Young Writers Society

I straightened my back and nodded my comprehension. “So you’re telling me I need to focus more on my mental strength rather than physical one?”

Floating fixed in front of me, Scarlet nodded. “Abilities depending on your mental strength are tricky. Well, they aren’t harder to master than the ones depending on your physical strength, but it’s difficult to use them when you’re multitasking because your thoughts would go to the things you’re doing rather than to focus on the ability you’re using.

“Because your ability is to control things, you are more of medium- to long-ranged fighter. Battles that involve close quarter combat or CQC are disadvantages to you since objects you need usually are a distance away from you. You better use your punches and kicks at that time. However, when a fight occurs that allows you to attack from a distance, that’s when you’re at your best.”

I gave some thoughts to his explanation. “That means it’s a good thing Damon is paired up with me. He changes his body parts’ properties to those of the objects he touches, which means he needs to use his fists and legs to fight. That’s short-ranged fighter, right?” Seeing him nodded, I continued. “He can protect me in case an enemy gets too near to us, and I can protect him if others attack from far away.”

“That’s true,” he said. “That being said, if you master advanced telekinesis, you can remove the distance hindrance and attack an enemy in CQC just fine. You just need to prepare yourself with some weapon objects and control them faster than usual.”

While he was explaining, I couldn’t help but to notice the change of his tone. His witty edge was replaced with a monotonous seriousness, and he didn’t float a bit here and there like he used to be when talking. I wondered what was it like being a warrior. I wondered if he had some kind of important position - a general, maybe? It dawned on me he had witnessed my life routine, and I didn’t even catch a glimpse of his.

“... assist you like regular ones when you have advanced telekinesis,” he said, concluding his explanation. He paused for a few seconds. “Are you listening to me, Merah? This is important.”

I stopped wondering about his life and blinked my eyes. “Sorry, I got distracted a bit,” I said. Straightening my elbow on my lap and resting my chin on my palm, my mouth twitched into a smile. “Are you used to explaining things like this?”

“What?” Seeing my eyebrows raised, he continued. “No, I’m not used being like this. My other siblings - other Scarlets - knew about our ability since we were created from the previous Scarlet’s remnants. This knowing was like breathing to you. It was natural.” He floated back to the bed’s head. “I’m used to, however, explaining war strategies with other warriors.”

“What position do you get?”

“General.” There was the familiar hint of smugness in his voice. “As Scarlets, we observe the surrounding to search things to control. Because of our tendency to do that, we can figure out the advantages and disadvantages of fighting at a location. This is crucial to our army, so the royals elect some of us as generals. We passed down our analysis and knowledge to others.”

Now that Scarlet was comfortable talking about his life as a general, I decided to pester him with more questions. “General is a position exclusive to Scarlets, then?”

He hummed in disagreement emphasis. “No, no. Generally, Scarlets are potential generals, but not all generals are Scarlets. Silver is a general - that was why I argued about taking her out from the war of our world. She’s among our best generals. Some of the royals also become generals - Sunglow’s older siblings from another shade of colour, Goldenrod, is the army’s head general.”

“That’s the way it works, huh?” I took a moment to absorb this new information. “If there’s a war in your world right now, why did you come here? You’re a general, and therefore is imperative to ensure your army’s victory. Isn’t it a huge disadvantage to have you here rather than there?”

He shrugged. “The royals and generals had talked about this for quite a while. They had theorized the bad lights - in our language we called them axors, by the way - were planning something that would multiply their strength to end the lasting war against us, aseal. The plan axors had would finalize their victory when currently, we are even.

My eyes widened. “So this fight against ax-axors isn’t just for humans, but also for aseal?” I thought the lights were being our saviors by helping us to beat the axors, but I realized they were also trying to avoid the axors from winning in their place.

He hummed flatly, agreeing with me. “Now you can see the axors's severity. They are aseal tainted by our traditional enemies, called areym for “shadows”. I don’t know how that could happen, but when a seal becomes a xors, it’s not just its light that changed - its thinking, its beliefs, and everything that has shaped its identity changes too. It becomes more like a reym, and end up allying with them.”

I frowned. The language confused me a bit. Xors is singular while axors is plural. The same went to seal and reym, I guessed. Something he said earlier tugged my mind, and I held up my hand, prompting him to wait. “You said you were even with axors, right? But they allied with areym, which means...”

“Aseal were winning the war,” he said, completing my sentence. “Areym have no match against us - they lack in power versatility and general strength. We’ve been literally ridding their darkness from parts of our worlds until our goal is achieved, which is to make our entire world bright with lights.”

I understood what he said, but I needed to confirm about something. “You - the aseal - think it’s important to rid the world from darkness, then? That fighting against areym is a must?”

“Of course. Areym are evil, Merah. They don’t mind shrouding the world in darkness. For hundreds of years, they’ve been stopping us from brightening the world. It is our duty to keep the world as best as it could be - enveloping it in darkness would mean chaos to other creatures living there.”

I nodded absently. I could comprehend how they thought areym are evil. But their goal... sounded off. Something tugged my conscience when I knew what they were planning for their world. The xors are evil and we should fight them - that much I agreed since they were behind the girl’s death and Sarah’s near-death state, and would be the cause of humanity’s demise. The areym, however... I had doubts about them.