[REND] 15.2 - Besties Together, Strong

I held my hand close to my chest. It was trembling—my hand. Also, my chest. Only now did I notice my harried breathing.

“W-why did you stop me?” I blurted as my mind booted back up. My surroundings gradually registered in my brain. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Only one thing was in focus—punch and punch. Also, punch. “I can… I can continue. I need to… practice—”

“No!” Deen firmly said. “Look at your hand!”

“My hand?” I dumbly repeated. Huh? I could no longer clench my fist. I couldn’t even feel my right hand… Or my arm. A weird numbness overtook the right side of my body. 

My hand almost wasn’t there. It looked like I had stuck it inside a compactor or something. Like a garbage compactor, but for hands. Was there such a thing? I should invent it. Yeah…  

All of my fingers had been bent back and crushed into a ball around my palm. It looked more like a fleshy and bloody club than an actual hand. I couldn’t spot any of my fingernails. Skin had been shredded away, flesh turned to compressed minced meat, bones sticking out in places, with shards pressed into bleeding flesh.

My arm was also super damaged. Patches of discolored skin covered my forearm, a camouflage pattern, but in violet and red. Skin tore in places with flesh bursting out like an overcooked sausage. This happened before when I fried sausages for too long. My uncle explained that was why he grilled sausages.

Should I grill my arm? Sounds like a good idea… The hell was I thinking?

“Are you okay?” Deen shook my shoulders. “Erind?”

“Okay?” I mumbled while giggling, my woozy mind peculiarly giddy. “W-why shouldn’t I be?”

“Omaygash, you’re not! I shouldn’t have asked. Stupid! What do I do?” Deen cautiously patted my hand to wipe the blood, as if it’d do anything. She mumbled under her breath, probably calling herself dumb. Next, she switched to straightening the broken bones of my arm.

“Ow!” I recoiled. There was pain, but I wasn’t personally feeling it. Like another person was in pain, and their thoughts were transferred to me. This was so weird.  

“Sorry, sorry, sorry! I don’t know—should I call an ambulance?” Deen slapped her forehead. “No! Stupid me. Are you healing? I think you are. Yes, you’re healing! Oh, thank the Mother Core.”

So freaking loud. I didn’t know what Deen’s deal was. Shouldn’t we continue practicing?

Practice…

I stared up at the column I was punching—it was around three feet wide. I gasped. Seeing it clearly for the first time, I couldn’t believe the damage. I did this?

There was no singular crater. Instead, the entire midsection of the wide column was shaved to its core as if it were a tree, and a family of beavers got to work felling it. Huge chunks of concrete, larger than my head, had broken off the column and scattered everywhere. Not even a demolition team with jackhammers could do this much damage in an entire day. The steel rebars reinforcing it were completely exposed, many of them torn and snapped.

And this wasn’t the only column I did it to. Two others, I had almost completely separated. They looked like a stalactite and stalagmite trying to meet in the middle.  

“Is… is that all my blood?” Crimson splattered the debris all over. It reminded me of a school project in elementary where we used a toothbrush to flick watercolor onto sheets of paper. “Just like a painting…”

“What are you talking about?” Deen shook me again. Annoying bitch. “You must be in shock! Erind, can you hear me?”

I weakly grinned as a brilliant plan entered my brain. “Can I grill a painting…?”

“Erind? Listen to me. Come over here,” Deen said in a gentle tone as if I were a baby. She led me to sit on a stack of floor tiles a few feet away. “We’ll have to wait for it to heal—that’s all we can do. Slowly breathe in and out. Endure the pain.”

“Deen…” I raised my arm. Giggles overcame me again. “My hand doesn’t look… correct. Dripping blood.” I followed the drops and noticed the small puddle of red between my feet. “My blood’s here too.”

“Hang in there,” Deen said, rubbing my back. “This won’t take long. Your body must be fighting the pain, flooding you with endorphins or whatever.”

“Endorphins? I hate science.”

“Yeah, endorphins. If I’m not mistaken, those are the hormones the body releases when stressed or injured. I’m not sure how it works with our superhuman bodies, but this must be why you’re… acting weird. I’m guessing your body is flooded with it. Oh, look! Your fingers are—Aah!”

