Chapter 47: Hatred. . . and I curled into a tight ball to escape the relentless pounding but it was no use, there was no escape; Sakura’s attacks tinued. Her kick found my undefeomach; when I dropped my hands to cover my torso she punched me across the fabsp; I tried crawling away only for her to seize my leg and twist it so that I thought it would break.

  “Stop,” I gasped, begged, barely able to breath. “Please--I ’t. . . .”

  I stared up at her as she walked around my prone form, her soft steps silent across the hard wooden floor. She kicked my side, nearly hard enough to fracture a rib. “Get up,” she said. Her face was an expressionless mask.

  “I ’t!” I insisted, breathless, defeated.

  She crouched by my head. “Get up.” She spped me, and then punched me in the shoulder. “Get up.”

  My eyes burned with sweat but not with tears, even though the sense of betrayal was nearly more than I could bear. I did want to get up--for her, the sense of failure was nearly siing, but my limbs were dead to me, my lungs burned with exhaustion and the pain was overwhelming. “I. . . .”

  Her fingers curled around my throat, cutting off my words, cutting off air. “Get up,” she said and my vision began to swim and danbsp; I must have bcked out, but somehow a moment ter . . . I was standing on unsure, weak legs, only half-scious--but upright.

  Sakura’s expression hadn’t ged. “Fight back,” she said. Her punch to the stomach sent me back to the floor.

  It took ages, but somehow standing once again became easier. “Please!” I cried out, blinking back tears.

  Another hit, another drop to the floor. “Fight back.”

  “Stop,” I gasped, but she didn’t and knocked me back again, and I cmbered bay feet and tried again, “stop!” ahis time and how could she do this to me, I was her student and she promised to take care of me and what the hell was she trying to do, kill me? “Stop!” I yelled.

  “Stop it!” I screamed and only then realized I’d just blocked her punbsp; A rush of pleasure coursed through me--until her sed attack smmed me bato the wall.

  I stared up at her in shobsp; “But--”

  “Fight,” she repeated, hitting me again, and just like that--my anger boiled over.

  “Bitch!” I screamed, and unched myself at her, a flurry of wild punches and blind kicks and rushes that never came close to toug her as she danced away; but I chased after her, bad forth across the training hall, blood rushing like p sand in my ears, vision reduced to a lurid crimson tunnel and my heart pounding furiously in my chest. “I’ll. . . .”

  My body gave out. I colpsed to the ground, unscious, the taste of vomit flooding my mouth.

  And iermiime ter I came to. Sakura k beside me. A look of such tenderness filled her face that I felt an impossible swell of love for her. It nearly drowhe newfound hatred that sat, like a jagged, heavy sto my core.

  “I thought you were going to kill me,” I whispered, incapable of speaking any louder.

  “Only if you fail me,” she said, and I desperately sought humour in her words.

  “You don’t traiher students like this.”

  Sakura smiled. “You’re not like the other students,” she said.

  Author's Notes:

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