AN: Hope ya'll don't get too messed up with the Japanese terms, I couldn't think of any better way to describe it. And thanks to my reviewers, especially Icequeen, for your support. The short chapters are for one more, then I'm gonna have to come up with new material. I know how I want it to end, it's if I want a romance in the middle is where I'm thrown. Ah well, on with it!
She's getting good, I'll admit that. A bit too overconfident in her side turns, though. Gonna have to fix that.
Flying through the corridors set up in the Danger Room, Storm eluded a laser blast from a robot, and turned to take it out with a well-placed blast of snow. Pushing herself towards the end target, Storm dropped to come up behind the next series of robots before allowing a rain cloud to wash out their circuits. For his part, Logan sat patiently, gun held up, waiting.
He had been purposely shooting to miss, allowing Ororo to build her confidence. After her sudden breakdown, Wolverine had no intentions of allowing her to return to that state. That had scared him out of his mind, seeing Storm alternate so fast between scared child and full-on angry Goddess. But now, Logan sighed, as he knew what he was going to have to do. Forgive me, darling. As Storm raced by him, Logan took aim at her left thigh, and fired.
Storm howled and dropped, balancing on her right leg, angry with herself for not evading the shot. She immediately took back off, ready for another try.
"Get down here, we better make sure you're alright, 'Ro." With sad, yet unyielding eyes, Logan strode over and sat Ororo down. Without speaking a word, he lifted Ororo's leg and looked carefully at the wound.
"You've got an exit wound, you'll be fine."
Nodding, Storm turned to grab a towel. She tied it around the wound to collect the rapidly escaping blood, and returned to the simulated alleyway. "Ready, Logan?"
"Yeah."
Once more, Storm took to the skies above. The robots had reset, and once more Storm had gone on the offensive against the metal opponents. Logan was glad for one thing: her fighting style had changed from a reactive style to a more aggressive approach. In his Japanese training, he had learned of three ways of fighting: sen, go no sen, and sen sen no sen.
While each of the terms carried with them a whole world of nuance that he couldn't even begin to explain, he was glad that Ororo had changed from a go no sen mindset to a sen mindset. Go no sen implied a basic "block, then counter" mindset and attack plan, while sen meant a simultaneous block and counter. While Storm rarely blocked anything, after all, she eluded things too fast to block; she had always had a mindset of "I will not attack first." It was time for her to realize that she needed to make the conscious choice of when something was going to escalate, not keep waiting for the other person to throw the proverbial first punch.
For someone who works so hard to control her emotions, it amazed him that Ororo continued to walk around, just bumping into stimuli and reacting. Logan was never the most emotionally aware human; he had come to rely on his nose and other senses to do the work for him. Storm's scent hadn't changed a bit, and she gave no outward signs of distress. But, even he couldn't help but notice that she was withdrawn, but fighting with fierceness rarely matched.
For weeks, this continued. Storm would attempt to evade the gunfire, but Logan's marksmanship abilities combined with her mounting frustration made it impossible for her to progress much further.