Camellia sinensis
"I'll take two. You draw?"
"No, I have everything I want."
"Yeah, you're making it up, such a bluff is not for me."
"You'll find out soon enough. Turn out the cards."
Liwia spread the cards on the bench. She had a happy face: she managed to collect a Full House from two jacks and three eights. Mask raised his eyebrows and whistled in admiration. The girl's good humor broke, like a crystal vase from her aunt's collection, which she once crash in rebellion against vacuuming a similar trinket hundredths a week. The Cancer Saint still nodded in mock appreciation.
"Okay, brag about it," she muttered.
The man threw the cards on the table. Quads.
"I told you it doesn't make sense, how do you think he got the money for his leather jacket?" Milo, who folded some time ago, stretched to the bone creak.
The Polish girl looked very trod-upon, seeing Mask picking up all the money from the center of the table. He brazenly smiled, chewing on the same match for an hour.
"Maybe a rematch?" he asked innocently, but Liwia just waved her hand. She wasn't going to lose all her savings and she noticed Camus, calmly descending from the last steps in front of the Aries Temple. Today she was supposed to have a patrol on the outskirts of Athens with him. She got up from the bench, stretched her folded blouse with her hands and walked over to the Aquarius. But he shook his head.
"I can't. I have a lot of work left in court, I did not finish it yesterday."
"Free afternoon, awesome!", she thought, trying to control her smile.
"I asked Shaka for a replacement. He agreed. He should be here soon," said Aquarius and started his way, leaving Liwia with her mouth half open in protest.
Indeed, the Virgo Saint appeared soon on the horizon. Long blond hair waved behind him like a golden cape.
"If you want, I can tell him that I need you today to help me train my soldiers," Milo whispered in her ear. Somehow all the Gold knew what had happened on her first day at the Sanctuary. Aldebaran probably wasn't the best at keeping his mouth shut.
"Thanks, but I'm not here on vacation, I have no right to be choosy. Besides, it had to happen eventually," she replied, walking towards the coming knight. Blond said nothing; his eyes were closed, so she had to convince herself that he was aware of her presence.
The day was hot as usual. Or even hotter than usual. The girl slowly began to get used to the local temperatures, nevertheless she regretted that she was not accompanied by the cold aura of Aquarius that day. Instead of a pleasant chill, she was dealing with an incense scent that the Virgo was unfolding around him. In other situation, this fragrance could be intriguing, but now she felt a little overwhelmed. Fortunately, the Cloths were not mere piles of iron, otherwise Liwia would have lost strength in this stifling heat long ago.
They walked through the Athenian outskirts, further and further away from the stony slopes of the Sanctuary. Somewhere in front of them stretched forests and in them scattered the houses of the poorer inhabitants of the city. There was peace and quiet, quite disturbing for the capital of the Southerners.
"I have a feeling that something is wrong," she murmured, looking at her companion. Shaka gave no indication that he had acknowledged it, he was walking at a steady pace and was extremely dignified. To Liwia it even seemed that the knight wasn't touching the ground. Nothing but to throw rose petals and bow before him.
They reached the first buildings. Decaying walls, neglected courtyards, a shadow of trees crowns and an echo of a barking dog tied to a chain. Nothing else.
"Where have everyone gone?" Liwia was turning her head to the left and right, but the area looked deserted. Shaka, still statuesquely calm, entered one of the courtyards that surrounded the ruined two-story house. The tied dog growled, then jumped, preparing to attack the intruder. In a split second dog fell to the ground, whimpering quietly and retreated to the shack on low legs. Liwia did not sense even a little cosmo, the Virgo Knight just passed the animal and disappeared behind the ajar door of the house.
"I wonder what happens when he's in a bad mood. Galaxies are disappearing?", she thought, following him. She pushed the door open and entered the dark, dirty vestibule. Dirty with blood stains.
