My Angel of the Dawn (WomanxBoy, ManxBoy, Sci-Fi + Romance)

***18***

After they had returned to Cendar, Nelsa gave Ariel a raise as promised. The boy's help had saved almost twelve standard hours on loading/unloading cargo and a day more on the way back. Nelsa received a bonus for delivering ahead of schedule. She pondered over it a little, threw in her own money (cursing her newly acquired spending habit in the process) and did what was absolutely necessary in their trade. She sent the boy to a fighting school for a week.

She'd taken the same course once. First they installed the fighting routines into your brain by deep cyber-hypnosis, not a pleasant thing by itself, and then they taught your body into accepting and using them. The whole week consisted of training, with protein cocktails for food, caffeine injections for sleep, cold-hearted monsters for teachers. As she remembered it, every muscle in her body had been hurting as hell the whole time. A real torture dungeon, that school. But effective and essential. Without fighting skills there was no way of conducting business at the outer rim of the galaxy. The newest, farthest colonies didn't care much for law and order. And that was where the smugglers operated most of the time.

The accident with Holloran had clearly shown that even a blaster wouldn't give you an upper hand if you weren't fast enough with the trigger. Nelsa wasn't surprised that Ariel saw the training as a gift, not as a necessary evil. He would do anything to be able to hold his own in a fight. Nelsa described him the horrors of the training in vivid details, to clear her conscience. It didn't get his spirits down.

He took the course and graduated. God only knew what it cost the eighteen-year-old boy, whose only physical training had been hitting the gym before, and even that occasionally. He hadn't even been in a proper fight. But Ariel was back in a week, looking a little thinner, a little older too — maybe due to the new confidence in his eyes and posture.

He still needed a lot of practice to be able to fully use his new skills. Of course, he would never be a match for a hired assassin or a trained bodyguard. But in a few years' time he would become a trained fighter, almost like Nelsa herself. Even now he had a good chance to defend himself against, say, a few street thugs.

Almost like Nelsa herself, but not quite. She had natural gifts of amazing stamina and quick-as-a-flash reflexes. She also fought to the death, with such rare ferocity that she could overpower any martial art expert. She had won every single fight she was engaged in. Many years ago, she had promised herself to never yield, never lose a fight, and never let anyone get the better of her. She had never broken that promise.