Episode 15: The Blood of My Blood

When Arson stepped into the First Kingdom of Magic once more, he experienced an odd excitement. Troy was once again with him, but so were many others.

Khalif and the twins were also there, alongside a few others whose names Arson could not recall.

He wanted to scare as many of them away from the area as possible, but so far it hadn’t worked. He was already surprised by the group of seven that entered the dump every night.

The group often changed because many of them needed more sleep than Arson and Troy did, which they both assumed was because of their affinities toward illumination. They were always charged up and ready to go (with post-fight Troy as an exception. She always slept at least a handful of hours after each competition).

Arson had almost gone through another round of poison without her, but when he’d shared his plan, he easily translated her glare as a “no.” Both she and Jade filled him with varying levels of fear, but fear nonetheless.

“Nature is what it is,” read Arson aloud, while he chose his next poison. He wasn’t even able to move an inch before the spearlike branch tore through his belly button. The branch sprouted from the ground in front of him like a spear and attempted to rip straight through his body.

Instead the point was stopped by his newly metallic spine, and seeds were released into his bloodstream. The effect that would normally take hours took moments. Typically, the tip of the branch was known to be the most poisonous part, and that was the part that had just entered his body.

Arson did his best not to black out, as his remaining red blood cells were eaten by his overabundant white cells, while they were further infused with mana.

This pain for Arson was foreign. He’d been beaten, cut, burned and more, but this pain was unique.

To Arson, it was as though his entire body was a scab. If it was possible, he’d try to rip his own skin off to see if the itching sensation would stop. This prickling itch ran bone deep and made him sweat as he tried to focus. He forced himself to enter his Cerebral Realm and found that things had changed once again.

He’d apparently realigned his mind and soul, and now the night sky itself could be seen, starlit in the halo, above all else.

Arson lost himself in the sight of a sunlit sky that seemed to wrap itself around a portal to another place entirely within his mind.

His focus was pulled toward the tree that now spat golden white spores in every direction. Some floated toward the black hole and roots of the tree. Some toward the storm above the tree and even throughout the air of the space.

“Sparks! I wish this stuff had a For Simpleton’s guide.” This was Arson’s interior monologue. He’d only spoken the words mentally—his lips had not flinched, yet his words rang through the space and make him giggle with joy as the vibration of his voice and laughter tickled him. Before Arson could correlate the sensation of what he felt, he was pulled from his mind as the branch was pulled from his body.

The branch was pulled back into the earth with a squelch, and Arson’s now glimmering golden-white blood splattered from his stomach and all over the ground.

Everyone behind him gasped in awe as his belly button closed and left peerless skin as if he’d never had one, and grass grew higher in the area at his feet.

“Yo,” said Khalif. Everyone in the area looked at him.

“You’re telling me that you have done this how many times now? Three? No wait four now, right? How hard is it to take you down, kid?” Arson shrugged and exited. He’d nearly attempted another poison, but didn’t know how that would affect him after undergoing such an obviously large change to his body.

He hadn’t felt as much pain during the last poison, but he knew it had affected him the most of all he’d taken in so far.

His blood pulsed with power and he wanted to move. “You guys wanna find out?”

Arson had only been playing around when he’d asked his friends if they’d wanted to test how hard it was to bring him down. Now, he stood surrounded by pretty much everyone he liked or at least considered a decent person. All of whom were ready to try and beat the sparks out of his entire being.

To be honest, he was only truly worried about Troy—before the fight began. And Jade’s arrival seemed to make his friends hungry for blood.

Arson realized the battle had already began. His adrenaline pumped so high that everything around him had slowed incredibly. Whatever skill he used caused his mana to visibly drain in the overlay in the corner of his vision.

Arson howled upward, and a pulse of energy bloomed from his chest. He watched the bloom ripple outward and knock everyone off their feet. He giggled to himself, and felt a beat thrum to life in his head.

He had to force his mind to increase his perception of time. It somehow got in the way of his ability to move correctly, and he needed to take advantage of his current situation without hinderance.

He dashed toward Troy and grabbed her by the ankles before she had time to react and spun.

“By the sparks, Arson, what the—” Troy yelled as she was flung into Khalif, who had no opportunity to get on his feet either, and Arson knew who he should be worried about for the most part.

The twins were a wildcard, and so were the couple brought by Khalif, but Arson didn’t give anyone time to think.

He fired conductive water orbs toward everyone, or at least in their paths. The explosions caught most off guard, but Arson smiled as he could tell he had pissed Troy off.

“Don’t you dare run, sparking little runt!” grumbled Troy. She bobbed and weaved through the explosions, unlike the others around.

Khalif barely stayed on his feet. The boy twin was on his rear and Arson lost the girl twin.

He knew neither where the girl, nor Khalif’s, additions were.

The hairs on the back of Arson’s neck rose up and he struck out behind himself with a sweep.

The kick knocked the girl twin off her feet, and Arson fired at the ground.

An explosion sent the girl and Khalif’s group in different directions. The gang members had also found their way behind him.

Then he was kicked into the air so hard he flew end over end for a handful of seconds and crash landed into a trash heap.

“You’re going to have to do better than that, Arson!” Arson knew Troy was already on the move and decided that he wanted to win, even if he hurt himself to do so.

He emerged from the trash heap and held an orb the size of an exercise ball. The violent water struggled to keep its form, but Arson threw it anyway.

He’d lobbed the energy up high and ran in the same direction. Directly toward the entire group.

The group once again scattered as Arson charged two more orbs.

None got far enough away that what Arson had planned wouldn’t affect them, but he hadn’t known the vast difference between his power before and his current abilities.

He positioned himself under the giant orb of energy, and smashed the two additional orbs into the larger one.

When his hands met, another halo of energy released. The golden white light moved slowly in Arson’s vision. That was because he had intentionally slowed his perception of time so he was able to see what his attack would do.

Something was wrong. The energy was a little different than it had been with less water. This water seemed much more chaotic, like the waves of a storm.

He tried to draw back in the chaotic burst of mana, and somehow managed to make things worse. A vortex formed between him and the halo of energy with him at the center.

As he roared and tried to pull, the energy around him did the same. Almost as if his mana mimicked his intentions. Luckily for Arson and his friends, his mother was there.

The sound of a snapped finger echoed out through the area, and Jade strode into the middle of their battle with a huge smile on her face. Arson’s halo of energy froze in place and stopped a fingernail’s length away from Troy’s serious gaze.

Arson stood in the middle of the still very active vortex of mana, hunched over, and gasping with every breath. It took a while but his body began to drink in what was around him—every drop of available mana absorbed by his pores in a handful of breaths.

“It seems I will have to intensify the training of your friends or you may kill them, child,” said Jade with a hearty laugh. The others looked at each other and grimaced.

“Reminds me of my own childhood. Once upon a time all my friends turned on me because they believed I was stealing their power,” stated Jade plainly as she rolled her eyes.

“If only they knew what they’d had a chance at,” finished Jade as she lowered herself to meet Arson’s dread-filled eyes.

“You’ve done nothing wrong. Just be careful when playing with friends, buddy. You are no longer what you once were. You are mana-blooded now. Remember that.” Jade pressed a finger to his heart, stomach, and then the center of his head before she hugged him, kissed him on the forehead, and laughed.

“Come, children, it is time to train.”