Stormblade [Skill Merge Portal Break] (B1 Complete)

25 - Breaking (1)


Tuesday afternoon. That was the soonest Ellen could meet up again—except for Sunday, and I'd already committed that time to helping Jessie. I wasn't ready for her to meet Ellen. It'd be a nightmare.

So, here we were. Ellen sat on one of the stools in my kitchen area. "This is the second time I've been here. Is it cleaner?" she asked. Her voice seemed higher-pitched, and her eyes couldn't help but dart around the apartment. Right now, she was nothing like the E-Ranked shadow mage who ripped monsters apart with Shadow Box.

If anything, she reminded me more of an animal cornered by a predator.

"Yep. My sister owed me some cleaning time."

Ellen's face darkened for a second, then she smiled. "I'd like to meet her sometime."

"What?"

"Seriously. You haven't talked much about her, but she's clearly important to you. I'd like to meet her. We could get coffee or something," Ellen said.

"I'm not so sure about that," I said automatically. The last thing I needed was for Jessie to know about Ellen. "Right now, I need you to focus on what's about to happen. I want you to gather your Stamina to your core, right below your sternum. Then, when you feel a pain on your palm, you're going to force all the Stamina you've gathered out to your hand. It'll dull the pain."

Ellen rolled her eyes. "I know the theory. I just can't do it in practice."

"'That's why we practice.' My dad used to say that when I couldn't do something. The more we practice, the easier it'll be when we have to do it for real. He's the one who taught me this, remember?" I grabbed a kitchen knife. The last thing I needed was to fry Ellen's hand with a Stormsteel weapon. "Are you ready?"

"No."

"Okay," I said. I put the knife down and stood up. "We'll wait until you are."

Ellen breathed. It took her almost a minute before she set her arm down again, palm facing up. "Alright. I'm ready. Do it." Her eyes were screwed shut as tightly as she could squeeze them, and she trembled.

I picked up the knife and dragged it across her palm. Dull side down. That was why we practiced, after all. One small step at a time, I was going to teach Ellen how to manage her pain.

It took almost a dozen practice cuts before I flipped the blade over. By that point, Ellen was almost relaxed. She'd started talking in between cuts, though she stopped every time the blade moved from her thumb pad to the base of her pinkie finger.

"Remember what you said about the people working out at the GC? About how you could tell who the serious ones were, because they acted like it was a job?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Remember, this is your job," I said.

And then I cut Ellen's hand.

For a moment, Ellen's mind didn't even register that it felt different than the dozen other times Kade had 'cut' her palm. She'd been practicing. Moving Stamina toward her arm with every false cut, then pulling it back. It wasn't hard; honestly, using her Mana was harder. The theory was sound, like she'd told him. But making it happen for real? That was difficult.

She started pushing her Stamina just like she'd been practicing.

Then the pain hit. It started as a wet feeling on her palm. Then a burning sensation that ripped across her hand and up her wrist, pushing the Stamina back down. Her eyes flew open. Blood. Her blood.

She panicked. Tried to wrench her arm back, away from Kade's grip. But his hand was like a vise. It didn't squeeze or crush, but she couldn't get away. His calloused thumb scraped against her arm.

"Breathe. Take your time," Kade said. "The pain's not going anywhere, and the knife's done hurting you. When you're ready, I'll walk you through this. Remember that this is your job."

Ellen breathed. The knife was on the counter, and Kade was right; it wasn't going to hurt her anymore. Another wave of pain hit her, and she flinched against his grip. His arm rocked to the side, then re-centered her own. It took her a minute to calm down, and the whole time, her hand kept bleeding onto Kade's counter.

Then she finally nodded. "Okay. Okay, I'm ready."

"Great. Now, your Stamina should be swirling around your core. You want to bring it up to your shoulder—you won't need much for an injury like this. Is it there? Good. Now, breathe again." I held Ellen's wrist in an iron grip.

The cut had been fine, but somehow, she'd turned her hand in mine, covering the white countertop with a streak of blood three inches wide and a foot long. Inside, I swore to myself. That'd only get harder to clean up over time, and it was going to get on my clothes, too. I didn't have that many clean sets left.

