|=| Nobody Said it was Easy |=|

Cas had been awake since and in the arena since the crack of dawn, practicing killing dummies and pretending that they were humans, enemies of the highest degree that needed to be executed in a ruthless way. Most were now unrecognisable, the tan gelatine like flesh now gnashed and gnarled with so many slash marks and arrows there because of Casimir’s doing. For hours he had been at this because anything was better than thinking. Thinking led to thoughts best left untouched, and Cas had so many of those. Memories of Michael, memories of Sophia, memories of everyone who had said he was lesser than they. They were the reason he had been so defenceless in the past, but not anymore. Now Casimir was strong, willed by his father to beat everyone who stood in his way, crush them to dust as if they were pillars of stone and he was a mighty giant. Zing! Another arrow flew into the marred flesh of the dummy and Cas half smiled. 

There was no one here, there hadn’t been for hours, and so the demigod had had free reign of the entire place. The arena was his kingdom, the weapons his subjects that were made to be ruled. For once, Casimir was happy, content with what he was doing and where he was going in life. He ran his hands through his greasy brown hair, oily from exercise and exertion and reached for a dagger to practice close range combat. However as he did so Cas noticed another figure in the otherwise empty arena. It was a girl and she was shooting arrows into a clean dummy. Normally the boy would leave her alone, but there was a fire in his veins, rage in his mind and anger in his soul. Despite coming here to escape bad thoughts, they had found him and Cas thought of his less than ideal childhood. He needed to take his emotions out on something or someone, and the dummies had long since stopped being satisfactory. The demigod walked over to the girl and pushed her down, growling. “What are you doing here?” Cas demanded. There wasn’t even a reason to get into a fight with the girl, but Casimir needed conflict in his life. He needed to be strong and in charge.

Casimir scoffed at the girl. “I’m not fighting you over the training grounds. You’re going to get out because I win and I’m awesome.” Back in Denver, Cas never would have been this daring. He would have coward at any sort of conflict, even a few sentences such as this would have sent him running to his room. But now that he was away from Michael and all that torturous hell Cas grew more audacious and more violent. Now sometimes he went into the woods and terrorised the nymphs for fun, even if it did get him into major trouble later on. “Train with you? No. No no no. I don’t train with anybody, and if I did it certainly wouldn’t be with you.” This wasn’t one of the demigod’s good days, however, the girl did seem tired, and so Casimir would cut her some slack, just this one time. “Fine, you beat me in a duel and I leave you alone. I beat you…” Casimir gave her a sly smile, full of mischief and ambition and slyness, his eyes a clear blue. “Well, just try not to think about that."