Taking the many not-so-subtle hints that Lu-sensei has dropped over the last several months, you spend a good part of the next year focused on honing your athletic abilities in general, and your martial skills in particular. The old man responds to your increased dedication by grinning in a way that emphasizes every line on his leathery face, and then drubbing you even harder than before, the jerk. He responds to your inquiries about further spiritual and philosophical training by handing you several old books that are right on the upper edge of your reading comprehension - and which exceed that in a number of places - and also by making you come in for extra lessons, where you are supposed to sit and think of nothing.
It is maddeningly difficult, not the least because Lu-sensei hangs around slurping tea, munching rice cakes, playing a flute - badly, at that - and doing any number of other distracting things. Quite often, he falls silent and disappears for a time, and then, just as you're starting to get a grip on your meditation, he pops up out of nowhere, scaring you out of your focus and a year of your life in the process. And every time you try to call the old man out on his antics, he whaps you over the head with a two-foot bamboo rod he calls the Enlightenment Stick. After the first time, which genuinely caught you off-guard, you make every effort short of using magic to try and avoid the hits, but Lu-sensei swiftly proves the adage that states youth and enthusiasm will always lose to old age and treachery. At least, you think that's how it goes - and if it doesn't, it should, because your master is a cheating bastard.
On the upside, you eventually learn how to sense when he's approaching, and when he means to strike. Over time, that carries over to your sparring partners, although you still have trouble getting the skill to work against regular people. You also discover an unusual new ability. In your previous life, Ganondorf didn't have all that much use for the spiritual arts. He studied them just enough to get a reasonable level of control over his magic, and to build up his defenses against ghosts and their ilk - as it stands, you've surpassed the Thief-King in those fields, and then gone a step farther. By focusing yourself in a certain way, you're able to align your spiritual energies - your soul - to augment your physical body. This has the immediate result of allowing you to hit almost twice as hard than normal, and it may have other applications you're not yet aware of. The first time you invoke this new power is a complete accident, which shatters one of Lu-sensei's training dummies with a flash of pale white light. As you stand there, staring at your hand and the broken heap of splinters, wondering frantically what you could possibly say to explain what just happened, the old man starts laughing.
"Well done, lad!" he cheers. "Well done, indeed! I knew you could do it!"
Then, still laughing in delight, he throws a bolt of soul-energy in your face, knocking you on your ass.
"Now, do better!"
Goddesses damn the man.
Gained Combat Prowess D+
Gained Physical Prowess D+++
Gained Spiritual Prowess C+
There are some additional consequences to your new training regimen. For one, you've done more growing, and gained a rather startling level of muscle mass and definition for a kid - at this point, you're bigger than some of the fifth-graders. Nobody at school wants to mess with you, and even the middle-schoolers who occasionally pick on your fellow elementary students prefer to give you a pass. If it weren't for your well-honed personal skills, people might start to think you were a delinquint. With your improved spiritual sensitivity and control, you unlocked another level of complexity in your recurring dreams. You're now reliving moments of Ganondorf's life every night, and you're able to take almost as many constructive lessons from those dreams as you are from Lu-sensei's classes. You spend some time each day checking your appearance over in the mirror, but after a while you conclude that no new changes have manifested.
Gained Intimidating D+++
Gained Past Life Experience C+
Gained Powerful Build D
Above and beyond your personal training, your normal education and growth has yielded a few other dividends. While none of these are overly significant, every little bit of advancement helps.
Gained Aura of Power D+++
Gained Magical Prowess D+++
Gained Mental Prowess E++
Gained Social Prowess C+
Gained Watchful F+
Much of the time you spend with your friends this year is taken up getting Cordelia and Larry fully up to speed on the supernatural. Briar's counsel is very helpful here, since she can provide you with basic descriptions of and tactics for avoiding, escaping, and fighting off a wide range of supernatural beings. How to kill them is a bit beyond her, except in the case of things like vampires and werewolves, who are common enough for their fatal vulnerabilities to be well-known. When she isn't busy being grossed out by your descriptions, extending her influence throughout the school, or shopping, Cordy spends her time looking into the possibility of obtaining other sources of information on the supernatural. There are several stores in town that claim to sell enchanted items and components for spellcasting - you warn her off the latter when she broaches the subject, taking the opportunity to talk about the corruptive effects most magical traditions have on their followers, and also why the style you and Amy practice is so much less-susceptible. Cordelia also buys herself a new computer and starts poking around online. She's not all that good at it, and yet she easily finds a dozen different websites that talk about the supernatural in serious, accurate terms. One called "Demons, Demons, Demons" proves an excellent source of supplementary information about the seemingly limitless number of otherworldly species.
