Selene was in a room on the third floor that had exercise equipment and a space for practicing strikes. She was lying on a mat, performing a complicated pose that contorted her body.
"Do these poses really help with flexibility? I feel like my bones are going to hurt. I've had them permanently enhanced to be resistant!" Selene muttered this as she tried to hold the pose for a few seconds.
Sweat dripped from her forehead into her eyes, causing her to blink several times due to the discomfort. Her face turned red. She never thought this simple exercise would be so demanding.
Meredith had given her a series of poses to develop flexibility and help her relax, a kind of meditation combined with physical activity.
The interesting thing was what she set out to do while performing one of those complicated positions: channel her Noeia! A gray mist rose from her head and transformed into hundreds of threads that covered her body for a moment before sinking into her skin.
"I'm not cut out for Assassin! What a stupid thing to say," Selene muttered as she returned her arms and legs to their normal position. She rested on her back on the mat she used for the exercise.
Those were Meredith's words after training with Selene for a couple of nights. According to Meredith, although Selene's movements were precise and deadly, and she knew how to gain the upper hand on several occasions, she lacked two key elements to being an assassin: absolute contempt for life and killer instinct.
Being capable does not make you an assassin. Being an assassin is a 'profession,' a duty. An assassin doesn't need to be agile, kill with one blow, or be stealthy. An assassin must fulfill their mission at all costs, even if the consequence is death.
Selene valued her life. One reason she wanted to become strong was to survive! She could take risks and injure herself to inflict mortal damage, but she would never exchange mortal wounds with her target.
As for killer instinct, Selene viewed it as a kind of functional psychopathy, similar to Meredith's. She could question her existence and be emotionally affected by it. After all, it was something no human could avoid.
However, Selene was somewhat disconnected from her emotions. She could feel, experience, and understand them, but they didn't penetrate her. She could put them aside as if she were a machine, coldly evaluating everything.
Selene assumed that Meredith's 'arrogance' was a limitation imposed on her in the simulation, so she removed the trait that clearly did not match Meredith's true self.
The maid explained that Selene was deeply affected by her emotions. Even if she killed her enemies, even if they were strangers, she would probably never forget their faces, which was true.
Selene remembers the woman from her first murder, the four men who robbed her, and everyone with whom she had a conflict that ended in death. Their faces remained in her mind, and she experienced a range of emotions during those events: relief, gloating, euphoria, sadness, pain, and discomfort.
Meredith did not think Selene was crazy, so she could read while Selene was dreaming. She also read the stories of the world and Selene's life that the purple-haired girl told her. The maid understood that the world in which the princess lived was very different from her own and that it was a wild place.
Outside the city-states, there were no laws, and each city had its own legislation. For example, a brain-computer implant was mandatory in Dusk City, where people had mechanical parts fitted, even mutilating themselves for that purpose, despite not needing them.
In Eclipse City? Implants involving the skull and unnecessary prostheses were prohibited because they were considered a risk to the safety and individuality of the population.
However, with permission, you could integrate combat capabilities into your mechanical replacements. For example, Selene saw a blue-haired woman several days ago who was participating in underground fights. It was clear that she had lost her leg and probably suffered a serious spinal injury.
Apogee City is another city where flesh is despised and mechanical prosthetics are sought to replace almost the entire body. This makes it much more extreme than Dusk City.
Moreover, the devotion to the Second Sun in this city was not only out of respect and appreciation for the help this entity gave humanity in the past; they also deified it. They had a cult in its name and preached in other cities. In their own city, it was illegal not to believe that this being was a god.
Knowing this, everyone had come to accept killing as a very likely possibility in the outside world, which was not under anyone's control except for some territorial monsters.
Selene could not be killed, even though she felt no guilt for her actions. She was inevitably affected by the deaths she caused, whether she liked it or not. She was a functional person who had to be forced to follow this implicit 'rule' of nature: kill or be killed.
'However, you can train with me. I'll make your movements more accurate, your attacks more ruthless, and, for heaven's sake, I'll make you flexible.' Always seeking rigidity in your strikes is not ideal," Meredith said to him at the end, just before showing him the complicated stances she had learned.
When she tried them, she noticed that they were an exercise that worked many muscles at the same time. She could tell because her focus was on controlling her muscle fibers, and she had made permanent improvements.
She didn't expect to achieve the flexibility of a professional contortionist, but she would develop 'softness' that she could integrate into her attacks over time, Meredith told her.
Selene was intelligent, which allowed her to learn to fight, create Glyphworks, and study science. Although esoteric concepts always seemed confusing to her at first, Meredith's explanation opened a new door for the purple-haired girl.
All of this helped her improve her fighting style by incorporating some of the techniques of an ancient assassin and developing a better understanding of her own strength and how to apply it more efficiently.
She knew she couldn't be an assassin. She charged forward like a front-line fighter, not a berserker. But no one said she couldn't absorb and integrate elements of other styles into her own.
'Extremes give you the illusion of unparalleled power, but extremes are bad without exception. Nothing extreme is beneficial to the body or mind, so you should always seek balance. Instinctively, we all tend toward the middle ground.
