[Hellion Brothers: Book #5] Verglas

Ten

Xiumin

It had been a couple of weeks since we started her training. She's a quick learner, I'll give her that, but she still had to work on her abilities. Appreciating her or telling her she was doing well would only spoil her more and I realized this the very first time I met her. She liked challenges. The type of person who didn't like things handed over to her easily. She liked to work for them and reach out to grab them. No matter how lazy or uninterested she was, if I told her she couldn't do it, she'd make it a point to prove me wrong.

"Nevermind." I looked at her hopelessly. "Not every ability wielder is good at controlling their abilities." That was what I told her in the second week of our training. She was learning pretty quickly, quicker than I did when I was younger, but whenever she used her abilities to shoot direct bursts of frost, her strength would go all out. She'd release frost beams on full power, instead of trying to keep them minimal.

"It's not a big deal. I'll do it." Sarang narrowed her eyes at me, then raised her hand to test her abilities once again. After a couple of failed attempts, I noticed how her breathing got heavier. I regretted my decision of provoking her when I noticed sweat trickling down the side of her head, her cheeks turning slightly red and her knees ready to give up on her any moment, but she was still determined. Her eyes reflected how desperately she wanted to prove me wrong and then warn me about making assumptions about her capabilities. It was insane.

"You don't have to push yourself, if you can't-" Wrong choice of words. I only ended up strengthening her intention to prove me wrong. And then she did. She took a deep breath, looked me right in the eye and raised her first two fingers, gesturing watch-me before I noticed a flicker of silver light on her palm. It all happened too quickly. She shot me with her abilities and instead of being thrown metres away from her, I felt a thin layer of ice cover my torso. I brushed it off and when I turned to look at her, she was lying on the ground, unconscious. I swear this girl will break her own record of falling unconscious in my presence. I guessed she drained herself way too much while training earlier, so she just collected everything she had left into that one shot. All to prove that she wasn't weak.

"You really are something." I whispered as I gently laid her down on one of the beds in the infirmary of the facility. Yes, the Hellions' den does have an infirmary. How can you expect poor Lay to heal every single ability wielder that injures them self or gets simple head aches?

I removed the strands of her hair that were covering her face and wiped it with the wet towel the nurse gave me. Her skin glistened under the bright light and that is when I got the chance to look at her as much as I wanted. Under normal circumstances, Sarang would just ask me why I was acting so creepy by staring at her, but I liked looking at her. Those perfectly sculpted, beautiful features didn't let me avert my gaze. Her small, cat-like eyes, long lashes, pointed nose, slightly red tinted cheeks and those lips. Cherry like lips. Lips that coat over candies and sweet treats. I wanted to keep looking at them, touch them, taste them.

Kiss them.

And then I shook my head and woke myself up from those thoughts. It wasn't impossible because she was my anima after all, I'd do everything I could to make her fall in love with me, but I also knew this wasn't the right time. Sarang wasn't going to naturally like me if I told her what it meant to be someone's anima. She would always feel like she was forced into this whole thing. If anything, I didn't want her to feel like this wasn't what she originally wanted and she was only persuaded by an anima bond.

It was the last Saturday in December, so we decided to begin our training early and from the looks of it, she had already controlled the intensity of her attacks. I was expecting the other Hellions to arrive in about twenty minutes, so I asked her to just sit down and relax. She was going to have to work harder to catch up with the rest of them, since Yojeung and Inha were ahead of her. Their attacks were fierce and contained way more energy than Sarang's, but it was natural because they had been training for a couple of months now. I also made a note about not provoking her or hurting her ego, there were some things that really got to her. One of them was 'being called weak'.