I talked about this in the last chapter, but after the final battle, my dad was never the same.
Now, when most people say that, they mean it in a negative way. But for me, it was in the best way. When I went into that battle, as I've detailed, I was all but ready to never see my father again. The prophecy said I'd defeat him, and to me, that meant I'd have to kill him. When the Overlord took over him, I knew that the battle had to be fought. I wasn't able to worry about whether or not I could handle that fight, because I had no choice but to fight. And so, when my father crawled out of those rocks after the battle, it was like I'd been given my own personal miracle.
Sensei Garmadon wasn't the same person that Lord Garmadon was. Without the evil flowing through him, he seemed far more calm, collected, and was a person that I could look up to. When my dad was evil, I always had to tell myself in the back of my head that he wasn't the person that I had always wanted to meet. I was a kid at the time, and while I admired him, I think I also knew by the time he left that he wasn't exactly the greatest person out there. My love for my father was being constantly tested, and I only got to see the dark side of him. Sure, he was doing evil things out of a sense of obligation, and doing everything he could to protect me while being strung along by what he felt was destiny, but he was still evil. When dad was purified, I was able to see the man that my mother fell in love with, the brother Wu had fought so hard for, and the father I'd always truly been hoping for.
Sensei Garmadon, my father, was an amazing teacher. I learned more in the few weeks that I spent traveling with him than I did almost the entire time training under Wu. He never held anything back like Wu did. He was upfront, forward, and he didn't believe in forcing any of us to learn on our own unless it was something that we needed to learn on our own. If we asked him a question, he would answer it. Sure, he could be coy, but when you talked to him you never felt like he was doing it like Wu. Wu would be cryptic and annoying just to make our lives harder. When Sensei Garmadon made us figure something out, we felt like we learned something beyond just what the lesson was saying.
He was also kind. I always felt like I could turn to him. Even if I did something wrong, or felt like I was going to mess up badly, he never judged me for it. He'd scold me, yes, but he never forced me to go through anything alone. When I felt down, he'd be there to help me figure out what was going on and how to handle what was getting me down later. He always made time for me, even if he had to push himself to do it. I never felt like he saw time with me wasted, even if we ended up doing nothing but sitting in silence. He always did what he thought he needed to make me feel better. He… he loved me.
That was something that was always there with whatever my dad did: he never stopped loving me. Even if I was angry at him, he never let anything get in the way of his love for me. He did what he felt he needed to in order to keep me safe and get me ready for what was going to happen next. He never let me take anything for granted, but never made me feel like anything I cared about was worthless.
I think there's one thing that comes to mind when I think about my dad, and how much he really cared about me. I was really into Starfarer at the time, and I'd been collecting all my old comics. Well, when the Bounty crashed on the Dark Island, all of those comics burned up. I was upset by it, since I'd spent a lot of time working on keeping them all in good condition and all that. I never even mentioned it to my dad. On one of my breaks during my tour, I went and visited him, and when I got there he said he had a surprise for me. He'd gone and not only rebuilt my collection, but even got me limited run copies, gotten me a special sleeves for all of them to keep them safe, and built me an airtight case so I could store them without worrying about cleaning them. I never even told him about it… he just found them all, and gave them to me.
I know it sounds a little silly to say that my dad giving me a comic book collection he helped destroy was an example of my dad, but I still have that case. He not only built it to keep everything out, but he build it to last. Whenever the Bounty would crash, I'd always find that case, sitting among the rubble, not even cracked. (Now, it's in Yang's still disappearing temple.) My mom said he spent days doing research just for the best materials to make sure it would never break. He said that one day, he'd build me even more cases so I could put whatever I wanted into them. He never did finish the rest of them.
My dad knew about his past, and he knew that all of the things that he'd done were in some ways unforgivable. According to my mom, he spent everyday working hard to prove that he deserved this second chance. He took every single minute of every single day as a gift to him. All he'd wanted was to find a way to be with his family again, and the Overlord had manipulated that into his own ends to help restart the final battle. Now that he had the ability to do that, without having to worry about when he'd be drawn back to evil, he had dedicated himself mind, body and soul to proving that he would make the most of his new life.
I think that's why he took his oath against violence. Violence had been what had driven him away from me in the first place. The venom of the Devourer sparked evil in him that drove him to do horrible things. Things that he was fully aware of, and in some ways he knew he could control. As odd as it sounds, I think he took an oath against weapons as well because the Golden Weapons had been such a driving force for him that weapons became mixed in with evil. He told me once that a violent man would solve his problems and leave behind a flame in his wake, whereas a peaceful man would stride through the flame to leave only the grass behind. I'm pretty sure that meant that if he swore off violence, he wouldn't hurt anyone else, or so he hoped.
