The tragedy in blood
Late August of 241, Sanctuary:
Despite the fact that the Gemini Cloth had chosen Lydia and Elena as its new wearers with nearly the whole Sanctuary as witnesses, everyone knew better than trusting the very tense peace to remain. For the seven days which followed afterwards, Romulus and Remus refused to humbly accept that they have not become the new bearers and openly showed pure anger and resentment over the rejection they had faced.
"Even with the girls protected by the most powerful Silver and Bronze Saints, it is only a matter of time before something happens. Grand Pope, Lady Athena, do you have any suggestions for what to do?" Darius wondered, his face showing an understandable fear for the two Gemini sisters, who still were his students due to their age and needing more training. Just because they had been chosen as a Gold Saint at the age of twelve, did not mean that they were ready for shouldering the role yet.
"We have talked about easing their memories of the Sanctuary, Athena and everything they have learned here, and sending them as common soldiers to serve in the Roman army once their Cosmos have been blocked. Their birth parents are already dead, as are several other close relatives that could have taken them in otherwise," the Grand Pope said and Athena nodded to show that they must have talked about this over the past days, "They have been trained as a sort of soldiers here, and while they have gotten a education in basic school subjects as part of what a Saint must know in everyday life, it is not enough to act as the claim that they left their childhood home in Rome to serve as priests to Jupiter in a temple in the eastern parts of the Empire. If they can not do the rituals right, everyone will come with uncomfortable questions about how they could have gotten a rather poor training for such a role in the service of the gods."
Darius could see the logic in that. It was well known that the Italian twins loved to fight, and did not exactly excel in the world of the written word. Even with twelve years of memories altered so they would not reveal the Sanctuary, allowing them to fight in the Roman army would still allow them to make a career in battle.
"I understand, and I agree that it is the closest thing we can do to give them back to a "normal" life in the wider world."
Suddenly, the Virgo Saint came running at high speed into the chamber, looking alarmed.
"Grand Pope! I was just going to alter the memories of Romulus and Remus as Lady Athena requested, but they have gone missing!"
"What?!"
"They must be planning something! Quickly! Find them before Lydia and Elena end up in danger!"
Cursing in their respective native language over the Sanctuary being so lax in keeping a close watch on the Italian twins after the events a few days ago, the two Gold Saints hurried out.
"Hurry!"
Even if Athena could not match the speed of her Gold Saints, she still did her best to follow after them, and neither she nor the Pope was surprised when Tiamat created an ice path along all the stairs way back down to the Aries Temple so the Gold Saints basically could slide along.
"Thanks for making a few ice walls so we do not slide off, Tiamat!"
"Spread out and search as wide as you can! If things goes wrong, I fear that the girls may be in a far different danger than just murder!" Julia ordered as she joined Agi and Baihu, the Chinese-born Scorpio Saint.
"What do you mean, Julia?!" the Libra Saint wondered in confusion behind them, and narrowly ducked for a ball of hard ice that Tiamat threw at his head over the question.
"Seriously, have you forgotten that Lydia and Elena actually are girls?! There is a reason for why Tiamat and I have trained the twins so much over the past three months despite Darius being their actual master: They have started their moon time every month now, meaning that despite just being twelve years old, they are fertile, aka they risk to end up pregnant if Romulus and Remus actually manages to force themselves on the girls!"
Even if they were not that familiar with how female bodies or pregnancy worked, both Agi and Utu did know the term "moon time" as a saying for the monthly bleeding of a woman, and with what Julia just had said, they hastened their speed even more, praying to arrive in time before something happened to the twin sisters right now.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Unaware of the danger that was threatening them, Lydia and Elena were testing their strength against the Silver Saints that had been tasked with guarding them until Romulus and Remus had left the Sanctuary. Given their young age and that the adults had been Saints for some years, a few defeats were to be expected, though the sisters did prove the same stubbornness that had allowed them to awake their seventh sense just in time for the Gemini Cloth to choose its new bearers.
"Not too bad. Having undergone training for just a little over two years, awakening your seventh sense at this age is a feat indeed!" the Lizard Silver Saint muttered, making a face over the swollen cheek that Lydia had managed to give him.
"Are you guys not annoyed with having to babysit us on the orders of master Darius? I mean, it is true that Romulus and Remus did not seem to accept their rejection from the Gemini Cloth too well…" Elena asked with a nervous glare between the older Saints, her old fear of her and Lydia just being in the way or an unwanted burden having surfaced for a moment.