Liwia was a knight, a Silver Knight, but she was only sixteen. Until now she did not know the smell of death, did not see her cruelty to the body. She grabbed her stomach and closed her eyes, praying that she would not vomit.
Torn bodies. Whole family.
Shaka stood a moment, then turned back, passed Liwia in the passage and left the building. The girl ran after him, gasping for air.
They passed another quiet courtyard. The Pole glanced furtively at her companion, but he didn't look like he wanted to go there. She really didn't want to check the house, but her conscience won; she had to make sure. She took the first few steps when she heard:
"No point to go there. They are dead," he said to her for the first time.
Whether he knew it through sensitive hearing or because of his unique powers, she took his word for it. They went further.
"The marks were fresh," she finally said, swallowing hard. "The killers can't be far away."
He didn't even answer, just nodded towards one of the houses on the hill. Liwia focused her eyes. A few dark silhouettes. The hammer's steady knocking against wood also reached her ears.
"Quick!" Liwia shouted and without looking at the Golden Knight she ran towards the group of villains. Adrenaline sang in her veins and she felt a fiery cosmo rising inside her. She knew it wasn't too late, at least not for the inhabitants of the last of the surrounding houses.
They finally spotted her. She heard laughter, which was probably a reaction to her armor, and after a while a group of men turned to her with guns and knives. The latter were stained with blood. Two of the oppressors were boarding up the front door of the house, from which screams and pleading were coming. One of the men looking at the girl said something to his companion and together they burst out laughing. Liwia did not speak Greek well, but she thought that he was talking something about a masked ball.
"Move away from the door or I cannot vouch for your safety," she snarled and reached for her long knives, which silently slid from the scabbards on her back.
"Oh, a weirdo is threatening us!" The bandit apparently knew English well enough to go into a discourse with Liwia. "And what will you do, little girl, stab me with your false blades? Call for your buddies from a fantasy convention? Other Dungeons & Dragons players?" he chuckled.
"Soon you'll find out," she hissed and was about to launch the attack when two of the criminals, ignoring her arrival, finished killing the door with boards and took the lighters out of their pockets. They picked up some bottles off the ground and set fire to the rags sticking out of their necks.
"No!" Liwia shouted and attacked these men. The gang leader and some of his henchmen fired at her. If she were an ordinary girl, she would already be dead. But she was a knight.
She ran like an arrow, avoiding bullets and outstretched blades of spring knives. Only the two at the door counted for her, she didn't waste time on the rest. She already got them, one whined because of the blow of her blade when the worst happened: the other thug managed to throw a Molotov cocktail through a broken window. Screams of terrified people came from the building.
Liwia hit with her Claw the one who threw the bottle and when he bent in pain she jumped on his back, bounced off them and fell with her whole body on the window glass. Before she flew to the other side of the wall into the interior of the fire-heated house, she felt a bullet from a gun pass through her thigh. She fell off the wooden frame and disappeared in flames.
"What was that?" asked the gang leader, scratching his chin. Nobody paid attention to the moaning two at the door. "Sprinter or something? How did she avoid the bullets?"
"Does it matter?" replied another murderer. "Stupid girl went to fry."
They chuckled in agreement, staring at the fire and the thick smoke from the broken window. They slowly began to move away from the building when they looked back worriedly.
The door flew out with the force of a missile, crushing those two men standing on their trajectory. Liwia emerged from a cloud of smoke and throw a young woman and her son onto the grass. After a while, she also pulled out the unconscious father of the family, grabbing him by the hand covered in soot. She fell to the ground, breathing heavily. Pants, peeking out from under the right greave, were burgundy of blood.
The leader of group had eyes the size of saucers.
"How did she do it?" he muttered to the rest of his people. Liwia didn't understand, besides she was busy trying to get to her feet. She heard the sound of reloading weapons.
"Um, boss?" one of the thugs said in a high-pitched voice, patting the group leader on the shoulder and pointing at something. "One of her convention buddy goes there."