But outwardly, I was a bastion of calmness—an eye to Ellen's storm.

Dad had done the same thing for me. I hadn't had the benefit of Stamina, of course, though he'd treated me like I did. His goal had always been to prepare Jessie and me for the moment our systems might awaken, and his instructions had worked even without Stamina. They just hadn't worked as well.

The first time he'd cut my hand hadn't been this gentle, either. It had been a fencing injury—his foil had thrown its safety end and left a jagged cut across my free palm. But, just like I was doing with Ellen, he'd grabbed my wrist, held it tight, and coached me through the pain-killing steps.

"Are you together again? Good job, you're doing great. Now, when I say go, move the Stamina to your elbow. There's a nerve/bone intersection there. You'll be able to feel it. And if you mess up, pull it back, but to your shoulder this time instead of your core." I touched the spot where her nerve crossed her elbow on the outside. "Go."

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It took almost ten minutes. And Ellen bled the whole time; by the time she slowly relaxed, the counter was covered in dark red smears, and her face was covered in tears. But she did it.

Then she did it again, but faster.

And again. And again.

I didn't open new injuries, and I never picked up the knife again. My goal wasn't torture. It was education. I simply had Ellen withdraw her Stamina, feeling the full pain again, then go through the steps.

After the sixth time, she slumped on her stool, and I caught her. "You're good. I've got you." I started—finally—bandaging her hand. It'd heal in an hour, and by tomorrow, it'd be as good as new. "You're using too much Stamina right now. My dad said it's a common mistake delvers make. Try using less next time, and you'll figure out how much you need for a given injury soon. I hardly even think about it anymore."

"Thanks," she said quietly. "For all of this. It hurt, but I learned. I owe you."

"No, you don't," I said automatically.

"I really, really do."

The door opened. "Hey, Kade," a voice said. I looked over my shoulder. So did Ellen.

And in a most excellent moment, with a bleeding woman in my arms, Jessie stared at us.

Her cane was in her hand, held in the middle instead of the grip, and in spite of the awkward situation, I felt some relief; it'd been a good day for her. Then she stopped, staring at Ellen as I propped her up with my shoulder and wrapped gauze around her hand. "Who's this? Am I interrupting something?" she asked teasingly.

And then she saw the blood.

"Nope. Uh-uh. Our deal doesn't cover that, Kade. Clean-up's all you two." She walked to her bed, pulled her laptop out of her bag, and focused on the screen and keyboard.

I sighed. We'd lost track of time, and my worst fears had been realized. "Ellen, meet Jessie. Jessie, this is Ellen."

My sister didn't talk about what had happened in the apartment until the next morning, toward the end of our bus ride to the ruins in the center of Phoenix. But once she did, it was obvious she'd just been biding her time. "So, Ellen is…"

"A friend from work," I said, staring at the buildings outside as we rolled past.

"And she was bleeding all over the kitchen because…"

"I'm teaching her how to use her Stamina to dull pain."

"And you couldn't do that at a GC center…"

"Because she needs real pain to get over some hang-ups." I stared out the window, watching the new glass-and-steel buildings—and a few older ones that had survived the Portal Blitz—as the bus crawled down Loop 101. "The GC sparring rooms have—"

"Variable-intensity damage reduction, quick healing, item repair, and Stamina/Mana acceleration within a specially-engineered, confined space," Jessie said. "It's powered by boss cores and based on research from higher-ranked portals. I'm almost done with my training, Kade. I know how it works—probably better than you do. But, Ellen. She seems nice."

The tip of my nose hurt for a split second, and I thought back to the Shadow Box that had shredded a wolf in our first E-Ranked dungeon. To the intensity with which Ellen had dug into her research on familiars. To how she'd started texting me asking for updates on the egg. "She's pretty intense."

"Says the guy cutting her hand open."

"Touche."

I went back to watching the city go by.

