Ghosts Of Revenge | ongoing

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A DAGGER TO THE BACK

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I QUICKLY DUCKED out of the way in order to escape the dagger that was going for my head.

When I had been woken up this morning, and subsequently thrown out of my dream before I could learn more about Hades and the Underworld, I was hoping to sit down and talk with the others about what I had found. Instead, Cosmo woke me abruptly by pushing me off the bed and then, he handed me my toiletry bag, telling me that I had to be ready for practice in ten minutes.

I quickly got up and started getting ready, feeling slightly disoriented from the sudden wake-up call. While I was brushing my teeth, I couldn't help but think back at the stuff I had uncovered in my sleep. I felt a pressure in the pit of my stomach as I thought back to all those memories I had witnessed. In a way, I couldn't help but feel a bit guilty for violating their privacy but at the same time, those portraits have given more clues about this goddamned quest than the people that had sent me.

And there was also that nagging feeling that maybe all of that had been fabricated by Hades. That this was all his plan to get me to feel bad for him, to get me on his side. I mean he had said that the underworld I was visiting wasn't the real one, but one he had created in my mind to intimidate me.

But I wasn't about to trust anything he said.

I kept a note in the back of my head to question everything - whether that underworld was real, whether whatever I saw and learnt was real. I mean if it wasn't real, how had Eunomia come to find me? As far as I know, Aphrodite's nymphs didn't have mind powers.

When I walked outside, dressed in gym wear and absolutely exhausted before we had even begun practice, Cosmo didn't even let me speak. I was still lost in my own thoughts when he just started throwing his daggers at me as if that was his way of saying 'good morning'.

And the annoying thing about all this is that because his daggers are enchanted to always return back to him, I couldn't rely on him throwing them all to take a break. I actually had to complete the exercise in order to get him to listen to me. The goal of this whole thing apparently was to avoid getting hit by the daggers and manage to land a hit of my own.

Keywords: A hit. Just one. I didn't have to do much and yet, somehow, that felt entirely impossible to manage.

Because of his enchanted... well, everything seemed entirely impossible to beat. By the time I finished ducking out of the way from one of his daggers, another one was coming my way. Thankfully we had found and rented a new place inside the woods where no one would see us practice because I was running around the place, grunting and gasping loudly.

After the whole fiasco with Deimos and Phobos, I hadn't been ecstatic to get back to training but both of my quest mates had told me that we would only focus on the physical part for now, until I told them otherwise. Which was nice because I wasn't a fan of making myself look like a weak fool in front of them again.

I still cringed every time I thought back to that afternoon; how I could run away instead of acting like a mature adult and dealing with my problems. I had told myself that I would never do that again if I could help it. Hopefully, my pride doesn't get the better of me next time.

Because there was going to be a next time. Maybe it would be this practice or the next, who knows? I'm still not fully trained, I, most of the time, have no fucking clue what I'm doing. And that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It wasn't like I was trained like the others or like I had been on other quests. But while there were no expectations of me being perfect, it felt like the whole weight of the world was resting on my shoulders.