Who Da Boss Lady? 14

Commissioned by InfiniteChaosRai

Who Da Boss Lady?

Chapter 14

-VB-

“It’s time for you to get stronger!” 

“No.”

Sato decided that “Venalita” wasn’t a bad creature or Avatar. Just … unconventional. Maybe a little dumb. Too straightforward at times, not honest enough at others, and definitely not a long term schemer of any kind with how impulse it was. 

But definitely a bad influence for Mari, one that he could not stop her from hanging out with.

“Why not?! You’ve been fine for at least a week now! Don’t you want to get strong enough to punt bad people?” 

The problem here was that his daughter and the creature were intrinsically linked. While they did not share power, there was a deeper essence that ran between the two of them. The problem here was that this link could not be severed without causing undue harm to his daughter. 

Getting rid of curses and the like was always painful, yes, but there was a difference between needed pain and torture, and for someone of Mari’s circumstance, he doubted that she could survive being cut off.

And that’s on the condition that the creature spoke the truth about itself, and not spewing bullshit it was programmed to say by whatever it was being puppeted by. 

At the same time, he can’t just let her go and do whatever it was that it wanted, and thus why he now trained her in things he had never wished for her. 

“Faster!” he snapped at Mari as she tried to roll out of the way of his attack, a harmless if slightly painful Mana Shot. It was one of the most basic attacks a magician would learn, either by instruction or from experience. It was simply a concentrated ball of mana fired into a specific direction with the intent to harm. Or in his case, the intent to shock. 

Mari, for all of her magical power and reserve, was not physically strong or fast. Why would she be? She was a perfectly normal high school girl just like how he would prefer her to be, unlike how he spent his teenage years fighting for every scrap of knowledge and bloody experience. 

So obviously she failed to dodge it for the fifth time in a row, yelped, and tumbled down to the grass. 

He winced but he didn’t move to help her. Mari’s mom wanted to, but both of them held back because this was training. 

Everything Mari could do with her power held its basis in her top physical form. Now, neither he or Venalita knew if her magical power added on top or multiplied from her current status, but in either case, there was nothing bad about Mari physically conditioning herself. 

So he trained her, even if it hurt him every single time she failed to dodge. 

“Are you going to stop?” he asked her again. He asked her every time she got hit. 

But every single time, she got up, glared, and waited for his next attack. 

He nodded. 

She got his tenacity. Once she accepted that she was going to do something, then she threw all of herself into it. And while she might not have been happy about this training, he had shown her that she was not strong as she thought she was or as powerful as Venalita promised she would be. 

But Venalita actually had a good counter to his argument. 

It hadn’t even been a month since they started, and because of Mari’s lack of worldly experience or necessary drive to grow stronger, she hadn’t had a change to grow stronger outside of that one attempt at absorbing essence. 

Personally, Sato considered this the perfect chance to train his daughter. 

She had just enough experience to be slightly traumatized by the world but not traumatized enough to kill her drive to grow stronger. She still wanted to grow stronger but hadn’t been set in her ways. She was also willing to learn but didn’t have any other teacher. 

Which left him with all of the options to train her. 

But he also realized very quickly that he couldn’t teach her everything he knew. He had plateau’ed a long ago. He was powerful, yes, but he was powerful because of happenstance and luck. He wasn’t like Mari, who could apparently grow her base magic reserve by “eating essence.”

Which meant that what he needed to do was for her to adapt to her current situation. 

IE train her until she can see a projectile coming for her, predict attacks even before there was a sign of them, and have a strong enough body to surface a hit or two.

And all of that started with the dodging practice.

He fired off again.

She rolled to the side and barely managed to dodge the Mana Shot. She rolled like how he taught her, but there was a twitch to it that left her unstable when she came out of the roll. And that’s when he shot at her again. 

This time, she was too slow to dodge - again - and took the hit. She yelped and tumbled back down to the grass, which made both him and her mom twitch.

But instead of being seriously hurt as most uninitiated humans would be against a Mana Shot, she got back up with gritting teeth and not a single bruise on her. 

“Ready,” she spat out. 

He shot again, twice at once this time. 

Her eyes glinted with something… but she was too slow to dodge again, this time because he predicted where she was going to roll toward. 

“You’re making this too predictable, Mari,” he chided. “You have a tendency to roll exactly in one direction. You have to rotate between all of your dodging techniques. I taught you how to side-step, roll, and jump.”

She groaned as she got back up. The fire in her eyes didn’t go away at all. 

Sato sighed. “It’s time for you to get cleaned up,” he said. “Then you eat and it’s time for school after that.”

Mari stood there for a second longer before she relaxed. 

And started whining. 

He chuckled as he walked up to her and scooped her up in his arms in a princess carry. “Only up to the door,” he told his sweaty princess.

She didn’t protest. Much.

-VB-

“You were taken out?” Kisuke looked shocked and worried. 

“Yeah,” Yoruichi grumbled. She had bandages and wraps all over her. Physically, she was bruised and tired. Yes, just from being exposed to that thing’s presence, her body had broken down. Spiritually? Whatever had struck her had been enough to make her reiatsu output flag. It wasn’t a permanent effect, Yoruichi can feel that, but it felt like … she had been cowed. 

Her. 

The former Captain of the 2nd Division. 

The Flash Queen of Soul Society. 

It irked her that she had been taken out so easily and left to the mercy of that creature. 

‘I can have a nibble, right?’

Its words haunted her ever since she woke up.

Kisuke explained that nothing had been done to her aside from what she could feel, but the idea that an Outsider might have had done things to her …

Could she even trust her memory? 

That’s the worst thing about confronting Outsiders. Outsiders distorted not just perception of reality but reality itself. Even if it was a Puppet, it had enough power to lay her low with its presence. So what happened when it did things it wanted to keep hidden? 

Plants things inside of her that no one but another Outsider could detect?

Like a face hugger? 

She and Kisuke already came to the conclusion that the Puppet was here on a possible reproduction cycle. So why not also make her one of its unwilling hosts? 

She felt sick.

Would her chest burst open? Would she slowly change and become something wholly not herself? 

She hated it. 

Hated it. HATED IT. HATED HOW WEAK IT MADE HER FEEL -.

“Yoruichi.”

She looked up, her hair forming a bang over her eyes. She saw Kisuke sitting patiently in front of her. 

“It’ll be alright.”

She kept looking at him before her eyes dropped back down, and she gave him a single nod.

The uncertainty ate away at her more than the loss.