Moira
What happened next was a blur of Moira literally taking measurements of Sarah's body, including ones that were a bit awkward for Sarah. She even had Sarah get on a special scale so she could measure how her weight was distributed while she was just standing versus assuming a fighting stance.
"Alright, hold this like you mean it, then go over to that area and give it a few swings so I can see what you look like holding it and moving with it." Moira handed the Naginata back to Sarah, and Sarah obediently went over to a practice area complete with practice mannequins and everything and began swinging it around.
"No, not like that, you are supposed to hold it like this, and carry your weight like that when you swing it."
"Now you are overextending yourself. The point of a polearm is to gain a reach advantage over your enemies, not to throw yourself into their blades."
Moira couldn't help herself from correcting Sarah's form, and midway through repeating this process with the katana, Sarah finally lost her patience with Moira.
"What the fuck is the point of all this? Why should I train with any of these weapons when magic can do more than they ever will?" She asked in a heated tone of voice.
Moira calmly walked over to a weapon rack holding a collection of swords, selected a European style longsword, and walked back over to where Sarah was standing, pushing her out of the way gently but firmly as she began her stance. She began glowing with a holy aura while she calmly held the sword down at her side. She remained like that for a few seconds, then abruptly whirled into a slashing cut followed by a piercing lunge. Her form was perfect, but more importantly the slash was accompanied by a windblade and a swordlight followed the lunge, so that the metallic targets on the far wall were cut in half, with a half meter hole blown right through the center one. She remained in the pose following the follow through on her lunge for a full 3 seconds before resuming a neutral stance.
Sarah remained silent, eyes widened in horror at the destructive power she had just seen unleashed. The silence continued for a full minute before Moira turned to look at her and began to speak, with a tiny trace of blood flowing out of her right eye.
"It's not weapons or magic, your training will encompass showing you how to entwine magic into everything you do, including fighting to defend yourself. In order to do that best, you will need to achieve a minimum competency with the weapons you have selected. Furthermore, since you have awakened as a cultivator and have been selected as a high priestess for a primordial goddess, you will need to train how to incorporate Spiritual Qi, Cosmic energy, Celestial Power, and Divinity into your techniques and into your cultivation. Your potential is great, and I refuse to allow you to fall short of it."
"You can be far more than just a witch, even one of some renown and authority. You have the qualifications to become a power some day, and you deserve to be given that chance." Moira paused for a moment to take a breath. Perhaps pushing her own expectations onto Sarah was a little unfair.
"However, if you wish to simply remain ordinary, you may feel free to walk up those stairs and never visit this part of the house again." Another deep sigh. "I have lost the heart to train people to be merely ordinary."
Unbeknownst to Sarah, Moira had gone somewhere else entirely within her own mind, remembering all the young women and men she had been forced to train who were barely older than Sarah was now. She remembered, too, having to step over their corpses as she evaluated the aftermath of the battlefield. How each one felt like another knife stabbing into her chest. How she wrote consolation letters to their families until her fingers bled…and then had to keep writing. How this process repeated in a seemingly endless and pointless cycle, with insane losses on both sides.
She had finally put a stop to it when she sent over 90% of the next batch home and trained the remainder to be elite soldiers who could survive all but the most insane situations. She never once looked back, and she never again trained people to be merely "passable" or "halfway decent". That was merely a polite, backhanded elitist way of saying cannon fodder.
From then on, her training methods became a lot more heartless, and the rates of would-be soldiers washing out skyrocketed. However, the ones who survived the process with their sanity intact would usually go on to become powerful figures and legends in their own right.
Ironically, she achieved the goal of building up the amount of forces required of her well before the deadline she had been given, simply because the casualty rate dropped from nearly 100% to almost 0%, so not only could she have soldiers surviving to fight in other battles, they would develop and pass on institutional knowledge and experience which would prove invaluable. However, by the time she had achieved this goal, the war she had been training them for had finally come to an end, and was replaced by an uneasy peace.
So naturally, their casualty rate increased as they were suddenly abandoned to a world that had very little use for them, and would rather conveniently forget about them than do anything with the soldiers it had spawned. Not because they died to enemy action, but because many of them chose to end their own lives. This had somehow been even worse than what had come before, because Moira had come to view them almost as her own after nearly 20 years in battle together.
She was shaken from this thankfully brief trip down memory lane when she heard someone calling her name.
"Moira. Moira! Moi-"
"Sorry, I was lost in thought. Did you wish to say something?" Moira cut Sarah off before her ears started bleeding as her volume kept increasing with each repetition.
