Returning to the place in the building where Frozhe was killed, Vera and Sya got to work moving furniture out of the way, which was rather appealingly easy. Most of the stuff would have been too heavy or too awkward to move with a single person, but a solid chunk of the furniture was destroyed in the fight the day before. Now the furniture was turned into more manageable bite-sized pieces. Thanks to that, it wasn't long before there was a large area free of any obstacles.

  “Pop quiz,” Vera said, as she placed one of the last pieces of furniture down. “How many pieces was this couch broken into?”

  “Huh?” Cirai asked, confused.

  “Five pieces,” Sya answered. “And it wasn't a couch. It was a chair.”

  “Very good. I thought I'd throw you off with that one,” Vera responded.

  “What?” Cirai asked.

  Sya explained.

  “This is part of our training. She's testing us to make sure nothing escapes our eyes. Observation is everyone's strongest weapon. To sharpen it, we need to push our perception to our limit.”

  “You can get stronger that way?” Cirai asked.

  “You can get stronger in all sorts of ways,” Vera said. “Pumping iron builds muscle, but muscle is only one way of getting stronger. Take Sya for example.”

  Cirai turned to look at the Blight Walker. When she did, Sya bowed dramatically like she just finished a show on stage.

  “Sya is physically weak. She has the constitution of a Blight Walker, so she isn’t good at close combat.”

  Sya furrowed her brows and gave Vera an affronted look. Vera continued.

  “She’s easily exhausted, and she tends to linger just outside of the fight plinking rocks towards her enemies.”

  “Hey, you were the one to give me a slingshot,” Sya said defensively.

  “But her strength doesn’t lie in fighting per se,” Vera said. “She is incredibly perceptive. She can notice a lot of details that most people won’t pick up on. Most of the time anyway.”

  “I've keyed in on some of the stuff that you don't even know about yet,” Sya thinking of Arden's little infatuation. "What do you mean 'most of the time?'"

  “Arden told me about what happened after my first training session with him.”

  Sya paled.

  “He did? I mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Vera turned to Cirai.

  “See? Most of the time. Perception is Sya’s biggest strength, to the point that I’m always surprised by it. It’s like she was born to be an observer. I don’t know what your strength is, but everyone has something.”

  “What’s Arden’s?” Cirai asked.

  Sya and Vera both took a moment to think about it. Having known him, it wasn’t hard to come up with an answer.

  “Tenacity,” Sya answered.

  “I was going to say his lack of fear, but that works too,” Vera said. “But you need to find your own strength. And if you’re trying to get stronger, you need to ask yourself a very important question.”

  “What is it?” Cirai asked.

  “Why? Ask yourself why you want to get strong. Is it a necessity or something you want? Are you willing to get hurt to grow in power?”

  Cirai scratched the back of her head, her fingers running through her shoulder length chestnut colored hair.

  “Sya said something like this as well. To be honest, I don’t want to be strong. The thought of fighting monsters and evil people terrifies me. I want to be happy, and I thought that using my powers for good would help with that. It hasn’t. I was happier working as a receptionist. This whole thing scares me.”

  Vera nodded along.

  “That’s reasonable. There’s nothing wrong with feeling fear. You don’t have to fight. You survived your trial. You’ve done your job already. If the cascade never happened you'd be living like you want to.”

  “What was that from?” Sya asked.

  “Nothing. I came up with it.”

  Cirai heard the advice and thought about it as Vera and Sya began to bicker over which TV show Vera quoted, which Vera vehemently claimed to be untrue. Cirai still didn't know what she wanted to do. She would be fine with literally anything that didn't put her in the thick of it with monsters from beyond the void trying to eat her alive. What was her calling?

  She didn't know.

  She had hoped to find the answer to that over the course of working as a receptionist, but that fell through. All that she realized was that a solid portion of the slummites had a severe deficit in positive personality traits. Most of them looked at her like she was meat, ready to be hungrily devoured. Only a select few managed to maintain their kindness, and it was those people that made her come into work each day. Some of them were standing in front of her right now giving her life advice.

  “All I'm saying is that your profound speeches come across as kind of forced. They aren't bad, they have good messages in them, but they feel kind of disjointed,” Sya said.

