Chapter 43: 39: Hidden conflict

Another cliff hanger warning.

Another perspective on the same events, so of course it more or less has the same cliff hanger. More information revealed this time though. Aerien's POV this time around, so you get a pretty first hand experience now.

Aerien’s POV (15 minutes earlier)

[Everyone! Get to the stairs!] Suddenly, Falmarin burst into the room shouting those words and then quickly dived into the floor. I didn’t understand what was going on exactly, but it had been getting a little noisy outside. I had ignored it at first, but with the warning Falmarin just shouted, I got a real sense that something was very wrong.

I looked around the room, this time with all my senses heightened for anything that could be a threat. My attention immediately came to the window. There was a vine hanging in front of it that wasn’t there before, and it was definitely pulled taught and shifting back and forth in a regular pattern that did not match with the swaying of the wind. No, that was definitely the movements of someone climbing it.

I looked over to the sealed stairs, which were just opening up now. Falmarin immediately flew back up the stairs as soon as the path was open. Meanwhile, the boys and Gaerien still seemed confused. Meanwhile, I saw a boot come up over the side of the window. I realized exactly what the person attached to that foot was about to do, and there was no way we would have enough time to run. Even if we could, I doubted it would do us any good.

As I watched the person in the window flex their legs and jump, swinging back with the vine they were holding, Levin came and grabbed me around the torso under the armpits, and began to drag me toward the stairs. I chose this exact moment to suddenly shift my weight and throw a hand onto Levin’s shoulder, disrupting his balance that was already rather poor since he was bracing himself so much in order to drag me.

He toppled to the floor, dragging me with him. In that same exact moment, the glass window shattered and the feet that had come through it were quickly followed by the body of a trim elven man who skillfully followed the momentum of his swing and landed on the floor with barely a scratch on him.

While Levin was trying to get up, I used his shoulder to push off of, bringing myself to my feet. I had to get eyes on the intruder quickly in order to size him up and figure for any advantage I could use. He was wearing some kind of vest made of fur as his armor. The same armor was also sewn to several key positions on his legs. As for weapons, he didn’t come in with a lot. However, I did still catch a glint of metal at his hip that could only have been some kind of knife given how it did not protrude far and he wore it on the front of his belt.

As for my advantages, well, I was a baby. I guess my strongest advantage, aside from previous life knowledge, would be that I would be underestimated. I still didn’t have a great deal of manual dexterity, and I could hardly even bend my knees correctly due to the fact that the knee cap hadn’t properly formed yet and thus my quads lacked the leverage to pull correctly. Also, I couldn’t really walk 2 steps without falling. Normally, this would be pretty stacked in this guy’s favor. That is, if I was a normal baby, or even a normal reincarnated person. In my case though, I had one major advantage. That being, soft fist martial arts.

There is a dirty little secret about the soft fist martial arts. All of the foremost masters are old men in their 70s and 80s. Some even older. This may not seem like much of a statement at first. In fact, it is quite stereotypical to have the old martial arts master in movies. As such, most people would react to this statement with a big fat “Of course they are all old men!” However, nobody really stops to consider the true implications that come from this.

The thing is, there are several diseases common to the elderly. These diseases are less prevalent in people who stay in shape, such as a martial arts master, but there is one disease in particular that actually becomes more prevalent instead of less for those who are very physically active. Rheumatoid arthritis. Most masters of the martial arts tend to suffer from this particular disease. In the hard fist martial arts, this means you become more of an instructor only, no longer having the ability to actually perform at the martial art. However, for the gentle fist styles, these masters can adapt their style to still work even with their arthritis riddled body.

These arthritis riddled masters, being the ones who are at the top of every school and who teach the younger students, will pass down their methods until the methods that are gentle on the joints and can function even with the most severe joint problems.

The art I practiced back on Earth was around 800 years old. As such, it had gone through so many generations of this that the entire style taught you by the time you got your yellow belt how to perform all your moves as though you were decrepit and old. Because, as one of the mottoes of the school says, one day you will be.

When it comes to being an arthritis ridden old man, there really wasn’t a lot of difference from being a toddling infant in terms of mobility. As such, my only real detriment was my balance and my inability to walk more than 2 steps… I could handle that. There was one thing that could go wrong and throw all of this off though.

