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Chapter Two: Teacher – Amilia
Amilia nestled down in the warm embrace of the smiling rogue that had absconded her from the grotto where she had awaited her twin sister and smiled. She was wondering how Akai was reacting to the fact that she had suddenly gone missing. Not that she meant anything mean by it or anything. It was just that Akai had gotten all of the masculine attention for so long that Amilia was relishing her chance to be in the spotlight. And maybe there was a bit of a mischievous streak in her somewhere deep inside.
Then her smiling rouge looked down and gave her another one of those perfectly wonderful smirks of his.
"So, Amilia-chan, how do you like flying so far?" he asked.
"It is most wonderful, Shima!" she cried back against the wind.
"Good! Oh... no. I forgot about lunch! I’m terribly sorry Amilia-chan!"
"That is alright, Shima. I am not terribly hungered."
"No, it’s not alright! It’s my fault you missed lunch, and thus shall I make it up for you!"
And suddenly they were spiraling down to the ground again.
**********
Some time later they were sitting across from each other in the common room of a tiny inn some many kilometers away from the main Lunar city. They had just finished with the main course of their meal and were mulling over what type of fruit pie they wanted for after with their spiced cider.
"I think perhaps Lunar gooseberry would be good, Shima. You may like it. It is much like the Earthian gooseberry as the fruit was originally imported from the Lunar surface." Amilia finally decided.
Shima shrugged. "It’s your choice, Amilia-chan. I don’t mind too much any which way." Then he directed his attention to the innkeeper. "My good man! May we have one of your fine Lunar gooseberry pies for our repast?" He asked as the rail-thin innkeeper strode over on his stalk-like legs.
"Most certainly, good sir and madam. They shall be along in short order." The innkeeper, who was a rather jovial fellow despite his slender appearance, replied with a cheeky grin and a sketchy bow.
As he moved away, Amilia tried to turn the conversation towards Shima. "So, Shima. Do you come here often?" she asked innocently. Which is why she was so surprised when Shima burst out laughing. "What?! What is so humorous?!" she asked indignantly.
"Oh, I am sorry, Amilia-chan! But that... that must be one of the oldest pick-up lines in the history of Earth!" he choked out as he slowly brought himself under control again.
"I do not understand, Shima. What is a ‘pick-up line’?" Amilia was confused. She truly did not understand.
"It’s hard to explain exactly. I think the one of the best way’s I’ve heard it explained though was when Endymion informed me that it was how men that no one really wanted as a life-partner attempted to get women that had not chosen a partner yet to both talk to them and preferably sleep with them. My half-brother told me that women in the same situation also used such lines. Which is the cause for my laughter, Amilia-chan. I had not realized that you thought yourself one that no man would want!" He finished in mock-outrage.
"Oh! Oh no, Shima! That is not.. I am meaning that that is... I .." she stammered, quite flustered.
"Don’t worry about it, Amilia-chan. I understand what you mean." He allowed with another of his smirks at her scarlet face.
Then the pie arrived and they were much more distracted by food then embarrassment.
**********
"What’s that?" Shima asked, leaning slightly over her shoulder so as to see the electronic mess covering the workstation before her.
"This?" Amilia asked, waving at the scattered circuit boards, wires, and chips.
Shima nodded. "Yes. That."
"Oh. Well, eventually, it should be a micronized computer."
"Like the Lunar Mainframes?" He asked, picked up a stray circuit board.
"Yes, sort of. Although much, much smaller than those." She replied.
"Well, of course. There’s not nearly enough stuff here to make a big thing. Not without magic anyway." Shima shrugged, setting the board back down on the table.
For sometime Amilia worked diligently at the tiny workings with Shima hovering about watching and making a general nuisance out of himself. Finally, she set her tools down upon the table and turned to face him.
"Shima, is there something I can help you with?"
"Me? Oh. No. There’s nothing."
"Are you sure?"
"Why yes. Of course I am. Why?"
"I do not know. Mayperchance it is because you have insisted upon hovering about for nearly two Terran hours now?"
"Uh... Sorry, Amilia-chan. I’m just a bit bored. What you were doing looked interesting so I decided to watch."
"Do you know how intensely annoying and distracting that is?"
"I... um... I’m beginning to find out, I think..."
"Good. If you insist on standing around though, kindly make use of your proclivity towards idleness and assist me."
"Sure. What do you need?"
"If you could hand me that 440 fromitz?"
***********
"Ami-chan," Shima was circling around the girl who stood in a very awkward looking stance in the middle of the training room. "what are you trying to do?"
"Akai said that this would help with my control." Amilia replied, slowly moving from her extremely awkward stance into a rather odd contortion that involved putting one arm back behind one leg while the other leg was stretched up above her head and the other arm was held out at a forty-five degree angle from the body.