"Babysitting? I would rather call it bodyguarding against real dangers because while you are currently the youngest Gold Saints of this generation, your ability to use your seventh sense is basically just awakened, and that makes you vulnerable against opponents who are bigger and more physically strong. But if you looks like harmless kittens, you can still give a nasty clawing across the nose of a dog to put it in place," the Auriga Silver Saint reminded in a somewhat indistinct voice before removing a slightly bloody rag from his face, as he pointed at his broken nose that Elena had given him in a lucky strike not too long ago. The Silver Cloths had been left in their Pandora Boxes during the training matches earlier, in order to make it a little more even for the two younger girls in the training.
"Kittens with sharp claws, indeed!"
As it was clearly not intended as an insult about their smaller statue or anything with a nastier meaning behind, neither Lydia or Elena felt offended.
"Alright, time to bring you back to the Gemini Temple, unless we want to be kicked in the rear by lady Tiamat for letting you keep training way past sunset."
Given that they had witnessed this happen a few times in the past two years, because Tiamat sometimes was not above kicking a rude person to literally be sent flying a very long distance away, sometimes even making them land on the stairs between two of the Temples further down and the Aquarius Saint also tended to leave a frozen inprint of one of the shoes of her Gold Cloth on the rear of the person she would kick, this mental image made the sisters giggle.
"Well, it is her way of saying that she will not tolerate any screw-ups on missions or whatever else we have messed up with. Sometimes a literal hit is better than a verbal scolding in order to teach a lesson."
With the Silver Cloths back on the wearers, the small group left the training grounds.
However, they did not get far, before a couple of Bronze Saints arrived at high speed. All five of them were spotting bloody wounds and their Cloths were partly broken in a few places.
"Hey, guys! Bring Miss Lydia and Miss Elena back to the Twelve Temples as soon as possible! Romulus and Remus have snapped for real after the rejection they suffered from the Gemini Cloth a few days ago! We just found their personal trainer murdered and we believe that the sisters are the next targets!"
"What did you say…?!"
But the question was never finished, as two massive Cosmos could be sensed.
"We will try to block their path for a while, get the girls away from here! Even two rejected Gold Saint candidates like those two are still powerful!"
But Lydia and Elena were already running away towards the nearest path leading to the Twelve Temples, both realizing that trying to face Romulus and Remus right now would be asking for their own deaths. After all, they had not forgotten the shared look of pure loathing that the older Italian twins had sent towards them over the shoulder as they left the ceremony site. Sometimes spoken words were not needed to reveal the feelings of others.
"Oi, girls! You are not being cowards for choosing to stay out of this! Call it plain common sense around people that honestly have proved themselves to be dangerous to others!" one of the Bronze Saints commented as they followed after the sisters.
"Watch out!"
The battle cries of the Silver Saints, and then screams of pain following almost straight after, revealed that the danger was much closer than expected.
"Damn! They are already here?!"
Stopping in their tracks, the Bronze Saints made themselves ready for a fight. Even with Romulus and Remus having trained to reach the level of a Gold Saint, and that the Gold Saints were the elite of the Saints, this did not mean that the Bronze and Silver Saints would fail to give their best in a battle.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
As they had witnessed how strong the Italian brothers were, it did not come as a surprise that the Silver and Bronze found themselves quickly defeated.
"They may be older and stronger, but we need to follow what Julia has told us about this sort of opponent: Attack the strong point!"
The arms if an enemy favored those as attack base, or the feet for kicking-based attacks.
"Trap one arm on them both in Another Dimension, so they can not do Galaxian Explosion!"
It was perhaps not the most well-planned idea on what to do, but the sisters knew that no matter how terrified they were right now, openly showing this fear for Romulus and Remus would only give the Italian twins a mental advantage against them. It would like proving themselves lacking a spine and be submissive to their masters in the past, back when they were still slaves, because they knew that any sort of disobedience or defiance would be punished in some form.
"We can not give in to them and let them think that we can be ordered around…we can not! Master Darius saved us from the other way of profit that our owner did though the female slaves…!" Elena whispered, recalling another reason why the sisters tried to avoid the Italian twins. Something that they both tried to forget, and had dreaded to happen once their moon blood would start coming as a sign of them taking the first step into womanhood, had not Darius shown up.
"And where are you two going, I wonder?"
The unnerving calm voice of Remus was heard, making them stop at the spot before they ended up running into him, where he was leaning with his back towards a huge rock as if nothing dramatic was happening.