  “If it gets the message across, does it really matter?” Vera asked defensively.

  “A bit. Some of it can get lost in translation for the listener.”

  As their argument continued, Cirai was reminded that for all of the inhuman feats the trio had accomplished despite being stuck as mundanes and a Blight Walker, they were fundamentally no different from her. Just a human in a world much larger than themselves.

  And man, did they act human.

  As soon as Cirai had the thought, Vera turned teaching mode on. She pulled one of her many old swords from her inventory, ending further argument from her disciples.

  “Alright Sya. I'm gonna teach you what I taught Arden back in the Mausoleum.”

  Vera offered Sya the hilt of the sword. Sya gave it a quick once over, and reluctantly grabbed the aged weapon.

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  “I don't think Arden wants me to be in the thick of it with you two. Besides, I thought we already established that I'm better at range than up close.”

  Vera took a second sword out her inventory and gave it a quick slash, nodding to herself that it would do.

  “That's just because you haven't been trained yet. As a fighter, it's best to be proficient in several types of weapons. As of now, you’re a range specialist, but if something gets close to you, you’re screwed. You need to know how to at least defend yourself from up close.”

  Sya gave the sword a few swings, mimicking her teacher. She was surprised by how heavy the sword felt, and felt the strain in her wrists after her third swing. Not for the first time, she found her weak physique to be a liability.

  She grabbed her wrist and repeatedly clenched and unclenched as it throbbed with pain while Vera and Cirai looked on.

  “You swing that around like it's nothing,” Sya said. “You make it look easy.”

  “I have the advantage of being built. Everyone underestimates how heavy a real sword actually is. You feel it even more because of your years of malnutrition and your sedentary lifestyle.”

  Sya looked at Vera, scanning her entire toned, athletic, muscular body. She could see the muscles that made her look closer to a goddess of war than of beauty. Sya could only imagine how much nutrition and training it took to make her look like that.

  “Being built…” Sya muttered. “How long until I get as shredded as you?”

  “That depends. How much are you going to train?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  Vera looked at Cirai, watching her watch them. She stood on the sidelines as if waiting to be brought from the bench and on to the field.

  “Are you sure you don't want to get stronger?” Vera asked.

  Cirai nodded and sat down on the ground, crossing her legs.

  “Positive. I'll just watch and listen and try to recover my essence. I'd rather listen to you guys than deal with Podren’s incessant flirting.”

  Vera grimaced and muttered to herself. She was not a fan of playboys. Returning her attention to her disciple, she noticed that Sya was staring intently at her.

  “What?” Vera asked.

  “You’re my teacher. I want to see you in action.”

  “Alright. Watch closely.”

  Just as she had done with Arden in the stargate, Vera gripped her sword with both hands and gave Sya a demonstration this time. There was a brief moment where she only held the sword, not doing anything with it.

  The moment passed, and Vera’s sword cleaved through the air and she took a step forward. When she finished the attack, she continued with another one, taking more steps.

  Sya watched in awe as Vera continued her Dance of the Nine Phases. There were countless motions in the dance itself, but they all connected to each other gracefully and without any difficulty.

  As Vera continued, Sya could see that it looked like the swordswoman was enjoying her swords dance. Sya could see a child-like mirth apparent on her face. To Sya, Vera didn’t look like someone who used swords, but someone who loved the sword.

  Sya was reminded of what Vera said before she started training Arden. Vera was someone who wanted to get stronger. She loved the feeling.

  Sya watched on, stunned, as the sword dance came to an end. Strangely, she felt refreshed, like the air had cooled around them.

  The dance ended, and Vera spoke to Sya, her face coated in a thin layer of sweat despite the cool air.

  “So what did you think?”

  “It was…incredible. How can you move like that as a mundane?”

  “Years of practice.”

  Sya was silent about the more questionable aspects of the Dance of the Nine Phases. This wasn’t the first time Vera had shown her prowess. Vera used it back in the Mausoleum against the Maverick as a failed hail mary. Back then, it produced more than cold air, as it had actually frozen over the arena.

  There was more to it and Vera herself than met the eye, but Sya couldn’t inquire about it with Cirai listening in on them.

