?” She stopped crying hard and hugged me tighter.

“Thanks, Lila. I’ve missed you so much.”

I closed my eyes and a single tear rolled down my face.

“Yeah, I’ve missed you all too.”

Geon Leventen: Two months went by quicker than I had thought.

The break was nearly over and so was training time. We didn’t have a lot of opportunities to get a lot of team training in since we were planning on doing that when all of us were back at school. Aurora went back to visit her family and Lila also periodically went to visit her family too—so it was hard planning things out. But me and Evay just stayed at the school. We had no families to go back to, and as sad as that sounded, it wasn’t so bad. We got to train together everyday, and it was a pretty odd feeling. Before Eden I had never trained a day in my life—I was too busy doing the important stuff like throwing firecrackers at temples, or making monkeys throw poo at each other in the village square. But nowadays I mostly trained for the sake of spending time with people, and my training partners also got to improve their skills—so it was a win-win for everyone. These days, Evay’s excellent defense was developing at a high rate, and he was also able to improve his Gold’s Veil as well. We spared almost everyday, which was hard but also entertaining.

Well, entertaining until someone blew something up—which was probably going happen in the next two seconds.

Evay flew at me in his Gold’s Veil form—with a maniacal smile on his face. A bright flash of yellow light blasted the boulder behind me into dust as I sidestepped it just in time. He summoned his spear, which seemed to be made of purely priceless metals. He leapt up in the air and he hurled it at full speed.I barely heard the sound barrier break as I ducked under the spear—now a blur of death. The trees behind me exploded and Evay wasted no time in pressing forward. He dashed at me and threw a high kick which I blocked. I grabbed his foot and he leapt up and kicked me in the chest with his other leg. I quickly caught his kick, grabbed both of his legs, and hurled him in a big swing. I flew at blinding speeds, clearing trees in my wake as I caught up to Evay. He immediately flipped backwards and landed on his feet. He held out one hand and another blinding flash of golden light exploded as vast areas of forest were simply turned to dust. I called on the metals of the earth and walls of tungsten enclosed around me as I felt the heat and might of Evay’s blast bang against my shields. I willed the walls to go down and I blasted towards Evay. I caught him in mid air and flipped him over my shoulder—adding an explosive blast to my throw. His golden shield went up just in time, and my explosion was blocked. He was still tossed to the ground as he landed on his feet. I concentrated hard. The soil, the earth, the trees, the ground. They all had elements of the Earth in them. It was hard for me to control the very land we stood on since it was hard to pick out the right elements to make it come under my control.

It was free, vast, noble, it never felt right to me when I controlled Mother Nature. But I felt like I would need to sooner or later…. I shut my eyes and felt the Earth shift around me as I willed the ground to swallow Evay up. Massive amounts of Earth shaped like jaws attempted to enclose Evay. He smiled and another bright glow of golden aura exploded out from him. The Earthen jaws were obliterated, and he started to fly towards me. I willed the trees and Earth to block his path. Huge oaks tumbled as they fell like giant soldiers. I jumped back and focused on controlling the things around me. Evay jumped onto a falling tree and kicked off another–I caused spikes of jagged rock to impale him but his shield decimated them into fine powder. I willed the Earth to crush him as two walls of dirt, rock, and trees slammed into him. I landed on the ground and knew it wasn’t over. I covered my eyes as another blinding flash of light went off, and Evay descended to the Earth untouched. He still had a smile on his face, but it wasn’t an Evay smile. It wasn’t wholesome, or kind, or genuine, but crazy, and dangerous. Every time he went into his new form it felt like he wasn’t himself anymore.

He didn’t look like himself either. His blinding gold and white hair as well as his golden eyes made him look inhuman. His glow and aura exuded confidence–an almost intoxicating amount. As he flew down and touched the earth it looked like he had just come down from the heavens. He looked like…a god. He smiled and in a flash, came face to face with me. I grabbed his face and tried to knee him, but he simply pushed my arms aside and head butted me instead. I covered my forehead in metal and heard a loud clang echo into the forest as Evay’s head smashed into my makeshift armor. He brought his legs up all the way to his head and kicked down at my falling body, but the earth came to my aid as a wall of dirt blocked his strike. The ground pushed me up as I flipped over Evay and encased his feet in titanium. He tried to pull away but was unsuccessful. I landed and aimed a hyper-speed kick to his liver. I felt the world slow down as I concentrated on my blast timing. I needed to add an explosion behind my kick for it to penetrate the shield, and I would have one chance to get it right.

My leg got closer, and closer, and closer, until I felt the timing snap in my head. Now.

