Returning from the blacksmith, through the woods, around the slums, and down the Fertile Bowl, Akuma, Rose, and Sao enter the house. Yuda and Rahat were sitting around the table, each with a glass of water.
'Welcome back, how was the walk?' Yuda asks genial, sipping his water.
'Yuda, Yuda, Yuda,' Akuma bounces. 'I'm going to get a robot arm. Once I get it, I'm going to be cooler than you, Eyepatch.'
'Really now. Why? Pirates not cool anymore.'
'Pirates were never cool. Heroes are cool.'
'This generation…' turning to Sao, 'You didn't give away all the money, did you? We've got to start saving if we plan on doing anything big.'
'Do, not, worry,' Sao says, waving off Yuda's concerns. 'We've still got plenty.'
'Well, that's relieving.'
Yuda downs the rest of his drink, takes Rahat's glass – which is empty – and begins washing them at the sink in the kitchen. Rahat taps her fingers on the table, starts swinging her feet, looks over to Akuma, their eyes meeting, sending hers down to the table, pausing all her movements.
Shifting to the side of the bed, Hannah sits with her legs resting on the armchair. She stretches her calves before swinging her arms in mini circles, warming them up.
'Akuma, I'm feeling better now.' Akuma spins his head to Hannah's addressing. 'What was it you said earlier? "No way." We can have a little spar now if you want. Unless you're scared.'
'Scared, never. Let's go then. I've been waiting for our rematch for ages,' he accepts, stretching his left arm over his head. 'I'm going to beat you with one hand.'
'I would like to believe that to be a threat. But I do not. Yuda.'
'Yeah, I know what you want,' Yuda says, still bored from the last match he was involved in. 'I'll make sure neither of you try and kill each other.'
The three of them stand outside the back of the house; the crude circle where they once fought eroded under the winter snow, leaving an open arena. Akuma hurries to the left, bouncing on the spot once he finds a position he's satisfied with; Hannah jogs to her spot, where she stands perfectly still, staring at the ground, lost in concentration. Sitting, resting his head against the house wall, flopping his hand over his wrist to signify the fight's beginning.
Feeling the shift in the air's flow, Akuma starts his assault; his left hand engulfed in a blaze, he drags it across the grass, drawing the fight's boundaries in a ring of fire around Hannah – who hasn't broken concentration on the ground – with one eye on her, watching for any abnormal misplacement of any atom surrounding her, the other eye looking back on his previous errors. The circle drawn, Akuma returns to his starting position, the blaze pattered out by the clasp of his fist, smoke creeping from the cracks between his fingers. As the smoke rises to his eye line, he charges forward with varied step lengths; long, short, short, long, long, short, long; irregular patterns to disturb Hannah's timing for whatever she was planning, but also providing a moment to retreat if necessary;
Hannah's eyes flash open; Akuma reverses his last step, jumping back five paces. Lowering her right hand, she grasps the dirt, pulling it up into a wall in front of her. To Akuma, his frontal approach rendered idiotic, takes a breath to decide his next step: left or right. As he exhales, the dirt wall implodes, sending forth an airborne mudslide, scattering the land behind in the spots poking through the gap left by a rotating block of rock hardened dirt; against his knowledge, Hannah attacks behind them, a serpent of water, emerging from the hole left by the wall of dirt, left a trail following her left hand, shaped as a knife slicing through the air. Breaking through the shattered wall, Akuma idle in front of her, the serpent begins to falter, raining back to the ground, leaving just her hand with any water surrounding it. Akuma's fire starts again, his hand swinging upwards to connect with Hannah's; a mist expands from the point of collision, enveloping them both. Conscious that their last spar would have ended there, a silent but recognised cheer breaks out for them;
Akuma returning the rest of the world to focus after his breather of cheeriness, notices the fog shift to the left, so he counters right; a steel palm to the face meets him, the shockwave vibrating a reddened cheek. He takes a knee and shakes off the sting. A sudden wave of heat hit his back, turning to see the mist tinted red, orange, and yellow;
The tinted mist grows towards Hannah, forcing her out of the way. With the tinted mist, all the mist elevates above them, forming a roof over the ring. From the mist, flames retreat to the ring, Akuma's left hand the orchestrator. The field cleared, flames begin to engulf Akuma's hand once more, then trapped in his mouth. He returns to his frontal assault approach, travelling full speed towards Hannah with a dog's gallop. Hannah focus unsteady, barely pulls up a, far smaller, earth wall in front of her, unable to reach the top of her head. Looking up at the space she could not cover, Akuma jumps over, staring at Hannah as he dives over her rushed obstacle. He blows out a cloud of smoke into the cornered Hannah, turning her vision a consistent choking black. She jumps out to the right, rolling through the smoke, spotting Akuma stretching his left hand towards her. The embers spark, her memories flood in, concentration lost;
From embers, to a fiery column spiralling towards Hannah, downed on both knees, shielding her eyes with her hands. An inch from her face, the scorching heat flushing across her, the column halts; then Akuma absorbs it all back into his left hand. Once all the fire completely vanished from view, the column and the ring, Akuma places his stumped right arm on Hannah's head:
'I win.'