"She did?" Shima’s voice indicated an obvious sense of disbelief mixed with curiosity. Which was a good thing sense, at her current angle, Amilia couldn’t really see much of any of him. "The only thing I can see it helping is your chiropractor’s practice. Doesn’t that hurt?"
Amilia had just switched into another position that looked like something you would see some hapless soul contorting into in a vision of Hades. The human body was just not designed to DO that!
"Well, it is fairly awkward." Amilia conceded after she gained her insanely painful looking position.
"Why don’t you just study one of the Martian Arts?" Shima finally asked, his curiosity getting the better of him at last. "I could teach you. Kina-chan is already learning from me. It wouldn’t be any trouble to teach you too. Really."
Amilia straightened with a rather loud crackle pop sound emanating from her back. Putting a hand to her back, she straightened entirely to her normal upright position. "Ouch. No, Shima. That is alright. I would rather not study those arts."
"Why? It can’t be pain. Anything would be less painful than whatever that was you were doing." Shima argued, gesturing towards the ground.
"Mayperchance you are correct, Shima. However, I chose not to condone any art which doth teach of the taking of another’s life."
"No matter how necessary, huh?" Shima’s voice was tinged with wry irony. His face was expressionless.
"That is correct. I cannot condone such senseless violence under any circumstance, which is why I do chose to distance myself from the barracks so often." Amilia finished, turning from him to begin gathering her things in preparation for her return to her rooms.
"Then you most certainly do not condone myself. Or Ranko. Or Prince Endymion." He paused, his face stern, as he let her turn back to face him again before finishing. "Or your sister, Akai."
"Shima! That is not.." She began, her face horrified as the realization of what she had done dawned upon her.
He held up a hand. "No. That is exactly what you meant. You said that you ‘cannot condone such senseless violence under any circumstance’. ANY circumstance, Amilia-san." She winced at the sudden cold formality filling his so often warm voice, and shuddered further to know that it was directed at her and why. "Those ‘circumstances’ have involved the defense of ourselves or defense of others from those less scrupulous than yourself. Those circumstances have involved ending the existence of a creature who had cut down a family in cold blood and destroyed a tiny child’s life. Those circumstances have saved my life and those around me. Those circumstances," He paused again, catching her eyes in his own piercing glare. "have involved saving your life.
Amilia knew of what he was referring to. She had been there when it happened after all. She had watched as Shima and her twin sister had suddenly and violently extinguished the spark of life in the two beasts that had attempted to have their way with her. She had been so grateful then. Grateful that they had come and saved her from them.
She had simply crouched there against the wall and let Shima deal with Akai as her sister had become so suddenly sick about what she had forced herself to do. She realized that now. Akai was not the violent warrioress that so many thought she was. She had had to FORCE herself to kill those two men, despite the fact that she knew what they would do if she hadn’t.
Suddenly, Amilia felt so totally and completely hypocritical. With a few simple, thoughtless words, she had destroyed so much more than she could ever help to regain. With a irrational turn of phrase she had effectively alienated one of the only people outside of the Senshi who would speak to her with anything approaching respect. She had annihilated any chance she had to learn of the strange dimension that Shima existed in with her own self-admittedly selfish convictions.
She could not understand what had possessed her to do as she had done. No one could truly influence Shima. And that was exactly what she had tried to do in her foolish attempt to sway him to her own choice of non-violence.
He was a unique and completely individual force in the structured existence of the Court of Serenity. Everyone knew who they were before the Queen. And they knew whom everyone else was as well. Except for Shima.
He was uncontrollable by any save himself and at times, her own sister, Akai. No one ever knew what he would do from one moment to the next. That disturbing non-predictability particularly disturbed the Guardian of Pluto, not that Amilia had much to do with the elusive Keeper of the Gates of Time. Which was a situation she took pains to keep as it was, just as the rest of the Senshi did.
Amilia slowly fell to her knees before Shima as she thought upon her actions. Slowly tears began to trickled down her face. She gazed up at him through watery eyes.
"Please forgive me, Shima-sama." She whispered, clasping her hands together. "I understood not what I said. Oh please, forgive me my error." Her gaze suddenly fell to the padded ground they stood upon.
Shima took an unhurried knee before her and reached out lifted her face with one hand so that he might look into her eyes.
"Do you understand now, little one? Why it is that I feel I must fight? Why your sister and the other girls feel the same?" He asked, the sternness in his voice now softened with an blanket of gentle kindness.
Amilia nodded slowly, silently.
Shima smiled softly as he reached out with his free hand and gently brushed away the tears that had fallen down her face. "We only want to help, Amilia-chan. We do not take pleasure in those deaths we must cause. Never, ever think we do. We fight to defend, to protect, and to preserve the innocence of others who either cannot fight or who chose to serve a higher calling. Maybe you are one of those blessed by the gods. I don’t know."