(Levin! Don’t touch me!) I shout back at him.

(What!?) He responds in confusion. Unfortunately, I absolutely do not have enough time to explain myself.

(Just don’t! I’m going to fight!)

There was no more time for words, because the intruder had already straightened up and had confirmed his surroundings. He began to walk toward us, and he looked straight at me and smiled.

[Don’t touch her!] Falmarin shouted, flying straight at the man’s face. However, he didn’t even seem to notice and continued walking straight through her ghostly form. That would mean this guy is non-magical then. I hadn’t put my faith in that working anyway, so that’s also fine. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I still couldn’t sense spirit energy, and thus people’s intentions, as I had in my past life. I likely wouldn’t be able to sense his anyway, beings he’s an elf, which is a type of fey. This meant I would have to pull off my move here with pure timing alone.

(Ah… Aerien..) Great! Levin is reaching for me. I swat his hand away and stumble a little, trying to keep my balance. In that time, the man has completely closed the distance and bends down to reach for me in order to scoop me off the ground. While he’s doing so, I stumble in a way that almost resembles drunkenness and collide with his bent knee.

I roll my body to the side, sliding down the outer portion of this guy’s leg as I cling onto his lower thigh which is only just barely in reach due to his bent over state in order to support myself.

[Haha! What’s this?] The man speaks for the first time, now crouching even lower in order to be able to reach me as I am so far around to his side. This brings his waist into reach and I immediately reach and grab onto his belt, my hand landing on my target right as he stops his descent. In the next moment, he managed to get his hands on me and lifted me up. As I was lifted, all I had to do was keep my arm straight and allow my hand to close and this allowed me to “lift” something else right off of his belt.

As soon as it was in my hand, I immediately pulled my arm tight to my body so he wouldn’t notice. I shifted my hands and figured I might as well try something since the alternative if this didn’t work would be about three times harder.

The man pulled my infant body to his chest. And, in the same exact motion, I made use of the force from his own action of pulling me in to drive the blade of the knife I had taken right off his own belt into his rib cage. Even through the fur armor he was wearing, the blade penetrated beautifully, and I successfully managed to get it between his ribs resulting in no deflections off of the rib cage.

[Ah! What!? Ahh..] I leaned forward and covered the handle of the knife with my body. And, with the hand that was not covering the knife, I began punching him in the center of the chest while I was struggling.

[leh e go!] I protest. Rather than react to his knife wound, he makes an effort to keep his hold on me. It seems like, for now, it all had worked beautifully. The muscles and the internal organs have no actual pain receptors, and if sliced cleanly enough you will also not immediately realize you just got a puncture wound, especially if your body is pumping full of adrenaline as it would be if you were infiltrating somebody’s home with a method such as this guy just used.

In this state, the alternate explanation of having just taken an elbow or punch can seem quite plausible as an explanation for where the pain came from. In fact, I had heard several stories about this exact thing happening in the real world. Most of these stories were from prison guards who happened to train in the dojo with me, both during my days as a student and master alike. It was a rather popular art among prison guards as they were the ones who needed non-lethal take-down methods and improved self defense the most. At any rate, they had several stories about people getting shanked and hearing from the victim that they literally did not even think they were being stabbed and thought it was just a punch.

[What’s going on!?] The voice of my mother cuts in as she arrives at the top of the stairs and sees the situation.

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[The… the fey dragon *huf* Everon… has… has ordered these children *huf* be brought to him under… under suspicion of… of being grey elves.] The man says. [Oh… what’s..] He seems very short of breath already. Between talking and fighting to keep hold of me, he is quickly using up the oxygen in his blood. And, with his lung cavity depressurized, he is no longer able to get his lungs to fill completely. His breathing has become quick and shallow.

[Let her go!] my mother shouts and then charges the guy. She runs right up to him, but he simply reaches out a hand to intercept her, pushing her down after having received her full momentum. Considering how fast she was running, that’s actually a rather impressive feat of strength. However, he seems to have been thrown off a little by his current state, and begins stumbling immediately afterward and slumps to the floor.

