Chapter 9 #3
“What a stupid question. Obviously not.”
The other students and I could only stare. The air was so charged we could barely breathe when Adele shot back:
“Then you must not need a real man, right?”
The boys exploded with laughter, and my eyes went wide at Naoki’s expression.
Everything happened so fast. One moment he was behind Adele and the boys were laughing, then Naoki’s hand clamped onto the back of her neck and he dragged her to a tree, slamming her against the trunk.
She kicked, but the bastard grabbed her throat and lifted her feet off the ground, choking her while banging her head against the tree. Ice formed where Naoki’s hand squeezed.
“Little slut,” he snarled. “You’re a disgrace to Yonser, wearing these secular clothes, dyeing your hair like you want to be one of the whores of this nation.”
Adele managed to grab his throat, but she was already turning red from lack of oxygen. The boys stepped forward to help their friend punish her.
My heart was pounding so loud I was sure everyone could hear it.
I thought about running to get the teacher.
But by the time someone arrived, things could get ugly for a girl alone with four guys.
I really wanted to run, but instead my body put itself in the path of Ethan, Adrian, and Miverik.
I shoved Adrian, who was closest, pushing him away from Adele.
He stumbled into Miverik. Fists clenched, I positioned myself between them.
I was screwed, I knew it, but it was too late now. The three of them surrounded me.
“You want to join in too, freak?” Adrian, the Interian son of the director, moved closer.
I dodged his hands as they grabbed for my arms. But Miverik, another albino Yonserian, came at me from the right and punched me in the stomach, then shoved me toward Ethan, who slapped me across the face.
I saw stars from the blow. Dirt, grass, and leaves stuck to my body when Miverik knocked me to the ground, and then one of them was hauling me up so the other could hit me.
“Good thing you volunteered—we already had our eye on you, little pig,” said Ethan, an electricity elemental. When he touched me, an electric shock jolted through me from head to toe.
Everyone laughed when I fell, thrashing like an octopus out of water.
As soon as the energy stopped, I looked at them in terror and scrambled to my feet to run.
I barely made it two steps before the air vanished from my lungs, and I clawed at my neck, struggling to breathe.
Miverik, an air elemental, was blocking oxygen from entering my lungs.
I choked, dropping to my knees. In that moment, past and present blurred together, and my heart raced dangerously fast. A sharp, painful ringing pierced my ears, forcing me to clench my jaw hard to contain the urge to scream.
Every time I faced real danger, that sound assaulted my hearing—a kind of post-traumatic stress from my days in the forest.
Someone grabbed the back of my neck, shoving my head down. Still on my knees, I pressed my palms flat against the ground, bracing myself and pushing back against the hand to keep them from grinding my face into the dirt.
“Grab her arms,” Adrian ordered the boys as he held me down. I screamed when the other two wrenched my arms behind my back. With me on all fours, they pressed my face against the ground.
“That’s it, just like that!” the boy whispered in my ear. “Now open that little mouth and lick the dirt.”
“No!” I grunted, terrified, and Adrian pressed harder, scraping my cheek against the pebbles beneath me.
I thrashed against them, trying to free my legs, but my struggles only made them pin me down harder. My shoulder was on the verge of dislocating.
“Come on, pig! I’m telling you to lick the ground. Or would you rather lick something else?!”
My eyes filled with tears, and the words caught in my throat. Even if I’d wanted to beg, I couldn’t—my jaw was locked from the pressure.
“Take it easy, Adrian,” Ethan said beside me, loosening his grip. “We don’t want trouble with the academy. She’s a Voluz, and your father told us to stay out of trouble this semester.”
“She’s a savage and had the audacity to get in our way,” Adrian shouted, completely unhinged. “She shouldn’t even be in this city, to begin with.” He brought his mouth close to my ear. “Are you listening to me, filth? You shouldn’t be here. You should have died the moment you were born.”
I tried to twist free, straining with everything I had, but my useless struggle only made Adrian laugh harder.
Hot, heavy tears spilled from my eyes and dripped onto the dirt.
I wanted to scream in defiance against that senseless humiliation, but I couldn’t even open my jaw.
The sharp sound kept making my head throb, as if something was fighting to claw its way out from inside.
Despite my efforts, I could only grunt like the pig they’d nicknamed me.
Aish and the other girls had vanished, and Adele was still being choked against the tree.
My gaze was locked on her, so I noticed her hand glowing, radiating power—something that made no sense at all, since she was a healer.
Little lights flickered at the edge of my vision, and that sharp ringing felt like it would split my skull in half.
Behind me, the boys argued, but I couldn’t understand a single word, drowning in panic.
Someone spat on the ground beside me, and the voices fell silent, the air thick with some kind of unspoken agreement.
Just when I thought they were going to beat me, the sound of a body hitting the ground made the boys release their grip to see what had happened.
I looked around, dizzy, finally free to push myself up from the dirt.
Everything spun, flickered, and echoed. I noticed Naoki had collapsed and was clawing at his own throat.
Adele remained standing, clinging to the tree, but as she took long, deep breaths, she laughed like a madwoman.
The boys abandoned me on the ground to see what had gone wrong.
“What happened, man?” Ethan asked, crouching beside Naoki, who was turning redder by the second, desperately pointing at his neck.
“What the hell?” Adrian grabbed his friend by the arms and sat him up. “Miverik, get air into his lungs.”
I watched the Yonserian struggle to obey. Then he looked at his two companions, terrified.
“I can’t. The air won’t go down.”
The three exchanged glances as Naoki turned purple. I shifted my gaze to Adele, who was cackling like a hyena. I sat up with difficulty—my ribs ached and I had a concussion. But even though my head wasn’t working right, I could understand what was happening.
“I need to help, or he’ll suffocate to death,” I said, getting up and walking toward them. My arm joint was so damaged it hurt like hell when I moved it back into place.
The three stepped aside as I approached. I knelt beside Naoki, whose eyes were bloodshot and the veins in his face bulged from the strain of trying to breathe.
“Where did you close it?” I asked Adele.
She ignored me, ecstatic as she watched him suffocate. I scanned his respiratory system, focusing on the upper airway since Miverik said the air wouldn’t go down. I found what I was looking for in the larynx.
“Are you crazy?” I asked, horrified. “You made the throat tissue close up and block his airway? He’s going to die!”
“He deserved it.”
At that, the boys around me panicked.
“What the hell is going on, man?” I heard one of them say as he paced back and forth around Naoki.
What Adele had done was forbidden among elmedics—known as umbros: the cursed healing. Ancient accounts told of healers who used this art to defend themselves, but it was so deadly it had been banned, violating our academic oath to save and preserve all living beings.
I asked Adrian and Miverik to hold him down so I could work.
I placed my hands on his neck and felt for the membrane she had created, but I couldn't make it recede.
Elmedics could create tissues and induce them to grow and regenerate, but the process didn't work in reverse.
We couldn't remove something from inside the body with the gift—that's why we spent years learning surgery in college.
Frantic at seeing the boy unable to breathe, I looked around for something that could help. At the hospital, Naoki would go into surgery to remove the membrane, but here in the middle of the woods, I had nothing to work with.
“What did you do, Adele? By the gods, he's suffocating.”