The Polish girl finally stood up and spread her hands, gathering cosmo; she was ready to defend the inhabitants of the house to the death. She froze, however, watching the same thing her opponents were. The end of Shaka's slow walk.
"Blind man", she understood so much from what the leader said and the rest she did not have to translate: the men aimed the guns at the blonde, wanting to get rid of the intruder as soon as possible. The other part of the group, those with knives, turned to Liwia and the family. However, Pole completely ignored them, also muted from the subconscious the screams of horror of the mother and her son. She only looked at the Virgo Saint. The pistols fired and it was the last element that the villains registered with their common senses.
Five of them suddenly bent in half and their ribs slammed unpleasantly. Hands of the two cutters standing close to Liwia, suddenly exploded; a shower of fingers spread sideways. The hand of the leader twisted at an unnatural angle; the gun fell deaf to the ground. Immediately afterwards the man began to howl mournfully, holding his head. From the stream of his feverish speech, Liwia distinguished only the word "demons." Five with broken ribs were blown out by supernatural force into the air. When they fell back to the ground, their two buddies with mutilated hands began to run around their axis, like a spinning-wheels. Guns bullets stuck in the bark of the nearest tree.
It was over; it did not last longer than a deep breath. Virgo's Knight was still walking calmly toward her. The girl realized that he was focusing on something. She turned her head to find that the mother and her son were silently looking at the battlefield, then at the approaching blonde. They were on the verge of a panic attack.
The man raised his hands as if to pray and almost whispered:
"Tenbu Hōrin."
The woman and the child fell unconsciously to the ground.
"What did you do to them?" Liwia was so shocked by everything she had just witnessed that she had forgotten about the fire raging behind her.
"I temporarily took their senses," he said, then passed her, murmured "Kan" briefly and entered the building shrouded in flames and smoke. He was gone for a moment, but when he returned, not even one hair from his head was twisted by temperature.
"Move them away," he said over his shoulder. After the first step Liwia remembered that she got in the leg. She almost fell, putting her weight on it. However, she managed to push the unconscious family a little further away from the burning building. She tried not to pay attention to the bloodied, demented thugs.
The blond man sat down cross-legged and began to accumulate power. It didn't cost him a lot of effort, because after a while cosmo hit the precisely selected points of the house, the roof crushed the broken walls and suppressed the raging fire. After the conflagration only black thick smoke remained.
Shaka stood up, by movement of his hand he undone the charm cast on mother and the child and began his leisurely journey back to the Sanctuary.
"Call the services and settle the matter," he said quietly to Liwia. The wind blew his golden hair.
"And how I supposed to do that?" she asked, pointing at her leg.
"It didn't hit the artery. You are a knight, you can handle it," he muttered and walked towards the setting sun.
Liwia always wondered why the countries in which knights were trained, in which the armors of Athena's warriors were located do not hire them to protect national interests, to remove enemies, to escort the establishment. She wondered what the authorities were gaining by agreeing to a trip like her to the Sanctuary in Greece. As she learned from the head of a tiny hospital on the outskirts of Athens – nothing but an unrealized threat. Who threatened and by what, the doctor did not know, but all countries accepted the law and only sometimes there were persuasions, bribery, playing on emotions to keep someone so talented in their homeland and try to use in some way. Liwia could even guess, where such abuses happened. Nobody bothered her when she was leaving her homeland, but all the formalities were handled by her master.
Unique hospital, in which she was, had an exceptional senior consultant. The gray-haired gentleman not only ran a clinic especially for the knights of Athena, he not only knew perfectly well what a cosmo charge aimed at an opponent could do, but also sensationally cooperated with certain special and order security units, which, unlike ordinary police, did not delve into the topic of armor and supernatural power. And he chatted like crazy. About ancient times, about Athena, about constellations, about the cases he had in the ward, about the durability of three types of Cloths, about his acquaintance with the Grand Master and his collector's passion, which was gathering personal items of knights. Liwia promised him a folk shawl with traditional Łowicz patterns, which she sometimes wore on a short skirt. This last, of course, she didn't tell him. So when she got this way in his good graces, she managed to convince the head physician to release her to the Sanctuary the same day, despite the stitched leg and stupefaction by a large dose of painkillers.