Brand new fingers grew out of my hand, pushing away the previous ones instead of repairing them. Clumps of flesh and bone dropped off my mangled hand. It was then that a tsunami of agony came crashing down all at once; all the pain I had been feeling rushed to the front of my mind.

I fell on my knees and knelt on my blood. I hugged my right arm. “Ow, ow, owfssh—” I bit my tongue and continued inside my head. Shitfuckshitfuckinghell it hurts! It fucking hurts goddamnit!

Erind was back online, and I knew that my face wouldn’t spout a litany of curses in front of Deen. I bit my tongue so hard that I tasted metal. Drops of tears rolled down my cheeks as I tightly closed my eyes.

“I thought you were healing!” Panic was evident in Deen’s voice.

She was shaking me again. Maybe her parents did this to her as a baby; that was why she stupidly assumed she was helping me one bit. Then, she finally did something useful. She gently lifted me off my blood pool of blood and settled me to the side.

“Lie down, okay?” Deen said. “Rest. Rest and, uh, endure the pain. You can do it.”

“Those are mutually exclusive options!” I curled up like a baby while hugging my arm. Remember to hide the crystals from Deen.

I breathed through my teeth as I forced myself to gradually get used to the pain. Somehow, this was worse than getting my stomach skewered. Probably because I pounded my hand to a pulp over several minutes instead of an instant pain. And something with the way my hand regenerated made this intensely agonizing.   

“We shouldn’t have done this hysterical strength training!” Deen stomped her food, cracking the tiles on the floor. “We should’ve stuck to throwing. I’m really sorry that—”

“It’s not your fault. It’s… It’s starting to get better now. Fsshhh…” I hissed, swallowing all the curse words threatening to escape.

“I should’ve stopped you before it got this bad,” Deen said. “I was too focused on my training upstairs. Things got too loud. It sounded like you weren’t stopping, so I became worried. If only I had gone down earlier. I’m so sorry.”

“Nah, it’s my fault I got too absorbed in punching,” I said. “My fault…”

This was the first time this happened to me. What an off feeling. Perplexing. Unnerving.

Was this what ‘blacking out’ felt like? We had read cases about blacking out used as an excuse by the accused. Did that rhyme?

Could be from too much alcohol, overflowing rage, even temporary insanity, and other explanations. Blacking out on its own wasn’t a legal defense, however. Not in the rules or jurisprudence. Rather, it depended on the reason and circumstances of blacking out. Sometimes, the defense worked. More often than not, it didn’t. Really hard to prove that someone blacked out.

But I could prove to myself that that was what just happened to me.

I didn’t like this one bit. It was a massive loss of control for someone who controlled themselves as much as I did. Bordered on losing my face. It was like getting taken over by the predatory instincts of my sexy monster body when I first transformed.

Actually, this was different. My mind went blank except for punching. This was more akin to killers stabbing their victims dozens of times before realizing what they were doing.

Law enforcement would categorize it as some crime of passion—extreme anger overcame the criminal, and the violence just went way overboard. True, anger was there. But I surmised it happened differently than the common belief. The killer didn’t have anything in his head other than the last thought of stabbing their victim. Since their brains were empty, they simply followed that last command until their brains rebooted. The anger was gone during the commission of the crime, as weird as it sounded.

Not sure how I knew this, but I was certain I was right. Could I excel in Criminal Psychology or something?

Another worrying possibility cropped up—was Spooky Erind taking over me? Could this be a sign that I was literally losing myself?

Deen helped me sit up and hugged me, snapping me out of thinking about Spooky Erind. “Concentrate on healing, Erind. Listen to my voice. Don’t think about the pain.”

“That’s an insane instruction, Deen,” I grumbled. “Don’t think about the pain, while my arm looks like I slotted it into a meat grinder?”

“You’re getting sassy.” She smiled. “Are you feeling better?”

“Still painful. It’s fading, though. I can handle it.” Some of my fingers were fully formed and could feel again. I checked for the crystals on my palm, hoping against hope that they’d disappear. Too bad they were also back.

“Don’t bend your arm that way.” Deen tugged my right arm, which I was hugging, and laid it across my lap. “A few more minutes. Just wait… just wait…” she said in a soothing voice.

