Cultivating Plants

Aloe didn't have time to react as the assassin lunged at her. Not only did the surprise assault block her thoughts, but the weird shadow magic they employed made it impossible to guess where they were.

So she kept herself on the move.

What was keeping her alive right now was the speed stance, so switching out was a last resort as it would be impossible to switch back for the rest of the confrontation.

The cultivator reached for a Cure Grass pellet as the living rock had stolen a good part of her vitality. The effects of the vitality pill were instantaneous, but because her reserves were still rather high, the restoration wasn't significant. Her vitality had yet to completely fill up.

Suddenly, as she was running away, the assassin appeared before her. Aloe did her best to stop, but her momentum was too high. She put her shoulder before her to inflict as much damage as possible with the collision to the assassin, but like before, they disappeared in a puff of shadows.

Hearing their steps behind her, the fugitive stopped and faced them. She wouldn't like to run away with her back unprotected if she knew where they were.

Aloe reached for her knife instinctively – all movements had been so far as it was hard to think fast enough in such a frenetic environment – but found her hand trembling when she did so.

She had never pointed a weapon at someone.

And the only real time she had fought wasn't even against a human but a monster.

We don't have to do this. Those were her thoughts, the words she wanted to say, but they didn't go past her throat. It didn't help that the assassin took out a knife of their own and pointed it forward.

Reflexively, Aloe almost switched to toughness but held it for the last moment. Bad, bad. They wouldn't be able to kill her with toughness, but she wouldn't be able to deal much damage otherwise. The defense stance would make her slower and weaker.

The assassin sprinted at her, knife facing forward, but they suddenly vanished in another puff of shadows. They were fast, but after training with Naila, they weren't fast enough. Sleight of hand might seem innocuous at first, but hands were already faster than legs, adding on top of that the speed stance, Aloe was used to speeds way above her league.

Not knowing where the assassin may appear next, Aloe dashed to the side and the assassin landed where she had been a blink later. Paradoxically enough, the only spot where they wouldn't be.

It was cruel, but whilst they were still on their knees, Aloe lunged forward and hacked with her knife wildly. She didn't know how to use it, so she could only hope that she got lucky. And no matter how many strikes she landed, the assassin seemed to shrug them off as if they were donning toughness.

Then, as she ran out of breath, the assassin launched an attack. One far more certain than hers as the blade deeply gnawed on her arm, deep enough to scratch the bone.

It was then that Aloe became aware for the first time of what it was to have her other physical attributes diminished by donning a stance. Not only her body was feebler than usual and therefore the dagger could cut her flesh as if it were butter, but there was also the pain.

Toughness dulled the pain. Every other stance increased it.

Aloe held her urge to scream for her dear life. The pain was bad, but she had had worse. Way worse.

It was the pain that remained her that she had another tool to fight. One that differentiated from friend and foe.

"Burn." It was a statement rather than a command, for a moment later flames sprouted from her back.

The Blossomflame's fire surged uncontrollably, mercilessly assaulting the assassin yet simultaneously healing the cultivator. Aloe's arm itched as the flesh was patched together and the bone was covered. In a way, the itch was worse than the pain.

Or at least distracting enough to dull the screams of agony of the assassin.

"Ahh!" As they shouted, it became clear that the assassin was a woman. Her figure writhing in pain was an uncomfortable one, to say the least.

Then she vanished.

Aloe was alerted by the sudden movement, but the female assassin revealed her position as she continued to scream in agony and be ablaze. The screams were chilling, but that didn't stop the fugitive from dropping to her knees in a mixture of exhaustion and fear.

Oh heavens, she ruminated. It had been too much action-packed in a small frame of time. Aloe took a few breaths to calm herself and moved her hand toward her satchels to grab a vitality pill. More to calm her frenzy rather than restore vitality, but that would also be useful. The Blossomflame! She realized after seeing the flames lingering in her back.

Precariously, the cultivator removed her backpack, threw it to the ground, and took the pot with the Blossomflame away. The evolved flower no longer spurted flames after the assassin had gone away and her wound had healed, but the flames still lingered in the backpack.

"Out, out!" She canted as she dusted the backpack to quench the flames.

The success of her endeavor was… minimal.

No matter how much she slapped the fire, the orange-red flames refused to be put down.

"Stop, please!" Aloe shouted in distress, yet somehow, her words did seem to have an effect.

The fire didn't instantly go out, but the flames she had been dusting finally reduced, and after some more slaps, the magical fire was no more.

"Okay…" The cultivator glanced at the Blossomflame through the corner of her eyes. "This is not the first time you show you can understand me." She was truly evaluating if she had lost it and if the pursuit had finally ruined her mind, but unfortunately, this wasn't the time to do so. "Gotta move."

