Chapter 9 - A helping hand

Wuwu was falling through an endless void. He felt hopeless. Was he destined to be a failure, even since he was born? He remembered when he got forced out of the orphanage at four years old, and dragged to the Largergarten estate.

"Aren't ya lucky? The bastard of a noble!" the caretaker, a hunchbacked old man with a pockmarked beak of a nose, had said, with a horrible, lopsided grin "Ya got me a pretty penny!"

And then the carriage, the bumpy, long ride, and then the mansion, the magnificent mansion that looked even bigger to him, who had never seen beauty. The pristine ashen white walls. The golden borders on the windows. A door that could fit a small army. Maybe this wasn't so bad after all.

Yet soon, she saw the cold eyes of Reilynn Reia Largengarten. She wasn't cruel. She didn't insult him. But he knew. He knew she preferred he didn't exist at all.

He liked when the servants and caretakers told him stories about his father, that man he had never met. He felt that if he could be like him, he could finally justify his existence, break through the matriarch's coldness, through everyone's underestimations, and conquer his own destiny. And try he did. He knew he was a swordsman, perhaps the best in his country if the servants' tales were true, so he swung a wooden sword until he could handle a real one. He pushed the world away in pursuit of his goal… and he was mostly left alone. Only his half sisters tried to talk to him, get to know him, but seeing them filled him with a strange feeling of nostalgia and fear, so he pushed them away.

And now, after defeating countless instructors, he found himself on the ground. Maybe he was just destined to fail.

When the instructor took his hand, the abyss faded away, and his bad feelings with it. He finally heard him:

"Don't feel too bad, my lord, most people want to kill me when they see me!" Hatter said, with a mocking smile "Although I'm hoping I can teach you how to control it."

"You're calling me lord now?" Wuwu said, as he took the hand to stand up "Did something change?"

"Well" the Hatter said, while he smiled "Now we've been formally introduced by a good fight, my lord. Now, do you want to learn to control your powers?"