Karmic Balance

Shiori stretched uncomfortably. The past few weeks were the longest she'd spent in her human form in a long time, and she forgot how limiting it was. As much as it helped her release and control her mana and aura more effectively, it was stiff and awkward. The position of her tail was awkward against her pelvis, limiting the balance she gained from it, and walking about on two legs felt unsteady. Having hands was nice, but she'd long moved past needing them, her telekinesis more than enough to accomplish anything a humanoid might do with their hands. The worst part was the breasts. While she had some control over her human form's appearance, no matter what she did the breasts were always unnecessarily large. The extra fat and muscle got in the way of her arm movements and put more strain on her shoulders simply by existing. Laying down on her back didn't help either. Her tail was scrunched up painfully, while the excess weights on her chest made breathing more uncomfortable.

She could understand how even Silver ranked humanoid women complained of shoulder pain all the time. Her daughter had gotten lucky in that regard. Speaking of her daughter, Shiori idly stretched out her aura senses, tracking her on her first day back. As expected, she slept in, still enjoying the reprieve she'd gotten by testing out of the humans' ridiculous classes. She and Inari had spoken of continuing the training sessions for their daughters and whichever of their friends could make it in the mornings, but they'd earned a break. Besides, her daughter's new schedule found her with practical classes every afternoon and evening. While the humans' training was intense for their standards, it tried too hard to teach every student the same way. Sometimes, as Inari liked to say, teaching required a personal touch.

Jun had come far under their tutelage. When they'd first met, she'd been a nervous and scared kitten thrown into the deep wilderness by an uncaring universe, but now she was taking her first steps as a warrior. Shiori doubted Jun would ever grow to be like her. The girl was far too kind for that, like many humans. But she was learning to use her claws.

Her kitten was far from ferocious, but she made up for it in creativity. She had a talent for knowing how to protect herself, giving her the opportunity to turn fights around to her advantage. Though it would be better if she simply overwhelmed her foes at the outset, that would take a level of ferocity her kitten just didn't have. Well done kitten, Shiori thought to herself as Jun managed to disarm the boy and push him back even though he was more than twice her side and far stronger. As Jun pushed Ivar back with a rudimentary version of a sword technique she'd seen one of Inari's foxes use, Shiori allowed a smile to curl across her human face. Her kitten was winning.

Until she wasn't.

The tempo of the fight changed as Ivar stopped retreating and recklessly charged Jun, taking blow after blow to vital areas to grab her shield and wrench her to the ground. Something was definitely wrong. He'd stopped acting like it was a training fight. Time slowed to a crawl as she sped up her mind. The boy her kitten fought seemed near feral, mana pumping through his body as it fed a berserker skill that gave him strength at the cost of his sanity. Such skills had been banned at one point, the risk such a skill posed to the weak minded far outweighing the power granted. Not that she cared what happened to the boy from using his skill. She only cared what might happen to her kitten.

Jun's teacher moved to step in, only to bounce off the arena's shield array despite the bypass token he carried. Shiori reached for her magic, picturing a simple pulse of telekinesis to pull Ivar off her kitten, only to recoil in shock as her magic bounced off the arena's barrier, unable to affect the space within. Shiori threw more power into her magic only to feel a mild shock of pain as the arena's array rebuffed her, violently. Such a thing shouldn't be possible for the school's arrays. It took far more power than the city had at its disposal to create and power an array capable of stopping her, and even if they did, she'd checked every array her kitten came near. The arena's arrays were barely strong enough to handle a Platinum. Or they should have been.

If she couldn't get her magic through the array, she'd simply have to destroy it.

Spinning up her mana, Shiori ripped a hole through space, connecting two points and moving herself through into the hidden array core room she'd been in once before. The humans' arrays were well designed, hidden beneath the ground in a series of stone tunnels and chambers that were only accessible from well hidden and protected entrances. The walls were even made out of a rare mana and aura absorbing stone that almost perfectly mimicked the feel of the surrounding earth. But well designed or not, it didn't stop Shiori from getting to the core. Nor had it stopped someone else.

The smell of metallic blood filled her nose, faintly awakening a primal part of her that she quickly subdued, luring the cat back to sleep as her eyes darted about the dark room. Sigils painted in fresh blood overlaid the embedded gold and other precious materials of the original array and glowed with potent mana. Mana nearly as powerful as her own. Looking at the sigils, she frowned, recognizing a few from the ancient past. She knew enough about sigils and arrays to get by, but the subject had never sparked her interest. Why bother with something so tedious when she could simply destroy whatever arrays barred her path?

That lack of interest impeded her now. Tuning out everything else, even her kitten for the moment, Shiori concentrated on the space lock array. Thousands of sigils, some the original shield's, others the ones painted in blood, all of them influencing the barrier's behavior in some way. Carefully, she pumped mana into each sigil in turn while feeling how the array changed. What felt like minutes to her sped up mind passed before Shiori figured out the proper sequence to cut off the hastily added sigils, returning the barrier to normal. She cast her awareness back into the arena and rage filled her soul. The hulking brute had his hands wrapped around Jun's throat, squeezing the life out of her. She felt her kitten's mana move and start to form a lethal spell, but Shiori was faster, using her telekinesis to shatter the boy's spine, severing his nerves.