Because the Blossomflame was placed atop the rest of the contents of the backpack, only the leather flap got burned, which she considered a good omen. Yet as she stood up with her bag again on her back, the air shifted around. She couldn't react on time as a shadow dropped on her and kicked her away.

Much like with the djinn, she was sent away. But a human didn't have the strength of such an abomination, so she just fell to the ground a couple of meters away from where she had been. The problem wasn't that she hadn't been sent flying, but the nastiness of the strike.

Something had broken there.

"Uhk." Aloe groaned in pain on the ground, but she didn't switch to toughness just yet. The damage was done, so changing stances would only alleviate the pain. She still needed haste if she were to fight. "Don't." She added a moment later as she felt warmth in her back.

The order was directed to the Blossomflame, but the assassin looked at her attentively.

The reason why she had refused the healing of the evolved flower was because she hadn't used a grown Blossomflame extensively before, and the green ones she had used had withered from over-exertion, so she didn't know the limit of the one in her back. She needed to save up any remaining magic the Blossomflame had unless it was strictly necessary.

"Don't?" The assassin snickered. As they talked, she realized it wasn't the same assassin as before. They all looked and sounded androgynous, but this one's voice was deeper – not that she had heard the other talking, but rather her grunts – and his thighs were thinner. "You know, we have orders to capture you, and whilst I won't disobey them, they never ordered me to bring you intact, you know?"

The next instant happened very fast as the assassin became a shadow and Aloe lunged with all the might of her stance toward where they had been. Her reasoning? That was the only place where they won't be. It had worked all right the previous time.

Her instinctive thought paid off as the assassin appeared behind where she had been prone.

"We don't have to do this." Aloe tried diplomacy with this assassin as it hadn't worked with the one before, mostly by her own faults. It had been hard talking when her heart beat fast enough to bust out of her chest.

She was also doing her best to overpower the pain in her chest, likely a broken rib that was puncturing something. The pain filled her with a sluggish agony as her thoughts and movements slowed from it, but it wasn't anything insurmountable.

"Don't come to me with that!" The assassin let out a war scream and lounged at her, dagger in hand.

Even if everything was happening fast, Aloe didn't fail to notice the tar-like substance covering the blade. Poisoned, she realized. The cultivator didn't switch to toughness as she was still faster than the assassin, but she was careful with her movements.

"Why?" She questioned as she sidestepped the assassin's movements with rather ease. It wasn't that she was graceful, but rather that the assassin was sluggish.

Both had been, now that she noticed.

"Why?" They repeated with a chuckle. If it wasn't because Aloe was used to faster-than-eyes sleight of hand, she would have missed the knife that they – or he, she guessed – threw at her. But not only the knife was wayward, but she also reacted with more than enough time to avoid it.

Perhaps not much of a fighter, but Aloe Ayad had a knack for enduring and avoiding damage.

"Because you killed her!" He finished when the throwing knife clattered on the ground.

"What? Killed wh-" The statement left her stunned, a chance that the assassin didn't let pass.

He closed the distance on her too quickly to avoid the stab, so Aloe did the next best thing and grabbed the arm with the poisoned dagger. It wasn't the best decision, not by a long shot, and that much became clear when the assassin started to overpower her even when she was using both arms.

"Dareen! The assassin that came before me!" The figure was cloaked in shadows, yet she could feel the distress in their expression.

"I… she is dead?" Even though she was getting assaulted with a bladed weapon, Aloe was rather oblivious to her possible death and rather focused more on that of others.

"Ye-" The shadow didn't finish their sentence as a conflagration assaulted them both.

It would seem that the Blossomflame had run out of patience.

Much like the previous assassin, this one dropped to the ground and began screaming in pain. As for Aloe, she felt the pain in her chest subside and be replaced by an unholy itch.

"Why did you do it?" The cultivator turned her face to the bag on her back and shouted at the plant inside. "I… I could still have done something!"

She had to shout with all her might as her voice was easily drowned by the screams of the assassin. Aloe was horrified, not because of the viscerality of the screams or how the assassin was dying, but because she couldn't care.

She was scared at the fact that this person was dying, yet she couldn't worry about it.

Sure, they had tried to hurt her, but it was still a person. Killing was bad, even in self-defense. Not only from a religious one, Sulnaya exalted life not death, but from an ethical and moral one too. But there she stood, looking at the assassin as they writhed in the ground, rolling in an attempt to put out the flames, but failing miserably. Considering the ground was still made of sharp needles, they were only hurting themselves more.

Then at one point, they stopped screaming and moving.

The assassin had died an agonizing death, and Aloe had just let it happen.

"Ah…" She groaned as the flames finally faded from the corpse as if it were the assassin's very vital energy.

Aloe felt nothing at the sight.

And that scared her.