After all, she just wanted to go back to her little hut. She felt like she'd come out of an extremely tedious movie screening: for hours she told investigators the same thing, though they were magically convinced that in fifty-fifths he would say more, that she would slip out something that would shed light on crimes, on motives, on probable course of events. Even before she explained that she hadn't mutilated and drove a dozen bandits crazy (two to eight is a modest statistic), criminal policemen thanked her with a rigid handshake and proposed a prize from the city. She couldn't believe it: in every normal country they would put her behind bars. However, despite the many tiring hours, despite the stitches on her thigh and mental exhaustion through all the dramatic, bloody scenes of today, she wanted to return to the Sanctuary as soon as possible. That HE would see she could handle it. That she is a full-fledged knight.
The head physician agreed only on the condition of a taxi ride to the very house, but the girl asked the driver for a slightly earlier, less embarrassing stop. It was long after dark when she stood at the door of her small house. A small house which was besieged by the concerned Aldebaran and Milo.
"He's dead," said Taurus as soon as he glanced at Liwia's bandaged leg.
Bull began to making a giant steps towards the zodiacal stairs.
"Wait, wait, wait! It's not like that, he really saved the situation," she said, surprised with her own words. Stockholm Syndrome, that's what. "He didn't leave me with anything I couldn't handle."
"But he could not leave you at all!" the giant growled, though it was obvious that he had calmed down a bit.
"There's no point in getting into quarrels, you know that the Grand Master would not be happy," Milo added and grinned. "Liwia, don't you want to go to Mu for a tea? I don't know what's in them, but you will definitely relax after everything you saw."
All she really wanted was to lie down but the macabre of dead houses was still appearing in front of her eyes. Melissa forte or she will not sleep a single second.
"Lead the way," she smiled faintly at Milo and the Scorpion took her arm, as if instead of her soot and bloodstained rags she was wearing a ball gown.
Aldebaran sighed, said goodbye and went to his room. It was past midnight.
"Do you think Mu's still awake? I always thought he was rather of those early risers."
"That's true," said Milo. "But when I was going down, he was still discussing something with Shiva and Agora."
Liwia stopped immediately.
"Oh no, no, no. I'm not going there. I don't have the slightest desire to be in their company."
"I know Shaka's students are, how to say it, um, original, but they aren't that bad, huh?" Scorpion asked, with gesture trying to make her walk again.
"Aren't they?" Liwia shook her head. "Shiva shits higher than his ass is and Agora uses such an irritatingly patronizing tone as if he were my grandfather, not a peer. I have been in the Sanctuary for two months, and they have criticized my way of fighting, the appearance of my armor, my manners and, I will quote here, "the lack of any spirituality in this flat, deprived of wisdom, depth of science and purpose existence."
"Oh, you don't have to bother with that," Milo as always downplayed everything. "You won't hide your head in the sand through two appendages, won't you? They are Silver Knights, like you, so you are equal. Besides, I'm coming too. They will not dare to be arrogant in front of two Golden Knights."
Milo was so wrong.
"Camellia sinensis, thank you, the master will be glad," said Agora, gratefully accepting the parcel from Mu's hands.
"Camellia sinensis, Goddamn it, he couldn't just say Chinese tea, it's too common," Liwia snorted in her thoughts.
Shiva saw them coming.