The Monastery that my dad built was a testament to this. It was slightly secluded, and I mainly helped him build the outer wall. He, like Wu, decided to dedicate himself to teaching. However, while Wu decided to become an actual teacher, Garmadon decided to teach his students the ways of self defense and fighting. The pinnacle of all of this was the Art of the Silent Fist.
In order to prove that one could fight without having to engage in violence, he developed the Silent Fist. In effect, the idea is simple: use your opponent's own strength against them. By dodging them, leading them on into traps or simply letting them exhaust their energy, you can defeat someone without ever needing to hurt them yourself. It's a tactic that's hard to understand at first, but once you see it, you start to understand it. If you don't know that your opponent is doing it, it's easy to get lost in it.
For example, let's say that someone is coming at you with a knife. You could try to attack them, or you could let them rush in and dodge to the side, letting them hit a wall. You could slide behind them while they attack and push them over. You could even grab their knife arm and then throw them forward so they stumble. Nothing that you do there is actually hurting them. Any damage they take is all due to their own attacks. It's incredibly powerful, even if it seems like you're just avoiding conflict.
That's the key to understanding the man that my dad was, in a sense. The very concept of the Art of the Silent Fist was that he could teach others how to fight without them having to go down the path that he had to. I remember he called it a 'kind way of fighting,' since you could make someone give up without having to hurt them. It requires that you care about your opponent and actively choose not to hurt them. Only he would take the time to develop an art like that, to work so hard at it and prove that it was actually viable in combat.
The night that we arrived at his Monastery was the night he was introducing that art to his class. We arrived and hid the vehicles in the nearby woods so that we could get into the Monastery without being spotted. Nya happened to somehow have a brand new ninja outfit for me, which I admit was pretty cool. As much as I loved the golden suit I got when I first fought the Overlord, having green was pretty nice again. It also had one of those facial hoods, which I again still wonder why we even had them given that the Digilord never had any trouble identifying us with them. It was a weird thing to have, you know? I also don't know where Nya got the new suits, but at this point I've just come to expect getting a new suit every year or so.
Now, our original plan had been to try to lay low at my dad's place since I knew that it wouldn't have anything on record for the Digilord to find. Of course, we didn't take into account that the Digilord would use his technology to forcibly probe Wu's memory and reveal he knew where the Monastery was… which, meant the entire thing was worthless in the end. Sometimes it feels when we plan ahead, we still end up behind.
I mentioned that my mother settled down in the Monastery for the first time in a long time. It's funny, since she really didn't stick around during that whole incident. She showed up, told us we couldn't take the Techno Blades into the Monastery given my father's vow, and after that it was like she was just gone again. I mean, it wasn't like I would have wanted to drag her into everything again, but it was something that felt a little weird all things considered.
We decided to join in on my father's lesson, and that was the first time I think the ninja had actually gotten to see Sensei Garmaodn ever since the actual final battle. I do remember that he actually reprimanded Jay for talking while he was trying to teach, which was pretty funny. Jay does talk an awful lot. In order to teach the Art of the Silent Fist, he asked for a volunteer, and so I decided to offer myself up for it.
My dad made a joke about me not using my powers so as not to destroy the place, and I didn't take that very seriously. He told me to attack him, and so I came at him pretty hard. I wasn't giving it my full all, but I wasn't holding back that much either. I haven't been beaten as badly like that since that class. I couldn't even manage to land a single hit on him. Everytime I'd go in for a kick, he'd just throw it aside like it was nothing. It was embarrassing enough that when he finally decided to taunt me, I actually got angry enough to try to blast him with my Golden Power. When my dad calmed me down, and I apologized, he said that I let my anger take hold of me. I don't know why, but he managed to completely emotionally destabilize me in barely even a minute. It was one of my first signs that I still had a lot to grow, even if I was almost all powerful now.
It was after this lesson that we saw Zane leading a tied up Pixel into the Monastery grounds. It was the first time I'd met her, and I didn't spend that much time with her either. Nowadays, Pixel is basically a full fledged member of our team, but for a long time she stuck mainly to Zane. I didn't know what to really make of her at first. I mean, I didn't dislike her, not even a little! But it's weird to think about how she is now versus how she was when we first met and she was still just a step above a full robot.