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Then Jun's professor was there, the man they called the Sergeant breaking the boy's arms with two precise punches before he grabbed and threw Ivar across the arena with Platinum strength fueled by rage. The Sergeant began shouting orders at his assistants as he stood guard over her kitten, and Shiori felt her rage cool just a bit. As one of the healers started flooding what she could into Jun, Shiori stood guard over the bloody sigils, doing her best to memorize them and capture the mana signature floating inside. Someone had just tried to kill her kitten using another student. She would make sure they could never try again.

Avery Sloan barely contained his rage as he marched into the Administration building, his aura already razor sharp and ready to lash out. He wasn't quite as threatening as an aura master, but he'd picked up a few things in service to the Kingdom before retirement. Namely the look in a man's eyes when they sought to kill you. A look he'd seen in Ivar's eyes right before he'd tried to kill Jun. No one tried to kill his students in front of him. Not even other students.

He tried to step in and stop the fight, but something messed with the array, locking him out despite the fancy remote array control they'd given him to operate the arena. He'd resorted to the tried and true method of trying to break through it himself, his peak Platinum body enhancements should've been more than enough. He'd checked, activating and breaking through the barrier several times over the summer before he started using it, drawing ire from Sean when his testing broke something and the Academy had to shell out to fix it. But the Sergeant didn't care about that. He needed to be sure he could protect his students if something went wrong with it, and he should've been able to break through the barrier with a single full-force punch. It'd taken him over 30, and that delay nearly got his student killed.

Avery admitted to himself that he let his rage get the best of him in the moment, breaking Ivar's arms and neck getting him off Jun. But the man had still been alive when his assistants started dragging him off to the infirmary, and they'd be able to patch him up enough. Or not. He didn't really care anymore. Ivar stopped being his student the moment he turned a training spar into a fight to the death, and he'd make sure he was no longer welcome at this Academy.

The enraged Professor of Combat Skills stomped through the Administration building, tearing past the panicked staff at the front desk and going right up the stairs to the Headmaster. As Avery moved through the building, he collected a group of increasingly desperate paper pushers that tried to stop him.

"W-Wait! You can't go up without an appointment!"

"Stop! Headmaster Allister's busy!"

They tried to physically block him or pull him back, but Avery slowly plowed through the group, ignoring his desperate hangers-on as they physically clung to him. They might as well have been feathers for all the good they did slowing him down. Noisy and annoying feathers.

"Stop or I'll call security!"

"Do it, they can't stop me," Avery growled at the paper pusher, pressuring the weak iron with a sliver of his aura strength. Ignoring the man's protests, Avery ripped open the Headmaster's door, finally shedding the bureaucrats who tried to bar his way, the weaklings too afraid to step foot in Allister's office without permission. The Headmaster looked up from his desk at the interruption, glancing between the splintered remains of his fancy door and the crowd of bureaucrats outside and the enraged Combat Skills professor.

"To what do I owe this unexpected visit Avery?" he said, cocking a single eyebrow at him.

"Expel Ivar Svenson," Avery growled, his knuckles cracking audibly.

Allister put down the document he held and stared at him.

Avery returned the stare with a glare of his own, letting just a hint of his aura leak out. Gasps and strangled cries of pain came from the doorway as some of the bureaucrats collapsed, unable to handle the Peak Platinum's aura pressure.

"Why would I expel one of my students? Especially the son of a war hero?"

"He tried to kill a student during a training match!"

"Young men can be a bit hot blooded."

"Bullshit! He tried to murder a girl right in front of me! I had to pull him off her myself!"

"Is he alright?"

"Ivar was alive the last I saw him. His victim had to go to the infirmary."

"Well I trust our capable healers will see everyone right as rain then. What's the problem?"

"The problem is that if you don't expel Ivar, you're going to have to explain his sudden disappearance to his daddy. Would you rather explain to the King's favorite bruiser an expulsion, or how you lost his kid?"

Shiori frowned as she spied upon Jun's Combat Skills professor and the Headmaster. Expulsion wasn't enough of a punishment for trying to murder her kitten, but she appreciated the man's anger on behalf of her kitten. Earning her ire however was the Headmaster. It took a few minutes for the professor to convince the man, but the Headmaster eventually agreed to kick Ivar out of the school.

It wasn't enough for her, but there wasn't much that she could do now. She could already feel the scales of karma telling her that if she got involved any further, there would be consequences. Sighing, Shiori pulled her awareness away and turned back to her daughter as she lay sleeping in the infirmary. The healers had done their best, but Shiori had already sent Inari a message that she was needed. The fox would fix Jun's body, of that she had no doubt.

But the faint trace of karma she felt floating about Jun made her worry for her kitten's soul.