No Turning Back [REWRITTEN]

Chapter 5

[256 hours]

[Dusk]

"Are you alright?"

I breathed in and out heavily, dragging in ragged breaths. My clenched fists wouldn't relax, even with my hands now empty and my exhaustion pulling at my will to keep upright. I wanted to reply, but I needed a moment to catch my breath. He seemed to realize this as I sort of stumbled over to a wall and sat down, away from the dummy I'd previously been attacking.

Dad was gone, thank Raegnaik. Off doing something, maybe still playing his part to keep us undercover. A relief, really - training for three hours straight was not fun in the slightest.

The small spirit floated above me, innocent, yellow-orange eyes staring at me from a young face. Unkempt brown hair fluffed up around his face and fell into his eyes, partially contained in the hood of a neutral orange hoodie underneath some battered denim overalls.

I finally found the words to speak. "I'm alright, I'm just... tired."

"He's not here. Can't you just take a break?"

"What, and risk him getting mad at me?" I said. I got back up, finding my breath and ignoring the agonized screaming of my arms. Anyone else might be used to this sort of heavy training by now, but me? Nope. That'd be too easy. Instead my underdeveloped muscles are struggling to catch up. I was only fourteen, after all.

"What says he'd find out?" The spirit asked. "He doesn't know everything, right?"

I sighed. Briefly I focused on my hands, forming a long staff with a curved blade at the end with a little bit of difficulty. I wasn't gonna let exhaustion get me in trouble, but damn did it make this harder.

"You'd be surprised, Milo. He knows when I've been getting lazy."

Milo just watched me as I started to attack the already beaten dummy with the scythe in my hand. Most would be afraid of being in such close proximity to a highly dangerous weapon that I could lose control of at any point in time, but to him it wasn't a big deal, considering he couldn't die as a ghost.

Not surprisingly, I needed another break pretty quickly. The scythe disappeared with my energy too depleted to keep it in a physical form, and instead of sitting against the wall I sat in a chair that was not far across the room. There was a small table next to it, where my dark green hoodie was sitting in a cloth lump out of the way.

Milo frowned at me, sitting in the air next to me as if there was another chair underneath him.

"You need a break, Dusk. Surely your dad can't expect you to keep training if you can't anymore."

Surely. But I knew him - he was my father, after all. Not like I grew up with him as a parent my whole life.

Sometimes I wondered if Mom was any better. Maybe she was. But she was back home. I haven't seen her since we left home, and I was only about five years old then. I have a vague remembrance of her face, her voice, maybe, but she wasn't a clear image in my head. All I had was Dad now.

I used to have a brother... but he's not here anymore.

"Honestly, Milo, you'd be surprised." He was so innocent. He didn't understand how ruthless Dad really was. If he had seen him kill that poor human like he did the other day... maybe he'd understand. But that would be mortifying to him, I can't let him see something like that.

"Here, come on. You can get back to training later if you want," Milo said. "You need to rest."

My head wanted to refuse, but the rest of my body gave in and followed the spirit out of the training room. I grabbed my hoodie and down the hall we walked, me stumbling a little out of pure exhaustion. It was a fairly large hallway, the walls made of an old, ancient stone that could've been here for centuries before. It'd been cleaned up a little before we got here, but not too much. I think one of the humans, Lionel, was putting some work into cleaning the place up. The basement, I guess, just wasn't something he had gotten to.