After Zane showed me what the Techno Blades could do firsthand by removing the Digilord's influence from her, she told us that she hadn't come alone. That was the first time we ever got our taste of the Nindroids. Apparently, during their initial visit to Borg Tower, Pixel had scanned Zane with his permission, and the Digilord had then used his blueprints she scanned from him to build a fully army of Nindroids.
Of all of the armies that we've faced -the Serpentine, Stone Army, Ghosts, Vermillion, all them- I would have to say the Nindroids are probably the coolest ones. I say coolest also knowing that they did try to kill us multiple times, but if you think about it, they're like something straight out of a comic book: a villain creates a better version of the hero to go and show the hero how weak they really are. And I admit, at first when I was fighting them, they were pretty tough. They were fast, strong, and since they were robots they didn't take damage in the same way. They never ran out of strength, and they all had a pretty creepy design. Being able to cloak themselves, fire lasers and fly all made them pretty strong too.
What made them the worst for me, however, was that I couldn't use my Golden Power on them. If I did, they would absorb it and then send it right back to the Digilord. Once again, I wasn't able to really fight. It wasn't as bad as when I was on the Dark Island, but I had to fight with just my fists. And punching metal robots doesn't exactly do your wrists any favors. With my Golden Power, I was stronger than all of the ninja combined. Without them, I was basically the weakest member.
Now, at this point, the Elemental Swords that the ninja had gotten on the Dark Island had vanished. I don't know what happened to them, but it meant that the ninja no longer had access to their elemental powers. It was weird, since I knew I saw Kai still having his blade when he woke up in the crater after the final battle, so I don't know where they went. I mean, they were literally swords that could channel raw elemental power from the ninja, so why they didn't have them, I don't know. Jay says that he misses them, but everytime I asked them about where they went, Jay never seemed to know.
I bring this up now since the only advantage that we had over the Nindroids were our elemental powers. Without them, fighting them went about as well as fighting your fridge would go. It put us on the backfoot, and forced us to come up with a plan to escape. My dad actually was holding his own pretty well with just his staff and dodging all the Nindroids, but the rest of us were losing badly. Zane was even beaten up enough that I got to see him with part of his face ripped off again. It's always creepy to see all those wires underneath him.
Our plan was pretty simple: we used the water wheel my dad used for power to make the Nindroids think we were escaping to go to our vehicles, then remotely started them and had them fly off. The Nindroids shot them all down as they escaped, which meant another cool pair of vehicles was completely wrecked. It's moments like these I realize we're almost never allowed to have vehicles that last very long. At least those vehicles we had commandeered, rather than building them ourselves. Makes the loss a little easier.
At that point, we decided it was best to split up. If the Nindroids had two priorities, that being me and the Techno Blades, it only made sense to split up. My dad and I came up with a pretty simple plan too: get lost. We'd simply get as far away from all of Ninjago's technology as possible, and use that to distance ourselves permanently from the Nindroids. To that end, my dad and I went to the Samurai X Cave, which I should say that at the time we didn't know existed, and would take whatever we needed from Nya to get out of there.
As a sidenote to the Samurai X Cave, it's a rather interesting place. I still have no idea how Nya built it on her own. If it was literally a cave, then maybe I'd be more open to it… but she straight up excavated everything from the ground and dug her own cave, added a system for opening it up, and installed I don't even know how many machines down there. I mean, even if Nya was working every single day that we weren't on a mission, I don't know how she managed to do that without help. And if she did, how did she pay off the help? It makes no sense!
But that's not to say the place wasn't cool. I mean, I love the Bounty and the Monastery, but as for the headquarters for ninja, I think a cave is just way more fitting. It's far more mysterious, a place that isn't easy to attack and destroy literally all the time, and it just has so many good options for us being up to make new vehicles and things down there! I do think Nya could have done without putting it in that super obvious thing. Like, once you know where it is, it's hard to forget. (And it's still secretive, even if we kinda forgot it existed for a long time, so I can't give more details than that).
My dad and I decided to take a car that Nya made for us and just get going. I remember my dad on the way to the cave didn't say too much, and since we were walking there that was for the best. Thankfully, I hadn't lost any of my training during my tour, probably due to me practicing my new powers, so walking all that way wasn't too hard. He was upset that it had weapons on it, and that was when I reminded him he was the one that grew four arms to hold all the Golden Weapons. He wasn't above joking about how somewhat ridiculous his plans were.
