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Chapter 10: Light (Part 2)
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The gash extended from the corner of my collarbone to the center of my chest. Blood seeped from its edges, dripping down my clothes and my arm.
"Hold it out. Steady, right here."
My father's voice was deep. That sound alone was able to draw my attention back to him, away from all the sensations that drowned me, then.
He stood in front of me, swaths of bandages in his hands as he handled the arm. We had plenty of supplies in the house, long needed for training injuries. This was the first time I had been cut so deeply, though. It would probably scar.
He didn't show much remorse for potentially maiming his son, but at least he was intent on cleaning it up.
I tried to focus on that energy inside me, hot and light, wrapping through my limbs. The electricity raced in my blood even after the fight had ended. I wasn't sure what had changed, but I could feel it, like water on my body. It filled every flake of skin and each standing hair.
It was an instinctive realization. I had broken through to the next level of understanding.
"Hey, Jino- listen to me, boy."
He snapped his fingers together, right in front of my face. I blinked and looked at him.
"Yes?"
"Hold up your arm. Slowly."
I raised my right arm- a twinge of pain made me wince, but I kept going. At around shoulder height, I stopped as another wave of pain washed over me.
"Can you go higher?" He asked.
"...I don't think so. Not without hurting something more."
"Hold it there."
It took minutes for him to finish wrapping the wound, covering that part of my chest and shoulder with the bandages, poking and prodding with wet tweezers, fetched from somewhere in the house.
The stars seemed dimmer than only minutes earlier. The candle in the window, on the kitchen table, had died out. The wind of the summer night raised goosebumps on my skin, underneath my thin training clothes.
I took a deep breath in. The heat inside my body, that crackling electricity, twisted and writhed.
Even though everything was dim in the night, I could see. The pores on my father's hands, the shimmer of the snow on the ground.
That's all this Aura was- it was a sensation. A deeper understanding of my own body, perhaps. It was like magic.
I was feeling faint, at that point, but my father didn't look worried.
He wrapped up the wound, drying it and pressing it with cloth. He had his own injury; that small, red cut on the corner of his wrist.
It couldn't have been larger than a paper cut, but it made me smile.
This man was a Sword Emperor. The only person stronger than him, in our art, was his master the Sword God. I had managed to touch this man.
In a small way, I had validated my existence in the world. That was what I felt that night, the stars blazing above both our heads.
He wrapped up the wound in silence.
"Father?"
"Yes?"
"Do you think we could try again? After you're done fixing that?"
A breath of air, visible in the cold night, puffed out of his mouth.
"Unfortunately not. You won't be able to swing a sword with that wound. We're not North God users, we can't fool around without proper technique."
I scowled. The pain from my shoulder flared beneath the thin layer of bandages. Did he understand what I was feeling? The energy that was flowing beneath my skin?
"-How long until it's healed enough, do you think?"
"A few weeks, at least. Maybe just one or two, now that you've started to understand Aura."
A week or two. Ten days, maybe. Ten days to do nothing but sit around, waiting to get better.
…What kind of ridiculous punishment was that?
The man smirked at the expression on my face.
"We might be able to find a mage to heal you. Don't be too hopeful, though."
I nodded, firm. I was not going to wait ten days to get better.
. . . . . . . .
I ended up waiting ten days to get better.
The Holy Land of the Sword was a gathering place for all the greatest users of the Sword God Style in the world- a place where swordsmen could come to advance their art, surrounded by other pioneers and dedicated students.
Magic users did not tend to stick around for very long.
Even the Adventurer's Guild, the warm tavern in the center of town that had various job postings on the wall, was only filled with swordsmen. Not a mage to be seen.
There was no church in town, for any of the religions that were so popular down south. Swordsmen were quite the atheistic bunch, it turned out. -And without a church, no priests with healing magic were around.
Nobody in the Holy Land of the Sword was able to use healing magic. It confused me, at first. How did these bloodthirsty swordsmen deal with any training injuries?
That question ate at me for the entire week I stayed at home, under the watchful eye of my mother.
I supposed, in the end, all those swordsmen just dealt with their injuries. Simple as that.
I was not in the mood to 'just deal' with my injury, though.
Nina visited, laughing at the expression on my face as I looked at her. She came over every single one of those days, just to annoy me. She didn't need to do training swings in my backyard right where I could see! I didn't need any reminders that I couldn't do it!
…That anger only lasted a day, before I realized this was the best entertainment I was going to get.
I watched her closely after that. Every flaw in her technique, everything she excelled at; the twitching of the muscles, the snap of the sword as it cut through the air.