You want total freedom, to be without restrictions, to be completely alone. But instinctively, you surround yourself with friends. You return home. You even intend to take me to your mental passage.
You pursue the extreme, but you tend toward balance. Luckily, you do that, or you would become a being dominated by your ideal and fall into the abyss that is extremism,' Meredith told her. Selene, who remembered this matter, felt uncomfortable and fortunate in equal measure.
"It made me think of Morgana. She loves hunting creatures, and she's much more ruthless than I am when it comes to fighting. But strangely, she hates hurting small, cute beings. She's not a monster who wants to spill blood. She just wants to prove herself and find her place in the food chain," Selene reflected on her friend as she stood up and felt the continuous burn in her muscles.
She then asked Meredith if her revenge wasn't an extreme as well, but the maid's response made the purple-haired girl never forget that conversation:
'Only when you live on the extreme and return to balance can you understand it as well as I do.'
"Extremes, huh? S.O.A.S. fell into an extremist attitude because of a flaw in logic. Wanting to take care of me was fine, but incapacitating me so that he could take care of me completely and not let the outside world hurt me? What a fucking extremist robot! If I find you..." Selene clenched her fists, making them crack.
"No, relax. Don't think about that piece of junk. Focus on the fact that you'll finally see the underground fights today," she said, a big smile spreading across her face as she spoke, calming her somewhat turbulent mood.
"But there are still two hours to go. I have half an hour to shower and half an hour to get dressed. I can train for another hour. Let's hit the sandbag," she said. Selene looked at a certain area of the room before picking up two gloves similar to the ones she used when training with her father. She put the gloves on her hands.
She walked over to the black sandbag and began punching it. She tried to make her attacks less rigid than before and attempted to take advantage of the concept of 'softness' that Meredith had explained to her. She sought a balance.
The sound of her punches echoed throughout the room like music to her ears, causing any negative emotions she had about S.O.A.S. to disappear.
'Softness and hardness are like the laws of physics; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Not only will flexibility make my body easier to manipulate, it will also allow me to better channel the force I receive, whether it is caused by me or my enemy,' thought Selene as she kicked the sandbag, causing it to barely move.
However, her foot bounced uncontrollably, forcing her to reposition herself to avoid falling. She clicked her tongue, knowing her attempt had not worked.
"Hardness, softness, external, internal. Why does it sound like an old story? Well, Meredith is from the past, perhaps from much further back than the origin of the Dream Interface Core, which is why she says such strange things." Selene's brow furrowed as she muttered, continuing to think about the way Meredith spoke and expressed herself.
She had to get used to hearing 'Grace' instead of Noeia. After all, that was how Meredith knew this power. She couldn't change that habit in a few minutes, so she dissociated herself from it, replacing that word with the term she knew.
Fortunately, her explanation of murderous intent and other esoteric topics was similar to what Selene already knew, only with more elaborate words. The essence hadn't changed.
Selene already knew these things and how to apply them since they were basic knowledge. A decent Noetarch should understand these aspects of themselves and know how to express them. They are a way for the mind to interact with the outside world.
When Meredith spoke to her about Hardness, Softness, External, and Internal, Selene spent a long time deducing their meaning until she came to a simple conclusion: They were just ancient names for attacks.
A hard blow was simply normal, while a soft blow required better control of one's strength. This is often used to deflect attacks or counter the enemy. Anyone who has learned to fight knows how to apply these concepts in a basic way.
The tricky part was integrating them and using them to their fullest potential consciously. But Selene knew it was only a matter of time. After all, anyone who didn't know how to deflect an enemy's force to the ground was asking to break their bones.
The complicated part came with the external and internal aspects. According to Meredith, every attack one provoked or suffered generally came from the outside in, which is why the concept of "external" was understood.
"The internal reminds me of the ability of my left gauntlet," Selene said, running the back of her hand across her forehead to prevent drops of sweat from falling into her eyes.
The internal aspect simply ensured that the impact of an attack would penetrate an enemy's internal organs and exit the body, causing external damage.
This required great control of one's power and extensive knowledge of how to apply force, gained through experience and battles, not simply practice.
"Now that I think about it, my father seems to know about these things. The attacks he makes are not entirely common," Selene said, looking at the bruises on her body, which were almost gone and barely noticeable.
"It seems that things are not lost; they just adapt. No wonder I always feel like my muscles have been hit directly. Even if my skin isn't as tough as his or Morgana's, it shouldn't be so easy to do with just a punch or kick." The purple-haired girl seemed to have understood something important, so she resumed hitting the sandbag.
All the while, she realized that she wanted Meredith in her life more than ever. Although Meredith's presence didn't instantly make her super powerful, it helped her better understand her condition and her chosen path in life and fighting style. This made her much more valuable.
"The best idea I ever had was wanting to make you part of my life! HAHAHAHA!" Selene burst out laughing. The sound of her punches landing on the sandbag was rhythmic, like background music.
Her own background music.