Souls Divided [Souls Series 1]

Chapter 7

She was ready for it though, having done these fights before, Aiko had made sure that this was where she excelled. She went low, went fast, used everything she knew about fighting an opponent who expected to win, just through mass and sheer force alone. It bought her a few seconds, nothing more. He read the dodge almost as fast as she made it, adjusted mid-lunge and clipped her shoulder hard enough to spin her half around before she'd fully recovered her footing.

She rolled with it, came up already moving, put a wall of packed dirt at her back so he couldn't circle behind her — small mercies — and bought herself two full breaths before he came again. This time she saw it coming and still barely got clear, his jaws snapping shut on empty air an inch from where her leg had been half a second earlier.

"Getting warmer," she muttered, mostly to herself, mostly to keep her own nerves steady. “But I see you still don’t think I can take you on fully; you are holding back at using your claws.”

He didn't dignify that with anything but another attack — faster this time, no pattern to it that she could read twice in a row, which told her plenty about exactly how good he actually was underneath the Specialist Commander title. She landed two solid hits in the exchanges that followed, real ones, enough to make him huff out something that might have been a growl of genuine annoyance rather than aggression. Neither one slowed him down.

He was too strong, too fast, too much wolf and annoyingly agile enough for her to be able to really hit those precise pressure points that usually won her a fight. Every trick that had worked on Malik bought her half the time here before Rohan adjusted and closed the gap again. She was breathing hard now, properly hard, sweat stinging one eye, and some small, honest part of her had started accepting that she might not win this one. But she pushed that part down; she had to win, or he would never respect her.

He caught her clean across the ribs with a paw that could have taken her legs out entirely if he'd meant it, and she went down hard, air punched clean out of her, his full weight already shifting to pin. But in her fall and his overconfidence in the effect of his hit, she could finally get close enough to that one nasty pressure point — the soft junction where neck met shoulder, buried just under the fur. She drove two knuckles into it with everything she had left.

His whole right side seized. Not pain, exactly — worse than pain, that particular dead, disobedient heaviness of a limb that had simply stopped listening. His paw, that should have finished pinning her, buckled instead, weight dropping wrong, and for one full second the massive wolf that had been outpacing her for the last five minutes was just a very large, very confused animal trying to remember how his own shoulder worked.

It was exactly long enough.

She was already moving before he'd finished registering it — out from under him, using the last of whatever strength she had left to put proper distance between them before he recovered.

She felt that her side was already starting to heal, but still, she could not keep this up for much longer. She needed to find a way to win fast! It was her only way out.

And then something in her chest lit.

Not heat, exactly. Not quite light either. A flicker, faint and blue-white at the edges of her vision, gone almost before she registered it — but it was enough to disorient Rohan’s wolf during his next lunge towards her. His head snapped back half an inch, ears flattening, some deep animal part of him flinching from something his conscious mind had a problem processing. And he seemed to start veering right, precisely the direction she wanted him to think she was going, but she hadn’t feinted right yet… just thought it. At least she believed so.

But what helped the most was that, suddenly a half-beat before he moved, she just knew what he planned — which way he was about to shift his weight to finish it.

She didn't question it. She had experienced small glimmers like this before and they always held true. So, she trusted it and her body reacted instinctively. She moved before her mind caught up to why — rolled the direction he hadn't committed to yet and drove her elbow into his peroneal nerve as he flew by her, missing her completely. His left front leg completely buckled beneath him.

He went down hard. The speed he had in coming towards her helped her in that sense. She jumped on him and pushed her forearm across his throat before he could fully recover from the fall. Both of them were already breathing hard, and he could not catch his breath fast enough to be able to win from the hold she had on him. They both knew that, and for a long, strange moment neither of them moved at all.

His wolf’s eyes — still black, still bottomless — held hers with something that wasn't anger anymore. Something closer to confusion. Like he was trying to work out what had actually just happened.

She didn't have a good answer for him. Whatever that had been — the flicker, him going right when she wanted to, and the way she had just known what he was going to do next — it hadn't come from anywhere she recognized as fully, controllably hers. It scared her a little, made her question herself sometimes, but those moments had helped her win fights before, so she decided to focus on that and filed away the rest with all the other things about her, she didn't have an explanation for yet.

