Ephemeral Dream

III: In Need of a Weapon

After my beat down of Cardin, the class went smoothly. Everyone finished up their spars and then, while the people without aura played basketball, Tai instructed us on basic hand-to-hand combat. I didn't get any skills out of it, though I wasn't too surprised about that.

Honestly, I was grateful. If I ended up with too many skills too soon, I'd have no time to actually master the skills I did have. I had enough skills that I needed to work on as was, there was no need for me to get even more just yet.

As a bonus for the beat down I gave him, Cardin was now going out of his way to avoid me in the locker rooms once we changed back into our uniforms. I was fine with it; Cardin was kind of an ass anyway.

As I changed my clothes, I willed my status menu to appear. Since I'd levelled up, it meant I had six more stat points to spend. I didn't hesitate putting three of those points into intelligence, and as well as two into sense, and one into luck.

Sense wasn't a skill I was used to in games but it seemed dead useful and worth investing in. Luck was also not to be underestimated. It was why I slapped my last stat for the level up in there.

From this point on, however, I'd be a bit more careful with my stat points since the game seemed to hand out stats for clearing quests, as evident by the fact one of my rewards for my day with Ruby would be three points in dexterity.

I waited outside of the changing rooms for Yang and Ruby, so we could eat lunch together. And, as I waited, I thought about the last friend I had in school outside of the two.

Admittedly, outside of Yang and Ruby, I didn't really have any friends. There were plenty of people with whom I would have liked to be friends but... I just didn't have the courage to approach them. I guess that's why I ended up befriending so many of them in my dreams.

The only friend I had outside of them was a faunus girl called Hikage. She was a snake faunus, her feature being her slit yellow eyes. She also had green hair and a body that could give Yang a run for her money.

Hikage was an orphan, nobody really knew what happened to her parents. She was just found on the doorstep of an orphanage one day in a basket, with a blanket that had her name on it. She was adopted at six by a nice woman called Hinata, and things seemed to look up for her... Until Hinata was killed when a peaceful faunus protest rally turned violent when Hikage was 10.

Hikage went back to the orphanage after that, and she displayed very little emotion from then on. It would be more accurate to say she'd seemed like she'd forgotten how to properly feel emotions all together.

I met her in my last year of primary school, shortly after the incident when her mother died. We, unbelievably, became fast friends. My family was a bit concerned by her lack of emotion, but they came to like her well enough and she was accepted.

And then... Came the day they all told me to stop being a Huntsman. I think, of all of them, Hikage's words had hurt the most when she told me to give up. At the time, I felt like a knife had been twisted in my stomach by her. I had slowly helped her start to feel emotions again, to start to move on from her mother's death, and then she'd gone and told me to give up my dream.

Of course, now I could think rationally and realise that when my parents spoke to her, they had likely mentioned my chances of dying were high and she couldn't bear to see me die like Hinata had.

"I love my parents, but some things are just too cruel to use against people..." I muttered to myself.

I didn't care if I was insulted or hurt, I was used to it. Both in the real world, and in my dreams. But to use Hikage's past and indirectly bring up her mother's death and use it to turn her against me? That was too far.