Smoke popped around me and blue fire trailed my leg as a deafening sonic-boom roared in our ears. The blast force almost tore my own leg apart as my kick went straight through the barrier and into Evay’s side. His eyes went wide with surprise and pain as his gold and white hair faded, and he lost his ethereal robes and glow. I immediately went in and detonated an explosive blast to his torso—which connected. I followed up with a hook to the body and an uppercut to his chin. I heard bones crunch and sweat came flying off of Evay’s face as the force of the strikes blasted him out of his titanium-chains. He rolled back onto his feet. I threw a right cross and he slipped it. He threw an uppercut at me which I promptly dodged and I landed with a straight punch to his face. He spun backwards and attempted a hook kick—spinning gracefully through the air—but I ducked it and threw my whole weight into one punch. I hit his solar plexus and he let out a gasp. He fell to the ground but tried to sweep my feet. I jumped over his legs and I pinned him to the ground. He struggled but it was all in vain. I willed the vines of the earth to coil around him, and titanium quickly surrounded his body.

I smiled weakly and he sighed. “Fine, you win, again.” I relaxed and Evay was free to move. We both fell to the ground and stared up at the sky while trying to catch our breaths.

“Yeah, well, I guess I keep my streak.” He laughed and sat up.

“I’ll win one…one day.” He helped me up and we examined the state of the forest. It wasn’t good. We usually just fought in the training range, but we had destroyed that too, so we came here. I wonder if we can get in trouble for this…

We started to hike back up to the campus and we talked about our sparring sessions as usual. “Well you finally broke my barrier. I didn’t even know it could break..” Evay sounded tired but glad. He liked training more than anything else in the world, and his work ethic helped him improve rapidly.

“Me neither. I guess there’s a first time for everything, right?”

“Yeah, I guess. By the way, where have you been going in the afternoon for the past couple days? You’ve been pretty routine about it.” My face started to go a little red.

“Um…nowhere much. Just to get some fresh air.” Evay looked a little suspicious and he started to grin. “Hmm, ok. I’ll take your word for it.”

Evay had grown up a lot these past two months. It was actually kind of scary how fast he grew. It was like he had aged three years in two months, and that wasn’t an exaggeration. He was now taller than Lila and about the same height as Aurora. Previously, they had both towered over him, but now he was the one that had the height advantage. His face looked a lot less boyish and more defined, and he generally looked a lot older than before. His body had also grown as he was no longer chronically skinny. He had put on a lot of muscle and his extra height gave him more strength and size. He wasn’t extremely strong or athletic looking, but it finally looked like we hadn’t starved him for the past couple months. He looked better—to say the least. And while we had always liked him for who he was, he had gotten a lot of new ... .fake people who wanted to be friends with him. Especially girls, a lot of girls.I could tell he didn’t particularly like it. He never really liked attention, from what I could tell, and he didn’t seem to really buy all the new fake friends either. He still stuck with us and I was grateful for that, but also felt kind of bad for him.

He just wanted to train and fight–not be bothered by everything else. In a way, I related to that… Aurora was especially mad though. Evay was always a good looking kid, he was just young, boyish, and little. But he wasn’t any of those now, and so Aurora had a lot of competition.. Well, not really. She was probably better looking than any of the girls that tried Evay, and he didn’t really care for any of them except her. But who knows, maybe all of this is just in my head and I’m a big idiot for trying to understand any of this at all—because usually that was the case. Evay began to grin again. “Oh I know why…You’re sneaking off to see Lila again right? I knew it, I should follow you next time.” I looked away and put on an innocent face.

“You sure man? That’s weird you want to see all of that? I didn’t know you were like that.” Evay laughed,

“I know for sure Lila wouldn’t let you do anything. You probably call her something weird like mommy—“ I shoved him aside and we finally entered the campus grounds.

Then I remembered something important pop into my brain. “Oh yeah, you should really use your spear more. It’s a lethal weapon, throwing it and leaving it is probably a waste.” He nodded and kicked a rock down a street.

“I would, but I don’t really know how..I’ve never used a weapon to fight. I should ask Professor Vylen.” We walked back into our dorm and I plopped on the couch.

“Yeah probably. You shower first. I’m gonna take a nap.” Evay nodded and left.

I stretched my arms and legs and yawned loudly. I turned to the left and let out a surprise yelp. Sitting on the floor was Deven, our fellow classmate. He wasn’t supposed to be in our room, and I had no clue what he was doing here.Then I saw Lila come out of nowhere, then Aurora, then several other classmates of ours. It was like a giant group of people had emerged from the shadows. A kid with messy black hair and deep black eyes emerged from the darkest part of the room. He was sickly skinny, with pale white skin, but he gave me a hollow smile. “Surprise party for Evay. You like my trick?” He spoke in a melancholy tone, but I could tell he was happy—which was rare.