Off to the side, Malik had gone very still.

Not confused, the way Rohan clearly was, and his easy posture hadn't moved, arms still loose, but something behind his eyes had changed, like he had recognized something Rohan and Anya clearly hadn’t. When Anya's gaze caught his, for half a second on her way up, he didn't offer her his usual grin. He just gave her a small, almost unreadable nod, like he was filing something away for later, like they shared a secret, only she had no idea what it was yet. But he definitely knew something, just wasn't ready to say it out loud yet.

Rohan shifted back beneath her, slow, human again, dust-covered and breathing hard. She got off him and stood, offering nothing this time — not out of spite, just because her hands weren't entirely steady, and she didn't want him to notice.

Nobody on that field said anything for a moment. Then, quietly, from where he still knelt in the dirt: "Noted."

For a moment, nobody moved. Then Freya's pen started scratching again — steady, unbothered, like she'd simply been waiting for the scene to finish playing out before logging it. Vane exhaled, low, the tension he'd been carrying since he first stepped toward Rohan finally draining out of his shoulders.

Rohan pushed himself up from the dirt slowly, wincing once when his shoulder reminded him it had recently forgotten how to be a shoulder and had still not found its way back. He didn't look at her right away. When he finally did, there was something almost sheepish underneath the exhaustion — not quite an apology, not quite anything she had a name for yet, but a far cry from the man who'd stood there an hour ago demanding she strip and shift.

"You're bleeding," he said instead, looking up at her and nodding at her hairline, where she now noticed, a thin trickle had started making its way toward her eyebrow. His concern showed her he had lost all his anger from before.

"You're one to talk." She gestured vaguely at the dust and dirt coating half of him and how his shoulder was turning dark purple. "We match."

That got a laugh out of him, gone as quickly as it arrived, but it had been there. He rolled the shoulder she'd hit, testing it, and grimaced. "That's going to be a problem for a few hours."

"Good." She said without malice, "Means you'll actually remember the conversation that led to it."

He didn't answer that immediately, and something in his silence made her push the point further, because she wasn't done yet — not with the fight, and not with the lesson underneath it.

"You wanted to know my strength, back when this started." She let her voice settle, no performance in it, no anger or judgment either, just the plain weight of something she'd said a hundred times to a hundred different rooms and would keep saying until it stopped being necessary. "So let me enlighten you about the capabilities of us beast-less and non-shifters; we contain multitudes. Never underestimate us. Just because most think they’ve already seen their ceiling, that doesn’t mean there actually is one. Standard shifters like yourself, and I don’t say this to make you feel guilty or accuse you of anything — it simply just is. You tend to see your own experience and capabilities as the norm. But I have worked with beast-less and non-shifters, and I specifically make a distinction between the two because there is one, and there is no single shape to what we’re capable of. It can be caused by many different things; genetics, trauma, magic, who even knows all of them and can act up in a variety of ways."

She paused, she was not just saying this to Rohan, but to his entire unit and teams, to all those that had judged her before knowing her. “I know this one guy that has so much strength, it's hard for him to close a door without breaking it, he could put you all down before his second breakfast and I know a woman who sees colors the rest of us can’t, so many shades and varieties, tetrachromatic they call it. She could outshoot even me, but she chooses to paint. Her work touches your soul, even the queen has one of her works hanging in her office. Not everyone has gifts that obvious or strong, but I truly believe they are meant to compliment shifters and not letting them is a waste.”

“And don’t forget how even amongst you shifters there is a wide variety, even if you may not always want to show it. Just from what I can quickly see, recognize and smell, a minimum of 8 here on this field have non-typical shifter abilities. I will not out them. I don’t know if they would want that…” She looked briefly at Malik and Vane, without making it too obvious. “But they should know their gifts are of value and are appreciated.”

She wiped the dirt off her hands and reached out to Rohan, who had been sitting on the ground for her entire speech, just taking it in. “How about I tell you more about it over those drinks you owe me? I have some marvelous and hilarious ones.” She smiled at him, wanting to show they were all good, as far as she was concerned.