After the Portal Blitz, reconstruction had started with the 303 wall and moved slowly inward, toward the city center. When I'd visited these ruins my freshman year, the clean-up was just wrapping up, and construction crews had been rebuilding the tangled web of overpasses and interchanges that criss-crossed overhead.

It had been nearly four years since then, though, and Phoenix's center had been reborn. I could tell from the hellish traffic on the 101—and how, the closer we got to our destination, the worse it got. Even with the rebuild, the upgraded bus system, and the expanded light rail, everyone wanted to drive their own car if they could. A retro silver luxury car cut in front of the bus, then weaved through traffic as it inched further ahead.

Some people were in such a hurry. Of course, I was one of them, but that was about the build, not about driving.

And then, there we were.

They'd upgraded the place since my trip. A series of huge rain shelters covered the ruins, blocking out the sun and providing a semblance of cool shade over them. Concrete paths looped between them and connected them to a sprawling museum to the left; I recalled the temporary building that the artifacts had been housed in the last time I was here.

The bus parked, and the teacher up front raised a hand for quiet. As the bus gradually dropped into something that resembled silence the same way a three-legged race resembles a marathon, he started explaining the plan and breaking people into groups. I ignored it all; the kids who were supposed to be with my group would find us, and we'd have an employee running the tour.

I was only here because Jessie needed me.

The students started filing off the bus, and I glanced at Jessie's chair. It was strapped to the floor in the back, brakes engaged. With a minute's work, we could offload it and bring it along in case she needed it. But she tapped my shoulder as I looked. "Come on. Let's go. Stephen's in our group, and I don't need that."

I took one more look at it, then nodded. "Alright. If you're sure."

"I'm sure, Kade. It's a good day."

Forty-five minutes later, as the interpreter walked us through the museum and explained about the different Basketmaker cultures, Jessie finally stopped whispering to Stephen and walked slowly over to me. She'd been leaning on her cane more and more, and taking every opportunity she could find to sit down, but even so, I was surprised she'd lasted this long. Therapy always wiped her out, and she had to have known she was looking at hours of standing and walking.

"You need it, huh?" I asked.

She nodded, flushed and pale at the same time. "I…I lied earlier. It's not really a good day."

"And you made it forty-five minutes?" I dropped my voice teasingly. "You must really be crushing, Jessie. Alright, I'll go get the chair. You hold on for, oh, five or six more minutes. Tough it out. Use that standing meditation technique if you have to, or, I don't know, ask Stephen to give you a hand."

"I can take care of myself for five minutes. I do it all the time at school."

"You can sit down anytime at school."

The walk through the museum was quick; I'd seen everything a few years ago, and even if it all looked different now that it was in a brand new building, the Hohokam culture that had lived in the Phoenix valley for hundreds of years a long time ago was still fresh in my mind. I broke into a light jog once I was outside and arrived at the bus.

The driver popped the emergency exit in the back and started helping me with the straps, and the wheelchair popped free. I lifted it out and set it on the ground. "Thanks for the assist," I said.

"No problem. You that delver? They said one was on the trip," the driver asked.

"Yeah, that's me. E-Rank, so I'm not one of the big heroes you see on TV sometimes, though."

"Are you with a guild?"

"No. No guilds would take me when my system awakened," I said. Then I started walking behind the chair, pushing it back to the museum. "I'm not here as a delver, though. I'm chaperoning the group with my sister, and she needs her chair. Hopefully, I won't have to fight today."

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. But it was too late.

My phone went off.

Jessie: Something's wrong here.

Kade: What?

Jessie: I don't know. It just feels off. We're moving into the exhibit about the Colorado ruins. Mesa Verde or something. I've got a tingle in my back. Do you have the chair?

Kade: Yes. Tell me everything you see.

I had a bad feeling. As I waited for Jessie's reply to come in, I pushed the chair toward the museum faster.

Then an alarm went off. A familiar one. As it howled from a dozen speakers all across the ruins and the neighborhood, I flashed back to the centipede bugs that had poured across the street and into our house a year ago. That was the last time I'd heard this alarm this close.

A portal break. Here. Now. And Jessie was in the middle of it.

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