“Deen, I’m fine now. I mean, my arm’s still not.” I kept my hand facing down. “But I’m back. I don’t know what came over me earlier, but I assure you that it’s over.” I turned to her and smiled. “And I managed to reach hysterical strength.”

She frowned. “With your arm looking like that, I suppose you can say that. But how sure are you that—?”

“What did Myra explain to us after our training? Fractured forearm bones are what we should aim for? Something like that. Breaking our fingers is easy when punching. The forearm is different.”

“I remember,” Deen said. “If the forearm is bent, the bones will easily break. But if pressure is applied on the ends, like punching straight, it takes a lot of force to break it.”

“Did you see my forearm?”

“I wish I didn't! Now, I want to unsee it.” She closed her eyes and rapidly shook her head.

This would be fun to tease her. I probably should not have even worried about Deen noticing the crystals on my hand since Deen does everything to avoid looking at it while trying to be so supportive. “It got compressed by the force that the skin ripped and the bones poked—”

Deen made a face. “Don’t describe it in such detail. I get it. You tapped your hysterical strength.”

“Hurray!” I mildly cheered, pretending to wave a flag with my left hand.

“I changed my mind about hysterical strength. I’m not denying how much stronger we’ll be if we can achieve it on command, but training for it is just…” Deen waved her hands in exasperation. She gestured at my right arm. “Your limb had to get… get… get fucked up!”

“Get fucked up?” I grinned. Deen was cursing. That was the sign she was super serious.

She blushed, as if a little girl caught by her mom saying bad words. Her real mom wouldn’t care about her. “Pardon my words, but they do capture the extent of your injuries. You were punching for five minutes straight before I went down here to stop you. I was horrified by your arm that I… I just got stunned instead of immediately stopping you. By the way, how did you do it?

“Do what? Fucking up my arm? You know—”  

“I meant switching off pain.”

That gave me pause. “I don’t know,” I slowly said, replaying what happened. This was an aspect of myself that I discovered only now. “I don’t… really know. I just thought really hard… to punch really hard.”

“It can’t be as easy as that,” Deen said. “If we’re talking about willpower, I don’t think I lag behind you. We’re both practicing the same thing, and we’re both beginners at it. I highly doubt there’s a talent for ignoring pain. It might be about focus. Are you the type to zone everything out when doing a specific thing? Like, in studying, do you get into a flow state where you just continuously absorb the material?”

“Not sure. I don’t think I’ve ever been this concentrated on anything.”

“Is that so? Your mind is stronger than you think. What’s more, you’re also breaking a psychological barrier. Perhaps your mind is different. Just, wow.”

Different is bad.

Erind Hartwell, a first-year law student at the prestigious Cresthorne College of Law, was a normal person. Should be a normal person. I didn’t make any waves besides the occasional ripple on the social pond. I didn’t stand out in a crowd and was a bit on the timid side. My face lived in the shadow of Deen. No one should give me a second glance because I was normal.

Even among the hero wannabes, I should be normal. It was my mistake showing off my strength. Another mistake was not controlling myself during hysterical strength training. 

Some would take what Deen said as a compliment, but I didn’t. Sticking out was a no-no.

When I was little—much smaller than I was now—I didn’t attend parties of other kids because they were noisy, irrational, selfish little shits. I preferred the other social gatherings of adults because I was entertained watching them interact. It didn’t go unnoticed, and Mom forced me to go to the birthday party of some girl named Callie.

Mingling with the other kids there, I realized I was different from them. I was like five or six years old at that time. My kiddie brain couldn’t form a concrete explanation as to why, but I just knew it. I also knew being different was bad. The other kids thought I was weird. Being branded as the ‘weird kid’ was a social death at that age. Any age, actually. And they avoided me.

After the party, I told Mom that I was nervous. Any weird shit I did at Callie’s house, I chucked to nervousness. Starting that time, I wore faces to blend into any social setting I was in. And the faces I wore would usually be the bland type, so that I wouldn’t stick out.

“My mind’s the same as yours, Deen,” I said. “Erm, I guess your brain is better than mine. You have higher grades.”

“This isn’t about intelligence,” Deen said. “Willpower. I suspect you have a stronger willpower than I do. But I don’t know how to test that. Or, you might have a higher pain tolerance. What do you think?”

“Pain tolerance?” My body tensed. Deen might be onto something here.