All in the Technique
By Moonraker One
DragonballChapter One – A New Student
It had been quite an adventure. So far, no one had seen such skill brought to the world as when he arrived close to nine hundred years ago, back when he was younger. Long before even the turtle hermit had been born, he was alive and well, learning the ways of the snake style technique from the master that had lived on Earth before the other martial arts masters would pop up. After that, he stumbled across the Spring of Eternal Youth that would sustain his life long into his nine-hundred-seventies. Since then, he's pondered his existence living in a small hut on the top of a hill somewhere a few hundred kilometers south of the Zulmyzubri mountain range, where it was slightly less frozen and thus, far more livable.
He gulped down that last drop of his drink-no one knew exactly what kind of drink it was, he just had a limitless supply of it-and effortlessly hurled the bottle into the trash bin. As he leaned back into his chair for a long-needed nap, he heard the faint but audible patter of footsteps running up the side of his hill. This confused him; it sounded like a child's footsteps, yet, he wondered what child would be able to evade the perils of the bottom of the hill to make it to the top. The last person who was able to reach the top of his hill was Korin, who would learn his way of the snake and later teach his own training technique at the top of a tower.
He scooted closer to the door, making extreme care to both suppress his ki and stay out of sight, and heard the call of a young girl. "Mister Hebi-sen'nin!" She called out. "I need to train in your Snake style of training!" He read her mind and did not see any evil intentions, so he let his ki rise back up to normal levels, and moved outside, into plain view: the area of caution.
"Mister Hebi-sen'nin!" She cried again. "Forgive me, lord Hebi-sen'nin, but I've come here because I need to train under you! It is quite important!"
He carefully chose his words, just in case she was a spy or assassin or someone who was a decoy while someone else killed him. "Miss…?!"
"Oh, forgive me!" She cried yet a third time. "My name is Maron, and I am here for your training."
"Ah Ms. Maron," he replied. "You seem like you have positive desires, in such case I guess I should train you in the ways of the snake."
Upon hearing such a statement she began to jump up and down, yelling and clapping. "Yyyipppppeeeee!" She yelled. He rolled his eyes at her simplicity. It was quite amazing; she was only twelve-his estimation of her age-or maybe even younger, and she already was interested in martial arts. He did not understand why she was so eager to learn the techniques that took him close to five years of intensive training under some of the strictest teachers of all time. Maybe, he thought, she would surprise him.
"Well," he said, "if you are to learn the ways of the snake style, you are going to have to be prepared for some of the harshest training of all time. This is, after all, the style of the gods."
"I'll be ready for anything, mister Hebi-sen'nin!" Her squeaky voice was cute; it gave him a false sense of her being inexperienced. Unbeknownst to him, she had been trained formally by her older brother who was a student of kame-sen'nin, the turtle hermit.
Ah, Kame-sen'nin. His old nemesis, the turtle hermit; the one man who had the audacity to challenge him at the very first Tenka'ichi Budokai close to five hundred years ago. That was the first-and only-time he had been defeated by a fellow master of the martial arts. Ever since, he had been working hard to try and find the master who had defeated him, but since he could not detect the ki of said individual, he gave up on revenge, and decided that it would be best to live his life out on top of a hill and let the students come to him. He did not know at that time that it was going to be quite a while until someone came to him seeking training.
He looked down at his new disciple. "Maron," he said, leading her into the training room section of his hut. "Today will be your very first lesson; you will learn how to use, manipulate, and sense ki."
As she walked into his somewhat small hut, she noticed that it consisted of four main areas: there was a kitchen where he ate, a bedroom with two cots separated at the opposite ends of the room, a bathroom, and the largest of the four rooms, a rather large room with white tile on the floors and the walls. Walking into the large training room, Hebi-sen'nin pressed a button on the wall near the door, and the door slammed shut, and the lights became brighter.
"This room, Maron," he said, showing her the room in its entirety, "is the training room. It is here where all of our lessons will be taking place. This room is treated so that any damage we do to the walls or the floors will be instantly repared. We can also increase the gravity of the room for better strength training."
She looked around, then faced her new master. He sat down Indian style on the floor, and motioned for his new pupil to do so as well. He closed his eyes, moved his hands so they were parallel to each other, and began to focus his ki into a small sphere between his two open palms. She was fascinated by the light from the ki sphere, and curiously, moved for a closer look. "This," Hebi-sen'nin explained, "is ki. It is the energy of your soul that all living beings possess. You have to be quite skilled to be able to sense ki or to use it."
As she could tell, this was going to be interesting.