"Yes, I am surprised you found out!" Aefia spoke while leveling her head up to look at the woman and getting up using her elbows. "How did you know? That your pity won't last long and it would die along with your body and mind?" She spoke as she stood up and heaved heavy breathes. Her hands covered the wounded area of the shoulder and once it had lifted, the bloody stains had also lifted.
"I thought you couldn't heal yourself because I took away your magic energy." Lady gray stared with sharp eyes, but not shocked, and with a straight face, she replied nonchalantly. "You were supposed to be weak even to stand up."
"But can you look around and see if my elemental animal is anywhere to be seen?" She asked as her eyes shadowed and a smile appeared at her face following that. "While you were absorbing my energy, I absorbed your overall back. Thats why, your elemental animal is at a confused state along with your mind turning foggy by the passing minute."
"Stop spitting nonsense young girl. You almost died again, and there is still no seriousness in your face or what-so-ever. Are you that reckless?" The woman spoke while finding nothing humourous. Suddenly, her fingers started to feel numb as she continuously tried to pick up the scattered knives across the ground. Her mind, at the same time like the young girl had said, started turning hazy as she fell to her knees and recalled multiple past memories.
"What are you doing?" The woman held her head as she bowed forward, as her eyes turned watery and lost their colour. "No, that's not it. How are you doing this?! Why are you doing this?! What benefit does it give you?!" The drops of tears fell to the ground, staining it a darker black.
"I still don't understand one thing. Is revenge something so useful to humans?" Aefia spoke while losing her cool by the passing time. Behind her, the tiger seemed to have awakened from its dazed state and rushed towards her at an inescapable speed. Her sword had appeared at her hand, but she didn't use it or wield it until the beast was close enough to chomp down on her. "Sometimes, it's better to leave room for a retry. Otherwise the world would remain boring and filled with people who think that's the end."
While leaping up into the air, her sword turned abalzed as the hand movements changed from the previous time, adjusted to a one handed battle as she used the other for summoning liquid magma from the cave which shaped into a large spike before hardening. The tiger growled loudly as the sword slammed into its body a small distance away from the spike and near the core.
Using her free hand, she slowed down her own speed of descend, as the fiction burned her palm and fingers and her eyes shut close due to the impact as she went into the pile of dust. Immediately, the remaining of the body fell to the ground while falling around her, with a core at her hand which converted itself into a small reserved stone. This same stone, was now going to be a magic energy for someone else to use and gain advantages from.
Aefia coughed due to the dust and threw the stone into her inventory while dusting her clothes while she walked towards Lady Gray. "I am sorry, but I have a very heavy hesitation where I don't want to kill you." She spoke while her eyes stayed souless and very deep maroon.
"Just kill me. I am not here to improvise your doings. I sincerely believe I need to be punished for what I have done so far." Her eyes lifted to face the girl in front of her with a gaze that could kill her before a blade did. "But do remember the Guardian of silence won't let you go! You betrayer-!" Before the remaining of the word could escape her mouth, strings around her throat tied her vocal cords up.
"I don't want to hear anymore. Because I know they are all just insulting words to keep me demotivated until I face the last boss of this dungeon. You have followed me around enough, now you need some rest." She spoke while her fingers contracted and pulled on the threads that hung her up in the air and snapped her backbone.
Like that day, when Aefia was held out in the air and stabbed to death, the same vision could be seen with the lady now. Her hands stayed flopped and her head seemed to hang from threads as she turned lifeless in a few seconds and was carefully lowered after that. "You did your best. I should say, you must have had a rough time alive too." Her fingers closed the eyes and she turned around to walk towards the only entrance left.
"Aefia, how did you know that once you completed kill off the elemental beast, you will be able to stop her from coming back alive?" Puppet asked as it appeared beside her, tapping its own whiskers and turning around again and again. "You seem to have gotten way smarter over the time and no one knows. What did you do? How did you get that knowledge?"
"It was simple links here and there." She spoke after a long silence. Her eyes kept glancing back towards the dead body laying still on the ground and the fingers that turned paler over the time. "The animal was the one giving her the skills and abilities to fight back, but once it were crumbled back to dust, it won't get the ability to continue supplying it's owner the strength. When I absorbed a partial of her power, I had sent the beast into a dazed state. As soon as it recovered, I knew I had to slaughter it to avoid her from getting back up."
"That's creepy. Who knows when you would do the same thing to me. Will you?" Puppet asked as it got goosebumps and stayed just beside her head. But somehow, her mind was stuck at the woman on the ground. "Why are you so occupated with someone who had wishes to kill you? Where at the end, you killed them off, and if they are dead, why are you so worried about them?" It crossed its arms. "You should pay attention to something important like me! I saved you when that woman tried to kill you!"
"But it is still a bad thing to leave her laying on the ground. At the end of the day, she is a human. We don't know if she was forced to take the path that led her to be killed, nor do we know whether she chose this path due to something she wanted done. At the end, her mind was something neither one of us still alive could decode because most people don't tell others about their problems the way they listen to ours. Don't get me wrong, I have faced many people with that mentality." She replied while diverting her eyes away from the woman.
"Why are you saying this nonsense all of a sudden?"