  For a moment, Sya said nothing. Instead she looked between the sword in her hands and Vera.

  “I wonder…” she muttered.

  Vera’s demonstration did more than just mystify Sya. For someone as perceptive as Sya, it also acted as a guide.

  The various movements were only a part of the sword dance, and they were also the least important of them. So Sya broke the Dance of the Nine Phases down in her mind. She focused on the tiny pieces of combat that Vera etched into them with her raw skill.

  After some visualizing, Sya grasped the sword’s hilt with both hands, imitating Vera’s form. Her feet were shoulder length apart, with her left foot facing forward towards her mentor, just like Vera had.

  “I think it was like this…” she muttered.

  Sya brought her sword down while taking a step forward, imitating Vera’s first strike of the Dance of the Nine Phases.

  She would have continued onto the next motion, but she stopped instead. It felt wrong. She was dissatisfied with the power she displayed. Under Vera’s watchful eye and silent gaze, Sya attempted the attack once more, and again, she was not a fan of it.

  ‘What’s the difference here? I'm doing the same thing right? Is it just the difference in muscle?’

  She gasped in realization after the thought.

  The muscle was what caused the difference in power, but it wasn’t the difference in muscle mass that caused the power disparity. It was how she used it. Vera smiled, seeing that Sya had figured it out. There was a strange excitement inside of her as Sya attempted the strike again. Vera wanted to see it.

  Using all of her weak muscles in her body, from her feet all the way to her hands, Sya performed the motion again, focusing on squeezing all of the power she could out of her body. This time, Sya stopped the dance, not because she was dissatisfied, but because she could feel her body begin to lock up. With a grunt, she fell to her knee and groaned in pain. Her body just wasn’t able to perform such a strike without any backlash.

  Vera was at her side immediately with a proud smile on her face.

  “Where the hell did you and Arden come from?” Vera asked, laying Sya down. “Seriously. I didn’t even have to tell you how to do that. You just figured it out.”

  Sya chuckled.

  “I learned it from watching you.”

  “Your perception is crazy.”

  Sya slowly got to her feet with Vera’s help. Her body ached, but she wanted more. If this was what power tasted like, she could understand why both Arden and Vera were hooked. Cirai opened her eyes, finally topped off on essence. She wished she could have seen what it was that Sya managed to do, but unfortunately she was too focused on her own recovery. Sya drew her sword again, prepared to continue her imitation of the Dance of the Nine Phases, but Vera put her hand on Sya’s arm, urging her to stop.

  “Please?” Sya asked. “I totally get this training now.”

  “No,” Vera said. “Trust me, I understand how good it feels to get stronger, but remember. This isn’t a good place for it. The cascade is still ongoing. We need to pace ourselves so that we are in good enough condition to fight when the world comes knocking.”

  With a sigh, Sya slackened her arm, letting it fall to her side.

  “You’re right.”

  Sya offered her sword to Vera so she could return it back to her inventory, when a monstrous pressure washed over the warehouse. The air felt heavy and was thrumming with a lively energy.

  Before they could respond to the aura that assaulted them, green cracks spread throughout the entire structure. The cracks had a black corruption flowing through them and smelled of rot.

  The metal door keeping everyone safe from the dangers of the outside world was not spared by the cracks. Countless cracks intersected with each other like it was glass. In less than a second, the door was blown off its hinges inward, and was shattered, sending a shotgun spray of shrapnel towards the three women who narrowly avoided the attack.

  Vera’s gaze sharpened as she withdrew two Satellites from her inventory. A slingshot for Sya, and an axe for herself, recently taken from the rogue Starborn.

  “The world came knocking at an inopportune time,” Vera said.

  When the dust settled, they were able to behold a vile creature. A humanoid creature standing twice the height of an average adult stood inside the warehouse across from them. It looked like a living tumor, with it being made of a rotting red mass of flesh. The cracks ran through this thing as well, exposing another fleshy mass writhing beneath the top layer.

  It had no head on its central mass. The limbs were uneven both in length and mass. Its right leg was longer but thinner than the left, and the same could be said for its left arm when compared to its right.

  Simply put, this thing was wrong.

  And it was here to hunt.