[What’s hap..?] as soon as I get the opportunity of his lap to put my weight on instead of his arm, I immediately shoot my legs down to step on his thigh, pulling the knife from his ribs in the process, and then I deliver an upward cut to his neck. After this, I quickly roll away out of his grip.

[Ah! What!?] He finally seems to have realized what’s going on, slapping a hand up to his neck to stop the bleeding. Unfortunately, the cut I made to his neck was not deep enough. Fortunately, the sudden realization that he had just received two fairly critical wounds caused him to panic and immediately start reaching toward me with the free hand, which of course I impale on the knife blade.

He screams and pulls back his hand reflexively at the sudden pain. I use this unobstructed opportunity to further stab the knife into his right thigh, just above the knee. With this, his mobility should be limited enough he should no longer be much of a threat.

Considering my work to be done, I roll away and then immediately look toward the window. The vine is shifting again. Another person is climbing it. That thing needs to be closed, and fast! That falmarin thing can make the stairs come and go by warping the wood of the house, it shouldn’t be that hard to turn the broken window into a solid wall. I have never managed to use that “green word” magic of the elves, but I had listened in on the concept of it both from mother’s lesson as well as my own much simpler lesson with the “smart nut” Ether guy had given me.

Ok, so I’m just supposed to push in mana and think of what I want to happen. Well, I’ve got plenty of mana from my meditation. It is not only spirit energy that comes through the energy of heaven, it’s every kind of energy. And, even if that wasn’t the case, my elf body is constantly converting all the excess spirit energy into mana, so it really ought to work out fine.

Ok, so, my intention is to have the window close. Actually, with all that’s happening, maybe I should just tell falmarin to do whatever it takes to protect me. As I begin to focus what I assume to be mana through my hand and into the floor, I suddenly feel a splitting pain in my head. Actually, I come to realize this pain has been there for a while. It seems that guy slumped over on the floor there wasn’t the only one who’s pain signals had been blocked by adrenaline. However, at this moment the pain is beginning to intensify.

I realize it’s not just my head. The pain is splitting, and it’s centered straight in the middle of my eyebrows. The pain is more intense than the blockage of the facial nerve, a phenomenon which causes a sharp pain to the area right above the eye ridge due to spamming neck muscles blocking the cranial nerve as it exists the skull. Also, if it were that, then it would be isolated to one side. This was straight in the center.

In addition, my throat hurts as well and feels like it’s tightening. My chest, right where my heart would be, is beginning to clutch in the same kind of pain. My stomach… no, not stomach, my solar plexus region feels like fire is being shot through it and that fire seems to spread to all my limbs as well as my liver and spleen nearby.

If I hadn’t just spent a week and a half learning everything there was to know about this subject, I likely would not have recognized what was going on. However, after having studied it so intensely, I realized every single location that was in pain was the exact location of one of the major or minor chakras.

The pain was becoming more and more intense. I could no longer concentrate on the idea of pouring mana and such into the tree. My mind was occupied with the concern over what exactly was happening to me, and it turned out I had exactly the method to answer that question.

-

Having spent so much time in my inner world in the last couple weeks, I had become quite good at slipping in and out of it, especially as my older self. This was a good thing with how intense the pain was, I was able to simply slip right in. However, what I saw upon arrival was something that I simply did not know what to make of.

For starters, as soon as I got in, I felt myself pelted with rain. This rain, was not coming down from above. It was hitting me from my side, blown by an intense wind like no wind storm I had ever felt before. The island that always served as a foothold whenever I came to this space… was gone. There were floating chunks of stone debris hovering all over the space like asteroids. No, not hovering, they were moving quite violently, constantly clashing into one another with massive impacts that reverberated throughout the space. It was a chaotic mess. And throughout the area, there were also bursts of flame constantly erupting from everywhere, even places that were just open air.

All four elements were going crazy, it was a complete uncontrolled mess. Even in my mental projection form, I felt the need to shield myself against this violent storm that was raging inside my spirit. However, despite all the chaos, it was not too hard to see the source of the problem if I just looked up.

As I looked to the center of my inner world, I saw my two ethereal forms filled with representations of my chakra. The maelstrom of out of control elements seemed to be centered around the two figures like twin tornadoes. As I watched, trying to get a better handle on what was going on, I came to realize the swirling energies of the elements actually seemed to be getting absorbed by the ghostly figures that represented my spirit bodies.