Gained Minion Cordelia E
Briar throws a fit when she finds out what the site has to say about fairies: "Lower-order demonic entities, normally only visible to young children. Absent-minded, unpredictable, and prone to chatter. Essentially harmless pests, fairies can be exceptionally arrogant and annoying. Their only useful function is the production of so-called 'pixie dust,' a magically-reactive powder shed from their wings, which has some uses in spells of detection and transformation."
"They don't know that you can heal?" you ask, surprised that this most well-known of fairy powers isn't mentioned by the site.
"More like they refused to believe it," Briar says sourly. "We're 'demons,' after all. Whoever heard of a demon that willingly heals people, without some horrible price tag?"
You think on it, but have to admit that nothing comes to mind. And in all fairness to the maintainers of the website, fairies don't automatically heal every injured person they meet - they generally only help people they like, or who have helped them in return. Considering that most of the human race can't see them - and in fact chooses not to be able to - you can understand why Earth's fairies might not be inclined to be helpful.
Larry starts spending more time with his grandmother. From what he says, she has some pretty awesome stories about his late grandfather. She also gets him an air rifle for Christmas, and sends home-baked cookies to you and the girls. They are delicious~.
Gained Minion Larry F+++
Amy appears to have taken your birthday demonstration as a challenge, and spends nearly all of her free time working on her magic. You advise her as best you can, but considering the sheer amount of time you're spending with Lu-sensei, most of Amy's guidance comes from Briar. Her progress is slower than it might have been under your direct tutelage, but she's advancing her skills much more quickly than she was before. At this rate, Amy should be up to a competent level of magical skill within another year.
Gained Minion Amy E++
"At that point, she'll be ready to start making simple magic items," Briar says one day, while the two of you are once again hanging out in your room. This has become a ritual of sorts for you, ever since the incident where you told Briar that you used to be Ganondorf; each week, usually on Saturday afternoons, you hole up in your room and chat about whatever comes to mind. Sometimes it's life in Sunnydale, either the present or plans for the future, and at other times, you talk about the world beyond the city limits - which, strangely enough, you've never set foot outside of. Sometimes the pair of you discuss Hyrule, and sometimes you talk about other worlds Briar has seen in her life. Faerie comes up pretty frequently, and you can imagine why; it sounds like a lovely place, the more so because no actual demons have ever been allowed there. That brings up the question of why any fairy would ever leave, which you asked during another meeting some weeks earlier.
"We're curious," Briar said at the time, shrugging as if it were self-evident. "Faerie has portals to everywhere and then some, and inevitably, some fairy will wander through one just to see what's on the other side. Then another fairy goes looking for the first, then maybe a couple more, someone comes back with a story about all the neat things on the other side, and so on. Once that happens, you've pretty much got a permanent population of fairies, even if most of them are tourists."
You thought about asking Briar why she was the only fairy you'd yet seen in Sunnydale, but something told you to refrain for now.
"Of course," your tiny friend continues in the present, while lying back on empty air, "you'll need to show her how it's done, and I get the feeling that even your best work, right now, would end up being of a strictly temporary nature."
"It's not a field Ganondorf had a great deal of expertise in," you admit. "He was all for the branches of sorcery that let him exploit and show off his raw power, or that just gave immediate results. Itemcrafting took too long to really hold his interest, especially when he could brute-force solutions that were just as good as most of the things he could have spent all that time making. If he really needed an item, he either went out and stole it, or had the minions with magical talent throw something together. Which is kind of what we're planning on here," you finish, frowning. "Does that make me more Evil than if I did all the work myself?"
"Only if you end up commandeering everything Amy makes for your own personal use," Briar responds. "At least, that's what I think."