Enemy?

After the unfortunate meeting, Enyo had with the mayor of the village, she returned to her home and as soon as she got there she saw Teras working hard on better take advantage of his mana vessels, she could tell he trained all the time because even though it was winter Teras was sweating intensely

"You have been training hard huh? Too bad you have to stop now, you have to cook now"

Enyo said as she tossed a tomato from her carriage to Teras

"This training isn't nearly enough to get used to my mana vessels"

Teras said as he relaxed his mana flow

"How do you think progress happens? Did your training always been as easy as snapping your fingers?"

"Of course not! I know that damn well but I feel like I'm not doing anything..."

Enyo then approached Teras and poked his head with her fingers

"Too much training will do that to you kid, that's why I'm giving you tasks such as these, you need some rest time for your vessels to grow, they are very similar to muscles, use them until they reach their limit and then relax them so they can grow, if you can do that then you will manage to see the change that happens in you"

Enyo said as she started walking back to her home, Teras soon followed, he had a task to do

"Hmm... It's good for your first time! Are you sure you weren't supposed to be a cook?"

Enyo said as she happily devoured Teras's vegetable meal

"Thank you..."

Teras silently replied before starting to eat from his plate

'That's good! At least he started to eat without me telling him to'

Enyo thought with a smile as she saw Teras eat

"By the way, stay on high alert because at night we probably have to fight..."

"Did you do something wrong?"

Teras stopped eating and looked Enyo in the eye when he asked that

"Do I look the type to do something wrong?"

"Well... you have the same aura disgusting aura around you like Tokkou and Joker... Nobody with that aura is completely pure..."

"You still go on about that "aura" you see huh? Sure kid I have made mistakes in the past but I'm reformed now, is not impossible to change, even you, seeing you like that reminds me of my own dark age that's the reason I helped you the first time I met you, but now that I know you are dear to Tokkou I have a second reason to do that..."

Enyo said as she got up, she had finished the food quickly

"Whoever attacks you make sure you don't kill them unless it is the Joker, then slaughter him!"

Enyo said with a sweet smile before exiting her house

"Alone again..."

Teras thought out loud as he continued eating

…

Some time passed after Teras ate, he cleaned the plates and the house and they continued his mana vessel training, he trained for hours upon hours, the shade of the trees allowed him to stay cool while his body was burning from inside, normal people would have been way too exhausted to train, but for Teras it was nothing, his mind was empty and his spirit was destroyed, Teras was essentially an empty husk that mindlessly repeated a pattern of moves, punch, kick, slash, repeat...

'Maybe it's time to relax... I don't feel my muscles anymore so that should be a good reason to do so'

Teras thought as he started lying on the ground, he stared deep into the green shine the setting sun had on the leaves

Suddenly he heard a sound coming from the bushes, Teras quickly got up and got ready to fight, he remembered what Enyo said before leaving so he was ready for everything

To his surprise, the person coming out of the bushes was a boy a bit younger than him holding an axe

The boy walked calmly at Teras but the closer he got the faster he started walking until he got to the point of running

Teras charged at the boy, punching the top of the wooden handle of the axe breaking it

The boy looked shocked at the falling metal part of his axe, the boy then got kicked on his side, and the kick launched him away violently, the kid landed near a tree, he was vomiting blood

"Why are you here?"

Teras asked the boy as he quickly dashed at it

"SHUT UP!"

The boy said as he hit Teras with the wooden stick of his but it was futile, the stick simply broke leaving the boy empty-handed

"Why did you come here?" Teras asked he was unfazed by this attack but it created a wound on his body

"Why did YOU come here? Go on! Take your little girlfriend and scram out of here! Nobody wants you here! The only thing you manage to do is make the villagers angry at my dad!"

The boy said as he started punching Teras in the chest, he was tearing up while doing that

At this moment Teras had one bad thought...

'Should I just punch him?'

Teras was unaware of the level of mana he controlled since he use his mana vessels for this long

"THAT'S ENOUGH!"

Enyo yelled from afar when she saw the two guys

"Shut up you traitor! You are nothing bad a fake! You are not helping anyone here so why stay? Get as far as you can from here!"

The boy was visibly frustrated

'Traitor?' Teras wondered

"I thought we got along with your father, but assume you two are not the same..."

Enyo said with a disappointed look on her face

"Exactly! I'm not weak like him! I'm strong enough to deal with my problems alone! Peace? Kindness? Why would I do that when everyone in this stupid village bullies me every single time they can?"

The boy yelled as he started running toward Enyo, his nose was still bleeding from Teras's attack

"Do you really think that kid?" Enyo asked

The boy attempted to punch her but Enyo easily evaded the attack and pushed the boy away from her

"Why would I lie, bitch?"

Enyo simply sighed

"I feel bad that your father has a kid like you... If you could open your eyes then you would realize how blessed you are..."

The kid paused for a moment, he seriously thought about her words, but it didn't take long for him to start attacking Enyo again, but before he could approach Enyo he fell down and started vomiting more blood

"What did you do to that kid, Teras?" Enyo asked but after inspecting the kid's body she found out that his ribs were broken

"Why would attack him like that? Can't you see that he is a kid?" Enyo asked Teras in a mad tone

Teras couldn't answer the question, he simply looked at the damaged kid, he then looked at his clothes that were dirty from the blood of the kid...

…At this moment his hands became bloody too, and to his surprise, he saw his previous friends on the ground, drenched in blood like the day he told them goodbye, he was holding two bloody daggers in his hands

"You survived! You actually survived!"