"I don't know. Maybe because I had watched many people...going through this sort of things."
***
Lady Gray, one of the most powerful and independent member of the Banshees. Somehow, it felt illegal to be saying this with her own mouth, because it sounded like she had been bragging instead. Her entire appearance was a representation of her name, maybe because she wanted to have fun, or maybe because that was the actual colour of the world from her eyes.
During the younger days, she went around in every shades of the colour wheel. Most of the time, pairing herself to try colours bright orange and sometimes yellow, those were her favourites colours as most of her favourite items and toys were the same hue. Some would say, sunshine and daffodils are what children would see when they are young. Maybe that was eventually true. Not even five years old, and she was forced into child labour to support her family with their living financial crisis.
A business partner of her father's, scammed them worth of his entire estate behind their back. But when they had found out, they couldn't afford a good attorney to fight back and gave up all hopes. Her father got depressed and would end up with hangovers every day, her mother would work with many illnesses and still be able to put up a smile on her face at the end of the day. "Maybe somedays, you will be able to bring our family up in the ranks again with the knowledge you get from schools." They would say to cheer her up.
Schools, they are just a building with a faculty who try to suck a family out of all their money and leave their children in more hunger then before. Just how many were there now that could give proper education? Multiple would be filled with rich kids who isolate any one below their family ranking and that was enough to mentally suffocate her. For her, school was a prison where they couldn't learn much about lives, but rather, learning to take up mental illnesses.
Education, it's supposed to be about the world, but why does no one teach kids about life and its unexpected happenings? Why can't teachers warn the students about the difficulty they will be facing while also learning about the things surrounding life? Why are these sort of informations, needed to be learnt through facing the situations in real time on a daily basis? Or is it because the teachers think it best to have them suffer?
Nowadays, kids go to school to just show off. It's hard to find real knowledge around any campus, which is just made to attract parents like bees to honey. Some schools have high end accustoms, but they highly lack of authentic people around the campus. Why was it so that the parents thought the children would learn so much about the world, that they would be tension free for the rest of their lives?
She quit school, convincing her parents that it was just a waste of money and time where she could study it by herself like people did as a homeschool. This saved family income and allowed space to add medical fees and utility. By the time she had chosen that decision, they were living at their neighbour's tight house. They were kind enough to let them in, but only with a singular condition that they would do everything they are commanded.
House cleaning and food were a must do for her mother, and the father had to help pay the bills around the house. Lady Gray, she had no use there, except to watch her family suffer in the hands of her kind yet arrogant neighbours. Her high school exams had arrived, and she successfully passed it. Her dreams were to go to another country and attend the prestigious fashion university since it was her interest from the young age.
The money that she had saved up by working at the fabric factory as a cleaner, was all out into the fees of shipping and having her move out. For some reasons, the day she had left, it felt a little too overwhelming, like it would return to this state any more and it was set deep into her mind that it was just the feeling of loneliness and leaving. One last glance at their faces, and the whole world turned around.
They weren't happy, yet they faked it. She could clearly tell that by the way they were glancing at her with those teary sharp eyes, she had never seen them before, but she did see them on the faces of those she had once withnessed suffering until eventually, they found a chance to rest in peace. While turning away, her mind freed her from the pain she had to endure through her childhood.
Travelling through the sea, she slowly turned homesick as the last vivid image of her parents' faces floated high in her mind and she told herself all the way there, "I am going to make them proud when I walk back with my certificates." That didn't keep her motivated for long as worry started to settle in within her as she endured it the rest of the trip.
The hard work of facing all those trouble finally got paid when she came home to her parents' residence with the acceptance letter from the prestigious university she had a dream of graduating from. This was the only thing happy as she imagined how more excited her parent would be when witnessing her walking up the platform and accepting her bachelor's degree. Her hands were so nervous and filled with excitement that parts of the paper crumbled under her grip and she walked very fast with her ankles almost twisting at some points.
She ignored the pain, and knocked on the front gate of the same house her neighbours lived, but the reply she had gotten back, left her nerves flaring for the rest of her life. "Go away! I killed your parents!" The greedy neighbor spoke as she didn't hesitate the next second to hold the door and stain the interior of the house with the blood coming from the neighbour's body.
She didn't get a chance to see or witness their graves, and her mind stayed in that state for years to come. The acceptance letter stayed untouched for a very long time, and she eventually gave up all hopes and ended up on the streets where she planned on dying alone. It was around winter that time, and snow fell up to knee height everyday, when suddenly, a few groups of people appeared around her place with scary looking faces. She was only twenty and still didn't know much about the outside world.
The boss of the Banshees offered her a position at his company, and in return, he would give her a life she didn't get when she was younger. The next five years flashed by at the speed of light, and she was treated like a daughter since there was no family member from her side...left to sacrifice. That was until a strange young girl came around and killed every single family member of hers.
Her age seemed the same as when Lady Gray had agreed to quit school, and she felt like the young girl had taken the same route as her, maybe suffered the same fate. It's better to have her die than repeat what I have gone through. Thinking that, it was suddenly her life mission to kill her with the orders she had received from the Guardian of Silence, a week before meeting her.