As soon as we left that cave, my dad said that he was going to start training me again. I was confused at the time. We were going to be on the run, and so taking time to stop and train didn't make much sense to me. However, he was adamant that we use this time wisely. After how I'd ended up nearly blasting him at his lesson, he said that I had been out of training for long enough. I was kinda confused at that, since he was the one that encouraged me to go on that tour in the first place, but now I realize that he meant it as saying that I'd been given a break, and now it was time for me to get back into it.
However, we weren't able to keep the car for too long. We were taking a rest after driving for almost the entire evening. At the time, the ninja were heading to the Central Power Station to help shut down the Nindroid's power source. We weren't paying much attention to that, since communications were likely going to be monitored. What we didn't know at the time was the fact that the Digilord had apparently managed to build an entirely mechanical dragon to come after us. How he found us, we don't know.
Given how many times that I've dealt with dragons, that was the second time that one had actually been coming after me trying to actually kill me. My dad was the one who spotted it, and we hightailed it out of there as fast as we could. The dragon was fast, just slightly faster than us, making it pretty dangerous. It wasn't a long chase, especially since when the ninja destroyed the power core, that meant the dragon collapsed to the ground right in front of us. I wish I had more to say about it but… not really.
That dragon told my dad and I two things: one, that the car we were using wasn't going to work for long, and two, that no matter what the Nindroids were going to come after us. At first, it stung again to have to be put out on the sidelines, but now that I was instead running away from danger rather than being held back from it, the importance of my new powers was weighing on me. I'd failed to defeat the Overlord, and now the Digilord was coming to take the very power of creation from me. I couldn't afford to let them take me, even if it meant running away.
And so my dad and I were together again, and my training had begun. I was going to learn how to control my new Golden Power, and my father was going to be the one that did it. And so we left the car behind, made our way to the coast and switched ferry to ferry until we had finally reached the outskirts of Ninjago. We were lost, and for the first time in forever, I was alone with my father. I was ready to learn how to become the true Ultimate Spinjitzu Master.
If only I had known just how little time I truly had left with my powers.
"Hey, Kai!" Lloyd called out as he made his way out of the recording room, "Wait up!"
Kai, who'd been walking down the hallway to get in some Spinjitzu training, stopped as he saw Lloyd coming towards him. After seeing the room he'd come from, Kai crossed his arms and smirked.
"What's up, my man?" Kai looked to the room, "Aren't you working on that book of yours?"
"Just finished a chapter, actually," Lloyd nodded, "I'm on my way to go meet Jay at the arcade now, but I needed to ask you a question first."
"Sure, you know I'm always open to those things," Kai grinned, "Especially if they're about me!"
"Why'd you hate all that technology that Borg made?" Lloyd asked curiously, "Back during the Golden Master Incident, you really hated technology for a bit there. Why was that?"
"Oh… that?" Kai chuckled, "Uh… well. I dunno. I mean, I don't have an issue with technology. Uh… well, let me think… we were teachers for a bit there, right?"
"Yeah," Lloyd mirrored Kai's stance by leaning up against the wall, "I just remember you really, really hating all of it."
Kai grimaced, "Honestly? I was overwhelmed being a teacher. I mean, heck, I didn't know how to teach kids! I wanted to try to act all mature and, you know, teacher-ly. And technology all just started changing so fast, I wasn't able to keep up with it. So I kinda just latched onto that and started hating on it. Not really sure why… I mean, I love my vehicles so like, I don't know why I hated it that much."
"Huh… that makes sense," Lloyd shrugged, "I mean, we did go from cars to hovercraft really quickly. So it's not that big of a deal. I'm doing chapters for the Golden Master, so I just wanted to know."
"Sure thing, champ," Kai smirked, causing Lloyd to groan at the nickname, "Anything else?"
"How many quarters you got?" Lloyd asked.
"Is this for the arcade?" Kai shrugged, "I don't have any quarters, I got some cash but I'm pretty sure I need tha-"
"I'm making a bet with Jay," Lloyd spoke up, "I've spent a long time training. I'm gonna beat him. And when I do, he's gonna have to buy us the new gaming console."
"Wait, you're gonna get him to buy you a console?!" Kai blinked, then he narrowed his eyes, "I give you the money, we share the console. Got it?"
"You read my mind," Lloyd winked, "Now come on, you can come with me. You weren't busy, were you?"
"Busy?" Kai looked down the hall to the training room, then he shrugged, "Nah, not much. Let's go!"