"That is not your business," Lydia responded with far more self-confidence than she really felt, it was rarely a good sign that the Italian brothers spit up like this. Romulus had to be somewhere, ready to attack them from behind.
"Coming here to the Sanctuary and stealing the Gemini Cloth has really made the two of you pretty brazen, huh? Looks like you need to be reminded of your origins, then!"
Despite coming from both Romulus and Remus, the Greek sisters managed to avoid the energy blasts aimed at them by jumping in different directions to the side.
"For being the age to join the Roman Army, you both are pretty immature in your reactions to not becoming the Gemini Saint! You act like children ten years younger!" Lydia called out, jumping in and out from different spots with the use of Another Dimension even as Remus tried to grab her.
"Or is it such a blow to your own egos that you lost to two younger girls?!"
Noticing Romulus running towards her with an open hand where a new energy blast was getting formed, Elena sacrificed her mask and tossed it into the center of the energy blast, causing it to explore out of control instead.
"AAAGH!"
The broken shards of the mask flew into different directions, and the cry of pain from his brother as Romulus held his hand over a rather nasty cut along his cheek made Remus pause, looking in that direction.
"You damn little lupa! You will regret hurting my brother…"
"You are the perverted ones who keep using that word about us! If you think we were brought here to become your bed slaves once we was old enough for that sort of slavery, then you are all wrong!"
First throwing her mask at him before using Another Dimension, Lydia trapped Remus with his lower body into the other dimension, then ran towards her sister and dragged Elena along after sending a energy blast of her own into the face of Romulus so he did not block a way to escape for her sister.
"Either love or kill any man for seeing your bare face if you are a female Saint?! Who made that stupid mask law in the first place?!"
Yet they did not make it that far away, before Romulus showed up again, using Another Dimension to arrive right in the path.
"Trýing to run away? Forget it!"
"You two are not the only ones to use this sort of trick, little fools!"
But his voice behind them betrayed that Remus was aiming to attack the sisters from that angle. And they had seen the brothers using this sort of tactic in training battles before. So instead, the sisters merely allowed themselves to sink into the ground, causing the brothers to hit each other instead.
"Who are the fools here?!"
However, the two sisters knew that they were in a serious disadvantage here, they had already trained most of the day so they did not have much energy left and they both knew that if they did not manage to escape from the brothers soon, this situation would go really bad.
"You are really begging for punishment now, you worthless little RATS!"
Despite Lydia and Elena trying to avoid getting captured, their fatigue began to manifest itself openly, as they tried to gasp for breath and not waste whatever energy that they had left.
"This is bad!"
"Did they intend this all along, aiming for a time when we were tired after today's training?!"
Against their best attempts to keep the distance, Lydia found herself caught by the throat by Romulus, who held her hard enough to start choking her with one hand due to the size difference between them.
"Let go of my sister!"
To her growing horror, Elena found her arm grabbed by Remus, whose smile really was not friendly now.
"Eager to join your sister so fast?" he laughed, for a moment mending together with a memory image of the young master back at the farm as he laughed over how helpless the sisters would be against him thanks to being living possessions of his family, and then Lydia felt her blood begin to boil at the sight of his face so close to that of her sister. Not out of fear, but out of pure desperation.
"You…FUCKING ROMANS!"
Her Cosmo exploded with unexpected strength, and Romulus was forced to let go of her from the sheer force that struck him.
"Do not touch me, bastard!"
Grabbing a very thin hairpin of bronze from her belt normally used for keeping her braid into an updo during training, Elena twisted herself around and stabbed the pointy end into Remus' hand. He screamed in pain because while the wound was small, she had aimed for a nerve and managed to do so.
"Damn little bitch!"
The following beatings and resulting injuries on their bodies were expected, because now both Romulus and Remus were really pissed off. Even with the brothers now starting to outmatch the sisters in speed as they used this to strike them with their fists and even trying to kick them, Lydia and Elena were no strangers to this sort of treatment. It did bring up flashbacks of their previous life before coming to the Sanctuary, but now they no longer accepted the beatings in a passive manner. But perhaps the bigger trigger of a very different danger than death was when Elena got the front of her tunic grabbed and a long tear was torn up in the fabric as she tried to get away from Romulus, which exposed her upper body in a way that could not be misinterpreted.
"Fucking whoremonger!" Lydia screamed, her Cosmos burning around her like fire from her fury at seeing what just had happened to her sister, "Do not think that we will allow ourselves to be treated like your playthings because you are older and bigger than us!"
