Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson was in pain.
For days on end, he spent his time lying on a bed that had been moved to the darkened mech workshop.
His stomach and gradually the rest of his body continued to suffer as tiny quantities of phasewater dispersed throughout his bloodstream and constantly threatened to tear open his veins and other body tissue.
"Nghh…"
He should have known that this would happen.
He was not ignorant about the consequences of ingesting phasewater. There were so many warning stories on the galactic net that even children knew better than to get into contact with this lethal substance.
Just because it had 'water' in its name did not mean it was drinkable!
Yet despite how foolish it was for him to do so, Tusa did not refuse Ves' challenge.
The competitive part of his mind irrationally wanted to accept the challenge.
Since Ves believed that Tusa could do it, then what was the harm of swallowing a bit of phase lord blood?
He already regretted this decision shortly after phasewater began to wreak havoc in his mind.
Fortunately, Ves was right that Tusa's willpower along with Blackwing's shadow control could exert just enough suppression to keep the phasewater in line.
It was not easy. Tusa constantly felt as if he was holding the leash of a bucking horse. He had to maintain constant focus and keep his willpower active on drops of phasewater that continued to circulate throughout his body.
While Tusa had reasons to feel confident that he could stay in control at first, as the struggle to exert his willpower and keep track of the phasewater in his body dragged on, he became increasingly more strained over time.
The difficulty of keeping phasewater in check constantly rose as a result. The struggle turned more and more life-threatening as Tusa found himself straining his willpower far longer than he used to whenever he was piloting his expert mech.
The battles he participated in never demanded Tusa to resonate with his mech and strain his willpower for hours or days on end!
Tusa had always considered himself to be a sprinter rather than a marathon runner. He excelled in quick and surgical strikes. Neither his combat approach nor the Dark Zephyr were suited for prolonged attrition warfare.
Yet that was exactly what he ended up with after ingesting a bit of phasewater!
Tusa cursed under his breath for the umpteenth time as he blamed Ves for accepting a challenge that happened to target one of his weaknesses.
"No wonder they call him the Devil Tongue!"
After accompanying Ves for so many years, Tusa finally fell victim to the patriarch's infernal persuasion.
The result was that Tusa unexpectedly entered into another struggle of his life!
The hours that passed since the expert pilot got hoodwinked by Ves had become one of the most difficult tests of his life.
The mental burden of exerting his willpower was already bad enough. Whenever he slipped up, he would have to endure the pain of feeling his own flesh shift in ways they shouldn't!
He already began to suffer a few instances of internal bleeding!
If not for the fact that his own piloting suit came with automated injury treatment functions, he would have been in much worse shape by this time!
Unfortunately, the suit had never been designed to neutralize or remove any phasewater that happened to enter his body. Tusa could only rely on his own efforts to keep his body whole.
"Pf! I am not going to let that smug bastard's blood defeat my resolve. This isn't the first struggle of my life!"
Since the day he was born in the Larkinson Family, he learned that he was a little different from his other cousins.
Many Larkinsons took pride in their names. The spouses that married into one of the relatively famous military families of the Bright Republic mostly abandoned their old family names in order to embrace a more honorable mantle.
Not so for Tusa's branch of the family. His parents and ancestors took pride in calling themselves the Billingsley-Larkinsons.
The implication at the time was that they considered the Billingsley Family on the same level as the Larkinson Family.
Although neither family objected to the union, the Billingsley-Larkinsons often stood out from the rest of their generation due to their names alone.
Tusa had to fight against the childish suspicions and faint exclusions of the other children he grew up alongside. There were times where he cried in his bed because his cousins treated him as if he was an outsider rather than a Larkinson.
For this reason, the first struggle of his life was to prove he was a genuine Larkinson!
There was little he could do to prove himself as a child. Neither the adults nor the other kids took him seriously.
However, Tusa quickly realized that the age of 10 was a watershed moment for every descendant of the Larkinson Family.
Each child who reached this age got tested for their genetic aptitudes.
A large majority of boys and girls came out of the testing room with crushed expressions. It was not strange for them to cry every day of the week as they failed to recognize reality.
Once they had no tears left to cry, the new teenagers reluctantly acknowledged the truth and went on to think about growing up to fulfill other jobs.
Tusa did not want to join their ranks. There was nothing wrong with becoming a norm, but the young Billingsley-Larkinson believed that it was ten times harder to prove that he was a part of the family if he failed to distinguish himself this way!
As a baseline human that never showed any notable talent, Tusa did not have anything special going for him. He was not an academic genius, nor an artist in the making.
Unlike his grandfather, he knew nothing about business and got bored whenever he was forced to learn how to manage real estate.
Tusa never wanted to study those boring subjects! He hated the thought of becoming a businessman!
If he was fated to become a norm, then at least he wanted to enlist in the Mech Corps in order to support the true heroes of the Bright Republic!
His odds were not the best. Unlike numerous other children, neither his parents nor grandparents were potentates. To children as young as Tusa, that meant that they probably faced an uphill battle when it came to acquiring the right genetic aptitude!
The worst part about growing up in that age bracket was the complete inability for children to improve their developing genetic aptitudes.
Each kid learned plenty of ways on how to reduce their chances of becoming a mech pilot.
In contrast, the Larkinsons always emphasized to their children that there was essentially nothing they could do to promote their chances. No matter whether they spent most of their time on playing sports, studying knowledge or socializing with each other, no single activity had ever been correlated with the development of the right genetic aptitude.
Getting their head hammered to the point of suffering actual brain damage was a surefire way to ruin one's genetic aptitude. Poor nutrition or outright starvation also weakened brain development to the point of sealing people's fates as norms.