The boy’s name was Millen, of house Shawden. He was a little spooky and weird but he wasn’t so bad. His liquor ability allowed him to manifest areas of darkness. So he usually looked really depressed and gloomy with his black attire, but he was cool once you got to know him. I saw Nila, the girl who had been our class partner so long ago. She was still small and looked a little younger than she probably was, but she also seemed excited. I knew she could sometimes blow stuff up when she got excited, but I hoped that wouldn’t happen. I saw Lila laughing and speaking quietly to a girl named Mena, who we had met up with a little over winter break. She had long curly blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She wore a simple white blouse and I always thought that she looked like Emmy with blonde hair. Her liquor abilities involved ice and she was really useful in any situation where we needed to control a large crowd. I saw Melissa, our medical aid and part time classmate. She was mainly friends with Lila after what had happened at the hospital. In fact, a lot of people knew us through Lila. She scared me a little though…She always looked at me with a cunning smile—like I was some cadaver she could slice open. Why is my medic the biggest threat to my life? I saw several people I didn’t know, but I assumed those were the upper class men that Lila knew. Others seemed like classmates I had met long ago but never got to know very well. But most surprising of all, was Taran. He looked a little out of place as he wasn’t talking to anyone and generally didn’t look very pleased. It was like he was forced to come here—which was very likely.He crossed his giant arms and sat on the couch in the corner of the room away from everyone. He hadn’t changed at all, except now he wore heavier clothes for the colder weather. Evay wasn’t going to be back for a little bit so I went to go talk to him.

I sat down on the couch beside him and he gave me a quick glance. His expression didn’t change but he didn’t look ticked off by what I did so that was good… I put my legs up on the table and my arms behind my head. I waited in awkward silence for him to say anything, but he didn’t speak a word. I knew he didn’t like to talk a lot but that was beginning to really become clear now.. Finally he spoke. “What’s up?” He didn’t look at me but I could tell he didn’t mean any disrespect. His words carried no harsh tone—so I went on.

“Nothing much. You agreed to come here? That’s cool, we never get to see you much.” He nodded and shuffled himself into a more comfortable sitting position. Everyone else was also conversing quietly so I didn’t feel as awkward, but I still felt like I was on the ropes. Taran wasn’t an easy guy to talk to and I didn’t have much to converse about. What was I supposed to say? Did you see all the pretty flowers that are starting to grow back, Taran?You definitely seem like the type of guy that likes flowers…

But I kept talking.

“How’s training? We haven’t been there in a bit. Is everything good?”

“Yeah, not bad. It sucks you’re not there, everyone else isn’t that hard to beat.” He didn’t sound too angry but I was kind of worried. I had beaten him in front of the whole class on the first day, and so I never knew if he still held that against me. He didn’t seem like that type of person though…

“Hey, about our fight—“

“No hard feelings. I don’t do that, that’s for people who can’t accept their mistakes. I learned from that fight and moved on. No use in crying over the past. What I meant is that it’s going to be a lot more fun when you guys get back. Because all of us, not just me, have gotten stronger.” I smiled and relaxed a bit. Taran was actually not a bad guy. He was serious, but reasonable. He accepted things for what they were and seemed real. But I also smiled since I had noticed it too. Everyone’s aura in this room had gotten stronger. Their power felt more raw, more dangerous, and sharper. I was worried we wouldn’t have anything to do after the tournament, but I was glad to be wrong.

“Ok, I’ll see if you keep that attitude when I return.” He smiled a little and got up. I got up too and he faced me.

“Also, I agreed to come here for two reasons. Someone asked me too, and I wanted to apologize to your friend.”

“Evay?”.

“I caught you guys up in my fight on the opening ceremony day right? I was stupid not to watch for collateral, especially with that stupid red-hair canceling everyone’s abilities. I wanted to make things right, you know? Sorry to you guys too.”

I nodded and gave him a pat on his shoulders. It felt like I was touching stone, and I reminded myself not to challenge him to any lifting competitions. “You're a pretty good guy after all, huh.” He scoffed and I took my hands off him.

“Who was the person that asked you to come?” He pointed at Aurora, who was talking while putting the birthday cake on the table.

“She asked me if I wanted to. I usually say no to these things, but I wanted to make things right. Also, I heard Mena was going to be here?” I raised my eyebrows and I laughed.

“Oh, I see.” He smiled and we got ready to surprise Evay. We both hid behind the couch as we heard him come down the hall.

He spoke. “Ow, hey Geon, you hit me really hard in the side. It’s actually kind of impressive because my entire rib cage is numb. I don’t know if that’s good. Geon? Geon? Hey where are you—“

“SURPRISE!” We all jumped out and I made a tiny blast that exploded the confetti in my hand into the air. Everyone went to congratulate Evay and both Lila and Aurora gave him a hug. He laughed and smiled and looked generally happy. It was like he had forgotten about his wounded side, and for a little bit, I could see the little boy come back to the surface. He laughed as we lit the candle of the cake and blew it out. Everyone applauded and we all sat down to eat. It was like a small mini party. People talked to people, and everyone was doing their own thing. Evay came up to me with cake on his face and a big smile. “You knew about this?” I laughed.

“Nah, this was all them. To be honest I forgot, man.” I pointed to Lila and Aurora who stood behind Evay. She gave him a hug. He turned a little red but smiled.

“I guess I should say thank you.”

Aurora smiled and spoke. “Yeah, that would be nice, that cake was ridiculously overpriced so everyone better eat it all.” Evay laughed and Lila joined us.

“I guess we get back to work now right? All of us are here, we got a couple weeks.” We all nodded. No delay now. We needed to get our final preparations in.

Lila smiled and she guided us over to the center of the party. “All thanks to our very timely appearances, yes we should. But after this party, and after cake.”