His smug face singing like he had proven God wrong or killed a Demon. He taps his arm on Hannah's head before walking over to Yuda. She takes the hint and stands; smiling a flipped rainbow, content with what she had accomplished.
'Yuda!' Akuma shouts, shaking Yuda awake.
'Great spar,' he responds lost. 'Who won?'
'Me, obviously,' says Akuma, slightly annoyed that Yuda would ask that question with such honesty. 'But Hannah's really good now. I don't think I can get away with much anymore.' He jokingly marks. Leaning closer to Yuda, he whispers, 'She's starting to get even scarier. If we're not careful we may have a witch with us.' They both look back at Hannah, walking towards, and let out a shiver.
Joining them, Hannah looks at Yuda and asks, surging with determination, 'How do I get stronger?'
Yuda smirks, 'Well, there is one way? But I want to inform you both that I cannot teach you how to do it.'
Both maintain eye contact with him, not breaking it for a millisecond.
'Okay, okay. I was going to tell you how. But I am serious; you will have to teach yourselves. If you learn the next steps, you may very well be better than me. Not even I am capable of it.'
'We understand,' Hannah interrupts sharply. 'Just tell us what it is. We will be fine.'
'Fine, Akuma can you-'
'No! I'm staying for this.' Akuma barks.
'This isn't up for discussion,' Yuda reluctantly responds calmly. 'I need you to-'
'You're not leaving me out on this again.' Akuma barks once again.
'Yuda, it's fine,' Hannah says, breaking their tug of war with words. 'He can hear this time; I'll deal with the consequences.'
Scratching his head Yuda gives in, the two pairs of eyes shooting daggers into his perseverance. 'Alright, if you insist.' He gathers all the words in his head, combining them into sentences before they are spoke, ready to be heard. 'As you know Hannah, there are four elements that you can control. Fire,' he says looking at Akuma, 'water, earth,' turning to Hannah, 'and air,' looking indiscriminately ahead. 'Hannah, when you were fighting, what did you notice about how you controlled each element?'
'Well… I had to concentrate a lot, and… Oh!' Her head shooting up. 'I could only control water with my left hand and earth with my right.'
'Correct. And that should be the same for you Akuma, you can only control fire with your left hand.'
'Yeah, that's right. So that's why losing my left hand would've been worse than my right.'
'Correct again. Your left hand can control either water or fire, while your right hand can control either earth or air. While you can learn all four with time, and you can use both your left and right hands simultaneously, you cannot control two elements with the same hand at the same time. For example, Akuma, if you learnt how to control water and air you could use both water and air, or fire and air at the same time, but it would be impossible for you to use both water and fire in unison. Why this is, I do not know. I may be able to control all four, but I'm not a scholar about them. It's likely that some of those in the older generations of your family would. Maybe when you find them you can ask.
'Contrary to all of this, however, is that I have heard of people doing something similar. While they could not control the two elements of each hand simultaneously, they did find a way to merge them in some way.'
Hannah and Akuma, both sitting down pretending they were in a classroom, lean to ensure no sound misses their ears.
Yuda continues, 'There are apparently tiers. All I can tell you is the first, the one you already know most of, and the second, the one you will be learning by yourselves. There is a third; the one those people used when merging the elements of one hand. Tier two should be possible for you two, even if I cannot do it. You will, however, have to use tier two if you want to have any hope of using tier three, as it consists of merging an element from your left hand with an element from your right; it's the next step from just using them at the same time.
'So,' Yuda takes a deep breath, 'the second tier consists of: lightning, from fire and air; lava, from fire and ground; precipitation, from water and air; and finally, blood, from water and ground.'
'Blood!' Hannah jumps. 'I've used that before.'
'You've what,' Yuda gasps, spitting out an imaginary glass of water. 'When did you do that?'
'You weren't there. It was after I got kidnapped. I used my blood to fight them.'
Yuda looks to the sky questioningly, 'Well then, I guess you two will have no problem learning by yourselves,' turning to himself, 'outclassed by a kid, such a teacher I am.' After coming to terms with his own weakness, he makes his way back to the front of the house. 'Come on you two, we're done for the day. Wherever we're off to next will give you more experience. More experience as well as reaching tier two, you may just be able to beat me. Maybe we'll have to test that properly sometime; not with a weird stick breaking competition.'
Sao and Rahat are starting the struck back up as Yuda, Akuma, and Hannah turn around the house corner, Rose handling the flowers across the road. Rahat, at the wheel, revving the engine growl; Sao, pores leaking with sweat, truck's hood open, the entanglement of metal wires, boxes, and tubs, a maze of specific pieces with specific roles which Sao recalls and guesses, scrambles to find a successful combination. With a huff of confused frustration, clearing his forehead temporarily from sweat, Sao closes the hood, ordering, with as much composure as he could control, for everyone to get in the truck. Rahat takes the driver's seat; Sao in the front passenger, and from left to right: Hannah, Akuma, and Rose fill the back row; expelled, Yuda sits in the trunk, waving goodbye to their short-lived stay back home.
Riding down a dirt road track, somewhere in the barren emptiness between Plutus and Gulhvitt, everyone has dosed off, apart from Rahat, keeping a watchful eye on the wheel, and Akuma, compressed in the middle, making the most of the scenes that will soon slip out of his memory.