Souls Divided [Souls Series 1]

Chapter 5

The obstacle course was designed by someone who enjoyed seeing failure, and if Anya had truly been without any shifter qualities — strength, speed, or enhanced eyesight — she would have made that person thoroughly enjoy themselves.

She did, luckily, have those qualities in abundance, and could enjoy the added challenge because of it. But she still thought courses like this were fundamentally biased. Training should always be something everyone could actually do — and right here, right now, there was no version of this course that a beast-less or non-shifter without her particular gifts could have completed at all.

She hoped this was simply because this was an advanced ground within the camp, not representative of standard training across the board here in this camp. If it was the latter, she just knew she was going to raise hell about it — not because she wanted to be difficult just for the sake of it, especially after this morning's confrontation with Alpha Rohan, but because some things were just worth being difficult about.

At the royal barracks and in the capital, she was already known for her beast-less and non-shifter advocacy. She coached various groups, had set up training programs etc. Something she found important, especially since she herself had faced prejudice.

Yet, sometimes she just wanted to be a soldier and a specialist and be seen as being good at her job. Not as that difficult troublemaker that enjoyed kicking at the shins of tradition.

Ok, s**t! Everything had its own time and place and now was the time to focus and not be in her head. She was going through the course at a good speed, for someone who tried it for the first time. But good wasn’t good enough, she had to be excellent.

When she cleared it, she heard a low whistle from Malik. Rohan's voice followed, flat and unreadable. "Surprisingly quick — for your first time, that is." It felt like a compliment and an insult at the same time. She needed to put her head more in the game. She wasn't even breathing hard, which she knew could be read as either impressive or her not trying enough.

“Correct,” she stated, “I can do better.” and without asking for permission, or waiting her turn, she went again. She bobbed and weaved through those that were still on the course and pushed herself harder than strictly necessary, if only to prove the point to herself more than anyone watching. A wall came and went. The rope bridge swayed under her, but she crossed it without slowing. By the time she hit the stretch of mud near the end, she was breathing harder than she wanted to admit, muscles burning. They burned in that specific and satisfying way that meant she'd actually pushed herself instead of coasting on whatever it was that let her coast. Her mind was blissfully empty.

She crossed the finish line a full length ahead of the time posted on the board beside it — a name she didn't recognize, someone who'd apparently held that record for a while, judging by the faded ink.

"Someone's competitive," Malik laughed, but he looked at her with approval.

She straightened, already working her breathing back under control.

Freya, from the sidelines, made a small note on something Anya hadn't even noticed her holding — a compact logbook. Efficient. Thorough. Exactly what a proper Beta should be.

Rohan said nothing, but she caught him watching the board too, the old time and her new one.

Malik pushed off the fence he'd been leaning against and rolled his shoulders, easy, unhurried, like someone who'd been waiting for this specific moment all day and was pleased it had finally arrived. "Alright little girl. Obstacle course, box checked. Time to see if those fists are as good as that footwork."

"Careful… that almost sounded like a challenge." Anya grinned

"Oh, it absolutely f*****g was." Malik’s smile broadened.

They walked to one of the fighting circles and squared off. Those still on the training ground stopped pretending that they were doing their own thing, like they had not watched her do the obstacle course and watched openly — conversations dying mid-sentence, and slowly an audience gathered around them.

Malik came in first, testing, not really full-on fighting yet — a jab she read half a second before it landed, not fast enough to avoid it clean, but she took it on the shoulder instead of the jaw. She rolled with it and answered faster than he'd clearly expected: a strike to the ribs that made him grunt and step back, genuine surprise flickering across his face for the first time since she'd arrived.

"Okay," he said, shaking it off… "Okay, I need to be careful with my assumptions I see." Approval was audible in his voice.

He came back faster, and she recognized how it wasn’t wolf-quick; wolves had something more rigid about them. She always compared them to a hard punch; effective, but straightforward. It was more like the type of panther-quick she had seen before; like the sweep of an elegant tango. A difference she'd learned to clock years ago, after enough foreign training missions and sparring partners from half the realm. He wanted to surprise her too, she realized.

But she could match that speed and made sure she was always one fraction ahead of him. He had the size and strength advantage, she had speed and a mastery of a few lesser-known fighting techniques she bet he didn’t know. Still, her strength was enough to block some of his attacks hard. She saw a flicker of surprise.

Still, they were quite evenly matched, and she just knew that the only way she was going to win was if she caught him by surprise.

They had been going at it a couple of rounds already when he caught her with a solid hit to the side, one that would bruise spectacularly by evening. She used that hit to pretend to bend over in pain and from that bend she did a forward roll, stretched out her leg coming out of it and used her momentum to sweep his legs out from under him — and had him flat on his back in the dirt.

Silence, for a second. Then Malik started laughing, flat on the ground, entirely unbothered by having lost.

"Yeah," he said, grinning up at the sky. "Yeah, okay."

She offered him a hand up, and they were both still half-laughing about it — him rubbing his ribs, her shaking out the hand that had done most of the damage — when Rohan's voice cut clean through the moment.

"Now switch to shifted form."