Amilia moved as if to speak, but Shima held up a hand with one of his smirks, though his eyes were sad. "I understand that you do not wish to fight, Amilia-chan, but I want you to understand something about the Martian Arts."
"I do not understand, Shima." Puzzlement filled her expression, wiping away the grief and pain that had been there.
"Not all of the Martian Arts are about killing, little one." He stood, bringing her up with him. "All of Mars learns at least one of the Martian Arts as part of their schooling during childhood. However, we do have those such as yourself upon the Planet of War. There are those who chose not to take the lives of others among what was once my people. Yet, they too learn of the Martian Arts."
"Shima.."
"Wait. Let me finish. Some of the Arts were developed through the use of passive aggression in order to reach ones goal. To this day, I have not heard of the passive aggression Arts taking of life, though if force, I am quite certain they are capable of it. As with any of the Arts, one is taught that one must always be certain of the amount of force to use against one’s opponent in order to avoid death whenever possible. I do not normally seek to destroy my opponents, though it has happened. You need not ever seek death for another. However, if you know that you are capable of such action if it is needed, you are less likely to need the ability."
"Permit me to attempt to understand this which you have said. It is better for me to possess the knowledge upon the manner in which action must be taken for to end the existence of another for such reason that by the possession of the aforementioned knowledge I shall endeavor to cause the diminution of the likelihood of necessary possession of such knowledge to be of sine qua non."
"Um. I think so."
"Alright. I may admit that I do not fully understand the exact need of the ability to enact pain upon another creature. However, I shall attempt the learning of this passive aggression Art that you speak of, Shima." Amilia finally decided. "As it exists, though, the training must wait for another day. It is time and beyond that I must be returning to my quarters. Fare thee well, Shima of the Lord Phoenix."
"Fare thee well also, Amilia of the Kingdom of Learning." Shima returned with a flourishing bow as she left the room.
***********
The soulless beasts assailed heavily upon the azure shield originally erected by Shima with the Phoenix Force and now kept powered by the steady feed of ki being fed into it by Amilia in the defended center of the diamond created by the five others she ran with. She may not have been able to force herself to take even the existences of the soulless demons which assaulted them, but she could by Mercury defend those who could!
"Minanoai! There! Those armored minotaur things have a chink in their armor generally around the center of the chest! It’s generally in the vicinity of that gem there!" She shouted, having scanned the entire division in order to find some shared weakness.
"Thanks, Amilia!" Minanoai called back over her shoulder even as she sent out several hundred of her signature ki blasts towards the gems on the armor.
Amilia glanced up from the palmtop computer that she had managed to build with Shima’s help just in time to see Kina spin kick something that looked disturbingly like the Earthian God, Shiva, in the head. Four faces and six arms wielding stone swords and axes tended to cause such an association, though Kina was managing to hold her own against it. Amilia almost shouted a warning as another arm came towards her friend, but Kina parried it with her oak-leaf guarded sword right before punching the blade through the creature’s chest and letting it die in a blue ooze.
The swords had been gifts from Shima before the battle began. Each of the girls carried one. And each one was unique to the girl. Amilia’s own was more like a baton then anything, with no edge or point to it. However, Akai’s was a curved affair that Shima said was a style used in an Earthian version of one of the Martian Arts called ‘kung fu’. There were steel loops running through the inner edge for some unknown reason. The hilt, guard and pommel were remarkably plain, though. The decoration was on the blade itself, a long curling wave that traced the length of the blade.
Minanoai carried a straight blade with a simple crescent for a guard. Reiki’s sword split into two, one with a dragon carved onto, the other with a phoenix, representing her tie to the Lord Phoenix through her brother. They were all beautiful weapons, though quite deadly. But none was quite like Shima’s blade. A long tongue of flame projected from the hilted and brought fiery death to any who got in the way of its path.
She recognized his sword of course. No one else had ever managed to wield the Martian Sword of the High Prince with its metamorphic blade. Some said it was tied to Shima through the medium of spilt blood. Others just said that it was the mastery of the blade that caused the Lord Phoenix to chose him as his Champion Among Mortals. Others said exactly the opposite. The only thing everyone knew for certain was that Shima was the only one to use that sword in combat for nigh onto five hundred years now. Shima himself had once mentioned off hand that he wasn’t the one that chose the blade he wielded, but the sword was. It was confusing, but then, so was Shima.
Which was why Amilia was now locked into a deadly battle against so many. She had never ever intended to ever be in a situation like this. But then, one can never truly predict the future. Especially not if one is a friend of the Phoenix Prince. Amilia smiled wryly at that thought, even as she focused on sending more energy into the shields covering them.