She seemed slower than usual, in those couple of days. As I sat to watch on the sidelines, I could easily track the tip of her sword.
It had been a long time since I was so intent on watching another person train. Probably not since I was three years old, not yet allowed to practice at all.
I had spent those first three years like this, just as helpless. Carried everywhere by my mother, only able to watch, never trying for myself. I was too weak, back then. And with the bloody gash carved into my upper chest, I was now the same way. Just as weak, just as helpless.
Every one of those days, I did nothing but laze around. Nina trained in the backyard, my parents left for the central dojo, and I could watch. I made no progress; I gained no deeper understanding. Despite the rest of my body being fine, all those people forced me to stay still. To heal- they said. Even my father, that man who drove himself into his training every day, told me to sit and do nothing.
I had no outlet and no way to improve myself. That feeling of constant focus, constant pressure, was gone. Even though I sat all day, doing nothing, I had lost my ground.
Maybe it was an illusion, but it almost felt like I was decaying through those days.
-I couldn't do anything. I had nothing, after all. There was nothing I did in my life besides my training.
Ten days passed, both quickly and slowly. I wasted those ten days, sleeping, sitting, and watching Nina train.
After that incredible night when I finally landed a hit on my father, the crash was indescribable. Like I had been given the entire world only to have it snatched out of my hands.
If those days had gone on any longer, I don't know what I would have done. As it was, Nina grounded me. She gave me something to focus on.
The tenth day of my rest period was much the same. In the morning, my father looked at the wound again. It was scabbed over, and he said it was healing well. But it would take another week or so before I could go back to my training.
He said there could not be any disturbance. He said I probably would not stop, even when I needed to, which was why I was not allowed to train.
I did not respond. There was nothing to say.
Hours later, the bright blue sky above, I was sitting on the porch. Nina was in front of me, swinging a sword. She had come early that day, some emotion in her eyes I couldn't identify. Concern, maybe. I don't know what I looked like.
I didn't enjoy thinking about how terrible I felt, after those couple days of not being able to train. I imagined it was similar to what an addict felt, separated from their vice.
I let out a deep breath, careful to not shift the bandages wrapped around my chest and shoulder.
Nina, standing beneath the sun in the center of the snowy yard, used a real sword that day. It was all heavy metal in her hands- not like the wooden blades we sparred with. I didn't know when she had started to use full-sized, adult swords, but the weapon was three feet long. She handled it easily, transitioning from high stance to middle guard, her body always shifting. Stepping with a burst of speed, she stabbed the sword in front of her before ripping it back into place. The snow on the ground cracked under her feet.
The girl had flawless technique. She moved with the kind of iron-spined posture that spoke to long years of practice. Nobody could get that familiar with the Sword God Style unless they had spent their whole life studying.
Nina had been born with a sword in her hands and had indeed dedicated the past ten years to nothing else.
A fourteen-year-old girl, her entire life spent on one art. A bloody art.
I shifted in my seat, my back propped against the wall of my house as I watched her.
I was sitting on a small porch just under the roof. The old wood was cold beneath me. Normally, I could warm up with exercise, but I was still supposed to be resting. If I even tried anything, Nina would stop me.
The cold summer air bit into my skin.
I looked inside my body, without anything else to do. The cold air was tugging on me, tugging out that strange energy that filled me. Electricity pouring from somewhere deep inside.
The chill of the wind was lessened, thanks to the energy.
Maybe that day, after a week of stagnation, I would find something new.
I closed my eyes to focus on the warmth.
It was easy to fall into a meditative state. I had become good at silencing my thoughts, focusing entirely on the feeling of living with my body. -But meditation wasn't quite what I did, sitting on that porch, on that tenth day.
The wood beneath me, Nina practicing sword swings, the wall on my back-
It hit me like a lightning bolt, straight out of the clear sky.
I could feel the inside of my hands.
Not the skin, and not the air on my body- this was deeper. It was deeper than I should have been able to feel- deeper than what the nervous system could touch. I could sense an inner core; I could make out the structure of bones in my palm.
It was strange, but not unpleasant.
Questions bit at the outskirts of my mind. What was this? Was this Battle Aura?
I opened my eyes, raising both hands.
I could feel the connection between my finger bones- I could feel veins pulse in my wrists. It was all there, right beneath me. My flesh and blood. It was me.
But that was not what I focused on.
There was that other layer, beyond the physical. More than what I could see. I closed my eyes again.
It was invisible. Maybe it wasn't even there- not in a sense of 'real' or 'unreal', but something entirely different. Magical. I shouldn't have been able to feel it, but I did. In my old world, it would not have existed at all, but here, I could sense it. Here, it was a part of me, just as sure as all the flesh and blood.