It was an act of desperation, but the sisters managed to catch the fists of the brothers on their own. The respective Cosmo from each one crashed at this close contact, causing cracks in the surroundings and the beginning of a pillar of Cosmo-based light around them as Lydia and Elena tried their best to not let the brothers form the pose for the Galaxian Explosion:
"Not good! We are losing our remaining strength…!"
"Hmf. As if a pair of slave girls would be able to defeat us? Do not make us laugh at such a bad joke!"
Due to both sisters focusing on stopping Romulus or Remus from trying to do the pose that signaled a Galaxian Explosion attack, both the Italian brothers managed to take them by surprise by a sudden knee slamming into their stomachs and both the twelve-year-olds landed dangerously near the edge of a deeper ravine.
"Ow!"
Before either of them could react, partly out of getting their breath knocked out like that, the brothers lift their arms upwards and take a pose that spelled bad news for the younger sisters:
"GALAXIAN EXPLOSION!"
But it was not the incoming attack coming straight against them that filled the sisters with horror, it was the distant sight of the other Gold Saints in the distance who tried to hurry over there in time to prevent the worst from happening.
"They tried to prevent the other Saints from being able to help us earlier…!" the Greek sisters realized right before they were struck, at the same time as they could hear Darius call out in horror:
"No! NO!"
Even with the signature attacks of the other Gold Saints being sent towards them in a desperate attempt to lessen the impact and Darius using a Jumping Stone to slam Remus into his brother so the Italian twins lost their focus, the edge of the ravine exploded from the force with the overwhelming screams from the sisters.
"LYDIA! ELENA!" Athena screamed in horror at seeing the blinding explosion of flames and natural materials causing a minor landslide, unable to take her eyes away from the horrifying sight in front of her. Even if the young Goddess could not see anything yet, she knew that this would end badly.
"Freezing Coffin!"
With Tiamat freezing the Italian brothers inside a thick layer of ice, Darius, Julia and Utu hurried down into the landslide that now covered the bottom of the ravine.
"Girls!"
"Lydia! Elena!"
But the sight that greeted them at the bottom, among a sea of blood strained rocks, was even worse than expected:
The young sisters laid separate from each other, neither one moving or reacting on the voices calling their names, and there was a massive wound in the back of Lydia that could not be mistaken as anything else than a killing strike. This was confirmed when Julia carefully turned her around and there was a lifeless look in her hazel eyes.
"Elena! Elena, please, wake up!"
But somehow, Elena had narrowly avoided the same fate as her sister, instead her left arm was a broken mass of blood and bones, and she needed medicinal treatment as quickly as possible if she was to live.
"Baihu, hurry down here and help to stop the bleeding!" Julia called to the Scorpio Saint. Agi was about to join the others, when he saw something float past him and he realized that he needed to go after it.
"That was Lydia…!?"
As a Saint whose powers was connected to the spiritual world and underworld, he had seen many souls right after death as they went towards the realm of the dead, and given what just had happened as well the very big likelyhood of the Italian twins being executed for what they had just done, he had a bad feeling about letting the soul of Lydia join the underworld:
"You sisters are not getting separated from each other so easily by death if I have something to say about it! Sekishiki Meikai Ha!"
Using his powers, he transported his whole body to the edge of Yomotsu Hirasaka. If he so had to drag the soul of Lydia back to the living world and place her soul in an object to avoid her returning to Yomotsu Hirasaka because she could not refuse the calling of every dead soul to the underworld, then he would do so.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Author note: In the Roman Empire, the minimum age for a girl to marry was at twelve years old. While it generally was the upper classes that tended to marry as teenagers, it is likely that the girls from the lower classes waited a few years more for reasons such as having to build up a dowry or having to finish an apprenticeship in a profession. In the classical period of ancient Greece and Roman Empire, as well as in the medieval period, the age at menarche was generally reported to be at approximately 14 years, with a range from 12 to 15 years. As for why they have already entered this stage of puberty in-story, Lydia and Elena have gotten much better and more nutritious food by the servants of Darius in the Capricorn Temple, so they are no longer malnourished as they were as slaves and have gained enough weight to have puberty start early. They are also active outdoors during their training with a lot of D-vitamins from the sun, rather than being forced to stay indoors for house work.
Baihu is the Chinese name of the White Tiger, associated with the west and the autumn season. Since Scorpio is one of the Zodiac signs in autumn, it felt suitable with a such name for a Scorpio Saint