Then, suddenly, she realized that Kina had somehow been drawn from their group deep into enemy lines. Even as she yelled and screamed for her tall and lanky friend to return to the safety of the shields, she was forced to watch as a monstrous creature that may have once been a man snuck up behind the girl. Amilia howled in pain and outrage as the creature drove its single overlarge claw straight through the back of her dear friend. Kina arched suddenly against the pain lancing through her body. Her face was a horrified mask of anguish. Blood ran everywhere, from her mouth, her nose, even her ears. Amilia could only watch her friend’s trembling, ensanguined lips form the sacred words that would unlock her power entirely in one gigantic burst of light, power, and sound. Amilia knew as well as Kina that those words were suicidal. But then, Kina was already dead and she knew it. As the short phrase was completed, her lips drew back into a terrifyingly satisfied smirk.
Then her body was ripped apart as every single iota of energy she had ever called upon suddenly burst from every cell in her wiry frame. A sudden desolation came across the demon corps as the undeniable eruption of power swept over them and reduced them to their component atoms. By the time the light faded enough to see by, everything in a hundred foot radius from the sight of Kina’s death had been eradicated. Barely three demons stood between the smaller and sadder band and the nearest edge of the explosion.
They fought on with even more energy after that. Amilia began feeding the slight amount of energy that was no longer needed in the shields into the other three Senshi. Shima, with his direct feed into the Phoenix Force that even Saffron had not been capable of destroying, neither needed nor wanted for extra power in his struggle.
Then as abruptly as Kina had vanished from their midst, Minanoai slipped upon ground slick with demon blood and fell beneath their trampling appendages. She held herself together and kept herself alive for just long enough for the others to get at least a hundred feet away from her before whispering her words of release.
As soon as they had managed to move out of the kill-zone, almost solid bolt of opaque golden energy shot up into the air then burst apart and showered death back down upon the demon corps. And then there was one more desolate hundred foot circle into which no one, human or demon, would enter scarred the Lunar surface.
They struggled on for what seemed like hours longer, leaving countless beings dead and bereft in their wake. Shima was constantly calling for them to stay with him and keep fighting. He knew they were beginning to lose spirit with the fall of their two comrades. So he kept at them, fighting alongside them, refusing to give up. Just by being there and staying strong despite the pain that he obviously felt because of the loss of their dear companions managed to keep them moving ever onward towards the Princess Serenity.
It happened without warning. Just as the other had fell, so did Amilia. The shields above her fell for just the briefest of instants, but that was all the fliers needed. One suddenly swooped down out of the sky and plucked her from the center of their band. She gave a single startled, painfilled cry as the heavy talons dug into and tore at her shoulders and back.
The flier that had grabbed her carried her high into the air above the band and deep into the flock of evil, bird-like entities. The winged creatures soared around her, tearing at her skin, and slowly torturing her to death.
She endured for as long as she could before responding. Slowly, her bloody, sightless face raised from where she had hung her head against her chest and stared out before her. Slowly her lips formed four words.
"I understand now, Shima." She whispered, even as the fliers screamed and dove at her again.
She reached deep with in herself and found the words she needed. The words that would facilitate her end and bring death and destruction to her enemies. It was the ultimate of kamikaze techniques and each of the Senshi had the ability within them if they ever found the abilities needed. And now, the sworn pacifist of the Senshi had found a need so powerful that it nearly drove her to tears.
"Sonzai Hitei Suru." Her lips formed the words, but no sound emerged, as the fliers had finally managed to remove her throat.
For a moment, she felt nothing and tears ran down her face as she contemplated her failure. Then she felt it. The cold building within her. The ice beginning to form on her skin. And then the sudden glorious eruption that neither hurt nor caused her any emotion but an abrupt and wondrous joy.
The sudden release of every iota of energy by the Senshi of Ice cause a lot of pain. As the sphere grew to its one hundred foot diameter, every last one of the fliers were sucked within. The bodies rained down upon the demon corps like a pestilence from heaven itself.
But the soul which had once been Amilia, the gentling counterpart of Akai and a Senshi in her own right, no longer cared. She was happy now, though a distant part of her felt a nagging sorrow at leaving an important part of herself behind. Then she felt a tugging at her soul and she found herself being pulled from her vantage point above the field of battle to another place. A place where she was once again with Kina and Minanoai, and they were reunited with their slightly less known friends and allies, Princess Soramegami of Uranus and Princess Hitode of Uranus. The youngest of the Outer Senshi, Princess Shizukesa of Saturn was not in sight.
Then it dawned on Amilia. Shizukesa, named so in home of calming the raging hurricane inside of the small girl, was being held back until the end. She was only to use her powers as a last resort. And Amilia suddenly knew that she would see Shizukesa soon. As well as the other girls that she had fought so long beside.