"I just wanted to say I am sorry. I didn't realize how cool this stuff could be, and I kind of underestimated you. I'm just curious though, where did you go while you were just sort of staring off into space like that?" Sarah asked this in a tone of voice that was conciliatory and maybe even a little concerned, so Moira did not take offense.
"Somewhere I would prefer you never have to follow. I suppose I should be grateful you find this stuff to be 'cool', because it will make you more motivated while I am training you, but you should remember that it would have been a lot messier if there had been people standing there instead of thin metal plates. I will make a point to teach you things that can be used in normal applications as well, because these things…are fundamentally meant to kill people. It is important to me that you remember this as you move forward. It's good to know these things, but it is even better to never have to use them."
Sarah nodded slowly, some of her enthusiasm dampened after that sobering thought, but before she could reply, a small rift opened in the middle of the small practice area.
"Umm, should we be concerned about that?"
"Not really. Until we have an idea of what is coming through there, there is no real need to panic. It could just be the Council sending Yulia another summons to hold court, which she will likely file in the round filing cabinet alongside the other 11 so far." Moira replied, unwittingly giving Sarah the wrong idea of the threat level the Vampire High Council poses.
"Why do they keep calling her to court? Does she have a traffic ticket or something?" Sarah asked innocently.
"I will pretend you didn't just say that. Technically, Yulia is the Vampire High Queen, and they are trying to get her to hold court so they can amend some laws in my absence while she remains none the wiser. Unfortunately for them, not only does Yulia have a better understanding of their ancient-ass legalese than I do, she has even less patience for their bullshit. Their population would probably drop like a stone if she had to interact with them for a protracted length of time, such as a court session, which can last up to 3 years." Moira didn't even think to conceal any of this information, and it blew Sarah's mind a little bit.
"Wait, if Yulia is the High Queen, what does that make you?"
"Originally, I was sovereign over all vampires. However, eventually the Council will become insistent in a way we cannot ignore, and in my current state of health and at my current cultivation level, trying to hold court in that den of snakes would essentially be courting death. So, I basically had Yulia insinuate to them that I was approaching a breakthrough and was therefore in closed-door cultivation in a remote realm. This leaves her as my Regent, and therefore the one who a lot of the responsibility will fall on. I kind of feel bad for her, as she will likely only be able to postpone things by another couple of years before they start making it a real pain in the ass to ignore them."
"However, while Yulia is quiet and allows me to do most of the talking when we are both present in court, she is hardly the pushover they think she is. She is one badly thought out muttered comment from literally tearing them all apart with her bare hands at even the best of times, and her temper has continued to fray as she has been stressing over my condition and the looming threat of going rogue has been encroaching on her." Moira replied absent mindedly, as she suddenly caught a familiar but unpleasant scent from the portal.
"Wait, what does 'going rogue' mean?" Sarah asked.
"I'm afraid I cannot trust you to treat my wife the same if I told you, and it is truly unfair to judge somebody for a medical condition that is no fault of their own."
"You don't know me very well, but I would never do that." Sarah replied.
"You mortals love to throw around your 'never's and your 'forever's as if you could even comprehend the depth of meaning held within, but you always break such promises. Know this, little priestess, if you go forth and become forsworn to me, the consequences will be dire. Are you sure you wish to make such a promise?" Moira had suddenly gained a very dangerous aura, and the lights around her seemed to have dimmed somehow.
Sarah felt a cold sweat trickling down her back, but she was determined to become someone Moira could trust, so she nodded her head firmly.
"Don't regret it later, then." Moira sighed and took a deep breath, and frowned as the scent was stronger, almost enough for her to recognize it.
"Rogue vampires are vampires who have failed to stand the test of time. Basically, the years started coming, and they never stopped coming, and eventually the weight of them all caused their sanity to snap. As vampires get older, they are more likely to fall victim to this. However, it is not like a perfectly fine vampire goes to sleep one day and awakens as a monster the next. There are signs long before then, and things that can be done to ameliorate the condition as much as possible. Cultivating their minds and their souls can definitely aid in this, but I have a pet theory as to a better solution."
"You see, there are 0 recorded instances of a vampire who has found their fated mate going fully rogue. Some of them even begin to get better, despite only ever getting older and experiencing more. While I believe the mate bond is a powerful thing, it's also incredibly rare. If this is the only solution, then most vampires are kinda screwed. However, I believe what helps keep the beast within at bay is to keep themselves grounded to the mortal world. As time goes on, vampires will naturally have less and less connection to the mortal world and the current events within it, causing a disconnect which will eventually cause them to see mortals as inferior creatures. This attitude in and of itself is the seed that everything else grows out of."