Teras turned around to look in the direction of the voice, and to his surprise, he saw the dark figure, it was clapping its hands

"That's your doing Teras! Why are you looking at me like that?"

The figure said as it looked at Teras's beast-like face, a face that was reflected on the blood of the fallen

…

"A nightmare again?"

Enyo asked as she sharpened Teras's weapons

"What happened?" Teras asked confused, he had a bad headache

"You fainted when I asked you "what did you do?" and I carried you here, and after a small talk, I somehow managed to calm him down... Well maybe the reason is way easier to explain, his adrenaline ran out and he started feeling the backlash of the broken ribs and had difficulty standing, so I carried him here and healed him"

Teras then slowly got up and saw the kid sitting on a chair drinking tea

"What's your name?"

He asked the kid

"Tom..."

The kid said silently

"I'm Teras! Nice meeting you! If you had started with your name then we wouldn't have fought like that..."

Teras said as he got up, he then looked outside a window, only to see that it was night

"Woah! I was out for a long time huh?"

Teras asked surprised, it was a rhetorical question

"So Tom... When are you going to go home? Based on your weapon and what you said you must be the woodcutter's son, he must be worried about you"

Tom looked surprised by Teras's calm speech, Tom thought that he would be mad

"He knows... I lied to him and told him that I went to sleep here..."

Teras then thought of what Enyo told him earlier

"What if something happened to you? I will take you back home! Just tell me where to go!"

Teras said as he grabbed Tom by his wrist, Enyo then stood up and blocked Teras's way

"You are not going anywhere at this hour, it may not look like it but this forest is dangerous! A lot of high-ranked monsters hunt at night even though lately they aren't showing up as frequently they are still a threat"

Teras let go of Tom's hand and sat back down

"What about the THING"

Teras said to Enyo knowing well that he talks about the attack

"He won't hold us back fro..."

Suddenly an arrow broke the window, that arrow was directed at Enyo's head, thanks to her battle experience was easily able to catch the arrow while it flew

"Kid hide somewhere! Teras let's go!"

Enyo said, she then teleported outside the house

Once she was outside she saw many people dressed in black clothing

'Thankfully they are disguised, meaning I can beat the villagers up with a good excuse'

Enyo thought as she smirked, she then proceeded to dive into the groups of people dressed in black, hitting them one by one but with not too much force since she didn't want to fatally hurt them

Teras came from inside the house too, he started hitting the people dressed in black but something was wrong, Teras was hitting them a little harder, he made them fly left and right, and as he made his way to another person he received a kick from Enyo

"What are you doing kid? You are hitting them too hard!"

Enyo yelled

"I'm barely putting mana into my attacks!"

Teras said as he quickly recovered from his fall

"Go back and protect the house! Your control is off!"

Enyo told Teras

"No way I'm doing that! I will help you!"

"Nothing will go wrong here! Just go!"

Enyo yelled to him this time

Teras finally listened to Enyo and went back to the house...

But there he saw something surprising

It was a masked man trying to light the house on fire, the house that Tom was in, so naturally, Teras enhanced his legs with mana and launched himself at the man, knocking the man away from the house

"What do you think you are doing?"

Teras asked with a smile on his face as he slowly approached the person

"I'm sorry! I was forced to do that! Please don't hurt me!"

It was the voice of a boy, Teras hesitated for a moment but without thinking, he got on top of the kid and started hitting the boy over and over again

Suddenly Enyo kicked Teras off the boy with enough force to make him crash into a tree

"What the hell are you doing Teras? I will beat the crap out of you if that's what I have to do to bring some sense back into your head!"

Enyo aggressively asked Teras

"I had to teach him a lesson! He was about to burn your house to the ground, you should be thanking me not attacking me!"

Teras replied with a loud voice, suddenly Enyo punched her house hard enough to smash the entire brick wall down

"Do you think I care about material things such as houses? Human life is worth way more than that Teras! You are no GOD! You can't take a person's life away for such a foolish reason!"

"Then what should I suppose to do? Let our enemies destroy everything and get away with it? Would you feel better if I let them beat me up? That's what you want me to do? Do you want me to just forgive Joker for all the things he did with me?"

"Enemies? Revenge? What enemies are you referring to?"

Enyo asked confused, that confused Teras too

"The guys attacking us, they were our enemies!"

Teras clarified

"Those weren't enemies Teras, those were simple attackers, there is no such thing as an enemy"

Enyo told him

"After what the Joker did to me how can you say that enemies don't exist? Are you trying to start a fight with me?"

Teras asked her while activating his mana flow

"I can't tell you how to feel about what happened back there, but I can tell you something else, whatever you do it won't bring your friends back, that's how the world is, revenge is an action the weak take to cling into the past, you are better than that Teras..."

Teras calmed down a little after what Enyo told him but his wrath was still unchanged

"H-How can you say that?" Teras said with a troubled face

"Look into the window of the house, what do you see?"

Enyo asked, Teras saw himself reflected, his reflection was surrounded by darkness

"Myself, but what does it get to do with anything?"

"You see once you grow up you will realize something, most people don't want to see you succeed, well not to a point that you will surpass them, but the person in your reflection will always motivate you, but this person is also your only and most dangerous enemy, sounds crazy doesn't it?"

Enyo said with a smile as she put her hand on his shoulder

She then went into the house, she was ready to fall asleep

'The enemy is me?'

Teras wondered as he too got inside the house

It was a long day and they had to sleep to regain their energy for tomorrow...