There was something off about it though. Between the two figures, the manner in which the elements entered the male form and the female form were different. For the male form, the void from below and the energy of heaven from above seemed to intensify. The void climbed the male form’s legs, and the heaven energy became even more intense. Also, it was no longer just the heaven’s chakra that had changed color to a pure white. The entire chakra system, including the maridians, the spirit vessels that ran from one chakra to the next, were also awash in the bright and pure light of the energy channeled from heaven.

The elements seemed only to eager to enter the male form, and the male form’s chakra system seemed to let off a bright and assuring glow that seemed to say it was satisfied and happy to receive the energy that was infiltrating it from every side. The case of the child-bodied female form was a far different case.

Unlike the male chakra body, the female form seemed to be actively suffering as a result of the energies assailing it. Also, several times, a large blast of some elemental energy would throw itself toward the female form and, instead of being absorbed as it was with the male form, it instead seemed to strike her and cause her intense pain. The worst part though, by far, was what I could see happening to the chakras within the female form’s body as I was powerless to do anything to stop it.

The heaven’s chakra, which had always been unstable for my female form, was glowing more intensely than ever and firing its energy off in every random direction. This included straight down through the female body itself, and the other chakras both major and minor did not seem to be taking well to it. As the energy was being pumped into her form, the major chakra from the sixth at the third eye, down to the third at the solar plexus, all seemed to swell well beyond their normal size. Having already noted that bigger in this case actually did mean something more akin to an injury than an increase in strength among these chakra, and having seen that the male form was not showing this behavior, I was certain this was not a good sign.

All the chakra that had become swollen up in the female form radiated intense bursts of light, not at all unlike those being fired off by the heaven’s chakra. They also began to shake uncontrollably like something was trying to escape from inside them. Right before my eyes, I saw the female form’s sixth chakra, the one at the location I had noticed having an issue first, was beginning to form a visible crack in it.

Mere seconds later, this all culminated in something unfathomable. Something that left me absolutely stupefied as to what to do next. The cracks began to spread across the little girl’s sixth chakra, until finally it exploded, burst into tiny fragments of light. Along with this, I heard an absolutely blood curdling scream. It was at this point I realized I had not clearly felt my younger self’s mind for quite a while.

Thanks to the rules of this inner world, I was able to freely teleport my mental projection to anywhere inside it I wanted to be. As I had heard the small child shrieking from somewhere within this space, I decided to transport myself immediately to her side. I found the manifestation of my child self clutching her head in absolute agony, and all she was able to do was writhe in pain, no longer even aware of the world around her. I immediately reached out and grabbed her, cradling her in my arms as she continued to do nothing but scream out and shriek in the pain that had riddled her body. The chakra manifestation that just had that happen to it, it was the one that represented her. As such, it was her feeling the pain. It was only at this moment that I realized that since I came in here I no longer felt the pain I had back in my physical body on the outside.

As though mocking the very concept of my desire to do something about this situation, a loud explosion and the sound that resembled glass shattering reverberated throughout the area yet again. The exact same sound I had heard a moment ago. Corresponding with this, the little one’s screaming and writhing only intensified as I cringed. I looked up to see that now the throat chakra was gone. And, almost as soon as I looked up, the failure of the two chakras began a cascade effect. The minor chakras seemed to begin popping all at once.

Once about half of them were gone, the heart chakra exploded, and then the most important third chakra, the Manipura as Gaerien had called it which acted as the chakra body’s actual equivalent of the heart. With that one gone, the final two major chakras as well as any of the remaining minor chakras simply seemed to flick out of existence as though they were candle flames being blown out by the wind of the third chakra exploding. That is, all of them except for the heaven’s chakra.

The great ball of white light was the last one remaining. It began to grow larger, until finally, it also exploded in the largest flash yet of any of them. After this, with the little one’s chakra system entirely destroyed, the small remaining energy fragments, just like the swirling torrent of the elements, seemed to be absorbed by the male form. After this, all at once, the storm seemed to settle down. Meanwhile, I was left with the limp body of my mental projection of my child self in my arms.

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