"Combine that with the accumulation of trauma and grievances over years, decades, even centuries, and you have a recipe for people to become incredibly bitter, incredibly jaded, and to slowly devalue life and people. Unfortunately, a vampire's natural predatory instincts sort of feed off of this, which creates a cycle that eventually leads to them beginning to slip up. Maybe it starts with them going out to feed and they accidentally took too much blood. Maybe their discontent with their mortal neighbor mowing their lawn at high noon every day when they are trying to sleep finally morphs into a homicidal rage, which they immediately regret. Maybe they just start getting angry at relatively petty things and breaking shit and hoping their spouse won't notice. Or maybe…" Moira swallowed. "Maybe they go to war and don't ever really come back."
"The werewolves have a similar problem, where if they don't find and claim a mate by their mid thirties, they become lost in something called 'feral fever'. It has similar early warning signs, but not only can they simply claim a chosen mate if they can't find their fated mate, they have even used their admittedly more developed technology to create a vaccine of sorts which slightly weakens their wolf's dominance but also holds the feral fever at bay more or less indefinitely."
"However, in both species, once it is fully developed, there is no recovery. The only thing to do is humanely put them down before they start dropping bodies like the villain in a slasher film. That's why the work I am doing is so important, because we don't need to keep losing vampires this way." It was doubly important because if Yulia went Rogue…maybe nothing and no one could stop her. Even if they did, Moira knew damn well that she would lose every last bit of her remaining sanity if she had to watch, or even worse participate in, her wife being put down like a rabid dog.
"Are you sure? Like, what if a rogue found their mate?" Sarah asked.
"For someone to be marked as rogue, means they have already done something inexcusable and unjustifiable. There have been thirty-three cases of a rogue finding their mate. In fully half of them, they killed their own mates and then themselves. In the other 16 cases, they lived perfectly normal lives until the authorities tracked them down. Adam, the werewolf high king, was damned near feral when he found his mate, who he kidnapped and ran off with. They have been living together ever since but he has refused to mark and mate her. So I have no clue if there is a true point of no return or if it is simply more convenient to give up on them rather than trying to save them. Probably feels better to the victims as well."
"And Yulia is at risk of this happening to her?" Sarah asked.
Moira sighed. "I know you just met her, but she has been showing the signs for quite a while. Actually, it has been slightly better today than it has been for a few years now." Moira pondered this for a moment, and then grew a sneaking suspicion about just what role Ashley was playing in that.
The scent suddenly grew far stronger, and the form of a man dressed in oriental robes covered in old, dried blood began to be visible through the portal.
"Demonic Qi." Moira whispered through gritted teeth.
"Sarah, I would like you to turn around, exit this room, and run up those stairs as if your life depends on it. Just as you reach the landing at the top, to your right there should be a large red button. I want you to strike it with all your might, and then proceed out the gym and straight out the front door without looking back. Ignore any and all sounds you might hear behind you. Do absolutely everything you can to get my wife's attention and bring her back here as quickly as possible." Moira's every word had just a trace of command and authority within them.
"But what about…"
"Sarah! Do it now!" There was a lot more than a trace of authority in her words now, and Moira would have to apologize to Sarah later as she watched multiple vessels burst in her eyes as the younger girl tried to resist the command.
The next moment, Sarah lost her battle and turned and raced up the stairs like the 7 armies of hell were at her back.
However, in the amount of time she had resisted Moira's commands, the demonic cultivator had almost fully emerged from the portal and was already preparing a technique to prevent the witch from escaping. Moira released the killing intent that she spent most of her time keeping in, and not only did he fail to cast it, she distinctly heard his heart stop in his chest for a few moments.
At first, he assumed that he had entered an area shared by some terrible monster of legends, but when he discovered it was just a small girl with a pitiful cultivation base that he could overpower with his pinky finger on his left hand, he scoffed at her efforts.
Meanwhile, Sarah was running so fast and so hard that the stairs seemed to disappear from underneath her in a blur. Her breathing was coming in ragged pants, and her vision had begun to fade in and out from the exertion.
She found the red button Moira had been describing and a twin opposite it, both labeled in Russian, and she hit what she hoped was the correct one and ran for it. She heard a loud grinding noise and then a booming clang, and when she glanced back she saw a massive steel blast door had blocked off the stairwell entirely.
She kept running outside, and as soon as she could get a breath, she started screaming at the top of her lungs, "Miss Yulia! Miss Yulia! Moira needs your help!"
Perhaps it was for the best that she said that last bit, because Yulia was fully entranced by Ashley's antics and was fully willing to ignore whatever the 12 year old girl wanted until her wife had been brought up. Perhaps it was also for the best that Sarah would never learn this fact.