It was the electricity. The thing that pounded in my bones, rising when I needed it most. It was the thing that blocked out the world.
It wrapped around my skin and my fingers, flooding outwards, pulsing, from the very core of my body.
Although I couldn't see it, it warmed me. An electromagnetic wave, curled over itself, forming a barrier. Or maybe a better description- it formed an aura. Just above my skin, penetrating my body completely.
I was protected.
With a blink, I realized that I could no longer feel the pain in my shoulder.
I stood up from the wooden bench.
"Nina!"
She turned to look at me, her sword falling from a ready position.
"What? You getting restless?"
I ignored the comment. Those long days had tested my patience. I was certain she received some kind of perverse joy from seeing me unable to practice.
"I'm ready to train again."
She raised an eyebrow.
"I don't think so, Jino. Wasn't it just this morning that your dad said it would take another couple of days?"
"I… I just figured something out. I'm good now."
I put a hand on the injured shoulder, rotating my arm slowly, raising it over my head. It felt perfect. Like nothing had even happened.
I was only half-focused on the conversation. The sensation in my hands, on my skin, all across me, was too distracting. I stood on my toes, stretching my ankles. As I balanced on the balls of my feet, it felt like I had just taken off weighted clothes. Like I had been under some huge burden, only to just leave it behind.
"I need to test it out." The words left my mouth. "-Want to spar?
She squinted at me.
"Yeah, sure. Now I'm curious."
It only took me a moment to grab a wooden training blade from inside. Nina hadn't brought a wooden sword of her own, so I took another for her.
I tossed the training sword to her, and she left her steel one sheathed, lying in the snow.
"...Your dad isn't going to yell at me, right? You're actually, totally healed?"
"Yes."
I was watching her. She was still hesitating, eying me with unease. Her posture was all wrong- where was that iron spine I had seen the past ten days? I wanted to experience that. -I wanted to fight my father again, too.
She shifted under my gaze, before raising her sword.
I was ready.
Her voice echoed across the empty training yard.
"All good?"
"Yes."
The world froze.
I was watching her. I was watching the movements in her legs, the twitching in her heels as she slowly dropped her weight, ready to lunge at me. I could see the flow of energy through her body. I could see the intent behind her sword.
I stepped forward.
For the second time in ten days, my world burst into light.
I rested my sword at the base of her neck.
"..."
I looked up. She was still taller than me- by maybe two inches. She hadn't moved her sword at all. She had barely even shifted her stance. I reached her before the energy in her body had a chance to flow.
Her eyes met mine.
After a second, her lips curled upwards.
I'm not sure how to describe the emotion on her face. It didn't look like happiness, though. Maybe at first glance it could have been mistaken for a smile, but it wasn't. She looked like she was in pain. Even though she was grinning, and her eyes were crinkled up, she looked like someone had just cut her with a sword.
I was sure I hadn't hurt her. My sword was made of wood, and it hadn't even touched her skin. I stopped my attack right before reaching her neck. Even then, the blade was hovering right above her.
So why did she look like that?
It wasn't anger that I had beaten her. I knew what that looked like- it always led to her storming off, and then the next day she was fine again. It wasn't frustration or annoyance at me- I had seen all of that.
I stepped away, letting my sword drop.
The energy, the Battle Aura, raced through my body. In my blood and my bones, I could feel it everywhere. It curled over my skin and protected me.
Maybe it was always there, but when I sat on that porch, and when I fought my father, I had finally learned to see it. I would never be able to unsee it, either. That energy would stay with me for the rest of my life.
In my blood and my bones. It was a part of me.
I looked at Nina. I was trembling, I think. It was the adrenaline, or maybe the exhilaration of that fight. Nina's fake smile was still there, that indescribable emotion still clear on her face.
That was the day I became a Sword Saint; the day I learned to see, and truly use, Battle Aura. It was also a day where I could have learned something important about people, but missed the chance.
I had a chance to reach out. Ask her a question. Give her some kind of comfort as a friend.
Instead, for the second time in ten days, I couldn't stop myself from laughing.
I was a Sword Saint, after all.
I felt amazing.
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*Author's Note*
A lot of this fic is very internal and focused on the thoughts of the OC main character, and this chapter especially so. It's probably a pretty divisive writing style for a piece of fanfiction and I can't imagine it's something that will appeal to everyone. Neo-Jino does a lot of things in his head and is not exactly neurotypical- which is something I wanted to portray from the start of this whole thing. Again, all the internal descriptions might not be your speed, but I want to say thanks for reading, anyway! The pace is about to pick up. We've got a few more chapters until the end of arc 1.
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