"Sir." The boy bowed his head slightly in front of Milo, and then he looked at the Pole. "We heard that meeting with death terrified you, Liwia, Silver Knight of the Fox. Quite late learning like for a warrior of Athena, for someone, who has sworn to devote his life in her defense. If you, like us, Shaka's disciples, had previously understood that death is inevitable for all beings and that this is an unavoidable stage in the eternal journey of living, you would free your mind from fears and instead of being afraid, you would find confirmation in all of Buddha's words. But well, you were not lucky enough to find such an enlightened master as Shaka, it's not your fault. "
"Has this yokel just offended my master, Gerard, the Silver Swallow Knight?" she growled, squeezing her fingers into twitching fists. Milo put a hand on her shoulder, but took it away in a moment. The metal burned the skin.
"Calm down," Mu ordered them, approaching the arrivals. "What did you come to me with?"
The girl was busy sending to Shiva murderous glances, so it was Scorpio who asked him for some relaxing brew. A strong relaxing brew.
"It will take a while," muttered the Knight of the Ram, eloquently looking at Shaka's students.
"Thank you again, sir." Agora bowed and began moving away from the Golden Knight with Shiva. After all, they had to say a few words when they got very close to the girl.
"Pathetic armor," Shiva whispered in her ear.
"Did you take your mother's clothes?" Liwia bit back.
"Don't pay attention to her, Shiva, it's not worth it," Agora said quietly to his friend.
"Yeah, and you have a nose like a potato and it is the one you want to recoil from a bag," she said after the Lotus Saint. He pretended not to hear anything and began to drown her out with the mantra on abokya beiroshanō makabodara mani handoma jimbara harabaritaya un… Finally they disappeared around the corner.
Milo was having fun, but Mu sighed loudly and gestured for them to sit down. They were in a primitive kitchen, being more like an ancient alchemist's laboratory, than a place to prepare meals. Still, it was quite cozy, and the smells of herbs pleasantly stimulated the senses.
"Do you have any weed?" the Scorpion asked curiously, but instead of answer he got a disapproving look.
"He's amazing," Liwia said thoughtfully.
"Sure I am!" Milo laughed. "I'm glad that you s... you didn't talk about me, huh?"
"She meant Shaka," said Mu. Aptly.
"He... just walked. I understand that they were not knights, but ordinary criminals, still: he should at least stop, articulate the attack, I don't know, wave his hand! But he just made a walk!"
"He is a Gold Saint, you expected him to waste time on simple opponents?" Mu boiled some ragged leaves lying at the bottom of a large cup.
Liwia shook her head.
"No. But his deadly calmness... is terrifying and attractive at the same time. The point is-" she added quickly, seeing their faces "-that he appears to be an arrogant half-god, but he also shows that unwavering faith, strictness in rules and monks asceticism. Damn, I don't know if walking so slowly towards the burning house he really didn't care, because, as his students said, dying is a natural, inevitable course of things, or maybe he put me to the test, maybe he gave the fate of the poor family into the hands of an inexperienced teenager which, damn, I admit it, I am. Or maybe during a leisurely walk he accumulated his cosmo, which I did not feel in some way?"
Mu laughed and handed the girl a cup of hot drink. Bitter fumes filled the kitchen air.
"Shaka is like one of the varieties of Chinese tea, the one that I gave to Agora. Its name is Tieguanyin, or the Iron Goddess of Mercy. It is said that only those truly virtuous will appreciate its unique, strong taste, for the rest it will be an indigestible brew. I wasn't there with you, but one thing is certain: Shaka did not have to accumulate cosmo to dispose of a few thugs who were not knights. He is a powerful and difficult man. Such power and such bitterness are often avoided."
"So, apparently, there is something wrong with Aldebaran's virtue," said Milo and Liwia laughed.
The girl drank tea, then instructed by Mu to go to bed immediately after coming to her hut, she began to gather to leave. Milo walked her to the door and, somehow strangely thoughtful, began climbing towards the eighth House of the Zodiac. Liwia only managed to fall on her squeaky, rattled bed and immediately drifted into the thick darkness of unconsciousness. Without any dreams.